Top eCommerce Tips for 2019 - Part I

1. Yotpo | Influencer Marketing

By Aimee Millwood, Director of Content at Yotpo

If you need evidence of just how important influencer marketing is today, look no further than the phenomenal rise of “Instagram brands” and digitally native retailers.

In the past decade, we’ve seen brands like Warby Parker, Bonobos and Glossier grow at an unprecedented pace by building word-of-mouth and brand advocacy into the foundation of their brand. By combining strategic influencer marketing with smart branding, they’ve been able to rapidly expand their online reach.

Today, we’re seeing a shift from traditional influencer marketing to a growing focus on micro-influencers. Micro-influencers may have smaller followings than mega celebrities, but they often have super high engagement rates with their fanbases. Leveraging micro-influencers is a scalable way to build awareness among a targeted and relevant customer community.

2. Smile | Mobile Commerce

By Alex McEachern, Head of Marketing at Smile.io

Mobile commerce is a big deal! Mobile checkout rates are catching up to desktop, and this growth is not slowing down anytime soon. That means your online store should be optimized for mobile devices (but you already knew that!).

What many people lose sight of is that mobile experiences extend beyond your checkout flow and theme. Mobile experiences are also portrayed by the emails you send, your product imagery, and most importantly, your app.

Providing mobile optimized app experiences are what take your customer experience from good to great! Make sure your apps have a mobile first design as opposed to a responsive design.

3. Klaviyo | Email Marketing, Automation & AOV

By Dana Fugate, Director of Content Marketing at Klaviyo

You will increase your revenue from email marketing when you deliver highly targeted, relevant (read personalized) content. And in order to do that, you need to first focus on segmentation and automation.  

Basic best practices for modern email marketing are:

1. Only email engaged contacts who have agreed to opt in to your outreach. Don’t buy lists or send to people who don’t want to receive emails.

2. Focus on data. Ensure your ESP can both access and use everything you know about your shoppers’ behavior on your site to inform the way you communicate with them.

3. Build narrowlytargeted segments. Don’t batch and blast. Klaviyo’s email benchmark report found that when an email was sent to less than a quarter of a company’s total email list, those targeted sends outperformed campaigns sent to three-quarters of the email list — meaning better open rates, click-through rates, and revenue generated per recipient .

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1. Don’t leave automation for later. Set up a few core automated email series, like abandoned cart recovery, welcome emails, browse abandonment and win-back series. Make sure you take a look at industry best practices around the number of emails each flow should entail and proper messaging. For instance, abandoned carts are best tackled as a series of 2-4 emails. Klaviyo’s email segmentation and automation benchmark report showed that across every type of company, automated emails are proven to bring in revenue.

4. InStockNotify | Automated Email Series

By Rebecca Germain, Owner of InStockNotify

When done right, abandoned cart flows can drive up to $14 in revenue for every recipient. Yes, it’s past time to set up your automated email series!

Implementing and maximizing the right technology solutions will set you apart from your competitors and is key to measurable sales growth in 2019.  These tools can improve the customer experience on your site, drive increased sales from return and repeat customers, and provide data and metrics for your store to facilitate growing your business.  

InStockNotify was created out of an intense need to cut down on time spent on manually maintaining a list of customers who wanted to know when a specific product was back in stock.  By creating the technology to do this automatically, we had the ability to instead focus our efforts on revenue-generating tasks and grow our business.  

An unanticipated benefit of creating and implementing InStockNotify was the immediate boost in customer satisfaction. Now, each customer receives a consistent email message with the desired product information along with other items they may be interested in, and it isn’t dependent on any one person remembering to check the current inventory and send out the messages.

Speaking from experience, opening an online store and navigating all the technology options out there is daunting. The best advice we can give is to open a dialogue with the technology provider. As a provider, we want to hear all types of feedback from our customers — good, bad or otherwise. We want our app to be in every single store and we are willing to listen to every single one to make that happen.  

Perhaps your product line needs a scenario we haven’t yet thought of  — let us know! If you have an idea for a feature or functionality that makes sense for other users — suggest it!  We want to work with you to build a solution that fits the needs of your store, so we can be part of helping you run your business as smoothly and profitably as possible.

5. Brightpearl | Omnichannel Management

By Michael Sherman, VP of Sales at Brightpearl

Today’s customer has the opportunity to browse and shop through a myriad of tools, devices and platforms, allowing them to make purchasing decisions at every twist, turn and click.

As a result, today’s merchants must be prepared to support customers on any device their ideal customers use. This is the start of effective omnichannel management.

A business that has truly grasped omnichannel management is in a position to better serve their customers, provide a barrier-free shopping experience and enhance brand differentiation. And what we’re seeing is that the changes and opportunities driven by technology have rapidly transformed the industry.

Therefore, the question is no longer if merchants should make omnichannel part of their strategy, but rather how to do so effectively.

However, Brightpearl’s latest survey of over 350 retail executives identified that while over 87% of retailers agree omnichannel is important, only 8% of those surveyed feel they’ve truly mastered it. The rest simply cite omnichannel is either a “pipedream” or “work in progress”.

If you feel like you fit into one of those categories, here are some of our best practices for omnichannel strategy.

Understand Omnichannel Buyer Journeys

The first step is to truly understand the different journeys an omnichannel buyer could take to get to your store; this Brightpearl infographic is a great place to start.

Ensuring you understand all the different paths an omnichannel customer will take to get to you will help you understand where to be every step of the way. Furthermore, the tools you use to communicate with your customers must support each unique omnichannel journey.

Analyze Customer Behavior

There are numerous tools and data you can use to analyze customer behavior, including:

• Google Analytics: Keep an eye on where your customers are coming from, what they’re interested in and other key demographics. This will help inform your marketing and buying decisions.

• Customer feedback: Whether it’s a social media message, a customer review or a blog comment, collect insights from customer feedback on a regular basis. They often highlight common problems or needs that you can use to inform decisions.

• Social media engagement & click-through rates: Which posts are garnering more engagement and click-throughs? Are they all tied to a certain brand, product type or offer? Use this information to figure out what your ideal customers are most interested in and update your marketing strategies accordingly.

Implement Your Omnichannel Strategy

Once you understand your buyer journeys and how best you can to communicate with your omnichannel customers, your next steps are to start implementing your strategy.

The data you’ve obtained so far should underpin all of your decisions on what to focus on first and what objectives you should have for your omnichannel strategy.

When implementing your new strategy, our advice would always be to start small and implement different elements, one by one, starting with working toward your most important goal.

If you’re still unsure where to start, we recommend taking a look at this “Introduction to Omnichannel” guide.

Our Technology Partners have given you plenty to mull over for the time being, but stay tuned for even more 2019 marketing strategies in part two of this series, coming soon.