Here are 10 tips we’ve learned through the years that if you nail in these final days, can make or break a very crucial Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday weekend.
Exchange cell phone numbers with the vendors that cost you the most money. Adwords teams, Retargeting vendors, Affiliate network reps and top affiliate account managers, Personalization vendors, marketing agency reps, technology providers, etc. You never know when you’ll need to shift direction on your ads during the weekend and need immediate approval pushed through. Or you find out Thanksgiving morning your link is broken on that affiliate’s site.
You should have placements secured with your top affiliates by now. If you don’t, huge miss. Affiliate revenue can account for as much as 30% of your sales this key weekend. Don’t let it happen again next year. And immediately contact the movers and shakers to buy, beg, and bribe your way into any remaining placements. Bonus pro tip: try your hardest to negotiate for increased commissions vs straight flat fees – your ROAS will be much improved. But if you’re at the 11th hour, beggars can’t be choosers.
On that note, you’ve sent all your affiliate creative on to them, right? If you haven’t, get moving. They’ll be inundated with last minute requests and that leaves room for mistakes. Mistakes will cost you serious money, so minimize your risk.
Take retargeting CPCs up (you are bidding on CPC, right?!), way up. Build as big of a cookie base in these final days as possible to cash in on during Cyber 5. Of course, make sure you’re still driving profits so only take them up as high as your goals allow.
Sale pages are ranking in Google organically. Not only sale pages, but check your rankings for your top brand terms + thanksgiving/black Friday/cyber Monday variants + sale variants (sale, deals, specials, coupons, offers, promotions, promos, etc.). The conversion rates on visitors coming through these terms can be upwards of 40% or better. Are your rankings not that great? Two fire drills to run: 1) Get with your PPC team and buy your way to the top of Google; 2)Some quick-but-strategic internal linking could be a solution to bump you up a bit.
Run a “site:domain.com” search on your domain and make sure things look copasetic. Fix any minor issues and keep an eye out for major ones (oh, ya know, like a robots.txt message!).
Have your coupon-based promos uploaded into your Google Shopping campaigns for a “Special Offers” highlight. This can drastically increase your CTR and of course conversion rates during this key time. Don’t have any coupons? Get creative. Free shipping, free expedited shipping, gift with purchase, purchase with purchase, etc. are some ideas. CPCstrategy.com does a nice write-up on how to enable Special Offers for your Shopping Campaigns.
If you’re not in a code freeze, use these last few days to remove any marketing tracking pixels/tags not in use. They decrease your load times and removing them is sure to provide a better UX and possibly increase conversion rates.
Give your IT staff the whole marketing team’s cell phone numbers. If your sites go down for any reason during Cyber 5, you’ll want to be nimble with your marketing plans. Pause that email campaign that’s sending out, pause PPC spend, etc. Think your site won’t go down? Never say never.
Check your PPC budget caps across all the engines and make triple sure you won’t cap out at 9am on Black Friday! No harm in raising them insanely high, if your goals are ROAS based.
Have some other gems to share? Let us know in the comments below or share with us at hello@MAKAdigital.com.
