Are you thinking of a florist website redesign or maybe switching your website to Shopify? Maybe you are just starting out and you want to choose the best marketing tool to attract and convert website visitors into customers.
I see this happen about once a month. A business owner comes to me for marketing and sales services after investing in a new website and their sales or traffic tanking. It goes one of two ways, either they invest in a brochure website, that is a terrible marketing tool, or they spend to much on form and the website does not have the functionality they need to build a thriving eCommerce business.
I wanted to put a case study together about this for a florist client of mine.
Before: When a website build goes wrong! (p.s. not It!)
Client X came to us after a website redesign went horrible wrong! Her traffic took a nose dive, her sales were in the toilet and she was $10,000 poorer.
Her mobile was not mobile friendly (and 90% of people research online before buying) (this was one of the main reasons she wanted to build a site)
It did not have a box to choose a delivery date.
It did not have a box to include a message with your order.
It did have a over 18 / 21 message for people to buy gift baskets with wine
They had not connected the dots between the old and new website so she kept her search engine traffic.
It was not easy for her to make changes so she would have had to pay them $300 every time she needed to change something.
There was no tracking set up to tell her:
Which marketing was working so she could do more of it
Which marketing was performing poorly so she could stop paying for it or make tweaks to improve it.
It wasn’t easy to set up things like a Facebook shop, google shopping, and marketing tools to help her grow her business.
What happens when you build a website that is a crappy sales person
You make little to know sales or they take a dive
You don’t attract free traffic from google into your business
After – Her Conversion Optimised Website Redesign
She has a fast website, that works on a mobile phone, tablet & desktop.
It is a fantastic sales person that works for her 24/7 attracting customers from around the world.
It has all the clever functionality she needs to run her business, age checker, delivery dates, shipping based on the gift recipients post code, gift messages, up selling cards and chocolates so she increases her average order value.
We 5x Her sales by using conversion rate optimisation design and tactics.
We doubled the amount of free traffic she received from google by using search engine optimisation practices on the new website.
We set up a measurement plan so she knows what marketing makes her money and what marketing to tweak or turn off if it is under performing.
Her new website is built on the Shopify platform so as her business’s grows she has technology that will grow with her.
Other Services: We also provide ongoing Monthly E commerce Growth Marketing Management running her Google Ads & Facebook Ads to continue to grow her business.
Do you need a Florist or Gift website? Considering a website redesign?
Talk to us today about our Shopify eCommerce website Design & Development Services or organise a quick audit to find out what you need to build a powerful online marketing machine that attracts strangers and turns them into customers.
When it comes to building a florist eCommerce website, it’s hard to choose a platform with all the bells and whistles you need.
A florist website needs special customisation like.
A Date for Delivery Box
Personalised Message Box
A Recipients Address that is different from the billing address
Last-minute add ons (or upsells) like chocolates, wine or a gift card.
Shipping by suburb.
The great thing is these can all be customised on Shopify e-commerce platform. The cool thing is you can also use the Shopify system to take payment and manage your stock in the store.
You can see them in action on this website we built for one of our clients Gina.
Why we love Shopify?
Easy to use – you don’t have to be techy if you can write an email, or use Microsoft word – then you should be able to handle Shopify.
There are tutorials and videos for everything – If there’s something you can not do – spend 2 seconds searching and you will have the answer you need.
100s of beautiful templates – Ifs easy to fit out a template with your logo and branding so you have a slick, smartphone-friendly website design
Integrates with all the good merchant facilities – so taking payment is a breeze.
Allows you to send email to people who abandoned carts – so you convert more of the traffic coming to your website
Why you should take care when you choose an eCommerce platform.
When you decide to build a website it’s important to make sure the technology it is built on has all the functionality you need to market in 2015 and beyond.
Old outdated platforms may not allow you to give Google all the information it needs to send you traffic
or to make your links look really slick on social media sites.
Or allow you to easily get the customization you need to take orders online (like delivery locations, shipping dates, and personalised messages).
So make sure you research your cart before you buy. (or use Shopify)
Is your website currently on a crappy outdated platform? Or do you need to build a new website from scratch?
Ever wondered how much you can afford to spend on your marketing and still make money? Do you struggle to set a marketing budget? Confused about how to measure the effectiveness of your marketing?
