Image is copyright of Buy Nothing Day UK

“Lock up your wallets and purses, cut up your credit cards and dump the love of your life – shopping. ”

“Saturday November 26th is Buy Nothing Day. It’s a day where you challenge yourself, your family and friends to switch off from shopping and tune into life.”

So says the blurb on the Buy Nothing Day website.  You can see where they are coming from.  Most of us would agree that there is more to life than shopping and so why not devote a day to the appreciation of a simpler, non-consumerist existence?

I’m all for devoting time to friends, family & fresh air, but the notion that it’s wrong to buy stuff is plain crass.  Especially now.  It oversimplifies a message to the point that it’s counter-productive. It hijacks an opportunity to say something useful and says something destructive instead.

How many thousands of struggling small businesses, the lifeblood of our economy and the green shoots of its recovery, rely on consumer purchases to sustain them and provide for the people that work in them? They need all the help they can get – many relying on the next few weeks of seasonal shopping to carry them through another year.

Examining the environmental and ethical impact of consumerism is a worthy agenda – but let’s keep it real.  Buy local – YES!  Buy quality – YES!  Buy from small businesses – YES!  Support ethical businesses – YES!  But please don’t think that buy buying NOTHING you will achieve ANYTHING very much at all.

Could I put a plea out to the relevant authorities to settle on a name for today?  So far, I’ve seen articles and offers heralding what’s likely to be the biggest online shopping day EVER with a confusing array of alternative ‘Monday’ labels:

• Mega Monday
• Manic Monday
• Cyber Monday
• Black Monday
• e-Shopping Monday
• e-Monday

Today has an identity crisis.

Perhaps the government quango that deals with such naming dilemmas has been recently disbanded (perhaps an Office of Naming Responsibility?).  Does anyone have a solution?

Don’t miss out on the biggest online shopping days of the year.

Christmas is a huge milestone in the calendar of a catalogue retailer.  After months of military-style planning, your promotional campaigns are in full swing and your well-oiled fulfilment operation purrs effortlessly as it shifts into a higher gear.  Not long to go now!

As you ride the festive wave and count down the days to the holiday, you’d be forgiven for looking forward to spending some time out of the office and forgetting about business for a few days.  But will your business keep on working for you over the Christmas shut-down, even if your staff are at home enjoying their mince pies?

The fact is, you can’t afford to neglect the busiest online shopping days in the entire year.  In 2009, like the year before, Boxing Day was the busiest day for online shopping.  The next day, the 27th, was the second busiest day.  Online sales on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were up 36% on the previous year.  Although YOU might be ready for a break, your customer has different ideas!  They have gift money and vouchers to spend, and new gadgets to shop with.  And more than anything – they’re hungry for some bargains.

Last year, John Lewis began its online clearance at 6pm on Christmas Eve and reported an increase of 23 per cent in sales for the first three days of its online sale, compared to the same period last year.  On Christmas Day, their website took an order every ten seconds on average – the peak shopping hours being between 9pm and 10pm.

Have you planned to take advantage of this opportunity?  If you’re looking no further than the Christmas postage deadlines, there’s a good chance you’ll miss out.  Here’s a checklist of actions you should be thinking about now.

1. Have your site update ready to roll out on Christmas Eve.
Time to clear away the tinsel on the header, ditch the last posting dates, and re-organise your featured categories and products.  Your customers are ready to change gear, and it’s your job to make the site relevant to their changed requirements.

2. Set expectations for customer service.
Your customer service team is likely to be depleted or absent altogether over the holiday period.  Make sure your customers know when to expect their purchases, and when they can expect to get an answer to their queries.

3. Make sure all your gift voucher recipients can redeem their vouchers online
There’s nothing worse than having a gift voucher and not being able to spend it online.  It’s a bugbear of mine – and surprisingly common.  If your system can’t handle it, it’s time you did something about it.

4. Use your social media channels to build the hype.
Build a dialogue of engagement with your followers and use it to remind them about you during the holiday period.  Use scheduling functionality to maintain the dialogue, even when you’re at home enjoying your Christmas lunch.

5. Launch your sale.
There’s no better time to create some empty space on the shelves and turn those slow-moving lines into cash.  If you run just one clearance sale a year, make sure you launch it over the Christmas holiday rather than waiting until January.

6. Land an email in your customer’s inbox on Christmas Day.
Come on, you’d be mad not to.  Whether it’s Christmas Day or Boxing Day, let your customers know you are open for business!  If you don’t, someone else certainly will.

Many niche multi-channel retailers don’t have an organisation big enough to support the in-house marketing expertise they need to grow their business at the pace they’d like. Often, the owner/manager will be working with limited resources, trying to navigate through an array of online tip-sheets and free advice to discover a strategy that’s effective, economical and sustainable.  I know, because that was me.

I’d make the annual pilgrimage to events like ECMOD and listen in awe to the quality of expertise on offer, wishing I could afford to bring my whole team, or even better, bring the experts into my own business and ‘internalise’ the learning.

So you can imagine how excited I was to get involved, through Gramar Investments, with the development and launch of an innovative online training program for ecommerce merchants.  The course mixes advice from many of the real-life experts I might encounter at ECMOD or equivalent events in the US, with the fictional story of a young, glamorous entrepreneur and her blossoming online cosmetics business.

The story is told through the eyes of Frank, a private investigator working for an undisclosed jealous rival.  His files, consisting of audio, email correspondence and notes, make up the course materials that are used to reinforce the key learning points of the program in a compelling, memorable and fun way.

Delivered online and on-demand, Frankly eCommerce enables your whole team to participate by working through the course materials collaboratively: tagging, sharing and commenting on lessons in a way that works best for your company.

