8 eCommerce Digital Marketing Tips

Hi! If you’ve landed on this blog, I will assume you run an eCommerce website and are looking for tips to grow your online business. Welcome...

 

Firstly, thanks to Neto for inviting me to provide this guest blog, it’s always a pleasure working with Neto and I hope you find the below tips useful! Having worked as a Digital Marketer at Reload Media (Neto’s digital marketing partner) for almost 4 years, I have built a number of digital campaigns for many eCommerce websites across a huge range of industries. So, with that in mind I have put together my top tips to help drive a successful eCommerce digital marketing campaign. Enjoy!

 

1. Set measureable objectives: Like any good marketing campaign, you should start by setting measurable objectives in order to drive digital marketing success. I know this one seems pretty straight forward but the key tip here is to ensure that you’re setting specific objectives for every aspect of your digital campaign including each platform that you chose to explore. For example, if I was running a Paid Search campaign to drive sales, I would set a ‘Return-On-Investment’ figure objective that is profitable for the business so that the exact point of profitability can be easily identified. Likewise, if I was running a Display banner ad campaign for brand awareness purposes, I would set objectives around ‘Cost-Per-Thousand-Impression’ figures and click volumes that are identified as successful. Whatever your objectives might be, identifying these early on is the key to knowing what’s not working, what needs tweaking or what just isn’t right for your business.

 

2. Know your competitors: I’m not just talking about identifying your competitors and keeping an eye on when they jump above you in Google’s search results. I mean really get you know your competitors. Have you joined their mailing list so that you’re kept up to date with exactly what they’re doing? Have you tested out their website, identified their ‘Unique Selling Propositions’ and navigated through their purchase path to see how it works? All of this information will help you develop campaigns that stand out against your competitors and draw customers in!

 

3. Be mobile: Creating websites and campaigns that are mobile friendly or even mobile specific is no longer just a nicety, it’s an absolute necessity. Understanding how your customers use mobiles/tablets/desktops will ensure user experience is maintained across multiple devices and ultimately gain better results. Google Think Insights also identifies that 90% of multi-device owners will complete a task across more than one screen (http://www.google.com.au/think/statistics/multiple-device-owners.html). Where possible, digital campaigns should be segmented across each device and messaging tailored so that you can better relate to potential customers on each device.

 

4. Analyse trends: This is especially important in the retail sector. At Reload Media, we see many increases and/or decreases in visits or revenue occurring as a result of natural peaks and troughs within an industry. Therefore, it is very important to understand the trends within your industry and business. This way, if sales are down (or up!) you’ll be able to ascertain whether it is normal for that time of year. In terms of managing your digital campaigns, understanding when there is simply less demand for your products or when to increase your budget to capitalise on higher demand will ensure you are adapting to industry trends. Using simple tools such as Google Trends for some of your top keywords as well as comparing year on year trends for your own website will help to drive your digital marketing campaign and understand any external market factors that could affect you.

 

5. Monitor purchase path dropouts: It’s all well and good to develop the best digital marketing campaign possible, but if you spend time and money drawing people to your website then you also need to invest in ensuring that your website is keeping those visitors on the site (and not clicking the back button straight to your competitors!). The beauty of digital is the amount of data available to help you gain real insight into your customers, and to understand why people browse multiple products or add products to the shopping cart but don’t finish a purchase. Once you are measuring this information, you can work on improving each step of the purchase path where most drop outs occur. This can sometimes be as simple as fewer fields on each page so that it’s not overwhelming or having a blue “Submit” button instead of a red one. Platforms like Neto also come in handy here making it much easier for businesses to constantly improve as they are focused on the usability of their platform for their clients.

 

6. Test, learn, then test again (and again!): Just like you would merchandise a bricks and mortar store as new products come in or update your shop front window to draw in customers, this same methodology should be applied to your digital marketing campaign. This could be as simple as testing different call to actions in your ad copy or landing people on a different page on your website. From there, identify what encourages more purchases and use this information to continually improve your digital marketing campaigns.

 

7. Try remarketing: Depending on the products you’re selling, the length of the consumer decision journey can vary, involving very little or a lot of research. Either way, I would recommend trying a remarketing campaign. This allows you to essentially ‘tag’ users who visit your website and build up a list over time which you can then serve ads to depending on how those visitors navigated your website. For example, if someone adds a product to their shopping cart but doesn’t complete a purchase; you could remarket ads to them with a ’10% off’ promotional code encouraging them back to your site to complete the purchase. Or, if your product is one that needs replenishing you could remarket to people who bought the product a certain number of days after with ads around “Don’t Run Out of [Product Name]. Buy Online Now. Quick Delivery!” There are lots of options when it comes to a remarketing strategy and it is a great way to increase branding, top of mind awareness and have a cost effective ongoing engagement piece with your customers.

 

8. Google Shopping: My final tip to you is to utilise Google Shopping. This allows you to show very targeted and specific advertising based on your website inventory. The granular level of the product targeting available (through use of a product feed) for your ads means that when people are conducting specific product searches and therefore more likely to buy, your ads will be placed in front of them. What’s more, utilising Product Listing Ads will also allow product images and pricing to be shown directly in Google’s Search results which may just help you get the click and ultimately, the sale!

 

Of course, there are so many other opportunities you can explore with digital marketing to help drive traffic and sales through your eCommerce website but these are just a few that I would recommend.

 

If you would like to get a digital marketing campaign started, contact the team at Neto or Reload Media today. Also, remember to share this article on your preferred social channel.