Happy Holidays! There are only a few hours left in the 2016 holiday shopping season as I write this. Those still doing their last minute shopping are probably thinking a little outside the normal box in order to find something good for their loved ones.
For this week's website review, I will work through a search scenario in hope to illustrate how your customers use the internet and why it's so important for you to build out your online identity much further than you might imagine. For many businesses, this is the make-or-brea... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
Bring up the topic of smartphones with your friends and the conversations will soon turn into a debate over the reasons why some think the Android OS phones are better than iOS phones. While the iOS phones are only available in a limited number of models from Apple, the Android OS is available on dozens of different models from dozens of different phone manufacturers.
Regardless what your personal smartphone choice is, knowing what your customers are using will help you design a ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Throughout the past month, I analyzed different sets of keywords that I collected during the 2015 holiday season. Most of that research focused on overall analysis of the keyword data without breaking it down into the desktop, mobile, or tablet categories of devices. I chose that approach to save time, and quite frankly, so as not to bore everyone with too much similar information.
That said, in this edition, I am splitting apart the results to show you how the u... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the last Daily Golden Nugget where I'll dive deeply into specific keyword phrases I collected during the 2015 Holiday Season. I've presented a lot of information over the last 30 days and I could spend another month sifting through it, but this stuff does get boring after a while when there's no specific goal in mind. That's an important thing to remember; it's best to perform your keyword research when you have a specific goal in mind. Every time I grind through keyword data, I seem to lose an... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The difference between the singular and plural version of the same keyword phrase oftentimes represents a very specific consumer point of view. When digging into your website keyword data, it's very easy to arbitrarily group phrases together, but doing so will most likely lead you to the wrong conclusions, which translates to the wrong SEO advice, which leads to the wrong marketing advice, and eventually the wrong business direction.
You have plenty of opportunity to capture data from your websi... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm going to examine more of the keyword data I collected during the 2015 holiday season, specifically the phrase "fine jewelry."
Retail jewelers and jewelry designers like to think of themselves as being in the "fine jewelry" industry, and they might even use that phrase in their advertising, but the truth is that the general public doesn't think about "fine jewelry;" they just view all jewelry as jewelry. Website research and search engine optimization activities ra... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What I'm presenting today is a continuation of the 2015 Holiday Season keyword data I presented yesterday. Today, I'm reviewing my findings about search queries that contained the phrase "engagement rings."
What I have here today is similar, yet very different to the "engagement ring" information I presented yesterday. Notice the difference in the query phrase between today's plural version an... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today I'm reviewing more keyword data that I collected during the 2015 Holiday Season, specifically some of my findings about search queries that contained the phrase "engagement ring."
Take note that I said the singular form of the phrase "engagement ring," rather than the plural form "engagement rings." Originally, I was going to review both variations in today's Daily Golden Nugget like I did for my VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today I'm reviewing more keyword data that I collected during the 2015 Holiday Season, specifically some of my findings about search queries that contained the words diamond and diamonds.
The typical keyword phrases I've reported on in the past have not changed much at all, and includes these examples:
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm continuing my analysis of a lot of keyword data I collected during the 2015 Holiday Season. Today's information is a continuation of the organic impression and click data I previously shared.
For today's Nugget, I sorted through the 16,000 keywords collected from desktop ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Now that we closed the book on the 2015 Holiday Season, it's time to review the results. Over the course of the holiday season, I captured more than 47,000 different keyword queries related to retail jeweler websites. I'm sifting through all that information to find something actionable for retail jewelers. I've been looking for things like a list of good keywords, or popular designer brands to carry, or even where to focus your energy over the next few month... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
Social media is bringing to light something that retail jewelers have known since they started selling jewelry: Christmas is when "everyone" gets engaged. According to the Chillisauce Marriage Proposal Survey, the most popular day to pop the question is Christmas Eve. Here's the bar graph with their findings:
This is a special Christmas edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each and every Friday, I write some type of website critique or review as an educational case study. For Christmas today, I'm changing it up and reviewing a Christmas-related search engine results page.
