Author: Atlantic BT

Social Marketing is going to play a bigger role during this holiday selling season than ever before. E-commerce merchants need to know how to use social media to create engagement, buzz and return-on-investment. This article shares 8 social media marketing tips designed to increase your website’s sales during this holiday selling season.

If we forgot your favorite social marketing holiday sales tip, please leave a comment or send a Tweet to @Atlanticbt. 

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Social Marketing Holiday Tip #1: Balance Your Social Media Diet

Argyle Social posted an excellent study showing that the best approach to social media is to balance links out with links in. You will always convert more with links directed in to your owned websites, since immediate conversion is possible there. Links out to curated content can help reinforce your authority and brand image and so may increase conversions– eventually. Links in to your owned content can convert NOW. The Argyle study suggests an optimal 50% to 50% mix of curation to promotion. If you have a B2C e-commerce website, we suggest moving links to owned content up to 75% as you get closer to your holiday shipping shutoff.

Make sure you increase your promotional links in an engaging way. Don’t just say, “HUGE SALE,” all the time, as that gets boring. Curate reviews into your tweets, use interesting facts about a particular product, inject some controversy and/or quote an influential person:

Example Tweet 1: 
.@Oprah called Widget Y a “Very Cool Thing”; Widget Y is part of Our Early Bird Holiday Sale. Buy Widget Y: <link to Holiday sale page with Widget Y in prominent position on the first row or featured>

Note the period in front of @Oprah. That period stops the Tweet from only going to @Oprah.

Example Tweet 2:
Buzz Team Member @ScentTrail Calls Widget Y Coolest Thing Since Sliced Bread. Read his and other Widget Y Power Reviews: <link to Widget Y product page>

Note this tweet should drive to a product page OR a Holiday Review page. I prefer driving to pages with more than one option during the holidays. If you do drive to a single product page, make sure you have plenty of Cross- and Up-Sells on that page. If not, create new pages for the holidays to focus reviews on popular products collected in a group.

Social Marketing Holiday Tip #2: Use Scoop.it as Real Time Feedback Loop

I’m a big Scoop.it fan. Take a look at our 12 Digital Revolution Scoop.it Feeds. Scoop.it earned our
loyalty by sharing their SEO juice, providing an easy way to spider the social web using keywords, being an easy to use hub, and providing a near real time read on content acceptance.

Scoop.it Shares Link Juice
Most social network platforms hoard their Search Engine Optimization power (link juice) with 90% or more of the benefits being accrued by the platform (Facebook comes immediately to mind). Your content is key to any social network’s position, but they usually share the minimum. Scoop.it takes a different approach. We have owned the #1 SEO position (absolute as determined by a tool) on “Curation Revolution” since weeks within launching the feed. We have never been able to make something similar happen on any other social network.

Scoop.it Spiders the Social Web
When you set up a Scoop.it account, and the first 5 feeds are free, you provide the keywords you want Scoop.it’s engine to spider. The stream is updated constantly throughout the day and can provide a great “first alert” early warning system for key products or competitive actions during the holidays.

Scoop.it is Easy to Use & Helps with Other Social Nets
Scoop.it has an easy to use interface. Setting up an account is a breeze, and you can get the hang of curating and posting in no time thanks to link hints and a good FAQ area with examples. Scoop.it also makes a great hub for other social networks, such as Facebook, Pinterest and Google Plus. It is easy to post to all of those networks from Scoop.it. The only tricky part is to keep in mind that links inside of Scoop.it drive back to your Scoop.it feed. If you have a blog post, you should link to it from Pinterest, Google Plus and other social networks directly, IN ADDITION to driving links from those networks to your Scoop.it summary. No need to add an extra click when there is no value added from the extra step.

