The world of ecommerce has experienced meteoric growth over the past two years thanks to the pandemic. According to eMarketer, more than 32 national markets including Australia saw double-digit growth. The furniture and electronics categories were clear winners, with online sales increasing by more than 200 percent.
While growth is to be welcomed, it also comes with its own challenges. Behemoth marketplaces like Amazon will continue to solidify their powerful position as they expand their offering and retailers must constantly evolve to keep their edge amongst an exploding world of competitors vying for customers’ attention.
The challenge, and the opportunity, is to find ways to maintain or grow your market share amongst these pressures. Here are eight performance marketing hacks retailers should consider for scaling online sales in 2022:
- Don’t forget the marketing basics
Ecommerce marketing is still marketing. Make sure you have the basics covered off including clearly determining your buyer personas, understanding your buyer journey and where your customers hang out online. Conducting ongoing competitor research is essential to see how you compare to your competitors in terms of marketing and their online user experience. What can you adopt or improve from these insights?
2. Run Google Shopping ads
If you’re not already advertising on Google Shopping there is a high chance you are missing out on potential sales. Google Shopping Ads provide shoppers with the option to browse a variety of products across multiple online retailers based on their search terms. They are the primary way to guarantee you have a prominent position on search results pages for customers looking for the types of products you offer.
3. Invest in ecommerce SEO
SEO requires an investment in time and resources, but it is well worth the effort. SEO delivers a solid ROI as a long-term sales strategy, acting as the ‘net’ that captures prospects during the stages of awareness and consideration, hence it fuels the fire for nurturing and re-engagement through remarketing and retargeting.
4. Advertise on Facebook and Instagram
With more than 18 million monthly users in Australia, Facebook and Instagram should not be overlooked when developing your ecommerce marketing strategy. Their huge audience, paired with the ability to hyper target customers based on their interests and behaviours, means it’s a very effective tool to get your brand in front of high intent prospects. Make sure you have engaging visuals and be clever with ad copy and creative to capture the attention of customers.
5. Email marketing is king
It is well known that email delivers one of the highest ROIs in comparison to other channels. Yet there are many businesses reluctant to invest time, resources and effort into good email marketing.
Your database is one of your business’s greatest assets. If you don’t have one, start building one now. It is an incredibly powerful channel to directly communicate with customers and prospects. Then, you should consider sending these types of emails to your database:
- Welcome email: Send a welcome email to all new customers who make a purchase
- Offers: Use email as a channel to send exclusive promo codes and free gifts to members
- Newsletters: Distribute an ongoing newsletter to inform customers and subscribers of new products, offers, tips and more
- Be helpful: When a product is purchased, send content designed to help customers get the most out of their new product
6. Sell true value with video
There is an enormous opportunity for retailers to incorporate video content into their key site pages and product pages. It’s incredibly effective for customers to see your product or offering in action rather than as a static image. Having run thousands of campaigns across different channels and industries, Rocket has learned campaigns are much more effective when video or animation is utilised.
Video content can be produced on all types of budgets – it just needs to be engaging, relatable and deliver value to the viewer.
7. Optimise for voice assistants
As of 2019, 57 percent of the Australian population use voice search features and this number is only going to increase. To support voice search, marketers have to take a step back from formal language and adopt what is now getting traction as ‘Conversational Marketing.’ This includes rapid adoption of interactive, personalised and relatable website copy that ‘speaks’ to your target customers. Optimising your website is all about being the first result read out by the assistant on your customer’s device.
James Lawrence is co-founder and director of digital marketing agency, Rocket.