As I started my search today by typing out "christmas jewelry ideas," Google offered me the suggestions you see here:
(We had something else planned for today, but then realized that it is #ThrowbackThursday, so why not just repost last year's poem instead? Enjoy...)
'Twas the night before Christmas, and time to close doors after a long four weeks, the time still soars. Did you break record sales with engagement rings sold? Hope she says yes tomorrow; the future's untold!
While it's usually children dreaming the morning's delight; the guys that you helped are filled with horrible fright. You're the town's best jeweler; the men come to you; your jewelry's the best at getting an "I do."
The times, they have changed, and there's much online chatter, you've got to keep up, or else you won't matter. You made mistakes then, when your website used Flash, but you took steps; improvement when sales came to a crash.... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of #ThrowbackTursday, I'm jumping back to October 2011 to the topic of website holiday themes.
In that Nugget, I explained how you could add a few small, cheerful holiday design changes to your website as well as some quick links to help holiday shoppers.
Most retail websites maintain the same design throughout the entire year even though those same businesses will dec... 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
Today is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., the only national holiday that transcends all races and religions. The holiday is typically celebrated by gathering together with friends and family and enjoying an elaborate meal. The next few weeks will see huge spikes in retail store sales, and today is probably the last day off most retail store owners in the U.S. will have until Christmas Day.
I'm mentioning this because a recent review of my own Google Analytics revealed that 47% of... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today is the eve of the official start of the "holiday season" in the U.S. Retail businesses have been preparing their inventory, ads, and employees for the last few months in hopes to really boost sales this year.
In a perfect world, most holiday season ads are already finalized and scheduled, but there's always the opportunity for retailers to gain a little extra publicity every day through different types of engagements with their customers.
One month ago today, I introduced the 2015 Holiday Run-Up with the premise that this year you could create several specialized marketing campaigns, or micro-campaigns, focused on singles products or groupings of products. Implementing the micro campaigns would require lots of product photography, correctly targeting your customers, writing lots of product content, sharing that product content to social media, coordinating... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's #ThrowbackThursday, and it's also the 19th installment of my special 2015 Holiday Run-Up series. Over the last 30 days, I've written out holiday marketing steps for Pinterest, Google+, VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"Save the clock tower! Hey kid, save the clock tower. Lightning struck that thing, 60 years ago!"
Today is Back to the Future Day, the day predicted in the 1989 movie Back to the Future II (BTTFII) where Marty McFly and Doc Emmett Brown race to the future--Wednesday, October 21, 2015--to save the McFly family from a horrible fate.
As I write this, I'm indulging in a very large pumpkin muffin. It will quite possibly be my lunch for today even though I know it's just a quick fix of food and not the type that could sustain me for more than a few hours.
Our lives are filled with quick fixes of one type or another. Many advertising tactics feed into the need to satisfy the human nature for a quick fix. In the website and e-commerce realm, we of... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The time needed to manage social media can easily eat up most of your day. Over the last few weeks, I've detailed a lot of social media tactics in this 2015 Holiday Run-Up series. If you've missed out on the discussion so far, then go back to the beginning here and catch up.
In today's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to January 2014 to my directions on how to post to Google+. This is also a continuation of my special 2015 Holiday Run-Up series giving you the tactics you need to help boost your sales this upcoming season.
I've covered topics of Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram so far in this Run-Up to the 2015 Holiday season. This is my 14th installment in this special Daily Golden Nugget series to help you boost your 2015 holiday sales.