Scoop.it’s Near Real-Time Feedback
Scoop.it provides a dashboard that shows your daily and all-time views. The Scoop.it community takes several hours to digest new content, but their “views” number is the closest thing we know of for consistent, near real-time feedback on your content. Watching your views, your Retweets and Facebook comments will create a near real-time feedback loop that can help you catch mistakes, know if you have winner offers or content, and generally inform your holiday social marketing better than if you weren’t using this magic wand of a social media tool.

Social Marketing Holiday Tip #3: Create Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

When something BIG or GOOD happens, SHARE IT on every social network you manage. Don’t share the exact same language, and don’t retweet your own Tweets very often if you manage multiple accounts since to do so is considered spamming, but be sure to share good news. If one of  your best sellers receives an award, create a badge (a little graphic), put the badge on the product’s image so it shows up all over your site, write content into the product page discussing the award, and share the good news several times in different ways over your social channels.

Calling attention to good things in social may make them bigger and better. Support your social notices with content on your core site. You want people to land somewhere and CONVERT, so add content to your site to take credit, announce or share good things. Giving your social media links a place to land inside a site you own is how you create social media marketing ROI.

Social Marketing Holiday Tip #4: How to Use Twitter – Tweet Frequency and When to Tweet

Twitter is a POWERFUL social media tool. We’ve had content reach close to a million people via power retweeters. Content that is cool, exclusive, funny, controversial and helpful will get shared. You should use Twitter to support every other social network you create and curate content into. Twitter + Scoop.it or Twitter + Pinterest is more powerful than either social network alone.

One common question is when and how often should you tweet. The half-life of a tweet, according to bit.ly research, is about 3 hours. In 3 hours, about half of all the shares your post will generate are known (this can vary by day of the week). If you were always SURE what link would create viral pickup, then Tweeting every 3 hours makes sense. If you knew ahead of time what would go viral, you should be on a beach somewhere sipping cold beverages since you can predict the future. In the real world, we play a “junk bond” content game. We tweet many links that will have average performance to find a few that will go viral. Once a link does go viral, be sure to call attention to it on your social networks, because most viral links have at least one second act.

If I were still managing an ecommerce site, I would tweet heavily early in the morning to feed people who retweet, heavily during the 11:00 to 2:00 lunch window, and then consistently from 4 to midnight. I would also have something fun and engaging happening on social media every weekend. You will need to queue some of your tweets. Be sure to be present and checking direct messages and comments during important times each day. Create an alert system and respond to compliments, complaints and news as soon as possible. The longer a brush fire burns in social media, the worse it gets.

Social Marketing Holiday Tip #5: Social Media Tools

There are several social media tools such as Scoop.it (see Tip 2), BufferApp and HootSuite that can help you manage and curate social media. Many tools use freemium business models, so you can use them at low levels for free. If you have a larger budget, WildFire and Expion make enterprise social media marketing tool suites that help manage campaigns across many networks. Our favorite social marketing reporting tool is Argyle Social. Our favorite unknown monitoring weapon is Spring Metrics. With Google hiding more and more data due to Secure Socket Layer encryption, Spring Metrics becomes a great supplement to Google Analytics.

Read TheNextWeb.com’s excellent “Best Free Social Media Tracking Tools You Should Know About” for more.

Creating An Alert System
If you don’t have the budget for Radian6, the premier ORM (Online Reputation Management) tool now owned by Salesforce.com, you can create a solid alert system with free tools such as Google Alerts and Topsy.

Topsy is our favorite, since it captures links all the way out to friends of friends, allowing you to know the whole story. Don’t just look at your link share tool. Many people who share your content will copy the link and not use your tool. And the only way to see those “friends of friends” shares is with a tool such as Topsy or Radian6 (if you have the budget).

Social Marketing Holiday Tip #6: Know What You Should Alert

You want your alert system to tell you about what hot products are doing out there in the competitive world. Putting product names as keywords into Google, Topsy or Scoop.it will bring back interesting information. If you see an important competitor using one of your best sellers as a loss leader, you may want to match their price in order to not lose sales.

