In 2020, your business is expected to apply an omnichannel approach, create a great customer experience, master inbound marketing, manage organic content and much more.
If you feel like it is impossible for you to take care of your customers, or taxes while dealing with sales and marketing at the same time or that your marketing team is not bringing the value you deserve, this article is made for you.
There are many different ways to grow your e-commerce business fast. With our Shopify expertise, we want to give you proven and actionable tips and techniques to boost your sales, improve your customer retention, increase your conversion rate and build a stronger community.
In this article you will learn about:
Ways to create an innovative customer experience
1. Ideas to help you adopt an omnichannel approach
2. How to develop inbound marketing
3. Why and how to show you value your customers
7. How to make the best out of remarketing
9. Nurturing your brand's advocates
Ways to create a great customer experience
Why is customer experience important?
Customers no longer base their loyalty on price or product. Instead, they stay loyal with companies due to the experience they receive.
A good customer experience means your customers will spend more. In fact, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Investing in Customer Experience (CX) initiatives has the potential to double your revenue within 36 months.
Improving the experience for your customers has been proven (time and time again) to increase retention, satisfaction and revenue.
How to create a great customer experience
Get feedback from your customers. More than 80% of business owners think they are providing a great customer experience, but only 8% of customers think so. This huge gap is only explained by the lack of feedback.
It is important to understand your customer journey, and develop a customized experience for each step of his journey.
1. Adopt an omnichannel marketing approach
Omnichannel refers to the multichannel sales approach that provides the customer with an integrated shopping experience. It is seen as a way to create a good customer experience.
Why you need an omnichannel approach
Based on numerous omnichannel studies and reports, here are a few compelling reasons why omnichannel marketing should be your next big focus.
- Brands that employ omnichannel marketing enjoy 90% higher customer retention rates and 18.86% higher customer engagement rates
- Average order value of stores using omnichannel marketing were 13% more than single-channel marketing
- After interaction with 3 or more channels, customers purchased 250% more frequently than those who interacted with only one channel
How to implement omnichannel marketing
Create a combination of online, mobile and in-store shopping experience. It is a great way to dynamise your brick and mortar store and adapt it to the “post-covid 19” customer behavior.
By collecting customer data, you want to personalize your interactions with your clients across different channels, online and offline.
2. Develop inbound marketing
Why is inbound marketing important
Mass marketing techniques are no longer as effective. Customers now decide for themselves what to buy, who to buy from and whether they want to be advertised to or not. And this is exactly why brands are embracing inbound marketing.
Inbound marketing is a business methodology that focuses on drawing in potential customers and visitors instead of interrupting them with unsolicited promotions and content. It's permission based.
Instead of shoving a product in your customers’ faces, you focus on creating valuable content that answers their questions and solves their problems.
It involves understanding the buyer journey and creating content for each stage, with the aim of turning visitors into customers and promoters of your business.
Some advantages of inbound marketing:
- Reduced expenses
- Higher trust and credibility
- Quality traffic and leads
How to develop inbound marketing
Sometimes, you just need to do an audit of your website’s pages, see which content pages are performing and optimize them. But from our experience, businesses fail to create content that is adapted to their buyer’s persona or the stage of their journey. You need to create a different kind of content to attract lead than to delight your repeat customers.
3. Start to value your customers' loyalty
Why are loyalty schemes important?
A lot of the businesses we work with spend a lot of time and money to acquire new customers, but fail to capture the revenues that existing customers could bring.
It's that simple. Existing customers bring more value to your business than new customers. In fact, you need to bring 7 new customers to match the revenue of one repeat purchaser.
How to show customers you appreciate their loyalty
In two words, it must be individual and personal. You can, for example, create different tiers of loyalty. Letting your customers know that they are close to becoming a VIP member is a great idea to include them in a community, a tribe. You can then add advantages for VIP members to delight them.
It's more important to create an emotional connection than to give a discount.