The course is released to limited number of users in March 2010 however we’re currently inviting e-commerce retailers to sign up for free beta access in February, qualifying them for priority access when the full course is released.  Please register your interest for the free trial at www.franklyecommerce.com.

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How a retailer of adventure luggage attracts high-converting traffic with search-friendly content (and has a lot of fun in the process)

When I met him in June at the Internet Retailer conference in Boston, he’d just spent a week on a 500-mile off-road expedition putting a brand new Land Rover LR3 through its paces in Colorado, courtesy of Land Rover Lifestyle magazine.  By the time you read this, he’ll have just arrived back from a three-week expedition to a remote corner of Namibia.  All this, while running a successful and growing retail brand back home in Montana.  How does he get away with it?  Well, put simply, Jim’s business is Adventure.Like his father before him, Jim Markell was a parachute rigger in the marines.  Day in, day out, paratroopers quite literally put their lives in his hands every time they jumped out of a plane.   Today, he applies the same perfectionist’s appreciation of quality materials and attention to detail to manufacturing and retailing the Red Oxx range of premium adventure luggage.  Needless to say, every piece has an unconditional lifetime guarantee.

Building a content-rich landscape

I was already a fan of his product range thanks to an introduction from a colleague in the US, but now I’m an admirer of his marketing strategy too.  Why? Because Red Oxx uses content not only as the cornerstone of a successful, long-term, sustainable search strategy, but it positions this content at the heart of a wider marketing strategy in a manner that leverages its effectiveness exponentially. More on this “holistic” approach later, but first a summary of the tactic.

Over several years, Red Oxx has been publishing informative articles of around 800 words, framed around particular keyword phrases developed using tools such as Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery.  Importantly, the focus is deliberately on longer keyword phrases of three or four words, thus avoiding the most popular and competitive phrases.  They’ve found that the fourth word in a keyword phrase can add the extra degree of specificity that results in significantly higher click-through and conversion rates.

For example, when the airlines changed the rules for carry-on luggage post 9/11, there was a surge of interest in the subject from travellers worldwide.  It was also a subject of particular interest to Red Oxx, who make a range of bags based around these regulations.  Keywords phrases were researched and informational content was crafted, generating a surge of traffic to the site and a very short payback on the effort employed.  So successful was this particular campaign that it still generates top 10 organic rankings for certain keyword phrases and a steady stream of high-converting traffic more than six years later.

Swimming with sharks as a marketing strategy?

Where the example above was a somewhat opportunistic tactic straight out of the guerilla-marketing handbook, the next example epitomizes a slow burn and sustainable content strategy that has become the mainstay of the Red Oxx approach to generating qualified traffic from search.    It’s based simply on understanding their customers – what sort of people they are, and perhaps more importantly, what sort of people would they like to be.  By tapping into these aspirations with content that allows the merchant to interweave their brand and product, there is an opportunity to create the content-rich landscape that the search engine robots really appreciate.
Take swimming with sharks.  Hammerhead sharks to be specific – on Cocos Island, 300 miles off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.  Yes, it really exists (I spent five eventful days there once, but that’s another story), and it’s one of the world’s top Scuba destinations where you’re guaranteed to see more varieties of shark in greater quantities than you might previously have thought advisable or even possible.

So Jim and his cousin Shawn took a trip there a couple of years ago with a company specializing in live-aboard diving trips.  They came home with some nice pictures, a bit of video, and enough words to create a series of four 800 word articles for the Adventure Journals section of the Red Oxx website.  Of course, no detail is spared when it comes to describing the choice of kit bags to take along for the ride – but the content is nevertheless compelling: detailed, well written, keyword rich, and supported by some visually appealing pictures and video.

The articles were all written in-house, and then optimized for search by an agency at a cost of around £250 each.  The cost of adding the supporting video content was probably less than £1,000.  The articles rank more highly than the website of the dive company that took them there.  Even with the cost of the trip factored in, it paid for itself within a year and, two years on, continues to pull in a steady stream of traffic with those high-ranking four word phrases (try “costa rica cocos sharks” and you’ll no longer be surprised to see a retailer of adventure luggage at number 3 on the first page).  The expectation is that it will continue for many years to send qualified prospects to the Red Oxx website at no additional cost – but this is not the only benefit.

Realising the holistic benefits

As I hinted earlier, the real benefits start to kick-in when your content becomes part of a wider strategy for your website. Dovetail with your email marketing in a way that reinforces your brand and supports your merchandise offering.  Allow your content to intertwine with your product pages and vice versa.  Your overall site search visibility will improve as people link to your content or click through from search results pages.

For Red Oxx, this strategy has delivered consistent and profitable double-digit organic growth.  It does no paid search.   It never sacrifices margin by discounting products in order to generate sales.  It no longer needs to tour the circuit of specialist consumer exhibitions (although they still do, mainly to gather ideas for fresh content).  Customers themselves generate a significant amount of content in the form of product reviews and travel diaries.  Jim even boasts of impatient email subscribers demanding to know when the next bulletin is being broadcast so they can read up on the latest Adventure Journals!

Of course, where merchants selling commodity products may struggle to achieve similar success, Red Oxx is a brand that is made for this strategy.  They make a unique range of products with a great story, and sell them to a booming market niche made up of voraciously inquisitive customers with money to spend. Notwithstanding the caveats, the Red Oxx story provides food for thought for any small online business, not least being this: if your brand is your passion, creating lots of keyword rich content can be not only fun, but perhaps the best long term investment you can make in your website.

Take-away points

• If your brand has a good story – tell it
• Write for the person you customer would like to be
• Research the long keyword phrases that will provide the sweet spot
• Create a content-rich landscape to boost overall site visibility
• Think holistically about your content

Article licensed for publication with Creative Commons “Attribution” terms.

First published in Catalogue & e-Business, September 2009