I don’t like letting someone else drive my e-commerce sites. I prefer when competitors watch and copy my sites. One favorite tactic when we saw a competitor offering a loss leader price on a hot product is to create a new bundle. Bundle the hot product into a new unique idea that combines upsale items (things frequently purchased with the hot product). This unique merchandising marks and one-ups the competitor in a unique way that protects the “value positioning” of the site responding to the loss leader pricing.

Set up alerts for your best brands and your company’s name (all variations). If someone complains on Yelp or Google Reviews, BRING THE REVIEW into your site. Manage negative infomation on your turf, not theirs. Thank the person with the complaint and be appreciative of the feedback, but don’t agree unless they are just dead right and you’ve already changed the issue.

I wrote a 2-part series for SmallRivers, the Paper.li team, about how to handle negative social feedback:

5 Social Media Marketing Safety Tips: Part 1

5 Social Media Marketing Safety Tips: Part 2

Another related post is “Turn Negative Reviews Into Money”

Social Marketing Holiday Tip #7: Tell A Story

Since everyone is going to be shouting FREE SHIPPING and SALE, telling a story will make your social media marketing stand out in a noisy crowd. What is your theme for the holidays? If you are my friends at Moon-Audio are you using music to tell your promotion story? If you are Vestique, a women’s apparel store, and you are social media champions, are you sharing wish lists, creating unique bundles and and telling the story of this fall’s best fashions?

Find the umbrella theme, the theme that unites all your disparate holiday sales efforts, and you will make more money this year than last. You will make more money than those who scream SALE with no connection to anything their customers care about. We buy with emotion and justify with logic, so don’t forget to provide and share both emotion and logic this holiday selling season.

Find great storytelling tips on Karen Dietz’s “Just Story It” feed on Scoop.it

Social Marketing Holiday Tip #8: Connect to Something Bigger

Every company is changing the world in some meaningful way. The annual Holiday season is an important time to share how your company changes the world. If, like Atlantic BT, you do work that is similar to building homes and you have a family connection with Habitat for Humanity, then making sure something you are doing in 4Q reinforces the connection to Habitat is a good marketing idea.

We are NOT suggesting using the holidays to manipulate. Don’t do things you aren’t already doing, since doing so will be inauthentic and create the opposite of what you want. We are suggesting if you have a cause near and dear to your company’s heart, make sure to extend your social capital to that cause during the holiday season. Some nonprofits depend on 4Q and the holiday season for a large portion of their operating budget. Somehow and someway, your company is changing the world, is saving the world. Make sure your visitors know you are in this holiday selling season for something more than money, but don’t beat visitors over the head with your “save the world” cause either.

What about Pinterest and Google Plus?
Pinterest is going to be a MONSTER social network. If you aren’t pinning content on Pinterest yet, you should be. If you are and have tips for how to use Pinterest as a tool to help an ecommerce website generate ROI, please be sure to share what is working for you.

Google Plus deserves attention too. Google Plus lives next door to SEO, so creating an engaging presence inside of G+ is a good idea. If you are using G+ to support your ecommerce site, please share your tips and ideas.

I hope these 8 Social Marketing Holiday Sales Tips help your holiday sales be something everyone is talking about and even more are buying!

 

Best USA E-commerce Sites

September marks the beginning of a race that ends on 12.25. After 12 years as an Internet marketer, I look at e-commerce sites differently. I look at how hero images, the largest image on the page, balance offers, navigation and search. I look for how keyword-dense an e-commerce site’s navigation is and how intuitive the design. Do I know where to go? Does the site feel like a place its target audience would want to shop and join. Are there clear Calls-To-Action?

Here is my list of 6 favorite E-commerce sites for 2012:

1. REI
Consistently great, the Internet marketing team behind my favorite ecommerce website knows how to point their hero’s eyes at Calls To Action; they keep their palette clean but full of eye candy. The engagement and “like me” factor is high. REI’s images make you feel like joining that party in that place, now please. Great job!

