May All Your Holidays be Online: Unwrapping the Varied Traditions of Christmastime Marketing
Through the end of January, Walmart.com expects to receive a total of 275 million hits for its efforts.
Still, smaller online retailers are also varying their approach to the holidays. Consider the just-launched online store from Maxim.com. When publisher Dennis Digital was approached by online retail management company Delivery Agent around Labor Day, the company knew it wanted to grab as much holiday traffic as possible and immediately began developing its service in earnest.
“We’re using the holiday season as our launching pad,” explains Russell Kern, Dennis Digital’s director of business development.
The store features unique high-end products that people usually only buy as gifts around the holiday season, said Kern; gifts like the $7662.00 “Villain Chair,” perfect for the Dr. Evils who have everything. Promotions include a holiday gift guide in Maxim’s print magazine, spots on the Maxim.com website, and an SEM campaign by Delivery Agent to capture holiday shoppers as they search for gifts online.
Kern has a different view of the holiday sales landscape. For him and the Maxim store, they actually put less emphasis on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The store went online before Thanksgiving, but the launch wasn’t officially announced until December 4th.
“Personally I think some of that hype is driven by the retailers themselves,” he adds. Kern believes that there are many consumers who buy early, which would fit the Black Friday/Cyber Monday profile–though most people tend to procrastinate and make their purchases as Christmas approaches.
To make things more confusing, this is arguably the first holiday shopping season to weather the impact of social networking. In August, online marketing research firm Hitwise reported that MySpace was actually driving more visitors to online retail sites than full-fledged internet search engine MSN.
Socialization would explain some of the impact of Amazon.com’s promotion. The company set up message boards on their site specifically for the holiday voting campaign. Since the promotion launched, those boards have been incredibly active with users giving feedback, lobbying for products they want to win, giving tips to other users about Amazon’s services.
“Some of the things that have pleasantly surprised us, not so much on what has been getting votes, but how engaged and passionate customers have been in participating in the voting and in the buying and in the discussion boards and blogs,” muses Amazon’s Berman. While happy about their current promotion’s success, he isn’t even going to speculate about what sort of promotions Amazon.com is going to run next year.
Whether online retailers follow the holiday marketing traditions or not, ecommerce this year is truly a mixed bag. Technology is changing so quickly, and the online audience is so diverse that just about any strategy will capture some part of the market. But deciding which is most efficient? Well, the online retail industry will just have to wait and see what sort of technological and methodological goodies Santa brings.
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Reader Comments.
Wow these comments really need more moderation. These guys are all just spam links.
Anyway cyber monday is a total scam. It was invented just so online business could complete with brick and mortars. I run several business online and I never saw a spike in traffic or sales that Monday. Only places like best buy get anything out of it.
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