4. Adopt email marketing
Why email marketing is important
Email marketing is more effective than social media, with businesses seeing 174% more conversions through the former. A good email marketing strategy should account for more than 20% of your online revenues.,/p>
Also, your customers will love it. 73% of millennials prefer email as their method of business communication.
How to improve your email marketing strategy
You need to rely on data and consumer behaviour. Your email list must be segmented and cleaned. All the “basic” email flows like “abandoned cart”, “welcome email” or “win-back email” should be optimized. Did you know that the abandoned cart flow of 3 to 5 emails perform 70% better than single email flow?
Nobody likes spam, so make sure your emails are 80% about content and bringing value to your customers and 20% about promotional messages.
5. Use social media ads
Why social media ads are important
For starters, organic reach is down across most of the major networks. The days of simply posting on social and expecting all your followers to see everything are over.
Still, a lot of your potential customers are using social media. That is a fact. So, by creating original campaigns you can reach them, increase your brand loyalty and bring traffic to your website.
The variety of social media allows your business to reach its target audience easily. If your business wants to reach customers, Facebook and Instagram are probably the go-to, while LinkedIn is optimized for businesses.
How to increase your traffic with social media adverts
With your business manager you can create ads for Facebook and Instagram. You can use organic content to fit in your customer’s feed easier.
People are tired of the overly-polished ads and want brands that are authentic, with real people behind them.
6. Use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
Why PPC is important
PPC advertising is the perfect tool to grow, stand out of the competition and break into new markets. It's the perfect tool to drive exposure for new products and services. You can drive immediate traffic to your website to promote your new offerings. PPC advertising allows you to test the market, and expand at your own pace.
The good thing about PPC is that you only pay for actions. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. This means that if you run a campaign that reaches 50,000 people, but no one clicks it, you do not have to pay a cent.
How to implement PPC
In 2020, different marketing channels are blurring together, no channel is an island. It means your marketing strategy cannot rely on PPC only. You need to understand how channels work together.
To implement PPC, you need to do a thorough keyword research that would match your buyer’s interests.
Then head over to Google Adwords and get started.
7. Increase your overall ROI with remarketing
Why remarketing is important
Remarketing (also known as retargeting) gives one of the highest ROI (return on investment) of any marketing channel. It increases your brand recall, it is really important since people need to see your brand 7 times to trust it.
With remarketing, your conversion rate will go through the roof, your audience will be accurately targeted and your ads more relevant than ever.
How to make the most of our remarketing
With enough data on your customers or their behaviour, you can easily create remarketing campaigns on Google and Facebook ads.
With the creation of a “Lookalike” audience, you will reach potential leads similar to your existing customers
8. Get a marketing audit
Why get a marketing audit?
From our experience, it is always good to have a second opinion. Most of our clients had some marketing strategies in place when they reached out to us, but had no idea how under optimized it was. A good audit allows you to clarify your brand image and buyer’s persona, but you also learn from competitors and it gives you a way to differentiate yourself and stand out.
You get a second opinion on every previous marketing campaign you paid for.
The goal is to identify mistakes and to design a new marketing plan that fits your needs.
How to audit your website
Take someone outside of your business to conduct the audit, that way the results will be truly impartial.
By gathering data about your marketing performance and comparing it with your initial goals, a marketing team can then create an action plan to align your results with your goals.
Here at Medito, we have marketing and technical experts working hand in hand. We want to give you a complete audit of your marketing strategy.
9. Nurturing your brand's advocates
Why nurture your brand's advocates?
Brand advocates are a fantastic way of attracting new customers at little expense on your part. With 77% of consumers more likely to buy a new product when learning about it from friends or family.
They are the secret weapon to boosting brand awareness and winning more customers. These are people who are willing to market for you, and their genuine advocacy can be more effective than almost any other type of media.
How to nurture your advocates
Give your loyal advocate a special treatment. You can invite them to special events, give them access to early-release of your products, organize private sales or create customer content to delight them.
