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
During my internet travels over the last few days, I came across the website for Goodman's Jewelers in Madison, WI. It caught my attention and I immediately decided to use it for today's #FridayFlopFix review. I hope to make a few suggestions that will help them improve how they use their site, and give you a few ideas on what to avoid on your own site. Let's dig in...
With the 2015 Holiday Season at an end, let's take a look at some website tracking results from the Thanksgiving week through Christmas.
I have a lot of data to from various retail jeweler websites. The set of data I'm referencing below was recorded across retail jewelry websites that have been active with updating their website regularly over the last 12 months. These same websites are also mobile friendly. This includes a combination of retail jewelers and ecommerce sites. Remember, the results show... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The year 2015 is about to come to a close, but before it does, I'm venturing out on a limb to give you my forecast insights for 2016. This year, I'm referring to these as "insights" and not necessarily as "predictions" because these things are what I already see happening in a small way, and steadily growing. They are in no particular order...
Social Media Change with the Young Generation
The current teenage generation is struggling to hide from their parents online. Many of them want nothing to do with Facebook because the grown-... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Reports from the first weekend of the big holiday season in the U.S. are in, and they are quite mixed.
Businesses both large and small tried to get a jump on the Black Friday specials this year by advertising "Black Friday" discounts throughout the four weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. Early in November, a blog post on C|Net speculated that VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the #FridayFlopFix edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, and it's also Black Friday in the U.S., the largest retail shopping day of the year for U.S. retailers.
The goal of these weekly flop fixes is to identify something on a retail jeweler's website that should be fixed. My suggestions are based on my previous experience and research. In honor of the upcoming Cyber Monday, I decided to specifically look for a retail jeweler with an e-commerce website to find some flops that need fixing. I made my search f... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The holiday season is quickly approaching and you need to consider how you will be spending your advertising dollars. Will you hold an event promoted with post cards and phone calls? Will you have a Black Friday sale promoted in the local newspaper? What medium will you use for your weekly ads for the holiday season?
There are a lot more choices now than just newspapers, post cards, billboards, TV, and radio. VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
With the 2014 Holiday Season at an end, let's take a look at some website tracking results from the Thanksgiving week through Christmas.
The following data was recorded through more than 100 jewelry related websites. This includes a combination of retail jewelers and e-commerce sites. Results shown here only apply to the jewelry industry.
Holiday 2014 Sessions
Here's a screen shot of my Google Analytics tracking across the retail jewelry websites I'm tracking:
Here are the website tracking statistics from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday in 2014. As usual, these results are pulled from the group of 100+ retail jewelry websites that I monitor and the results might not apply to any other industry.
November 2014 Sessions
Let's first take a look at this chart from Google Analytics:
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
It's the Thanksgiving Holiday in the United States. For many years, this day marked the official point on the calendar as the start of the holiday season in the US. Not too long ago, you wouldn't see a single Christmas Tree or holiday decorations in a store until the Friday morning after Thanksgiving. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade would march down the streets of New York and not a word about Christmas was mentioned until Santa Claus went by on that last float, giving us the go-ahea... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm outlining a potential marketing plan for the upcoming holiday season. My example will focus on specific items which we will build content around and share socially.
What I've written out in this guide will be good for anyone looking for a different approach to marketing for this upcoming holiday season. There's a lot of detail for the setup, implementation, and then the post-analysis of the entire campaign. You'll do the setup... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
According to a report from the National Retail Federation, the number of Americans out shopping during this past weekend was up from 139 million in 2012 to 141 million this year. However, the average amount of money each person spent was down from $423.55 last year to $407.02 this year.
Yesterday, December 2, 2013, was Cyber Monday. This "special" day is designated as the day when Americans replace their weekend shopping with shopping online. This trend started way back fo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I typically do a website review every Friday but this week I'm changing that up and going to review some recent email marketing that's associated with today: Black Friday 2013.