2. Apple
I copy this clean Einstein-smart design all the time, and I am not alone. Apple.com is one of those rare sites that shouldn’t heed my “people not things sell” rule.  These products can be the hero. We project ourselves right into Apple’s product shots. We see ourselves using those cool superhero tools. Can’t ask for more from a website image.

3. Patagonia
Different feel than REI, even though they plow some of the same, “Life is an adventure,” terrain. If REI is about the magic of the tribe, Patagonia is about the magic of place. Patagonia’s magical website design is not designed to SELL, it breaks every e-commerce rule, but it really works. Patagonia is the exception that proves rules such as big Call-To-Action buttons in orange and offers you can SEE (lol). I love that in half the images they roll, their tiny “Free Shipping over $75” offer can’t even be seen. That is a huge rule break, and Patagonia can do it because of those magical images. I wouldn’t suggest hiding your Free Shipping offer!

4. DWR.com (Design Within Reach)
The furniture category has strong players and may be a six of one, half-dozen of the other between DWR, Crate and Barrel and others. This category can quickly all look alike. I like DWR.com’s clean lines. They keep it simple but are creative with social, campaigns and offers.

5. Vestique.com
Women’s apparel can start to all look alike, too. I like how Vestique’s site uses pictures of their target audience (young women) engaged in almost candid moments. The design is clean, social and engaging. The design points the way to social engagement, and Vestique’s owners live on Facebook,  Pinterest and Twitter. The website design makes visitors want to be part of the club, a very important idea for a fashion site. Eileen Allen and her design team at Atlantic BT did a great job on Vestique, and it was supported with some great behind-the-curtain e-commerce functionality in Magento by Chris Duffy and his team. Well Done, Guys!

6. Woot.com
Daily deal sites seem to be losing some luster, but Woot.com has some of the best copy online. The “wooters” are a very loyal tribe. They get up in the middle of the night and check Woot’s deals. This rabid loyalty is something you EARN by being great. Every Woot.com element works.

Your favorite Ecommerce site not on the list? If we missed your favorites, post a comment here,

Tweet to @Atlanticbt, or

share your list on our Facebook page.

I’m now working on ecomm websites NOT in the USA, so be sure to share your favorites.

– Marty

Holiday Ecomm Secret #1: Focus

Testing and experimentation help ecommerce teams understand what works and why. ABT stands for “Always Be Testing” and you should test, test and test more. We would never say don’t test, but testing during the holiday window, a window that may start with Back-To-School in September for some websites, should be limited to testing things that are immediately beneficial.

Testing button color, headline placement and copy length during the holiday selling season is not a good idea. Testing in the fall, especially the early fall, should focus on offers. If you find your Free Shipping trigger works better at $75 than $55, that is valuable information. Be sure you define “works better” clearly with multiple dimensions such as AOV (Average Order Value), Conversion Rate (for the site and key pages such as your sale page), Dollars Per Visitor, New To File (people who purchased for the first time), traffic source, Lifetime Value (LTV) and transactions over impressions (traffic). Don’t forget the most important metric – Dollars To The Bank.

You may also want to reduce your testing to 50% from your summer testing schedule.  You and your team have other fish to fry in 4Q. Continue to test, but test things that can make a difference THIS holiday season, such as offers and merchandising combinations. Leave global improvement UX (User Experience) testing until next year.

Holiday Ecomm Secret #2 – Segmented Sale Page

Don’t dump a hundred items in your sale page and ask your customers to figure it out. Create some organization that makes sense for your site. Examples of good sale page segmentation include:

• For Him, For Her, For kids.
• Buzz Team Recommends (your team of reviewers).
• Best or Top Sellers By Category (whatever categories you use).
• Best Selling Combinations (people who bought X also bought Y and Z).
• Highest Reviewed (if your Ecomm site doesn’t have reviews, GET THEM).
• Fastest Sellers or HOT products (trending cultural products are important to highlight).
• Most Press – If you have products in O Magazine or Redbook, promote that.
• Guest Curators’ Picks – Celebrities or category expert picks can work well and create PR.
• Staff Picks – Your staff are experts too, so create a sale section with their picks.
• Social Media Curation – Most Pinned, Most Retweeted, Most Mentioned.

