As an ecommerce business owner, we can definitely say that you are always watching marketing spend. The competition is quite fierce and entrepreneurs rarely have the financial resources of big companies.
So, how do you reach customers in the most cost-effective way?
The most important thing to remember is that re-investing whatever profit you make back into PPC is not a long-term solution. A smarter marketing strategy is to use what you already have: data. Your sales, customer, and product data is a gold mine of opportunities to sell more and more. This data tells you exactly what marketing strategies are working, what strategies aren’t working, who’s buying and who isn’t.
1) You should monitor your campaign performance
If you use analytics to track what’s working, you’ll be able to rinse and repeat the best campaigns. No need to constantly come up with new ideas, which can save you a lot of time and even money. Analytics will tell you which partnerships bring the best referral traffic so you can drop the rest. You can also monitor how influencers are doing in terms of conversions and pay them for each sale made. This saves you significant fees.
2) Keep Your Ad Budget Within Limits
Analytics will also help you better manage your ad budget and prevent wasting dollars on poorly performing campaigns.
Let’s take an example. What if you’re spending too much money acquiring new customers that only place one order? With that data, you’d be able to track your new acquisitions and their purchasing behavior. From there, you could pinpoint which channel brings in these one-time purchases and stop your customer acquisition funnel from leaking money.
Spend some time looking at your expected customer lifetime value based on historical data to know how much you can afford to spend on acquisition without cutting into your profits.
3) Nurturing potential customers via email marketing
Nurturing is the process of capturing people’s emails and engaging them until they purchase. Use exclusive offers or your blog to get them to register on your site.
Then, you should use the email as an identifier and look in your ecommerce analytics. Take a look at what pages they visit on your site, what content they read, what products they look at, what gets added to their cart but doesn’t get ordered, how often they browse, etc. Use this information to craft engaging messages to keep their interest – give them more of the info they consume, talk about the products they looked at, and so on until they convert.
4) Engage with your existing customers in order to retain them
When you know what people are interested in, it’s easier to keep a mutually beneficial relationship going. Engaging existing customers will help you drive repeat sales and you won’t need to spend as much on ads to acquire new customers.
You can send them relevant information for the products they like and customize the offers. You can also look at buying cycles and remind people they’re running out of products to increase order frequency.
5) Tailor offers by taste
Once you have some history on your customers, you can customize the offers, the messaging, and even the timing. Highlight categories they shop from and avoid those that they never look at. Personalize exclusive offers instead of running blanket promotions. This saves your margins from unneeded discounts.
With proper data, you can even time your reactivation emails for the best possible moment when people are ready to shop. Sending a good offer just before they typically make a purchase (based on your analytics) is not seen as a pushy sales tactic and converts well.
6) Do everything and anything you can to keep your current customers
Did you know that acquiring a customer costs 7x more than it does to keep one? This means you should focus on customer retention through quality customer service and customer communications.
This includes delivering on your promises and keeping customers interested in your business by sending emails and engaging them through social media. As an added perk, as you build customer loyalty, these fans will begin sharing your business with their networks, which is the most affordable and effective way to drive new business to your store.
Growing your online business takes more than finding new ways to make money—saving wherever you can also makes a huge difference.
To sum up
Analytics are one of the most powerful tools that any business owner has at their disposal. Use it wisely! Try to follow the above tips and we assure you that you’ll improve your conversions and get more customers in.