As the second installment in Newegg’s Holiday Blog series, we take a look at the best marketing and promotional practices that marketplace sellers should consider implementing to prep for this busy season.
Seller Store
Establishing a seller store provides a credible, professional venue to host your brands and products. Build brand loyalty and improve customer AOV with a slick looking and informative seller store. Look to improve your stores by decking them out with eye-catching content like banners, videos, customer reviews, and your own branding. Also, try to predict your customers’ questions and provide the solutions right in your store. Imagine walking into a store with dusty shelves and an unhelpful staff. Would you purchase from there? This is the equivalent of a poorly designed seller store.
Free Shipping
Free Shipping This is considered a MUST for many consumers. Deloitte states that more than 83% of consumers consider “fast shipping” to be two days or less. The stakes to keep customers happy are even higher during the holiday season with many of them demanding packages arrive on time, especially if products purchased were for gifting. While shopping online, have you ever looked at your own cart and seen that one product without free shipping? It really makes you reconsider purchasing it – doesn’t it? Trust us, you do not want customers thinking twice about your products this season. Don’t give them a reason to!
We have established that successful sellers need to offer free shipping, but be mindful that free shipping does not have to be fast shipping all the time. Keep the holiday timeline in mind when evaluating this. You may be able to save significantly on costs by offering free 5-day shipping in November and adjusting this to free 2-day shipping as the December holidays approach.
If all of this seems like a headache to handle during this incredibly busy season for your business, it may be a perfect time to consider one of Newegg’s fulfillment services. Even if you are only looking for help during the holidays, our fulfillment services are simple to start up and end at your convenience. So, whether you’re a seller who wants to free up resources and space by having Newegg handle all your warehousing, shipping, and customer service duties; or you just want WAY better shipping rates, Newegg offers a number of fulfillment services that can streamline your operations.
Participate in Campaigns
During Q4, marketplaces will be running constant promotions through all their product categories. There are so many opportunities and varieties for sellers to take advantage of this holiday season – and that is why you need to have your marketplace account managers on speed dial. Merchants need to be getting familiar with the teams responsible for promoting their brand. These managers have the inside track on upcoming campaigns and will know the best placements for your brands and products. Working with them, you will be able to strategically identify which campaigns you want to be a part of and participate in for maximum impact and conversion.
For Newegg sellers, this season will be seeing a massive ramp up in support for many of our on-site promotions with use of off-site advertising vehicles such as email blasts and affiliate marketing.
Holiday Marketing Emails
How do you draw customers to your store and products when they aren’t searching on a marketplace?
Accounting for 20% of e-commerce site visits, promotional emails are one of the most successful ways for sellers to get customers drawn to their site. If you are not currently using an email marketing service to stay in contact with your customers, now is the time to take advantage of this powerful messaging tool. Many top email marketing companies offer free services that allow for customizable content to be sent to hundreds of your customers. Another promotion to keep in mind is that marketplaces such as Newegg offer features that allow you to create personal post purchase email messaging to send to your customers, driving them back to your products and brand store.
Google PLA
Consider this another mandatory tool for online retailers. The biggest priority that e-commerce sellers have should be to get their products on the first Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for Google. It is Newegg’s philosophy that PLA (product listing advertising) is the best return on investment advertising for marketplace merchants. In case you didn’t want to devote the manpower to navigating the ins and outs of SEM, consider teaming up with our Newegg Account Managers. We can help develop a budget and smartly apply marketing funds to popular products and drive external traffic right back to your Newegg product page.
What’s Next??
This blog was all about addressing key promotional strategies that all marketplace sellers should be engaging in. In the next installment, we are going to take a deep dive into the top performing marketing vehicles on Newegg.com, and what tools our sellers have to maximize their on and off-site impressions.
