Tips & Guides — 26 May 2022
9 Tips to Increase eCommerce ROI
Customer attention is focused on eCommerce, which has made significant strides in recent years since the market is expected to grow by almost $11 trillion by 2025. However, the way to sell or buy is not the same as a few years ago. The field is rapidly evolving and constantly changing while requiring marketers to review their tactics frequently.
13 eCommerce Trends to Watch in 2022
Learn now →Research from Shopify shows that consumers are willing to spend more on a brand that shares common ideas. They are 4x more likely to buy from a company with strong brand values while considering as a crucial point the environmental impact of the products they’ve chosen.
Additionally, eCommerce is requiring new promotion strategies, as paid advertising costs grow and leads are more difficult to convert. In this scenario, brands are looking for long-term tactics and prioritizing customer lifetime value.
Image source: Statista, Shopify
Successful eCommerce today depends not only on a good product but also on good digital marketing strategies. Even if your product is ready to be marketed and offers remarkable quality, the big challenge is to make potential customers aware of the existence of your product or service and get them to trust your brand.
That brings us to one of the side effects of all the growth eCommerce is experiencing, the increase in acquisition costs. Competition is rising and making it harder to be found by new customers. As a result, many brands are focusing on lifetime value as a way to increase their ROI.
Even though nailing down ROI can be tricky, measuring it is crucial to track progress and understand what needs to be done to improve your marketing strategies. So if you find that the ROI is not in line with the expected indicators, it means that you need to change your tactics. Same for the other side: when a strategy is working well, you must identify it.
To learn more about the best strategies in eCommerce marketing, let’s look at the tactics your business needs to increase ROI and stay ahead of the competition.
Image source: Freepik
One of the key tactics for eCommerce owners who want to succeed in 2022 is to invest in their brand’s differentiators and values. To do this, analyze your values to see if they are being communicated appropriately.
This is not only important to stand out from the competition, but also to show that your brand shares common values with your customers, as this will increase trust. For instance, if your brand is committed to simplifying the customer’s daily routine, demonstrate this through simple and clear communication, as Glossier, a make-up eCommerce website, does.
The Glossier message emphasizes that make-up is simple and casual, and one of the ways they do it is by describing their products easily and giving useful tips to show how simple it is.
Image source: Glossier
An eCommerce website needs to communicate well, plus perform expected, capturing leads and conversions. As you probably know, without enough visitors to your site, your ROI will decline. So, we can assume a big part of ROI results is related to how the website is performing: if visitors are finding what they need, if it is intuitive, and so on. More visitor interactions usually lead to more chances of conversions.
To achieve good results, you should consider using SEO to increase your website traffic organically. Creating engaging content that answers frequently asked questions and helps your audience are some common ways to do this. From time to time, content should be updated. However, this is not all, and here are more techniques to consider:
While interacting and learning more about business on social media, customers can easily detect if a brand is what they expect: transparent, authentic, and readily available. Now, when a consumer likes a brand, it is possible to purchase without even leaving social media.
Recently, social media channels have improved their tools to allow brands to sell directly on the platform, without redirecting customers to their website. As a result, sales through social media channels are increasingly growing, and, according to research, set to almost triple by 2025, with China as the global leader of this expansion. Thus, many strategies are being tested, and Social Commerce is at the center of online shopping, especially thinking about tomorrow’s consumers.
Ikea, for example, has a page on Instagram where customers can get inspired to decorate their house while they can see the products and buy them with a click. It saves their time when compared with going to the website and searching for the item. However, keep in mind that this resource only works on mobile. To employ Social Commerce, start by synchronizing the product catalog with your business accounts on social platforms, so users can shop there directly.
Image source: Ikea instagram
Shopping via digital platforms has one accelerant: video. Research has found that 86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, motivated by consumers’ desire to watch product videos before buying. As a result, videos can help your eCommerce business gain visibility and recognition in many ways. One of the tactics most used by brands selling on social media platforms is a live chat. Brands are testing the format of live sales for various products and services, as is the case of coffee livestreams in China.
These practices allow customers to ask questions and understand more about the products in real-time. Additionally, shows the brand is accessible and easy to reach, which directly influences the purchase decision. Videos work for many niches, especially beauty and well-being. For instance, the eCommerce Sephora has a Youtube channel where they explain and demonstrate how to use their products.
