Black Friday / Black Monday?

Some say the holiday shopping season got off to a good start.  comScore reports that online sales for Thanksgiving Day were up 29% to $272 million and "Black Friday" sales were up 22% to $531 million.  For the month to date, online sales are up 17%

But, I’m not so sure this will be a good retail season overall.  I think consumers are tapped out – they don’t save and they can’t tap the equity in their homes.  They’re up to their ears in credit card debt.

The stock market was down big time today – Cyber Monday, the day many
consider to be the biggest online shopping day of the year.  I think
it’s really Black Monday this year – and a sign of things to come unfortunately.

Online sales are up 17% for the month, but the S&P 500 is down 10% for the same period!

The spin I heard was that more shoppers purchased on the day after Thanksgiving.  The reality is that they didn’t spend as much as last year.  Many people bought the early bird sales, but nobody was in the stores late afternoon.  (My wife and I both noticed it on a trip to Iowa on Friday)  That’s troubling.

But what seems pretty obvious is that more people are buying online than ever before.  3 or 4 years ago, some people thought it unsafe to shop online.  Not so today. 

In fact, if you watched "60 Minutes" last night, Leslie Stahl did a piece on how unsecure some brick and mortar stores wireless POS (Point-Of-Sale) terminals are.  She and some guy went war-driving and watched sales being rung up from their car in the parking lot.  They said that more credit card numbers are scammed offline than on.

I couldn’t help but to think of my previous career, managing a Radio Shack store and obsessing over the amount of stuff I had ordered for the holiday and hoping it would sell well, while fretting over the hot merchandise that was on allocation.  That was before the days of gift cards and late holiday buying.  U.S. consumers know that they will get discounts if they are patient.  Usually what you want is going to be available close to Christmas.  I think you need to develop a strategy to get the sales earlier, rather than later.  Make your offer more compelling.  It may be a special offer, bundled products, personalization or just a better merchandise mix.  Free shopping is a motivator, but it seems like everyone is doing it, so it isn’t special and it cuts into your margins.

This year’s Tickle-Me-Elmo/Cabbage Patch Kids is the personal GPS products, mostly made by Garmin.  There have been many reports of sellouts. According to comScore, the hottest retail category overall this year is Video Games, Consoles and Accessories.  No surprise there, it’s a hot category for kids.

If you sell ANYTHING online, you need to monitor holiday shopping.  What works and what doesn’t, not only in terms of products, but pricing, presentation, marketing and service.

— Kurt Scholle

Top Search Engines

I don’t think anyone would be surprised to find that Google is the biggest search engine on the Internet.  Hitwise, a unit of Experian, reports that "the Google", as Jim Cramer calls it, accounted for 64.49% of all searches in the United States last month.  That was up nearly a point since September and 3 1/2 points since October 2006.

Yahoo! had 21.65% of search traffic.  MSN about 7.4% and Ask bringing up the year at just under 5%.

In September, comScore ranked the top search engines a little differently, with Google and it’s related properties, like YouTube accounting for 57% of search traffic, Yahoo! sites getting a 23.7 share, MSN ranking 3rd with 10.3% and Ask with 4.7%

It’s interesting that AOL/Time Warner has dropped as far as they have, down to 5th place with a 4.3 share.  They once had 3 or 4 times that.  And when you consider that AOL is the default search engine for AOL subscribers and MSN is the default for all Windows machines, you can see that an overwhelming number of searchers have bookmarked Google and Yahoo.

All of these search engines are important when developing your online strategy.  Google may be the 1,000 pound gorilla, but often times you can rank higher in some of the other search engines and benefit from traffic that comes from other search engines or directories.  You may also find more reasonable bids on other search engines or directories.  The way you go about that varies from engine to engine.

And don’t forget that there are hundreds of search engines that cater to specific niches.  We found a search engine that caters to the plastics industry for a client once.  We found a search engine dedicated to anyone wanting to export into or out of Greece.  So don’t count out niche players either.

We regularly use software that checks search engine rankings on top search engines for coveted words.  That should be the very least of your monthly assessment of your online initiatives.  We’ll cover more metrics in the weeks ahead, or contact me today to get the conversation going.

Broadcast E-Mail Mistakes

E-Mail marketing can be very effective and in-expensive.  Some companies lose sales to existing customers, simply because they’ve forgotten you or were never aware of your product or service.  So, staying in touch is a smart strategy.  But there are ways of doing it right and most effectively.  But doing it yourself can be very risky.  We have a number of customers who maintain e-mail lists both large and small and we’ve seen some similarities in the challenges that have come up.  Contact us for best email practices if you currently send mass emails or are considering it.

Here’s a look at what NOT to do.

Problem – SPAM Restrictions: At some point, when a company or organization begins to grow, the ‘herd’ or list of contacts increases to several dozen or more.  This can prevent a challenge to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) due to limits on the number of outbound emails that are allowed due to SPAM fears.  Some, but not all, ISPs limit the number of outbound emails at any given time.  Some cap the number on a daily basis.  That means you might lose the ability to send any emails because you’ve exceeded your limit.  At the very least, you might be limited to the number of emails you can send at any one time.  I spoke to a guy this morning who is trying to send out emails to a herd of 5,000 – but he can only send 85 at a time.  Not very efficient.

Problem – Blacklisting:  People are sensitive to the number of SPAM messages they receive every day and it’s often very easy for them to mark an email as SPAM, even if they originally requested information or signed up for a newsletter, etc from you.  Getting off a blacklist is time consuming.  What’s worse, if your website URL gets reported as SPAM, you may have difficulty in sending regular emails as well as broadcast emails!

Problem – SPAM Filters:  Deliverability is probably the biggest issue for email marketers.  E-Mail is filtered for a variety of reasons, but some people don’t realize that email is scanned for certain words, which often leads to messages being deleted or sent to SPAM folders that never get checked.  You might be surprised to learn how many of your  emails fail to get delivered because of words in the subject line or content.  Even worse, what if your all your emails have been permanently banned?  You’d never know it from Outlook or your AOL account.

Problem – Opt-Out Compliance:  And then we have the issue of complying with the Canned SPAM Act, which among other things requires that a link be included in broadcast emails allowing the recipient to opt-out (forever) from receiving messages from you.  Failure to do so, can lead to significant blacklisting problems and even fines.

So, what’s the solution?  CRM (Customer Relations Management)  All of the issues above are managed or the downside reduced by using a service like 1shoppingcart, Infusion or AWeber. 

  • These firms maintain mailservers that can send thousands of emails at a time.
  • They have staff to work at resolving blacklisting and other deliverability issues.
  • They offer tools that let you check your email draft for a ‘Suspected SPAM Rating’, giving you the ability modify your message before its sent, and improving the number of emails that get thru.
  • They automatically add an opt-out link to the bottom of your emails, so un-interested recipients can be taken off your list automatically.

These service companies can give you reports on how many emails were delivered per campaign including those not delivered for technical or other reasons, how many emails were opened, how many people opt-ed out and other useful metrics.  The increased deliverabilty alone is worth the price!