If you're just joining in for the first time, then you should review the outline of this series I explained here. I'... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the continuation of my annual Daily Golden Nugget "Holiday Run-Up" series loaded up with step-by-step explanations of how to make the most of your holiday season advertising. The focus of this Run-Up is how to make the most of your product advertising to attract customers through multiple media methods. This is the 13th installment of the Run-Up, and this series still has a few more days before I finish all the topics that should make a positive impact on ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is Part 11 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 3 weeks ago with directions for all the initial steps needed to prepare for the information you'll find in these last few run-up days. The initial marketing strategies overview is here.... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is probably the Daily Golden Nugget you've been waiting for! Over the last few weeks I've been working through several topics related to marketing for the upcoming holiday season. This is part 10 in that special Holiday Run-Up series, and it's also a #ThrowbackThursday edition.
I'm not throwing back too far in this one, only to August 2014, when I explained how to use Facebook's VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is Part 9 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 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 7 of a multi-day Daily Golden Nugget series packed with tactics to help you in your 2015 holiday marketing. The series started with the overview of 2015 holiday marketing strategies and has continued since.
In this edition, I'll explain ways you can plan your product content to correspond to the holiday ads you have ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For today's edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I want to jump back to a Nugget from November 2013. In it, I gave ideas on how to use gift certificates as a reputation management tool. That idea, which is still very viable today, is to donate a gift certificate to your local charity in exchange for asking them to write an online review.VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is Part 5 of a multi-day Daily Golden Nugget series packed with tactics to help you in your 2015 holiday marketing. The series started with the overview of 2015 holiday marketing strategies.
In this edition, I'll show you how to use the Facebook Audience Insights tool to build and save a target audience fo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is Part 4 of a multi-day Daily Golden Nugget series packed with tactics to help you in your 2015 holiday marketing. The series started with the overview of 2015 holiday marketing strategies. Today I'm specifically covering the topic of...
This is Part 3 of a multi-day Daily Golden Nugget series packed with tactics to help you in your 2015 holiday marketing. The series started with the overview of 2015 holiday marketing strategies. Today I'm specifically covering the topic of...
This is the #ThrowbackThursday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, but it also has a special tie-in to my ongoing Run-up series of 2015 Holiday Season Marketing Preparedness. The throwback doesn't go back too far, in fact it's a year ago today when I originally wrote about using different domain names to track your offline marketing. I've since... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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.
Another summer has come to a close and the holiday season is almost here. No matter what the financial forecasts say, I want to give you some current ideas to improve your marketing methods, and hopefully your sales, through the end of this year.
Create a Uniform Branding With Your Ads
I'd like to start with a suggestion for you to review the ads you are already planning for this season. Instead of running standalone ads this year, you can use all the potential advertising methods... 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
September has a strange place on my yearly calendar. I view it as a month that tries to maintain a death grip on the hot days of summer while also revealing the temperatures and colors of the fall. I remember how it was to dread the beginning of the school year, and now, even though I'm not a parent myself, I can appreciate how parents feel now to have their children occupied all day again.
Google Image search has really started to mature. Not just in its ability to find and surface images, but also with the way that people are using it.
In fact, if you look at this Nugget from last week, you'll see that 75% of the search impressions are generated through Google Image Search and 57% of actual organic visitors come from Google Image Search too.
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll provide some research based information about mobile keyword search data collected during the 2014 Holiday Season.
Cross reference your own sales figures and website analytics against this data, and use it to improve your future marketing. The findings here should be useful to you all year long, but especially as you start planning your website content and marketing for the 2015 Holiday Season.
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm exploring keyword data collected between November 1 and December 31, 2014 from many retail jeweler websites.
I collected a large amount of keyword data from people using Google's desktop search, mobile search, and image search. The mobile search data is very interesting. Last week, I presented th... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
When using Google Webmaster Tools, you can view which search queries will trigger your website to appear in search results. In the past when we SEO guys would spew the phrase "search queries" it was just a fancy name for saying "keywords." In fact, you can say "search queries," and "keywords," and "search phrases" and mean the same thing.
Regardless what you called it, all you wanted to do was put the right words on your website that correspond to what people search for in the dif... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Throughout 2014, Google made several advancements in their search engine and gave us some new reports in Google Webmaster Tools to see the results of those advancements.
