#help I used too mayne words to answer these

[alderjayne]

isaac? :3c

HIM HIMHIM

Sexuality Headcanon: you see he's already canonly gay and canonly demiace so there's only so much to hc, saving how for he fits on the ace spectrum, which kai mentioned a while ago to someone was fine to mess with a tad bcause trying to identify where exactly on the aspec you fall is finicky and difficult to pinpoint anyways. ACTUALLY now that I think about it I do pretty often consider him... probably demi-aro as well, but also simply more likely to have romantic attraction to someone than sexual once they meet the qualifications for either. that's just the vibe in my head tho this is not upset by seeing different portrayals about it at all. and also if he's at a point where/if he manages to like multiple people. poly. obtaining this however assumes that he not only has the emotional comprehension, initiative, and articulation to establish a relationship with one person, but in fact 2+ persons. he can't do that. probably they'd have to come to this conclusion and propose it first.

Gender Headcanon: that depends on my mood lol. most often either cis or mlm nb, typically either agender or a little bit genderfluid about it perhaps or both.

A ship I have with said character: OTPs isward and whatever the ship name is for drew's there too. with one of the jocks could be interesting potentially I think I'd like to see that sometime.

A BROTP I have with said character: Cody called him a little knife man.

A NOTP I have with said character: honestly nevin and Chris w him. not in the sense that I dislike content of them together or it existing. They're both dynamics that appeal to me! but I tried a few times and simply could never make myself care. Neither ship invokes any particular feelings or keep my attention, so I frankly just don't think about it much. (wasn't always the case, but currently this happens to be true for me and Nevin-or-Chris + everyone else that isn't each other, so they can go candoodle in peace ig.) also Felix or the evil jocks + Isaac. I've seen a little bit of it and I simply don't have any feelings about the concept, probably even less so than the above since while they're fun to watch cause problems, they exist solely to cause problems and give Cody jock lore so I'm not actual attached of them as people, as opposed to Nevin and Chris who obviously we're all already fond of as individual characters. as for actual NOTP in terms of NOTP. gross age dynamics, and the girls, I guess? The obvious? (one of those is worse than the other, but nonetheless)

A random headcanon: if I remember right it's outright canon he doesn't tell his parents jack because he doesn't want to deal with the trouble of it, but I think about this a lot so putting it here anyways?? and I'm definitely projecting at him about something that I don't even do anymore, (albeit I think everyone has to do this to some extent, ESPECIALLY in terms of you what you mention to your parents when you're a teenager, because the truth is that they genuinely don't need to know all about everything always. He's just bad about it worse.) but he has a habit of. simply not mentioning things that happen if he decides that it being mentioned won't directly a trigger an immediately drastic tangible improvement, and occasionally even when it would. hes only sometimes right that it won't. Telling his parents he got thrown into a bookcase isn't going to unconcussion him, so while there's not going to be negative consequences from telling them, it sure would be slightly inconvenient for him to explain and upsetting for them to find out about and then might try to do something about, and potentially lead to the magicky stuff being mentioned to them, which he hasn't told them about because.... uh. well, not that they would hurt him, but it could complicate things? and he wouldn't gain anything from them knowing, so it would be the same level of positive impact regardless, except that he wouldn't have to hide it which doesn't matter that much, not that he's... hiding it, exactly, but net no change vs the potential for it to be slightly worse or more annoying or inconvenient or take energy or be awkward or upsetting somehow without it curing cancer or anything, so yes he is actually. that said by now it'd kind of have to be a habit because I don't think he thinks enough in general to consciously be making that decision this much. negative points in thinking thoughts and negative points in communication. At this point I feel like it would take a BIG BIG payoff to get to him be open about Literally Anything, and regardless of whether he's right about the amount knowing about things will or won't fix, EMOTIONALLY he sure is a lot worse off for it. tbh I'm not even sure if this is technically even headcanon because it's kind of just an apsect of canon I latched onto really hard and had thoughts about. Unrelated but when he was younger (middle school + first grade probably) he bit people. He just did. If he was in a situation where biting someone would help him enough he would do it again. also unrelated again but I think he gets kind of weak about being kissed on the neck.

General Opinion over said character: I THINK ABOUT HIM A LOT AND EVERY TIME SOMEONE MAKES CONTENT ABOUT HIM I GET SO HAPPY ABOUT IT.

[nerdygaymormon]

Who were your gay heroes growing up? Any of them Mormon?

Growing up, I was in the closet and was part of a devoutly Mormon family. I didn't get much exposure to gay people. My only real impression of gay people came from music. I'd know that a particular singer was gay, but I didn't know much about them beyond their music.

There's 3 non-LDS people who I would describe as a hero of mine in the LGBTQ area. I was 26 years old when Ellen Degeneres came out publicly, and so did her TV character. People felt like they knew her, she is the nice comedian, and they didn't reject her or talk of her being gay as something shameful. To me it felt like there was a big shift in America because people were comfortable with this openly gay person regularly being in their living room on TV. Ellen is the first gay person who gave me hope that things could get better, that there could be space for me to be open about who I am and still be accepted.  

And while he isn't queer, President Obama did much during his presidency to normalize the lives of LGBTQ people, and I'll forever remember the White House lit up in rainbow colors the night that gay marriage was made legal across the country. He is the only US president to openly support LGBTQ people and their rights.    

I also want to acknowledge Matthew Shepard. In 1998 he was given a ride by 2 men who took him out to the country, tied him to a fence, beat & tortured him, then left him to die in the cold Wyoming night. The violence done against him for no good reason was shocking and pushed a number of people from being passively anti-gay to acknowledging this isn't right and not wanting to be on the same side with such bigots. I’m sorry that this is how Matthew is known, as a victim. By all reports, he was a nice guy, and ended up a college student who was killed for being gay. I could see myself in him and knew I wanted to try to make the world better for myself & others. 

Sadly, I didn’t know about the many great queer pioneers until later in my life. I admire them and what they did, many are the epitome of courageous. These include Leonard Matlovich, Barbara Gittings, Harvey Milk, Marsha P. Johnson, Gilbert Baker, Frank Kameny, Dr. John Fryer, Barney Frank, Alan Turing, and many others. I also am proud of RuPaul, Laverne Cox, Anderson Cooper and others who bring their queer identity into popular culture. 

———————————————————— Queer Mormons are the ones who've had the most impact on me and my perception of what's possible in my life. 

Stuart Matis - I learned of him in 2000 when he committed suicide outside his church bldg the night before stake conference. People who knew him spoke so well of him as a model gay member who did everything right. It's the first time I can remember Church members talking about a gay person in a sympathetic way. His writings show the mental anguish of a faithful gay member, and also that he had come to disagree with the Church on LGBTQ topics because of answers to his own prayers and study. His words made a deep impression on me and helped me realize I don’t have to accept & believe the harmful, hateful things taught about people like me at church.  Mitch Mayne - An openly gay man who was called to be a ward executive secretary in 2011. He made the news and maintained something of a public profile. He had a blog and regularly spoke to groups of LGBTQ Mormons. He was able to serve and keep the Church standards even as he said the Church needs to change on LGBTQ issues. A few years later I was made a stake executive secretary and I think about Mitch from time to time. He had an impact in his ward and the wider LDS LGBTQ+ community and I wonder am I doing enough to live up to his example? 

Savannah - In 2017 this teenager came out to her ward during testimony meeting while sharing that her heavenly parents love her. That was so brave. A video of her at the pulpit went viral after the stake presidency cut the microphone off and told her to sit down. She made me want to be braver in telling people that I’m gay. And Carol Lynn Pearson who is not gay, but she had a gay husband and a gay son-in-law. She is a musician, lyricist, playwright, and author who has done more than anyone else to influence LDS people towards loving their LGBTQ+ siblings.  

Actually, we're living in the age of LDS Queer Heroes. I interact with many of you on Tumblr and Twitter. Whether you made changes on your campus, you share your life on Tumblr, LDS Living shared your tweet, you were a girl in a striped shirt who stood up for LGBTQ people in a classroom, you were interviewed by the news, you ask people to use your pronouns at church or you marched against the BYU Honor Code, I admire you and learn from your example and am inspired by you. This includes people I know who’ve taken steps to find joy in how God created you, just as is taught in the temple, by finding loving relationships. 

I've also met many LDS/post-LDS LGBTQ pioneers, leaders & allies at Affirmation conferences or on Facebook. I could list so many as my current heroes, but I prefer to think of all as friends because being a hero would make everyone seem too distant for me to feel like I could talk with you.

[mindthump]

Language supermodel: How GPT-3 is quietly ushering in the A.I. revolution https://ift.tt/3mAgOO1

OpenAI

OpenAI’s GPT-2 text-generating algorithm was once considered too dangerous to release. Then it got released — and the world kept on turning.

In retrospect, the comparatively small GPT-2 language model (a puny 1.5 billion parameters) looks paltry next to its sequel, GPT-3, which boasts a massive 175 billion parameters, was trained on 45 TB of text data, and cost a reported $12 million (at least) to build.

“Our perspective, and our take back then, was to have a staged release, which was like, initially, you release the smaller model and you wait and see what happens,” Sandhini Agarwal, an A.I. policy researcher for OpenAI told Digital Trends. “If things look good, then you release the next size of model. The reason we took that approach is because this is, honestly, [not just uncharted waters for us, but it’s also] uncharted waters for the entire world.”

Jump forward to the present day, nine months after GPT-3’s release last summer, and it’s powering upward of 300 applications while generating a massive 4.5 billion words per day. Seeded with only the first few sentences of a document, it’s able to generate seemingly endless more text in the same style — even including fictitious quotes.

Is it going to destroy the world? Based on past history, almost certainly not. But it is making some game-changing applications of A.I. possible, all while posing some very profound questions along the way.

What is it good for? Absolutely everything

Recently, Francis Jervis, the founder of a startup called Augrented, used GPT-3 to help people struggling with their rent to write letters negotiating rent discounts. “I’d describe the use case here as ‘style transfer,'” Jervis told Digital Trends. “[It takes in] bullet points, which don’t even have to be in perfect English, and [outputs] two to three sentences in formal language.”

Powered by this ultra-powerful language model, Jervis’s tool allows renters to describe their situation and the reason they need a discounted settlement. “Just enter a couple of words about why you lost income, and in a few seconds you’ll get a suggested persuasive, formal paragraph to add to your letter,” the company claims.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. When Aditya Joshi, a machine learning scientist and former Amazon Web Services engineer, first came across GPT-3, he was so blown away by what he saw that he set up a website, www.gpt3examples.com, to keep track of the best ones.

“Shortly after OpenAI announced their API, developers started tweeting impressive demos of applications built using GPT-3,” he told Digital Trends. “They were astonishingly good. I built [my website] to make it easy for the community to find these examples and discover creative ways of using GPT-3 to solve problems in their own domain.”

Fully interactive synthetic personas with GPT-3 and https://t.co/ZPdnEqR0Hn ????

They know who they are, where they worked, who their boss is, and so much more. This is not your father's bot… pic.twitter.com/kt4AtgYHZL

— Tyler Lastovich (@tylerlastovich) August 18, 2020

Joshi points to several demos that really made an impact on him. One, a layout generator, renders a functional layout by generating JavaScript code from a simple text description. Want a button that says “subscribe” in the shape of a watermelon? Fancy some banner text with a series of buttons the colors of the rainbow? Just explain them in basic text, and Sharif Shameem’s layout generator will write the code for you. Another, a GPT-3 based search engine created by Paras Chopra, can turn any written query into an answer and a URL link for providing more information. Another, the inverse of Francis Jervis’ by Michael Tefula, translates legal documents into plain English. Yet another, by Raphaël Millière, writes philosophical essays. And one other, by Gwern Branwen, can generate creative fiction.

“I did not expect a single language model to perform so well on such a diverse range of tasks, from language translation and generation to text summarization and entity extraction,” Joshi said. “In one of my own experiments, I used GPT-3 to predict chemical combustion reactions, and it did so surprisingly well.”

More where that came from

The transformative uses of GPT-3 don’t end there, either. Computer scientist Tyler Lastovich has used GPT-3 to create fake people, including backstory, who can then be interacted with via text. Meanwhile, Andrew Mayne has shown that GPT-3 can be used to turn movie titles into emojis. Nick Walton, chief technology officer of Latitude, the studio behind GPT-generated text adventure game AI Dungeon recently did the same to see if it could turn longer strings of text description into emoji. And Copy.ai, a startup that builds copywriting tools with GPT-3, is tapping the model for all it’s worth, with a monthly recurring revenue of $67,000 as of March — and a recent $2.9 million funding round.

“Definitely, there was surprise and a lot of awe in terms of the creativity people have used GPT-3 for,” Sandhini Agarwal, an A.I. policy researcher for OpenAI told Digital Trends. “So many use cases are just so creative, and in domains that even I had not foreseen, it would have much knowledge about. That’s interesting to see. But that being said, GPT-3 — and this whole direction of research that OpenAI pursued — was very much with the hope that this would give us an A.I. model that was more general-purpose. The whole point of a general-purpose A.I. model is [that it would be] one model that could like do all these different A.I. tasks.”

Many of the projects highlight one of the big value-adds of GPT-3: The lack of training it requires. Machine learning has been transformative in all sorts of ways over the past couple of decades. But machine learning requires a large number of training examples to be able to output correct answers. GPT-3, on the other hand, has a “few shot ability” that allows it to be taught to do something with only a small handful of examples.

Plausible bull***t

GPT-3 is highly impressive. But it poses challenges too. Some of these relate to cost: For high-volume services like chatbots, which could benefit from GPT-3’s magic, the tool might be too pricey to use. (A single message could cost 6 cents which, while not exactly bank-breaking, certainly adds up.)

Others relate to its widespread availability, meaning that it’s likely going to be tough to build a startup exclusively around since fierce competition will likely drive down margins.

Christina Morillo/Pexels

Another is the lack of memory; its context window runs a little under 2,000 words at a time before, like Guy Pierce’s character in the movie Memento, its memory is reset. “This significantly limits the length of text it can generate, roughly to a short paragraph per request,” Lastovich said. “Practically speaking, this means that it is unable to generate long documents while still remembering what happened at the beginning.”

Perhaps the most notable challenge, however, also relates to its biggest strength: Its confabulation abilities. Confabulation is a term frequently used by doctors to describe the way in which some people with memory issues are able to fabricate information that appears initially convincing, but which doesn’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny upon closer inspection. GPT-3’s ability to confabulate is, depending upon the context, a strength and a weakness. For creative projects, it can be great, allowing it to riff on themes without concern for anything as mundane as truth. For other projects, it can be trickier.

Francis Jervis of Augrented refers to GPT-3’s ability to “generate plausible bullshit.” Nick Walton of AI Dungeon said: “GPT-3 is very good at writing creative text that seems like it could have been written by a human … One of its weaknesses, though, is that it can often write like it’s very confident — even if it has no idea what the answer to a question is.”

Back in the Chinese Room

In this regard, GPT-3 returns us to the familiar ground of John Searle’s Chinese Room. In 1980, Searle, a philosopher, published one of the best-known A.I. thought experiments, focused on the topic of “understanding.” The Chinese Room asks us to imagine a person locked in a room with a mass of writing in a language that they do not understand. All they recognize are abstract symbols. The room also contains a set of rules that show how one set of symbols corresponds with another. Given a series of questions to answer, the room’s occupant must match question symbols with answer symbols. After repeating this task many times, they become adept at performing it — even though they have no clue what either set of symbols means, merely that one corresponds to the other.

GPT-3 is a world away from the kinds of linguistic A.I. that existed at the time Searle was writing. However, the question of understanding is as thorny as ever.

“This is a very controversial domain of questioning, as I’m sure you’re aware, because there’s so many differing opinions on whether, in general, language models … would ever have [true] understanding,” said OpenAI’s Sandhini Agarwal. “If you ask me about GPT-3 right now, it performs very well sometimes, but not very well at other times. There is this randomness in a way about how meaningful the output might seem to you. Sometimes you might be wowed by the output, and sometimes the output will just be nonsensical. Given that, right now in my opinion … GPT-3 doesn’t appear to have understanding.”

An added twist on the Chinese Room experiment today is that GPT-3 is not programmed at every step by a small team of researchers. It’s a massive model that’s been trained on an enormous dataset consisting of, well, the internet. This means that it can pick up inferences and biases that might be encoded into text found online. You’ve heard the expression that you’re an average of the five people you surround yourself with? Well, GPT-3 was trained on almost unfathomable amounts of text data from multiple sources, including books, Wikipedia, and other articles. From this, it learns to predict the next word in any sequence by scouring its training data to see word combinations used before. This can have unintended consequences.

Feeding the stochastic parrots

This challenge with large language models was first highlighted in a groundbreaking paper on the subject of so-called stochastic parrots. A stochastic parrot — a term coined by the authors, who included among their ranks the former co-lead of Google’s ethical A.I. team, Timnit Gebru — refers to a large language model that “haphazardly [stitches] together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning.”

“Having been trained on a big portion of the internet, it’s important to acknowledge that it will carry some of its biases,” Albert Gozzi, another GPT-3 user, told Digital Trends. “I know the OpenAI team is working hard on mitigating this in a few different ways, but I’d expect this to be an issue for [some] time to come.”

OpenAI’s countermeasures to defend against bias include a toxicity filter, which filters out certain language or topics. OpenAI is also working on ways to integrate human feedback in order to be able to specify which areas not to stray into. In addition, the team controls access to the tool so that certain negative uses of the tool will not be granted access.

“One of the reasons perhaps you haven’t seen like too many of these malicious users is because we do have an intensive review process internally,” Agarwal said. “The way we work is that every time you want to use GPT-3 in a product that would actually be deployed, you have to go through a process where a team — like, a team of humans — actually reviews how you want to use it. …  Then, based on making sure that it is not something malicious, you will be granted access.”

Some of this is challenging, however — not least because bias isn’t always a clear-cut case of using certain words. Jervis notes that, at times, his GPT-3 rent messages can ��tend towards stereotypical gender [or] class assumptions.” Left unattended, it might assume the subject’s gender identity on a rent letter, based on their family role or job. This may not be the most grievous example of A.I. bias, but it highlights what happens when large amounts of data are ingested and then probabilistically reassembled in a language model.

“Bias and the potential for explicit returns absolutely exist and require effort from developers to avoid,” Tyler Lastovich said. “OpenAI does flag potentially toxic results, but ultimately it does add a liability customers have to think hard about before putting the model into production. A specifically difficult edge case to develop around is the model’s propensity to lie — as it has no concept of true or false information.”

Language models and the future of A.I.

Nine months after its debut, GPT-3 is certainly living up to its billing as a game changer. What once was purely potential has shown itself to be potential realized. The number of intriguing use cases for GPT-3 highlights how a text-generating A.I. is a whole lot more versatile than that description might suggest.

Not that it’s the new kid on the block these days. Earlier this year, GPT-3 was overtaken as the biggest language model. Google Brain debuted a new language model with some 1.6 trillion parameters, making it nine times the size of OpenAI’s offering. Nor is this likely to be the end of the road for language models. These are extremely powerful tools — with the potential to be transformative to society, potentially for better and for worse.

Challenges certainly exist with these technologies, and they’re ones that companies like OpenAI, independent researchers, and others, must continue to address. But taken as a whole, it’s hard to argue that language models are not turning to be one of the most interesting and important frontiers of artificial intelligence research.

Who would’ve thought text generators could be so profoundly important? Welcome to the future of artificial intelligence.

[achtung-attitude]

CHAPTER TWELVE: Love Street

Doctors, nurses and nuns file through the hallways of the Love Street General Health Center, providing aid both physical and spiritual to patients sitting or lying on gurneys. Down one hallway, a janitor mops away a speckled trail of blood leading to a ward room. The janitor does not enter this room, nor do any of the medical professionals or people of the cloth.

Inside, Kilo Staples is alone, recovering. Intermittently, he paces up and down at the far end of the room, pausing to glare out of the window. His eyes are clear. WITCH MOUNTAIN’s power has left his system entirely it seems, and anger hangs around him like an aura.

Facing the window, he hears the door to the room open. “I told you I’m fine,” he says without turning around, “If you people ain’t gon’ let me out of here, then piss off!” The door closes, but no doctor or nurse responds to him. Kilo frowns, and turns to see he is, apparently, still alone in the room. SATURN BARZ tentatively emerges, gathering its power in Kilo’s hands. “Who’s there…?”

“IT’S ME IT’S ME!!” comes the anxious reply from a few feet in front of him. Shizuka cancels her invisibility and appears in front of him, clad in her regular clothes now. She giggles nervously, embarrassedly.

“Shizuka?! Why are you…? Why did you have to sneak in? Is someone after you--?”

“Oh no, it’s not like that! I just didn’t feel like waiting around and signing a bunch of paperwork before I could see you, that’s all! Ehehehe...”

“Uh, ok… So what happened?” He clenches his fist, “What happened with WITCH MOUNTAIN?”

“Oh yeah yeah, that’s what I’m here to tell you! I beat her! We won’t be seeing her again!”

“Is she dead?”

“Uh…”

“Did you kill her?” he asks again, insistently.

Shizuka swallows, then says, “... No. We… she ended up saving my life, and we parted ways.”

After an agonizing moment, Kilo says through clenched teeth, “What?”

“Yeeeahh, it’s kinda a long story. But, like I said, don’t worry about it! She’s not going to bother us again, we’re not going to see her again!”

“Bother us?” Kilo whispers, chillingly soft. He steps towards her slowly, “Bother us? She tried to kill me. She tried to make me kill myself. And you just gonna play it cool like that’s all hunky. Fucking. Dory?”

“Kilo--” Shizuka starts to say, until he shoots his hand out and grabs her lapel.

“I told you before, you wouldn’t survive here. You’re too damn soft! Are you just gonna make friends with everybody who tries to kill you?! Is that it?!”

“Kilo, you’re hurting me--” she says steadily.

“Do you know what that cunt did to me?!! She made me feel things I never wanted to feel again! You think that’s funny?! You think this is a game, huh?!! If you think I’m just gonna lie down and be a stepping stone for you to find your mommy, you better think again!!”

A hard, cold hand tightly grips Kilo’s wrists, cutting his tirade short. When he looks, he sees that his hands and half his forearms have disappeared. Only no, they haven’t. He can still feel them gripping the fur of Shizuka’s jacket.

“You need to calm down,” she says, calmly, meeting his gaze. Kilo does not let go of her, but he does not shout at her either.

“I’m sorry,” Shizuka continues. “I understand if you’re angry. If you don’t wanna help anymore, I understand that too. I just… I did was what I thought was right. You don’t need to worry about Moya anymore. She won’t hurt us again.”

They stare at each other for a long time. Then at last, Kilo exhales and releases her. His hands become visible in the same instant. He walks backwards to the window and sits on the sill. Looking to the side, he mutters, “Sorry.”

Shizuka smiles, and trots next to him. “How are your injuries? Are they gonna keep you for long?”

“I’m fine. All they had to do was slap me awake,” Kilo replies, then irritatedly clicks his tongue, looking at the door and raising his voice, “Still gotta pay for the ambulance and the room, though! So much for affordable fucking healthcare…!”

She laughs. “I could pay your bills if you wanted, Kilo. I just need to call--”

“Don’t you say anotha word!” cries a voice, accompanied by the slam of the ward room door bursting open.

“C-KING!!!” squeals Shizuka, delighted to see the rapper standing in the doorway, all nonchalant and cool.

“It’s Jerome, baby. Kilo, brother, what’s this shit I heard about you drowning yourself, man?”

“Nothing,” Kilo replies. “It’s complicated. I’ll fill you in later…”

“Well, your business is your business. I just asked cause I worry, you know? But hey, don’t you worry about no bills. Ya boy’s got you covered!”

“Jerome, you don’t gotta--”

“I know I don’t, but I’m gonna anyway! It’s on me, no big deal.”

“... Thanks,” Kilo says, rubbing the back of his neck. He then glances at Shizuka, and says, “Shizuka, you’re bleeding.”

“What?” Shizuka, who watched the men with a beaming smile on her face, looks down and notices the blood emerging from her sleeve and streaming down her hand and fingers. “Whoa wow! Completely forgot about that!”

She removes her jacket and pulls up her shirt sleeve, revealing the cut on her upper arm. Blood streams dully from it and the flesh around it turns purple and bruised. “I got this in the fight with Moya.”

“That don’t look good. Who’s Moya?” Jerome remarks.

“You should go get that looked at.” Kilo says, chin resting in hand. “Could get infected...”

“Yeah…” Shizuka agrees, embarrassedly, “Good thing we’re in a hospital, right?” She stands, seemingly to leave, but then stops and turns around to bare her wound to Kilo. “You can fix it for me,” she says.

“What?” he asks.

“Re-composition of matter, that’s what you said your power was. Solid to liquid, liquid to gas and back again, right?”

“Well… yeah, but--”

“So, blood’s a liquid. So you should be able to do it on blood too. You can heal me Kilo!”

“What you talking about, girl?” Jerome cuts in.

“That’s not how it works, I can’t--”

“Oh shit!” Jerome cuts in, “she talkin’ about your voodoo thing, mayn?”

“Voodoo?” Shizuka asks.

“Yeah yeah! This one time I got a flat tire on my Lambo and my boy Kilo waved his hand over it and fixed it up! Voodoo shit! Magic!”

“It’s not magic, they’re called Stands!” Shizuka corrects. “They’re a manifestation of your fighting spirit.  I’ve got one too, and I bet Kilo can use his Stand to fix me!”

“Just hold on a damn minute--” Kilo argues, overwhelmed.

“Just give it a try!” Shizuka cries, insistently, “I know you can do it if you try!”

“Alright, fine!” Kilo says, relenting. He stands up and raises his hand to Shizuka’s wound, summoning the hand of SATURN BARZ. He gingerly places his hand over the cut, feeling out the composition of the running blood. Then he acts, exercising his ability, solidifying liquid into solid on a minute scale.

Shizuka hisses in pain, and Kilo jolts back, removing his hand quickly. “Sorry! I tried to… You ok?”

“It’s cold!” she giggles, despite herself, then inspects her arm. “And it’s good as new! See?” she declares, showing her arm. The cut is scabbed over. No blood is flowing, and the flesh around is still purple and bruised.

“Uh, sure…” says Jerome, skeptical. Kilo stays quiet.

“Do you know what this means? Kilo, you’re a healer!” Shizuka declares, delighted. Kilo stays quiet, dumbfounded.

“This is damn bizarre, man…” Jerome says, removing his hat and rubbing his head.

                                                      ***

Later on, as they leave the hospital, Jerome gripes to his companions, but also no one in particular, “So not only was the lead a bust, but we also got a undercover cop to deal with? Aw man, I don’t know about this no more. I don’t need no pig tryin’ to bust me on whatever.”

“Why would the police wanna do that to you, C-King?” Shizuka asks, quizzically. Kilo and Jerome both look at her, but neither of them answer.

“...Anyway,” Kilo says, “We still could use your help, Jerome.”

“A’ight,” Jerome sighs, “I’ll keep my ears open. But y’all gotta do something for me tonight.”

“What do you need?” Shizuka asks, just as Jerome pulls out two slips of paper from his pocket and hands them to her and Kilo. Upon seeing them, Shizuka appears to vibrate on the spot.

“Y’all have just received exclusive official backstage passes to my show tonight at the Santa Monica Pier! Take a load off for tonight and watch me do my thing!”