This was a very busy week for email blasts. On Monday, I received 31 emails from retail jewelers, on Tuesday 37 email, 43 emails on Wednesday, and even 35 emails on Thanksgiving day by the time I posted this. I sign up for new emails all the time and most jewelry stores never send any emails until the holiday season.
In fact, I saw a few emails on Tuesday from retailers I signed up with more than 6 months ago and had never heard from before then.
It's Thanksgiving Eve in the USA and that means many people are preparing for a huge feast while many more are planning how they will spend their Black Friday. Those of you reading this will probably be working very long hours on Friday.
Even though the forecasts for this season are low ,I'm hoping to see higher sales this Friday and especially Saturday since it's once again promoted as "Small Business Saturday" by American Express. Collectively, I like to refer to this entire upcoming weekend as "Black Weekend."
Even if your jewelry store isn't filled wall to wall with shoppers this weekend, the sales you make will have more to do with the in-person customer service you provide than the sales you are running. Sure, they might come in beca... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For my US readers I'd like to say Happy Black Friday!
Today officially kicks off the holiday shopping season in the United States. Many department stores and chain stores open very early today with "Doorbuster Sales" which usually end by Noon.
According to the Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English, the "doorbuster" is a special discount price available for a limited period, typically during special early-opening hours. From my experience, the items sold during these doorbuster periods are nothing more than lo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget I explained that there are 4 potential days in November around which you could base some type of marketing campaign or announcement. Those days are Daylight Saving Time, Election Day, Veterans Day, and Thanksgiving. Simple email announcements, Facebook posts, or Tweets could raise awareness of your special promotion and sneak in under references to those days.
On the first hand, most retail stores--including most retail jewelers with active marketing campaigns--would rather focus th... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Since we seem to be on a roll with blogging topics, we'll continue today with another important blog discussion.
We frequently get asked what blogging software and blogging hosting service should be used to set up a jewelry store's website. There are obvious answers to that question, but they come with not so obvious consequences.
The apparent, obvious answer is to use a readily available blogging platform. According to TopTenReviews.com the top 5 blogging software platforms for 2012 (so far) are: 1. WordPress 2. Typepad 3. Squarespace 4. LiveJournal 5. Blogger
The popular blogging platforms amongst the jewelers we work with seem to be WordPress and Blogger. WordPress has a lot of features and can be used not only as a blog, but also to run the entire operations of your website. On the other han... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In the United States we refer to this day as Black Friday. Many businesses other than retail are closed to celebrate the long weekend of Thanksgiving. It's the only day off from work before Christmas and the Holiday Season is officially kicked off. A large percent of consumers will go shopping today.
It's time to make those lists and check them twice...
We've not spoken about Foursquare in a while, but it's still growing, and to us it's clearly the winner of the location based services. Facebook has moved away from promoting it's check-in service and Gowalla has reformatted itself more as a tourist guide map.
This Nugget was published on November 25, 2011 in hopes that our readers that morning would take action before their store opened that day.
Black Friday emails continue to surge every year. According to Responsys.com there was a 67% increase in Black Friday emails in 2010 from previous years.
Black Friday shopping starts very early in the day, so if you're planning on sending an email that day you need to send it out at 3AM or 4AM local time so shoppers are reminded of your deals and include you in their shopping schedule.
Here are some suggested subject lines for Black Friday, a few of which come from Responsys.com.
"Wake Up! Don't Miss BLACK FRIDAY DEALS" "Black Friday Deal Buster Specials on Jewelry" "Black Friday Only - Free Necklace with every Pendant"
Naturally that last suggestion of a free necklace would be a loss leader. Take a look at yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget for some recommendations on low cost suppliers.
Today we're going to give you some ideas for email and website content that you should launch on the Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday prior to Thanksgiving. That's 2 weeks from today, so if you jump on this right now, you can still get it done.
To begin, we'd like you to take a moment and think about all the emails your vendors have sent you in the past week or so. This year it seems like many vendors are promoting their low-cost jewelry lines. These low-cost lines include silver charms, woven jewelry, alternative metals, and we've seen a few specials on traditional jewelry including pearls.