Specifically, from within Webmaster Tools you can easily see when your website appeared in web search results, images search results, and mobile search results. During the first quarter of 2014, I started noticing retail jewelry websites appearing in image results more than ever before, and the Webmaster Tools ... 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:
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
'Twas the night before Christmas, and time to close doors after a long four weeks, the time still soars. Did you break record sales with engagement rings sold? Hope she says yes tomorrow; the future's untold!
While it's usually children dreaming the morning's delight; the guys that you helped are filled with horrible fright. You're the town's best jeweler; the men come to you; your jewelry's the best at getting an "I do."
The times, they have changed, and there's much online chatter, you've to to keep up, or else you won't matter. You made mistakes then, when your website used Flash, but you took steps; improvement when sales came to a crash.
Your jewelry designs always win Best in Show, but your website's sad ranking had fallen too slow. With new learning, you hoped an answer'd appear... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Here are the website tracking statistics from mid-November through mid-December 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.
4-Weeks of Holiday Data
Here's the graphical representation of the sessions I've been 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
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
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
I've seen a lot of chatter online recently and in business magazines about the management of store inventory and how it relates to online advertising. Many of the conversations stem from the requirements for the new online advertising system called Google Shopping and how it will help online sales for this holiday season.
For today, the eve of Thanksgiving in the United States, I wanted to briefly cover the topic of online inventory, inventory uploads, and how that works with Google Shopping.<... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We're now in the last two weeks of October and a lot of holiday promotions are about to launch. You've probably already completed your own marketing and all the publication dates have been set. In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll go over some last minute online marketing referral sources that you still have time to set up this week.
Your customers will find you through many online sources. Some of those sources will be your own paid marketing, while other people arrive through organic tra... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll bring to a close a multi-part series of holiday marketing for the 2014 season. This is the 11th part of the series all based around the unified topic of marketing for the 2014 season.
In this series, I started with explaining how to organize your marketing, then showed you how to set up tracking of that marketing, and concluded with a few posts showing you how to read the tracking results.
I've including the previous 10 related posts at the bottom, but you don't... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll show you how to use a scrollmap to help analyze a product page. A scrollmap is a created by monitoring the up and down scrolling of your website visitors to reveal which part of the page are viewed most often. The brightest areas show what users have seen the most, while the darker areas show what has been viewed the least.
Although you can read today's Nugget as a single post about scrollmap usage, this is a continuation of a longer series designed to help you with your 2014 hol... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll show and explain the Exit Page report in Google Analytics.
Although this edition can stand alone as a single Nugget, it's actually part of a larger series on holiday marketing and how to analyze that marketing. This is the 8th part to that series. I've included the first 7 in a link list at the bottom of this Nugget.
Google Analytics Exit Page Report
Let's take a look at the Exit Pages report in GA. This is similar to the VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In today's edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'd like to show you how to find the keywords that people are using to find particular pages of your website.
Although this Nugget does stand on its own, it's actually part of a series of post I've written for the 2014 holiday season. This is part-7 in that complete series. I've included links to the first 6 parts at the bottom of this post.
Today we'll be looking at Google Webmaster Tools, so if you don't already have your account set up and ve... 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.
Over the last three days, I've given you some specific marketing tactics that, as a whole, would equate to a large marketing campaign for the holiday season. I began with a discussion on choosing the right products for the campaign, then explained how to 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
Over the next 4 months, you'll have several opportunities for social media and email marketing campaigns that can be associated with special calendar events.
A quick look at my own wall calendar and I see these jumping out at me as important US dates that can tie into your marketing campaigns:
September 7, 2014: Grandparents Day October 13, 2014: Columbus Day October 31, 2014: Halloween November 2, 2014: Daylight Savings Time Ends November 11, 2014: Veterans' D... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'd like to officially close out the 2013 Holiday Season with one last review of a few emails I've been tracking. I've lost count with how many email newsletters I've joined since I started tracking this in 2011, but I know it's more than 200 retail jewelers all over the world and in multiple languages.
