Whether the fiscal year ends in December or during a different season, most companies use the coming months to review their eCommerce promotional efforts and look for ways to improve their performance. Your once strong campaigns might not be as effective as they could be, especially if they have run on autopilot over the last few months. It’s time to jumpstart your eCommerce promotional strategies to get the results you need. Follow these 10 best practices to optimize your digital campaigns.
1. Set Micro Conversion Targets
A macro conversion on an eCommerce site is a completed purchase, which means a micro conversion is a small step toward the purchase. Micro conversions include small steps like visiting your website, looking up a coupon code and adding items to the cart.
Tracking these micro conversions can help you see where customers are falling out of the sales funnel. You can also break them apart by channel and campaign to better understand the effectiveness of each tactic. Looking at your sales and macro conversion rates is the first step toward understanding your business.
2. Calibrate Your Cost-Per-Acquisition and ROI Goals
You cost-per-acquisition refers to how much you’re willing to spend per each customer purchase. For example, if you spend $300 on Google Ads that result in 10 purchases that month, your CPA is $30.
CPAs are likely to change based on the campaign and channel, but it helps to review them every few months to make sure your campaigns are held accountable to your set standards and are driving profits.
For example, if the average purchase from Google Ad campaigns is $90, then you will have a positive ROI. However, if customers only spend about $35, then you need to reconsider your promotion efforts and CPA targets.
3. Improve Your Website Speed and Performance
Your eCommerce promotional strategies are only as effective as your website. It’s not uncommon for marketers to create highly-optimized campaigns that perform poorly because of the website they drive traffic to. Remember, it takes 0.05 seconds for users to form an opinion on your website and determine whether they want to stay or bounce. Plus, 88% of customers are unlikely to return to a website that provided a bad experience.
Work with your design team to make sure your website is performing at its best, with optimal speed performance and functionality.
4. Create Landing Pages for a Better Site Experience
Landing pages should be at the top of your list to improve your eCommerce promotional strategies. If you’re using a few catch-all landing pages for all of your content, then you need to take steps to grow your web footprint.
Companies see an average 50% increase in leads when they increase the number of landing pages from 10 to 15. Of course, there are other effective ways to push leads through the funnel like drip marketing.This increase spikes even higher when the number of landing pages exceeds 40.
More landing pages mean you can micro-target customers and create more efficient campaigns, so you will spend less and convert more buyers.
5. Update Your Copy, Graphics, and Branding
Digital marketers and eCommerce professionals tend to get caught up in the numbers of their campaigns to the point where they lose focus on the softer aspects of your promotions. Review your ad copy, graphics, and overall branding to make sure it keeps up with other graphics and content on the website.
6. Banish Vanity Metrics From Your Reporting
Vanity metrics are impressive insights that actually tell you nothing about your campaigns. These are metrics that rarely change or don’t indicate anything that reflects your performance. Potential reach and potential impressions are two common examples. It doesn’t matter your potential, look at how many people actually saw your message and how many people cared.
You can also remove charts and tables in your reporting that no one looks at. If your team spends hours compiling reports that most people brush off, remove the information that no one cares about so you can focus on the most important metrics.
7. Review Campaign Performance Across the Sales Funnel
As you review your eCommerce promotional strategies, don’t focus exclusively on the bottom of the sales funnel. The customer journey is not linear; your customers do not see your ad and then immediately buy your products. They touch your website multiple times and there are multiple factors go into their decision.
Map out the customer journey and what it looks like for each marketing tactic. This will help you identify weaknesses in your promotional efforts that you can improve upon in the new fiscal year.
8. Look for Wasted Spend Across the Board
Digital marketing involves growing and pruning your campaigns. You expand campaigns, channels, and keywords throughout the year and it’s easy for these channels to get out of control after a few months.
Set aside time to look at what is not working from a high level in your marketing efforts. Trim the fat where you’re not getting the results you want, or create a plan to change weaker campaigns to improve upon them in the near future.
9. Identify New Ecommerce Promotional Strategies You Want to Explore
From customer engagement activities to personalization, successful marketers are always learning and trying new things. Whether you pick up new ideas at a conference or by following the latest updates through top publications, always keep learning and exploring new things.
The top eCommerce companies create an “experiment budget,” each year to try new things. This budget isn’t tied to a direct ROI but gives teams a chance to do something new to see if it pays off. This reduces their fear of failure and gives your company the chance to stay up-to-date on the latest trends.
10. Evaluate Your Contractors and Agencies
Your marketing agency, service providers, and contractors need performance evaluations along with your employees. Review the costs of working with various people against the benefits they provide your company. If you have worked with a particular agency for a few years, check their prices and services against others in the industry. You may find that you’re overpaying and not getting the results you want.
If you find that you’re not happy with what you find, Trinity Insight is happy to step in and offer our services.
Start optimizing your digital campaigns today with our free self-assessments and calculators. We will review all of your eCommerce promotional strategies and look for ways to trim the fat, take advantage of new strategies, and grow your business.
