We will be sharing tips on how conversion and acquisition can grow your business, You may still be polishing off the last of the champagne and eggnog, but we’re already counting down to the end of the year.
Don’t you want to make money? It’s time to wake up from the food coma and get serious.
The problem is, there are a million things you can do to grow your online business.
You can write more content, better content,improve SEO, hire more employees, start an Instagram promotion, boost social sharing, do a publicity stunt, use PPC advertising, guest blogging, or get better at email marketing. But you have to take a critical note on how you can use conversion and acquisition to grow your business.
There are so many things you can do, but what should you do? Where should you focus your energies in 2017 for maximum impact on the bottom line?
Fix Where You’re the Worst
Growing a business doesn’t happen from any single activity, it happens when you’re continually getting better and optimizing your business to deliver the best possible experiencing.
This requires shifting your thinking away from one-off tactics by focusing on lifting conversion rates throughout the lifecycle.
The places where you will have the biggest impact are the areas in which you are currently focusing all your mindset on.
You can’t just be good at turning strangers into visitors; you have to turn those visitors into users or customers, then turn those customers into repeat buyers.
If you’re underperforming in one of these areas, your whole business will suffer. Are you interested in well-detailed digital marketing plans?
The Customer Lifecycle
Acquisition: Get in front of the right eyes
Conversion: Get that person to take the action you want
Reactivation: Get that person who stopped taking the actions to start again
Retention: Get that person to take those actions again.
How to Identify Where You are Underperforming
Acquisition
The acquisition stage is focused on one thing – get more eyeballs. Traffic is the lifeblood of any eCommerce store. You need eyeballs, and lots of them, to keep an eCommerce store growing.
Read this: Businesses-need-inbound-marketing
Time in business: If you’re a new store owner then this area will undoubtedly be a top priority, and it should be.
Traffic growth: If you’re not experiencing double-digit traffic growth month-over-month then you have an acquisition problem.
Keep in mind, if you’re looking at 2016 data to check the health of your acquisition strategy, be sure to exclude 2016 holiday data – it will muddle your averages.
Recommendations for improvement:
Test your strategies: Every eCommerce marketer should be testing acquisition strategies weekly.
If you’re struggling in this area, you’ll be well served by ramping that up to daily.
Don’t put all your eggs in the PPC basket: PPC is often a quick win for e-commerce, but it’s not cheap.
Be sure not to ignore the slower momentum channels like SEO and content marketing.
These activities won’t have the immediate impact of PPC, but over time, the payoff is big.
Particularly in the post-holiday slow down there’s additional opportunity to gain attention as plenty of e-commerce stores will be slowing their content production during this time.
Targeted landing pages: One very common mistake e-commerce marketers make having ads that don’t point to targeted landing pages. This acquisition error is one that tends to have an adverse impact on conversion rates. Make sure the customers’ experience stays consistent from ad to a site.
Conversion
Once you’ve got the eyeballs, it’s time to turn them into paying customers. Small, targeted tweaks to the conversion process can have a significant impact on overall growth. If you use data wisely at this point, you can get great results with much lower effort.
Read this: Engaging In Social Media
Macro conversion rates: One big warning sign that you definitely do have a problem with is if less than 3% of your visitors are turning into customers.
Micro conversion rates: Leading up to the big conversions there are often smaller conversions that happen along the way such as subscribing to your blog or newsletter, adding items to a wish list, or interacting with you on social media.
These numbers don’t immediately translate to revenue growth, but steady improvement over time indicates a healthy eCommerce business.
Recommendations for improvement:
A/B test your face off: Make tools like Optimizely your best friend. Get smarter about how, where, and when you test.
Test visitor flows: Tools like Google Analytics will provide insight on your visitor flow so you can spot the areas where visitors are dropping off.
Revive abandoned carts: Abandoned shopping carts are a huge opportunity for online stores to boost conversion rates.
Use your data to find the best time and approach for sending these follow-up emails to soon-to-be customers.
Retention
If you have a steady stream of new customers coming in, it’s time to look at how you keep them coming back.
Repeat purchase rates: Repeat purchase rates vary dramatically depending on your business.
If you’re selling computers, this number is likely very small, if you’re selling used books, it should be quite a bit higher.
Benchmark your repeat purchase rates and use this as a barometer of your future success.
Churn rate: Churn is a vital health metric of your business. Even if customer acquisition is fantastic, high churn will destroy the success of your business.
Customer lifetime value: Your customers are not all created equal. If retention is low among customers with a high customer lifetime value, that’s a far bigger problem than if retention is low among your discount-chasing customers.
Recommendations for improvement:
Repeat purchase analysis: Use your data to find out where shoppers are dropping off. Is it between order 1 and order 2? What were the characteristics of the people who bought a second time and those who didn’t?
Churn analysis: Things like website difficulties or shipping delays can cause surges in churn. If you find that this was the case for you, then go back to these customers and offer an explanation, a sincere apology, and an invitation to give your business another chance.
Test email marketing: Email marketing is a staple in the eCommerce marketing toolbox. You can drive repeat purchase rates by checking things like sending follow-up emails recommending items frequently purchased together, subject lines, and content.
Reactivation
If you’re younger than a year, don’t worry too much about reactivation. You will lose customers, but at this point, it’s more important to focus on acquisition and conversion.
Once you’re more established, it’s time to start looking at how to get those churned customers back.
Win back rate: Your win back rate is a measure of customers who came back and remained customers. If this number is too low, it can indicate a problem with your reactivation strategy.
Customer lifetime value: If you’ve lost some high lifetime value customers then this is the #1 place to start getting reactivation results.
Recommendations for improvement:
Win back Analysis: There’s a tendency to approach reactivation with the discount hammer.
This can lead to customers coming back once for the discount, only to never purchase again…again. Understanding why customers returned and turned into repeat customers will help you design a reactivation strategy with the offers and messaging to create repeat customers.
Retargeting: Most people think of retargeting as an acquisition strategy, but you have your customers’ cookies, go ahead and test using this for reactivation.
Test and Measure
Once you know your weak spot, you can then kick start – testing new tactics and measuring the results. Remember: you don’t have to have all the answers up front. Just make sure you’re always trying new things and learning what works!
Shameless Plug
Want a marketing strategy grounded in data and aimed at fixing your business where it needs it most? Get in touch.
We’ve got the tools and the people that can help you conduct the types of analysis described in this post.
Source:http://blog.rjmetrics.com/
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