“Urrrgh…” says Kilo.

“That means you too, mang! And Shizu, between you and me...”

“... What?” Shizuka  asks after he doesn’t continue.

“Lean in,” he whispers, gesturing her closer, “I got a special guest playing with me tonight. Secret special guest. We kept it under wraps for a while now, so nobody but me and the coordinators know who.”

“Who?! Who is it?!”

Jerome whispers in her ear, covering his mouth with a hand. Kilo strains his ears to hear, then shudders all over when Shizuka releases a squeal of excited joy.

“NO WAY NO WAY NO WAY!!” she exclaims, bouncing around in a circle.

“Shh shh, keep it down, girl!” Jerome chides, laughing.

“Even though I nearly died a couple hours ago, this’ll be the best day of my life!!” she declares.

“Uh… ok. Always good to please a fan, I guess.” Saying this, he ushers her and Kilo into his limousine, and they drive away.

                                                         ***

Elsewhere, a stage is being set up right on Santa Monica Pier. In a trailer a short distance away, a woman sits in front of a mirror while a gaggle of make-up artists attend to every detail of her face. There is a white cloth over her head to protect her hair. A ladybug brooch pinned to the jacket is hanging on the back of her chair.

A professional looking woman clad in business attire and sensible shoes steps into the trailer, going over a clipboard. “Are you almost ready in here, boss?”

“Yes, Maria, of course I am,” the woman says, “But I don’t see why we have to do this all now. The show doesn’t start for another two hours.”

“Well, we need to do something with our time. C-King hasn’t arrived yet. He didn’t even show up for rehearsal!”

“Well, then give him another call! If Jerome doesn’t show up, then this isn’t happening.”

“I’m on it,” Mariah says, leaving the trailer. She hardly looked up from her clipboard.

The woman in the chair sighs, and reaches for the table. On it are six bullets, .32 calibre, arranged in a straight line along the edge. She takes all 6 in one hand and starts counting them, absently. “You can never be too early, am I right?” she says.

“Uh, of course, ma’am,” says one of the make-up artists.

The woman waves at them to stop and they recede. “It’s not right.” the woman says, standing up and removing the towel from off her head, revealing pink hair arranged in a large whorl. “It’s not right to keep a star as big as Trish Una waiting, right?”

From where they are, it’s possible to see the Hollywood sign in the distant hills. If one were to squint.

END of CHAPTER TWELVE

[loretranscripts]

Lore Episode 14: The Others (Transcript) - 7th September 2015

tw: death of children, childhood illness

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

No one likes to be alone. Even introverts need to come out for air every now and then, and experience human contact. Being around others has a way of calming our souls, and imparting a bit of safety, even if only in theory. But sometimes, even crowds of people and scores of friends can’t fight the crippling feeling that we are, in the end, isolated and alone. Humans have become very good at chasing away that feeling, though. When darkness threatens to cut us off from the world around us, we discovered fire, and then electrical lights. We use technology today to help us stay connected to friends and relatives who live thousands of miles away, and yet the feeling of loneliness grows deeper every year. We’ve learnt to harness tools to fight it, though. In ancient cultures, in the days before Facebook and the printing press, if you can fathom that, society fought the feeling of being alone with story. Each culture developed a set of tales, a mythology and surrounding lore, that filled in the cracks. These stories explained the unexplainable, they filled the dark night with figures and shapes, and they gave people, lonely or not, something else to talk about – something other. Some tales were there to teach; some preached morals through analogy; others offered a word of warning or a lesson that would keep children safe. In the end, though, all of them did something that we couldn’t do on our own: they put us in our place. They offer perspective. It might seem like we’re at the top of the food chain, but what if we’re not? From the ancient hills of Iceland and Brazil, to the black-top streets of urban America, our fascination with the “others” has been a constant, unrelenting obsession. But while most stories only make us smile at the pure fantasy of it all, there are some that defy dismissal. They leave us with more questions than answers, and they force us to come to grips with a frightening truth: if we’re not alone in this world, then we’re also not safe. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

In Greek Mythology, we have stories of creatures that were called the Pygmy. The Pygmies were a tribe of diminutive humans, smaller than the Greeks, who were often encountered in battle, and these stories have been around for thousands of years. We even have images of Pygmy battles on pottery found in tombs dating back to the 5th century BC. 1st century Roman historian, Pliny the Elder, recorded that the Pygmies were said to go on annual journeys from their homeland in the mountains. They would arm themselves for battle and climb onto their rams and goats, and ride down to the sea, where they would hunt the cranes that nested at the shore. In South America, there are tales of creatures called the Alux, a figure of Mayan mythology. They said to be between one to two meters tall, hairless, and dressed in traditional Mayan clothing. Like the Pukwudgies of the Native American tribes of North America, the Alux are said to be troublemakers, disrupting crops and wreaking havoc. According to tradition, the Alux will move into an area every time a new farm is established. Mayan farmers were said to build small, two-storey houses in the middle of their cornfields, where these creatures would live. For the first seven years, the Alux would help the corn grow and patrol the fields at night. Once those seven years were up, however, they turned on the farmers, who would put windows and doors on the little houses to trap the creatures inside. The ancient Picts of the Orkney Islands, off the north-eastern tip of Scotland, spoke of a creature they called the Trow, or sometimes, the Drow. They were small, humanoid beings, described as being ugly and shy, who lived in the mounds and rock outcroppings in the surrounding woods. Like many of the other legends of small people around the world, the Trow were said to be mischievous. In particular, they were said to love music - so much, in fact, that it was thought that they kidnapped musicians and took them back to their homes so that they could enjoy the music there. In addition, it was common for the people of Shetland to bless their children each Yule day as a way of protecting them from the Trow. Nearby, in Ireland, there are tales of similar creatures, small and hairless, called the Púca. The Púca are said to stand roughly 3ft tall, and like the Trow, they too live in large, stone outcroppings. According to legend, they can cause trouble and chaos within a community, so much so that the local people have developed traditions meant to keep them happy.In Country Down, for instance, farmers still to this day leave behind a “Púca’s share” when they harvest their crops. It’s an offering to the creatures, to keep them happy and ward off their mischief. But the Púca isn’t unique to Ireland. In Cornish mythology, there’s a small, humanlike creature known as the Bucca, a kind of hobgoblin. Wales is home to a similar creature with a reputation as a trickster goblin. It was said to knock on doors and then disappear before people inside opened them. And in France, a common term for stone outcroppings and megalithic structures is pouquelée. Oh, and if you’re a fan of Shakespeare’s play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, you might remember the character Puck, the clever and mischievous elf. The name Puck, it turns out, is an Anglicization of the mythical creature, Púca, or Puck. I’ll stop, but I think you get the point. There doesn’t seem to be a culture in the world that hasn’t invented a story about smaller people, the “others” that live at the periphery of our world. It’s not surprising, either – many of these cultures have a deep history of invading nations, and that kind of past can cause anyone to spend a lot of time looking over their shoulder. These stories are deep, and often allegorical; they mean something, sure, but they aren’t rooted in reality. No one has captured a Púca or taken photographs of an Alux stepping out of its tiny, stone building. But that doesn’t mean there’s no evidence. In fact, there are some legends that come a lot closer to the surface than you might have thought possible - and that might not be a good thing.

The Shoshone tribe of Native Americans that live in the Rocky Mountains have been there for thousands of years. Their lands span much of the countryside around the Rockies, but they also built seasonal homes, up high in the mountains, sometimes 10,000ft above sea level. One of the Shoshone legends is that of a tribe of tiny people, known as the Nimerigar. One story tells of a man who rode up a small trail into the Wind River Mountains to check on his cattle. While he was travelling the narrow path, one of these creatures stepped out and stopped him. This was his trail, the little man said, and the rancher couldn’t use it anymore. The man ignored the tiny person and continued on toward his cattle, and this angered the Nimerigar. The tiny creature took aim with his bow and fired a poisonous arrow at the man’s arm. From that day on, the story goes, the rancher was never able to use his arm again. The Nimerigar are just myth, or at least that’s what most people think. But in 1932, that perception changed, when two prospectors, Cecil Mayne and Frank Carr, found a mummy in a cave in the Pedro Mountains of Wyoming. They said it had been sitting upright on a ledge in the cave, as if it had been waiting for them. The mummy was small (honestly, it’s only about six inches tall), but had the proportions of an adult. The two men had found it on a ledge, sitting upright, mummified by the dry Wyoming climate. After its discovery, the mummy changed hands a number of times. Photographs were taken, as well as an x-ray, but by 1950, it had vanished, never to be seen again. In 1994, after an episode of Unsolved Mysteries asked viewers to help them locate the missing mummy, a second mummy came to light. This one was a female, with blonde hair, but it was roughly the same size, and also from a mountain cave. This time, medical experts were able to study it, and what they discovered was shocking: it wasn’t an adult after all, it was an infant that had been born with a condition known as Anencephaly, which explained the adult-like proportions of the body and head. Like the first mummy, this second one disappeared shortly after the examination, and the family who owned it vanished with it.

Halfway around the world, in Indonesia, there are stories of small, humanlike creatures called the Ebu gogo. Even though their name sounds a lot like a Belinda Carlisle cover band, these creatures were said to strike fear in the hearts of the neighbouring tribes. According to the story, the Ebu gogo had flat noses and wide mouths, and spoke in short grunts and squawks. They were known to steal food from the local villages, and sometimes even children, and apparently one of these incidents from the 1800s led to an extermination. The Nage people of Flores, Indonesia, claimed that generations ago, the Ebu gogo stole some of their food, and the Nage people chased them to a cave, where they burnt them all alive - all but one pair, male and female, that managed to escape into the woods. The stories are full of imagination and fantasy, but in the end, they might hint at something real. In 2003, archaeologists discovered human remains in a Flores cave. The remains, dubbed Homo Floresiensis, weren’t ordinary, though. They were small adults, very small in fact, at just one meter tall. They were nicknamed hobbits, if that helps you picture them. Small people, found in a cave near the Nage tribe of Flores. It seems like the stories were proving true. The trouble was the age of the remains. The oldest skeletons clocked in at around 38,000 years old, and the youngest at about 13,000. In other words, if the Nage actually had attacked a tribe of tiny people, it had happened a lot more than a handful of generations ago. Unless you believe them, that is – in that case, the stories hint at something darker, that the Ebu gogo were in fact real, that they might still inhabit the forests of Flores, and that ultimately, the stories were telling the truth. It sounds enticing. In fact, I think anyone would be fascinated by such a notion. Unless, that is, these stories were about something in your own backyard.

On the night of April 21st, 1977, a man named Billy Bartlett was driving through the town of Dover, Massachusetts, with two of his friends. On Farm Street, they began to drive past a low, rough stone wall that was well-known to the locals. As they did, Billy noticed movement at the edge of his vision, and turned to see something on the wall unlike anything he had ever seen before. It was a creature, with a body the size of a child’s, long, thin limbs, elongated fingers and an oversized, melon-shaped head. Billy claimed it was hairless, and that the skin was textured. He even reported that it had large, orange-coloured eyes. Billy later sketched a picture of the thing he had seen, and then added a note to the bottom of the page: “I, Bill Bartlett, swear on a stack of Bibles that I saw this creature”. A whole stack of Bibles, you say. Well, alright then. Something like this probably happens every year – somewhere in the world, someone sees something weird, their mind twists their memories, and all of a sudden, they think they encountered Abraham Lincoln in a hot tub. But Billy’s story had some added credibility. You see, just two hours after he saw… whatever it was that he saw, 15-year-old John Baxter was walking home from his girlfriend’s house, about a mile from Farm Street. He claimed that he saw something walking down the street toward him. According to him, it was roughly the size and shape of a small child, and when the figure noticed him, though, it bolted for the woods. John, being a highly intelligent teenager with powerful decision-making skills, decided that midnight was the perfect time to chase something strange into the woods, and so he followed after it. What happened next was a literal, over-the-river-and-through-the-woods chase. When Baxter finally stopped to catch his breath, though, he looked up to see that the creature was standing beside a tree just a few yards away from him, watching him. That’s the moment when common sense took over, and John ran for his life. Later that night, he drew a sketch of what he had seen. He also told the police about it. He described a creature that had the body of a child, a large, oval-shaped head, thin arms and legs and long fingers. On their own, each of these sightings could have been easily dismissed by the authorities, but together, they presented a powerful case. Still, any chance of their similarity being labelled a coincidence vanished less than 24 hours later. 15-year-old Abby Brabham and 18-year-old Will Taintor were out for a drive on Springdale Avenue in Dover, when they saw something at the side of the road, near a bridge. It was on all fours, but both of the claim they got a very good look at it, and each of them described the creature as hairless and child-sized, with an overly large head and long, thin limbs.

Three separate events, spanning two nights, three unique sightings, yet one seemingly impossible description, each captured in eerily similar sketches. There were small discrepancies regarding the colour of the creature’s eyes, but outside of that, the consistency was astounding. Each of these eyewitnesses had seen something they couldn’t explain, and each of them seemed to have observed the same thing. What I find most fascinating, though, is that nearly 30 years later, in 2006, the Boston Globe interviewed Billy Bartlett, and he’s never wavered from his story. He’s experienced embarrassment and ill treatment because of it over the years, of course, but though he’s clearly transformed from a teenager who saw something into a responsible, middle-aged adult, that maturity hasn’t chased his testimony away, no matter how fantastical it might sound. They’ve called it the “Dover Demon” ever since that week in 1977. Others have since come forward with similar sightings. One local man, Mark Sennott, said he had heard rumours in his high school in the early 70s of something odd in the woods. Sennott even claimed that he and some friends observed something odd near Channing Pond in 1972 that fits the description from these later reports. Channing Pond, mind you, is right beside Springdale Avenue, where Taintor and Brabham said they saw their Dover Demon. Clearly, something was in those woods. Like most legends, this one will continue to cause debate and speculation. There have been no more sightings since 1977, but even still, the Dover Demon has left an indelible mark on the town and the surrounding area.

It’s true, we don’t like to be alone, but I think in the process of creating the stories that have kept us company for centuries, humanity has also created convenient excuses. All of these human-like creatures have acted as a sort of stand-in for human behaviour and accountability. In an effort to absolve ourselves from the horrible things we’ve done, we seem to instinctively invent other beings on which we can set the blame. But what if the others really were there, long before we wove them into our stories? What if they were less an invention, and more a co-opting of something we didn’t fully understand? Perhaps in our effort to shift the blame, we altered the source material a bit too much, and in doing so we buried the truth under a mountain of myth. There have been countless theories surrounding the 1977 sightings in Dover. Some think it was a type of extra-terrestrial known as a “grey”; others have actually suggested that it was just a baby moose. I know, that does seem like an odd way to explain it – only two moose sightings were recorded in Massachusetts in 1977, and both of those were out in the western part of the state, far from Dover. Add in the fact that a yearling moose weighs more than 600lbs and I think that it’s clear that this theory just won’t hold up. But there’s a different and more textured theory to consider. If you remember, Billy Bartlett saw the Dover Demon sitting on an old stone wall on Farm Street. Well, just beyond that wall is a large, stone outcropping that the locals have always called “The Polka Stone”. Some think that the stone’s nickname is a mispronunciation of a different word, though. The original name, they say, was the Pooka Stone. It could just be folklore, perhaps the tall tales of an early Irish settler, told to a group of children around the foot of an enormous rock. Unfortunately, we’ll never know for sure, but if you really want to see for yourself, you’re always welcome to head over to Dover, and take a drive down Farm Street. The wall, and the woods beyond, are still there, still dark, and still ominous. Just be careful if you travel there at night – you never know what you might see at the edge of your headlights.

This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Mahnke. You can learn more about me and the show, as well as info about live events, episode transcripts and more, over at lorepodcast.com, and be sure to follow along on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, @lorepodcast. This episode of Lore was made possible by you fine listeners, [Insert sponsor break]. And finally, your ratings and reviews on iTunes make all the difference for this show, so please take a moment today to fill one out. You can find links to help you do that at lorepodcast.com/support. If you want to help this show even more, Lore is on Patreon – that’s a platform that allows fans to support their favourite creations with monthly donations. And if you want more Lore in your life, backers at the $5 level get access to two extra, ad-free, brand new episodes each month that aren’t in this podcast feed. They’re short and sweet, but they’re fully produced and beautiful to listen to. Of course, I’m biased, but you’ll have to take my word for it. Just visit patreon.com/lorepodcast to sign up today and start enjoying new Lore episodes. Thanks for listening.

[funginerd]

                             remember my thanksgiving list? this one is gonna be worse. yes you read right, im attempting this and i hope whoever sees this has a nice day and happy holidays. star tr.ek in more ways than i care to admit has shaped my life so to write paul and get back into the fandom felt like a fresh breeze while simultaneously it felt like coming home and i’m incredibly happy to be here again with such cool and kind folks like you all.                             basically, because german’s celebrate christmas on the 24th and we open our presents the same evening this might come as a pre-present to some of you but whatever. HAPPY HOLIDAYS, guys, under the cut is a long ass list from me to you to express just how grateful i am for you all to be here. i tried my best to include as many people as i could but of course, i sadly don't have the capacity to find kind words for all of my beauty followers but please be aware - and i might repeat myself but it doesn't make it less true - i love you all and im thankful you’re here with me.

in no particular order bc fuck me that's too much work (also wow jelly told me it was stupid to keep my conversations in tabs but tbh never really closing them really helped me here)

@infiinitepossibilities : im glad we started talking more. before i just knew you as this amazing multimuse writer who had all their muses down perfectly but now im getting to know you as an amazing person as well and that's just incredibly cool

@hcndlehim : adam, my dear boy adam. i love you. through many fandoms and over the course of many blogs we have stayed together and i can honestly say that is one of the best things that has ever happened to me. you’re such a delight to talk to and your writing has such a nice flow, so having you as my friend and writing partner for so long has just ?? made my a lot happier than you know

@culberr  / @disciipled : i have time and time again told you i love your writing and i have no idea if oyu think im kidding when i say i show it off but some of my friends can confirm i did actually send stuff to them and i do gush about our amazing writing because i cannot get enough of your style (and oyu bc i lub u). your way of telling things just has such a nice and easy flow that it makes me want to never stop reading your things and we’re lvl 5 friends so when i say i hate how much i love everything you do im not lying. you are amazing and talented and such a nice guy like im still stocked to be able to call you that and not weird you out with that. i just ?? adore you

@stamcts : some people say my aesthetic is on point but they obviously have never seen your blog bc arthur? i love every single post you make. i have seen your ic posts, they’re great and your writing is beyond amazing so ?? let it be known i adore you and im jealous of your skills to dig up cool things on the internet. and ur writing skill, fuck you for that.

@lifedeathpeacewar : leo my boi, my friend,i just cannot tell you how easily i fall in love with people who stan the same people i stan and lets be honest i think you love him more than i do but that's okay bc this way i can focus some of my love on you. im one of the people that say i love duplicates but then only follow two idk why im just that weird but i know you’re doing great with my son and i know you’re doing even  better with mark and lets be honest i already know you’re gonna be great with lucas as well bc you’re great with everything that you put your mind to and i envy you for that.

@orbinglight : i tried for your birthday already to express how much i love you but in no language the world has to offer there are enough words to really make it known just how much you really mean to me. im not as poetic as you are when it comes to praising and finding the right way to phrase things for you, so i just have to hope that you know - through all my clumsy attempts of telling you - just how near and dear to my heart you are. at this point you’re truly the person with the most beautiful soul i have ever met online or irl and i just cannot stand the thought of one day maybe not having you anymore because damn you’re gorgeous and amazing and talented and in so many ways the best thing that has happened to me on this blue hellsite

@selflessdoctor : i kinda wanna say see above bc for you too i feel all these things even though i dont always tell them as outright as i list them for artie but you’re important to me, having found you and somehow forced you into talking to me and becoming my friend was one of the best ideas i ever had and ? im so glad you let me - this odd girl you never met before - stick around and harras you. not really you know what i mean but like ?? i love you and i know i don't say that often enough but just let it be known you’re fucking perfect okay.

@turrissomnia  : three god damn blog changes and you know what ? i still love you, im still impressed by your TOS knowledge and im still absolutely adoring your portrayals. now its just even more muses you’re nailing its really cool to watch tbh.

@bellicaptivus : i honestly dont understand your fascination with strudel but im here for it and im here for your absolute magnificent portrayal of this boi so stay awesome, stay here with us and ?? don’t change bc i absolutely adore you

@adheretologic : i probably mentioned this before but you were the first disco blog i ever followed, like i think you came before adam and i still very much love seeing you on my dash

@kelpiencomplexities : i wish we knew each other better, i wish i would see your writing but man, i just love you in general idk you just are such a delight, like you introduced yourself with a pun thats always a plus in my book im just ?? very happy to have you around friend you’e really cool

@georgiov : im extremely thankful for your patience, you somehow have managed to explain the basics of SW to me without losing your mind and all that while running an amazing disco blog? you’re and im running out of positive words but like you’re the best and i love you okay

@starxbcrn : you are so iconic its unfair, like look at you having all of this creativity and talent and somehow you always come back to your golden boi, i just ?? cannot not tell you how much you inspire me and how much i love seeing you around without having to use the thesaurus

@astromed : you aesthetic: on point. your mccoy: on point. your writing: unfairly amazing. i’ll be honest i like looking at your posts, i like reading your posts, i like just having you on my dash and from the few interactions we had i know you’re a cute bean. i said it before you got recommended to me by a friend and i cannot ever regret following you

@neverarhyme : call me a nerd but i love you and im very grateful we’ve managed to stick together through me ignoring your messages and you being you for two years already but you’ve somehow become one of my best friends on this website and i don't hate you for it. in fact im time and time again amazed at how oyu handle things, at how developed ver is and how you still manage to surprise me even tho so much time ahas passed.

@theharricr : lizzie, lizzie, lizzie, you are my light sometimes, i just ? i just absolutely love you, no strings attached i love talking to you, i love watching things with you just ?? being able to call you a friend is honestly making me so happy time and time again

@jaylahofussfranklin : you’re one of the people who sometimes pop up and sometimes vanish without a trace and honestly every time you  come back to me im very happy about it. like - you’re cool, you’re one of my oldest friends here, probably the only german i want to talk to on this website and idk if i ever told you but your jaylah and your sarah are just fucking perfect.

@friendoftheood : honestly every time we talk you’re just the cutest bean and your grasp on rose is absolutely admirable. i have no idea why you think im worthy of having you follow me but im so grateful to have you around you can’t imagine

@cadetxtilly : you are honestly a bucket of sunshine and your tilly just absolutely makes me happy. she is very on point, she is very adorable and you convey every single aspect of her perfectly. your headcanons and ic posts about her just ?? make it really worth following you

@atomiism : would still 10/10 drop my man for you but real talk? when i rp’ed as ray and saw you and your blog and your writing i was ready to just completely give this boy over to you and what you have done with him since then is magical, i cannot believe someone as talented as you is here and likes me. even after so mayn months im still blown away by having met you, by knowing the face behind the brain that knows all these pretty words and can string them together like damn my darling dear you are perfect in every single way <3

@burnedlegend : you truly are a very special specimen. obv not in a bad way i mean i fucking love you but in a way that you’re so unique even though you’re sometimes a mess i can honestly say im looking forward to seeing you grow and be happy in your life bc already you have a fantastic personality and a kind soul and you’re so refreshing to talk to (when u fucking answer) idk if i have told you lately, probably not bc lets face it i suck as well, but i adore you and i value your friendship and i’ll always be here if you need me. you’re great no matter what anyone says, bc you’re you and i love that man that i have come to know over the course of this year bc he is such a passionate disaster and i wouldn’t want you to stop being you for anything in the world.

@revivedlegend : you’re an absolute dear, you have been there for me in tough times and you’ve given me so many great advice i honestly don't know what i would do without you. i know life is hard and i know people say it gets better but sometimes it doesn’t look that way? listen, you’re perfect and you deserve good things and im absolutely positive that you’ll reach great things, that life will be beautiful for you but until then im here for you and i love you with all of my heart and some that i borrowed from gabe. you are amazingly creative even if you dont see that right know but i have always loved your portrayals, your writing and your devotion to the things you love. christina you’re fantastic, okay. <3

@warsighted  : i love you, i hate your penname but i love everything else about you. listen, from the way you approach characters to the way your characterise them and the way you plot and the way you get excited about things. i love all of that. you’re incredible and so nice on top of being stupidly talented. its honestly unfair thank god you’re balancing that out with a weird penname xD

@outlawiism : how can i make this list and not say something nice about you? kinda not an option tbh bc you’re this amazing ball of positivity even when times are rough its just magical to see you on my dash and now that we talk again its just making me want to be the best version of myself so i can spread just as much positivity and make people happy and honestly? all that aside your love and devotion to peter is one of a kind, your writing is flawless and i just hope ?? one day you’re gonna archive your dreams and do the things you want and tbh you deserve cool things happening to you. so knock on wood for that!

@srenity & @courtesn : sorry im throwing you both together like this but liten, i’ve loved your inara before and im incredibly happy you’re back and now seeing the both of you play this otp out is something i hadn’t known i needed bc you’re not just beautifully on point but you’re both carrying the fandom with your fantastic writing its just making me love firefly so much more thanks to you two <3

@snowinabottle : you’re cute, your girl is cute, your blog is cute, your aesthetic is cute idk maybe you noticed, maybe you didn't but im not the best with words i just ? don't know how i should tell you but i like having you around and i like seeing you on my dash and i just like you in general okay? okay

@stellaexlacrima : im always weak for ocs even tho sometimes it takes me a while to get to know them and im sorry we didnt start talking sooner bc now that i know you i cannot believe i was so blind to your genius for so long. honestly? i love you, i loved plotting with you, i loved talking to you and im absolutely positive i will love writing with yoou no matter how slow i am. im absolutely excited for our thread, im excited for orange people and weird caves and wicked plant sutff bc i a excited to let paul have this adventure with anika

@multamusae : you are one of the people on this website who somehow manage to be very productive and as much as it sometimes makes me feel funny very often i look at your blog and im just astonished by the sheer amount of work and effort you put into everything. you are incredible, you’re so cool and your ocs give me all the life, i originally followed you for your mycroft and im still here it feels like years have passed and you’re still this amazingly talented writer from so long ago please don't ever change in that way.

@childzerozeronine : we don’t talk often enough and that is partially my fault and partially yours but let it be known im very happy that we did eventually started talking after so long of just loving artie together. nine is one of the best stranger thangs ocs i have ever seen and we both know for a while you couldn't look anywhere without them but she is amazing and i love her and i love you and im sorry im not the best chat partner

@derbefehl : we honestly have never talked but i feel very much drawn towards you for you have shown a great taste in muse, a great taste in ivan and you’re just all around ? really cool to have on my dash? i really like your writing like damn that's some good stuff you have right there

@chosemypain : i know we never talked but jelly is really loving your portrayal and honestly that’s good enough for me, you have shown great taste in show and muse and im all here for your brilliance tbh 

@espressovixen / @brokenspy : vicky my dear, im sorry im not on jayne so it might be confusing but it is i, your local disappointment: dottie. can i just take a moment and tell you: you’re probably one of my favourite writers? like idk if you can tell but i have seen so many people, i’ve seen so many different writings styles and yours is just ? outstanding to me. your love and passion for your girls is magical, your personality is so sweet and kind and i ? cannot believe how lucky i am to call you a friend, i’ve literally been in love with your writing like four blogs ago already.

