eMarketers get tactical for the holidays

Particularly in the ecommerce sector, there’s lots of focus right now on optimizing the website conversion in anticipation of the impending holiday season, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. A poll SeeWhy conducted in early October among 95 eMarketers shows that they are (understandably) shifting their priorities towards short-term initiatives directly connected to website conversion and revenues.

 
In the poll the question asked was “What is your top marketing tactic in the last 9 months and the next three months?” Each respondent was forced to choose ONLY their top tactic, primarily to highlight any changes.
 
In terms of techniques used, not surprisingly, SEO ranked highest when looking back over the previous 9 months, and showed the biggest drop of 25% due to the longer lead time required to get SEO results. Search and display advertising also showed a marginal drop of 1%, but this is too small to be considered significant.

But the big news is that Abandonment Remarketing is the number one marketing priority for 13% of respondents. This is significant in two ways: Firstly that it is the TOP tactic, among all the potential marketing initiatives, for the holiday season for so many sites. And secondly that the swing is so significant, up by over 300% compared with the previous 9 months.
 
In fact if you look back to the previous holiday season, many of the top US retailers focused on shopping cart abandonment emails, so clearly this is a seasonal initiative for some. Of course some of those retailers also learned to their expense that shopping cart recovery programs can, if not executed properly, train customers to expect offers. Hopefully this year we will have learnt the lessons from last year since it is straightforward to ensure that you don’t train customers.
 
The ‘Other’ category highlights a flaw in our survey design. It’s a significant swing, up by 150%, but frustratingly we don’t know more. Our best guess, based purely on anecdotal evidence is that this shift is to promotions, but I’m curious to see what you think. What’s your top initiative this holiday season?