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When discussing with many companies what they face as a biggest challenge when trying to grow their revenues it is often said that the challenge is not innovation - it is the ability to commercialize and communicate it to the audience.
Let's have a look at the major obstacles.
1. Time required Selling new products is challenging especially when introducing new behaviour. On average selling new products requires a much larger investment and training than selling items known to a public. Therefore any company investing in innovation and selling products not previously known must keep this in mind.
2. Which products to sell?
Today many cheap and user friendly platforms have eliminated the barriers of entry, it is fairly easy to launch your own online store.Amazon is taking over the eCommerce world with their massive online product catalog. Their marketplace and fulfillment services have enabled sellers from all over the world to easily reach paying customers.Let’s not forget about Aliexpress. They’ve simplified product sourcing by giving access to Chinese manufacturers within a couple of clicks.All of this has made it very difficult for retailers to source unique products unless you they decide to manufacture your own.
3. Making yourself attractive to right customers
Online shoppers don’t shop the same way as they used to back in the day. They use Amazon to search for products (not just Google). They ask for recommendations on Social Media. They use their smartphones to read product reviews while in-store and pay for purchases using all sorts of payment methods.Lots has changed including the way they consume content and communicate online. They get easily distracted with technology and social media.E-commerce companies must figure out where their audience is and how to attract them efficiently without killing their marketing budget. They must market smartly.
4. Generating right traffic
Digital marketing channels are evolving. Retailers can no longer rely one type of channel to drive traffic to their online store.They must effectively leverage SEO, PPC, email, social, display ads, retargeting, mobile, shopping engines and affiliates to help drive qualified traffic to their online store. They must be visible where their audience is paying attention.
5. Converting visitors into shoppers
Driving quality traffic and nurturing leads is key if you want to close the sale. At a certain point, you need to convert those leads in order to pay for your marketing campaigns.Retailers must constantly optimize their efforts in converting both email leads as well as website visitors into customers. Conversion optimization is a continuous process.
6. Retaining your shoppers
Attracting new customers is more expensive than retaining the current ones you already have.Retailers must implement tactics to help them get the most out of their customer base in increase customer lifetime value.
7. Using data & Business Intel
E-commerce companies must understand that they have all of the data and intel they need in order to make targeted campaigns. Email marketing is still proven to be an effective channel which can be made specific based on the customers previous shopping behaviour. This is a direct communication link which should not be underestimated.
8. Achieving profitable long-term growth
Increasing sales is one way to grow the business but in the end, what matters most is profitability.Online retailers must always find ways to cut inventory costs, improve marketing efficiency, reduce overhead, reduce shipping costs and control order returns.
9. Choosing the right technology & partners
Some online retailers may face growth challenges because their technology is limiting them or they’ve hired the wrong partners/agencies to help them manage their projects.Retailers wanting to achieve growth must be built on a good technology foundation. Online retailers must choose carefully who to work with. Understanding that in today's world not being programmatic means losing profitability.
10. Understanding their own Key Strategy & focus areas and growth
Retailers must consider what is their key strategy and focus area is to further their growth. This is true especially in small-to mid size e-commerce retailers. Understanding your own limits is also key to further growth and taking a considered approach that one can not do everything at once means is a difficult but a very necessary part of furthering growth dynamically.
Written by: Ana Stanojevic
Articles by Jonas Hagströmer Theodorsson
How to boost sales during sale season as an e-commerce and how to evaluate those results
Sales season is a nightmare or a goldmine depending on who you talk with. One can indisputably if well prepared make good sales out of seasonal campaigns. So how do you best prepare as an e-commerce?
Start with the analytics.
Start by analyzing your traffic. If you only have time for top level then look at your timeline when the offers were up, how much brand traffic did you get how much non brand traffic in Google Ads? What are the demographics of your customer base and what ad copy was the most successful?
In addition if time allows look at your keywords, what where the top 10% keywords generating traffic and more importantly conversion? If your agency provides analytics on keyword level in regards to demographics, location, device, time of day and other key factors those are great to analyze in order to understand when where and how you should be bidding. The same goes for Shopping, in Google ads you have loads of information stored. Example of this can be the top movers in your google shopping campaigns but also demographics like where your top shoppers are, what device did they use when they purchased from you and what day of the week did they prefer to buy?
All of this data especially if you are a large e-commerce can be massive to even scim through therefore preferably if you have a large customer base your agency should be doing an analytics report for you.
Now let's look at step 2. There are certain measures and steps you should consider in order to make any seasonal offers like Black Friday, Christmas or Easter a success.
Start by looking thoroughly through your budget. What are you willing to spend? Where should most of the traffic come through? In case of unexpected scenarios what do you want to do; should you kill any advertisement or keep it going? Take a moment to consider your ROI and revenue target and the different scenarios connected to your business that could affect the budget and plan in advance.
The next step is to consider how much you want to spend for your brand and non brand traffic. A good rule of thumb is that brand traffic should be unlimited. If they are searching for your brand you should always be visible. In regards to non brand, try to target for the average position, look at data cost per click from last year and add 15% on top of that. Make sure to review your performance constantly during the campaign period. Important to review average position as ROI and revenue will not had time to be accurately updated.
Now any time you have bidding campaigns you are of course also looking at conversion, or at least you should be! Depending on whether you are a large or small e-commerce those ROAS targets can fluctuate slow or really fast, therefore you should also be careful when reading into that data. See the graph below:
A small to medium sized e-commerce company may have high to medium fluctuation in ROAS on their conversion data. This means that drawing any conclusions from that data can be very tricky. Whilst, large e-commerce companies with alot of data, conversion have acquired a higher amount of data that shows good patterns. Their ROAS fluctuation is usually lower, and you can draw conclusions must faster.
Unless you are a full time specialist working with Google Ads, it may be daunting to have to think of so many parameters before doing any advertisement during seasonality offer. Some years ago the sphere of e-commerce did not have as high competition as it does today hence mistakes or missed opportunities were forgiven. In today's extremely competitive unfortunately that is no longer the case. Therefore make sure that the agency you are working with, has a proactive approach to preparing you and your e-commerce for seasonal offers. A good agency will approach this matter strategically asking for your input after it has provided you with an overview on data from your account. If you are not receiving this type of support switch today!
Written by: Ana Stanojevic
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