You are receiving this email on October 15th. A simple math calculation makes the heat skip a beat – October is half over already and we are just about six weeks out from the Zombie E-pocalypse that we call the holiday shopping season. But we’ve got your back.
Here are this week’s top stories.
1. Zen and the Art of Holiday Strategy
Do you have all your ad spending and email campaigns set up yet? No? There’s still time for that, and the time is now. These guys did some solid research and put together some advice, tips, and trends with snippits of advice from a bunch of industry folks. It’s worth the reading.
Read about Profit and Peace on CommonThreadCo.
2. It’s Like Having a Crystal Ball
Most of us in Ecommerce don’t compete with folks like Best Buy and other big box retailers. But those guys have already done all the work. They have pre-purchased their ads, built their email campaigns and … believe it or not … they have already printed their flyers and mailers. So, whether you want to price-match, want to see their content and marketing copy, or want to get a jump on your own personal holiday gift-planning ….
Here is BestBuy’s BFCM marketing flyer.
Here is Amazon’s pre-pre-pre-BFCM flyer.
Don’t like Walmart’s very much.
Find a bunch more of them here.
3. SEO is the Grinch
SEO is competitive, hard, and time consuming, but we all have to worry about it. But there might be a few so-called “rules” of SEO that are more myth than fact. Practical Ecommerce came up with a list of seven of them.
See the 7 SEO Rule to Ignore for Ecommerce.
4. More BFCM Stuff to Look at
Shopify is gearing up the servers and stress-testing their platform for the holiday season to make sure that the tech is ready for the load. But they have also opened up the info toolbox for merchants to get ready too. And this is what that looks like.
Read the Black Friday Cyber Monday Toolbox from Shopify.
5. Black Friday is About Existing Customers
We’ve said this a lot…. The competition for attention during the holiday shopping extravaganza is intense. You’ve got huge mega-mart companies with more money than sense sucking a lot of oxygen. The key for the smaller seller is to remember that the best sales on BFCM come from your existing customers – the folks that have already purchased from you before.
That is the top take-away on this stat-filled article from Klaviyo.
OK kids … that’s a wrap for this week. I would normally take a few extra minutes to write up something clever, but you have work to do.
Happy Selling,
Zachary