The key to digital marketing and creating a predictable lead and sales generating system is knowing your money metrics. When you have a measurement plan and you know your money metrics, you can easily measure if you put $1000 into marketing exactly how much you get out of your marketing machine at the other end. The idea is to make sure if you put $1 into marketing you always get $3, 5, 10, 20x more out at the other end.
Lucy Ross – Director at EcommerceMarketing.co.nz with an online marketing update video about your customer life cycle, what it is, how to calculate it and how to know if your marketing is working.
How much is a new customer worth to your business?
We all know the old saying goes you have to spend money to make money. But when I speak to people about their marketing budget it is amazing to see how many people do not know how much they can afford to spend to acquire a new customer. As a business owner it is important to think beyond the first sale… and start to think about your customer life cycle. How long do your customers stay with your business?
What is the customer life cycle? – This is basically the length of time a customer will stay with your company and keep returning to spend money.
How do I track a customer life cycle? – Depending on your business model there are different ways of doing this, the most common would be:
Look at past appointments by customers e.g. Hair Dressers, Spas, Chiropractors, Physios, Doctors, Lawyers.
Set up customer clubs and in store promotions so people scan each time they buy e.g. Pharmacies, Retail Stores,
Supermarkets (like the One Card), Farmers card, customer clubs, reward cards.
Two really cool examples here in New Zealand would be:
The Countdown One Card – You swipe that card and they track what you are buying, the things you like, how often you come, how long you have been using the one card for and that gives them some really great data to market to you with.
The Farmers Club Card – They do a similar job where they will send you promotions based on purchase history and they know how long you have been using their farmers club card.
By tracking a customer against their purchase history you can start to build statistics about the frequency with which people return to your business.
How often do they shop with you?
How much do they spend?
How Long do they stay with your business?
So here is an example of what I mean….
Lets say you sell Chiropractic Services. You charge your customer on average $65 for an appointment. Let’s say you spend $2000 on a marketing campaign (online or offline).How many customers does that advertisement have to bring you in order for you to break even? $2000 divided by $65 = 31 Single bookings to cover costs.
If the average customer generally stays with you for X time and books an appointment at X frequency that customer is actually worth the following….
Stays 3 months and books every week = $838 (3 customers to cover this cost)
Stays 1 year and books every 1 months = $780 (You need 3 customers to cover costs)
Stays 3 years and books every month = $2340 (you would need one new customer to cover costs)
Stays 10 years and books 6 times a year = $3900 (You would more than cover costs with this one customer)
So the question really is… What is a new customer worth to you?
You would worth this out by looking at the following:
How much do they spend on average?
How often do they return?
How long do they stay with your business?
how many customers you will need to make a profit rather than just cover costs.
What are your overheads
How much margin will you make off each sale
How much margin will you make over the customer life cycle?
This will give you an idea of how much you can afford to spend to acquire that new customer taking into account your overheads.
That is our online marketing tip on how to calculate your customer life cycle for this week. Really Important when you are considering any business marketing online or offline so you can figure out how much you can afford to spend to get those new customers.
This will really help you make marketing decisions about what success looks like when you finish that campaign.
What did you think of this article?
We would love to hear your feedback, let us know what you thought of the video and if you want us to make more or answer any questions you may have using the comment box below
Want to find out where the holes are with your current marketing and hatch a plan to grow your business?
Let’s get together for a digital marketing audit to find out what you have, what you do not have and what you need to explode sales and get more return on investment from your marketing.
Courses, Mentors and Books have been telling you for years that Customer Retention is key and that getting repeat customers is MUCH cheaper then acquiring new ones.
As a business owner it can be really stressfull as you see the costs of advertising growing everyday.
You will have tried marketing funnels, s.e.o, content marketing, google adwords, facebook ads, social media posts, content marketing, remarketing and all the rest…
As the cost of traffic growing as more and more businesses go online you need an actionable strategy to drive sales and profits up… and make your marketing an investment NOT an expense.
So how do we do that?
One of the cheapest ways to increase your sales is to encourage repeat purchases.
For this, you need a customer retention strategy to reactivate first time and existing customers.
This is considerably cheaper than paying to acquire new ones each time you want to make a sale.
e.g.
