Since the start of advertising through mass publishing, coupons have been a great way to test the effectiveness of an ad run. Simply put, if a lot of customers in your target market came to your store to shop and used coupons from your ad, then you had a pretty good idea that the ad did two things:
A. It hit your target market and
B. It was effective at bringing in customers
Have you noticed that when you use a store coupon at your local favorite shopping spot, they scan the bar code on it? That’s so they can track which ad the coupon came from and how many people in that area are using the coupons from that ad. From that information, they know they can continue sending the same type of ads to the areas that performed well while changing the type of ads sent elsewhere that were ineffective.
Your business profile is, essentially, an online billboard. The only difference is that it sits on the information super highway instead of a physical highway. However, unlike a “real” billboard, your virtual billboard can take advantage of coupons as one method of tracking its success.
If you know from checking your reporting that you are getting visits to your profile, you may be wondering if any of those visitors are following up with a phone call or actually coming in to your store or other place of business.
Calls can easily be tracked thanks to InLocal’s call tracking feature. But if you want to know whether people are actually making a physical visit to your location and making a purchase, online coupons are one way of estimating that metric.
If customers are bringing in coupons that you placed in your profile, then you can use that information to guesstimate the number of conversions your profile is resulting in.
The downside to this is that even if nobody brings in one of your online coupons, it doesn’t necessarily mean that nobody is converting. It could simply mean that those people aren’t interest in or didn’t see your online coupon.
To improve the odds that somebody will see your online coupon, make a mention of it right in your business description. Remember that you are allowed to use HTML, so make it stand out by enlarging the text and/or changing its color.
The Q4 holiday rush may seem like a ways off from here, but for savvy website owners, now is the time to start preparing for it. A lot of work goes into preparing for the last quarter push in sales, and with good reason. Consumers get in a mindset of spending money, and those who are prepared reap the highest benefits.
Q4 has a slew of holidays that gradually build up to “the big one”. While most Internet businesses tend to focus most of their resources on the last week of December, forgetting the other holidays can be a big mistake. Getting your site prepared for each holiday keeps people coming back for more ensuring that your last week of December is as big as it can possibly be.
The “HOT” Holidays
Fourth quarter holidays that should not be ignored include:
Columbus Day (second Monday of October)
Halloween (October 31)
Veteran’s Day (November 11)
Thanksgiving (November 22)
Kwanzaa, Hannukah, and Christmas (last weeks of December)
Other lesser known Q4 holidays (likely to only be observed by Google, who updates their homepage to reflect virtually every holiday, and very few others) include:
Leif Erikson Day (October 9)
White Cane Safety Day (October 15)
World Freedom Day (November 9)
National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day (December 7)
Human Rights Day (December 10)
Wright Brothers Day (December 17)
Also included are National Disability Employment Awareness Month (October) and National Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15 to Oct. 15).
Taking Advantage of Every Holiday
The fact that Google updates their homepage with a new theme to reflect virtually every holiday has created a lot of talk within the Internet community. Creating and updating your website with holiday themes can help create some chatter for your site as well.
Develop some thematic graphics that appear on your home page and throughout your site for each holiday, and run specials for these holidays to help drive sales. Here are a few ideas for specials you can run through each holiday:
Offer free shipping
Discount product prices
Create top-selling lists of holiday-based items
Include free thematic gifts with each order
For most folks, holidays are a way to remind them of something important. But for those of us in business, it’s an excuse to run a promotion that will boost our sales! Since consumers gravitate to promotions like bees to honey, you should never dismiss any chance to celebrate a holiday on your website.
