Pre-Holiday Campaigns: Twitter Marketing Checklist for eCommerce Businesses

The big holiday season is fast approaching. Is your eCommerce store ready?

There’s a lot to do to prepare your eCommerce business for the holiday season. To help you out, here’s a quick Twitter marketing checklist for eCommerce brands to ensure you maximize your opportunities.

1. Research relevant hashtags and set up your tracking

Hashtags are key to Twitter success.

Aside from helping maximize content discovery, hashtags can also help you and your team brainstorm more effective content and seasonal special offers.

Surprisingly, there are not a lot of tools for hashtag research, so you will have to spend some time searching Twitter and trying to narrow down your list. To give you a head start, here are a few cool tools for you discover your best-working holiday-related hashtags:

KeywordTool.io

KeywordTool.io is a freemium keyword research tool that includes a very helpful hashtag research feature. For free, you'll get a list of hashtags to research. If you upgrade, each hashtag will also be accompanied by helpful metrics, including:

• Google’s search volume - Shows how many people were searching Google for this hashtag this month in the previous year
• Trend - Shows you how the monthly search volume for a keyword has changed over the last 12 months
• CPC - Data on cost per click performance based on Google Ads)
• Competition - This is the number of advertisers bidding on each keyword, relative to all keywords across Google

While those metrics don’t really rely on any Twitter-specific data (because Twitter doesn’t give access to much of the data that they collect and own), these insights can help you make a more informed decision as to the popularity of each hashtag. 

Hashtagify

Hashtagify is one of the few hashtag-specific tools out there. It analyzes millions of Twitter feeds to identify closely related hashtags.

This enables you to expand your core list to more terms to research.

Text Optimizer

Another tool to discover terms beyond your initial “obvious” list, Text Optimizer uses semantic analysis to find underlying concepts that constitute any topic.

You'll also be able to use these hashtags on Instagram, so keep this list handy.

2. Find and connect to influencers

To get the most out of your holiday push, try and find people that will help you spread the word. Lots of bloggers and Twitter influencers are looking for content and gift ideas for Christmas, so if you approach them with your freebie or ideas, they may be really thankful.

Buzzsumo is a great tool to find niche influencers and start building meaningful connections with them. Just type in your keyword/s and look through the list. 

For each identified Twitter profile, Buzzsumo will display the number of followers, as well as reply and retweet ratios, which reflect how much unique content each influencer publishes versus how much content they repost from other accounts. Another useful metric here is “Average Retweets” which shows how many retweets, on average, this users' tweets see.

All of these data points can help you identify “real” influencers, i.e. those that retweet others and generate retweets from their followers.

3. Optimize your site for conversions

Prior to launching your Twitter campaign, make sure to create a clear conversion optimization strategy. In other words, what is it that you want your Twitter referral traffic to do on your eCommerce site.

Specifically, for an eCommerce store, think about creating and/or optimizing these pages:

• Special offers page (e.g. “Christmas deals”)
• Product bundles pages
• Gift ideas
• Individual product pages

Make sure all of these pages look good and function well on mobile devices (Twitter traffic has long been mostly mobile). Moreover, you need to also create clear buying journeys throughout the site by setting up product recommendations, personalized CTAs and off-site engagement methods (like cart abandonment emails).

Before launching your Twitter campaign, you need to ensure that you're maximizing your odds to convert the traffic you'll (ideally) get, across your entire store.

Using Artificial Intelligence, Dialogue provides a great way to personalize your site users’ shopping experience and turn them into your customers by providing smart product recommendations and suggesting best content based on each user journey.

Dialogue is easy to integrate using a Shopify app, so you can easily test it now while you still have some time.

Here are a few more great Shopify apps to consider for this holiday season.

4. Track your results

Finally, the earlier you set up your events and goals, the more data you will be able to accumulate. You'll need all that data for an even more successful Twitter marketing campaign next year.

Finteza is a great web analytics suite which makes data analytics easy and effective. You can track your conversion funnels and how your Twitter traffic is interacting with it to identify possible issues and distractions that could prevent your site users from making a purchase:

Conclusion

Holiday marketing is exciting, especially on a fast-paced social media platform like Twitter. Yet, it can be quite overwhelming as well.

It will be both easier and more effective if you come prepared. Use the checklist above to make sure your holiday marketing campaign will be a huge success.