Lets say you are spending $10 to acquire a sale on adwords. If you can get that customer to repeat purchase than it is only costing you $10 / 2 = $5 per sale. If you can get them to buy from you four times that is $2.5 per sale… and well you get the idea.
By extending the customer life cycle you can greater ROI from advertising.
Conversion Tip – Create a Customer Retention Strategy and try different retention tactics to encourage repeat purchases.
6 Customer Retention tactics you could try to increase ROI from marketing and grow sales:
There are loads of things you could be doing to reactivate your existing customers. Here are six customer retention tactics you could use to keep your customers coming back again and again.
Emailing a coupon to be used on their second purchase.
Asking for their email so we can email them in future.
Getting them on our social media platforms (facebook, instagram, pinterest, youtube, google+, Twitter etc).
Killer after sales emails to build the relationship.
A coupon for a cross sells packed inside their order.
Product based email sequences based on other items they might like.
These are just a few of the lower costs tactics you could try.
Confused about how to scale your eCommerce Business? Be sure to grab a copy of our eCommerce Profit Maximiser Blueprint and learn the key steps you need to take AND the order you need to take them to scale up sales and profits in your eCommerce Business. Don’t have time? Let us do it for you
Over to you… I would love to connect and hear more about your business. Please drop me a line below and let me know “What customer retention tactics are you using in your business?” Or “Which one do you think would work best for you.” And please feel free to help share this article with friends of co-workers and help us spread the word. Ok GO…
Here is an eCommerce CONVERSION rate optimisation tip – “Stalk your customers using remarketing”… in a non creepy way of course.
If you are not down with the AdWords lingo.
Adwords Remarketing is the process of tagging a person’s computer with a cookie when they look at a certain page or take a certain action on your website like adding a product to their cart and then leaving a website. You can set it up so that everyone with that cookie on their computerseese’s an ad related to the product they were looking at on your site.
[bctt tweet=”Stalk your customers online with Google Adwords Remarketing” username=”ecommercemarket”]
Here is an example of re-marketing in action
Last week I was on theiconic.com website looking for a new swimsuit for a holiday I have coming up in Hawaii.
Now whenever I log in to Skype, Gmail or browse content websites on the internet I see Iconic banners featuring the exact pair of togs that I looked at on the site.
Why would you want to do this?
Be a step ahead of the competition
Make sure your brand stays at the top of peoples minds when they are researching products you sell.
Recover people who abandoned their cart and do not purchase at their first visit.
People may not purchase something the first time they visit your website for a number of reasons maybe the phone rang, maybe it wasn’t pay day until the next week, maybe they were still comparing their options. Without re-marketing you run the risk of them forgetting about you.
How do you do this?
You have some code on your website that tags anyone that visits your website with a cookie so google knows they visited your website
You select the people you are interested in showing an advertisement to e.g. anyone who has looked at a certain page or taken a certain action on your website e.g. looked at togs, added to cart, did not purchase.
You create an ad in google adwords to display to that group of people
You tell Google Adwords to display banner those people.
You track the results.
The add then appear on any websites that display google ads e.g. gmail, skype, trademe, information sites when your potential customer is shopping online and reminds them about your website which increases your chance of making the sale.
Tip:
Make sure your website is built for success before turning on any re-marketing or any new traffic channels. If your website is not set up to convert the traffic you have you are not utilizing your marketing budget effectively. In order to get the best possible return on investment and create an eCommerce business you can scale you need to optimise your website, then turn up the traffic. Need help with that… Learn more here..
As you know from my previous post – mobile and tablet searchers continue to grow, and with this change customers are changing the way they research and purchase online.
Here are some cool stats from google on the devices your customers use to find you:
If you have not installed adwords conversion tracking on your website you are shooting yourself in the foot. Learn more about how conversion tracking helps you make marketing decisions that grow your business.
TRANSCRIPTION
Hi, Lucy Ross here from ecommercemarketing.co.nz with another online marketing update for you. Today we’re going to talk about the importance of tracking and actually finding out where your marketing budget is going and if it’s bringing you, customers.
Are you tracking conversions?
If you set up any sort of Google AdWords and you’re not using Google AdWords conversion tracking, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. That’s because conversion tracking allows you to see exactly what keywords make sales or bring leads into your business.