@fasciinating : you are probably one of the first spocks i EVER found and honestly i can’t believe i got so lucky that you follow me back, i swear whenever i see you on my dash im just blown away by your talent and portrayal 

@methodcop : over different blogs and fandoms neither of us is in im very glad we seem to keep finding each other over and over again. you truly are one of these people that you just ?? don't feel right not having on the dash, skye you’re amazing and i love you okay? okay

@rendczvous : fish, im sorry you’re last on this list and i wasn’t sure if i should even say something but honestly i just kind of have to. you are so cute and jelly loves you so much i sorta have to be thankful that you put up with her when im not around and honestly that in itself is a feat already but then you write and its just like woah you’re not just cute but also talented and honestly i find that unfair and i would like to file a complaint

AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST EVEN MORE AMAZINGLY BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE AND I LOVE YOU ALL EVEN THO WE NEVER TALKED THE AMOUNT OF TALENT ON THIS LIST IS OVERWHELMING TURNING CAPSLOCK OFF IS IMPOSSIBLE BC I FEEL VERY STRONGLY ABOUT THIS:

@newaldera / @sunworn / @noprodigalson (ur a cutie and i feel like i had to mention that here) / @selfsaving / @stellarumwomen / @monstrousmade / @resistancehistorian / @astradie / @chpls / @seeheroic / @livesinnarrative / @hopefired / @danversiism / @dancerdoc /  @acepilct / @starshipxcaptain / @starfleets1stmutineer / @pcrsonae / @spacemarincr / @saevio / @starjourney / @theholisticdetective / @paramounticebound / @ichorcrowncd / @abscntee / @boywonderish & @needanswers (im convinced you two are just the real deal and the hsow never ended like you two really are that good) / @boldlylogical / @aprettygooddetective / @amcrist / @enhanc / @mysticwiitch / @coneyislandcastaway / @daredbetter / @atlantisking / @164 / @zooomies / @xenobridge / @thistimefeelsnew / @chaxswalking / @hisgenius / @verycivilofyou / @five-guns-days / @interstel / @superiorambition / @thedestrcyer / @astrcphobia / @admiralsdontfly / @addsalsa / @sempitern / @heroheart / @thexjoinedxsurgeon / @xaedificare / @quietresistance / @falsepsychiic / @gcdlikc / @makeshistory / @positronicminds / @honoredsouls / @zherka / @samenkomen / @spaceforkirk / @definiibus / @captainussdiscovery / @mavxricks <3 / @ofstarrynights /  @1stofficerspock / @humanandvulcan / @nxtasidekick / @dutyandcompassion

wow. ehm happy holidays guys and im so sorry if i have missed anyone i truly tired my best.

[are-you-still-writing-that]

My Muse

It doesn´t matter who I am, or not. The only thing that matters at the moment is, whether you are alright? Don´t give me that look now, I have seen it countless times before. I just wanted to help you, when I stretched my hand out for you to take. Was I really that frightening, that you now fear me? That you flinch back, when I move too quickly? When I move in your direction? I think I can´t look into your eyes any more, the expression they have is killing me inside.

My name? I don´t think I remember it either. It has been lost for a long time. Sometimes I believe that only the stars from high above us, could remember my name, but I don´t think they have bothered too. At this point I have many names, not a single one truly mine, but not wrong eihter. Just say something, I will notice when you are talking with me, and I will response as best as I can, even though I am more like my teacher, than I ever thought I would. Don´t worry, that is a story for another time.

I came from a horrible place, but I have a feeling that is not quite what you wanted to know. I swore myself to never go back to this place, to leave it behind once and for all, but I think I failed. It still follows me, every step that I take, it is always right behind me, and no matter what I do, I can´t shake it off. But like I said, this isn´t what you wanted to know. The place, that you mean, doesn´t exist any more. It was burned down a long time ago, and something new was built on top of it. I mourned it, when I first saw it, hated them for doing such a thing, but I came to realize, that it was already gone, when I was rebuild, and that it would have fallen apart anyway eventually.

Family? No, I don´t think so. Years have passed the last time I saw my blood relatives, and I hope that they aren´t aound any more. I know how that makes me sound, but it would be for the best. Really! For everyone, it would be the best. People that I have searched for myself, I have lost long ago too. Death, really makes no difference, with whom it takes. Friends, some left me behind, other I had to leave behind. But, let´s not talk about this any more. It still hurts to think of them.

Hah! What?! I, do I, huh. What makes you think that? Look, just look back on how you yourself reacted, when I tried to help you, and you think that I have a partner? Well, putting that ridiculous notion aside, the simple answer is no. I don´t. I had a companion once, brave and smart, and the only one that never minded my ways. But he was horse. Which makes this answer really weird right now. Other people tend to avoid me, they just don´t stay around for long, and in the end I am left alone.

What do I-? What is it with you and those kind of questions? Kindness and acceptance, I guess. Those are traits, that I enjoy to stay around. But I don´t think that will be of any use for you! I don´t even know what you are doinh here. Though I would like to know, where your mind is, when you open your mouth! Knowing who you are, is also a pleasent attribute to be around. I guess I like to be around people that will accept me and the way that I am, every once in a while. It is good for the me, I need that, you know. The assurance, that I am not completely unwanted, that there is someone out there, who will accept me. But enough of that for now!

Nothing specific, if I am being honest. I find work, where the people need another hand to help. I often get paid in favours or in food. While we are on the topic, I rarely have the need for money either. I sleep under the stars, and believe it or not, nature can sustain you. There is enough food around, you just have to know where to find it, and that get´s earsier over time. Sometimes, I guess, I kill monsters. I don´t know when I started, but it somehow stuck with me. It became something that I do a lot more often, then I ever thought I would do.

A dragon. I knew it, I knew him. He wasn´t evil, just angry. Maybe even rightfully so. I saw him grow up, and I was there. Some days I would teach him what I know, and when I came back, I always would have a little gift ready. One time, I gifted him this chicken, you see, her name was, I think it was Casey. He was so happy. But then, there was another child, and it was sick, there could have been a medicine, but the price was too high. He got so angry, and the price was still far too high. It happened so long ago, but I still have to cry for him. It wasn´t fair what happened, the circumstances, it  just wasn´t fair. He deserved more of a chance, but he never got it.

I never visited a school, even though I have to add, that doesn´t mean I don´t know what is taught there. I learn from the people that I meet in my life, and from the libaries across this world. After all I was taught how to read and write, an important skill in my opinion. I can learn whatever is written down out there. The fighting I learned from a soldier, my medicine from witch. I learned the basics from them, and could then further my knowledge with what I learned on my travels. My knowledge really just is what I accumulated over time.

Travelling is a full time occupation. I don´t really have things I could pick up on the side, though I try to keep myself entertained most of the time. Nature doesn´t only offer you food, there is far more to it, than you believe. I like to listen to the birds sing in the morning, when they are just waking up, or to observe the way clouds draw in the sky, with a little imagination, there are the most beautiful pictures up there, or to watch the different behaviour of different animals. It is all so interesting, and I guess I like to see it, when I have the time. My favourite sights by far though are the stars, and the way the sun rises and goes down. It is just beautiful.

My favourite? I guess I like reading. There is something new in every book. Almost like you are stepping through a little portal into another world. It is also nearly always worth the time I spent over books. I rarely regret, reading or staying in a libary, instead of travelling further. My knowledge, is also mostly based on that. Sometimes I learn phrases, and words that way that I have never heard before, so that is always good too. It is something that can occupy your mind for a little, when your body is exhausted. It is almost peaceful.

The weather? Really? You are asking me about the weather, that I like? Well, I guess I like the warm days, but not the hot ones. The ones were you just enjoy the warmth, without sweating. When the sky is clouded, even though I tend to worry about rain on those day, they still are my favourites. And it is definitely the nightsky that I prefer! I adore the stars more, than the sun, so that shouldn´t be much of a surprise. I guess all, in all I love autuum and spring, those middle times, more than the extremes. It is just the most pleaseant time.

Once a long time ago, I really had such a place. My companion had found it, and it was really beautiful there. There was little lake, and the whole thing was surrounded by trees. The light would always break in such a fascinating way on the water. I really loved it there. But one day my companion died. I only visited that place once after that day. He was the one that had found it, I always thought, that I shouldn´t stay there without him. And in the I didn´t. I don´t know what happened to it. Maybe it is gone, maybe it is still there, exactly as I left it. But I won´t go looking for it, that much is sure.

Yeah, I learned them over time. Stay in a foreign place long enough, and you will learn. A hard way to learn a language, sure, but it had always worked for me before. It get´s easier and harder at the same time. I get used to learn new words and a whole other way of speaking, but on the other sides, I sometimes have som many words, for the same thing in my head, that I don´t even know any more, which one is the right one and which one is the wrong one. It is weird. There are also soome languages that I know, that aren´t even spoken any more, those were a pain to learn, that I can tell you!

I do listen to music, I had once in fact a friend, who made music. He was a strange one, but he was always nice. Sometimes he would even teach me a bit of what he knew, that was fun. Other times he would just play songs for me, that came to him in that moment. They were always the most beautiful songs that I knew. And of course do I know stories too. I am traveller, a vagabond. That is the way I entertain myself on the road, reciting old stories, and thinking about them. I have heard stories from across the world, and they are all so unique, even when they share some core themes. The product of creativity is always so beautiful.

Religion? I will be honest with you, I don´t care for it. If someone wants to belive in a single allmight god, or a whole pantheon. It doesn´t matter to me, and as long as it doesn´t concern me, I have no reason, to go against it. Though it makes me angry, when people use their religion and their text to hurt other. I don´t think that is right, and I hope thos people would just stop it. Though I don´t care much for the believing part, I sometimes like to listen to the stories that people tell, they are fun, sometimes.

Yeah, most of times mythology are stories, that people believed to be true. There are so mayn out there, and most were once the core for another religion. Myths usually run around the making of the world, and the gods that lived there and watched over humanity. Well, I loose the term watched really loosely here. There are so many different view points there, and no matter where you will go over time, there will always be something like a myth there.

My favourite, well, that would have to be the one about a goddess and the king of the underworld. There are many different versions of the myth around, but some things always stay the same. The goddess somehow winds up in the underworld, sometimes she is kidnapped by the king, other times she just wanderes there by accident, and decided to stay there, by the king´s side. Her mother is the goddess of harvest, and in her grief over her daughter all the plants die, so a bargain is made, that the daughter returns for an amount of time. They explained in that myth how the seasons came to be, and I think I just like it. It is a nice story.

Ah! From the light hearted topics, back to the depressing ones, with just one question. I think as a child I just wanted to get away from it all. I didn´t want to stay where I was any more, and I needed to be somewhere else. So that is what I did. Packed my bag and just went away. I started running that day, and I don´t think I have ever stopped running since that day. I can´t any more. But, hey! Who can say that they have fullfilled their childhood dream, right?!

For some reason, it is the rain. Maybe it is because it was raining for days, after I finally left, or because it tends to rain after I lost someone. But that sound, coupled with the smell, it just, there is an ache in my chest, when that combination hits. There is nothing that I can do against it. It is just there, and it is so heavy to carry around. But it is there, makes it hard to breathe, maybe it isn´t nostalgia, maybe it is just sorrow, at this point, so painful, that I can´t even cry because of it any more.

I have a good nose, so I smell a lot more than you would imagine. There is one smell, I don´t really hate it, as much as I rather fear it. It makes me uncomfortable, and makes me sick whenever it crosses my nose. Do you know how burned flesh smells? How ash does? This combination is just something horrible. It reminds me of something I would rather forget. A smell that I love would have to be freshly cut grass. I don´t know, it is just pleseant. Often enough reasoning for me, to like something apparently.

Sometimes of the darkness, sometimes of what I can´t see, sometimes of a false smile. There are many things in this world, that can and have already, stricken fear in me. There are things out there, you would never go to sleep any more in fear of meeting them in your nightmares. But I know that they exist, that they are real. Sometimes it is even the smallest things, that can strike fear in me so very naturally, sometimes it is something so abstract, that I don´t even know where I would start to describe it. But no matter what it is, the things I fear are numerous.

Are you trying to give me a whiplash with those questions of yours? You change quicker between heavy and depressing to light and silly, than I can keep up with. Are those your real intentions to confuse me thourougly, so I don´t know what is happening any more? Huh. But to come back to your little question. I am ambidextorous, originally left handed, and so this day the hand I like to use more, but you may know the talk about the devil. So the right hand I learned to use more, to keep myself safe. Happy?

Apparently not. I do indeed possess a few of those. Habits are countless for me. I wake up with the sun and go to sleep with the stars. I need those habits, for I am a vagabond, and though the road brings plenty of change, it also needs a certain kind of routine, that is where the habits come into play. And vices, they come with time too, with hunting, with killing. My most noticeable one, as a vice at least, may be my drinking. I carry my flask with me, and when it becomes too much I start to drink once more.

I would prefer the truth by far. Though I can imagine that for some it might be nice, to be lied to repeatedly to sare their feelings, I couldn´t take it. I would rather take the unpleasant truth, then the nice lie. At least then I can start to make my plans according to reality, to deal with what is really happening, make a plan appropriate to what is going on around me. In the end it is so much easier to deal with an unpleasant truth, then with a nice lie. In the long run, I will come out alive, it will have maybe hurt in the first moment, but I will be alive.

To come back to your prior question. A nice lie. Even better when it is said with a sweet smile on the face. Nothing, and I really mean nothing, gets my blood to boil so quickly. I always rage, when I see behind the lie, against myself, against the person who lied. I doesn´t just make me angry, it is a violent rage that comes over me then. Something that is only barely in my control, and would destroy anyone in my path if I led it.

They thought all of this, without ever answering a single question.

[itsjessicaisreal]

Christmas in July! Create Smarter Ecomm Landing Pages for the Holidays

Don’t let our header image fool you. 

Christmas is not right around the corner. The holiday shopping season is not upon us. You’ve got oodles of sunny summer days ahead before you need to start worrying about untangling the lights, trimming the turkey, or leaving presents under the tree. (Thank goodness!)

But if you’re in ecommerce, that’s a different story. It turns out that right now is the best time to start planning your next holiday campaign.

In fact, most experienced ecomm marketers start prepping long before Thanksgiving and Black Friday roll around. There’s just too much at stake not to. In 2018, for example, US consumers spent a whopping $7.9 billion on Cyber Monday. (Heck, they spent $2.2 billion on their phones alone.) Cyber Monday 2018 represents the biggest ecomm sales day in history, and 2019 is projected to be even bigger.

And there are other important reasons you should start prepping…

Sure, that’s a lot of cheese on the table. But, according to Jonathan Naccache of Webistry, heavy discounting also cuts into profits:

The holiday period is a double-edged sword. Due to heavy discounting, your sales might not even be profitable, even if you generate an above-average volume of sales. This is why planning is so important. November and December are all about volume, so every dollar you can save when it comes to your cost-per-acquisition can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Building up your audiences and ramping up your ads in the preceding 3-6 months is very important. 

Jonathan Naccache, Webistry

More obviously, Naccache points out that preparing simply takes a lot of work: “You’ll need great content (more than one piece) for your ads,” he says, and that may involve “many sets of banners, several video pieces, different iterations of copy” as well as “a series of dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences.”

Taylor Holiday (yeah, that’s his real name) of Common Thread Collective says his agency does massive research and planning before running a summit for their clients in mid-August. Why? So everyone is good and ready for the make-it-or-it-break months:

The reason it is so important to begin planning well in advance is because holiday outcomes are created in October and November.

Taylor Holiday, Common Thread Collective

Common Thread have a lot of data to back them up here. Emails they acquire in October, for instance, have the highest 90-day value of any time of the year. “It’s not rocket science to understand that email is valuable during this period,” says Holiday, “but it does require foresight and research into the exact value of email subscriptions to make the payback immediately profitable.” Common Thread found that running email campaigns in November and December will be “up to 5x as valuable as any other month,” so they need to be ready to build email lists in October.

So Naccache and Holiday clearly know that there are big wins—and big challenges—on the horizon. Planning in July (or even earlier) makes tons of sense to them. But for many marketers, it’s almost too easy to get planning late and let the holiday pass you by without running your own specials. That’s a mistake.

With that in mind, Unbounce has teamed up with a few heavy-hitters of marketing to give you the rundown on how you can start with your holiday campaigns and landing pages today. (So, uh, Merry Christmas!)

Read on, or jump straight to any of the subtopics below:

Rethinking Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers

Writing Copy for Gift Buyers

Learning from the Ghosts of Deals Past

Using the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

What about other times of the year? I’m talking Christmas here, the biggest and “mostest” (that’s a word, right?) of the holidays in North America. But there’s no good reason you shouldn’t plan campaigns around other special days relevant to your business. Most of this advice should apply. (Also, if you’re reading this in November and short on time, using a drag-and-drop builder like Unbounce makes pages faster to pull off.)

1. Rethink Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers

You’re running a holiday sale, eh?

15% off, you say?

Free shipping on all orders over $100?

That’s terrific. 

But here’s the thing about holiday discounts: during this period, most shoppers are so bombarded with deals and offers that they become inured to simple bargains. (Plus, your competitors likely have similar perks on to go, so there’s that…) 

Unless you’re prepared to cut bone-deep, building a campaign around a discount may not be enough to create genuine excitement. Instead, the experts recommend that you create promotions that use specific psychological triggers. 

Here are a few ideas to help you go beyond lame-duck discounts:

BOGO (Buy One, Get One) Deals

Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons when Homer gives Marge a bowling ball for her birthday? You know, the one with his name engraved on it? As you’ll recall, she wasn’t pleased:

Not a look you want from your loved ones.

Don’t be too hard on Homer. By buying Marge a present that he wants for himself, he’s exhibiting pretty normal human behavior.

In fact, it’s one reason that “buy one, get one free” deals can be more persuasive than straightforward discounts around the holidays. It’s not just a free thing, it’s that you get to play Scrooge and Santa at the same time: “I really want this thing for myself,” your customers will tell themselves: “I’ll pick one up for me, and give the other one to my friend.”

(There’s a fascinating study to be done on whether BOGO buyers think they’re keeping the “free” item or giving that one away.)

BOGO promotions also work brilliantly for products that you might naturally want to pair or share. Take a look at how Starbucks’ yearly “Buy One, Share One” promotion conjures the spirit of giving:

Starbucks’ “Buy One, Share One” uses the positive emotions associated with sharing and togetherness to sell lattes.

While traditional BOGO might appeal to greed, Starbucks combines the urgency of a very narrow purchase window (limited time, from 2-5 pm) with messaging that implies generosity. (We’ve seen customers build very similar limited promos using popups on their websites.)

Tiered Deals

BOGO promotions can be very attractive, but done wrong, they can also take a bite of profits and hurt your brand. Aaron Orendorff, the founder of iconiContent and former editor in chief at Shopify Plus, suggests instead creating promos that encourage more spending:

Not only is traditional discounting becoming less effective over the holidays, but it can also substantially lower brand value as well as AOV (average order value). The answer is creative deal structures that drive AOV from the ad or email to the onsite experience right through to the checkout.

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

One of Orendorff’s favorite examples is Brooklinen, who created a tiered “spend more, save more” deal structure to increase order values.

Spend $150, get a free gift

Spend $250, get 10% off

Spend $350, get 15% off

Spend $450, get 20% off

Orendorff points out that Brooklinen doesn’t mess around when it comes to encouraging buyers to take it up a tier: “Brooklinen featured that exact deal in all their promotions: organic, paid, and email. The real genius is the brand also integrated the tiers into its checkout, prompting shoppers to spend more and nudging them into the next tier.” It looks like this:

Mixed Product Bundling

Like BOGO, bundling involves combining multiple products into a single package. It attracts customers with the promise of greater value.

You can certainly bundle the same product together, but mixed bundling works best by joining your products into a single, discounted bundle. Why? Since people generally prefer experiential gifts to physical ones, this form of bundling transforms your product into an experience by offering a total package.

And it can be as simple as what Australian retailer Joyce Mayne did when they bundled a Fujifilm Instax camera with its accessories. Check it out:

This clever bundle by Joyce Mayne transforms a product (a hot pink instant camera) into an experience (sharing memories with friends and family).

The promo page for this bundle no longer exists online, but supporting copy went straight for the heart: “This would make for a brilliant Christmas present for anyone who loves to seize the moment and share memories with friends and family.” Notice how Joyce Mayne reframe the purchase in terms of a shared experience.

Scrooge-Style Discounting

For the right type of brand, sometimes the best approach is to only offer discounts at the holidays—and at no other time of the year.

For example, Lush Cosmetics runs once-a-year-only BOGO sale on December 26th (or Boxing Day to those of us outside the U.S.). By only offering it once a year, they create urgency and reinforce the perception that their products are too valued to discount.

By limiting this BOGO sale to one day a year, Lush creates anticipation and urgency while preserving their image as a superior-quality brand. (More practically, it also clears out holiday inventory that wouldn’t sell anyway.)

Lush sticks to its guns when it comes to this sale, but it’s not uncommon for brands to think it’s a good idea to revise their exclusivity: “Our once-a-year sale is now once-a-month! Get hyped!” Counterintuitively, this can work against you.

According to Lianna Patch of Punchline Conversion Copywriting, it’ll puncture any urgency you’ve been trying to create:

Your discounting will always be more effective when your brand itself is more trustworthy—so if you tend to extend “one-day-only” sales often, or by multiple days, or you run promotions frequently, you’re likely dis-incentivizing your customers and ruining your own appeals to urgency and scarcity. On the contrary, if you can say “Hey, we run just one sale a year, it ends when we say it ends, and you’ll never get a better deal than this,” you’re going to strike a chord with even your most reluctant prospects.

Lianna Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Of course, that doesn’t mean your campaign will be a short one. An accompanying ad or email campaign can create anticipation, while a landing page with a sign-up for reminders builds your nurture lists. (There’s more on this anticipation strategy below.)

Post-Click Upselling

A frequently neglected (but still very effective) tactic is to make an additional offer after your visitor has converted. The principle is actually very simple: you’ve already done the hard part of overcoming their resistance. Now they’re in the mood to buy.

The psychological phenomenon of loss aversion can play a role here too, since an offer made on a Thank You page or a well-timed popup feels more limited: “Get an additional 10% off your next purchase today.” This special shouldn’t be mentioned until this step in the process, of course. If customers feel like they could get it at any time, it’ll be less effective.

A clever use for popups or sticky bars. If your customer service hours will be reduced over the holidays, let customers know when they can expect contact. A sticky bar can double as a holiday greeting and let your visitors know about reduced hours. We’ve even got a template for it.

2. Write Copy For Gift Givers

Most of the year, the people you target purchase for themselves or their immediate family. And much of your existing content is (understandably) attuned to their self-interest. That’s why good copywriting is typically you-oriented: it focuses on the wants and needs of the reader. 

During the holidays, however, this is often less true. Homer Simpson aside, people aren’t buying only for themselves. Many will shop with loved ones, friends, and colleagues in mind.

In other words, the purchase intent of visitors to your holiday landing page will be different. Your headline, call-to-action, and supporting copy all need to be different too. As you sit down to write for your landing pages, try to think about common gifting considerations:

Will mommy lurve this sweater?

Can the wife and I experience this gift together?

Will this make my BFF lol? Will it make her ?

Does this present have any special meaning?

What will my coworker think if I give him this present?

These all have an especially strong emotional core as visitors search for the right gift. Like the examples from Starbucks and Joyce Mayne above, the best promos for holiday shoppers don’t just slap the words “Black Friday Sale – Get 10% Off” at the top of an existing page and call it a day. They use both copy and visuals to tap into these emotions.

And, yes, it can be easy to sink into cliches. But hitting those warm feels or helping someone find the perfect gift for their loved one satisfies the intent more than an appeal to self-interest.

According to Naccache, Webistry create “dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences” for this purpose. This pre-Christmas landing page from Country Chic Paint is a killer example of copy tailored to indecisive gift buyers.

Click to see the full image of the landing page. (Courtesy of Webistry)

While a 40% limited discount is nice, the copy below is also very specific in communicating a gifting context: this product is perfect for buyers who are “blanking on gift ideas” for a creative someone in their life. A mystery box takes an awful lot of the pressure off visitors looking for a meaningful gift.

Lianna Patch agrees the challenge lies in “effectively changing your approach from ‘Buy this, it’ll make you feel good’ to ‘Buy the feeling of giving a great gift.'” (She and Val Geisler recently teamed up for a webinar on writing copy for holiday emails, so she has a lot to say on the subject.) 

But Patch also cautions that your buyers will have more practical considerations in mind:

It’s also important, when appealing to gift-buyers, to address objections around shipping/logistics (Will it arrive in time?), presentability (Does it come gift-wrapped? Do I have to remove the price tag?), and returns and exchanges (Will it be a pain to exchange shirt sizes? If my mom doesn’t like the mug I got her, can I return it?).

Lianna Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Ecomm landing pages are particularly bad at answering these kinds of questions. If you’re equipped to tackle any them, make it as explicit as you can in your copy. Shipping guarantees, for instance, should probably never be buried in your FAQ at this time of year.

Who’s this gift for? According to Think with Google, searchers get extremely specific and personal during the holidays: “searches for ‘gift + ____ year old’ have seen a two-year growth of over 100%, while searches for ‘gifts for dad’ have grown over 80% during that same period.” Creating targeted PPC campaigns with tailored landing pages (using Dynamic Text Replacement) can help.

3. Learn from the Ghost of Deals Past

Look at your previous campaigns. You may have conducted a routine post-mortem already, but remind yourself now of what worked—and what didn’t—before you start to plan.

Review the key performance metrics for your campaigns. For landing pages, your conversion rate should tell you whether or not your page performed to your expectations. (If you’re just starting out, you can use Unbounce’s Conversion Benchmark Report or a variety of other resources to get a sense of where you should be hitting.) 

But I’d also recommend pulling other traffic and engagement metrics from Google Analytics. Your page’s bounce rate and session time are important. Plus, any relevant info about visitors (like geolocation, device type, etc.) that might give you a clue to who’s being naughty or nice. A lower than expected conversion rate might indicate that something went wrong, but engagement stats like these ones can help you sniff out the cause. 

Let’s say, for instance, you see that your holiday landing page had few conversions but Google Analytics also shows people are spending a long time on the page.

Google Analytics surfaces a lot of additional data about how prospects are interacting with your landing pages. It’s worth digging deep while you have the time so that you can make informed decisions going forward.

Why is this happening?

It could be visitors are actually very interested in your product, but they’re confused or turned off by something they see (or don’t see) on the landing page. Take steps to simplify the layout, add more impact to your copy, and make your call-to-action more prominent. (Perhaps, as mentioned above, you need to re-write it with specific gifting contexts in mind.)

Another possibility is that your product already compels, but your visitors hesitate to actually buy it. Maybe it’s an idea so ahead of its time that they remain locked in the consideration phase. Or maybe you’re selling something that’s a big investment. Assuming your prospects may be sitting on the fence, you might want to throw in an incentive (by way of a timed popup or sticky bar) to give ’em a nudge. 

Of course, you may have other ideas. In any case, diving into engagement metrics lets you formulate a hypothesis and plan your next move. 

What about A/B testing? Running valid A/B tests during the holiday period can be challenging. You need traffic and time that you may not have. Plus, seasonal traffic behaves differently—so you can’t rely on what you’ve learned at other times of the year. I do like this holiday testing guide from ConversionXL, which gives you a detailed rundown of what’s involved.