Don’t do ALL of these segmentations at once! Segmenting your sale page is a good thing to test in the summer. We wouldn’t suggest testing your sale page during the holiday selling window, because there are too many moving parts. By September you should know what segmentations work best for your site and sale page.

If you DON’T know your site’s best sale page segmentations, then go with your categories, generic values like Best Sellers or Best Reviewed or For Him, Her and Kids. Put “test segmented sale page” on your testing calendar for next year. Testing will probably show that standard segments work best, but how your customers respond to different segments is a good thing to learn from testing.

REI’s Sale area is segmented by: Gear, Snow Sports, Clothing and Footwear and Outlet.

We found a cool new segmentation on CB2.com – “Most Pinned”. Most Pinned is great social marketing segmentation. You could also do Most Retweeted or Most Discussed.

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Holiday Ecomm Secret #3 – Seasonal Hero Images

The largest picture on a webpage is also known as “the hero”. The hero is an important touchstone for visitors. Hero images create a sense of style unique to the site, reinforce key value messages and create connection to the time of year. If your site is shopped by people from California to Maine, creating a single fall hero can be a challenge since fall is different in New England than it is on the west coast.

If your site can be programmed to read the incoming cookie and visitor location and then supply a related image, you can create different hero images for different areas of the country. If your site is not that sophisticated and you have an image roll, a hero that changes every few seconds, be sure to include different fall looks in your roll.

If you don’t have any of those options, find an image that communicates the values of fall without being too specific to place or time. REI does a great job of using hero images to communicate a sense of generic place and time. Their hero images show people in warm gear in the mountains. It isn’t clear if the mountains pictured are California, Colorado or Maine.

REI Seasonal Hero Example:

Holiday Ecomm Secret #4 – People in Hero

What do humans like to look at more than anything else? If you answered “other humans,” you win a cookie. Here is a quote from Perceptual Science and Technology at Rutgers:

As inherently social animals, humans most accurately perceive and
interpret the movements of other people.

Intuitively, we know the truth of our “people watching” obsession. Why then do we put THINGS, not people, into our website heroes? Heroes are the largest pictures on a web page, and they should include people.

A recent analysis of an Apple iPad ad  proved the point. Apple’s 32 second includes 30 people, or almost a person a second. Some people are in the background, but our brains register more than we “see”. Apple understands the importance of people watching in their ads.

Line of Sight
When people look at your website, their eyes go immediately to the upper right, then they follow the line of sight of people pictured in images on your site. Have people pictured in your hero look directly out at your visitors to increase engagement. Have people in your images look at Call-To-Actions (CTA) to increase conversion.

BassPro Example Of Line of Sight
Great example of the power of people in a hero from BassPro.com. We would prefer a larger Call-To-Action of a more contrasting color, but your eyes can’t help but look where the archer is aiming (right at the boot LOL).

Holiday Ecomm Secret #5 – Simple, Quiet and SALE

We can debate the Chinese finger puzzle e-commerce merchants find themselves in later. The “constant sale” syndrome is a pain, but it is the reality of 4Q Ecommerce. To NOT have a significant sale during the holiday season will drive traffic to your competitors. This is NOT to say that you can’t make a value argument, just make sure your value argument is in combination with an amazing sale. Here are a few ways to create an amazing sale:

• More items on sale than your competitors.
• More items on sale than last year (record number is a great claim).
• Cooler and hotter items on sale than competitors.
• Deeper discounts on popular items than competitors.
• Unique merchandising combinations your competitors don’t have

The last point is a favorite tactic. Combining items in unique ways creates a new SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) that will be uniquely yours until competitors catch up (and they may not care to chase your site). Customers visiting shopping comparison engines are unlikely to find any competitor exactly matching your unique merchandising. Give your unique combinations cool names and create them faster than your competitors can copy, and you will stay ahead in the SERPs (Seerch Engine Result Pages).

