It’s that time of the year again. Digital marketers have returned from their summer holidays and before their hard earned suntans have begun to fade, the spectre of the holiday code freeze has appeared on the horizon.
As consumers, many prefer to delay their preparations for Christmas but as e-commerce marketers, the busy and hugely profitable holiday season has to be meticulously prepared for. Like the bloated feeling experienced directly after eating too much Christmas dinner, the code freeze is inevitable.
The code freeze is a company-mandated lockdown on any changes to their digital assets, so the chance of errors during the most important time of the year for online sales is drastically reduced. With UK retail spending during the 2014 festive period estimated at £74 billion, and around £17 billion of that online, you can understand why organisations are so cautious.
Christmas is an opportunity to make hay while the sun shines (if you will forgive the seasonally incompatible figure of speech) and e-commerce marketers need to ensure there is minimal downtime and a maximised flow of successful orders.
But there is a contradiction here – during periods of high activity, digital marketers should be able to implement, test and optimise new campaigns that could boost sales even further. But like the striker that scored a hat-trick and was then subbed, they are left cheering from the sidelines as the team defends their lead for the last 20 minutes.
It doesn’t have to be like this. With the Tealium iQ™ tag management in place before the freeze takes hold, digital marketers are able to continue contributing at the most vital stage of the game.
You want to deploy a new personalisation tool to optimise sales at the beginning of December? Not a problem. Marketers with no Javascript coding experience can implement, test and launch the campaign swiftly through our intuitive interface, reducing the burden on technical resources and retaining marketing agility and the competitive edge.
The new agility and control provided by Tealium iQ has other benefits — for instance, you may have a tag become faulty and wreak havoc at a critical point. That is precisely what happened to our client Deckers on Cyber Monday when an advertising tag caused considerable site performance issues across its network. The company had only deployed Tealium iQ on its main site, UGG Australia, at that point, and was able to easily identify and neutralise the rogue tag through the click of a button. This ensured the smooth running of the site and saved 100 percent of Cyber Monday orders. For the other e-commerce sites where Tealium was not deployed, the company had to bring in its developers to manually deal with the problem.
So now digital marketers no longer need to fear the code freeze every year and can plan to contribute and optimise at all points of the process. And the best news? Navigating the code freeze is only one of many benefits enjoyed by digital marketing and analytics professionals from Tealium iQ. It truly is the gift that keeps on giving.
Interest in learning more? Download the free guide, Escape the Holiday Code, today.
