Key Lessons From Black Friday 2015

Love it or loathe it, Black Friday is fast becoming a fixture in the UK's retail calendar. We've rounded up the most interesting articles about the size, impact and changing perceptions of Black Friday. Here are our top takeaways from the news in the last week: Retail sales dropped 10% but online sales grew by 36% on the biggest ever day for Ecommerce in the UK. Mobile ecommerce continues to grow: 35% of purchases on Black Friday were from Mobile devices. Some ecommerce sites weren’t ready for the rush - Argos and John Lewis both had outages during the day. Although that didn’t stop John Lewis from reporting it’s biggest ever sales week with a turnover of £187.7m. Email marketing drove more sales than any other sales channel - 25% of all online Black Friday sales were the result of an Email offer. Black Friday has an image problem - it's still a divisive marketing strategy; there were even national campaigns against it's consumerist message (see http://www.buynothingday.co.uk).  Here’s our round up of our top five Black Friday articles from around the web: Tesco got their strategy wrong here (CityAM) John Lewis had their strongest sales week, despite site outages here (Telegraph)  Some retailers don't like Black Friday, but lots of consumers definitely do here (Retail-Week) Key stats from Econsultancy here (Econsultancy) A good overview of trends from IMRG here (IMRG)

When Is Your Last Posting Date?

As Christmas approaches don’t forget to let your customers know when your last posting date is. We recommend putting it clearly on your homepage and updating your delivery information page. You can also use it in emails to generate loss aversion sales. You might also consider changing the messaging in your abandoned basket emails.

Get Your Black Friday Ecommerce Plan Right

Once it was confined to holiday-makers in the USA, but Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become firm fixtures on UK marketing calendars. Black Friday is on 27 November 2015, so you still have plenty of time to create a masterful marketing plan.

What can you do to jump on this American bandwagon and maximise your Christmas revenue? We’ve put together a list of our top tips for Black Friday and Cyber Monday:

1. Cart Abandon & Order Confirmation Emails - Add a juicy promo code to your order confirmation emails to see if you can get customers to buy again or return on Cyber Monday. Change the messaging on your cart abandonment emails to remind users there is a time limit on your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. 
2. Stock - People want great discounts and if you get it right, you can shift huge amounts of stock. Pick products where you have lots of stock and good margins. 
3. Servers - If you get your marketing right you can expect a big jump in site traffic. Make sure your servers are ready for the onslaught. 
4. Paid search - Optimise your ad copy and increase your bid prices to ensure you get the biggest share of Black Friday traffic. 
5. Mobile - More than 50% of all email opens occurr on mobiles. Make sure that your email, landing page and checkout are all easy to use on Mobiles. 
6. Christmas Decorations & Messaging - Does your email, site and social media content offer a consistent message? Have you added some 'christmas decoration' to your normal site imagery? 
7. Timing - Don't wait until Friday before sending your first email. Many sites get a head start and start their sales on Thursday. Why not try offering exclusive offers to existing customers on Thursday to make them feel special? 

Got any questions or need a hand with your Christmas ecommerce plan? Drop us a line at info@moneyspyder.co.uk.

Summer Is Ending - Is Your Christmas Ecommerce Plan Ready?

Now that September is here, your minds will surely be turning towards your Christmas Ecommerce Plan (if they haven't already!). Many ecommerce companies make more than half their revenue in the last three months of the year so It's important to make sure you have a clear online marketing plan that will deliver sales.

Here are our top five tips to get ecommerce success this Christmas:

1. Email & Social Media Plan - In the final hectic weeks before Christmas it's easy to fall behind on email and social media. This can be a costly oversight, so make sure you have all your emails and key posts planned well in advance, so all you have to do is press send and watch the sales come in.
2. Christmas SEO - It's never to early to launch your Christmas Gifts category and product pages. Give yourself an edge by uploading your categories early, and updating copy on your site to reflect the upcoming season so that Google can index your new products.
3. Google Shopping - Make sure your products have maximum visibility in Google as people are much more likely to convert in one visit during the festive season. Google Shopping ROI will soar over the next few months.
4. Brand PPC - Although you might not run PPC throughout the year, running brand PPC at Christmas allows you to tailor your brand copy, landing pages and sitelinks to Christmas traffic, to improve conversion rates.
5. RLSA - Remarketing Lists For Search Ads allow you to show ads for broad keywords only to previous visitors to your site. Eg. You would never normally bid on 'Christmas Gifts For Men' keywords but with RLSA you can ensure that only users who have visited your site see these adverts in Google. Christmas is the ideal time to experiment with these campaigns.

Get in touch if you would like any help or advice about getting the most out of the festive season.

The Google Shopping Feed Spec Is Changing Today

Google is changing their Shopping Feed Specification today (15th September). If you run Google Shopping ads, you should check that you don't need to make any changes, and acquaint yourself with the new format.

What is changing?

• The main changes that may affect you are to the Google Product Taxonomy. Various products have been reclassified or the categories have been simplified. For example you no longer need to add a subcategory for many clothing types like trousers, shorts and shoes.
• Google Product Categories can now be submitted as numbers, rather than long text strings. e.g. "Animals & Pet Supplies>Pet Supplies>Bird Supplies>Bird Cages>Stands". This should make it easier to update your feed in future.
• Improved ID accuracy - GTIN numbers and ID Attributes (probably your item SKU) will be tightened up so you will need to make sure that you aren't using invalid character types.

You can read Google's summary of changes here: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6231410

What do I need to do?

Many feeds won't be affected by the changes to the GTIN and ID attributes. The changes to the Google Product Categories are a great opportunity to improve the accuracy of your feed, and so improve your Google Shopping performance.

You can download the Google Product Category Taxonomy here to check whether your products need updating.

Shopping Feeds can be complicated and frustrating to get right. If you need a hand, or have any questions, just send us an email and we'd be happy to check your feed for you.

New Site Launched - 7stripe.com

MoneySpyder are pleased to announce the launch of 7stripe. A new player in the ecigarette market, their focus is providing high quality cigalikes which have a realistic flavour and provide a satisfying alternative to real cigaretttes.

The site comes with all the key elements needed for growing a brand. It has the usual ecommerce functionality: best practice checkout, responsive mobile template, and SEO ready page designs. It also has built-in blog functionality and an advance promotions engine.

If you're looking for a new platform, or you want to know how to make the most out of your current platform by removing key conversion blockers, get in touch with us on info@moneyspyder.co.uk.