Consumers are in a spending mood, and the prospects for retail e-commerce this coming holiday season are bright. A recent Coremetrics report predicts another record-breaking season with 21 percent of online shoppers expected to spend more on the Web in 2011.
Consumers are in a spending mood, and the prospects for retail e-commerce this coming holiday season are bright.
This kind of news can make a marketer’s eyes light up like a child’s on Christmas morning, but big opportunities also mean big challenges. Consumer spending trends and behaviors are constantly changing, and you’ll need the right strategy and technologies to optimize your media buying.
A recent Coremetrics report predicts another record-breaking season with 21 percent of online shoppers expected to spend more on the Web in 2011.:
- Pinpoint your target audience. The key is precision and depth in developing your demographic profiles. Think beyond gender, age, marital status and income to other characteristics such as life-event triggers and attitudinal motivators.
- Consider doing a trial run. Allow the campaign to start a week or two before the peak holiday shopping season. This will give you more insights into consumer behaviors, which will help you establish the campaign’s broad framework and fine-tune the creative, channel strategy and other marketing components.
- Take advantage of real-time bidding (RTB). Buying patterns and costs change by the hour. RTB dynamically analyzes creative, consumer, and contextual parameters to make automated decisions that optimize your value/price ratio. Remember, however, that RTB technology does not discriminate, so you will need to work with your provider to develop a “blacklist” of sites where your ad won’t run.
- Be open to allowing your home page to be re-pixeled. This strategy can be used to constantly improve algorithms and enhance a campaign’s retargeting efforts.
- Personalize the customer experience. Match offers to complement consumers buying preferences and needs by combining real-time data with advanced lifestyle segmentation systems.
The value and importance of responding to real time data increase exponentially during the holiday shopping season. Preparation, the right strategy and RTB solutions can give you an edge in the fierce online battleground for tens of billions of dollars.