Online Retailers Return To ‘Basics’ During Holiday Season
By Anna Johnson on December 8th, 2009According to eMarketer, online retailers are returning to Internet marketing ‘basics’ such as paid search marketing and email marketing to generate sales during the holiday season.
eMarketer points to several research studies bearing this out. BDO Seidman’s ‘Retail Compass Survey’, for example, found that email promotions were at the top of retailers’ list of preferred online marketing strategies.
Shop.org, meanwhile, found that ALL the online retailers it surveyed intended to use email marketing for their house lists, while 97 percent planned paid and organic search marketing campaigns.
That’s not to say retailers are optimizing their ‘basic’ campaigns though.
According to a study by web content management system provider CrownPeak conducted at the end of October, two-thirds of advertisers did not use a dedicated landing page for the search keywords they were targeting, misdirecting search engine users to homepages, generic category pages or search results for canned phrases. As much as one-half of product-specific search ads did not even link to the product advertised.
Perhaps going back to ‘basics’ of online marketing should also mean going back to the basics of putting together those paid search and email marketing campaigns…
Source: eMarketer, “Evaluating E-Tailer Holiday Strategy,” eMarketer, December 1, 2009
