If you haven’t started your holiday planning yet, it’s time to push the panic button.
Email marketers often don’t get pulled into the planning process until the end and then it’s often an afterthought or emergency: “Yeah, just send another email”. When email is an afterthought instead of the engine, you’re setting yourself up to fail.
Don’t sit on the sidelines and wait for the coach to send you in. Develop your own plan, including copy and contact strategies. It should fit into the overall brand strategy, but it needs to be your design because you have your own revenue and goals to meet.
Develop your Black Friday strategy now
Although many consumers have already started shopping, Black Friday is still the official kick-off for the season. Locking down your strategy now gives you time to test it and have it in place. You’ll be ready to start building your base of subscribers from the fresh…
Free coaching for Ecommerce marketers from Rand Fishkin of Moz and other industry experts at International Ecommerce Day
The Ecommerce world is so crowded with a glut of content and different providers competing fiercely. What’s more, ecommerce marketers often are rushing to implement the latest tactics and technology, which can leave creating a proper strategy and plan being neglected.
There are lots of blog articles, infographics and tutorials about how to build a successful digital business. The problem with this is that there are too many people blogging for the sake of attracting traffic and clicks, and they don’t always offer the best business advice. This means it can be hard for marketers to know what pieces of advice will be useful, and which won’t be.
But, of course, you need to be connected to the latest trends in order to make your business grow and apply innovative techniques to drive up your sales.
One…
Litmus, Liveclicker and Unbounce speak on conversion optimisation for ecommerce
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) can be a very complex creature – particularly when it comes to optimising ecommerce sites and campaigns using Email marketing to engage our audience. The opinions in this article focus on email marketing. A common theme is that during the process of optimisation we need to put our subjective opinions aside, create some robust hypothesis-based upon data and insights and try to start optimising for the biggest wins first – not always an easy task.
So we asked three of our expert speakers from our email marketing summit the following question:
“So many channels, so many aspects of a campaign to test. What’s your key piece of advice that you would provide to increase conversions for an ecommerce site?”
Dave Holland, European Regional Director of Liveclicker and expert presenter, gives us his…
Partnering with a supplier can save time and boost profits.
Ask any eCommerce retailer what is the number one concern they have and inventory will likely enter the equation. Fulfilling orders yourself is time-consuming and not always the cheapest option in the long run. Hiring employees to do it cuts into your profit margin.
So what’s the solution?
Dropshipping.
If you haven’t heard about this rising trend in eCommerce order fulfillment, let this article be your guide to understanding dropshipping, how it makes you a better business owner, and what to expect in the coming months.
What Is Dropshipping?
Image: Oberlo
Rather than you buying inventory, stocking it, then packaging and shipping it out every time an order comes in, dropshipping allows you to sell products that are housed by your manufacturer or a wholesaler. They store it until you sell it. And you don’t…
Applying the RACE Framework to eCcommerce
The eCommerce sector is soon to be hit with one of the greatest opportunities of the year. Sales, brand awareness and loyal customers are all opportunities to address within this festive period.
Last year, eCommerce Black Friday sales hit an estimated £4.3 bn in the UK. The growing popularity of Black Friday amongst shoppers opens opportunities for eCommerce businesses that do not usually use discounted offerings (to maintain customer perceived brand equity and quality) to get involved with the heightened retail buzz.
Within this article, the RACE framework is introduced and applied within the context of Black Friday and the e-commerce sector.
Breaking down your Black Friday marketing strategy will give your e-commerce marketing initiatives a concrete structure to thoroughly approach, identify, and meet your outlined Black Friday objectives.
The RACE Framework, Black Friday, and eCommerce
The RACE framework takes into account all aspects of the customer journey,…
Simplifying the purchase journey will help ensure you provide a happy customer experience.
The customer journey can be a long and arduous one for consumers as they move through the buying maze/funnel from initial research all the way to receiving their goods. These same consumers are demanding more and more from retail brands with, buy in-store for delivery, click and collect, and same hour delivery. At every turn, you are potentially putting off the customer from making their purchase.
WorldPay surveyed over 2,500 consumers and analyzed their behavior cross buying channels, generating in-depth insights into their behavior to give you a deeper understanding of what they want from retailers.
Worldpay found that while 28% of consumers are being frustrated with the lack of delivery options, a combined 31% of people are struggling with finding a product and then understanding the product when they finally do. This…
10 tips to create an effective Cart Recovery Programme
According to research recently released by Britain’s Retail E-mpire, the UK will become the world’s leading ecommerce exporter, with online sales generated by UK retailers from international markets expected to soar sevenfold to £28bn by 2020. However, according to our latest research, on average 84% of people who visit a site abandon their purchase before checkout, costing retailers billions in lost sales.
So what can we do about this problem? Well first of all – let’s switch it around and look at it as a fantastic opportunity rather than a problem. Opportunities are always easier to action than problems – right?
The Opportunity for retailers
So we now have a lot of potential buyers who in many case simply need a small nudge in order to complete the purchase and the good news is, that these abandoned sales are 10 times more likely to convert…
Use these essential ecommerce tools to help convert your prospects
To maximise conversion, an online shopping experience needs to be simple and easy for the user, secure at the point of payment and robust so as to deal with both high volumes of product and traffic. E-commerce management tools were designed for this specific purpose and have a number of features that other platforms (i.e. a generic content management system) do not. All of these tools provide a platform for online retailers to sell their products and services online; they create a ‘digital store front’ to enable products in different categories to be search, browsed and purchased.
Key things to consider before purchasing and using these tools:
Implementation and running costs. There are (often large) costs associated with development, maintenance and migration from these tools. Be clear on these up front.…
Users are changing devices across the customer journey - marketers need to recognise this.
Mobile, mobile, mobile. It's all about mobile. Be mobile first. Do everything mobile first. That's pretty much what you hear from eCommerce or search thought leaders these days.
In fairness, they do have a point. Not only do mobile sessions now outstrip desktop sessions across the web, but they do so by a big margin on eCommerce sites. 59% of sessions on eCommerce sites are on some form of mobile device, according to a study of 87 million web sessions by Wolfgang digital.
But the picture isn't that simple. When it comes to revenue by device, it's actually desktop that still dominates. A massive 63% of revenue comes desktop, 3 times what comes from Smartphones.
So can eCommerce marketers breath a sigh of relief and stop worrying about those pesky mobile visitors that they've always struggled to engage with? -…
Tips to help you learn how to effectively utilise trigger emails and reduce shopping cart abandonment
When it comes to successful email marketing, it is evident that carefully worded calls to action must be married with incentive for the customer to convert. Consumers must be enticed to click through from the email message, enter the retail e-commerce website and make a transaction.. They must be provided with the assurance that their patronage is valued and that their satisfaction is of the company’s utmost importance.
The internet is rich with “email marketing best practices” resources; articles, blog posts, software and how-to lists enlightening those interested in utilizing trigger emails as an effective marketing tool with vast amounts of information on the topic. Despite the wealth in available material, email marketers continue to commit trigger email faux-pas that extend beyond the realm of misspells and misplaced graphics. These errors dramatically…
