The next couple of months present big opportunities for digital marketers as holiday shopping gets underway. This year poses even greater opportunities as Shop.org predicts an 8% to 11% increase in November and December ecommerce sales over last year.
Making the most of the holiday shopping window requires an ability to measure and refine seasonal offers, design creative and implement overall campaign strategy in real-time. The good news is that marketers have access to huge amounts of data they may use to understand what’s working and what’s not. The bad news is that it can be a daunting task to keep up with the volume of data, especially during the busy holiday season.
All of those campaigns create a lot of data. Think about the vast volume of information that a single holiday digital marketing campaign can yield; thousands of data points covering everything from where customers are located to which devices they’re on and what channel(s) drove the most conversions or sales.
One of the simplest of ways for digital marketers to manage this holiday data, as well as optimize it throughout the season, is through tagging. Much how keywords make blogs searchable, performance marketers can use this powerful tool to help them sort through vast amounts of campaign, offer and affiliate data. All they need is a platform that provides tagging.
Below are tips on how tagging can make it easier to organize, search and analyze the vast amounts of data generated during the critical holiday shopping season.
- Localize – Affiliates can be tagged by location, from hemisphere down to individual streets, so offers can be localized. Local holiday themes can be used to better endear the campaign to consumers.
- Incentivize – Bonus offers and higher introductory commissions can be offered to new affiliates recruited at a specific event or through an alternative marketing method. Affiliates are looking to take advantage of the holiday season, so marketers can incentivize them with holiday shopping season offers.
- Reward top performers – Top-performing affiliates can be separated from the pack and rewarded with better incentives. Marketers can target these top performers with increased incentives during November and December.
- React to shifting trends – Commission rates can be changed for a large number of affiliates all at once, quickly and easily – so that marketers can react to real-time market conditions. Each year, what becomes popular during the holiday season can emerge very quickly and may even change throughout the entire season. Tagging can help marketers react dynamically to these consumer whims.
That’s not all! Marketers can use tagging to greatly reduce the time it takes to manage data and digital marketing campaigns by applying updates to any affiliate data en mass, and activating and deactivating a large number of affiliates or offers all at once. With tagging, marketers can also stay in contact with key affiliates and partners through bulk emails and better analyze campaign data by filtering reports.
Most importantly, once offers and entities have been tagged, they can be filtered and analyzed with ease and speed. Tagging is useful for grouping and separating affiliates from network partners or tagging offers by type such as pay-per-click, display, profit share, revenue percentages, etc.
Through tagging, marketers can separate and analyze data in a manner that best fits their holiday campaigns, reducing the effort, time and cost of managing their digital marketing campaigns. With nearly one-third of all sales occurring during the holiday shopping season, retailers need to recognize just how important their digital marketing campaigns can be to their bottom line during that time.
Jeff Deisner is Vice President of Operations and leads Client Services for the marketing technology company, CAKE.