Tuesday, December 1, 2020
Tuesday, December 1, 2020
If the strategies in this blog post are executed properly you will be successful in eCommerce and exponentially grow your brand. Let’s dive right in.
The most important part to getting sales in eCommerce is your website, going even further, specifically, your product page where users complete the purchase action and where you are sending your traffic to. This is the foundation of your whole operation, if this isn’t done right everything else will fail.
The number one goal of your eCommerce website should be to establish trust and credibility. You’ll see those words a lot in this article and we’ll give actionable practices to increase this on your eCommerce operation throughout this post. Ecommerce is like a giant machine with many gears operating simultaneously. The website or funnel is the base of the operation and needs to have the proper content/structure in place to convert and function. 50% of all global traffic in 2020 was mobile. People have their cards, Paypal, Apple Wallet, etc connected and are ready to buy with one click. Some red flags that will make customers bounce on your site are:
We always say K.I.S - keep it simple, it’s better to not reinvent the wheel here. Unless your brand calls for it. What we mean is to use functionality that people expect when shopping online.
Use high-quality imagery to evict emotion, it’s always best to use gifs or videos of your product in use.
Want to see your conversion rate skyrocket? - Include reviews of satisfied customers with imagery. Over our years and years in eCommerce, this is the number one thing we’ve seen an increase in conversion. It’s social proof and it establishes trust and credibility. Now maybe you’re saying to yourself I don’t have any reviews or how the heck do I get reviews? Don’t worry here are a few ways to get them:
It’s important to go the extra mile on this.
Alright, so now you have an eCommerce website with high-quality imagery, product videos, customer reviews, best conversion design practices, mobile responsiveness, what’s next?
Again, using K.I.S. let’s break down what’s happening. Remember this Acronym: T. P. S.
Traffic → Product → Sales
That’s all eCommerce is. It’s quite simple. Always remember this if you feel overwhelmed by digital marketing strategies or technical implementation. We’re sending targeted traffic to our product page and converting them. We then look at all the data and optimize/repeat!
Let’s dive even further on this by plugging the Shopify eCommerce model into the 5 functions of business.
Let’s go over practical examples for the Shopify eCommerce model as it applies to the 5 functions of business:
This is your front-end efforts. Any and all methods you are using to get traffic to your store. Some popular traffic generating efforts are Facebook ads, Youtube ads, Tik Tok ads, Instagram ads, Google ads, social media content creation, outbound efforts, email marketing, influencer marketing, and affiliates.
When customers do arrive at your website it’s best practice to have social media pixels installed to capture data and Google Analytics. Many eCommerce brands will have exit-intent popups and email capture forms. This will allow you to nurture potential customers and allow you to use your eCommerce assets to retarget customers in hopes to convert them.
This is why the eCommerce model is so popular, your website does this step for you. This is simply everything we’ve built on our website to get the website visitor to take out their credit card and enter their information to buy your product.
This is the logistics and infrastructure in place to get your product to your customer. Keep in mind Amazon does this step in a day or the next day. While this is unrealistic for smaller eCommerce brands, you’ll see an increase in conversion the faster you can get your product to your customer.
This step is often missed by eCommerce store owners but is key to building a long-term brand and increasing profits. It can best be explained by an example: If you have a watch eCommerce brand an example of customer ascension would be to upsell a watch cleaning kit immediately after the user adds a watch to their cart or makes a purchase. Or cross-selling them similar matching bracelets or necklaces. The point is to increase your customer’s average order value in turn, increasing your profit margin.
True customer ascension is always having the next step for your customer. For example, referring back to the watch eCommerce store, you can ascend your customer after they purchase a lower ticket watch into “ the watch of the month club” a premium watch subscription service or ascend them into buying a high ticket custom watch display case.
The point is you should always have the “next thing” more likely than not a higher ticket item to sell to your customers. Hopefully, this example helps the brainstorming phase for what you can upsell or ascend your customers into a higher ticket product. Without trying to sound crass, the customer ascension phase is trying to make more money off your current customers.
To really hit the customer ascension phase home here is a real-life example we are using here at Webvio with one of the eCommerce brands we manage.
