This holiday season, retailers are resorting to more traditional marketing tactics, such as paid search and e-mail marketing, to achieve company sales objectives. With the economy in a recession, it is important for retailers to successfully execute these strategies. Fifty-five percent of CMOs at leading US retailers plan to focus on e-mail promotions this holiday season, according to an October 2009 survey by BDO Seidman. Other strategies retailers are likely to focus on include free shipping offers, search engine optimization and social networking.
Though social media usage is increasing at the highest rate this holiday season, a small portion of online retailers do not plan to incorporate sites such as Facebook and MySpace in an overall marketing strategy. On the other hand, 100% of retailers will send e-mails to their house lists, and a majority (63.9%) will not include mobile phone alerts in marketing strategies.
Due to a disconnect between ads clicked and the company landing page, some of these efforts are not as successful as they have the potential to be. For example, two-thirds of advertisers did not have a landing page relevant to purchased keywords, causing misdirected searches. In order to avoid this, retailers need to improve landing pages and increase visibility of marketing messages on e-commerce websites.
Source: eMarketer; December 1, 2009
