Over the last 6 years, I've subscribed to more jewelry email lists than I can remember. Whenever I do a website review, I look for the newsletter signup and add myself to their list. Most of the time, I never hear from those retail jewelers because they don't follow through with their email list.
Amidon Jewelers, in New Hampshire, is one of the few independent retail jewelers that I know that has consistently sent me emails since I signed up to their list way back in 2012. Years ago, they were sendi... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is Part 8 of my annual special Daily Golden Nugget "Holiday Run-Up" series packed with tactics to help you during November and December this year. I started this series with an overview of the marketing strategies that have worked over the last 12 months and have been expanding on each idea every day since.
This is Part 2 of a multi-day Daily Golden Nugget series packed with tactics to help you in your 2015 holiday marketing. The series started yesterday with the overview of 2015 holiday marketing strategies. I'm breaking down each section of that overview into a more detailed Daily Nugget.
The 2014 Holiday Season has come to a close and it's time to review your marketing strategies and record the results for next year's season.
I've compiled some email details that you can use as a benchmark for your own strategies.
I've subscribed to hundreds of email newsletters from retail jewelry stores, large and small e-commerce jewelry sites, and a few chain stores. This is a graph showing the quantity of emails I received from all those senders from November 1, 2014 through December 26, 2014: ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's time to kick off my yearly report of email subject lines throughout the holiday season. This is my breakdown of "Black Friday" emails throughout November 2014.
As part of my email tracking, I'm subscribed to hundreds of different email lists. Every month, I monitor trends and techniques to see how email marketing is evolving. During the month of November, I received almost 1000 emails building towards the launch of the holiday season.VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As the internet and online shopping have become more popular over the last few years, today, the first Monday after Thanksgiving and Black Friday, has earned the designation as Cyber Monday. This is the day when many e-commerce websites have 24 hour sales to lure shoppers to spend their money online instead of shopping in local stores.
Every year comScore.com reports the sales figures for different shopping days through the holiday season. Although the calendar date of Cyber Monday changes ever... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Throughout all of last week, I've been laying the groundwork for a complete holiday 2014 marketing plan that you can use to promote a chosen suite of items.
This is the third part of my Daily Golden Nugget series outlining a potential marketing plan for the upcoming holiday season. The first part explained how to select the items to promote during the holidays. The second part detailed how to set up your newspa... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the second part of my Daily Golden Nugget series outlining a potential marketing plan for the upcoming holiday season. The first part I began yesterday explained how you should select a specific set of jewelry items and then write blogs, take photography, and make videos for those items.
For those of us working in retail, or those of us who provide services to retail businesses, we know the day after tomorrow is when we can official start promoting the Holiday Season. True, we will still get flack for "skipping Thanksgiving," or for beating the first snowfall (maybe!) to the punch, but after Halloween, it's finally fair game. Holiday movies start playing on TV, and new holiday albums came out today is the US, which will start to affect the iTunes charts this weekend.
The USA is one of the few countries that celebrates Halloween in such a big way, and that day now represents the dividing date between "Fall" advertising and Holiday advertising. Not too long ago, that dividing date was Thanksgiving.
Of course, I'm only referring to the USA. Other countries that don't celebrate or commercialize Halloween in... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Headlong into the holiday season already and you are either hoping for better or already happily surprised.
We're already hearing it both ways. Depending on the location, some jewelers have higher sales, some are the same as last year, and we've even heard from one that didn't have a single phone call or walk-in at all last week!
We're pretty sure that no matter what situation you are in you would be happy to get a few more quick sales this season so here are two fast tips to fish for some extra customers today.
1. Send an email to your list.
Alright, so we published that entire Holiday Run-Up and many days of email examples, but have you used those ideas? A few months ago we signed up for email newsletters from several dozen large and small jewelry stores. We're monitoring the messages and intensity of ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Marketing campaigns in early December each year shift from talk of Black Friday and Cyber Monday to campaigns mentioning the "12 Days of Christmas." Many of these marketing campaigns will align themselves with the 12 items in the popular song in hopes to create memory retention.
If you are looking for ways to create memory retention, you don't have to limit yourself to the overly popularized use of those 12 days and items; instead, you should try to be a little more creative. Let's look at some ideas that might spark your own.
The Holiday Season comes jam-packed with many religious traditions, cultural traditions, and popularized TV/movie/theatre traditions. Any one of these can be adapted to help your own brand or specific product positioning.
