your blueprint for growing ecommerce sales - jarrang · 2018-07-25 · your blueprint for growing...

Your Blueprint for Growing

Ecommerce Sales

ContentsIntroduction

It’s all about the data

Understanding your business

Your marketing strategy

Executing your strategy

Measuring success

Conclusion

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IntroductionLet’s get an assumption out of the way first: you’re here because you want to grow the sales of your ecommerce store, and we’re here because we want to help you do it.

Sales and marketing have always gone hand in hand. When it comes to ecommerce the two are joined at the hip. We’re a data-driven marketing agency and we specialise in helping our clients turn their data into sales.

We want to increase your sales, provide a better experience for your customers and help your business grow.

As a starting point we’ve created this blueprint for growing your sales. In it we’ll cover the fundamentals every ecommerce business needs to have covered in order to be successful, from understanding your customers and your business to creating a marketing strategy and executing it.

We want this to be the catalyst for a conversation and the first-step in a working relationship we hope to build with you. We specialise in turning your data into sales with hand-crafted, industry-leading marketing campaigns designed to inspire your customers and help you achieve your business goals.

We hope you find this blueprint useful and it inspires you to talk to us about how we can help you grow your business.

YOUR BLUEPRINT FOR GROWING ECOMMERCE SALES

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It’s all about the dataThe growth of ecommerce sales has been exponential for the past decade yet still only accounts for 7% of all retail sales (Shopify), which means there are plenty of opportunities to grow fast, grow big and secure significant market share.

But to do so you’ll need to make sure you have the best systems in place to generate new business, make it easy for customers to buy and ensure your customers come back for repeat purchases.

If you’re serious about increasing the revenue of your ecommerce store then you need to get serious about understanding your data. And by understanding your data, we mean understanding your customers.

This includes information you hold in mailing lists, customer relationship management systems and any third-party integrations which collect data for you. The more you know about your customers, their preferences and their behaviours, the better your marketing will be.

And with better marketing comes increased sales, happier customers and a healthy business.

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It’s not necessarily the quantity of the data that matters, what’s far more important is the quality.

To kick things off, answer these questions:• Apart from basic information, how much do you know about your customers? Do you know how

often they buy? Who your best customers are? How much each customer is worth to you?

• Where is your data stored? Is it in the back end of your website or an external CRM? Is it easy for you to integrate it with your marketing channels?

• How is it updated? Is everything automated and in real time or do you rely on manual processes?

• How usable is the data? Do you have the information you need to send targeted, relevant and personalised communications to your customers?

The last point is the crux of being able to use your data more effectively. The best marketing cam-paigns are the ones where the right message is delivered to the right person, at the right time and through the right channel.

If you’re serious about growing your ecommerce sales you need to create advanced customer seg-ments within your marketing database to ensure you serve up the right content to the right people at the right time.

Without usable primary data it’s impossible to do this which is why making sure the data you hold is in the best possible shape has to be your starting point.

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Understanding your businessHow well do you know your business? Once you’ve done the work to understand your customers, it’s imperative to grow your understanding of how they interact with you.

Try to answer the following:• Where do your customers come from?

• What digital channel has the best conversion rate?

• Where is your lowest cost per acquisition?

• How good is your persona analysis?

• What makes your customers engage with you?

These are just some of the questions we ask our customers in order to get the best insight into how their customers interact with them. By delving into your Google Analytics, email reports, social media insights and persona analysis you’ll build up a 360-degree view of how your customers behave and engage with your business. By analysing this secondary data you’ll be able to see your most popular channels, your conversion rates and your most successful campaigns.

This means you’re able to make evidence-based and data-driven decisions when it comes to your marketing strategy.

The answers to these questions will let you set accurate and realistic key performance indicators (KPIs) so you can measure results and more effectively analyse your business. You’ll find full details of what metrics you need to be measuring towards the end of this guide.

You’re now in the position where you know who your customers are, how they interact with your business and where the majority of your sales come from. Armed with this knowledge you can then set about identifying the best way of reaching new customers and growing the value of your current ones through a marketing strategy.

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Your marketing strategyIn a nutshell, there are three things you need to do with your marketing. You need to create great campaigns, you need to make sure they reach the right people and you need to make sure they generate sales.

Through the analysis you’ve already done on your customers and business, you’re now able to create the right messages for your customers and identify the right channels to use.

This allows you to deliver personalised and relevant content, which always stands the best chance of con-verting. By understanding the needs of your business and your customers’ behaviours, you can then define the marketing channels to deliver the best results.

Every marketing strategy is going to be different because every business will be different. Whether it’s outbound marketing (pushing your message out to people) or inbound marketing (pulling your customers in), you’ll typically use the following channels:

Email. The latest figures from research carried out in the US shows email delivers a $38 return for every dollar spent. If you don’t have a comprehensive email marketing strategy in place for your ecommerce business then you’re missing out on the low hanging fruit. From post-purchase and shopping cart abandonment emails to rewards for your best cus-tomers, an automated email programme is essential for growing your sales.

Social media. By now you should know what social media channels your customers use and what content they engage with. Advanced targeting options allow you to set up custom audiences for your content, a tactic that can be incredibly useful when trying to attract new customers.

Search marketing. Whether it’s your SEO or paid advertising, every good marketing strategy will include search marketing. Track how your customers find you through search engines and know what keyphrases convert to sales. You can have the best products in the world but this doesn’t mean a thing if customers can’t find you.

Content creation. What questions do your customers ask you? The answer to this question is always a great starting point when it comes to content creation. You can set up a blog, film short videos, run a podcast, create downloadable guides… the list goes on. Customers love content which adds value and doesn’t constantly push a sales message.

