Marketing is essential to promote and make your business grow. You need to plan your marketing strategies baring in mind your objectives, products or services you provide and the customers as well as potential customers.
It is not an easy task, and sometimes, it might be a bit overwhelming. But it is not impossible; here you will find all the items you need to consider when planning your marketing strategies.
When setting your marketing plan, you should take into account the following concepts:
Brand promotion to the customer base is a crucial component of any marketing strategy and a great way of ensuring that any promotional material is retained and valued is through the use of mapping. Messages that are highly visual can have a significant impact on both customers and prospects.
A customer journey map is a visual representation of every experience your customers have with you. It helps to tell the story of a customer's experience with your brand from original engagement and into a long-term relationship.
Create each customer persona. Think about WHO your ideal customer is and you have to aim that target when planning your marketing strategies.
Your customers are the pillars of your business, reason why you should take care of them and please them in every opportunity you have. Here you will find a set of ideas to improve your relationship with them and so, their experience with your brand.
A third party review system will increase traffic to your website. That's why we work with external expert SEO agencies to ensure this benefit. And because we also partner with Google, you’ll get star ratings in your paid ads, which increases click-through rates by 17%.
As Google only approves specific ratings and reviews providers, and not individual companies, if you’re using an in-house system you won’t get this benefit.
You will find many reasons for buyers to abandon their carts such as unexpected shipping cost, having to create a new user account, long and confusing checkouts, among others.
Cart abandonment is a huge problem, you might lose up to 75% of your online sales because of this and in some cases, up to 83 %.
What you can do to reduce this abandonment is to implement Cart follow up emails. By doing this, you will redirect your customers to the purchasing page allowing them to continue buying. No matter the reason they left they can come back to complete the purchase.
One way to improve your product page is to add push notifications. You will benefit the customer by providing a direct method of communication; they are the best form to speak them directly. Forget about spam filters or inbox messages which are rarely checked.
An Upsell is used to get the customer spend more money by buying a more expensive model of the same product or add some features. In some other cases, also warranties that relate to the product in question. On the other hand, a Cross-sell is used to get customers to spend more money by adding more products from different categories than the product being viewed or purchased.
Your thank-you page is a critical component of an eCommerce checkout process, but it is also an opportunity to squeeze more value out of your customers. However, most eCommerce stores waste the chance.
Marketers consider the “thank you” page the end of the sales funnel, while this might be partially true, you should also see it as a part of a broader relationship with your customers.
When a customer reaches this page, it means they trust you with money. They like your products and believe you will follow through the end of the transaction. This is why the probability of selling to an existing customer is 50-60 %, while the likelihood of selling to a new customer is only 5-20%.
So, you should consider offering some coupon on the next purchase, adding a survey, upselling related products or asking the customer to share purchases socially.
At this point, you might have already some channels that you regularly use with your customers. Now, let's see how you can take full advantage of them to improve your sales and get more customers.
Build Your Email Channel: It will help you grow your subscribers.
#1 Create a free opt-in offer - one of the best ways to capture email addresses organically is to give away something valuable for free.
This freebie could be any form of content that shows off your brand´s expertise. You have to offer a more top-of-the-funnel piece of content to people who need a little more nurturing before making a purchasing decision. And for those who have explicitly expressed interest in your product or service, you can offer something more bottom-of-the-funnel.
What you create and send is up to you, but the underlying strategy is the same: deliver something useful to your audience, and they will happily trade your email address in return.
#2 Make subscribing to your email list easy - Many brands tuck their newsletter signup boxes way down at the bottom of their homepages. There's A good chance this prompt will go unnoticed by many visitors. But if your primary goal is growing your email list, then you need to prioritize placing multiple opportunities for people to give you their email address throughout the page.
When you take the right step to nurture your relationship during this initial period, odds are much higher than your readers will turn into evangelists for your brand. This is a pivotal moment when you can encourage your reader to share your information with their family, friends and social networks.
An easy way to get to this point is with another (automated) thank-you message. After your reader completes a defining action, such as finishing your five-part email series or buying the project, set up an automated message that thanks them.
In that email, consider encouraging readers and customers to share your content with their friends and family since they found it helpful. A great way to build awareness is to make satisfied readers and customers into advocates for your brand.
Segmenting your list ensures that you are delivering the right message to the right reader. It also provides a more personalized approach to connecting with your reader based on where they are in your funnel, which will naturally increase your open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
MarketingSherpa found that segmenting your email can increase the amount of revenue generated by 50%. Unfortunately, despite all the positives associated with segmentation, 42% of marketers do not send targeted email messages.
Furthermore, they reported that sending irrelevant content was the #3 reason why consumers marked a message as spam. That's what happens when you don't segment your list: you risk your email being marked as spam.
The most popular way to divide your list include separating users by the following traits:
Lifecycle stages (subscribers, lead, MQL, SQL, customers)
Demographics (gender, age, location, job title, or buyer persona)
Behavior (did they complete the email course, or did they stop after the first two emails?)