4. Use the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

Unless you’re just starting out, you already know about the persuasive power of adding a little urgency to your promotions. Countdown timers, announcing (realistic) product scarcity, running limited-time offers—these old hat strategies boost your conversions at any time during the year, as long as you don’t overdo ’em. 

Around the holidays, though, there’s already a sense of urgency built into the holiday shopping experience. Your customers are racing to get the best deals and check off every name on their list before Christmas.

Yeah, you could take advantage of this rush by ratcheting up the misery with big black numbers (counting down the remaining shopping days until the kids are forever disappointed, let’s say).

But there’s a much better approach.

Instead, offer your visitors a little something more…

Offer a Little Relief from the Rush

Think about your campaign like a pleasing piece of music: you need tension, sure, but also release. (Otherwise, it’s just noise.) Instead of relying on purely negative types of urgency, then, you can promote a sense of trust and reliability by relieving your visitors’ anxieties. It may lead to fewer impulse buys, but it’ll also help your brand in the long run.

As always, Amazon offers a pretty sharp example of this practice.

Sure, around the holidays they’ll up the ante with a countdown timer or two. (They also never miss an opportunity to indicate low stock.) But their bread and butter lies in relieving the anxiety associated with shipping. 

By including “Want it delivered by… order by…” messages on product pages, they promise their customers an almost impossible level of control. The effect of seeing that you need to “order it in the next 6 hours and 10 minutes” to receive the package by December 23 amplifies the urgency, sure, but it also empowers the customer:

There’s more than one way to get ready for the holidays.

Needless to say, if you want to go this same route, your expedited shipping solution should be up to the task. If your customers aren’t going to get those fancy new boots until mid-March, you’ll need to find another approach.

Anticipation and Excitement

Anticipation is another more positive expression of urgency worth exploring with your holiday campaigns. Amazon does this too.

As this analysis of their Black Friday promotions points out, over the past decade the company has slowly extended the sales period into “one torturously long stretch of spending lasting from Nov. 1 to Dec. 22.” But this period is also punctuated by flash sales and specials meant to keep the customer excited. Since 2011, in fact, they’ve made the countdown to the sale itself into an event with “Countdown to Black Friday Deals Week.”

Since 2013, Amazon’s Black Friday sales period has stretched from November 1st to December 22nd. (Image via Quartz)

Why are anticipation and excitement so effective? This may seem obvious, but they encourage repeated visits to their storefront in the quest for new deals, generate excitement about upcoming sales, and stretch the holiday shopping season across longer periods of time.

Is Amazon worth imitating, even on a smaller scale? You betcha.

And, according to Aaron Orendorff, there’s another major benefit to creating campaigns around anticipation: it can be much cheaper.

Ad costs are far lower in the lead up to the holidays. So, buy your traffic early by previewing your upcoming event across paid social. Collect your best deals—built around product categories or specific audiences—onto landing pages with one goal: to get visitors’ email addresses in exchange for early access (or something similarly enticing).

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

(I think Aaron just dropped the mic on us.)

Don’t Let the “Christmas Creep” Sneak Up on You

Here’s a final question for you: when will people start their Christmas shopping this year? The answer: they already have.

Sure, the received wisdom is that the holiday season starts after American Thanksgiving. But the National Retail Federation says brick-and-mortar retailers start to see shoppers before Halloween, which is why some stores have started setting up displays in September.

That’s nothing compared to the ecommerce world though. According to a consumer survey from Valassis, there’s a strong interest in early shopping online: “40 percent completing a portion of their gift purchase on Amazon Prime Day.” (That’s mid-July Christmas shopping!) Why not devise some clever ways to target these buyers longer before your competitors get there?

It’s a neverending nightmare, Charlie Brown.

Let’s face it. For today’s ecommerce marketer, the holiday season feels like it’s always just around the corner.

Thankfully, the enemies you face when planning these campaigns aren’t different from any other part of the year. How do you overcome them? Planning well in advance is a must. And finding workable shortcuts that don’t cut short on the quality of your campaigns is another approach. (That’s one of the big reasons we think landing pages are a killer alternative to web pages. You can drag and drop a campaign together without involving your web developer.)

And there are plenty of other times throughout the year to apply these tips. Depending on your perspective, the Christmas shopping season stretches across Halloween, two Thanksgivings (American and Canuck), Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day, and even New Years. But then you might see other opportunities around Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, July 4th, Arbor Day… you name it, there’s a promo you can run (and run early).

But if you want to have a real impact, the real meaning of Christmas in July is that you need to get started today.

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/landing-pages/landing-pages-for-holidays-ecommerce/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[annaxkeating]

Christmas in July! Create Smarter Ecomm Landing Pages for the Holidays

Don’t let our header image fool you. 

Christmas is not right around the corner. The holiday shopping season is not upon us. You’ve got oodles of sunny summer days ahead before you need to start worrying about untangling the lights, trimming the turkey, or leaving presents under the tree. (Thank goodness!)

But if you’re in ecommerce, that’s a different story. It turns out that right now is the best time to start planning your next holiday campaign.

In fact, most experienced ecomm marketers start prepping long before Thanksgiving and Black Friday roll around. There’s just too much at stake not to. In 2018, for example, US consumers spent a whopping $7.9 billion on Cyber Monday. (Heck, they spent $2.2 billion on their phones alone.) Cyber Monday 2018 represents the biggest ecomm sales day in history, and 2019 is projected to be even bigger.

And there are other important reasons you should start prepping…

Sure, that’s a lot of cheese on the table. But, according to Jonathan Naccache of Webistry, heavy discounting also cuts into profits:

The holiday period is a double-edged sword. Due to heavy discounting, your sales might not even be profitable, even if you generate an above-average volume of sales. This is why planning is so important. November and December are all about volume, so every dollar you can save when it comes to your cost-per-acquisition can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Building up your audiences and ramping up your ads in the preceding 3-6 months is very important. 

Jonathan Naccache, Webistry

More obviously, Naccache points out that preparing simply takes a lot of work: “You’ll need great content (more than one piece) for your ads,” he says, and that may involve “many sets of banners, several video pieces, different iterations of copy” as well as “a series of dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences.”

Taylor Holiday (yeah, that’s his real name) of Common Thread Collective says his agency does massive research and planning before running a summit for their clients in mid-August. Why? So everyone is good and ready for the make-it-or-it-break months:

The reason it is so important to begin planning well in advance is because holiday outcomes are created in October and November.

Taylor Holiday, Common Thread Collective

Common Thread have a lot of data to back them up here. Emails they acquire in October, for instance, have the highest 90-day value of any time of the year. “It’s not rocket science to understand that email is valuable during this period,” says Holiday, “but it does require foresight and research into the exact value of email subscriptions to make the payback immediately profitable.” Common Thread found that running email campaigns in November and December will be “up to 5x as valuable as any other month,” so they need to be ready to build email lists in October.

So Naccache and Holiday clearly know that there are big wins—and big challenges—on the horizon. Planning in July (or even earlier) makes tons of sense to them. But for many marketers, it’s almost too easy to get planning late and let the holiday pass you by without running your own specials. That’s a mistake.

With that in mind, Unbounce has teamed up with a few heavy-hitters of marketing to give you the rundown on how you can start with your holiday campaigns and landing pages today. (So, uh, Merry Christmas!)

Read on, or jump straight to any of the subtopics below:

Rethinking Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers

Writing Copy for Gift Buyers

Learning from the Ghosts of Deals Past

Using the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

What about other times of the year? I’m talking Christmas here, the biggest and “mostest” (that’s a word, right?) of the holidays in North America. But there’s no good reason you shouldn’t plan campaigns around other special days relevant to your business. Most of this advice should apply. (Also, if you’re reading this in November and short on time, using a drag-and-drop builder like Unbounce makes pages faster to pull off.)

1. Rethink Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers

You’re running a holiday sale, eh?

15% off, you say?

Free shipping on all orders over $100?

That’s terrific. 

But here’s the thing about holiday discounts: during this period, most shoppers are so bombarded with deals and offers that they become inured to simple bargains. (Plus, your competitors likely have similar perks on to go, so there’s that…) 

Unless you’re prepared to cut bone-deep, building a campaign around a discount may not be enough to create genuine excitement. Instead, the experts recommend that you create promotions that use specific psychological triggers. 

Here are a few ideas to help you go beyond lame-duck discounts:

BOGO (Buy One, Get One) Deals

Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons when Homer gives Marge a bowling ball for her birthday? You know, the one with his name engraved on it? As you’ll recall, she wasn’t pleased:

Not a look you want from your loved ones.

Don’t be too hard on Homer. By buying Marge a present that he wants for himself, he’s exhibiting pretty normal human behavior.

In fact, it’s one reason that “buy one, get one free” deals can be more persuasive than straightforward discounts around the holidays. It’s not just a free thing, it’s that you get to play Scrooge and Santa at the same time: “I really want this thing for myself,” your customers will tell themselves: “I’ll pick one up for me, and give the other one to my friend.”

(There’s a fascinating study to be done on whether BOGO buyers think they’re keeping the “free” item or giving that one away.)

BOGO promotions also work brilliantly for products that you might naturally want to pair or share. Take a look at how Starbucks’ yearly “Buy One, Share One” promotion conjures the spirit of giving:

Starbucks’ “Buy One, Share One” uses the positive emotions associated with sharing and togetherness to sell lattes.

While traditional BOGO might appeal to greed, Starbucks combines the urgency of a very narrow purchase window (limited time, from 2-5 pm) with messaging that implies generosity. (We’ve seen customers build very similar limited promos using popups on their websites.)

Tiered Deals

BOGO promotions can be very attractive, but done wrong, they can also take a bite of profits and hurt your brand. Aaron Orendorff, the founder of iconiContent and former editor in chief at Shopify Plus, suggests instead creating promos that encourage more spending:

Not only is traditional discounting becoming less effective over the holidays, but it can also substantially lower brand value as well as AOV (average order value). The answer is creative deal structures that drive AOV from the ad or email to the onsite experience right through to the checkout.

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

One of Orendorff’s favorite examples is Brooklinen, who created a tiered “spend more, save more” deal structure to increase order values.

Spend $150, get a free gift

Spend $250, get 10% off

Spend $350, get 15% off

Spend $450, get 20% off

Orendorff points out that Brooklinen doesn’t mess around when it comes to encouraging buyers to take it up a tier: “Brooklinen featured that exact deal in all their promotions: organic, paid, and email. The real genius is the brand also integrated the tiers into its checkout, prompting shoppers to spend more and nudging them into the next tier.” It looks like this:

Mixed Product Bundling

Like BOGO, bundling involves combining multiple products into a single package. It attracts customers with the promise of greater value.

You can certainly bundle the same product together, but mixed bundling works best by joining your products into a single, discounted bundle. Why? Since people generally prefer experiential gifts to physical ones, this form of bundling transforms your product into an experience by offering a total package.

And it can be as simple as what Australian retailer Joyce Mayne did when they bundled a Fujifilm Instax camera with its accessories. Check it out:

This clever bundle by Joyce Mayne transforms a product (a hot pink instant camera) into an experience (sharing memories with friends and family).

The promo page for this bundle no longer exists online, but supporting copy went straight for the heart: “This would make for a brilliant Christmas present for anyone who loves to seize the moment and share memories with friends and family.” Notice how Joyce Mayne reframe the purchase in terms of a shared experience.

Scrooge-Style Discounting

For the right type of brand, sometimes the best approach is to only offer discounts at the holidays—and at no other time of the year.

For example, Lush Cosmetics runs once-a-year-only BOGO sale on December 26th (or Boxing Day to those of us outside the U.S.). By only offering it once a year, they create urgency and reinforce the perception that their products are too valued to discount.

By limiting this BOGO sale to one day a year, Lush creates anticipation and urgency while preserving their image as a superior-quality brand. (More practically, it also clears out holiday inventory that wouldn’t sell anyway.)

Lush sticks to its guns when it comes to this sale, but it’s not uncommon for brands to think it’s a good idea to revise their exclusivity: “Our once-a-year sale is now once-a-month! Get hyped!” Counterintuitively, this can work against you.

According to Lianna Patch of Punchline Conversion Copywriting, it’ll puncture any urgency you’ve been trying to create:

Your discounting will always be more effective when your brand itself is more trustworthy—so if you tend to extend “one-day-only” sales often, or by multiple days, or you run promotions frequently, you’re likely dis-incentivizing your customers and ruining your own appeals to urgency and scarcity. On the contrary, if you can say “Hey, we run just one sale a year, it ends when we say it ends, and you’ll never get a better deal than this,” you’re going to strike a chord with even your most reluctant prospects.

Lianna Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Of course, that doesn’t mean your campaign will be a short one. An accompanying ad or email campaign can create anticipation, while a landing page with a sign-up for reminders builds your nurture lists. (There’s more on this anticipation strategy below.)

Post-Click Upselling

A frequently neglected (but still very effective) tactic is to make an additional offer after your visitor has converted. The principle is actually very simple: you’ve already done the hard part of overcoming their resistance. Now they’re in the mood to buy.

The psychological phenomenon of loss aversion can play a role here too, since an offer made on a Thank You page or a well-timed popup feels more limited: “Get an additional 10% off your next purchase today.” This special shouldn’t be mentioned until this step in the process, of course. If customers feel like they could get it at any time, it’ll be less effective.

A clever use for popups or sticky bars. If your customer service hours will be reduced over the holidays, let customers know when they can expect contact. A sticky bar can double as a holiday greeting and let your visitors know about reduced hours. We’ve even got a template for it.

2. Write Copy For Gift Givers

Most of the year, the people you target purchase for themselves or their immediate family. And much of your existing content is (understandably) attuned to their self-interest. That’s why good copywriting is typically you-oriented: it focuses on the wants and needs of the reader. 

During the holidays, however, this is often less true. Homer Simpson aside, people aren’t buying only for themselves. Many will shop with loved ones, friends, and colleagues in mind.

In other words, the purchase intent of visitors to your holiday landing page will be different. Your headline, call-to-action, and supporting copy all need to be different too. As you sit down to write for your landing pages, try to think about common gifting considerations:

Will mommy lurve this sweater?

Can the wife and I experience this gift together?

Will this make my BFF lol? Will it make her ?

Does this present have any special meaning?

What will my coworker think if I give him this present?

These all have an especially strong emotional core as visitors search for the right gift. Like the examples from Starbucks and Joyce Mayne above, the best promos for holiday shoppers don’t just slap the words “Black Friday Sale – Get 10% Off” at the top of an existing page and call it a day. They use both copy and visuals to tap into these emotions.

And, yes, it can be easy to sink into cliches. But hitting those warm feels or helping someone find the perfect gift for their loved one satisfies the intent more than an appeal to self-interest.

According to Naccache, Webistry create “dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences” for this purpose. This pre-Christmas landing page from Country Chic Paint is a killer example of copy tailored to indecisive gift buyers.

Click to see the full image of the landing page. (Courtesy of Webistry)

While a 40% limited discount is nice, the copy below is also very specific in communicating a gifting context: this product is perfect for buyers who are “blanking on gift ideas” for a creative someone in their life. A mystery box takes an awful lot of the pressure off visitors looking for a meaningful gift.

Lianna Patch agrees the challenge lies in “effectively changing your approach from ‘Buy this, it’ll make you feel good’ to ‘Buy the feeling of giving a great gift.'” (She and Val Geisler recently teamed up for a webinar on writing copy for holiday emails, so she has a lot to say on the subject.) 

But Patch also cautions that your buyers will have more practical considerations in mind:

It’s also important, when appealing to gift-buyers, to address objections around shipping/logistics (Will it arrive in time?), presentability (Does it come gift-wrapped? Do I have to remove the price tag?), and returns and exchanges (Will it be a pain to exchange shirt sizes? If my mom doesn’t like the mug I got her, can I return it?).

Lianna Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Ecomm landing pages are particularly bad at answering these kinds of questions. If you’re equipped to tackle any them, make it as explicit as you can in your copy. Shipping guarantees, for instance, should probably never be buried in your FAQ at this time of year.

Who’s this gift for? According to Think with Google, searchers get extremely specific and personal during the holidays: “searches for ‘gift + ____ year old’ have seen a two-year growth of over 100%, while searches for ‘gifts for dad’ have grown over 80% during that same period.” Creating targeted PPC campaigns with tailored landing pages (using Dynamic Text Replacement) can help.

3. Learn from the Ghost of Deals Past

Look at your previous campaigns. You may have conducted a routine post-mortem already, but remind yourself now of what worked—and what didn’t—before you start to plan.

Review the key performance metrics for your campaigns. For landing pages, your conversion rate should tell you whether or not your page performed to your expectations. (If you’re just starting out, you can use Unbounce’s Conversion Benchmark Report or a variety of other resources to get a sense of where you should be hitting.) 

But I’d also recommend pulling other traffic and engagement metrics from Google Analytics. Your page’s bounce rate and session time are important. Plus, any relevant info about visitors (like geolocation, device type, etc.) that might give you a clue to who’s being naughty or nice. A lower than expected conversion rate might indicate that something went wrong, but engagement stats like these ones can help you sniff out the cause. 

Let’s say, for instance, you see that your holiday landing page had few conversions but Google Analytics also shows people are spending a long time on the page.

Google Analytics surfaces a lot of additional data about how prospects are interacting with your landing pages. It’s worth digging deep while you have the time so that you can make informed decisions going forward.

Why is this happening?

It could be visitors are actually very interested in your product, but they’re confused or turned off by something they see (or don’t see) on the landing page. Take steps to simplify the layout, add more impact to your copy, and make your call-to-action more prominent. (Perhaps, as mentioned above, you need to re-write it with specific gifting contexts in mind.)

Another possibility is that your product already compels, but your visitors hesitate to actually buy it. Maybe it’s an idea so ahead of its time that they remain locked in the consideration phase. Or maybe you’re selling something that’s a big investment. Assuming your prospects may be sitting on the fence, you might want to throw in an incentive (by way of a timed popup or sticky bar) to give ’em a nudge. 

Of course, you may have other ideas. In any case, diving into engagement metrics lets you formulate a hypothesis and plan your next move. 

What about A/B testing? Running valid A/B tests during the holiday period can be challenging. You need traffic and time that you may not have. Plus, seasonal traffic behaves differently—so you can’t rely on what you’ve learned at other times of the year. I do like this holiday testing guide from ConversionXL, which gives you a detailed rundown of what’s involved.

4. Use the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

Unless you’re just starting out, you already know about the persuasive power of adding a little urgency to your promotions. Countdown timers, announcing (realistic) product scarcity, running limited-time offers—these old hat strategies boost your conversions at any time during the year, as long as you don’t overdo ’em. 

Around the holidays, though, there’s already a sense of urgency built into the holiday shopping experience. Your customers are racing to get the best deals and check off every name on their list before Christmas.

Yeah, you could take advantage of this rush by ratcheting up the misery with big black numbers (counting down the remaining shopping days until the kids are forever disappointed, let’s say).

But there’s a much better approach.

Instead, offer your visitors a little something more…

Offer a Little Relief from the Rush

Think about your campaign like a pleasing piece of music: you need tension, sure, but also release. (Otherwise, it’s just noise.) Instead of relying on purely negative types of urgency, then, you can promote a sense of trust and reliability by relieving your visitors’ anxieties. It may lead to fewer impulse buys, but it’ll also help your brand in the long run.

As always, Amazon offers a pretty sharp example of this practice.

Sure, around the holidays they’ll up the ante with a countdown timer or two. (They also never miss an opportunity to indicate low stock.) But their bread and butter lies in relieving the anxiety associated with shipping. 

By including “Want it delivered by… order by…” messages on product pages, they promise their customers an almost impossible level of control. The effect of seeing that you need to “order it in the next 6 hours and 10 minutes” to receive the package by December 23 amplifies the urgency, sure, but it also empowers the customer:

There’s more than one way to get ready for the holidays.

Needless to say, if you want to go this same route, your expedited shipping solution should be up to the task. If your customers aren’t going to get those fancy new boots until mid-March, you’ll need to find another approach.

Anticipation and Excitement

Anticipation is another more positive expression of urgency worth exploring with your holiday campaigns. Amazon does this too.

As this analysis of their Black Friday promotions points out, over the past decade the company has slowly extended the sales period into “one torturously long stretch of spending lasting from Nov. 1 to Dec. 22.” But this period is also punctuated by flash sales and specials meant to keep the customer excited. Since 2011, in fact, they’ve made the countdown to the sale itself into an event with “Countdown to Black Friday Deals Week.”

Since 2013, Amazon’s Black Friday sales period has stretched from November 1st to December 22nd. (Image via Quartz)

Why are anticipation and excitement so effective? This may seem obvious, but they encourage repeated visits to their storefront in the quest for new deals, generate excitement about upcoming sales, and stretch the holiday shopping season across longer periods of time.

Is Amazon worth imitating, even on a smaller scale? You betcha.

And, according to Aaron Orendorff, there’s another major benefit to creating campaigns around anticipation: it can be much cheaper.

Ad costs are far lower in the lead up to the holidays. So, buy your traffic early by previewing your upcoming event across paid social. Collect your best deals—built around product categories or specific audiences—onto landing pages with one goal: to get visitors’ email addresses in exchange for early access (or something similarly enticing).

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

(I think Aaron just dropped the mic on us.)

Don’t Let the “Christmas Creep” Sneak Up on You

Here’s a final question for you: when will people start their Christmas shopping this year? The answer: they already have.

Sure, the received wisdom is that the holiday season starts after American Thanksgiving. But the National Retail Federation says brick-and-mortar retailers start to see shoppers before Halloween, which is why some stores have started setting up displays in September.

That’s nothing compared to the ecommerce world though. According to a consumer survey from Valassis, there’s a strong interest in early shopping online: “40 percent completing a portion of their gift purchase on Amazon Prime Day.” (That’s mid-July Christmas shopping!) Why not devise some clever ways to target these buyers longer before your competitors get there?

It’s a neverending nightmare, Charlie Brown.

Let’s face it. For today’s ecommerce marketer, the holiday season feels like it’s always just around the corner.

Thankfully, the enemies you face when planning these campaigns aren’t different from any other part of the year. How do you overcome them? Planning well in advance is a must. And finding workable shortcuts that don’t cut short on the quality of your campaigns is another approach. (That’s one of the big reasons we think landing pages are a killer alternative to web pages. You can drag and drop a campaign together without involving your web developer.)

And there are plenty of other times throughout the year to apply these tips. Depending on your perspective, the Christmas shopping season stretches across Halloween, two Thanksgivings (American and Canuck), Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day, and even New Years. But then you might see other opportunities around Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, July 4th, Arbor Day… you name it, there’s a promo you can run (and run early).

But if you want to have a real impact, the real meaning of Christmas in July is that you need to get started today.

from Digital https://unbounce.com/landing-pages/landing-pages-for-holidays-ecommerce/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[samanthasmeyers]

Christmas in July! Create Smarter Ecomm Landing Pages for the Holidays

Don’t let our header image fool you. 

Christmas is not right around the corner. The holiday shopping season is not upon us. You’ve got oodles of sunny summer days ahead before you need to start worrying about untangling the lights, trimming the turkey, or leaving presents under the tree. (Thank goodness!)

But if you’re in ecommerce, that’s a different story. It turns out that right now is the best time to start planning your next holiday campaign.

In fact, most experienced ecomm marketers start prepping long before Thanksgiving and Black Friday roll around. There’s just too much at stake not to. In 2018, for example, US consumers spent a whopping $7.9 billion on Cyber Monday. (Heck, they spent $2.2 billion on their phones alone.) Cyber Monday 2018 represents the biggest ecomm sales day in history, and 2019 is projected to be even bigger.

And there are other important reasons you should start prepping…

Sure, that’s a lot of cheese on the table. But, according to Jonathan Naccache of Webistry, heavy discounting also cuts into profits:

The holiday period is a double-edged sword. Due to heavy discounting, your sales might not even be profitable, even if you generate an above-average volume of sales. This is why planning is so important. November and December are all about volume, so every dollar you can save when it comes to your cost-per-acquisition can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Building up your audiences and ramping up your ads in the preceding 3-6 months is very important. 

Jonathan Naccache, Webistry

More obviously, Naccache points out that preparing simply takes a lot of work: “You’ll need great content (more than one piece) for your ads,” he says, and that may involve “many sets of banners, several video pieces, different iterations of copy” as well as “a series of dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences.”

Taylor Holiday (yeah, that’s his real name) of Common Thread Collective says his agency does massive research and planning before running a summit for their clients in mid-August. Why? So everyone is good and ready for the make-it-or-it-break months:

The reason it is so important to begin planning well in advance is because holiday outcomes are created in October and November.

Taylor Holiday, Common Thread Collective

Common Thread have a lot of data to back them up here. Emails they acquire in October, for instance, have the highest 90-day value of any time of the year. “It’s not rocket science to understand that email is valuable during this period,” says Holiday, “but it does require foresight and research into the exact value of email subscriptions to make the payback immediately profitable.” Common Thread found that running email campaigns in November and December will be “up to 5x as valuable as any other month,” so they need to be ready to build email lists in October.

So Naccache and Holiday clearly know that there are big wins—and big challenges—on the horizon. Planning in July (or even earlier) makes tons of sense to them. But for many marketers, it’s almost too easy to get planning late and let the holiday pass you by without running your own specials. That’s a mistake.

With that in mind, Unbounce has teamed up with a few heavy-hitters of marketing to give you the rundown on how you can start with your holiday campaigns and landing pages today. (So, uh, Merry Christmas!)

Read on, or jump straight to any of the subtopics below:

Rethinking Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers

Writing Copy for Gift Buyers

Learning from the Ghosts of Deals Past

Using the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

What about other times of the year? I’m talking Christmas here, the biggest and “mostest” (that’s a word, right?) of the holidays in North America. But there’s no good reason you shouldn’t plan campaigns around other special days relevant to your business. Most of this advice should apply. (Also, if you’re reading this in November and short on time, using a drag-and-drop builder like Unbounce makes pages faster to pull off.)

1. Rethink Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers

You’re running a holiday sale, eh?

15% off, you say?

Free shipping on all orders over $100?

That’s terrific. 

But here’s the thing about holiday discounts: during this period, most shoppers are so bombarded with deals and offers that they become inured to simple bargains. (Plus, your competitors likely have similar perks on to go, so there’s that…) 

Unless you’re prepared to cut bone-deep, building a campaign around a discount may not be enough to create genuine excitement. Instead, the experts recommend that you create promotions that use specific psychological triggers. 

Here are a few ideas to help you go beyond lame-duck discounts:

BOGO (Buy One, Get One) Deals

Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons when Homer gives Marge a bowling ball for her birthday? You know, the one with his name engraved on it? As you’ll recall, she wasn’t pleased:

Not a look you want from your loved ones.

Don’t be too hard on Homer. By buying Marge a present that he wants for himself, he’s exhibiting pretty normal human behavior.

In fact, it’s one reason that “buy one, get one free” deals can be more persuasive than straightforward discounts around the holidays. It’s not just a free thing, it’s that you get to play Scrooge and Santa at the same time: “I really want this thing for myself,” your customers will tell themselves: “I’ll pick one up for me, and give the other one to my friend.”

(There’s a fascinating study to be done on whether BOGO buyers think they’re keeping the “free” item or giving that one away.)

