It's the Most Lucrative Time of the Year

It’s the most lucrative time of the year. And while it’s only August, you’re already behind schedule (in some cases) if you haven’t queued up your holiday playlist and started strategizing this year’s holiday efforts.

Holiday-esq Keywords and Other SEO Opportunities

September and October is the perfect time to start optimizing your holiday SEO so, come November, your customers can find you online (that’s quite important). Given that Americans spent $7.4 billion on Black Friday alone last year, any business with an online presence would do well to put some effort behind their holiday SEO strategy. Do your research on holiday keywords and put together a list to attract a lot of general holiday shoppers looking for a specific product.

We can guarantee that almost every publisher from the national to the city level will be producing gift guides this year. When you’re creating yours, be sure to include things that are unique to your audience. You probably won’t be able to own the keyword ‘gift guide’ against the giants, but perhaps you can own ‘New Jersey gifts’ or ‘gifts for people who love Maine’. 

Most importantly, make sure your website is discoverable when someone is searching for your product to subscribe themselves or give a gift. Demand for magazine subscriptions increases during the holiday season, but if you aren’t watching your organic and paid search visibility, even people searching directly for your brand can end up shopping with someone else. Take D Magazine as an example. In the search query below, a user is looking for a ‘d magazine subscription’ but every link above the fold takes the user to a website other than dmagazine.com. In fact, one of them takes them to a competitor’s website. 

Monitor your organic search visibility, especially for subscription keywords during the holiday season. 

TFD tip: If you aren’t winning search for your own ‘subscription’ keywords, consider spending $100-$200 a month during the holiday season bidding on your own branded subscription keywords so you don’t lose out on revenue to agencies on paid search.

The Big Email Push

Despite the overabundance of emails and special offers that are bound to hit your customer’s inbox, email is still a defining player during this billion dollar sales period. While the majority of TFD clients saw more single day success on Cyber Monday, when we factor in Black Friday Preview and Last Chance sales that stretched outside of a single day, Black Friday outsold Cyber Monday by 73%. Don’t be afraid to start early this year and maximize what was initially more of an in-store retail sales period. Particularly as more retail stores are closing on Thanksgiving this year and the continued concern over COVID and the upcoming flu season, expect more of your users to transition to online shopping this year. Keep in mind other retailers will also be taking advantage of this timeframe as well, so be mindful of your segmenting and frequency practices (TFD clients sent an average of ~3 emails during BF/CM and saw a conversion rate of .6%.)

TFD tips: 

Context is everything. Your consumers are coming off of a very tough year and may have experienced job loss, family illness or general anxiety from ongoing COVID-concerns. Consider testing a reduced price, and be mindful of overly tone deaf messaging and design i.e. ‘We’re celebrating the best Christmas EVER’.

Start off big ... then segment. Start your first holiday email send list larger, then start segmenting and refining from there. Segment options: users that have opened >5 emails, been on the site recently, or have made a purchase last year. This will allow you to send more emails without fatiguing your database. (TFD clients saw an average of 90 unsubscribes during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales period.)

Keep payment simple. Make sure your landing pages accept forms of payment like Paypal and Apple Pay to keep the checkout process seamless.

The Long (Social Media) Game

This year, people are spending more time on social media than ever before. And we mean ever before, because COVID has changed the way Americans use the Internet. Publishers know that they are losing opportunities to get in front of their customers. With less and less people making purchases on the newsstands (thanks, COVID), it’s time to go where you know your audience is … social media. 

Work with your team to insert subscription ads into your organic social schedule. We recommend you post to both your feeds and stories on Facebook and Instagram. But, because Stories have a 24-hour shelf life, you can share a subscription message more frequently. Create a few variations of story ads to throw in the rotation. Try experimenting with different times during the day and different days of the week to see when your users are more likely to subscribe or engage. Get interactive! Get creative! Don’t forget to provide a subscription link in a swipe up, pinned in your linkinbio tool, or simply a subscription link in your bio so users can easily navigate to purchase a subscription via your organic efforts. Later.com has some amazing tips to help businesses leverage Instagram Stories, check that out here. 

Media companies are pinching pennies right now, but it is worth considering spending a few hundred dollars a month on social media to start filling your funnel with potential subscribers. Play the long game. Get people familiar with your content, subscribed to your newsletters, and becoming repeat readers/visitors to your website over the next few months. TFD is currently running Traffic Campaigns on Facebook that are running for the lowest CPCs we have ever seen. Take your most popular site content and start pushing it out to users that haven’t engaged with you before and start pushing new users down that funnel so, come December, they are more likely to follow through with a purchase. 

Set up your subscription campaigns to target users that are frequently on your website, opening your newsletters, and engaging with your content on social media. Pay close attention to your frequency, though. You don’t want these potential subscribers to get annoyed with your messaging. Change your ad creative when your frequency gets too high and rotate audiences you’re targeting so you can stretch your budget further. 

TFD tips: 

Take it slow. You wouldn’t propose on the first date, so don’t ask a user for money if they don’t frequently engage with you or read your content. Target people who are familiar with your brand/product! 

Be mindful. Don’t waste your money advertising to ‘magazine readers’ or ‘frequent travelers’ via Facebook’s detailed targeting segments. These folks don’t know you, so don’t ask them for money.

No-fluff Pop-ups

Last year we tested pop-ups aimed directly at selling subscriptions. The CTA drove users directly to a subscription page where we set up code to track the data. The best part? Pop-ups are completely free and can be set up in just minutes. 

A drop down pop-up (similar to the one shown below) was displayed on the client’s homepage from October - January and garnered 250 subscriptions. A similar slide in pop-up brought in nearly 90 subscriptions … and a Cyber Monday/Black Friday-specific pop-up brought in over 65 subscriptions. This type of holiday effort is a no-brainer and can mindlessly bring in money without much continuous labor. 

TFD tip: Suppress your current subscribers from the pop-up list! Better yet, target them with a gift subscription message like the one above.

2020 has been a year, and going into a holiday season with a presidential election in the mix is going to make marketing that much more of a difficult and saturated experience. It is imperative that you spend your budget (however small) wisely, and you subsidize those paid efforts with organic efforts. Keep the focus on your user … from your ad placement to your email messaging, remain consciously aware of their search keyword usage and drive traffic to your subscription pages efficiently and come out of 2020 in the black. 

Want to talk about your holiday plan? Email me: lauren@twentyfirstdigital.com.