Consumers are increasingly looking for recommendations. According to Shopify research, 89% of viewers trust recommendations provided by YouTube creators. So, teaming up with influencers, content creators, and partners is a great way to promote campaigns to audiences potentially interested in your products.
Some benefits include integrating new channels to reach your audience since establishing a partnership will take your brand to be seen by more potential clients. As a result, your brand will gain trust from the niche, which helps your business to drive better results and conversions.
For many brands, finding and establishing beneficial partnerships with influencers can be a challenge. This tends to be even more difficult when we think about long-term relationships. To do it smoothly, Reach is a platform developed to simplify partnerships by allowing brands to discover partners globally and contact them directly.
Thus, the platform allows you to easily manage partnerships in a personalized way and monitor the performance of each partner. This way, a brand can know which influencers and content creators are the most promising for its niche and offer.
Start using Reach now and see how partners can boost your results5
Image source: Freepik
Having an eCommerce website involves constantly thinking about ways to improve the consumer’s virtual shopping experience. One reason is that potential customers can quickly walk away if they are confused or disappointed by complicated navigation, visual clutter, glitches, or errors that can cause a website to not function properly.
Therefore, it is essential to write thorough product descriptions, provide attractive images and reviews to help visitors make purchasing decisions. Let’s see what are the points to be considered in this regard:
Your eCommerce can be a responsive website with quality products, good offers, and competitive conditions. However, if it does not provide different payment options, you are losing potential sales. Customers need to feel free and comfortable to make the payment with the method they prefer, and by allowing them to do it, brands are increasing the chances of conversion and repeat purchases.
7 – Create a community with purpose
One way to strengthen relationships with customers is by creating more interaction points and building communities. Increasingly, communities are gaining ground among consumers, as well as lowering customer support costs for customer service.
However, if a brand is building a community, it should consider going beyond just answering questions. Business owners should think of this space as an opportunity to keep their customers engaged and show that the brand shares common values with them.
Also, experiment with creating your community in a closed form, to give a sense of exclusivity to members. Creating content or “members-only” spaces can be a strong incentive for fans to avoid being left out. “Interested consumers can join the community through an email sign-up, a purchase, a series of purchases, posting a review, or any other goal you set.
Since Google announced the intention to eliminate third-party cookies by 2023, many brands had to start rethinking the approach to personalization and switching to cookieless tracking. In recent years, personalization has become almost standard for online shopping, however, what personalization means to consumers and marketers doesn’t always match up.
Consumers don’t perceive excessive personalization as a positive thing that makes brands closer to them. However, they are still willing to share personal information with companies. So, to access their customers’ data, brands need to approach personalization in a way that engenders trust. For instance, creating Gated Content. White papers, webinars, case studies, infographics, and so on, are some of the examples. Many customers are willing to share data such as their email addresses in order to get exclusive content.
Image source: Segment
Monitoring the ROI of marketing actions closely allows you to get accurate information about how much your company is getting in return for the effort and resources invested in each one of your campaigns. By tracking campaign performance, it is possible to see what works and what doesn’t and increase your ROI by using only the most effective tactics.
More importantly, you can begin to analyze the reasons behind these trends. For example, you may see a 200% increase in website traffic, however, if your sales do not increase proportionately, you know that traffic is not the best metric to define the effectiveness of the marketing campaign. Over time, the metrics will indicate which are the most relevant strategies of business health and success.
After all, we can see the market is full of opportunities for eCommerce, which now no longer compete only by price anymore, but by who best manages to demonstrate its brand proposition. Such factors as values, transparency, and exposure are essential for the audience to decide on one product or another.
As a result, marketers need to diversify the marketing channels within their strategy and make room for new ideas, from trying new partnerships to implementing videos. Differentiation has also been used as an alternative to the rising costs of traditional online ads. Further on, to differentiate a brand from its competition, having a clear message is needed, as most buyers are more likely to buy from a company with shared values.
If you want to have a helpful resource that offers more details about effective marketing channels and tactics, go further, and grab your eBook with valuable information for the success of your eCommerce strategies.
Written by
Affise Academy
Affise is a partner marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to scale via all possible performance marketing channels. Synergy of technology and our long standing experience lets you expand your partnerships, automate every step of the campaign lifecycle and make data-driven decisions.
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