Some jewelry stores have a regular routine of sending email newsletters for many reasons other than sales or promotional offers, while others only send emails when they want to sell... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's Christmas Day and the holiday gift buying season has come to a close. Typically this day each year is one of 3 with the lowest website traffic for retail jewelry stores, and the traffic that is searched is usually related to popular brand names and specific style numbers. That type of traffic always makes me wonder if people are searching for details of jewelry they gave as gifts, wanted to get as gifts, or saw someone else open as a gift.
In this installment of the Daily Golden Nugget I'm going to explain how to correctly set up your Google Analytics account structure to correctly track your marketing activity.
Almost as if they knew I was planning this topic for today, Morgan Stanley reported last week that that we would see the weakest Holiday Season since 2008. One of the reasons they cited in their report was that "increased promotional activity likely inhibits 2013 Holiday sales."
It seems like they are referring to the idea that too many promotions will cause people to buy less. Of course that almost seems like a paradox unless you are aware of all the consumer studies that measure choices vs. sales. This topic is widely e... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In Yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget I listed the 9 popular pages that people were reading on independent retail jewelry store website throughout the 2012 Holiday Season. Today I'm looking at the popular Landing Pages.
The term "Landing Page" refers to the first page a person visits when they arrive at your site. This is the page you link to from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or a blog post. More importantly, it's the page that people see when they search for something in Google or B... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'm still reviewing more online tracking data for the 2012 Holiday Season. Today I take a quick look at the popular pages that customers were most interested in during the 2012 Holiday Season.
As always, the most popular page on any website is the Home Page. Here's a list of the 9 pages from independent jewelry store websites in the order of their popularity for the Holiday 2012 Season:
1. Online Catalog 2. Store Hours 3. Contact Us 4. Designer Pages (for specific ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'll keep today's Golden Nugget brief and just cover some statistics I've been tracking this season in the jewelry industry.
Here are some stats direct from Google Analytics. These are average statistics measured across many websites run by independent retail jewelers. These statistics include both e-commerce sites and non e-commerce sites and are a comparison of the 2011 Holiday Season to the 2012 Holiday Season.
Our previous 8 Daily Golden Nuggets covered many topics of email marketing. Today we'll switch gears into a new topic that is directly related to all your email marketing, and that's your website Landing Page.
Every marketing strategy should have a message and a call to action.
Typical calls to action are: • "Visit our store" • "Visit our large showroom" • "Give us a call" • "Fill this bag with unwanted gold and bring it to us to sell" • "Visit our website" • "Click this link for more information" • "Sign up for your own wish list" • "Scan this QR code for more information"
We assume you will have website links in all your digital advertising. Those links shouldn't simply direct people to your website home page, or to a web page which is only somewhat ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
So far, you have a lot of ammunition from us to have a pretty successful online holiday season. But we don't simply want to sit back and watch you succeed. Here are even more email ideas that we've learned from previous years.
Your emails and website don't actually need to be holiday focused. In other words, you don't need to have photos of Christmas Trees or Menorahs. Instead you just need to show photos and tell stories that remind people that the holidays are a wonderful time to talk about the future and the past.
Emotions drive purchases and if you can somehow tap into those emotions you will have successful sales.
Some specific ideas:
1. Create a relationship or longing of emotion by showing photos on your website and in your email newsletters. Go to bigstockph... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
You know we're just coming out of a recession, right? Have you kept track of how many people are still unemployed? You should, because right now it's a business owner's market for picking the best qualified person for your job opening. Better yet, you can offer them peanuts for pay.
Your busiest month of the year is right around the corner. Do you need to hire more staff to help out? Please, before you say "no" let's try a little test.
