The scramble has begun for many online sellers as they make final preparations for this years holiday selling season. With all the many task of current inventory evaluation (seeing which items can be discounted), holiday web site preparations, product production itself and of course advertising it’s easy to become overwhelmed.
For those that started early, they are on the down hill run of these preparations but for those just starting their holiday preparations, it’s going to be a very busy time for them. The obvious question for these folks is “How to get it all done and not loose my mind at the same time”?
Here are some things to keep in mind as you design your plan of attack.
Having sufficient inventory will most likely be your biggest problem. We all know how long it takes for us to produce our products. With this in mind, you should set aside enough time each day for production so that by November 15th at the latest, you have 85% of all the stock you will need for this years holiday selling season. The remainder 15% can be addressed at a less hectic pace.
With the ever increasing number of online merchants that are our competition, Marketing and Advertising your online store during the holidays is an absolute necessity. How much and where is the question. Keep in mind that if you spend your time and advertising dollars marketing to every person on the internet, you will most likely only see very marginal success.
It’s kind of like this. Many think that using the “Shotgun Approach” will gain them the most sales. For stores like Wal Mart and other mega stores this is correct but for those of us that sell in the handmade – handcrafted market, it just doesn’t work. We need to market and advertise to customer who are most likely to purchase our types of products. If you are a butcher, you aren’t going to market to vegetarians. The same is true here.
To get the biggest bang for your marketing and advertising time and dollars, you need to place your name in front of people who want, or are most likely, to buy our products. This can best be done by marketing and advertising in and on places that promote and draw shoppers actively seeking handmade and handcrafted products.
We have a very unique advantage these days when it comes to marketing and advertising if we just take advantage of it. I don’t know what percentage of products for sale across the internet are commercially mass produced compared to those that are handmade or handcrafted but I would be willing to bet that commercially mass produced products far exceeds the types of products we create.
With this in mind, why not take advantage of it. More and more consumers are becoming fed up with the poor quality and high prices of commercially produced products and are actively seeking products that are distinct with quality and are priced reasonably. Our tight economy is making shoppers more cautious about what they buy these days. Let’s give them what they want.
Although large search engines like Google, Yahoo and the like will of course be used significantly by shoppers this holiday season, there is a very large group of shoppers that will be and have been turning to Specialized Shopping Directories and similar sites. Because of this, Specialized Shopping sites, often called Niche Shopping Sites, will be used significantly more this holiday season than ever before.
If nothing else, those of us that create and sell handmade and handcrafted products certainly fall into a Niche category so why not market and advertise with this in mind and make use of this fact. Putting your marketing and advertising time and dollars into raising your visibility on these types of web sites will pay off much greater in the long run.
Now there are two different types of Specialized (Niche) Shopping web sites. First are those that actually allow you to sell your products from their web site and those that are strictly designed to point shoppers towards stores based on the shoppers needs. These are true Shopping Directories.
Most of us sell on more than one venue already so I don’t think I need to elaborate about selling venues. A word though about true shopping directories. One of the biggest advantages they have in relationship to drawing customers is that they usually have stores listed in them from many different sources. This allows the shopper the ability to see wider diversification of stores than any particular selling venue will have.
Another factor to consider here is that true shopping directories are unbiased when it comes to the stores listed in them. Let me explain. Selling venues are always skewing the search results of shoppers towards those stores that pay them to do so. That doesn’t mean that true shopping directories don’t have advertising available for their listed stores and yes this advertising is designed to give those advertisers a higher visibility. After all, that is what they are paying for. True shopping directories however don’t manipulate their search features though. If a shopper uses a specific search term, the search results will show every page and store that matches or incorporates that search term in it. Not based on the amount of money any particular store spends at the directory but based on what is actually listed in the directory. That is why in true shopping directories, and particularly those that also use categorizing, like most of them do, the real advantage of advertisers pays off by advertising within the actual category at the stores listing point. There ads will actually be seen more often because if their store description is written properly, their store (and its associated ad) will be coming up in more searches and their store will have greater visibility as shoppers browse through the listed stores.
Here is another factor to take into consideration. Most shoppers realize they are being manipulated by most search engines and many types of directories and are getting sick and tired of it and they are looking for places that aren’t saying to them. “You really don’t know what you want so we’re going to show you only what we want to”. This type of shopper manipulation is beginning to back fire on search engines that use it. No one likes to be called “Stupid” and that is exactly what many of these types of web sites are saying to shoppers. Oh, they spin it around and say we are making the search experience better – one of the new expressions used today. Shoppers are more than capable of deciding what they want and making their own decisions. This is one of the big reasons for the ever growing increase in the use of true shopping directories.
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Keep these things in mind when you are about to spend your advertising dollars.
Showing posts with label holiday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label holiday. Show all posts
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Being Ready To Sell More During The Holidays
Let me begin by talking about a couple of things that might seem obvious at first but seem to always cause problems for those unprepared. The first has to do with inventory.