Creating branding or product positioning for your store or jewelry shoul... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's the season of giving. Combine that with the social web and you could come up with some creative ideas to weave through your website, email, Facebook, and Twitter marketing. If all your holiday marketing is simply attempting to sell, you will quickly lose your audience, so how can we spice up your website and email messages?
A good place to start is to think about what people do during the holidays other than buy gifts. They get together with family, catch up with friends, decorate their homes inside and out, watch seasonal movies and TV shows, bake, sing carols, and anything else you can think of. What are your traditions during the Holiday Season?
Actually that's a good question to ask on your Facebook Page: What are your Holiday Traditions? You could even make it a contest and have every shared story entered int... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We've spent each day this week reviewing important marketing tips and SEO ideas as they relate to key shopping days in the holiday season. Today's topic is Cyber Monday, the heyday for those of you that have e-commerce websites.
This year Cyber Monday falls on November 28, 2011. Cyber Monday of 2010 was reported to have 1,028M in online sales according to comScore, but according to our own data it wasn't the highest day for online visitors to jewelry store websites. The biggest traffic day award goes to December 20, 2010, the Monday before Christmas.
The philosophy behind Cyber Monday is that disappointed shoppers from Black Friday and the weekend are still trying to complete holiday shopping but ran out of time over the weekend. Many e-commerce websites will announce Cyber Monday specials to capture the online sales.VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
There's a tactic we commonly use when creating AdWords campaigns that allows us to target online ads to appear to people who have already visited your website. The idea is that if someone took the time to browse through your website, they were probably interested in your jewelry, but weren't interested enough to purchase at that moment; so we keep showing them ads to make them remember the jewelry store.
This is a very successful strategy that Google AdWords has enhanced greatly in the last 12 months or so. Google explains the effectiveness in the fact that people are targeted with specific offers. These offers were not, and will never be, visible on the regular website, making the person feel like they found a special deal or even say to themselves "wow, thankfully I didn't buy that a day ago."
Cyber Monday is the Monday immediately following Thanksgiving Day in the USA. Last year the company comScore tracked $1,028M (that's a Billion) in online sales that day. Sales were up 16% from 2009.
Cyber Monday got its name from the idea that holiday shoppers who were discouraged by their in-person weekend shopping experience would continue their shopping on-line that Monday morning.
This year Cyber Monday is November 28, 2011. Your strategy, should you decide to accept it, is to remind your customers early that morning about your jewelry store and what you have to offer. Even if you don't have an e-commerce jewelry website, you still need to get their attention.
According to our research we expect that on Cyber Monday morning, your customers will be tempted by emails from Macy's, Kay, Tiffany, David Yurman, Jar... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today's Daily Golden nugget is a continuation of the holiday email research from the website Responsys. During the Holiday 2010 Season, Responsys tracked emails from more than 100 large retailers and published a report of holiday email trends.
We've taken their generic retail research data and reworked it for the retail jewelry store. The ideas presented here come directly from Responsys, with a little jWAG tweaking.
Let's turn our attention to the flurry of emails sent to consumers on the morning of Black Friday. For 2011, Black Friday in the USA is November 25th.
Any emails for Black Friday should be sent out during overnight hours, perhaps about 3am or 4am, so customers can find them waiting on their Smartphone first thing in the morning. Remember that many shopping malls and large department stores will open a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
During the months of November and December, email marketing experiences a huge spike in usage as the entire retail industry seems to remember that they can contact consumers through this "old fashion" communication method.
We have been monitoring emails from a handful of jewelry stores over the years, but we know that some of the best holiday email research comes from the website Responsys. For this Daily Golden Nugget and for this part of our Holiday Run-Up 2011, we're going to directly reference their research.
During the Holiday 2010 Season, Responsys tracked emails from more than 100 large retailers and found that every holiday related message contained one of the following types of messages somewhere in the body of the email. As usual, we've modified these where appropriate to make your job easier.
"...articles are easy to follow and seem to have information one can use right away." -Ann, Gallery 4, Hamden CT
"...serious kudos to you. We love your straight talk, pertinent information and plain language. I don't know how many industries have something of jWAG's caliber available, but I learn from the emails every day. Really, really nice work, and very appreciated." -Cheryl Herrick, Global Pathways Jewelry