We have a personalization eCommerce brand where users can upload a picture of their pet and customize their own products. Our cash cow is our phone cases. Once someone customizes their phone case and adds it to their cart we upsell them a low-ticket custom dog pet id tag. Some customers take it, some do not, but it increases our average order value and makes our digital marketing efforts more profitable. After they receive their product and they love it, they’ve completed the front-end funnel. We then ascend them into our backend high ticket funnel upselling them customized pillows, mugs, and our most expensive item, a professional hand-drawn portrait of their pet.
Hopefully, that clears up the ascension phase and starts brewing some ideas for you. The power of this comes in increasing the lifetime value of your customer. Instead of making 40% margins on a custom phone case, a percentage of our customers will ascend into buying a more expensive product.
The ascension model is done through the backend of your Shopify strategy, we’ll cover best practices on the backend of your eCommerce business model where the magic really happens and separates real brands from pop-up shops bound to fail.
The foundation is laid, you understand the big picture of eCommerce, you have all the 5 functions of business implemented for your eCommerce strategy, now let’s talk about the backend of eCommerce. The goal of the back end is to increase profits and set you up as a long-term brand.
The backend model of eCommerce includes your tracking pixels, email list building, and referral marketing campaigns. Let’s go over the importance of owning your own data and the power behind the backend of eCommerce. Most commonly used will be the Facebook tracking pixel. This piece of tracking code installed on your website will track website visitors and what actions they take on your website. Let’s say you get 1,000 purchases in a month. You can go in your Facebook ads manager and create a lookalike audience of Facebook/Instagram users who “look like” your 1,000 customers who have purchased. It’s incredibly powerful and no other Facebook advertiser will own that data but you. The cheapest ads you will run on paid media are retargeting campaigns.
Again, with the Facebook pixel, you can send ads to people who have already been on your website. As we know it takes about 13-15 times for a user to interact with your brand before they buy. This is especially true for higher ticket items. You can accomplish similar goals with Google Analytics and newly, the Tik Tok pixel.
As customers come to your website, order, and interact with your brand you will be building up an email list and getting subscribers. To go even further on this, you can collect phone numbers and Facebook messenger subscribers to accomplish even better results on your backend strategies. You can send your most loyal and engaged customers discount codes, promotions, ascension tactics, incentivize reviews, and our personal favorite, referral campaigns.
This strategy is not that common but incredibly powerful and can exponentially grow your eCommerce brand. A referral campaign is turning your current and happy customers into mini salesmen/affiliates for your brand. Your customers are doing the work for you. You see this all the time with large brands. For example, on Hulu if you refer your friend you get a month free and they get 5 bucks off their first month. One of the most successful referral programs we’ve seen is the Robinhood app. If you refer a friend you get a free stock and so does the user to whom you’ve signed up. This can be done a lot easier than you think. There are many Shopify applications you can plugin to accomplish this. Referral Candy and Talkable have free trials, free starter plans, and low-budget monthly subscriptions. If you need more advanced features and a more complex referral program, we recommend Ambassador. (Our founder used to work for them). These programs are easier to set up and launch than you might think. We currently use Talkable for our referral programs on the eCommerce stores we manage. You can have your program up and running in less than 20 minutes, realistically.
Let’s dive into this even further to paint the picture of what to expect with a successful referral program. Your customer completes the checkout process they are then sent to a screen where they can email or share a custom link to their network and any purchasers they send you will receive whatever reward you set. It could be money, discounts on your product, or an Amazon gift card. Make it enticing enough that they actually want to refer you though. Your customer can then take their unique link and post it to their 1,000 Facebook friends who know and trust them already. Or text/email their friends and family to help get them a discount. Hopefully, you can understand how this could exponentially grow and the power behind this. Next thing you know, you have an army of satisfied customers working behind the scenes to build your brand sending your products out to their network who already know and trust the person referring them. It’s incredibly powerful.
If you take all the practical knowledge from this post and apply it to your Shopify eCommerce brand you will see results. Overall, eCommerce, digital marketing, even business, in general, is just about trying new strategies, seeing if it works, and optimizing. If we could leave you with a few things to take away from this post it would be: K.I.S - keep it simple and everything you do whether that’s building your store or marketing it’s all about trust and credibility.
If you want to talk about any and all things eCommerce let’s chat! Schedule a call even if you just want to get a second opinion on some strategies, design, we’re nerds about this stuff we’d love to chat for a few minutes with you and bounce ideas around!