One of the criticisms of online retail businesses when the tech boom first started was they did not have the inventory on hand to fulfill the orders they received. There are as many different ways to manage your inventory as there are ways to paint your house, but you can minimize some issues up front and prepare for others.
To state the obvious is to say, have enough inventory on hand to fulfill all your orders between November 1st and December 31st, but that isn’t as easy as it sounds for a small business. You have to carefully plan your cash flow needs to be able to buy additional production supplies for inventory, and shipping materials over the holiday selling time period. Cash flow for small businesses is usually as tight as it can be, so make adjustments as early as you can, before you need the inventory and can’t fill all those orders.
The holiday season can be filled with family and fun (or something like that) but it can also take a lot of time you might normally use to post, do research, and everything else you do to maintain your store. Trying to do tech writing while your in-laws are visiting can be challenging at best, so be prepared in advance and ramp up your inventory levels.
Second, many online merchants have built in phobias about some simple yet effective merchandising and selling formats.
Use Gift Certificates, Gift Cards, and Coupons. As buyers have become more Internet savvy they have come to expect to find some good coupons or specials, especially around the holiday season. You don’t have to give away the store, but get a few promotional coupons ready to send out to your mailing list, or make them readily available on your website.
In addition to a few different coupons you should create some kind of gift certificate that your visitors can buy to give as a gift for later use on your storefront. You see these gift certificates everywhere because they are guaranteed revenue, cost almost nothing to produce, and each year a certain percentage go unused.
Provide Good Customer Service. This is probably the most important for customer acquisition or retaining those valued customers for future purchases. The issue of customer service is a standard item among small businesses but it shouldn’t be overlooked. Just plain good customer service can go a long way and much of the time is one of the lesser expenses of the fall season.
Answer your business email as soon as you can, return customer phone calls promptly, ship your products quickly, and offer a clear return policy your customers can understand. These are common issues but can quickly become out of hand when multiplied by a higher volume over the holiday shopping season.
You don’t want to be the last horse out of the gate when it comes to your marketing and advertising.
Your marketing and advertising plans should already be in place. In fact, you should be doing your final reviews of them at this time. Making last minute changes in an ad campaign can be disastrous and cost you untold sales.
One of the most over looked aspects of selling on line for many small business owners is their Credibility & Trust Factor. A lot of research and study has been done in these areas and the results show that even though more and more people become internet savvy, they still have difficulty buying from stores or businesses that are new or appear to be new. This is particularly true for buyers over the age of 40 or so. The average internet buyer may visit a new online store and use them for price comparison but when it comes down to buying, they will pay a couple of dollars more to purchase from a store that they have seen on line for some time.
This can create problems not only for new online store owners but for those that have been around awhile but haven’t really developed any real internet visibility. Granted, it isn’t logical for a small business to expect to have the online visibility of Amazon or some other big company but they can pre-position themselves so they appear to have been in business online for some time. Studies show that if your store appears to have been in business for a reasonable period of time, a buyers buying confidence in your store will be significantly higher. Even if you really have only been in business on line for a few months.
It does take time to develop internet visibility but being in the right places at the right times can expedite this process and your stores customer perception. It all about what the customer perceives. Not the reality. The idea is to get them through the front door. Your products and great service will keep them coming back.
Over the last several years there have been some significant changes in the way people shop. Particularly during the hectic holiday season. Although search engines are still used to find products, more and more buyers are turning to places like Shopping Directories to find that special item. It makes sense too. At a Shopping Directory, customers automatically feel more at ease. Their general trust level in any store listed in a Shopping Directory is higher since they believe that the directory themselves has done some evaluation and qualification of the store prior to allowing it to be listed in the directory. Another reason is that they have every thing in one place without having to bounce all over the net.
There are a lot of on line merchants that feel they have to spend a lot of money and focus only on the really big search engines and high priced directories to make sales. The facts are that you don’t need to spend exorbitant amounts of money and by being listed in specialized niche shopping directories pays off better. Most online buyers know what they are looking for and go to places where they are most likely to find the type of item they want.
You should be looking for those Niche Shopping Directories that don’t charge and arm and a leg and that will be drawing the types of buyers you are looking for. Another nice thing about these Niche Shopping Directories is that your store will not be lumped in with 10,000,000 other similar stores. It just doesn’t make sense to purposefully give yourself more competition than you need to. One final point of interest about Niche Shopping Directories is that they very often have holiday marketing and advertising specials running that can really stretch a merchants’ advertising dollars. As a final point about Niche Shopping Directories, in most instances they provide much better service to the merchant than the big boys do.
If you haven’t already downloaded our Free 30 plus page booklet of Marketing & Advertising Suggestions, Tips, Tricks and Ideas you can download your copy HERE
Want To Increase The Traffic To Your Store? Get Listed In The Hand Made Product Directory Today!
Copyright © 1988-2008, The Hand Made Product Directory / New Creations Consulting, LLC
All rights reserved
info@dmpmc.net www.dmpmc.net/THMD
Subscribe To Our Monthly Newsletter
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