Halloween: performance or a treat!

Trick or treat!

Marketers, although Halloween is fast approaching, it is often overlooked in the world of e-commerce! When you are busy getting things ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as well as Christmas, it is easy to forget about the spookiest day of the year.

However, a well-thought-out marketing campaign for Halloween can be a fantastic springboard, setting you in good stead for the busiest time of the year for any e-commerce.

Would you like to have a website that generates useful leads using powerful marketing strategies, or will you let your competitors get the better of you year after year?

To make sure this doesn’t sound like you, here are the essentials to make the most of Halloween!

An effective back office

Avoid your own nightmare this Halloween by making sure your website doesn’t collapse due to peaks in traffic. Or even worse, get hacked at the worst possible time of year (is there ever a good time to get hacked?). Your website is your shop window. It must, therefore, work well, be quick, secure and easy to update. From your CMS and plugins to your server response time and making sure your database and personal data belonging to your customers are safe, it is essential you are on top of everything.

It is the time of the year to give your brand a clean-up in order to optimize your technique and tools. It is also the time to get rid of anything that is outdated, such as old articles which no longer bring any value, and check links and promotional offers to avoid the dreaded 404 error and unsafe redirections to irrelevant pages, as well as obsolete landing pages.

The best websites are those that load quickly. Each second lost lowers your probability of visitors making a purchase, yet another reason to boost the performance of your website.

Effective content

To get your potential customers to come to your website, you must offer them value-added content. Equally for B2B or B2C e-commerce, your content must bring value in the form of new articles, fresh content, white papers, webinars, newsletters, events, etc. Now is the time to sort out what is on your website, breathe life into old content of interest, update your product pages and articles, and plan upcoming content.

It is also the time of year to update your editorial calendar and, if necessary, editorial line. What do you intend on publishing between now and the end of the year? Why? What are you hoping to achieve? Your content is key to boosting your SEO and therefore visibility.

An effective customer experience

Offering the very best experience for your customers means paying attention to all your brand’s touchpoints to make sure you provide the right information, at the right time, to the right person. The easier and smoother the experience, the more likely you are to convert visitors. As a rule, ghost trains always keep the best until last, gradually increasing the suspense. This is exactly what your customer path should do.

What about the automated aspects of your website? Is everything that should be automated, automated? Are there too many or too few automated messages? Are visitors seeing it at the right time, based on lead scoring?

On the subject of scoring, what strategy have you got in place to determine the potential of your leads? Are you providing the right information at the right time on your customer path?

The customer experience plays a decisive role in getting visitors to make a purchase. Each touchpoint must be extremely well crafted and thought out. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot!

Effective advertising

Your advertising strategy, including affiliate, influencer, email, and display marketing, must also be well designed. That will ensure you are not throwing your money into a black hole. Have you got the content and inspiration necessary to create ads that are relevant and catch people’s attention?

Performance-based advertising is an effective tool for helping get conversions as advertisers only pay when users engage with their ads. This is a strategy that limits risks and offers a multitude of options to increase your chances of success. At the end of the day, an effective ad is one that brings results, not necessarily one which is attractive or expensive. It is simply about making the most of the right moment. Capitalising on these moments is crucial for creating an optimal customer path, from lead generation to conversion.

All things considered, are you going to take your digital marketing strategy to the next level this Halloween? Or get caught out in a nightmarish game of trick or treat? To make sure it is the former, focus your energy on continuous improvement, your customer experience, A/B testing, your content marketing strategy and protecting your data.

Offer treats, not tricks, with these Halloween Marketing Performance insights. We are here to help you with your project!