BOGO promotions also work brilliantly for products that you might naturally want to pair or share. Take a look at how Starbucks’ yearly “Buy One, Share One” promotion conjures the spirit of giving:

Starbucks’ “Buy One, Share One” uses the positive emotions associated with sharing and togetherness to sell lattes.

While traditional BOGO might appeal to greed, Starbucks combines the urgency of a very narrow purchase window (limited time, from 2-5 pm) with messaging that implies generosity. (We’ve seen customers build very similar limited promos using popups on their websites.)

Tiered Deals

BOGO promotions can be very attractive, but done wrong, they can also take a bite of profits and hurt your brand. Aaron Orendorff, the founder of iconiContent and former editor in chief at Shopify Plus, suggests instead creating promos that encourage more spending:

Not only is traditional discounting becoming less effective over the holidays, but it can also substantially lower brand value as well as AOV (average order value). The answer is creative deal structures that drive AOV from the ad or email to the onsite experience right through to the checkout.

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

One of Orendorff’s favorite examples is Brooklinen, who created a tiered “spend more, save more” deal structure to increase order values.

Spend $150, get a free gift

Spend $250, get 10% off

Spend $350, get 15% off

Spend $450, get 20% off

Orendorff points out that Brooklinen doesn’t mess around when it comes to encouraging buyers to take it up a tier: “Brooklinen featured that exact deal in all their promotions: organic, paid, and email. The real genius is the brand also integrated the tiers into its checkout, prompting shoppers to spend more and nudging them into the next tier.” It looks like this:

Mixed Product Bundling

Like BOGO, bundling involves combining multiple products into a single package. It attracts customers with the promise of greater value.

You can certainly bundle the same product together, but mixed bundling works best by joining your products into a single, discounted bundle. Why? Since people generally prefer experiential gifts to physical ones, this form of bundling transforms your product into an experience by offering a total package.

And it can be as simple as what Australian retailer Joyce Mayne did when they bundled a Fujifilm Instax camera with its accessories. Check it out:

This clever bundle by Joyce Mayne transforms a product (a hot pink instant camera) into an experience (sharing memories with friends and family).

The promo page for this bundle no longer exists online, but supporting copy went straight for the heart: “This would make for a brilliant Christmas present for anyone who loves to seize the moment and share memories with friends and family.” Notice how Joyce Mayne reframe the purchase in terms of a shared experience.

Scrooge-Style Discounting

For the right type of brand, sometimes the best approach is to only offer discounts at the holidays—and at no other time of the year.

For example, Lush Cosmetics runs once-a-year-only BOGO sale on December 26th (or Boxing Day to those of us outside the U.S.). By only offering it once a year, they create urgency and reinforce the perception that their products are too valued to discount.

By limiting this BOGO sale to one day a year, Lush creates anticipation and urgency while preserving their image as a superior-quality brand. (More practically, it also clears out holiday inventory that wouldn’t sell anyway.)

Lush sticks to its guns when it comes to this sale, but it’s not uncommon for brands to think it’s a good idea to revise their exclusivity: “Our once-a-year sale is now once-a-month! Get hyped!” Counterintuitively, this can work against you.

According to Liana Patch of Punchline Conversion Copywriting, it’ll puncture any urgency you’ve been trying to create:

Your discounting will always be more effective when your brand itself is more trustworthy—so if you tend to extend “one-day-only” sales often, or by multiple days, or you run promotions frequently, you’re likely dis-incentivizing your customers and ruining your own appeals to urgency and scarcity. On the contrary, if you can say “Hey, we run just one sale a year, it ends when we say it ends, and you’ll never get a better deal than this,” you’re going to strike a chord with even your most reluctant prospects.

Liana Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Of course, that doesn’t mean your campaign will be a short one. An accompanying ad or email campaign can create anticipation, while a landing page with a sign-up for reminders builds your nurture lists. (There’s more on this anticipation strategy below.)

Post-Click Upselling

A frequently neglected (but still very effective) tactic is to make an additional offer after your visitor has converted. The principle is actually very simple: you’ve already done the hard part of overcoming their resistance. Now they’re in the mood to buy.

The psychological phenomenon of loss aversion can play a role here too, since an offer made on a Thank You page or a well-timed popup feels more limited: “Get an additional 10% off your next purchase today.” This special shouldn’t be mentioned until this step in the process, of course. If customers feel like they could get it at any time, it’ll be less effective.

A clever use for popups or sticky bars. If your customer service hours will be reduced over the holidays, let customers know when they can expect contact. A sticky bar can double as a holiday greeting and let your visitors know about reduced hours. We’ve even got a template for it.

2. Write Copy For Gift Givers

Most of the year, the people you target purchase for themselves or their immediate family. And much of your existing content is (understandably) attuned to their self-interest. That’s why good copywriting is typically you-oriented: it focuses on the wants and needs of the reader. 

During the holidays, however, this is often less true. Homer Simpson aside, people aren’t buying only for themselves. Many will shop with loved ones, friends, and colleagues in mind.

In other words, the purchase intent of visitors to your holiday landing page will be different. Your headline, call-to-action, and supporting copy all need to be different too. As you sit down to write for your landing pages, try to think about common gifting considerations:

Will mommy lurve this sweater?

Can the wife and I experience this gift together?

Will this make my BFF lol? Will it make her ?

Does this present have any special meaning?

What will my coworker think if I give him this present?

These all have an especially strong emotional core as visitors search for the right gift. Like the examples from Starbucks and Joyce Mayne above, the best promos for holiday shoppers don’t just slap the words “Black Friday Sale – Get 10% Off” at the top of an existing page and call it a day. They use both copy and visuals to tap into these emotions.

And, yes, it can be easy to sink into cliches. But hitting those warm feels or helping someone find the perfect gift for their loved one satisfies the intent more than an appeal to self-interest.

According to Naccache, Webistry create “dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences” for this purpose. This pre-Christmas landing page from Country Chic Paint is a killer example of copy tailored to indecisive gift buyers.

Click to see the full image of the landing page. (Courtesy of Webistry)

While a 40% limited discount is nice, the copy below is also very specific in communicating a gifting context: this product is perfect for buyers who are “blanking on gift ideas” for a creative someone in their life. A mystery box takes an awful lot of the pressure off visitors looking for a meaningful gift.

Lianna Patch agrees the challenge lies in “effectively changing your approach from ‘Buy this, it’ll make you feel good’ to ‘Buy the feeling of giving a great gift.'” (She and Val Geisler recently teamed up for a webinar on writing copy for holiday emails, so she has a lot to say on the subject.) 

But Patch also cautions that your buyers will have more practical considerations in mind:

It’s also important, when appealing to gift-buyers, to address objections around shipping/logistics (Will it arrive in time?), presentability (Does it come gift-wrapped? Do I have to remove the price tag?), and returns and exchanges (Will it be a pain to exchange shirt sizes? If my mom doesn’t like the mug I got her, can I return it?).

Liana Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Ecomm landing pages are particularly bad at answering these kinds of questions. If you’re equipped to tackle any them, make it as explicit as you can in your copy. Shipping guarantees, for instance, should probably never be buried in your FAQ at this time of year.

Who’s this gift for? According to Think with Google, searchers get extremely specific and personal during the holidays: “searches for ‘gift + ____ year old’ have seen a two-year growth of over 100%, while searches for ‘gifts for dad’ have grown over 80% during that same period.” Creating targeted PPC campaigns with tailored landing pages (using Dynamic Text Replacement) can help.

3. Learn from the Ghost of Deals Past

Look at your previous campaigns. You may have conducted a routine post-mortem already, but remind yourself now of what worked—and what didn’t—before you start to plan.

Review the key performance metrics for your campaigns. For landing pages, your conversion rate should tell you whether or not your page performed to your expectations. (If you’re just starting out, you can use Unbounce’s Conversion Benchmark Report or a variety of other resources to get a sense of where you should be hitting.) 

But I’d also recommend pulling other traffic and engagement metrics from Google Analytics. Your page’s bounce rate and session time are important. Plus, any relevant info about visitors (like geolocation, device type, etc.) that might give you a clue to who’s being naughty or nice. A lower than expected conversion rate might indicate that something went wrong, but engagement stats like these ones can help you sniff out the cause. 

Let’s say, for instance, you see that your holiday landing page had few conversions but Google Analytics also shows people are spending a long time on the page.

Google Analytics surfaces a lot of additional data about how prospects are interacting with your landing pages. It’s worth digging deep while you have the time so that you can make informed decisions going forward.

Why is this happening?

It could be visitors are actually very interested in your product, but they’re confused or turned off by something they see (or don’t see) on the landing page. Take steps to simplify the layout, add more impact to your copy, and make your call-to-action more prominent. (Perhaps, as mentioned above, you need to re-write it with specific gifting contexts in mind.)

Another possibility is that your product already compels, but your visitors hesitate to actually buy it. Maybe it’s an idea so ahead of its time that they remain locked in the consideration phase. Or maybe you’re selling something that’s a big investment. Assuming your prospects may be sitting on the fence, you might want to throw in an incentive (by way of a timed popup or sticky bar) to give ’em a nudge. 

Of course, you may have other ideas. In any case, diving into engagement metrics lets you formulate a hypothesis and plan your next move. 

What about A/B testing? Running valid A/B tests during the holiday period can be challenging. You need traffic and time that you may not have. Plus, seasonal traffic behaves differently—so you can’t rely on what you’ve learned at other times of the year. I do like this holiday testing guide from ConversionXL, which gives you a detailed rundown of what’s involved.

4. Use the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

Unless you’re just starting out, you already know about the persuasive power of adding a little urgency to your promotions. Countdown timers, announcing (realistic) product scarcity, running limited-time offers—these old hat strategies boost your conversions at any time during the year, as long as you don’t overdo ’em. 

Around the holidays, though, there’s already a sense of urgency built into the holiday shopping experience. Your customers are racing to get the best deals and check off every name on their list before Christmas.

Yeah, you could take advantage of this rush by ratcheting up the misery with big black numbers (counting down the remaining shopping days until the kids are forever disappointed, let’s say).

But there’s a much better approach.

Instead, offer your visitors a little something more…

Offer a Little Relief from the Rush

Think about your campaign like a pleasing piece of music: you need tension, sure, but also release. (Otherwise, it’s just noise.) Instead of relying on purely negative types of urgency, then, you can promote a sense of trust and reliability by relieving your visitors’ anxieties. It may lead to fewer impulse buys, but it’ll also help your brand in the long run.

As always, Amazon offers a pretty sharp example of this practice.

Sure, around the holidays they’ll up the ante with a countdown timer or two. (They also never miss an opportunity to indicate low stock.) But their bread and butter lies in relieving the anxiety associated with shipping. 

By including “Want it delivered by… order by…” messages on product pages, they promise their customers an almost impossible level of control. The effect of seeing that you need to “order it in the next 6 hours and 10 minutes” to receive the package by December 23 amplifies the urgency, sure, but it also empowers the customer:

There’s more than one way to get ready for the holidays.

Needless to say, if you want to go this same route, your expedited shipping solution should be up to the task. If your customers aren’t going to get those fancy new boots until mid-March, you’ll need to find another approach.

Anticipation and Excitement

Anticipation is another more positive expression of urgency worth exploring with your holiday campaigns. Amazon does this too.

As this analysis of their Black Friday promotions points out, over the past decade the company has slowly extended the sales period into “one torturously long stretch of spending lasting from Nov. 1 to Dec. 22.” But this period is also punctuated by flash sales and specials meant to keep the customer excited. Since 2011, in fact, they’ve made the countdown to the sale itself into an event with “Countdown to Black Friday Deals Week.”

Since 2013, Amazon’s Black Friday sales period has stretched from November 1st to December 22nd. (Image via Quartz)

Why are anticipation and excitement so effective? This may seem obvious, but they encourage repeated visits to their storefront in the quest for new deals, generate excitement about upcoming sales, and stretch the holiday shopping season across longer periods of time.

Is Amazon worth imitating, even on a smaller scale? You betcha.

And, according to Aaron Orendorff, there’s another major benefit to creating campaigns around anticipation: it can be much cheaper.

Ad costs are far lower in the lead up to the holidays. So, buy your traffic early by previewing your upcoming event across paid social. Collect your best deals—built around product categories or specific audiences—onto landing pages with one goal: to get visitors’ email addresses in exchange for early access (or something similarly enticing).

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

(I think Aaron just dropped the mic on us.)

Don’t Let the “Christmas Creep” Sneak Up on You

Here’s a final question for you: when will people start their Christmas shopping this year? The answer: they already have.

Sure, the received wisdom is that the holiday season starts after American Thanksgiving. But the National Retail Federation says brick-and-mortar retailers start to see shoppers before Halloween, which is why some stores have started setting up displays in September.

That’s nothing compared to the ecommerce world though. According to a consumer survey from Valassis, there’s a strong interest in early shopping online: “40 percent completing a portion of their gift purchase on Amazon Prime Day.” (That’s mid-July Christmas shopping!) Why not devise some clever ways to target these buyers longer before your competitors get there?

It’s a neverending nightmare, Charlie Brown.

Let’s face it. For today’s ecommerce marketer, the holiday season feels like it’s always just around the corner.

Thankfully, the enemies you face when planning these campaigns aren’t different from any other part of the year. How do you overcome them? Planning well in advance is a must. And finding workable shortcuts that don’t cut short on the quality of your campaigns is another approach. (That’s one of the big reasons we think landing pages are a killer alternative to web pages. You can drag and drop a campaign together without involving your web developer.)

And there are plenty of other times throughout the year to apply these tips. Depending on your perspective, the Christmas shopping season stretches across Halloween, two Thanksgivings (American and Canuck), Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day, and even New Years. But then you might see other opportunities around Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, July 4th, Arbor Day… you name it, there’s a promo you can run (and run early).

But if you want to have a real impact, the real meaning of Christmas in July is that you need to get started today.

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/landing-pages/landing-pages-for-holidays-ecommerce/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[roypstickney]

Christmas in July! Create Smarter Ecomm Landing Pages for the Holidays

Don’t let our header image fool you. 

Christmas is not right around the corner. The holiday shopping season is not upon us. You’ve got oodles of sunny summer days ahead before you need to start worrying about untangling the lights, trimming the turkey, or leaving presents under the tree. (Thank goodness!)

But if you’re in ecommerce, that’s a different story. It turns out that right now is the best time to start planning your next holiday campaign.

In fact, most experienced ecomm marketers start prepping long before Thanksgiving and Black Friday roll around. There’s just too much at stake not to. In 2018, for example, US consumers spent a whopping $7.9 billion on Cyber Monday. (Heck, they spent $2.2 billion on their phones alone.) Cyber Monday 2018 represents the biggest ecomm sales day in history, and 2019 is projected to be even bigger.

And there are other important reasons you should start prepping…

Sure, that’s a lot of cheese on the table. But, according to Jonathan Naccache of Webistry, heavy discounting also cuts into profits:

The holiday period is a double-edged sword. Due to heavy discounting, your sales might not even be profitable, even if you generate an above-average volume of sales. This is why planning is so important. November and December are all about volume, so every dollar you can save when it comes to your cost-per-acquisition can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Building up your audiences and ramping up your ads in the preceding 3-6 months is very important. 

Jonathan Naccache, Webistry

More obviously, Naccache points out that preparing simply takes a lot of work: “You’ll need great content (more than one piece) for your ads,” he says, and that may involve “many sets of banners, several video pieces, different iterations of copy” as well as “a series of dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences.”

Taylor Holiday (yeah, that’s his real name) of Common Thread Collective says his agency does massive research and planning before running a summit for their clients in mid-August. Why? So everyone is good and ready for the make-it-or-it-break months:

The reason it is so important to begin planning well in advance is because holiday outcomes are created in October and November.

Taylor Holiday, Common Thread Collective

Common Thread have a lot of data to back them up here. Emails they acquire in October, for instance, have the highest 90-day value of any time of the year. “It’s not rocket science to understand that email is valuable during this period,” says Holiday, “but it does require foresight and research into the exact value of email subscriptions to make the payback immediately profitable.” Common Thread found that running email campaigns in November and December will be “up to 5x as valuable as any other month,” so they need to be ready to build email lists in October.

So Naccache and Holiday clearly know that there are big wins—and big challenges—on the horizon. Planning in July (or even earlier) makes tons of sense to them. But for many marketers, it’s almost too easy to get planning late and let the holiday pass you by without running your own specials. That’s a mistake.

With that in mind, Unbounce has teamed up with a few heavy-hitters of marketing to give you the rundown on how you can start with your holiday campaigns and landing pages today. (So, uh, Merry Christmas!)

Read on, or jump straight to any of the subtopics below:

Rethinking Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers

Writing Copy for Gift Buyers

Learning from the Ghosts of Deals Past

Using the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

What about other times of the year? I’m talking Christmas here, the biggest and “mostest” (that’s a word, right?) of the holidays in North America. But there’s no good reason you shouldn’t plan campaigns around other special days relevant to your business. Most of this advice should apply. (Also, if you’re reading this in November and short on time, using a drag-and-drop builder like Unbounce makes pages faster to pull off.)

1. Rethink Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers

You’re running a holiday sale, eh?

15% off, you say?

Free shipping on all orders over $100?

That’s terrific. 

But here’s the thing about holiday discounts: during this period, most shoppers are so bombarded with deals and offers that they become inured to simple bargains. (Plus, your competitors likely have similar perks on to go, so there’s that…) 

Unless you’re prepared to cut bone-deep, building a campaign around a discount may not be enough to create genuine excitement. Instead, the experts recommend that you create promotions that use specific psychological triggers. 

Here are a few ideas to help you go beyond lame-duck discounts:

BOGO (Buy One, Get One) Deals

Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons when Homer gives Marge a bowling ball for her birthday? You know, the one with his name engraved on it? As you’ll recall, she wasn’t pleased:

Not a look you want from your loved ones.

Don’t be too hard on Homer. By buying Marge a present that he wants for himself, he’s exhibiting pretty normal human behavior.

In fact, it’s one reason that “buy one, get one free” deals can be more persuasive than straightforward discounts around the holidays. It’s not just a free thing, it’s that you get to play Scrooge and Santa at the same time: “I really want this thing for myself,” your customers will tell themselves: “I’ll pick one up for me, and give the other one to my friend.”

(There’s a fascinating study to be done on whether BOGO buyers think they’re keeping the “free” item or giving that one away.)

BOGO promotions also work brilliantly for products that you might naturally want to pair or share. Take a look at how Starbucks’ yearly “Buy One, Share One” promotion conjures the spirit of giving:

Starbucks’ “Buy One, Share One” uses the positive emotions associated with sharing and togetherness to sell lattes.

While traditional BOGO might appeal to greed, Starbucks combines the urgency of a very narrow purchase window (limited time, from 2-5 pm) with messaging that implies generosity. (We’ve seen customers build very similar limited promos using popups on their websites.)

Tiered Deals

BOGO promotions can be very attractive, but done wrong, they can also take a bite of profits and hurt your brand. Aaron Orendorff, the founder of iconiContent and former editor in chief at Shopify Plus, suggests instead creating promos that encourage more spending:

Not only is traditional discounting becoming less effective over the holidays, but it can also substantially lower brand value as well as AOV (average order value). The answer is creative deal structures that drive AOV from the ad or email to the onsite experience right through to the checkout.

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

One of Orendorff’s favorite examples is Brooklinen, who created a tiered “spend more, save more” deal structure to increase order values.

Spend $150, get a free gift

Spend $250, get 10% off

Spend $350, get 15% off

Spend $450, get 20% off

Orendorff points out that Brooklinen doesn’t mess around when it comes to encouraging buyers to take it up a tier: “Brooklinen featured that exact deal in all their promotions: organic, paid, and email. The real genius is the brand also integrated the tiers into its checkout, prompting shoppers to spend more and nudging them into the next tier.” It looks like this:

Mixed Product Bundling

Like BOGO, bundling involves combining multiple products into a single package. It attracts customers with the promise of greater value.

You can certainly bundle the same product together, but mixed bundling works best by joining your products into a single, discounted bundle. Why? Since people generally prefer experiential gifts to physical ones, this form of bundling transforms your product into an experience by offering a total package.

And it can be as simple as what Australian retailer Joyce Mayne did when they bundled a Fujifilm Instax camera with its accessories. Check it out:

This clever bundle by Joyce Mayne transforms a product (a hot pink instant camera) into an experience (sharing memories with friends and family).

The promo page for this bundle no longer exists online, but supporting copy went straight for the heart: “This would make for a brilliant Christmas present for anyone who loves to seize the moment and share memories with friends and family.” Notice how Joyce Mayne reframe the purchase in terms of a shared experience.

Scrooge-Style Discounting

For the right type of brand, sometimes the best approach is to only offer discounts at the holidays—and at no other time of the year.

For example, Lush Cosmetics runs once-a-year-only BOGO sale on December 26th (or Boxing Day to those of us outside the U.S.). By only offering it once a year, they create urgency and reinforce the perception that their products are too valued to discount.

By limiting this BOGO sale to one day a year, Lush creates anticipation and urgency while preserving their image as a superior-quality brand. (More practically, it also clears out holiday inventory that wouldn’t sell anyway.)

Lush sticks to its guns when it comes to this sale, but it’s not uncommon for brands to think it’s a good idea to revise their exclusivity: “Our once-a-year sale is now once-a-month! Get hyped!” Counterintuitively, this can work against you.

According to Liana Patch of Punchline Conversion Copywriting, it’ll puncture any urgency you’ve been trying to create:

Your discounting will always be more effective when your brand itself is more trustworthy—so if you tend to extend “one-day-only” sales often, or by multiple days, or you run promotions frequently, you’re likely dis-incentivizing your customers and ruining your own appeals to urgency and scarcity. On the contrary, if you can say “Hey, we run just one sale a year, it ends when we say it ends, and you’ll never get a better deal than this,” you’re going to strike a chord with even your most reluctant prospects.

Liana Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Of course, that doesn’t mean your campaign will be a short one. An accompanying ad or email campaign can create anticipation, while a landing page with a sign-up for reminders builds your nurture lists. (There’s more on this anticipation strategy below.)

Post-Click Upselling

A frequently neglected (but still very effective) tactic is to make an additional offer after your visitor has converted. The principle is actually very simple: you’ve already done the hard part of overcoming their resistance. Now they’re in the mood to buy.

The psychological phenomenon of loss aversion can play a role here too, since an offer made on a Thank You page or a well-timed popup feels more limited: “Get an additional 10% off your next purchase today.” This special shouldn’t be mentioned until this step in the process, of course. If customers feel like they could get it at any time, it’ll be less effective.

A clever use for popups or sticky bars. If your customer service hours will be reduced over the holidays, let customers know when they can expect contact. A sticky bar can double as a holiday greeting and let your visitors know about reduced hours. We’ve even got a template for it.

2. Write Copy For Gift Givers

Most of the year, the people you target purchase for themselves or their immediate family. And much of your existing content is (understandably) attuned to their self-interest. That’s why good copywriting is typically you-oriented: it focuses on the wants and needs of the reader. 

During the holidays, however, this is often less true. Homer Simpson aside, people aren’t buying only for themselves. Many will shop with loved ones, friends, and colleagues in mind.

In other words, the purchase intent of visitors to your holiday landing page will be different. Your headline, call-to-action, and supporting copy all need to be different too. As you sit down to write for your landing pages, try to think about common gifting considerations:

Will mommy lurve this sweater?

Can the wife and I experience this gift together?

Will this make my BFF lol? Will it make her ?

Does this present have any special meaning?

What will my coworker think if I give him this present?

These all have an especially strong emotional core as visitors search for the right gift. Like the examples from Starbucks and Joyce Mayne above, the best promos for holiday shoppers don’t just slap the words “Black Friday Sale – Get 10% Off” at the top of an existing page and call it a day. They use both copy and visuals to tap into these emotions.

And, yes, it can be easy to sink into cliches. But hitting those warm feels or helping someone find the perfect gift for their loved one satisfies the intent more than an appeal to self-interest.

According to Naccache, Webistry create “dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences” for this purpose. This pre-Christmas landing page from Country Chic Paint is a killer example of copy tailored to indecisive gift buyers.

Click to see the full image of the landing page. (Courtesy of Webistry)

While a 40% limited discount is nice, the copy below is also very specific in communicating a gifting context: this product is perfect for buyers who are “blanking on gift ideas” for a creative someone in their life. A mystery box takes an awful lot of the pressure off visitors looking for a meaningful gift.

Lianna Patch agrees the challenge lies in “effectively changing your approach from ‘Buy this, it’ll make you feel good’ to ‘Buy the feeling of giving a great gift.'” (She and Val Geisler recently teamed up for a webinar on writing copy for holiday emails, so she has a lot to say on the subject.) 

But Patch also cautions that your buyers will have more practical considerations in mind:

It’s also important, when appealing to gift-buyers, to address objections around shipping/logistics (Will it arrive in time?), presentability (Does it come gift-wrapped? Do I have to remove the price tag?), and returns and exchanges (Will it be a pain to exchange shirt sizes? If my mom doesn’t like the mug I got her, can I return it?).

Liana Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Ecomm landing pages are particularly bad at answering these kinds of questions. If you’re equipped to tackle any them, make it as explicit as you can in your copy. Shipping guarantees, for instance, should probably never be buried in your FAQ at this time of year.

Who’s this gift for? According to Think with Google, searchers get extremely specific and personal during the holidays: “searches for ‘gift + ____ year old’ have seen a two-year growth of over 100%, while searches for ‘gifts for dad’ have grown over 80% during that same period.” Creating targeted PPC campaigns with tailored landing pages (using Dynamic Text Replacement) can help.

3. Learn from the Ghost of Deals Past

Look at your previous campaigns. You may have conducted a routine post-mortem already, but remind yourself now of what worked—and what didn’t—before you start to plan.

Review the key performance metrics for your campaigns. For landing pages, your conversion rate should tell you whether or not your page performed to your expectations. (If you’re just starting out, you can use Unbounce’s Conversion Benchmark Report or a variety of other resources to get a sense of where you should be hitting.) 

But I’d also recommend pulling other traffic and engagement metrics from Google Analytics. Your page’s bounce rate and session time are important. Plus, any relevant info about visitors (like geolocation, device type, etc.) that might give you a clue to who’s being naughty or nice. A lower than expected conversion rate might indicate that something went wrong, but engagement stats like these ones can help you sniff out the cause. 

Let’s say, for instance, you see that your holiday landing page had few conversions but Google Analytics also shows people are spending a long time on the page.

Google Analytics surfaces a lot of additional data about how prospects are interacting with your landing pages. It’s worth digging deep while you have the time so that you can make informed decisions going forward.

Why is this happening?

It could be visitors are actually very interested in your product, but they’re confused or turned off by something they see (or don’t see) on the landing page. Take steps to simplify the layout, add more impact to your copy, and make your call-to-action more prominent. (Perhaps, as mentioned above, you need to re-write it with specific gifting contexts in mind.)

Another possibility is that your product already compels, but your visitors hesitate to actually buy it. Maybe it’s an idea so ahead of its time that they remain locked in the consideration phase. Or maybe you’re selling something that’s a big investment. Assuming your prospects may be sitting on the fence, you might want to throw in an incentive (by way of a timed popup or sticky bar) to give ’em a nudge. 

Of course, you may have other ideas. In any case, diving into engagement metrics lets you formulate a hypothesis and plan your next move. 