1. Are you the only full time employee with only 2 part time employees? Hire another part-timer quick!
2. Track how much time is spent on all phone calls for 2 weeks. Double that number. Can your current staff handle that much time on the phone and also properly service their normal duties and the increased holiday foot traffic? If not, hire someone else.
This is the last in our series on holiday planning.
Each of the past 9 Daily Gold Nuggets gave you tips and strategies for marketing through November and December this year.
Each day we told you to write some new content and add new pages to your website. Photographs were equally important to include in each new page we suggested adding.
We also gave you ideas for changing your home page throughout the holiday season including who to target and when to target them.
It all sounds like a lot of work to do during your busiest time of the year. However, there's a trick to making it work smoothly.
Ready for the trick? Here it is...
Use your content management system to set up all the pages now. And we really do me ALL the pages, including the variations of your home page.
It's almost 2 weeks since we started this series on planning your strategic online holiday marketing. Many of the ideas we presented need to be implemented on your website before Friday THIS WEEK in order to have the highest chance to work before November. Clear your schedule and get it done this week.
Tomorrow is our final nugget in this series, but before we wrap it all up, let's talk about the online frenzy that takes place in the USA the final 7 days leading up to Christmas.
During those last 7 days, the home page of your website should display all types of gift ideas for her and for him. Most of the merchandise listed on your home page should stay below the $487 psychological price barrier. Your photography is especially important since many will gravitate to that.
In yesterday's Gold Nugget, we described the strategy of changing your website home page in early November to take advantage of the women shoppers that purchase earlier in the holiday season.
Today we will briefly explain how to turn this idea around to target the men shoppers that typically wait until the first and second weeks of December to shop.
David Geller explains the many differences between the sales pitch toward men vs. women. Here's one example he used last time we attended his workshop: When selling a diamond to a lady, put it in a setting so she can try it on; however, when selling a diamond to a man, hand it to him in tweezers with a loupe. Men want to know more of the technical aspect than the beauty or emotion of it.
We don't consider large diamond ring purchases to be a last minute gift item; that ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We've given you several action plans for producing content for the holiday season, but so far we haven't told you how and when to use it. That information starts now.
If we asked you who procrastinates more--a husband or his wife--what would you say? Do we need to find statistics that state 99.999% of men procrastinate more than their counterparts? We don't really have that kind of measured data other than looking at our own family and friends. But it sure seems like all the women we know can plan way in advance for all parts of life, including printing out directions.
All joking aside, let's apply this idea to our marketing strategy: "Women shop early and men procrastinate."
Starting early in November you need to restructure your website's home page with large photos of jewelry and watches "for him." The captions... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Quick! Name items you sell from your jewelry store more during the holiday season than any other month of the year.
Your sales might reflect differently than our findings, but here's what we know for sure.
According to statistical data provided by Google since 2004, we have seen higher online interest in lockets, crosses and jewelry boxes every holiday season for 6 years in a row.
Did you know that there's a psychological dollar value barrier that consumers are not willing to spend above online? We've seen that number to be somewhere between $450 and $497. Purchases of higher value than that usually trigger the need for a consumer to physically touch the product before purchase.
Lockets, crosses and jewelry boxes are relatively low ticket items, and consumers are willing to spend money on them without botheri... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
When it comes to SEO, time is very precious. It's ticking by very quickly and if you want your website to be functioning correctly for the holidays, you need to take action before September 30.
On Friday last week, we explained a strategy of writing a description of your holiday inventory and having your webmaster post it on your website. Today we are continuing with a different spin of this idea.
Video.
As soon as your holiday inventory arrives, you need to film a video presentation of each item you are serious about selling. Production studio camera and sound quality is not needed, but lighting is very important.
You have several choices to shoot your video: Digital camera, Flipcam, or Cell Phone.
Your audience will forgive poor audio quality as long as the video image is good, and the jewelry color... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
While broadcasting live, we added products, blog entries, and newsletters to that site. Then we used our Google Webmaster Tools account to submit a sitemap to Google on August 13, 2010 and again on August 18, 2010.
