As consumers tighten their budgets and reevaluate spending during the Christmas season, it is important to sharpen your online marketing efforts. Here are a few suggestions courtesy of John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing:
Direct Offers – Create offers that involve low-cost trials, free samples and valuable education-based information. Make an immediate response to these offers the sole reason your advertising exists.
Repackaging - Re-introduce your products with added features or services of value or do the same with your service offerings by packaging them in new and innovative ways. Increase the value of your products and services and spell the value out in terms that mean something to the prospect.
Referrals – Get out to your customers and start [talking] with them about ways to partner for referrals. Your customers know times are tough, too. [Communicate] with them and honestly explore ways to help them help you.
Strategic Partners – Now is the time to build your network of strategic referral partners. Start by referring business to trusted partners and make it a point to sit down with at least one current or potential strategic partner each week with the sole purpose of directly discussing ways to help each other grow.
Creative Thinking - Give your customers and vendors “reason why” thinking to encourage larger orders, better terms, guaranteed purchases, and loyalty clubs.
Magento offers native functionality that allows you to execute on many of John’s strategies:
- Flexible Coupons: create offers to get customers back in your store
- Email Newsletter Management: deliver the coupon via email
- Multi-tier pricing for quantity discounts: increase order size by encouraging larger quantity purchases
- Bundled Products: repackage how you offer your products by bundling
- New Items Promotional Tool: highlight new products
- Up-sells in Shopping Cart: increase order size at time of purchase
- Cross-sells on Product Page: increase order size during shopping experience
- Send to a Friend: make it easy for a visitor to forward their wishlist to mom in time for Christmas
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Ben Waugh says:
December 10th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Do you do blogroll exchanging? If you want to exchange links let me know.
Email me back if you’re interested.
Toni Anicic says:
January 5th, 2009 at 12:23 am
These are some great tips you gave us here. I think the key goal in these tough times should be to connect with your costumers and try to get a good word of mouth out there.
An e-mail newsletter is a great way to do just that. Especially if you provide them with some real content (if you don’t try to sell to them all the time).
joshcolter says:
January 6th, 2009 at 5:25 am
Great point, Toni! E-mail has about a $45 ROI for every $1 spent according to the DMA. It is a fantastic way to connect with customers and build relationships.
Last weekend I bought a mattress. I spent a couple of days trying to figure out why some mattresses cost $300 while others run $3k. The online stores that provided content shaped my thought process on what is important for the purchase. They added value to me in a non-salesy way and stood out from their competition.
Ultimately I bought a discounted mattress at a brick & mortar store because it was less expensive than comparable models online. I would have gladly opted into email newsletters from different mattress companies if they had offered frequent discounts or offers for signing up for a newsletter. Now I need a new pillow and maybe a new set of sheets. Why wouldn’t the same company drop me a note after the sale to say, “Hey, thanks for choosing us. Oh, by the way, we have pillows and sheets that match your exact mattress.” The customer acquisition cost disappears for them since they do not have to pay for keywords to get my pillow purchase (they should have my email from original purchase). And they could probably upsell me along with a lot of others to increase the lifetime value of their existing customers.
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