What about A/B testing? Running valid A/B tests during the holiday period can be challenging. You need traffic and time that you may not have. Plus, seasonal traffic behaves differently—so you can’t rely on what you’ve learned at other times of the year. I do like this holiday testing guide from ConversionXL, which gives you a detailed rundown of what’s involved.

4. Use the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

Unless you’re just starting out, you already know about the persuasive power of adding a little urgency to your promotions. Countdown timers, announcing (realistic) product scarcity, running limited-time offers—these old hat strategies boost your conversions at any time during the year, as long as you don’t overdo ’em. 

Around the holidays, though, there’s already a sense of urgency built into the holiday shopping experience. Your customers are racing to get the best deals and check off every name on their list before Christmas.

Yeah, you could take advantage of this rush by ratcheting up the misery with big black numbers (counting down the remaining shopping days until the kids are forever disappointed, let’s say).

But there’s a much better approach.

Instead, offer your visitors a little something more…

Offer a Little Relief from the Rush

Think about your campaign like a pleasing piece of music: you need tension, sure, but also release. (Otherwise, it’s just noise.) Instead of relying on purely negative types of urgency, then, you can promote a sense of trust and reliability by relieving your visitors’ anxieties. It may lead to fewer impulse buys, but it’ll also help your brand in the long run.

As always, Amazon offers a pretty sharp example of this practice.

Sure, around the holidays they’ll up the ante with a countdown timer or two. (They also never miss an opportunity to indicate low stock.) But their bread and butter lies in relieving the anxiety associated with shipping. 

By including “Want it delivered by… order by…” messages on product pages, they promise their customers an almost impossible level of control. The effect of seeing that you need to “order it in the next 6 hours and 10 minutes” to receive the package by December 23 amplifies the urgency, sure, but it also empowers the customer:

There’s more than one way to get ready for the holidays.

Needless to say, if you want to go this same route, your expedited shipping solution should be up to the task. If your customers aren’t going to get those fancy new boots until mid-March, you’ll need to find another approach.

Anticipation and Excitement

Anticipation is another more positive expression of urgency worth exploring with your holiday campaigns. Amazon does this too.

As this analysis of their Black Friday promotions points out, over the past decade the company has slowly extended the sales period into “one torturously long stretch of spending lasting from Nov. 1 to Dec. 22.” But this period is also punctuated by flash sales and specials meant to keep the customer excited. Since 2011, in fact, they’ve made the countdown to the sale itself into an event with “Countdown to Black Friday Deals Week.”

Since 2013, Amazon’s Black Friday sales period has stretched from November 1st to December 22nd. (Image via Quartz)

Why are anticipation and excitement so effective? This may seem obvious, but they encourage repeated visits to their storefront in the quest for new deals, generate excitement about upcoming sales, and stretch the holiday shopping season across longer periods of time.

Is Amazon worth imitating, even on a smaller scale? You betcha.

And, according to Aaron Orendorff, there’s another major benefit to creating campaigns around anticipation: it can be much cheaper.

Ad costs are far lower in the lead up to the holidays. So, buy your traffic early by previewing your upcoming event across paid social. Collect your best deals—built around product categories or specific audiences—onto landing pages with one goal: to get visitors’ email addresses in exchange for early access (or something similarly enticing).

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

(I think Aaron just dropped the mic on us.)

Don’t Let the “Christmas Creep” Sneak Up on You

Here’s a final question for you: when will people start their Christmas shopping this year? The answer: they already have.

Sure, the received wisdom is that the holiday season starts after American Thanksgiving. But the National Retail Federation says brick-and-mortar retailers start to see shoppers before Halloween, which is why some stores have started setting up displays in September.

That’s nothing compared to the ecommerce world though. According to a consumer survey from Valassis, there’s a strong interest in early shopping online: “40 percent completing a portion of their gift purchase on Amazon Prime Day.” (That’s mid-July Christmas shopping!) Why not devise some clever ways to target these buyers longer before your competitors get there?

It’s a neverending nightmare, Charlie Brown.

Let’s face it. For today’s ecommerce marketer, the holiday season feels like it’s always just around the corner.

Thankfully, the enemies you face when planning these campaigns aren’t different from any other part of the year. How do you overcome them? Planning well in advance is a must. And finding workable shortcuts that don’t cut short on the quality of your campaigns is another approach. (That’s one of the big reasons we think landing pages are a killer alternative to web pages. You can drag and drop a campaign together without involving your web developer.)

And there are plenty of other times throughout the year to apply these tips. Depending on your perspective, the Christmas shopping season stretches across Halloween, two Thanksgivings (American and Canuck), Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day, and even New Years. But then you might see other opportunities around Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, July 4th, Arbor Day… you name it, there’s a promo you can run (and run early).

But if you want to have a real impact, the real meaning of Christmas in July is that you need to get started today.

[kennethmontiveros]

Christmas in July! Create Smarter Ecomm Landing Pages for the Holidays

Don’t let our header image fool you. 

Christmas is not right around the corner. The holiday shopping season is not upon us. You’ve got oodles of sunny summer days ahead before you need to start worrying about untangling the lights, trimming the turkey, or leaving presents under the tree. (Thank goodness!)

But if you’re in ecommerce, that’s a different story. It turns out that right now is the best time to start planning your next holiday campaign.

In fact, most experienced ecomm marketers start prepping long before Thanksgiving and Black Friday roll around. There’s just too much at stake not to. In 2018, for example, US consumers spent a whopping $7.9 billion on Cyber Monday. (Heck, they spent $2.2 billion on their phones alone.) Cyber Monday 2018 represents the biggest ecomm sales day in history, and 2019 is projected to be even bigger.

And there are other important reasons you should start prepping…

Sure, that’s a lot of cheese on the table. But, according to Jonathan Naccache of Webistry, heavy discounting also cuts into profits:

The holiday period is a double-edged sword. Due to heavy discounting, your sales might not even be profitable, even if you generate an above-average volume of sales. This is why planning is so important. November and December are all about volume, so every dollar you can save when it comes to your cost-per-acquisition can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Building up your audiences and ramping up your ads in the preceding 3-6 months is very important. 

Jonathan Naccache, Webistry

More obviously, Naccache points out that preparing simply takes a lot of work: “You’ll need great content (more than one piece) for your ads,” he says, and that may involve “many sets of banners, several video pieces, different iterations of copy” as well as “a series of dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences.”

Taylor Holiday (yeah, that’s his real name) of Common Thread Collective says his agency does massive research and planning before running a summit for their clients in mid-August. Why? So everyone is good and ready for the make-it-or-it-break months:

The reason it is so important to begin planning well in advance is because holiday outcomes are created in October and November.

Taylor Holiday, Common Thread Collective

Common Thread have a lot of data to back them up here. Emails they acquire in October, for instance, have the highest 90-day value of any time of the year. “It’s not rocket science to understand that email is valuable during this period,” says Holiday, “but it does require foresight and research into the exact value of email subscriptions to make the payback immediately profitable.” Common Thread found that running email campaigns in November and December will be “up to 5x as valuable as any other month,” so they need to be ready to build email lists in October.

So Naccache and Holiday clearly know that there are big wins—and big challenges—on the horizon. Planning in July (or even earlier) makes tons of sense to them. But for many marketers, it’s almost too easy to get planning late and let the holiday pass you by without running your own specials. That’s a mistake.

With that in mind, Unbounce has teamed up with a few heavy-hitters of marketing to give you the rundown on how you can start with your holiday campaigns and landing pages today. (So, uh, Merry Christmas!)

Read on, or jump straight to any of the subtopics below:

Rethinking Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers

Writing Copy for Gift Buyers

Learning from the Ghosts of Deals Past

Using the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

What about other times of the year? I’m talking Christmas here, the biggest and “mostest” (that’s a word, right?) of the holidays in North America. But there’s no good reason you shouldn’t plan campaigns around other special days relevant to your business. Most of this advice should apply. (Also, if you’re reading this in November and short on time, using a drag-and-drop builder like Unbounce makes pages faster to pull off.)

1. Rethink Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers

You’re running a holiday sale, eh?

15% off, you say?

Free shipping on all orders over $100?

That’s terrific. 

But here’s the thing about holiday discounts: during this period, most shoppers are so bombarded with deals and offers that they become inured to simple bargains. (Plus, your competitors likely have similar perks on to go, so there’s that…) 

Unless you’re prepared to cut bone-deep, building a campaign around a discount may not be enough to create genuine excitement. Instead, the experts recommend that you create promotions that use specific psychological triggers. 

Here are a few ideas to help you go beyond lame-duck discounts:

BOGO (Buy One, Get One) Deals

Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons when Homer gives Marge a bowling ball for her birthday? You know, the one with his name engraved on it? As you’ll recall, she wasn’t pleased:

Not a look you want from your loved ones.

Don’t be too hard on Homer. By buying Marge a present that he wants for himself, he’s exhibiting pretty normal human behavior.

In fact, it’s one reason that “buy one, get one free” deals can be more persuasive than straightforward discounts around the holidays. It’s not just a free thing, it’s that you get to play Scrooge and Santa at the same time: “I really want this thing for myself,” your customers will tell themselves: “I’ll pick one up for me, and give the other one to my friend.”

(There’s a fascinating study to be done on whether BOGO buyers think they’re keeping the “free” item or giving that one away.)

BOGO promotions also work brilliantly for products that you might naturally want to pair or share. Take a look at how Starbucks’ yearly “Buy One, Share One” promotion conjures the spirit of giving:

Starbucks’ “Buy One, Share One” uses the positive emotions associated with sharing and togetherness to sell lattes.

While traditional BOGO might appeal to greed, Starbucks combines the urgency of a very narrow purchase window (limited time, from 2-5 pm) with messaging that implies generosity. (We’ve seen customers build very similar limited promos using popups on their websites.)

Tiered Deals

BOGO promotions can be very attractive, but done wrong, they can also take a bite of profits and hurt your brand. Aaron Orendorff, the founder of iconiContent and former editor in chief at Shopify Plus, suggests instead creating promos that encourage more spending:

Not only is traditional discounting becoming less effective over the holidays, but it can also substantially lower brand value as well as AOV (average order value). The answer is creative deal structures that drive AOV from the ad or email to the onsite experience right through to the checkout.

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

One of Orendorff’s favorite examples is Brooklinen, who created a tiered “spend more, save more” deal structure to increase order values.

Spend $150, get a free gift

Spend $250, get 10% off

Spend $350, get 15% off

Spend $450, get 20% off

Orendorff points out that Brooklinen doesn’t mess around when it comes to encouraging buyers to take it up a tier: “Brooklinen featured that exact deal in all their promotions: organic, paid, and email. The real genius is the brand also integrated the tiers into its checkout, prompting shoppers to spend more and nudging them into the next tier.” It looks like this:

Mixed Product Bundling

Like BOGO, bundling involves combining multiple products into a single package. It attracts customers with the promise of greater value.

You can certainly bundle the same product together, but mixed bundling works best by joining your products into a single, discounted bundle. Why? Since people generally prefer experiential gifts to physical ones, this form of bundling transforms your product into an experience by offering a total package.

And it can be as simple as what Australian retailer Joyce Mayne did when they bundled a Fujifilm Instax camera with its accessories. Check it out:

This clever bundle by Joyce Mayne transforms a product (a hot pink instant camera) into an experience (sharing memories with friends and family).

The promo page for this bundle no longer exists online, but supporting copy went straight for the heart: “This would make for a brilliant Christmas present for anyone who loves to seize the moment and share memories with friends and family.” Notice how Joyce Mayne reframe the purchase in terms of a shared experience.

Scrooge-Style Discounting

For the right type of brand, sometimes the best approach is to only offer discounts at the holidays—and at no other time of the year.

For example, Lush Cosmetics runs once-a-year-only BOGO sale on December 26th (or Boxing Day to those of us outside the U.S.). By only offering it once a year, they create urgency and reinforce the perception that their products are too valued to discount.

By limiting this BOGO sale to one day a year, Lush creates anticipation and urgency while preserving their image as a superior-quality brand. (More practically, it also clears out holiday inventory that wouldn’t sell anyway.)

Lush sticks to its guns when it comes to this sale, but it’s not uncommon for brands to think it’s a good idea to revise their exclusivity: “Our once-a-year sale is now once-a-month! Get hyped!” Counterintuitively, this can work against you.

According to Liana Patch of Punchline Conversion Copywriting, it’ll puncture any urgency you’ve been trying to create:

Your discounting will always be more effective when your brand itself is more trustworthy—so if you tend to extend “one-day-only” sales often, or by multiple days, or you run promotions frequently, you’re likely dis-incentivizing your customers and ruining your own appeals to urgency and scarcity. On the contrary, if you can say “Hey, we run just one sale a year, it ends when we say it ends, and you’ll never get a better deal than this,” you’re going to strike a chord with even your most reluctant prospects.

Liana Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Of course, that doesn’t mean your campaign will be a short one. An accompanying ad or email campaign can create anticipation, while a landing page with a sign-up for reminders builds your nurture lists. (There’s more on this anticipation strategy below.)

Post-Click Upselling

A frequently neglected (but still very effective) tactic is to make an additional offer after your visitor has converted. The principle is actually very simple: you’ve already done the hard part of overcoming their resistance. Now they’re in the mood to buy.

The psychological phenomenon of loss aversion can play a role here too, since an offer made on a Thank You page or a well-timed popup feels more limited: “Get an additional 10% off your next purchase today.” This special shouldn’t be mentioned until this step in the process, of course. If customers feel like they could get it at any time, it’ll be less effective.

A clever use for popups or sticky bars. If your customer service hours will be reduced over the holidays, let customers know when they can expect contact. A sticky bar can double as a holiday greeting and let your visitors know about reduced hours. We’ve even got a template for it.

2. Write Copy For Gift Givers

Most of the year, the people you target purchase for themselves or their immediate family. And much of your existing content is (understandably) attuned to their self-interest. That’s why good copywriting is typically you-oriented: it focuses on the wants and needs of the reader. 

During the holidays, however, this is often less true. Homer Simpson aside, people aren’t buying only for themselves. Many will shop with loved ones, friends, and colleagues in mind.

In other words, the purchase intent of visitors to your holiday landing page will be different. Your headline, call-to-action, and supporting copy all need to be different too. As you sit down to write for your landing pages, try to think about common gifting considerations:

Will mommy lurve this sweater?

Can the wife and I experience this gift together?

Will this make my BFF lol? Will it make her ?

Does this present have any special meaning?

What will my coworker think if I give him this present?

These all have an especially strong emotional core as visitors search for the right gift. Like the examples from Starbucks and Joyce Mayne above, the best promos for holiday shoppers don’t just slap the words “Black Friday Sale – Get 10% Off” at the top of an existing page and call it a day. They use both copy and visuals to tap into these emotions.

And, yes, it can be easy to sink into cliches. But hitting those warm feels or helping someone find the perfect gift for their loved one satisfies the intent more than an appeal to self-interest.

According to Naccache, Webistry create “dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences” for this purpose. This pre-Christmas landing page from Country Chic Paint is a killer example of copy tailored to indecisive gift buyers.

Click to see the full image of the landing page. (Courtesy of Webistry)

While a 40% limited discount is nice, the copy below is also very specific in communicating a gifting context: this product is perfect for buyers who are “blanking on gift ideas” for a creative someone in their life. A mystery box takes an awful lot of the pressure off visitors looking for a meaningful gift.

Lianna Patch agrees the challenge lies in “effectively changing your approach from ‘Buy this, it’ll make you feel good’ to ‘Buy the feeling of giving a great gift.'” (She and Val Geisler recently teamed up for a webinar on writing copy for holiday emails, so she has a lot to say on the subject.) 

But Patch also cautions that your buyers will have more practical considerations in mind:

It’s also important, when appealing to gift-buyers, to address objections around shipping/logistics (Will it arrive in time?), presentability (Does it come gift-wrapped? Do I have to remove the price tag?), and returns and exchanges (Will it be a pain to exchange shirt sizes? If my mom doesn’t like the mug I got her, can I return it?).

Liana Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Ecomm landing pages are particularly bad at answering these kinds of questions. If you’re equipped to tackle any them, make it as explicit as you can in your copy. Shipping guarantees, for instance, should probably never be buried in your FAQ at this time of year.

Who’s this gift for? According to Think with Google, searchers get extremely specific and personal during the holidays: “searches for ‘gift + ____ year old’ have seen a two-year growth of over 100%, while searches for ‘gifts for dad’ have grown over 80% during that same period.” Creating targeted PPC campaigns with tailored landing pages (using Dynamic Text Replacement) can help.

3. Learn from the Ghost of Deals Past

Look at your previous campaigns. You may have conducted a routine post-mortem already, but remind yourself now of what worked—and what didn’t—before you start to plan.

Review the key performance metrics for your campaigns. For landing pages, your conversion rate should tell you whether or not your page performed to your expectations. (If you’re just starting out, you can use Unbounce’s Conversion Benchmark Report or a variety of other resources to get a sense of where you should be hitting.) 

But I’d also recommend pulling other traffic and engagement metrics from Google Analytics. Your page’s bounce rate and session time are important. Plus, any relevant info about visitors (like geolocation, device type, etc.) that might give you a clue to who’s being naughty or nice. A lower than expected conversion rate might indicate that something went wrong, but engagement stats like these ones can help you sniff out the cause. 

Let’s say, for instance, you see that your holiday landing page had few conversions but Google Analytics also shows people are spending a long time on the page.

Google Analytics surfaces a lot of additional data about how prospects are interacting with your landing pages. It’s worth digging deep while you have the time so that you can make informed decisions going forward.

Why is this happening?

It could be visitors are actually very interested in your product, but they’re confused or turned off by something they see (or don’t see) on the landing page. Take steps to simplify the layout, add more impact to your copy, and make your call-to-action more prominent. (Perhaps, as mentioned above, you need to re-write it with specific gifting contexts in mind.)

Another possibility is that your product already compels, but your visitors hesitate to actually buy it. Maybe it’s an idea so ahead of its time that they remain locked in the consideration phase. Or maybe you’re selling something that’s a big investment. Assuming your prospects may be sitting on the fence, you might want to throw in an incentive (by way of a timed popup or sticky bar) to give ’em a nudge. 

Of course, you may have other ideas. In any case, diving into engagement metrics lets you formulate a hypothesis and plan your next move. 

What about A/B testing? Running valid A/B tests during the holiday period can be challenging. You need traffic and time that you may not have. Plus, seasonal traffic behaves differently—so you can’t rely on what you’ve learned at other times of the year. I do like this holiday testing guide from ConversionXL, which gives you a detailed rundown of what’s involved.

4. Use the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

Unless you’re just starting out, you already know about the persuasive power of adding a little urgency to your promotions. Countdown timers, announcing (realistic) product scarcity, running limited-time offers—these old hat strategies boost your conversions at any time during the year, as long as you don’t overdo ’em. 

Around the holidays, though, there’s already a sense of urgency built into the holiday shopping experience. Your customers are racing to get the best deals and check off every name on their list before Christmas.

Yeah, you could take advantage of this rush by ratcheting up the misery with big black numbers (counting down the remaining shopping days until the kids are forever disappointed, let’s say).

But there’s a much better approach.

Instead, offer your visitors a little something more…

Offer a Little Relief from the Rush

Think about your campaign like a pleasing piece of music: you need tension, sure, but also release. (Otherwise, it’s just noise.) Instead of relying on purely negative types of urgency, then, you can promote a sense of trust and reliability by relieving your visitors’ anxieties. It may lead to fewer impulse buys, but it’ll also help your brand in the long run.

As always, Amazon offers a pretty sharp example of this practice.

Sure, around the holidays they’ll up the ante with a countdown timer or two. (They also never miss an opportunity to indicate low stock.) But their bread and butter lies in relieving the anxiety associated with shipping. 

By including “Want it delivered by… order by…” messages on product pages, they promise their customers an almost impossible level of control. The effect of seeing that you need to “order it in the next 6 hours and 10 minutes” to receive the package by December 23 amplifies the urgency, sure, but it also empowers the customer:

There’s more than one way to get ready for the holidays.

Needless to say, if you want to go this same route, your expedited shipping solution should be up to the task. If your customers aren’t going to get those fancy new boots until mid-March, you’ll need to find another approach.

Anticipation and Excitement

Anticipation is another more positive expression of urgency worth exploring with your holiday campaigns. Amazon does this too.

As this analysis of their Black Friday promotions points out, over the past decade the company has slowly extended the sales period into “one torturously long stretch of spending lasting from Nov. 1 to Dec. 22.” But this period is also punctuated by flash sales and specials meant to keep the customer excited. Since 2011, in fact, they’ve made the countdown to the sale itself into an event with “Countdown to Black Friday Deals Week.”

Since 2013, Amazon’s Black Friday sales period has stretched from November 1st to December 22nd. (Image via Quartz)

Why are anticipation and excitement so effective? This may seem obvious, but they encourage repeated visits to their storefront in the quest for new deals, generate excitement about upcoming sales, and stretch the holiday shopping season across longer periods of time.

Is Amazon worth imitating, even on a smaller scale? You betcha.

And, according to Aaron Orendorff, there’s another major benefit to creating campaigns around anticipation: it can be much cheaper.

Ad costs are far lower in the lead up to the holidays. So, buy your traffic early by previewing your upcoming event across paid social. Collect your best deals—built around product categories or specific audiences—onto landing pages with one goal: to get visitors’ email addresses in exchange for early access (or something similarly enticing).

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

(I think Aaron just dropped the mic on us.)

Don’t Let the “Christmas Creep” Sneak Up on You

Here’s a final question for you: when will people start their Christmas shopping this year? The answer: they already have.

Sure, the received wisdom is that the holiday season starts after American Thanksgiving. But the National Retail Federation says brick-and-mortar retailers start to see shoppers before Halloween, which is why some stores have started setting up displays in September.

That’s nothing compared to the ecommerce world though. According to a consumer survey from Valassis, there’s a strong interest in early shopping online: “40 percent completing a portion of their gift purchase on Amazon Prime Day.” (That’s mid-July Christmas shopping!) Why not devise some clever ways to target these buyers longer before your competitors get there?

It’s a neverending nightmare, Charlie Brown.

Let’s face it. For today’s ecommerce marketer, the holiday season feels like it’s always just around the corner.

Thankfully, the enemies you face when planning these campaigns aren’t different from any other part of the year. How do you overcome them? Planning well in advance is a must. And finding workable shortcuts that don’t cut short on the quality of your campaigns is another approach. (That’s one of the big reasons we think landing pages are a killer alternative to web pages. You can drag and drop a campaign together without involving your web developer.)

And there are plenty of other times throughout the year to apply these tips. Depending on your perspective, the Christmas shopping season stretches across Halloween, two Thanksgivings (American and Canuck), Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day, and even New Years. But then you might see other opportunities around Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, July 4th, Arbor Day… you name it, there’s a promo you can run (and run early).

But if you want to have a real impact, the real meaning of Christmas in July is that you need to get started today.

Christmas in July! Create Smarter Ecomm Landing Pages for the Holidays published first on http://nickpontemktg.blogspot.com/

[josephkchoi]

Christmas in July! Create Smarter Ecomm Landing Pages for the Holidays

Don’t let our header image fool you. 

Christmas is not right around the corner. The holiday shopping season is not upon us. You’ve got oodles of sunny summer days ahead before you need to start worrying about untangling the lights, trimming the turkey, or leaving presents under the tree. (Thank goodness!)

But if you’re in ecommerce, that’s a different story. It turns out that right now is the best time to start planning your next holiday campaign.

In fact, most experienced ecomm marketers start prepping long before Thanksgiving and Black Friday roll around. There’s just too much at stake not to. In 2018, for example, US consumers spent a whopping $7.9 billion on Cyber Monday. (Heck, they spent $2.2 billion on their phones alone.) Cyber Monday 2018 represents the biggest ecomm sales day in history, and 2019 is projected to be even bigger.

And there are other important reasons you should start prepping…

Sure, that’s a lot of cheese on the table. But, according to Jonathan Naccache of Webistry, heavy discounting also cuts into profits:

The holiday period is a double-edged sword. Due to heavy discounting, your sales might not even be profitable, even if you generate an above-average volume of sales. This is why planning is so important. November and December are all about volume, so every dollar you can save when it comes to your cost-per-acquisition can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Building up your audiences and ramping up your ads in the preceding 3-6 months is very important. 

Jonathan Naccache, Webistry

More obviously, Naccache points out that preparing simply takes a lot of work: “You’ll need great content (more than one piece) for your ads,” he says, and that may involve “many sets of banners, several video pieces, different iterations of copy” as well as “a series of dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences.”

Taylor Holiday (yeah, that’s his real name) of Common Thread Collective says his agency does massive research and planning before running a summit for their clients in mid-August. Why? So everyone is good and ready for the make-it-or-it-break months:

The reason it is so important to begin planning well in advance is because holiday outcomes are created in October and November.

Taylor Holiday, Common Thread Collective

Common Thread have a lot of data to back them up here. Emails they acquire in October, for instance, have the highest 90-day value of any time of the year. “It’s not rocket science to understand that email is valuable during this period,” says Holiday, “but it does require foresight and research into the exact value of email subscriptions to make the payback immediately profitable.” Common Thread found that running email campaigns in November and December will be “up to 5x as valuable as any other month,” so they need to be ready to build email lists in October.

So Naccache and Holiday clearly know that there are big wins—and big challenges—on the horizon. Planning in July (or even earlier) makes tons of sense to them. But for many marketers, it’s almost too easy to get planning late and let the holiday pass you by without running your own specials. That’s a mistake.

With that in mind, Unbounce has teamed up with a few heavy-hitters of marketing to give you the rundown on how you can start with your holiday campaigns and landing pages today. (So, uh, Merry Christmas!)

Read on, or jump straight to any of the subtopics below:

Rethinking Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers

Writing Copy for Gift Buyers

Learning from the Ghosts of Deals Past

Using the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

What about other times of the year? I’m talking Christmas here, the biggest and “mostest” (that’s a word, right?) of the holidays in North America. But there’s no good reason you shouldn’t plan campaigns around other special days relevant to your business. Most of this advice should apply. (Also, if you’re reading this in November and short on time, using a drag-and-drop builder like Unbounce makes pages faster to pull off.)

1. Rethink Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers

You’re running a holiday sale, eh?

15% off, you say?

Free shipping on all orders over $100?

That’s terrific. 

But here’s the thing about holiday discounts: during this period, most shoppers are so bombarded with deals and offers that they become inured to simple bargains. (Plus, your competitors likely have similar perks on to go, so there’s that…) 

Unless you’re prepared to cut bone-deep, building a campaign around a discount may not be enough to create genuine excitement. Instead, the experts recommend that you create promotions that use specific psychological triggers. 

Here are a few ideas to help you go beyond lame-duck discounts:

BOGO (Buy One, Get One) Deals

Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons when Homer gives Marge a bowling ball for her birthday? You know, the one with his name engraved on it? As you’ll recall, she wasn’t pleased:

Not a look you want from your loved ones.

Don’t be too hard on Homer. By buying Marge a present that he wants for himself, he’s exhibiting pretty normal human behavior.

In fact, it’s one reason that “buy one, get one free” deals can be more persuasive than straightforward discounts around the holidays. It’s not just a free thing, it’s that you get to play Scrooge and Santa at the same time: “I really want this thing for myself,” your customers will tell themselves: “I’ll pick one up for me, and give the other one to my friend.”

(There’s a fascinating study to be done on whether BOGO buyers think they’re keeping the “free” item or giving that one away.)

