Each
year, it seems that decorations for Christmas and
announcements of sales begin earlier and earlier. When I was
growing up, it used to be that lights didn’t go up on the
houses until early December. As the years passed, it wasn’t
uncommon to see houses lit up before Thanksgiving and well
past New Year’s Day. A similar trend is starting to shape up
in the online space. The online parallel, while not
decoration related, is the search for the holiday hit.
Unlike other industries where planning for the Christmas
season starts months if not years in advance, the online
direct marketing world often sits back and waits to see what
will stick, then scrambles once they find it.
https://www.lynxtrack.com/signup.php
Another
big difference in the direct marketing world besides the
timing of the offers is the offers themselves. Offline
marketing sees products from big brands with large marketing
budgets trying to generate interest and buzz. Online, the
big holiday offer is often some no-name piece of junk.
Remember the remote control cars – the tiny ones that didn’t
turn but could do some minor acrobatics? I do. We bought
several just for fun, and we can say without a doubt that
they must have given thousands of kids the biggest
disappointments in their life. Amazingly though, I not only
saw them in my inbox but started to see them in a few mall
kiosks as well. Personally, I kept trying to see who had the
best deal and wondering how many degrees of separation there
were between the suppliers of the mall kiosks and those for
the emailers.
I think
most of us have accepted that the online pay for performance
space differs from the offline world. The big question now
is, what will be the remote control car for this year?
Surely more than one company is trying to figure out what it
will be and how to be the first one to blast it to the
market. Many products have already been tried and done
better than expected. You can buy a star for a loved one,
purchase some space on the moon, and find stuffed animals
that don’t exist in stores, just to name a few. Given the
lack of any effort related to building a brand, the fact that we can
convince people to purchase as much as they do, amazes and even
scares me.
The one
main drawback to our method of reaching users does preclude
us from advertising those wonderfully lucrative big brands.
Ours is one of reach and frequency, with an emphasis on
frequency. Some direct marketers interested in the holiday
rush feel so much pressure to devise the one killer campaign
and to saturate the market before others do. And that
feeling points out one other weakness in the direct response
model for holiday shopping. There exists a sense that our
market, despite its size, can only support one particular
product. Marketers scramble to not only figure out what that
product will be but to have theirs stand out from the crowd
because they instinctively feel that users will buy only one
product, and of course they want it to be theirs.
The churn
and burn nature of online direct marketing holiday
advertising might also explain why so few companies
specialize in holiday-only offers. Most that tried were not
able to build a sustainable model. This still does not
lessen the amount of money to be made during the holiday; it
only points to the difficulty and pressure that companies
feel come the holiday season. The best and worst aspects of
performance-based internet advertising come out. Several
companies make an unbelievable amount of money off of what
other channels would consider little work. It would seem
only online can generate seven-plus figures in revenue with
only a fulfillment house and a few creatives. Consequently
though, the consumer ends up feeling slightly burned, as
rather than having their needs met, they have others not so
subtly trying to convince them of what their needs really
are.
I cannot
wait to see what this year’s hot product will be. No matter
what it is, it will show the potential of email and test the
limits of other channels. For the hot product tends to be
one that users don’t want but impulsively buy. Were email to
go away, getting the hot product in the hands of the masses
would prove much harder. Doing it through a registration
path would require more deftness than most need now. Were it
left to search, the total sales volume would drop as users
aren’t normally looking for tiny remote control cars when
they do their search queries. The pressure is on. Let’s see
what it will be. At the very least, you know what to get me.
Just see what shows up in your inbox the most.
