Your brand is set up on your choice e-commerce platform. You’ve installed all the cart tools, widgets and apps to bring home those sales. But your competitors are using the same platforms and probably the same tools as you, so how can you gain a competitive edge?
Success in e-commerce comes down to having a strategy built on three fundamental components: identifying who your audience is, getting that audience to engage with your content and optimizing your site to convert more users faster.
1. Laser-Focused Targeting, Strategy and Execution
At its core, marketing is about getting people from one place to your site or app. With the right audience targeting, you are making sure your energy and resources are focused on people who are interested in your product or service. This increases your marketing click-through rate (CTR) and lowers the cost per acquisition (CPA). Before you send a single email or launch an ad campaign, you need to know who your target audience is.
Understanding Your Core Audience
• Review your analytics. Use channel analytics and free and paid tools like Google Analytics or Segment to deep dive into your audience.
• Experiment. Testing different in-market and affinity audiences, interests, life events, geographies and demographics will help confirm your assumptions and find new opportunities.
• Survey your current customers. Go directly to the source and find out who your customer is and why they like your products.
• Evaluate your competitors. Perform a competitive analysis to discover who your competitors target and how they communicate to find new opportunities.
Once you have your audience defined, you need to know your goal. Are you building brand awareness or driving conversions? Do you want to focus on impressions or clicks? The answers to these questions will help you set your direction and define your campaign strategy.
2. Scroll-Stopping Creative
As marketers, we need to acknowledge the way people consume information. Most of us spend our online time distractedly scrolling and searching for something that will surge our endorphins, get our blood pumping, make us feel something. We often read headlines but not the articles. We scroll through images but ignore the captions.
Knowing that the attention span of our target audience is getting shorter, and the amount of content available is growing exponentially, means we need to focus on creating assets that will stop the mindless scroll, and we only have a split second to do that.
How to Stop the Scroll
• Prioritize videos, gifs, HTML5 or animations. When something moves where it shouldn’t, our subconscious alerts us to danger, which draws our line of sight. Building ads with movement means a higher likelihood of a click and getting you closer to conversion.
• Maximize the format. Use visual and audible assets where and when available, and create assets that resonate with why people use the platform.
• Use emotion. As American poet Maya Angelou once said: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Engaging your customers’ emotions will make your campaign memorable.
• Include strong calls to action. If you do not tell your customers what you want them to do, they will do nothing. Don’t be shy; let them know what action you want them to take.
• Include star ratings or testimonials. Leverage your hard-earned five-star ratings in your ads to build trust with your customers through social proof.
• Mention an offer, discount or promotion. Consumers know they have options and are prone to shop around. Give people who are price-sensitive a reason to say yes.
• Highlight features, value and benefits. Explain to your customers why your product or service is different and better than all the other options.
Your energy should be focused on creating assets that capture attention, provide valuable information, respond to potential “nos” and make people feel excited about your products and services.
3. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and User Experience Optimization (UXO)
CRO and UXO comprise the last pillar of a successful e-commerce strategy. CRO and UXO are the processes of increasing the percentage of your users who perform a desired action.
While the ultimate conversion is generally a sale, the conversion event you’re interested in may be any other step along the way — creating an account, downloading an e-book or filling out a form.
CRO and UXO are all about asking questions regarding your customers’ experience on your site:
• What kind of friction do my customers experience as they navigate from page to page exploring our products or services?
• Are there opportunities to upsell or cross-sell my customers?
• How quickly can they get through the checkout process?
Without sitting over the shoulder of your customers, it might feel like a Herculean task to get answers to these questions. Luckily, there are visualization tools to help you understand what is happening on your site. You can also use analytics tools to focus on a few key metrics, which include:
• Page bounce rates: Knowing which pages result in high exits allows you to focus on optimizations that will keep more people engaged.
• Best and worst performing products: Understanding your best- and worst-performing products can help you set up cross-sells, upsells, line expansions and eliminations.
• New versus returning users. Keep an eye on the rate of returning visitors to inform you of how engaging your content is and how to improve your retention.
• Page speed and mobile friendliness. Run a page speed analysis using Google’s free PageSpeed Insights to see opportunities to improve average load times.
CRO and UXO are never stagnant, and work is never done because consumer behavior is constantly changing. Evolve with your customers to stay ahead of your competitors.
Focusing on any one of these pillars will set you apart from your competition. Independently, they are powerful tools for improving performance. However, implementing all three into your marketing and growth strategy will deliver the rocket fuel your business needs to become a household name.
Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies.
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