It’s March and that means we are well into 2015. You’ve got 9 months left to get it right and only 7 months before the holiday season officially kicks off. So are you ready to increase your revenue this year and make 2015 your best year yet?
If you answered an enthusiastic absofrickenlutely sign me up YES to the above question (because why would you not?), you might be asking yourself a few questions:
- How do I entice people to buy more and spend more from my store?
- What do I do to get customers to make purchases more frequently, or in greater volume?
- How do I decrease shopping cart abandonment?
- Or maybe you just want more people to start coming to your website….
Whatever your goal may be, we (the springbots) always suggest creating time-sensitive eCommerce marketing promotions that have a good grasp on your target customer demographic. If you do this, you’ll be able to incentivize the right people to take the right actions, get them to respond, and voila, you just accomplished your 2015 revenue goals.
However, before you start creating revenue generating butt-kicking marketing campaigns, you first need to understand the 3 very different stages of the buying journey. By understanding these stages, you can better target your campaigns to the right person with the right message at the right time.
- Stage 1: Before they meet you and your store: For many purchases, the buying journey starts when the consumer decides that they need a specific product, such as a new pair of shoes. Or maybe, you’re such a good marketer that the consumer is not even aware they need new shoes…and then you show them the error of their ways. This aspect of the buying process looks at how a potential customer finds your store. Is it through organic search? Is it from some blog writer or maybe it’s from an AdWords campaign. Whatever the reason, they found you. Now what? How do you get them to convert? And how do you make sure that more and more people continue to find you and not your competitors.
- Stage 2: They’re in the middle of making a purchase: If you’ve reached this step, you should give yourself a pat on the back. You’ve created awareness and the consumer is ready to part with their hard earned money. You may think your work is done, BUT in reality you need to take the opportunity to upsell and/or cross-sell. This is the perfect stage to cross-sell them other related products, like socks to go with their shoes, or try to upsell them to a more expensive pair of shoes. Heck, maybe you are even running a product bundle promotion that encourages them to buy 4 shoes for the price of 3.
- Stage 3: After they make a purchase: As you may have heard a time or ten, it’s easier AND cheaper to sell more to an existing customer than to attract a new one. And we (the springbots) think it’s crucial that it be done right. This is also your opportunity to create brand/store advocates and increase customer loyalty. Maybe you want to run a promotion that targets the top 25% of your customers and offers them an exclusive offer to thank them for their loyalty. You could also always offer this segment of your customer base a first peek of all new merchandise and early access to all store promotions.
For the purposes of this post, we are going to focus on 4 tactics that are specific to eCommerce marketing promotions (regardless of their selling stage) that are worth their weight in revenue gold when implemented correctly. They are:
- Why you should upsell like crazy
- How to stop the annoyance of shopping cart abandonment
- Why email is the bomb.com
- And the super obvious. Tracking your efforts.
Ready to get started?
1. Upsell Like Crazy
“May I interest you in this upgrade that you cannot possibly turn down because you cannot possibly live without (insert product)?
Most of us have heard some form of that question, probably in a more subtle way. It’s an example of upselling, or a way to get the customer to spend more money. Basically you want them to buy a more expensive model of the same type of product, or add features and/or warranties that relate to the product in question.
And guess what? Upselling works. In fact, Econsultancy says upselling is 20 times more effective than cross-selling online (and the reason we are focusing on it in this post).
Now what? We think that when it comes to successful upselling, there are two main tactics to focus on: 1) Make your upsells related to the original product. For example, if your customer wanted to buy boots, you probably do not want to upsell a pair of sandals. It’s confusing. 2) Always remember to be sensitive to the price range of your customers. Just keep in mind that your product has to fit the original needs of your customer, and that they may not be very enthusiastic about a higher product price once they have an anchor price in mind. The new product must really be better than the original.
2. Stop “Abandoning” Easy Revenue Tactics
You’re losing money by missing out on potential orders. But don’t take it personally. It happens to the best of us. And even better, it’s an easily fixed problem.
Shopping cart abandonment, aka the thorn in the side of any eCommerce marketer, is the practice of a customer adding items to their carts but abandoning their carts during the checkout process. According to the Baymard Institute, 67.45% of shopping carts are abandoned before they’re completed. Think about that for a second. If your store generates 1 million a year in revenue, that means you are potentially missing out on an additional 2 million a year in sales. That means, if you converted every single cart that was abandoned, your store is suddenly generating over 3 million a year instead of 1 million. Do I have your attention now?
So the question is, how do you fix this? Easy. One simple and effective way to reduce the incidence of abandoned carts is by launching an automated abandoned cart email recovery campaign. This campaign should convince your customers to complete their purchase, and whether that be through great content that convinces them that buying from you will be the best decision they ever make or by offering an additional sales incentive, this email is your chance to get them to come back and make a purchase.
So go ahead. Craft a good email that entices your customer to return to their cart. And guess what? You can do this with Springbot. Just contact our eCommerce marketing experts and schedule a demo to learn how it works. We also suggest you take a look at this infographic that talks about 14 reasons why online shoppers abandon their carts.
3. Email. It Really Truly Works.
If you could only invest in one marketing channel, it would be email. But to be clear, we think you should explore, test and make use of every marketing channel out there. With that said, email is the very best channel at your disposal in online marketing. It drives traffic, it features your awesome blog content, promotes time sensitive exclusive deals, helps to nurture customer loyalty and outperforms social and pretty much everything else when it comes to generating sales.
Don’t believe us? According to recent research, email is the number one driver of traffic for eCommerce stores.
The key to successful email marketing is remembering that it’s not enough to capture a bunch of email addresses. You actually have to send them emails, preferably on a consistent basis. Even better if you segment those emails and send personalized offers and content based on your segments.
What type of emails should you be sending?
- An easy email campaign to launch is to send out a welcome email as soon as a customer signs up. These have among the highest open rates of any marketing emails.
- You could also send out an automated email every time a customer makes a purchase to a) thank them for their purchase and b) encourage a future purchase by offering a buying incentive. This email is also a great way to encourage customer reviews and get people to share their purchase experience on social channels.
- Another super easy email campaign you should be doing is sending out regular newsletters, and let subscribers know of new discount offers, product tips, and fun company news. At Springbot, we send two monthly newsletters that segments based on customers and future customers. We find that offering our readers different content based on where they are in the buying cycle increases the open rate and overall success rate.
For more email inspiration, check out How to Increase your Email List Size and Realize the Incremental Sales Benefits and Email Subject Lines: The Good, the Bad, and those Other Ones.
4. Lastly, You Need to Know What is and is NOT Working.
In order for you to get the most benefit from running any eCommerce marketing promotion, whether it be one listed in this blog post, or something entirely different (like a rock star retargeting campaign) you SHOULD track the percentage of sales resulting from the campaign you are running.
In a perfect world, you would be able to track revenue attribution from every marketing action taken and from every different marketing channel available. You would also be able to get a better understanding of who is buying and what they are buying. For example, maybe women mostly make purchases from email campaigns while men tend to buy from Twitter campaigns.
Guess what? Your world just got perfect because Springbot can do all the above and more. Check out our blog post that explains how our analytics dashboard works and all the different features it offers. With the right tool (like Springbot), you can be far more strategic and efficient in your marketing. And this is what will give you enough time to plan everything in advance and understand what is and is not working so you can adjust accordingly to ensure you’re not wasting your efforts.
So, the next time you need a little marketing inspiration, you’ll have no trouble finding the perfect promotion strategy for your goal. (Hint: We suggest bookmarking this page). You can also contact one of our eCommerce marketing experts who can walk you through a million more ideas.
