Over the Thanksgiving weekend, search, affiliate, and other pay-per-click marketing made the difference online for the brands of multi-channel direct marketer Vermont Teddy Bear Co. Web manager Tom Funk tells Internet Retailer that on the Friday after the holiday, source code revealed that traffic from search and affiliate links was up two to four times its normal volume.
Most of the time, what drives sales for the company is radio and TV advertising, which the company doesn’t typically ramp up at this time of year. “Our biggest revenue source at this time of year is direct mail catalogs. We timed them to start hitting around Black Friday. But mail flow is a little slower than we predicted and it looks like we will see most of our direct mail catalog business happen this week, rather than last Friday,” says Funk.
Catalogs aside, the Friday after Thanksgiving was a day when online shoppers, including many new to the company, found the company’s brands through search. Funk says one of the company’s brands that is particularly strong at this time of year, Pajamagram.com, is also the site among the company’s family of sites that is most optimized for search. “On Friday, the people who are shopping online searching for pajamas and find us maybe don’t know about us, so they are not responding to direct mail marketing,” he adds.
Funk says Friday and also Monday volume doubled average volume over earlier in the month for all the company’s brands. About two-thirds of orders across the brands are now coming in online instead of through the company’s 800 number, compared to about 60% the rest of the year. He attributes that change to consumers’ increasing adoption of the web overall and some migration in the company's marketing mix to online advertising and search optimization.
Embroidered personalization, available as an option initially on two pajama products but now expanded to about 50 styles in the brand’s line, is also a factor in driving sales at the Pajamagram.com. “We now embroider about half of the items we offer on Pajamagram. Indications are that those high-speed embroidery machines are going to be really busy this month,” Funk says.
Vermont Teddy Bear ranks No. 174 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide to Retail Web Sites.
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