A digital marketing strategy that was successful in one quarter might not bring the same results in the next. As small business owners and marketing strategists, it is within our job description to stay up-to-date with emerging trends, adjust fast, and keep coming up with innovative ideas without breaking the bank.
When it comes to marketing, it’s all about ROI, and this guide will focus on some ecommerce marketing strategies that should help you reach a higher return of investment in your 2021 marketing campaigns.
Applying a data-driven approach to your marketing campaign and personalizing your content are two of the safest overarching strategies this year. Running a data-driven and personalized strategy can net you more than five times the ROI in your marketing efforts.
Increasing Your eCommerce Marketing ROI — Actionable Tips
Let’s take a look at a few specific and practical strategies that you can use to help increase the ROI of your ecommerce marketing plan in 2021.
1.Use Personalization to Provide More Relevant Offers
Your customers’ buying decisions are directly impacted by content personalization, and this is a fact that you should not neglect by any means.
The preferences and interests of online shoppers can differ significantly. This provides a particular challenge for content personalization since brands need to consider multiple customer segments when creating relevant experiences. A web design agency in Miami will be looking at an entirely different set of parameters than a dentist’s office in Mumbai.
Firstly, you need to collect as much information as you can find on your users’ behavior. You should be tracking the pages they visit, how often they convert with your store (and others), and what types of products interest them.
You can measure and keep track of other things, but these are some of the most prevalent examples. Before you start creating your personalized ecommerce offer and page content, take this information and analyze it to get a clearer picture of your audience’s preferences.
A simple and efficient way to approach this is by using online questionnaires and polls to get additional info about your store visitors and learn about the types of products and content they enjoy.
Once you’ve settled on a data collection plan, you can start thinking about the elements of your website that you can customize to provide a personalized user experience to each one of your customers. A few popular examples include the product pages, the checkout process, and perhaps most notably, the main page.
Dynamic content, including product descriptions, headlines, widgets, and images, can all be customized to each user to create a one-of-a-kind experience based on the interactions said user has had with the store in the past.
2.Don’t Underestimate the Power of Segmentation
Another way to keep your offers more relevant to your customer is list segmentation. Email, more specifically your newsletter, is an excellent example of a channel where segmentation is crucial. Let’s take a look at a few ways to segment your email lists to provide unique experiences to your different user groups.
You can personalize online content with email automation using a wide array of different criteria, including but not limited to:
- Preferences and interests
- Demographics (employment, age, etc.)
- Browsing history
- Location
- Purchase history
If you run an apparel ecommerce store, you can ask your customers to rank how well a previously purchased product fits them. This is not just a great way to gather customer feedback and get your clients to rate the quality of your product, but it helps you engage your audience via email and increase their trust in your brand.
3.Take Advantage of that Sweet, Sweet Data
You can’t improve what you can’t measure, so when you decide to create an ecommerce marketing strategy you have to rely on data to do the heavy lifting.
Use dashboards and custom reports to identify potential problems and bottlenecks in your strategy by analyzing every aspect of your campaign’s performance.
A custom dashboard enables you to quickly check your KPIs and marketing goals and see if everything is running smoothly. You can also see whether your new content personalization strategy is going and if your efforts are translating into more sales.
That said, while custom dashboards tell you how some of your strategies are performing, they can’t tell you why this is the case. For this, Google Analytics custom reports are your best bet, as they enable you to dive deep into things like goal completions and traffic sources, differentiating between different devices and operating systems, for example.
Always keeping data at the forefront of your decisions (marketing and otherwise) is an excellent approach if you want to achieve the goals you’ve set for your ecommerce store.
4.Learn About Your Customers Through A/B Testing
No matter how much you study your data, you’ll never be able to know your customers as much as they know themselves.
You might have some informed assumptions on how they will interact with your store and what elements and content will best serve their preferences and needs. However, when these assumptions don’t provide the results you were hoping for, you’ll inevitably question them.
At this point, you may think that it is time to conduct a set of usability tests and learn what your customers really think about your store. Unfortunately, the results are more than likely to surprise you in a bad way.
To avoid ever reaching this stage, your best bet is to test a set of different approaches from the very beginning. Running regular A/B tests enables you to immediately understand exactly which page versions and website elements perform better, keeping your conversion rates at the height of their potential.
A/B testing allows you to understand how small changes in your page structure and content can affect your prospects’ behavior. There are several page elements you should take into consideration for your A/B tests, including:
- Content
- Call-to-action buttons
- Reviews and testimonials
- Images
- Checkout page
- Navigation bar
Researching the way that your prospects interact with your store is crucial and allows you to make more accurate predictions about their behavior in the future. This, in turn, lets you set up different sets of variables and launch more tests, continuing to improve your website’s performance along the way.
5. Nurture Your Leads to Avoid Churn
Churn and cart abandonment are among the biggest challenges in ecommerce. Statista reports a whopping 88.05% of abandoned shopping orders across all industries in March 2020. This is undoubtedly an alarming piece of data, but to an entrepreneurial mind, it also presents an opportunity.
If you can keep your churn rate lower than this number, you can create a tangible advantage over your competition in the market.
Arguably the only way to avoid high abandonment rates is to nurture your relationship with the users who haven’t gone through with their purchases yet. Triggered emails and retargeting ads can bring your hesitant prospects back to the store. For first-time buyers, in particular, time-sensitive discounts are also an excellent strategy.
6. Build Trust Through User-Generated Content
Social media posts, product photos, and reviews shared by your customers are an excellent way to spread brand awareness and break the buying objections of hesitant prospects.
Encouraging user-generated content (UGC) through hashtags and challenges on various social networking platforms allows shoppers and influencers to share their experiences with your brand. This can help you show other potential customers how your products can be used and how they can add value to their lives.
Another significant aspect of this social media strategy is that it not only spreads awareness of your brand but builds closer relations with your loyal customers — those who are willing to engage with the campaign.
7. Rely on Evidence Rather Than Your Gut
It can be tempting to make life decisions based on your gut feeling. After all, we’ve been taught from a young age to follow our hearts. The truth is that, even though you should let your creative ideas flow,토토사이트 nothing will bring you more surefire results than using data analytics and keeping a close eye on your KPIs.
It may not sound glamourous, but it is the only way to reliably build an effective marketing strategy in 2021.
Trust us — you’ll run into many trendy marketing hacks along the way, and a few of them may even sound like the best ideas ever conceived of. However, if you want to achieve a big goal and truly build an ecommerce empire, slow and steady wins the race.
Set aside short-term tactics and fads and focus on a well-planned strategy backed up by data. So, what are the aspects you should keep in mind to increase your ecommerce marketing ROI?
First of all, consider how you introduce new strategies into your overall campaign. Analyze how much time is spent on each strategy, separating those that performed well and those that performed poorly.
Time-management tools can help you learn how you should re-allocate your time and reduce spending time and effort on activities that don’t contribute to the growth of your business.
Finally, remember the success of your marketing strategy relies less on the strategy itself and more on how you and your team deliver it. Reconsider your team’s management of daily tasks and think about making a plan to improve the overall collaboration and cooperation within the company.
Travis Dillard is a business consultant and an organizational psychologist based in Arlington, Texas. Passionate about marketing, social networks, and business in general . In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing for Finddigitalagency.