E-Commerce Marketing: Detecting & Escaping Black Holes

Do you ever feel like you’re throwing your money into black holes and you hope it will bring leads and sales to your online store?

I wish I have a complicated godlike explanation for this, but it is too simple. When you do not base your decisions and investment on well-studied metrics that is how you feel. Spending and hoping for the best.

Unfortunately, it is the case of many online retailers and eCommerce store owners. They find data and metrics too complicated, numbers are frustrating and the time they waste collecting it can be invested in other tasks.

However, metrics are the raw material of wise decision making, business growth and sustainability. But only when you track the right Key Performance Indicators or KPIs.You can measure dozens of different metrics, and your specific needs will determine which are the most important for your store.

However, there are some metrics which are vital to the success of any store, such as your conversion rate or cart abandonment rate, average order value,…etc.

Keep up with me for couple of minutes, I will share with you some of the important areas that you should pay attention to, how it will help you grow your revenue, while keeping your spending WISE. And most of all stop sending your marketing budget to an unknown planet.

Q: What does a bad date and an awkward dinner have in common?A: They’re both a horrible waste of time and money.

Tossing your marketing budget down a black hole with no return on investment (ROI) is a similar waste of time and money. My point here is to learn from your black hole mistakes or prevent falling there in the future. Here are some tips on how to spend wisely your ecommerce marketing budget, and get rid of the hole by the ROI you’ll make.

Know/Segment your audience:

This is the most 101 tip for all companies who promote their products. Knowing your audience helps you:• craft specific messages• focus on potential• reach the right people• create cost-effective strategiesOnce you know who you are targeting, it is much easier to make decisions on media allocations. If your target market is young women, there is no need to purchase ad space in every magazine. You can advertise only in those popular with that audience. You’ll save money and get a better return on investment by using a target market plan.

Find general demographics, likes, interests, common problems, find out why they use your product or service, learn what the common language they use when communicating. All this information helps to create buyer personas that are targeted for your business.

Remarket to your customers and visitors:

After realizing some purchases, most eCommerce store owners become happy for earning their very first buyers. Later on they keep on hoping and praying to always get buyers.

At the same time that they never realize that those new customers can be turned into loyal ones.

“Remarketing” is typically the term used to describe re-engaging customers, whether via email marketing, Facebook ads or Google Adwords. Of course this can be done only with visitors who already got engaged with your store, whether they subscribed to your VIP email list, made a purchase or you tracked them using Facebook pixel.

This strategy has been proven to increase significantly your conversion rates. Once a person has expressed that initial interest in your business, they’re more receptive to relevant messaging. Remarketing allows you to get in front of them again on social channels, with display ads all over the web, in their email, wherever they are at the time.

If you experience that your Adwords campaigns perform badly compared to the other marketing tools, then your have several choices to remedy the problem. One of them is modifying your landing page where your ads are directed. As this has a beneficial effect on efficiency in a number of viewpoints. It is important for the ad, as well as for the CPC, how relevant your landing page is for a given search phrase and the given ad that occurred in the search. After that, it is important that your landing page would raise interest and support the buying decision. In order to achieve this goal, you might consider using the AIDA model for framing your landing page, by which you can achieve higher conversion rates once again.

Study the performance of your marketing channels:

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results”. That is exactly what you should never do, spending money on same marketing channels and expecting different outcomes.

These question should be part of your weekly reports:

• Which marketing channel brings the best conversion rate?
• Which keywords you need to use in your campaigns?

It is highly important for you to know these information. For example if your organic reach providing you with a good revenue, that’s where your focus should be. Furthermore, if you find out that you’re spending money on Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads however you’re not generating a revenue out of it, you should stop it since it’s not performing for you.

Creating ads without testing ad copy, not optimizing positive and negative keywords, or adjusting bids to find your sweet spot is pure craziness. You might as well just close your eyes and give Google a check each month.

Just remember that at some point you need to realize that the respirator plug needs to be pulled on ideas and strategies that don’t perform. Listen to the numbers, they don’t lie.

Use keywords with the highest PSI in your SEO campaigns

PSI (Potential SEO Index) tells you which keywords have the greatest potential. This shows you how likely you are to be ranked first, and how much revenue growth you can expect. Although these are only estimates, they provide a starting point for which keywords you should use.

Your non-converting keywords are keywords that direct visitors to a page which doesn’t convert. For category or product page that allow people to add an item to their cart, this can indicate a problem. You may need to optimize the landing page for the keyword, or you need to find keywords that convert better.

The key to leaving the marketing black hole is, track, analyze, and track again! Take a proactive approach to your marketing efforts.

Conversific is a Business Intelligence platform that help eCommerce site owners to unlock hidden revenue in their data and boost their store’s performance by delivering actionable business insights.

Here is the solutions it provides:

• All important ecommerce based data in one place.
• In a comprehensive but easy-to-understand way.
• Smart insights about products, categories, marketing channels and customers.
• Actionable tips and advices from eCommerce gurus about what to do with the data.

Beyond opportunities of increasing sales, you can also identify the bottlenecks where your business is losing money. Data-based optimization is the key to reducing your costs and growing your business.

After the installation, you just need to enable Google Analytics and Google Search Console Connection. Immediately after you’ve signed in, you’ll see a comprehensive view of your reports and dashboards.

Conclusion:

If you’re running an online store, you’re already working hard but there’s too much to do, and never enough time. Sometimes you’re not even sure where to begin when it comes to marketing. That’s why you should be looking for fast, easy ways to outsmart, out-position, and out-execute your competition so you stop “marketing by accident” and so that you sell more, more easily and more often…