Black Friday shoppers will probably be more interested in finding gift items for people on their list than directly interested in spending time looking at your expensive ring showcase; so stay focused on the holiday buyers on Black Frida... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
During the first week of October one of the jewelry website SEO strategies we gave you was to add your holiday website content to your website immediately so Google could find it and serve it up to holiday shoppers when the time came.
Well, that time is just about here. Many national brands launched their holiday websites yesterday, November 1, 2011. Let's look at them:
Blue Nile: http://www.bluenile.com 1. Their background was changed to include their signature snowflake. 2. BlueNile's website design signature is the home page large red ribbon. That red is now darker, less noticeable. 3. As of yesterday they added a small red bow next to "Find the Perfect Gift," which in... 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
Christmas is just about 6 months away from this week and already people are starting to search online for holiday gifts. We're going to continue our discussion from yesterday and provide a few more ideas.
Since 2009, Google's been compiling data about holiday shopping experiences and then publishing it through www.google.com/think/insights. We're grabbing some of the important information and giving it to you with key takeaways. Unless otherwise noted, all the data presented here comes directly from Google's reports for retail stores.
Google referred to consumers as "Pavlov's dogs, trained for coupons." Like we explained yesterday, the consumer is always looking for some type of free offer or discount. You don't simply have to discount your jewelry. You could make them... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's that time of year again; time to start preparing your website for the Holiday Season.
Christmas is just about 6 months away from this week and already people are starting to search online for holiday gifts.
Since 2009, Google's been compiling data about holiday shopping experiences and then publishing it through www.google.com/think/insights. We're grabbing some of the important information and giving it to you with key takeaways. Unless otherwise noted, all the data presented here comes directly from Google's reports for retail stores.
From August 2009 through December 2009, Google surveyed to find out when people had started their online research. 44% of those surveyed said they started the process before August 30th that year.
It's Black Friday in the USA and that means millions of people are out spending money and hopefully many of you retail store owners are bringing in some good sales. Which, by the way, we hope you are reading this from your cell phone or tablet while out on the sales floor.
Speaking of cell phones and tablets, here are a few good ideas you should think about over the next week.
#1. This one's for iPad users. Get yourself a nice photo frame stand that the iPad can sit in. A clear plastic frame will work, too. Load the iPad with some photos of items you have in stock. On Windows, you can easily load photos as if the iPad is a camera by using the standard iConnect-to-everything-iRelated-cable. On a Mac, you can use the iPhoto program to load and organize your photos.
Today is Thanksgiving Eve in the USA. Our readers in other countries might not understand the significance of this so let's briefly talk about it.
Thanksgiving could be explained as the only national holiday that transcends all races, religions, creeds, politics and national origins. It is the day when all Americans celebrate being American, and immigrants can celebrate the freedoms found here. There's more to it than that, but this needs to be "brief."
In the USA, there are two holidays that act as buffers between the summer and when it's "officially" the holiday season. Those holidays are Halloween on October 31 (which is not a national holiday, but rather a retail/fun holiday) and Thanksgiving on the 4th Thursday of November. As Thanksgiving approaches there is a subtle change in the mindset of the American consumer... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"...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
The big shopping dates of Black Friday and Cyber Monday have passed for the 2013 season and the mobile user numbers are in.
According to a report from the National Retail Federation, the number of Americans out shopping during this past weekend was up from 139 million in 2012 to 141 million this year. However, the average amount of money each person spent was down from $423.55 last year to $407.02 this year.
For my US readers I'd like to say Happy Black Friday!
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget I explained that there are 4 potential days in November around which you could base some type of marketing campaign or announcement. Those days are Daylight Saving Time, Election Day, Veterans Day, and Thanksgiving. Simple email announcements, Facebook posts, or Tweets could raise awareness of your special promotion and sneak in under references to those days.