Making the right decisions
Now, if you’re not using conversion tracking what you’re going to find is with Google AdWords, you’ll be spending money on a whole lot of different keywords, but you won’t know specifically which ones bring you business, so you can’t adjust your bids to perhaps make sure you appear in front of more people and you scale up those sales.
It also means because you don’t know which keywords aren’t making you any money, you can’t reduce the cost on them and turn them down. This could lead to basically empty pockets, and exhausting your AdWords budget, and no way to really refine and tweak things.
Do you have a measurement plan?
It’s important to set up a measurement plan in Google AdWords which is going to let you track things like phone calls or people that use the contact us page, or an e-commerce you want to be tracking if they make a sale. You want to basically track people’s engagement from AdWords and that they took the specific action that you wanted them to take.
Goal Tracking, Cart Abandonment and Profits
This is also important to carry through to your Google Analytics account. You have the ability in there to track goals, and there’s even an eCommerce tracking option in there if you want to track what products you’re selling, your conversion rate, and your shopping cart abandonments. You want to set up a measurement plan to basically find out all the things that are going well and resulting in sales or leads or money in profit. This involves sitting down and saying okay, what would a positive result look like, and how could we measure that, and how can we implement that into our website.
Track peoples actions on your website
With Google AdWords conversion tracking code, you basically take a little bit of code and you paste it onto the page that people reach after they take that action. If they filled in a contact form, it would be on the thank you page that came up once they’d pressed send on that contact form. If they went and put their details into your shopping cart, it would be on the successful order or order thank you page that came up.
Build a funnel (by fixing the holes in your website)
Basically, Google knows that when someone’s visited that page that a sale has happened, or with the case of Google Analytics goal tracking, it would say people reached the cart page, they reached the checkout page, and then they reached the sale page, so that’s a sale.
But, it could also track things like people reaching the cart page, the checkout page, and then not going through, so you could see how many people were putting things in their cart and then abandoning and not making a sale.
This is really helpful for you if you’re perhaps thinking about making changes to your website. Or, if suddenly things change, it would let you know that something was wrong and needed attention on your shopping cart.
Get tracking
This is Lucy Ross from Ecommerce Marketing. If you need help with Google Analytics or Google AdWords, we offer training. It can help you set up a measurement plan to make sure you’re getting results out of your online marketing. If you want to find out about more tips and techniques like this, be sure to sign up to our newsletter. I’ll see you next time.
You only have to look around you on the bus, in a cafe or just walking down the street to see how prevalent smartphones are. We never leave home without them, often checking them is the first thing we do in the morning, the last thing we do at night… and even during out lunch break… I even heard a horror story the other day about someone using one at a urinal.
So what does this mean for businesses…
Smartphones are influencing the way we research, make purchase decisions and shop.
Comparing prices
Getting Directions
Calling up and making a booking
Looking at menu’s
Buying online using their mobiles
Checking stock at other stores
reading reviews to decide between models
Mirror your marketing on a mobile!
Now you know that a large percentage of potential customers are looking for you on a mobile phone…you have to ask yourself if your website is mobile friendly.
How does your site stack up – You Mobile Friendliness Self Check
Does it load quickly
Can they click to call
Can they easily find your contact details
Can they get directions to drive to your store
Can they read your content on their small screen without pinching and scrolling
Can they fill out a contact form on their small screen
Are you stressed out by how much money you are spending on marketing each month? Would you like to squeeze more profit out of your marketing budget? Cart abandonment emails could help you make thousands of dollars worth of sales you would have otherwise lost.
Is your online marketing an expense or an investment?
It can be scary seeing your credit card bill each month and looking at how much you have spent on boosted posts, Facebook ads, Google Adwords and various subscriptions – To it is important to squeeze every last sale out of your sales funnel.
So what happens when your customer gets interrupted during a purchase?
Don’t you hate it when someone interrupts you when you are in the middle of doing something? It happens a lot, doesn’t it? The phone rings? One of the kids is yelling at you or your phone decides to go flat. What ever the cause this is happening to your customers when they shop on your website.
This raises the question – “how do we recover those sales?”