Buying frequency (do they purchase your product monthly, quarterly, or yearly?)
Where they signed up (did they sign up for your newsletter or a content offer?)
Start segmenting right away. The sooner you categorize where your customers are currently at, the faster you will be able to deliver targeted content and see the positive ROI that makes email marketing worthwhile.
Browser Push Notifications are clickable messages that can be sent from a website to its subscribers on both desktop or mobile devices. These notifications get delivered in real time, even if the website isn't open on the user's browser when they are sent. Also called Web Push Notifications, they are a great way to re-engage with your visitors without knowing their email or any other contact details.
When a user arrives on your website, a small dialog box asks them for their permission to send push notifications. If they click on ‘Allow´, your website can start triggering notifications even when they are not present on your website.
It gives you the power of instant communications - Browser Push Notifications can be seamlessly delivered without delay to your user's desktop browser or in the notification slider of the user´s mobile phone, even if they are not on your website.
Works similarly to Mobile Push Notifications- Push Notifications on Chrome, as well as FireFox, work the same as native notifications which are sent by apps on your phone. So, there's no need to manage a separate mobile app.
Assured delivery- Browser Push Notifications overcome one of the biggest flaws of Email Marketing- messages not getting delivered because of spam filters, or some other reason. It's a one-hundred percent consent driven communication channel.
Wide reach across browser- desktop internet usage accounts for 42% of the total internet time. Browser Push Notifications work on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari which have a combined market share of more than 75%.
Re-engage with both users and visitors- by using Browser Push Notifications; you can reach out both your users and website visitors, given they´ve subscribed to receive browser push notifications form you. It gives you the ability to re-engage with your audience without knowing their contact details.
More opt-ins and higher conversion rates- Studies prove that Browser Push Notifications produce better results in term of opt-in and click-through compared to other marketing mediums. Since browser push notifications only require the user to allow permission with just one click and users can unsubscribe at any time instantly, the opt-ins for these are higher than Email or SMS.
Affiliate Channels
Whether you are a retailer or a publisher, affiliate marketing, like anything in the digital marketing world, is not going to fix your dying balance sheet by itself.
What it can do, however, is to add another revenue stream without the need to expand masses of effect or money. This is particularly important for publishers with the rise of ad-blocking.
But brands that go down the affiliate marketing route need to remember that it is effectively a form of advertising, and individual responsibilities come with that. Namely: protecting the trust in your brand of products.
One of the best practices when recruiting affiliates is to give a chance to everyone. In affiliate marketing, the Pareto rule still applies: 80% of sales come from 20% of your affiliates. The problem is that you don't know who belongs to the 20% group. You can use the affiliate selection tool.
Commission Junction is the perfect example. While it does not have a formal affiliate approval process, they strongly recommend you possess the requirements. Otherwise, you won't be successful as an affiliate.
Commit to affiliate marketing. Many people jump into affiliate marketing thinking they'll be making money on the internet the first week and live happily ever after; the truth is, there is no magic bullet. Earning money as an affiliate publisher can be difficult unless you are genuinely committed.
Create a game plan. A solid game plan on how you can maintain and continually build traffic to your website is essential, and figuring out what set you apart from others will improve your chances at winning.
Set yourself apart. By CJ´s Publisher Service Agreement, a publisher account that does not generate any ‘commissionable’ transaction for six months will be deactivated, and a non-refundable $10.00 (US) Dormant Account Fee will be assessed.
It is a must to set objectives. This clarity allows you to select the right affiliates and define your commision.
Some common objectives that you might have for your program could be:
To increase the sales volume by 5% year on year,
To increase the sales value by 10% month on month,
To increase the average order value by 20% by October 2019,
To increase the number of active affiliates in the program by 30% by the end of the year.
Once objectives are defined, you need to set up the strategy that helps to reach them. This strategy is divided into four parts: terms and conditions, setting PPC rules, approach to validating sales, and recruiting the right affiliates.
Within the terms and conditions of the program, you will focus on how affiliates can promote you. The terms and conditions can, therefore, play a big part in how you are represented online and how successful you will be at achieving your objectives.
Within your terms and conditions, you need to define what can and cannot be promoted through PPC. The most apparent restrictions are brand terms and misspellings. So one of your objectives could be to increase your visibility on search engine affiliates, and you can do this by targeting only long tail keywords. Other things to consider are whether affiliates can link PPC directly to your site and whether they can use your URL in the ad copy. There are decisions you need to state in your terms and conditions.
Now that you have all these details information, it is time to plan your marketing strategy carefully. Remember that your customers and visitors are your top priority, so you need to attract them to your brand. Apply one, some or all the strategies that suit your purpose and let your business grow considerably.
If you're looking for a team that can steer you in the right path for your website development and digital marketing, please contact us. We promise the initial call will provide enough insights to make it more than worth your while.
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