The fall is a great time for Occam’s Razor. If you KNOW what is going to work because you’ve tested all summer, reduce your offers. Since every ecommerce site is SCREAMING at this time of year, it is a great time to narrowcast. Create a story you can tell over 4 months, a story that gets faster and faster the more you tell it and the closer 12.25 becomes. We are taking our own advice. By making September Ecommerce Secrets Month, we are developing a timely idea that can go into our content bag for next year.

We could discuss social, shopping carts and email marketing, since that content would prove helpful, but the impact of great content without an umbrella to organize it can be overwhelming. If this weekend is one sale, and next weekend a different sale, and the following weekend a third, you will burn out your list, increase unsubscribes and lower conversion.

Here is a favorite ecommerce merchandising irony: Take exactly the approach described above as part of an articulated plan shared with your customers, and conversions increase and your list stays healthy. Sharing your merchandising WHYs with your customers is powerful magic. Your customers get it, they have a way to describe what is happening, and so they don’t feel spammed.

ANY STORY WORKS better than no story.  You can create  a sale based on:

• The 12 days of Christmas
• Customer requests
• Dr. Seuss.

The story behind your merchandising events is important, but not as important as HAVING A STORY, sharing the story and responding to feedback about the story. If someone says negative things about your use of the Cat in the Hat, be appreciative for the feedback and continue on. If an army of people (or lawyers) takes issue with your Cat in the Hat promotion, find a new story (lol).

The last line is important enough to comment further. NEVER get so married to your merchandising plan that you continue a bad one. The beautiful thing about Internet marketing is your team should be able to change directions if your first direction is losing money.

I rarely created a Plan B option, but there were 2 holiday selling seasons out of 7 during my tenure as Director of Ecommerce I wished we had. Junking a merchandising calendar after Halloween is stressful and risky, so it’s something you should only do if the early returns are poor beyond question (they rarely are, btw).  When you have millions riding on something, creating a Plan B you hope you will NEVER be used is a good idea.

Main Page Follow @Atlanticbt Like on Facebook Email Ecomm ?’s To: Martin.Smith(at)Atlanticbt.com	September is Ecommerce Tips Month Labor Day is the sound of the starter’s gun. Back-To-School marks the beginning of a new holiday selling season online. Ecommerce websites behave differently during the fall. As we draw closer to the world’s most popular deadline, 12.25, conversion rates go up, visits before purchase go down, and Average Order Values (AOV) increase. This holiday selling season is going to be different because: Mobile Marketing Mobile will be important, even if your customers aren’t buying from your site using their phones and iPads yet. Your customers are curating your emails and other communication with mobile devices. This year will be the first truly mobile holiday selling season. Social Media Marketing Social marketing is exerting a greater and greater influence on SEO and purchase intent. Combine mobile and social, sometimes called SoLoMo (Social, Local and Mobile), and you have the makings for a very different holiday selling season. Atlantic BT Ecommerce Experts Atlantic BT has e-commerce experts who’ve managed millions in holiday ecomm sales via every Internet marketing channel including: email marketing, PPC, organic SEO, traditional advertising, content and cause marketing, mobile commerce, and social media marketing. Here is a look at our September E-commerce Tips Calendar. As content goes live, we will Tweet on @Atlanticbt and add the link to this page. Ask Atlantic BT’s Ecomm Experts Have a burning ecommerce question? Email to Martin.Smith(at)Atlanticbt(dot)com with the subject “ECOMM Question”. Questions featured win a free T. Deadline for ecomm questions is Friday, 9.14.
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