With Christmas just around the corner, etailers are getting on high gear to ensure that shoppers go to them for their Christmas shopping. The research group eMarketer predicts that e-commerce will hit $26.2 billion for the last quarter of 2005, and etailers will be fighting to get a bigger share of that huge pie.
If you are selling online, part of the marketing strategies used to get more shoppers to come to your site is search engine marketing. Direct Magazine has an excellent article on the best SEM strategies that an etailer can adopt for the holiday season, as follows:
1. Adopt a 3-pronged approach: use broad generic keywords early in the shopping season, then move to more branded terms later on, after which cut back on SEM drastically just before Christmas. This follows a consumer’s pattern of researching what items to buy early in the season, before making the actual purchase.
2. Manage your budget so you don’t run out of your alloted keyword spending early.
3. Look beyond Google, Yahoo! and MSN to the smaller or vertical search engines, including both alternative searches and comparison engines.
4. Identify and use very specific keywords that may not get searched often but that convert strongly to sales and at a lower price than more popular terms.
5. Constantly tweak your ad as well as landing page to make sure that you clearly convey why customers should shop from your website
6. Don’t forget the retail basics of inventory, fulfillment and suggestive selling. You don’t want to advertise heavily something that you don’t have! You have to have the inventory, able to deliver, and suggest other items that the customer may be interested in.