A strategy which covers these channels will ensure you have maximum reach and maximum engagement. It should also include the different campaigns you plan on running throughout the year and, if appropriate, each channel should be used to push the different campaigns.

Next it’s time to execute your strategy…

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Executing your strategyAt some point most businesses will have to ask themselves the question: “Can we do this in-house or should we outsource it?” The answer is never a simple one and always comes back to your marketing strategy.

If you can execute that strategy both technically and creatively with the resources you already have at your disposal then you might not have to look at outsourcing. However, there may be times where you need to bring in a specialist to help make sure your marketing campaigns are executed effectively.

Let’s look at the pros and cons of each approach:

Quality. As a rule of thumb, when you decide to engage an agency to help you execute your strategy you’re buying their quality and expertise. If you’ve done your homework and found an agency you think is the right fit for your business then you can be confident the work they produce for you will be of significantly better quality than if you did the same work in house. As an example, do you have the skills and knowledge to manage your data effectively and build automated email programme? If the answer is ‘no’ then you should be looking for an agency to help you.

Control. For some business owners and marketing managers outsourcing is giving up too much control. They like to be hands on and involved in the micro details of every campaign. If this is the case with you, while it’s not impossible to work with an agency, you may be better off keeping your marketing in house. Trust plays a big part in a successful relationship and is a vital component when outsourcing work.

Time. Working in and running a business means one thing is guaranteed: you can expect the unexpected. Your time is precious and inevitably you’ll be pulled in numerous different directions. If you’re trying to execute a marketing strategy and this happens then your marketing can often suffer. Outsourcing should save you time and energy.

Cost. If you go down the route to outsource then you’ll want to know the impact this is going to have on your bottom line. Keep in mind that running everything inhouse not only has a financial cost but also a time cost (as mentioned above). Outsourcing may seem expensive but you’ll be paying for quality and results.

As you can see, there’s no clear answer on whether to outsource your marketing efforts or keep them in-house. By weighing the positives and advantages of each of these factors, you can make an educated decision that will point your business in the right direction. Our approach is to treat each situation on its own merit and give the best advice we can as to how we can help and the results you’re likely to see.

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Measuring successWhen it comes to measuring the success and effectiveness of marketing too many people are still hung up on measuring the wrong things.

Forget open rates, click through rates and number of social media followers. These are what we call ‘vanity metrics’ and they will only ever give you a limited view on how well your marketing is performing.

While it’s interesting to measure vanity metrics, which can be useful indicators of performance, your focus and KPIs should always be set around conversion rates and how much it’s costing you to acquire new customers.

These are the metrics that matter:

Conversion rate. As mentioned previously, conversion rates will tell you in an instant how successful your marketing activities are. You’ll also be able to drill down further and see which channel and which campaigns have the best conversion rates. Simply put, the conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who end up making a purchase. The higher the conversion rate, the better it is for you.

Cost per acquisition. We work with our clients to turn their data into sales. And typically our clients will want to know how much money they will make based upon their spend. By working out how much each new customer costs you (your cost per acquisition), you’ll be able to make much more effective use of your marketing budget. The more effective your marketing is, the lower this number should be.

Return on investment. Measuring return on investment should be top of every marketing manager or business owner’s list. If you spend £1,000 on a campaign, then you’re going to want to know how much money that £1,000 made you. Measuring ROI should be a simple task for an ecommerce store, especially with ecommerce tracking enabled within Google Analytics.

Average order value. Tracking your average order value over time will help you make better decisions, budget more effectively and more accurately predict revenue growth for the future. Simply take the total value of sales and divide it by the number of orders to get your average order value.

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Lifetime customer value. It also pays to know how much each customer is worth to you over their ‘lifetime’ of being engaged with your business. Every store will have an element of churn or one-off purchasers. Once you know how much each customer is worth to you and what your churn rate is (how many customers you lose each year) you’re then able to set accurate KPIs for both the number and the value of new customers your marketing needs to acquire.

Shopping cart abandonment. Knowing the percentage of shopping cart abandonments is a great indicator to how effective your checkout is. Customers who reach this point have a strong intent to buy. If a high percentage of them are failing to complete a purchase then there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way your checkout works. You can ‘recycle’ abandoned shopping carts with triggered emails which is a great way of improving conversion rates and your average order value.

Too many marketing agencies use vanity metrics to as a way of masking ineffective campaigns. We’re not one of these. We want to create and execute hand-crafted campaigns tailored for your business and measure their true impact.

When we do this it means your marketing will constantly evolve, improve and deliver you the best results.

SummaryThe blueprint for success is a simple one:

• Understand your customers by understanding your primary data.

• Know how your customers interact with your business by understanding your secondary data like Google Analytics.

• Create a marketing strategy built around delivering the right message to the right people.

• Ensure you have the right resources to execute the strategy correctly.

• Measure the true impact of your marketing efforts and analyse what works for your business and your customers.

If you’d like to take things further then we’d love to talk. Our approach is simple: we work with you to find out what your customers want, then we identify the best way of delivering it to them. Data driven marketing isn’t just the future; it’s the past and it’s the present. We have over a decade of expertise in using data to deliver the right message to the right people to get the best results.

We do it by being proactive partners in our clients’ businesses, continually evaluating, recommending and implementing ways to improve returns. Trust, partnership, expertise and commerciality are the foundations of our business and it’s these values we bring to every relationship we have with our clients.

This blueprint is just the start. Let us help you take your marketing to the next level.

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your blueprint for growing ecommerce sales - jarrang · 2018-07-25 · your blueprint for growing...

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