A Conferência Tudo sobre eCommerce é um dia muito intenso de partilha de conhecimento e informação sobre ecommerce. Nove oradores sobem ao palco para em menos de 30 minutos partilharem com a audiência case studies reais do trabalho que desenvolvem nas marcas para as quais trabalham

Por esse motivo, a Conferência Tudo sobre eCommerce tem dois painéis de Q&A, um com os oradores da manhã e outro com os oradores da tarde, para que os participantes possam ter a oportunidade de colocar as suas questões aos oradores.

A Chloë Thomas, fundadora do Ecommerce Masterplan, responde neste artigo às perguntas colocadas pela audiência através da nossa app que não tiveram tempo de ser abordadas durante a conferência.

1 What’s your opinion on creating an affiliate-based strategy to increase sales?

The short answer is that it can be a good idea, but like all marketing strategies it’s not going to deliver phenomenal results overnight, so you need to be sure it’s the right choice for you.

If you’re aiming to find existing affiliates to advertise your products for you – you need to make sure they exist. Talk to any of the big networks and find out if they have businesses similar to yours using them successfully, and find out if they have affiliates actively looking for new businesses like yours that they can promote. Make sure you’ve got enough margin to make it worth your while whilst offering enough commission to get the affiliates interested.

If you are interested in doing it because you have bloggers and influencers who want a commission in return for promoting your products then you might be better off skipping the big affiliate networks and running the program yourself. A very basic version can be done with Google Analytics and Google URL Builder, but there are also a lot of good apps out there.

The single most important part about running a successful affiliate program is remembering to think of your affiliates as a sales team who you need to get to know in order to work out how best to incentivise them to promote your products.

2 What are the most important metrics to monitor in our online stores.

 

These are the ones you should be monitoring over time to see how your business is progressing.

I’d suggest drilling down a little deeper to look at these per traffic source – so how your email marketing traffic is doing, and how your Google ads traffic is doing etc. Then you can track these marketing methods over time and if they’re not changing the way you think they should you can dive deeper into the numbers to work out why.

That’s the thing with metrics you want to keep the list of ones you look at in your regular weekly / monthly performance reports as short as possible. They should be enough for you to be able to tell “That’s ok, that’s awesome” / “that’s awful – I’d better investigate and fix”.

The great temptation is to record everything every single week. Avoid that.

3 You said for us to “Build a strong emotional connection between your business and each customer”, what content should I create to achieve this goal?

It all starts with:

• a great About us page – great eg.  https://www.farmtoysonline.co.uk/pages/about
• a great Email sequence to welcome new email sign ups (good egs. Snakehive https://www.snakehive.co.uk/ and Project Repat https://www.projectrepat.com/ )

The content to add should be:

• Why your business exists / founding story
• About your products – what makes them awesome
• Social proof – customer reviews
• Trust building content – reviews by bloggers, newspapers etc.
• Content that addresses the questions, and concerns your customers have most often about buying from you (just ask whoever looks after your customer service enquiries – they’ll quickly tell you!)

Once you’ve created that, continue to improve the content on your website and the messages you send your customers in order to improve performance.

4 You didn’t focus on Average Order Value in your presentation, can you please talk a bit about it and the role that it pays to increase online sales?

 

 

If you can increase your AOV from €45 to €50  then you’ll be making an extra €500 for every 100 orders placed. Given that it’s still the same number of parcels being dealt with this usually has a more positive impact on profit than getting €500 of new orders because it doesn’t increase costs as much.

So, increasing AOV is a very attractive strategy. However, there’s only so far you can increase it before it has a negative impact on the business – you have to find your sweet spot! And historically that’s €45-60.

So, how to increase AOV?

• Give customers a target to aim for

Often the simplest one to test and gives you a quick win. You’re basically just incentivising the customer to spend more.

eg. Spend over €x and get free P&P /free next day delivery / a free gift / a donation to charity / entry into a competition

Setting X is the hard part. Look at your orders in terms of the mode average – so how many orders per month between €0 and €10, €10 and €20 and so on. Then set the X to be just above the highest number so that your incentive impacts the maximum number of people.

• Get them to add more items to their basket

eg. 3 for 2 and other multibuy offers

eg. create product bundles to make this easier for them

eg. offer a couple of products for half price

• Change your product price mix

This means adding products to your range that have a higher price point. They may be ‘better’ alternatives to products you already sell, or complementary items.

In fact, each business has an optimum price point mix. That’s what percentage of your stock should be €1-€10, and €20-€30 and so on.

Often if you see a declining AOV it’s because you’ve added more lower priced items and reduced the number of higher priced items.

 

5 What’s the best way of using influencer marketing to grow my ecommerce business?

The best way is pretty much the only way!

Find people who love your product / might be persuaded to love your product, that have influence over a lot of people – probably via social media or a blog.

Then find the right way to get them to tell their audience about your product.

I’d suggest you start small – find 5-10 micro influencers (up to 10k followers) get in contact with them and find out if they’d be interested in promoting your products. If they are, find out how they’d like to work with you.

If your happy to work with them in that way – set up the test, track the results, and if it’s good keep working with them.

Have a listen to these podcast episodes to find out more about this subject:

https://ecommercemasterplan.com/influencer-marketing-million-dollar-collar/

https://ecommercemasterplan.com/172-influencer-marketing-alexandra-jimenez-explains-how-to-target-and-work-with-influencers/

https://ecommercemasterplan.com/influencer-marketing-summit/

https://ecommercemasterplan.com/live-glam-podcast/

6 Can you share some quick wins on a subscription business model in ecommerce?

Build a community with your customers – they’re after more than just the product in the box, they’re after an experience, so give them one!

Don’t forget to build a dunning sequence – a series of emails to get those whose credit card fails to come back and update their details. Doesn’t take a lot of effort but has a big impact on profits.

Be very careful with the weight and cost of your box – you need to make profit on every single one.

7 How can I make the most of Facebook ads with a very small budget?

Wow, that’s a BIG question.

Start at the end of the funnel.

Build the campaign to target those who got to the checkout but didn’t complete the purchase. That’s going to put your ads in front of a small audience who are very likely to convert – so minimum spend for maximum potential impact.

Once you’ve got that working, go back a step – target those who have visited your site but not made it into the checkout.

 

Quer aprender a fazer crescer as suas vendas online, utilizando metodologias comprovadas em projetos de comércio eletrónico de marcas de referência em Portugal e na Europa? Inscreva-se no nosso Curso Intensivo de Ecommerce no Porto!