[bctt tweet=”Cart abandonment Emails let you squeeze more sales out of the same marketing budget.” username=”ecommercemarket”]
What is an abandoned cart email?
Here is an example of one in action:
Let’s say you Jim is shopping for some new headphones and come to my website, he likes the price, he has read the reviews and decided these are the headphones for him… but then his dog runs the past, eating his new running shoes, so he goes and grabs the show off the dog, then the phone rings… and then he completely forgets about the headphones and goes on with his day.
Then 2, 10, 24 hours later he gets an email in his inbox saying…
“Hi Jim, You left these Headphones in your cart. Did you still want them.”
With a link, and branding and everything, he needs to continue with his purchase. While not every person who abandoned their cart will take you up on this offer, some will. So it’s an important part of your conversion strategy.
One of my clients is using this tool to recover $600 in lost sales a month – that is $7200 in extra sales a year.
E-commerce Shopping Cart Abandonment Emails can help helpful to:
Convert people who were in the research stage into buying.
Recover customers who were interrupted during the purchase process.
Remind people who were waiting for pay day to buy this product.
Get more sales without doing any extra work.
Now I know that sounds small but to a small seasonal local business it’s all profit that they would not have other wise received and helps transform their marketing costs from an expense into an investment… and it happens automatically – so there is no EXTRA work involved (other than setting it up once).
How do I get my website to send out one of these emails?
This is easier for some people than others. If you build your website on a smart “platform” like Shopify or Shopsite it will automatically send these emails out for you if you decide to turn the feature on. You can customise the email so its personal.
If not this is something your website platform can do. This is why we love building Shopify Websites for customers because it is really easy to turn on this marketing functionality and squeeze more sales out of your website. You can learn more about shopify here
Is your website platform up to scratch?
If you are considering upgrading your eCommerce Website and want to make sure you have all the necessary technology you need to increase not just sales but profits then check out our shopify web development services – we build businesses not just websites – and make sure your website has the necessary functionality you need to thrive online.
What to do next
[callout title=”Book some Google analytics training.” link=”/google-analytics-training/”]If you are worried about the growing costs of marketing or want to increase sales this is one way to get a conversion bump. Start by Jump into Google Analytics and check out your Cart Abandonment rate and see how many people are leaving your website at the checkout. Not sure how? [/callout]
Pin me
Over to you… Are you using cart abandonment emails on your store? How many sales do you recover each month? Have questions about cart abandonment?
Like this article? We would love it if you would take 2 seconds out of your day to pin, post or tweet this article and share it with friends and colleges and help us spread the world about online marketing.
Are you struggling to attract the right kind of traffic to your website? Is your pay per click advertising bill through the roof? Creating content rich landing pages is crucial for converting strangers on your website into paying customers.
[bctt tweet=”The words on your website can make or break a conversion on the site so it is important to make your landing pages sing!” username=”ecommercemarket”]
The words on your website can make or break a conversion on the site so it is important to make your landing pages sing! That way more of the traffic you are attracting to your website will stay and buy, and less will bounce off to your competitiors.
[bctt tweet=”Creating content rich landing pages is crucial for converting strangers on your website into paying customers.” username=”ecommercemarket”]
Why build landing pages?
Get more conversions on your website
Get more traffic from google, social media channels and referrals
Get better results from your marketing
Spend less per click on google adwords
What does a landing page do?
Pre-sell customers on your products and services
Convert them from strangers into leads and send them to your product pages
Rank in google for more keywords
Target your ideal customer and tell them what they need to know so they buy from you
How we use landing pages for our clients.
Landing pages are a crucial part of the work we do for our clients when it comes to attracting traffic and educating it into leads and customers. They allow us to split test certain copy, appear relevant to the reader and the search engines, and help us keep control of our pay per click costs.
Would you like to start using landing pages to attract the right type of website visitors that convert like crazy?
Organise a chat to talk about our Conversion Rate Optimisation Services
[callout title=”Organise a quick chat” link=”/business-scalability-audit/”]Because we don’t know each other yet, and you probably have questions. We have designed a quick 9-minute chat, so we can get to know you better, answer your questions and help you get clear on exactly what needs to change to grow your business.[/callout]
Over to you? Do you use landing pages? Have questions? I would love to connect so please drop me a link below