BOGO promotions also work brilliantly for products that you might naturally want to pair or share. Take a look at how Starbucks’ yearly “Buy One, Share One” promotion conjures the spirit of giving:

Starbucks’ “Buy One, Share One” uses the positive emotions associated with sharing and togetherness to sell lattes.

While traditional BOGO might appeal to greed, Starbucks combines the urgency of a very narrow purchase window (limited time, from 2-5 pm) with messaging that implies generosity. (We’ve seen customers build very similar limited promos using popups on their websites.)

Tiered Deals

BOGO promotions can be very attractive, but done wrong, they can also take a bite of profits and hurt your brand. Aaron Orendorff, the founder of iconiContent and former editor in chief at Shopify Plus, suggests instead creating promos that encourage more spending:

Not only is traditional discounting becoming less effective over the holidays, but it can also substantially lower brand value as well as AOV (average order value). The answer is creative deal structures that drive AOV from the ad or email to the onsite experience right through to the checkout.

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

One of Orendorff’s favorite examples is Brooklinen, who created a tiered “spend more, save more” deal structure to increase order values.

Spend $150, get a free gift

Spend $250, get 10% off

Spend $350, get 15% off

Spend $450, get 20% off

Orendorff points out that Brooklinen doesn’t mess around when it comes to encouraging buyers to take it up a tier: “Brooklinen featured that exact deal in all their promotions: organic, paid, and email. The real genius is the brand also integrated the tiers into its checkout, prompting shoppers to spend more and nudging them into the next tier.” It looks like this:

Mixed Product Bundling

Like BOGO, bundling involves combining multiple products into a single package. It attracts customers with the promise of greater value.

You can certainly bundle the same product together, but mixed bundling works best by joining your products into a single, discounted bundle. Why? Since people generally prefer experiential gifts to physical ones, this form of bundling transforms your product into an experience by offering a total package.

And it can be as simple as what Australian retailer Joyce Mayne did when they bundled a Fujifilm Instax camera with its accessories. Check it out:

This clever bundle by Joyce Mayne transforms a product (a hot pink instant camera) into an experience (sharing memories with friends and family).

The promo page for this bundle no longer exists online, but supporting copy went straight for the heart: “This would make for a brilliant Christmas present for anyone who loves to seize the moment and share memories with friends and family.” Notice how Joyce Mayne reframe the purchase in terms of a shared experience.

Scrooge-Style Discounting

For the right type of brand, sometimes the best approach is to only offer discounts at the holidays—and at no other time of the year.

For example, Lush Cosmetics runs once-a-year-only BOGO sale on December 26th (or Boxing Day to those of us outside the U.S.). By only offering it once a year, they create urgency and reinforce the perception that their products are too valued to discount.

By limiting this BOGO sale to one day a year, Lush creates anticipation and urgency while preserving their image as a superior-quality brand. (More practically, it also clears out holiday inventory that wouldn’t sell anyway.)

Lush sticks to its guns when it comes to this sale, but it’s not uncommon for brands to think it’s a good idea to revise their exclusivity: “Our once-a-year sale is now once-a-month! Get hyped!” Counterintuitively, this can work against you.

According to Liana Patch of Punchline Conversion Copywriting, it’ll puncture any urgency you’ve been trying to create:

Your discounting will always be more effective when your brand itself is more trustworthy—so if you tend to extend “one-day-only” sales often, or by multiple days, or you run promotions frequently, you’re likely dis-incentivizing your customers and ruining your own appeals to urgency and scarcity. On the contrary, if you can say “Hey, we run just one sale a year, it ends when we say it ends, and you’ll never get a better deal than this,” you’re going to strike a chord with even your most reluctant prospects.

Liana Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Of course, that doesn’t mean your campaign will be a short one. An accompanying ad or email campaign can create anticipation, while a landing page with a sign-up for reminders builds your nurture lists. (There’s more on this anticipation strategy below.)

Post-Click Upselling

A frequently neglected (but still very effective) tactic is to make an additional offer after your visitor has converted. The principle is actually very simple: you’ve already done the hard part of overcoming their resistance. Now they’re in the mood to buy.

The psychological phenomenon of loss aversion can play a role here too, since an offer made on a Thank You page or a well-timed popup feels more limited: “Get an additional 10% off your next purchase today.” This special shouldn’t be mentioned until this step in the process, of course. If customers feel like they could get it at any time, it’ll be less effective.

A clever use for popups or sticky bars. If your customer service hours will be reduced over the holidays, let customers know when they can expect contact. A sticky bar can double as a holiday greeting and let your visitors know about reduced hours. We’ve even got a template for it.

2. Write Copy For Gift Givers

Most of the year, the people you target purchase for themselves or their immediate family. And much of your existing content is (understandably) attuned to their self-interest. That’s why good copywriting is typically you-oriented: it focuses on the wants and needs of the reader. 

During the holidays, however, this is often less true. Homer Simpson aside, people aren’t buying only for themselves. Many will shop with loved ones, friends, and colleagues in mind.

In other words, the purchase intent of visitors to your holiday landing page will be different. Your headline, call-to-action, and supporting copy all need to be different too. As you sit down to write for your landing pages, try to think about common gifting considerations:

Will mommy lurve this sweater?

Can the wife and I experience this gift together?

Will this make my BFF lol? Will it make her ?

Does this present have any special meaning?

What will my coworker think if I give him this present?

These all have an especially strong emotional core as visitors search for the right gift. Like the examples from Starbucks and Joyce Mayne above, the best promos for holiday shoppers don’t just slap the words “Black Friday Sale – Get 10% Off” at the top of an existing page and call it a day. They use both copy and visuals to tap into these emotions.

And, yes, it can be easy to sink into cliches. But hitting those warm feels or helping someone find the perfect gift for their loved one satisfies the intent more than an appeal to self-interest.

According to Naccache, Webistry create “dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences” for this purpose. This pre-Christmas landing page from Country Chic Paint is a killer example of copy tailored to indecisive gift buyers.

Click to see the full image of the landing page. (Courtesy of Webistry)

While a 40% limited discount is nice, the copy below is also very specific in communicating a gifting context: this product is perfect for buyers who are “blanking on gift ideas” for a creative someone in their life. A mystery box takes an awful lot of the pressure off visitors looking for a meaningful gift.

Lianna Patch agrees the challenge lies in “effectively changing your approach from ‘Buy this, it’ll make you feel good’ to ‘Buy the feeling of giving a great gift.'” (She and Val Geisler recently teamed up for a webinar on writing copy for holiday emails, so she has a lot to say on the subject.) 

But Patch also cautions that your buyers will have more practical considerations in mind:

It’s also important, when appealing to gift-buyers, to address objections around shipping/logistics (Will it arrive in time?), presentability (Does it come gift-wrapped? Do I have to remove the price tag?), and returns and exchanges (Will it be a pain to exchange shirt sizes? If my mom doesn’t like the mug I got her, can I return it?).

Liana Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Ecomm landing pages are particularly bad at answering these kinds of questions. If you’re equipped to tackle any them, make it as explicit as you can in your copy. Shipping guarantees, for instance, should probably never be buried in your FAQ at this time of year.

Who’s this gift for? According to Think with Google, searchers get extremely specific and personal during the holidays: “searches for ‘gift + ____ year old’ have seen a two-year growth of over 100%, while searches for ‘gifts for dad’ have grown over 80% during that same period.” Creating targeted PPC campaigns with tailored landing pages (using Dynamic Text Replacement) can help.

3. Learn from the Ghost of Deals Past

Look at your previous campaigns. You may have conducted a routine post-mortem already, but remind yourself now of what worked—and what didn’t—before you start to plan.

Review the key performance metrics for your campaigns. For landing pages, your conversion rate should tell you whether or not your page performed to your expectations. (If you’re just starting out, you can use Unbounce’s Conversion Benchmark Report or a variety of other resources to get a sense of where you should be hitting.) 

But I’d also recommend pulling other traffic and engagement metrics from Google Analytics. Your page’s bounce rate and session time are important. Plus, any relevant info about visitors (like geolocation, device type, etc.) that might give you a clue to who’s being naughty or nice. A lower than expected conversion rate might indicate that something went wrong, but engagement stats like these ones can help you sniff out the cause. 

Let’s say, for instance, you see that your holiday landing page had few conversions but Google Analytics also shows people are spending a long time on the page.

Google Analytics surfaces a lot of additional data about how prospects are interacting with your landing pages. It’s worth digging deep while you have the time so that you can make informed decisions going forward.

Why is this happening?

It could be visitors are actually very interested in your product, but they’re confused or turned off by something they see (or don’t see) on the landing page. Take steps to simplify the layout, add more impact to your copy, and make your call-to-action more prominent. (Perhaps, as mentioned above, you need to re-write it with specific gifting contexts in mind.)

Another possibility is that your product already compels, but your visitors hesitate to actually buy it. Maybe it’s an idea so ahead of its time that they remain locked in the consideration phase. Or maybe you’re selling something that’s a big investment. Assuming your prospects may be sitting on the fence, you might want to throw in an incentive (by way of a timed popup or sticky bar) to give ’em a nudge. 

Of course, you may have other ideas. In any case, diving into engagement metrics lets you formulate a hypothesis and plan your next move. 

What about A/B testing? Running valid A/B tests during the holiday period can be challenging. You need traffic and time that you may not have. Plus, seasonal traffic behaves differently—so you can’t rely on what you’ve learned at other times of the year. I do like this holiday testing guide from ConversionXL, which gives you a detailed rundown of what’s involved.

4. Use the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

Unless you’re just starting out, you already know about the persuasive power of adding a little urgency to your promotions. Countdown timers, announcing (realistic) product scarcity, running limited-time offers—these old hat strategies boost your conversions at any time during the year, as long as you don’t overdo ’em. 

Around the holidays, though, there’s already a sense of urgency built into the holiday shopping experience. Your customers are racing to get the best deals and check off every name on their list before Christmas.

Yeah, you could take advantage of this rush by ratcheting up the misery with big black numbers (counting down the remaining shopping days until the kids are forever disappointed, let’s say).

But there’s a much better approach.

Instead, offer your visitors a little something more…

Offer a Little Relief from the Rush

Think about your campaign like a pleasing piece of music: you need tension, sure, but also release. (Otherwise, it’s just noise.) Instead of relying on purely negative types of urgency, then, you can promote a sense of trust and reliability by relieving your visitors’ anxieties. It may lead to fewer impulse buys, but it’ll also help your brand in the long run.

As always, Amazon offers a pretty sharp example of this practice.

Sure, around the holidays they’ll up the ante with a countdown timer or two. (They also never miss an opportunity to indicate low stock.) But their bread and butter lies in relieving the anxiety associated with shipping. 

By including “Want it delivered by… order by…” messages on product pages, they promise their customers an almost impossible level of control. The effect of seeing that you need to “order it in the next 6 hours and 10 minutes” to receive the package by December 23 amplifies the urgency, sure, but it also empowers the customer:

There’s more than one way to get ready for the holidays.

Needless to say, if you want to go this same route, your expedited shipping solution should be up to the task. If your customers aren’t going to get those fancy new boots until mid-March, you’ll need to find another approach.

Anticipation and Excitement

Anticipation is another more positive expression of urgency worth exploring with your holiday campaigns. Amazon does this too.

As this analysis of their Black Friday promotions points out, over the past decade the company has slowly extended the sales period into “one torturously long stretch of spending lasting from Nov. 1 to Dec. 22.” But this period is also punctuated by flash sales and specials meant to keep the customer excited. Since 2011, in fact, they’ve made the countdown to the sale itself into an event with “Countdown to Black Friday Deals Week.”

Since 2013, Amazon’s Black Friday sales period has stretched from November 1st to December 22nd. (Image via Quartz)

Why are anticipation and excitement so effective? This may seem obvious, but they encourage repeated visits to their storefront in the quest for new deals, generate excitement about upcoming sales, and stretch the holiday shopping season across longer periods of time.

Is Amazon worth imitating, even on a smaller scale? You betcha.

And, according to Aaron Orendorff, there’s another major benefit to creating campaigns around anticipation: it can be much cheaper.

Ad costs are far lower in the lead up to the holidays. So, buy your traffic early by previewing your upcoming event across paid social. Collect your best deals—built around product categories or specific audiences—onto landing pages with one goal: to get visitors’ email addresses in exchange for early access (or something similarly enticing).

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

(I think Aaron just dropped the mic on us.)

Don’t Let the “Christmas Creep” Sneak Up on You

Here’s a final question for you: when will people start their Christmas shopping this year? The answer: they already have.

Sure, the received wisdom is that the holiday season starts after American Thanksgiving. But the National Retail Federation says brick-and-mortar retailers start to see shoppers before Halloween, which is why some stores have started setting up displays in September.

That’s nothing compared to the ecommerce world though. According to a consumer survey from Valassis, there’s a strong interest in early shopping online: “40 percent completing a portion of their gift purchase on Amazon Prime Day.” (That’s mid-July Christmas shopping!) Why not devise some clever ways to target these buyers longer before your competitors get there?

It’s a neverending nightmare, Charlie Brown.

Let’s face it. For today’s ecommerce marketer, the holiday season feels like it’s always just around the corner.

Thankfully, the enemies you face when planning these campaigns aren’t different from any other part of the year. How do you overcome them? Planning well in advance is a must. And finding workable shortcuts that don’t cut short on the quality of your campaigns is another approach. (That’s one of the big reasons we think landing pages are a killer alternative to web pages. You can drag and drop a campaign together without involving your web developer.)

And there are plenty of other times throughout the year to apply these tips. Depending on your perspective, the Christmas shopping season stretches across Halloween, two Thanksgivings (American and Canuck), Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day, and even New Years. But then you might see other opportunities around Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, July 4th, Arbor Day… you name it, there’s a promo you can run (and run early).

But if you want to have a real impact, the real meaning of Christmas in July is that you need to get started today.

Christmas in July! Create Smarter Ecomm Landing Pages for the Holidays published first on https://nickpontemrktg.wordpress.com/

[jjonassevilla]

Christmas in July! Create Smarter Ecomm Landing Pages for the Holidays

Don’t let our header image fool you. 

Christmas is not right around the corner. The holiday shopping season is not upon us. You’ve got oodles of sunny summer days ahead before you need to start worrying about untangling the lights, trimming the turkey, or leaving presents under the tree. (Thank goodness!)

But if you’re in ecommerce, that’s a different story. It turns out that right now is the best time to start planning your next holiday campaign.

In fact, most experienced ecomm marketers start prepping long before Thanksgiving and Black Friday roll around. There’s just too much at stake not to. In 2018, for example, US consumers spent a whopping $7.9 billion on Cyber Monday. (Heck, they spent $2.2 billion on their phones alone.) Cyber Monday 2018 represents the biggest ecomm sales day in history, and 2019 is projected to be even bigger.

And there are other important reasons you should start prepping…

Sure, that’s a lot of cheese on the table. But, according to Jonathan Naccache of Webistry, heavy discounting also cuts into profits:

The holiday period is a double-edged sword. Due to heavy discounting, your sales might not even be profitable, even if you generate an above-average volume of sales. This is why planning is so important. November and December are all about volume, so every dollar you can save when it comes to your cost-per-acquisition can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Building up your audiences and ramping up your ads in the preceding 3-6 months is very important. 

Jonathan Naccache, Webistry

More obviously, Naccache points out that preparing simply takes a lot of work: “You’ll need great content (more than one piece) for your ads,” he says, and that may involve “many sets of banners, several video pieces, different iterations of copy” as well as “a series of dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences.”

Taylor Holiday (yeah, that’s his real name) of Common Thread Collective says his agency does massive research and planning before running a summit for their clients in mid-August. Why? So everyone is good and ready for the make-it-or-it-break months:

The reason it is so important to begin planning well in advance is because holiday outcomes are created in October and November.

Taylor Holiday, Common Thread Collective

Common Thread have a lot of data to back them up here. Emails they acquire in October, for instance, have the highest 90-day value of any time of the year. “It’s not rocket science to understand that email is valuable during this period,” says Holiday, “but it does require foresight and research into the exact value of email subscriptions to make the payback immediately profitable.” Common Thread found that running email campaigns in November and December will be “up to 5x as valuable as any other month,” so they need to be ready to build email lists in October.

So Naccache and Holiday clearly know that there are big wins—and big challenges—on the horizon. Planning in July (or even earlier) makes tons of sense to them. But for many marketers, it’s almost too easy to get planning late and let the holiday pass you by without running your own specials. That’s a mistake.

With that in mind, Unbounce has teamed up with a few heavy-hitters of marketing to give you the rundown on how you can start with your holiday campaigns and landing pages today. (So, uh, Merry Christmas!)

Read on, or jump straight to any of the subtopics below:

Rethinking Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers

Writing Copy for Gift Buyers

Learning from the Ghosts of Deals Past

Using the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

What about other times of the year? I’m talking Christmas here, the biggest and “mostest” (that’s a word, right?) of the holidays in North America. But there’s no good reason you shouldn’t plan campaigns around other special days relevant to your business. Most of this advice should apply. (Also, if you’re reading this in November and short on time, using a drag-and-drop builder like Unbounce makes pages faster to pull off.)

1. Rethink Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers

You’re running a holiday sale, eh?

15% off, you say?

Free shipping on all orders over $100?

That’s terrific. 

But here’s the thing about holiday discounts: during this period, most shoppers are so bombarded with deals and offers that they become inured to simple bargains. (Plus, your competitors likely have similar perks on to go, so there’s that…) 

Unless you’re prepared to cut bone-deep, building a campaign around a discount may not be enough to create genuine excitement. Instead, the experts recommend that you create promotions that use specific psychological triggers. 

Here are a few ideas to help you go beyond lame-duck discounts:

BOGO (Buy One, Get One) Deals

Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons when Homer gives Marge a bowling ball for her birthday? You know, the one with his name engraved on it? As you’ll recall, she wasn’t pleased:

Not a look you want from your loved ones.

Don’t be too hard on Homer. By buying Marge a present that he wants for himself, he’s exhibiting pretty normal human behavior.

In fact, it’s one reason that “buy one, get one free” deals can be more persuasive than straightforward discounts around the holidays. It’s not just a free thing, it’s that you get to play Scrooge and Santa at the same time: “I really want this thing for myself,” your customers will tell themselves: “I’ll pick one up for me, and give the other one to my friend.”

(There’s a fascinating study to be done on whether BOGO buyers think they’re keeping the “free” item or giving that one away.)

BOGO promotions also work brilliantly for products that you might naturally want to pair or share. Take a look at how Starbucks’ yearly “Buy One, Share One” promotion conjures the spirit of giving:

Starbucks’ “Buy One, Share One” uses the positive emotions associated with sharing and togetherness to sell lattes.

While traditional BOGO might appeal to greed, Starbucks combines the urgency of a very narrow purchase window (limited time, from 2-5 pm) with messaging that implies generosity. (We’ve seen customers build very similar limited promos using popups on their websites.)

Tiered Deals

BOGO promotions can be very attractive, but done wrong, they can also take a bite of profits and hurt your brand. Aaron Orendorff, the founder of iconiContent and former editor in chief at Shopify Plus, suggests instead creating promos that encourage more spending:

Not only is traditional discounting becoming less effective over the holidays, but it can also substantially lower brand value as well as AOV (average order value). The answer is creative deal structures that drive AOV from the ad or email to the onsite experience right through to the checkout.

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

One of Orendorff’s favorite examples is Brooklinen, who created a tiered “spend more, save more” deal structure to increase order values.

Spend $150, get a free gift

Spend $250, get 10% off

Spend $350, get 15% off

Spend $450, get 20% off

Orendorff points out that Brooklinen doesn’t mess around when it comes to encouraging buyers to take it up a tier: “Brooklinen featured that exact deal in all their promotions: organic, paid, and email. The real genius is the brand also integrated the tiers into its checkout, prompting shoppers to spend more and nudging them into the next tier.” It looks like this:

Mixed Product Bundling

Like BOGO, bundling involves combining multiple products into a single package. It attracts customers with the promise of greater value.

You can certainly bundle the same product together, but mixed bundling works best by joining your products into a single, discounted bundle. Why? Since people generally prefer experiential gifts to physical ones, this form of bundling transforms your product into an experience by offering a total package.

And it can be as simple as what Australian retailer Joyce Mayne did when they bundled a Fujifilm Instax camera with its accessories. Check it out:

This clever bundle by Joyce Mayne transforms a product (a hot pink instant camera) into an experience (sharing memories with friends and family).

The promo page for this bundle no longer exists online, but supporting copy went straight for the heart: “This would make for a brilliant Christmas present for anyone who loves to seize the moment and share memories with friends and family.” Notice how Joyce Mayne reframe the purchase in terms of a shared experience.

Scrooge-Style Discounting

For the right type of brand, sometimes the best approach is to only offer discounts at the holidays—and at no other time of the year.

For example, Lush Cosmetics runs once-a-year-only BOGO sale on December 26th (or Boxing Day to those of us outside the U.S.). By only offering it once a year, they create urgency and reinforce the perception that their products are too valued to discount.

By limiting this BOGO sale to one day a year, Lush creates anticipation and urgency while preserving their image as a superior-quality brand. (More practically, it also clears out holiday inventory that wouldn’t sell anyway.)

Lush sticks to its guns when it comes to this sale, but it’s not uncommon for brands to think it’s a good idea to revise their exclusivity: “Our once-a-year sale is now once-a-month! Get hyped!” Counterintuitively, this can work against you.

According to Liana Patch of Punchline Conversion Copywriting, it’ll puncture any urgency you’ve been trying to create:

Your discounting will always be more effective when your brand itself is more trustworthy—so if you tend to extend “one-day-only” sales often, or by multiple days, or you run promotions frequently, you’re likely dis-incentivizing your customers and ruining your own appeals to urgency and scarcity. On the contrary, if you can say “Hey, we run just one sale a year, it ends when we say it ends, and you’ll never get a better deal than this,” you’re going to strike a chord with even your most reluctant prospects.

Liana Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Of course, that doesn’t mean your campaign will be a short one. An accompanying ad or email campaign can create anticipation, while a landing page with a sign-up for reminders builds your nurture lists. (There’s more on this anticipation strategy below.)

Post-Click Upselling

A frequently neglected (but still very effective) tactic is to make an additional offer after your visitor has converted. The principle is actually very simple: you’ve already done the hard part of overcoming their resistance. Now they’re in the mood to buy.

The psychological phenomenon of loss aversion can play a role here too, since an offer made on a Thank You page or a well-timed popup feels more limited: “Get an additional 10% off your next purchase today.” This special shouldn’t be mentioned until this step in the process, of course. If customers feel like they could get it at any time, it’ll be less effective.

A clever use for popups or sticky bars. If your customer service hours will be reduced over the holidays, let customers know when they can expect contact. A sticky bar can double as a holiday greeting and let your visitors know about reduced hours. We’ve even got a template for it.

2. Write Copy For Gift Givers

Most of the year, the people you target purchase for themselves or their immediate family. And much of your existing content is (understandably) attuned to their self-interest. That’s why good copywriting is typically you-oriented: it focuses on the wants and needs of the reader. 

During the holidays, however, this is often less true. Homer Simpson aside, people aren’t buying only for themselves. Many will shop with loved ones, friends, and colleagues in mind.

In other words, the purchase intent of visitors to your holiday landing page will be different. Your headline, call-to-action, and supporting copy all need to be different too. As you sit down to write for your landing pages, try to think about common gifting considerations:

Will mommy lurve this sweater?

Can the wife and I experience this gift together?

Will this make my BFF lol? Will it make her ?

Does this present have any special meaning?

What will my coworker think if I give him this present?

These all have an especially strong emotional core as visitors search for the right gift. Like the examples from Starbucks and Joyce Mayne above, the best promos for holiday shoppers don’t just slap the words “Black Friday Sale – Get 10% Off” at the top of an existing page and call it a day. They use both copy and visuals to tap into these emotions.

And, yes, it can be easy to sink into cliches. But hitting those warm feels or helping someone find the perfect gift for their loved one satisfies the intent more than an appeal to self-interest.

According to Naccache, Webistry create “dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences” for this purpose. This pre-Christmas landing page from Country Chic Paint is a killer example of copy tailored to indecisive gift buyers.

Click to see the full image of the landing page. (Courtesy of Webistry)

While a 40% limited discount is nice, the copy below is also very specific in communicating a gifting context: this product is perfect for buyers who are “blanking on gift ideas” for a creative someone in their life. A mystery box takes an awful lot of the pressure off visitors looking for a meaningful gift.

Lianna Patch agrees the challenge lies in “effectively changing your approach from ‘Buy this, it’ll make you feel good’ to ‘Buy the feeling of giving a great gift.'” (She and Val Geisler recently teamed up for a webinar on writing copy for holiday emails, so she has a lot to say on the subject.) 

But Patch also cautions that your buyers will have more practical considerations in mind:

It’s also important, when appealing to gift-buyers, to address objections around shipping/logistics (Will it arrive in time?), presentability (Does it come gift-wrapped? Do I have to remove the price tag?), and returns and exchanges (Will it be a pain to exchange shirt sizes? If my mom doesn’t like the mug I got her, can I return it?).

Liana Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Ecomm landing pages are particularly bad at answering these kinds of questions. If you’re equipped to tackle any them, make it as explicit as you can in your copy. Shipping guarantees, for instance, should probably never be buried in your FAQ at this time of year.

Who’s this gift for? According to Think with Google, searchers get extremely specific and personal during the holidays: “searches for ‘gift + ____ year old’ have seen a two-year growth of over 100%, while searches for ‘gifts for dad’ have grown over 80% during that same period.” Creating targeted PPC campaigns with tailored landing pages (using Dynamic Text Replacement) can help.

3. Learn from the Ghost of Deals Past

Look at your previous campaigns. You may have conducted a routine post-mortem already, but remind yourself now of what worked—and what didn’t—before you start to plan.

Review the key performance metrics for your campaigns. For landing pages, your conversion rate should tell you whether or not your page performed to your expectations. (If you’re just starting out, you can use Unbounce’s Conversion Benchmark Report or a variety of other resources to get a sense of where you should be hitting.) 

But I’d also recommend pulling other traffic and engagement metrics from Google Analytics. Your page’s bounce rate and session time are important. Plus, any relevant info about visitors (like geolocation, device type, etc.) that might give you a clue to who’s being naughty or nice. A lower than expected conversion rate might indicate that something went wrong, but engagement stats like these ones can help you sniff out the cause. 

Let’s say, for instance, you see that your holiday landing page had few conversions but Google Analytics also shows people are spending a long time on the page.

Google Analytics surfaces a lot of additional data about how prospects are interacting with your landing pages. It’s worth digging deep while you have the time so that you can make informed decisions going forward.

Why is this happening?

It could be visitors are actually very interested in your product, but they’re confused or turned off by something they see (or don’t see) on the landing page. Take steps to simplify the layout, add more impact to your copy, and make your call-to-action more prominent. (Perhaps, as mentioned above, you need to re-write it with specific gifting contexts in mind.)

Another possibility is that your product already compels, but your visitors hesitate to actually buy it. Maybe it’s an idea so ahead of its time that they remain locked in the consideration phase. Or maybe you’re selling something that’s a big investment. Assuming your prospects may be sitting on the fence, you might want to throw in an incentive (by way of a timed popup or sticky bar) to give ’em a nudge. 

Of course, you may have other ideas. In any case, diving into engagement metrics lets you formulate a hypothesis and plan your next move. 

