tagged: christmas, ecommerce, onlineretail, paidsearch, postalstrike, ppc, seo, strategy

Paid Search and Postal Strikes

Posted by Kupr in ppc, seo

Today the Royal Mail will see CWU members go on two 24 hour strikes, which will obviously have an effect on the speed of postal deliveries over the next few days.  If this strike had taken place during the lead up to Christmas the impact on business and individuals would have been a lot worse.  Amazon have already announced that they are switching supplier for all deliveries weighing more than 500gs, as they do not want their business to be threatened by a militant key third party.

So taking all of this into account, what can be done with paid search to minimise the negative effects, or even capitilise, on a postal strike?

• If an advertiser has the option of using a different postal service to the Royal Mail, this should be highlighted in the ad text as it could be a USP over competitors.

• If a strike takes place in the lead up to Christmas, make sure the last delivery date is clear in the ad text, to ensure customers know when they have to order items to arrive in time for Christmas.

• As the delivery times will be affected some advertisers might decide to offer free postage to compensate.  Again this should be clearly mentioned in the ad text as a KSP.

• In keeping with best practice of making sure the customer receives no suprises between the ad text and what they find on the site, you should state the typical number of days for delivery.  This will stop users clicking on your ad who wanted a quicker turnaround time than can be supplied and you will preserve more of your budget and protect ROI.

• Is there a ‘buy and collect’ service available that can be promoted.  This would give the customer all the benefits of shopping online, but the guarantee of getting their purchase when required.

The danger for the e-commerce sector is that many consumers may turn to the highstreet to make physical purchases of their goods if they feel they cannot rely on the Royal Mail to provide normal delivery times.  In an already tough climate, this will put even more pressure on the online retailers to hit targets and a lot of the focus will undoubtedly fall on PPC.  Agencies should be talking more than ever to their clients so that strategies can be devised early and make sure there are clear objectives and tactics in place.

All of this creates a great example of the advantage PPC has over SEO in terms of immediacy.  Whithin the space of an hour, a strategy can be formulated and implemented to react to an outside influence giving the advertiser the oportunity to reduce any potential losses or possibly increasing performance due to an advantage they may be able to exploit.  To do this through SEO particularly, or any other form of online advertising would take a lot longer to implement by which time the event may have already passed by.

To read more about using PPC and SEO together, see one of my previous posts.