This Gold Nugget is part of our extended series of data analysis for the holiday season.
This is what you need to know to properly coordinate your online advertising to previous trends throughout November and December. This data *does not apply* to January - October!
DAYS OF INTEREST we saw in both 2008 and 2009 (our recession years):
* Typically, the busiest day of the week for all online activity is Tuesday. However, for the jewelry industry, each year starting the second week of November, that day changes to Monday.
* We also see a lot of new activity starting the third Friday of November and continuing each Friday until Christmas.
* In 2008 and 2009, online activity on Saturdays and Sundays was always lower than the previous Monday and Friday. Interesting to note: the activity volume is 25% les... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Planning for the holiday season always seems like a never ending task. You select your holiday inventory during the summer months; plan your advertising in August and schedule dates for events; give your staff a brush-up on merchandise knowledge and sales tactics; and after all that, you even have to decorate your store.
Come January, you need a vacation!
For several years we've been tracking dates, times and jewelry types that should be advertised between November 1 and December 31. Over the next week or so, each Daily Gold Nugget will be dedicated to a single group of days and the strategy you should employ on your website.
The tips we give you this September should be enough time to help you with writing copy and gathering the necessary photography for November and December.
During our live broadcast on August 27, 2010 we demonstrated how important a wish list is for a jewelry website and, more importantly, that a customer should be able to add items to their wish list from their cell phones.
Here's another Gold Nugget idea you can implement with those wish lists for the 2010 Holiday Season: Wish List Special Offers.
Recent research data from the location based service WeReward identified that consumers are willing to change their purchase decisions with a special discount for as low as $2.00.
Let's apply this idea to your marketing while at the same time adding value for the purchaser of an item from a wish list.
How do you notify significant others that a wish list is waiting for them at your store? Do you mail a postcard or a copy of the wish list? You should at least send... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Marketing is your responsibility; not your bookkeeper's, not your salesperson's, not your bench jeweler's.
Owning the store means not only making sure it runs every day, but also planning marketing far enough in the future to ensure continual profits (or at least break even in this economy).
It's time for an online marketing plan that you can get running quickly.
Here's a list of things that we have measured successfully for retail jewelers. This list alone can be used as the basis for your online marketing strategy: 1. Add new information to a blog on your *website* regularly. 2. Manage a Facebook Business Page and give your customers a reason to Like you there. 3. Link your Facebook status feed updates to Twitter. 4. Maintain a Flickr account and post new photos of jewelry daily, properly labeled. 5... 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
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll show you how to use a scrollmap to help analyze a product page. A scrollmap is a created by monitoring the up and down scrolling of your website visitors to reveal which part of the page are viewed most often. The brightest areas show what users have seen the most, while the darker areas show what has been viewed the least.
I'd like to officially close out the 2013 Holiday Season with one last review of a few emails I've been tracking. I've lost count with how many email newsletters I've joined since I started tracking this in 2011, but I know it's more than 200 retail jewelers all over the world and in multiple languages.
It's Christmas Day and the holiday gift buying season has come to a close. Typically this day each year is one of 3 with the lowest website traffic for retail jewelry stores, and the traffic that is searched is usually related to popular brand names and specific style numbers. That type of traffic always makes me wonder if people are searching for details of jewelry they gave as gifts, wanted to get as gifts, or saw someone else open as a gift.
The big shopping dates of Black Friday and Cyber Monday have passed for the 2013 season and the mobile user numbers are in.
In Yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget I listed the 9 popular pages that people were reading on independent retail jewelry store website throughout the 2012 Holiday Season. Today I'm looking at the popular Landing Pages.
I'm still reviewing more online tracking data for the 2012 Holiday Season. Today I take a quick look at the popular pages that customers were most interested in during the 2012 Holiday Season.
This is Christmas Day!