What about A/B testing? Running valid A/B tests during the holiday period can be challenging. You need traffic and time that you may not have. Plus, seasonal traffic behaves differently—so you can’t rely on what you’ve learned at other times of the year. I do like this holiday testing guide from ConversionXL, which gives you a detailed rundown of what’s involved.

4. Use the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

Unless you’re just starting out, you already know about the persuasive power of adding a little urgency to your promotions. Countdown timers, announcing (realistic) product scarcity, running limited-time offers—these old hat strategies boost your conversions at any time during the year, as long as you don’t overdo ’em. 

Around the holidays, though, there’s already a sense of urgency built into the holiday shopping experience. Your customers are racing to get the best deals and check off every name on their list before Christmas.

Yeah, you could take advantage of this rush by ratcheting up the misery with big black numbers (counting down the remaining shopping days until the kids are forever disappointed, let’s say).

But there’s a much better approach.

Instead, offer your visitors a little something more…

Offer a Little Relief from the Rush

Think about your campaign like a pleasing piece of music: you need tension, sure, but also release. (Otherwise, it’s just noise.) Instead of relying on purely negative types of urgency, then, you can promote a sense of trust and reliability by relieving your visitors’ anxieties. It may lead to fewer impulse buys, but it’ll also help your brand in the long run.

As always, Amazon offers a pretty sharp example of this practice.

Sure, around the holidays they’ll up the ante with a countdown timer or two. (They also never miss an opportunity to indicate low stock.) But their bread and butter lies in relieving the anxiety associated with shipping. 

By including “Want it delivered by… order by…” messages on product pages, they promise their customers an almost impossible level of control. The effect of seeing that you need to “order it in the next 6 hours and 10 minutes” to receive the package by December 23 amplifies the urgency, sure, but it also empowers the customer:

There’s more than one way to get ready for the holidays.

Needless to say, if you want to go this same route, your expedited shipping solution should be up to the task. If your customers aren’t going to get those fancy new boots until mid-March, you’ll need to find another approach.

Anticipation and Excitement

Anticipation is another more positive expression of urgency worth exploring with your holiday campaigns. Amazon does this too.

As this analysis of their Black Friday promotions points out, over the past decade the company has slowly extended the sales period into “one torturously long stretch of spending lasting from Nov. 1 to Dec. 22.” But this period is also punctuated by flash sales and specials meant to keep the customer excited. Since 2011, in fact, they’ve made the countdown to the sale itself into an event with “Countdown to Black Friday Deals Week.”

Since 2013, Amazon’s Black Friday sales period has stretched from November 1st to December 22nd. (Image via Quartz)

Why are anticipation and excitement so effective? This may seem obvious, but they encourage repeated visits to their storefront in the quest for new deals, generate excitement about upcoming sales, and stretch the holiday shopping season across longer periods of time.

Is Amazon worth imitating, even on a smaller scale? You betcha.

And, according to Aaron Orendorff, there’s another major benefit to creating campaigns around anticipation: it can be much cheaper.

Ad costs are far lower in the lead up to the holidays. So, buy your traffic early by previewing your upcoming event across paid social. Collect your best deals—built around product categories or specific audiences—onto landing pages with one goal: to get visitors’ email addresses in exchange for early access (or something similarly enticing).

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

(I think Aaron just dropped the mic on us.)

Don’t Let the “Christmas Creep” Sneak Up on You

Here’s a final question for you: when will people start their Christmas shopping this year? The answer: they already have.

Sure, the received wisdom is that the holiday season starts after American Thanksgiving. But the National Retail Federation says brick-and-mortar retailers start to see shoppers before Halloween, which is why some stores have started setting up displays in September.

That’s nothing compared to the ecommerce world though. According to a consumer survey from Valassis, there’s a strong interest in early shopping online: “40 percent completing a portion of their gift purchase on Amazon Prime Day.” (That’s mid-July Christmas shopping!) Why not devise some clever ways to target these buyers longer before your competitors get there?

It’s a neverending nightmare, Charlie Brown.

Let’s face it. For today’s ecommerce marketer, the holiday season feels like it’s always just around the corner.

Thankfully, the enemies you face when planning these campaigns aren’t different from any other part of the year. How do you overcome them? Planning well in advance is a must. And finding workable shortcuts that don’t cut short on the quality of your campaigns is another approach. (That’s one of the big reasons we think landing pages are a killer alternative to web pages. You can drag and drop a campaign together without involving your web developer.)

And there are plenty of other times throughout the year to apply these tips. Depending on your perspective, the Christmas shopping season stretches across Halloween, two Thanksgivings (American and Canuck), Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day, and even New Years. But then you might see other opportunities around Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, July 4th, Arbor Day… you name it, there’s a promo you can run (and run early).

But if you want to have a real impact, the real meaning of Christmas in July is that you need to get started today.

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/landing-pages/landing-pages-for-holidays-ecommerce/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[reviewandbonuss]

Christmas in July! Create Smarter Ecomm Landing Pages for the Holidays

Don’t let our header image fool you. 

Christmas is not right around the corner. The holiday shopping season is not upon us. You’ve got oodles of sunny summer days ahead before you need to start worrying about untangling the lights, trimming the turkey, or leaving presents under the tree. (Thank goodness!)

But if you’re in ecommerce, that’s a different story. It turns out that right now is the best time to start planning your next holiday campaign.

In fact, most experienced ecomm marketers start prepping long before Thanksgiving and Black Friday roll around. There’s just too much at stake not to. In 2018, for example, US consumers spent a whopping $7.9 billion on Cyber Monday. (Heck, they spent $2.2 billion on their phones alone.) Cyber Monday 2018 represents the biggest ecomm sales day in history, and 2019 is projected to be even bigger.

And there are other important reasons you should start prepping…

Sure, that’s a lot of cheese on the table. But, according to Jonathan Naccache of Webistry, heavy discounting also cuts into profits:

The holiday period is a double-edged sword. Due to heavy discounting, your sales might not even be profitable, even if you generate an above-average volume of sales. This is why planning is so important. November and December are all about volume, so every dollar you can save when it comes to your cost-per-acquisition can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Building up your audiences and ramping up your ads in the preceding 3-6 months is very important. 

Jonathan Naccache, Webistry

More obviously, Naccache points out that preparing simply takes a lot of work: “You’ll need great content (more than one piece) for your ads,” he says, and that may involve “many sets of banners, several video pieces, different iterations of copy” as well as “a series of dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences.”

Taylor Holiday (yeah, that’s his real name) of Common Thread Collective says his agency does massive research and planning before running a summit for their clients in mid-August. Why? So everyone is good and ready for the make-it-or-it-break months:

The reason it is so important to begin planning well in advance is because holiday outcomes are created in October and November.

Taylor Holiday, Common Thread Collective

Common Thread have a lot of data to back them up here. Emails they acquire in October, for instance, have the highest 90-day value of any time of the year. “It’s not rocket science to understand that email is valuable during this period,” says Holiday, “but it does require foresight and research into the exact value of email subscriptions to make the payback immediately profitable.” Common Thread found that running email campaigns in November and December will be “up to 5x as valuable as any other month,” so they need to be ready to build email lists in October.

So Naccache and Holiday clearly know that there are big wins—and big challenges—on the horizon. Planning in July (or even earlier) makes tons of sense to them. But for many marketers, it’s almost too easy to get planning late and let the holiday pass you by without running your own specials. That’s a mistake.

With that in mind, Unbounce has teamed up with a few heavy-hitters of marketing to give you the rundown on how you can start with your holiday campaigns and landing pages today. (So, uh, Merry Christmas!)

Read on, or jump straight to any of the subtopics below:

Rethinking Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers

Writing Copy for Gift Buyers

Learning from the Ghosts of Deals Past

Using the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

What about other times of the year? I’m talking Christmas here, the biggest and “mostest” (that’s a word, right?) of the holidays in North America. But there’s no good reason you shouldn’t plan campaigns around other special days relevant to your business. Most of this advice should apply. (Also, if you’re reading this in November and short on time, using a drag-and-drop builder like Unbounce makes pages faster to pull off.)

1. Rethink Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers

You’re running a holiday sale, eh?

15% off, you say?

Free shipping on all orders over $100?

That’s terrific. 

But here’s the thing about holiday discounts: during this period, most shoppers are so bombarded with deals and offers that they become inured to simple bargains. (Plus, your competitors likely have similar perks on to go, so there’s that…) 

Unless you’re prepared to cut bone-deep, building a campaign around a discount may not be enough to create genuine excitement. Instead, the experts recommend that you create promotions that use specific psychological triggers. 

Here are a few ideas to help you go beyond lame-duck discounts:

BOGO (Buy One, Get One) Deals

Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons when Homer gives Marge a bowling ball for her birthday? You know, the one with his name engraved on it? As you’ll recall, she wasn’t pleased:

Not a look you want from your loved ones.

Don’t be too hard on Homer. By buying Marge a present that he wants for himself, he’s exhibiting pretty normal human behavior.

In fact, it’s one reason that “buy one, get one free” deals can be more persuasive than straightforward discounts around the holidays. It’s not just a free thing, it’s that you get to play Scrooge and Santa at the same time: “I really want this thing for myself,” your customers will tell themselves: “I’ll pick one up for me, and give the other one to my friend.”

(There’s a fascinating study to be done on whether BOGO buyers think they’re keeping the “free” item or giving that one away.)

BOGO promotions also work brilliantly for products that you might naturally want to pair or share. Take a look at how Starbucks’ yearly “Buy One, Share One” promotion conjures the spirit of giving:

Starbucks’ “Buy One, Share One” uses the positive emotions associated with sharing and togetherness to sell lattes.

While traditional BOGO might appeal to greed, Starbucks combines the urgency of a very narrow purchase window (limited time, from 2-5 pm) with messaging that implies generosity. (We’ve seen customers build very similar limited promos using popups on their websites.)

Tiered Deals

BOGO promotions can be very attractive, but done wrong, they can also take a bite of profits and hurt your brand. Aaron Orendorff, the founder of iconiContent and former editor in chief at Shopify Plus, suggests instead creating promos that encourage more spending:

Not only is traditional discounting becoming less effective over the holidays, but it can also substantially lower brand value as well as AOV (average order value). The answer is creative deal structures that drive AOV from the ad or email to the onsite experience right through to the checkout.

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

One of Orendorff’s favorite examples is Brooklinen, who created a tiered “spend more, save more” deal structure to increase order values.

Spend $150, get a free gift

Spend $250, get 10% off

Spend $350, get 15% off

Spend $450, get 20% off

Orendorff points out that Brooklinen doesn’t mess around when it comes to encouraging buyers to take it up a tier: “Brooklinen featured that exact deal in all their promotions: organic, paid, and email. The real genius is the brand also integrated the tiers into its checkout, prompting shoppers to spend more and nudging them into the next tier.” It looks like this:

Mixed Product Bundling

Like BOGO, bundling involves combining multiple products into a single package. It attracts customers with the promise of greater value.

You can certainly bundle the same product together, but mixed bundling works best by joining your products into a single, discounted bundle. Why? Since people generally prefer experiential gifts to physical ones, this form of bundling transforms your product into an experience by offering a total package.

And it can be as simple as what Australian retailer Joyce Mayne did when they bundled a Fujifilm Instax camera with its accessories. Check it out:

This clever bundle by Joyce Mayne transforms a product (a hot pink instant camera) into an experience (sharing memories with friends and family).

The promo page for this bundle no longer exists online, but supporting copy went straight for the heart: “This would make for a brilliant Christmas present for anyone who loves to seize the moment and share memories with friends and family.” Notice how Joyce Mayne reframe the purchase in terms of a shared experience.

Scrooge-Style Discounting

For the right type of brand, sometimes the best approach is to only offer discounts at the holidays—and at no other time of the year.

For example, Lush Cosmetics runs once-a-year-only BOGO sale on December 26th (or Boxing Day to those of us outside the U.S.). By only offering it once a year, they create urgency and reinforce the perception that their products are too valued to discount.

By limiting this BOGO sale to one day a year, Lush creates anticipation and urgency while preserving their image as a superior-quality brand. (More practically, it also clears out holiday inventory that wouldn’t sell anyway.)

Lush sticks to its guns when it comes to this sale, but it’s not uncommon for brands to think it’s a good idea to revise their exclusivity: “Our once-a-year sale is now once-a-month! Get hyped!” Counterintuitively, this can work against you.

According to Liana Patch of Punchline Conversion Copywriting, it’ll puncture any urgency you’ve been trying to create:

Your discounting will always be more effective when your brand itself is more trustworthy—so if you tend to extend “one-day-only” sales often, or by multiple days, or you run promotions frequently, you’re likely dis-incentivizing your customers and ruining your own appeals to urgency and scarcity. On the contrary, if you can say “Hey, we run just one sale a year, it ends when we say it ends, and you’ll never get a better deal than this,” you’re going to strike a chord with even your most reluctant prospects.

Liana Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Of course, that doesn’t mean your campaign will be a short one. An accompanying ad or email campaign can create anticipation, while a landing page with a sign-up for reminders builds your nurture lists. (There’s more on this anticipation strategy below.)

Post-Click Upselling

A frequently neglected (but still very effective) tactic is to make an additional offer after your visitor has converted. The principle is actually very simple: you’ve already done the hard part of overcoming their resistance. Now they’re in the mood to buy.

The psychological phenomenon of loss aversion can play a role here too, since an offer made on a Thank You page or a well-timed popup feels more limited: “Get an additional 10% off your next purchase today.” This special shouldn’t be mentioned until this step in the process, of course. If customers feel like they could get it at any time, it’ll be less effective.

A clever use for popups or sticky bars. If your customer service hours will be reduced over the holidays, let customers know when they can expect contact. A sticky bar can double as a holiday greeting and let your visitors know about reduced hours. We’ve even got a template for it.

2. Write Copy For Gift Givers

Most of the year, the people you target purchase for themselves or their immediate family. And much of your existing content is (understandably) attuned to their self-interest. That’s why good copywriting is typically you-oriented: it focuses on the wants and needs of the reader. 

During the holidays, however, this is often less true. Homer Simpson aside, people aren’t buying only for themselves. Many will shop with loved ones, friends, and colleagues in mind.

In other words, the purchase intent of visitors to your holiday landing page will be different. Your headline, call-to-action, and supporting copy all need to be different too. As you sit down to write for your landing pages, try to think about common gifting considerations:

Will mommy lurve this sweater?

Can the wife and I experience this gift together?

Will this make my BFF lol? Will it make her ?

Does this present have any special meaning?

What will my coworker think if I give him this present?

These all have an especially strong emotional core as visitors search for the right gift. Like the examples from Starbucks and Joyce Mayne above, the best promos for holiday shoppers don’t just slap the words “Black Friday Sale – Get 10% Off” at the top of an existing page and call it a day. They use both copy and visuals to tap into these emotions.

And, yes, it can be easy to sink into cliches. But hitting those warm feels or helping someone find the perfect gift for their loved one satisfies the intent more than an appeal to self-interest.

According to Naccache, Webistry create “dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences” for this purpose. This pre-Christmas landing page from Country Chic Paint is a killer example of copy tailored to indecisive gift buyers.

Click to see the full image of the landing page. (Courtesy of Webistry)

While a 40% limited discount is nice, the copy below is also very specific in communicating a gifting context: this product is perfect for buyers who are “blanking on gift ideas” for a creative someone in their life. A mystery box takes an awful lot of the pressure off visitors looking for a meaningful gift.

Lianna Patch agrees the challenge lies in “effectively changing your approach from ‘Buy this, it’ll make you feel good’ to ‘Buy the feeling of giving a great gift.'” (She and Val Geisler recently teamed up for a webinar on writing copy for holiday emails, so she has a lot to say on the subject.) 

But Patch also cautions that your buyers will have more practical considerations in mind:

It’s also important, when appealing to gift-buyers, to address objections around shipping/logistics (Will it arrive in time?), presentability (Does it come gift-wrapped? Do I have to remove the price tag?), and returns and exchanges (Will it be a pain to exchange shirt sizes? If my mom doesn’t like the mug I got her, can I return it?).

Liana Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Ecomm landing pages are particularly bad at answering these kinds of questions. If you’re equipped to tackle any them, make it as explicit as you can in your copy. Shipping guarantees, for instance, should probably never be buried in your FAQ at this time of year.

Who’s this gift for? According to Think with Google, searchers get extremely specific and personal during the holidays: “searches for ‘gift + ____ year old’ have seen a two-year growth of over 100%, while searches for ‘gifts for dad’ have grown over 80% during that same period.” Creating targeted PPC campaigns with tailored landing pages (using Dynamic Text Replacement) can help.

3. Learn from the Ghost of Deals Past

Look at your previous campaigns. You may have conducted a routine post-mortem already, but remind yourself now of what worked—and what didn’t—before you start to plan.

Review the key performance metrics for your campaigns. For landing pages, your conversion rate should tell you whether or not your page performed to your expectations. (If you’re just starting out, you can use Unbounce’s Conversion Benchmark Report or a variety of other resources to get a sense of where you should be hitting.) 

But I’d also recommend pulling other traffic and engagement metrics from Google Analytics. Your page’s bounce rate and session time are important. Plus, any relevant info about visitors (like geolocation, device type, etc.) that might give you a clue to who’s being naughty or nice. A lower than expected conversion rate might indicate that something went wrong, but engagement stats like these ones can help you sniff out the cause. 

Let’s say, for instance, you see that your holiday landing page had few conversions but Google Analytics also shows people are spending a long time on the page.

Google Analytics surfaces a lot of additional data about how prospects are interacting with your landing pages. It’s worth digging deep while you have the time so that you can make informed decisions going forward.

Why is this happening?

It could be visitors are actually very interested in your product, but they’re confused or turned off by something they see (or don’t see) on the landing page. Take steps to simplify the layout, add more impact to your copy, and make your call-to-action more prominent. (Perhaps, as mentioned above, you need to re-write it with specific gifting contexts in mind.)

Another possibility is that your product already compels, but your visitors hesitate to actually buy it. Maybe it’s an idea so ahead of its time that they remain locked in the consideration phase. Or maybe you’re selling something that’s a big investment. Assuming your prospects may be sitting on the fence, you might want to throw in an incentive (by way of a timed popup or sticky bar) to give ’em a nudge. 

Of course, you may have other ideas. In any case, diving into engagement metrics lets you formulate a hypothesis and plan your next move. 

What about A/B testing? Running valid A/B tests during the holiday period can be challenging. You need traffic and time that you may not have. Plus, seasonal traffic behaves differently—so you can’t rely on what you’ve learned at other times of the year. I do like this holiday testing guide from ConversionXL, which gives you a detailed rundown of what’s involved.

4. Use the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

Unless you’re just starting out, you already know about the persuasive power of adding a little urgency to your promotions. Countdown timers, announcing (realistic) product scarcity, running limited-time offers—these old hat strategies boost your conversions at any time during the year, as long as you don’t overdo ’em. 

Around the holidays, though, there’s already a sense of urgency built into the holiday shopping experience. Your customers are racing to get the best deals and check off every name on their list before Christmas.

Yeah, you could take advantage of this rush by ratcheting up the misery with big black numbers (counting down the remaining shopping days until the kids are forever disappointed, let’s say).

But there’s a much better approach.

Instead, offer your visitors a little something more…

Offer a Little Relief from the Rush

Think about your campaign like a pleasing piece of music: you need tension, sure, but also release. (Otherwise, it’s just noise.) Instead of relying on purely negative types of urgency, then, you can promote a sense of trust and reliability by relieving your visitors’ anxieties. It may lead to fewer impulse buys, but it’ll also help your brand in the long run.

As always, Amazon offers a pretty sharp example of this practice.

Sure, around the holidays they’ll up the ante with a countdown timer or two. (They also never miss an opportunity to indicate low stock.) But their bread and butter lies in relieving the anxiety associated with shipping. 

By including “Want it delivered by… order by…” messages on product pages, they promise their customers an almost impossible level of control. The effect of seeing that you need to “order it in the next 6 hours and 10 minutes” to receive the package by December 23 amplifies the urgency, sure, but it also empowers the customer:

There’s more than one way to get ready for the holidays.

Needless to say, if you want to go this same route, your expedited shipping solution should be up to the task. If your customers aren’t going to get those fancy new boots until mid-March, you’ll need to find another approach.

Anticipation and Excitement

Anticipation is another more positive expression of urgency worth exploring with your holiday campaigns. Amazon does this too.

As this analysis of their Black Friday promotions points out, over the past decade the company has slowly extended the sales period into “one torturously long stretch of spending lasting from Nov. 1 to Dec. 22.” But this period is also punctuated by flash sales and specials meant to keep the customer excited. Since 2011, in fact, they’ve made the countdown to the sale itself into an event with “Countdown to Black Friday Deals Week.”

Since 2013, Amazon’s Black Friday sales period has stretched from November 1st to December 22nd. (Image via Quartz)

Why are anticipation and excitement so effective? This may seem obvious, but they encourage repeated visits to their storefront in the quest for new deals, generate excitement about upcoming sales, and stretch the holiday shopping season across longer periods of time.

Is Amazon worth imitating, even on a smaller scale? You betcha.

And, according to Aaron Orendorff, there’s another major benefit to creating campaigns around anticipation: it can be much cheaper.

Ad costs are far lower in the lead up to the holidays. So, buy your traffic early by previewing your upcoming event across paid social. Collect your best deals—built around product categories or specific audiences—onto landing pages with one goal: to get visitors’ email addresses in exchange for early access (or something similarly enticing).

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

(I think Aaron just dropped the mic on us.)

Don’t Let the “Christmas Creep” Sneak Up on You

Here’s a final question for you: when will people start their Christmas shopping this year? The answer: they already have.

Sure, the received wisdom is that the holiday season starts after American Thanksgiving. But the National Retail Federation says brick-and-mortar retailers start to see shoppers before Halloween, which is why some stores have started setting up displays in September.

That’s nothing compared to the ecommerce world though. According to a consumer survey from Valassis, there’s a strong interest in early shopping online: “40 percent completing a portion of their gift purchase on Amazon Prime Day.” (That’s mid-July Christmas shopping!) Why not devise some clever ways to target these buyers longer before your competitors get there?

It’s a neverending nightmare, Charlie Brown.

Let’s face it. For today’s ecommerce marketer, the holiday season feels like it’s always just around the corner.

Thankfully, the enemies you face when planning these campaigns aren’t different from any other part of the year. How do you overcome them? Planning well in advance is a must. And finding workable shortcuts that don’t cut short on the quality of your campaigns is another approach. (That’s one of the big reasons we think landing pages are a killer alternative to web pages. You can drag and drop a campaign together without involving your web developer.)

And there are plenty of other times throughout the year to apply these tips. Depending on your perspective, the Christmas shopping season stretches across Halloween, two Thanksgivings (American and Canuck), Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day, and even New Years. But then you might see other opportunities around Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, July 4th, Arbor Day… you name it, there’s a promo you can run (and run early).

But if you want to have a real impact, the real meaning of Christmas in July is that you need to get started today.

https://unbounce.com/landing-pages/landing-pages-for-holidays-ecommerce/

[junker-town]

4 reasons we’re so happy Marshawn Lynch is back in the NFL

Lynch makes the league much more fun.

Marshawn Lynch is back in the NFL, and we couldn’t be happier about it. Even though he continued to entertain us during his retirement by starting a fire with one of his dreads in the wilderness with Bear Grylls and riding a bike around Houston, Scotland, for a Skittles Super Bowl commercial, football wasn’t the same without his antics.

Whether Lynch was leaping over the goal line or repeating “I’m just here so I don’t get fined” so often to reporters that he eventually trademarked the phrase, he was never afraid to be himself.

There are many memorable moments from Lynch’s career that kept us waiting eagerly to see what he would do or say next. We’re looking forward to adding many more to this collection from Lynch’s new chapter with the Oakland Raiders.

There’s no one in the NFL like Marshawn Lynch

Marshawn’s personality was on display from the moment he was drafted by the Buffalo Bills in 2007.

Buffalo isn’t a hotbed of culture or nightlife, but Lynch’s sense of humor was on display in this segment with Kenny Mayne for ESPN.

Lynch cares about how he performs on the field, but it seems like he could take or leave most things off of it. He didn’t join the Seahawks at the White House after Seattle’s Super Bowl XLVIII win because he just didn’t feel like going.

It looked like he might miss the Seahawks’ parade, too, but he showed up and did it all in the most Marshawn Lynch way possible — on the hood of the Sea Gals’ duck boat, smoking a cigar, drinking Fireball, and beating a drum.

Marshawn Lynch, riding on the SeaGals' Duck Boat, beating a drum, like a boss. #12parade #celebration48 http://pic.twitter.com/fQw8IZVvGs

— Bettina Hansen (@bettinahansen) February 6, 2014

He’s just about that action, boss

Lynch never loved talking to the media. It was never more evident than during the week leading up to Super Bowl XLIX.

He debuted his catchphrase “I’m just here so I don’t get fined,” using those words to answer 25 questions in a row, much to reporters’ chagrin. The next day, he switched it up, telling them “You know why I’m here,” when they asked questions.

He caught a lot of heat for all of it, too, but to be fair, Super Bowl Media Day is a veritable circus, and Lynch’s answers were probably more substantive than the questions he was getting.

This approach wasn’t limited to Super Bowl week. During the regular season, Lynch responded politely to reporters without really answering a single question. It was brilliant.

Transcript of @MoneyLynch's post-game quotes: http://pic.twitter.com/cuEIfYgzau

— Danny 710ESPNSeattle (@DDMon710) December 22, 2014

Lynch explained why he doesn’t care about talking to the media in an interview with NFL Network’s Deion Sanders.

“I’m just about that action, boss,” Lynch said. “That’s what it is. I ain’t never seen no talking win me nothing.”

Marshawn Lynch is a great dancer

Former Seahawks kicker Stephen Haushka found this out when he became somewhat of an unwilling dance partner for Lynch on the Seahawks’ bench.

And Lynch celebrated Seattle’s XLVII win by dancing in the locker room while (sort of) answering questions for the media.

Marshawn Lynch answering questions through the magic of dance.

A post shared by Tom Pelissero (@tompelissero) on Feb 2, 2014 at 7:45pm PST

We want more Beast Quake runs

Lynch coined his own nickname, Beast Mode, when he came into the league. Those words came to represent his style of play, best epitomized by his two Beast Quake runs.

In the first one, against the New Orleans Saints in the Wild Card round following the 2011 season, Lynch made contact with seven different Saints defenders, none of whom came close to slowing him down, on his way to the end zone. The Saints had finished the regular season 13-3 and were heavily favored to beat the home team. Seattle went 7-9 in 2011 and made it into the postseason by being just good enough to win the NFC West with a losing record.

The “Quake” part of its name from the seismic activity from Century Link Field immediately after Lynch’s touchdown. It registered as a magnitude-one earthquake, SB Nation’s Matt Ufford learned from John Vidale, the director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.

And that wasn’t the only time Lynch pulled off a Beast Quake. In 2014, he pulled off the longest touchdown run of his career, bouncing off of multiple Arizona Cardinals defenders en route to a 79-yard touchdown. The Week 16 win over the Cardinals helped the Seahawks lock up the NFC West.

During a visit to the NFL Films Studio, Lynch narrated his original Beast Quake run. Lynch’s commentary is probably the only thing that could make this play better.

We can’t get enough of Beast Quake, or anything else Marshawn does, and we’re thrilled he’s back.