Pre-Holiday Campaigns: Checklist for eCommerce Businesses

The big holiday season is fast approaching. 

Is your ecommerce store ready?

There’s a lot to do to prepare your ecommerce business for the holiday season

To help you out, here’s a quick Twitter marketing checklist for ecommerce businesses to use:

# 1. Research Relevant Hashtags and Set Up Your Tracking

Hashtags are key to Twitter success: Apart from letting your content get discovered by people outside of your circles, hashtags also help you and your team brainstorm more effective content and seasonal special offers.

Surprisingly, there are not many tools for hashtag research, so you will have to spend some time searching Twitter and trying to narrow down your list. To give you a head start, here are a few cool tools for you discover your best-working holiday-related hashtags:

1. KeywordTool.io

KeywordTool.io is a cool freemium keyword research tool that includes a very helpful hashtag research feature. For free, you will get a list of hashtags to research. If you upgrade, each hashtag will also be accompanied by helpful metrics:

• Google’s search volume (how many people were searching Google for this hashtag this month in the past year)
• Trend (Trend shows how the monthly search volume for a keyword has changed over the last 12 months)
•  CPC (cost per click if you invest in this keyword using Google Ads)
• Competition (This is the number of advertisers bidding on each keyword, relative to all keywords across Google. It helps you understand how competitive the keyword is. The table below will help you to understand the competition breakdown)

While those metrics don’t really rely on any Twitter-specific data (because Twitter doesn’t give access to much data they collect and own), those numbers can help you make a more informed decision as to the popularity of each hashtag. 

2. Hashtagify

Hashtagify is one of the few hashtag-specific tools out there. It analyzes millions of Twitter feeds to identify closely related hashtags. This allows you to expand your core list to more terms to research.

3. Text Optimizer

Another tool to discover terms beyond your initial “obvious” list, Text Optimizer uses semantic analysis to find underlying concepts that constitute any topic.

[All the concepts associated with Christmas. Any of these can become your core hashtag to research further!]

Mind that you will be able to use these hashtags on Instagram as well, so keep this list handy.

# 2. Find and Connect to Influencers

To make your holiday campaign work, try and find people that will help you spread the word. Lots of bloggers and Twitter influencers are looking for content and gift ideas for Christmas, so if you approach them with your freebie or ideas, they may be really thankful!

Buzzsumo is a great tool to find niche influencers and start building meaningful connections with them. Just type your keyword and look through the list. 

For each identified Twitter profile, Buzzsumo will show the number of followers, reply and retweet ratios which reflect how much unique content each influencer publishes versus how much content they repost from other accounts. Another useful metric here is “Average Retweets” which shows how many retweets each tweet of this influencer generates.

Both of these metrics help identify “real” influencers, i.e. those that retweet others and generate retweets from their followers.

[If your ecommerce store is selling makeup, target these influencers]

# 3. Keep an Eye on Your Competitors

How are you competitors getting ready for those big holidays and how early do they start? Keeping an eye on your competitors’ websites will give you lots of new ideas to use in the future.

Visualping is a great new tool to use for this type of tracking. You can add your competitors’ homepages (and possibly also blogs) and the tool will notify you via email and/or text message when there’s a change. It is a good idea to keep your competitors there continuously to always know when they are making updates to their sites.

Here’s more info on using Visualping for competitive intelligence.

# 4. Optimize Your Site for Conversions

Prior to launching your Twitter campaign, make sure to create a clear conversion optimization strategy. In other words, what is it you want your Twitter referral traffic to do on your ecommerce site? Specifically, for an ecommerce store, think about creating and/or optimizing these pages:

• Special offers page (e.g. “Christmas deals”)
• Product bundles pages
• Gift ideas
• Individual product pages

Make sure all of these pages look good and function well on mobile devices (Twitter traffic has long been mostly mobile), load fast and provide a smooth user experience. Moreover, create clear buying journeys throughout the site by setting up product recommendations, personalized CTAs and off-site engagement methods (like a cart abandonment emails).

Before launching your Twitter campaign you need to make sure you’re maximizing your odds to convert the traffic you’d get, on the entire store.

Using Artificial Intelligence, Dialogue provides a great way to personalize your site users’ shopping experience and turn them into your customers by providing smart product recommendations and suggesting best content based on each user journey.

Dialogue is easy to integrate using a Shopify app, so you can easily test it now while you still have some time.

Here are a few more great Shopify apps to consider for this holiday season.

# 5. Track Your Results

Finally, the earlier you set up your events and goals, the more data you will be able to accumulate. You will need all that data for an even more successful Twitter marketing campaign next year.

Finteza is a great web analytics suite which makes data analytics easy and effective. You can track your conversion funnels and how your Twitter traffic is interacting with it to identify possible issues and distractions that prevent your site users from making a purchase:

Conclusion

Holiday marketing is exciting, especially on such a fast-paced social media platform like Twitter. Yet, it can be quite overwhelming as well. It will be both easier and more effective if you come prepared though: Use the checklist above to make sure your holiday marketing campaign will be a huge success!

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