Niall O'Gorman Chief Strategy Officer at ChannelSight was delighted to recently join Heather Kaplan Customer Success Director at Clavis Insight on a joint webinar 'Online Retail Readiness For Brands: Ensuring A Positive ROI On Your Digital Marketing Spend'. On this webinar Niall and Heather delved into key things brands can do to truly optimize their marketing spend. In theory digital advertising and social media can deliver ready-to-buy consumers direct to product landing pages in online retailers. However campaigns will only produce incremental revenue if targeting is on point and products are setup correctly and ready for sale. If you missed this webinar not to worry we've pulled together 6 key takeaways to help you on the road to ecommerce success. So let's take a look at some key things you can do to ensure you are retailer ready in the online store
To capitalize on paid and earned consumer interest you need to ensure you offer convenient options to purchase across all owed earned and paid media. A recent research study by the Association of National Advertisers found that 69% of companies are investing more in digital and social ads that being shoppable ads via digital banners social media commerce Buy Now ads. With the rapid adoption of Buy Now call-to-actions across digital platforms in recent years consumers have come to expect easy options to purchase. Brands need to meet the changing expectations of the modern shopper. However it's equally important to know when not to deploy Buy Now CTA's. Offering such choice at the wrong stage in the consumer journey can lead to a poor experience. It's important to identify at what stage along the consumer journey Buy Now options are most relevant and build your campaigns around this.
Consumers want more choice and control when it comes to online shopping. No one wants to be pushed to one particular retailer by a brand. Quite often a consumer will prefer to shop with Amazon or Walmart as they wish to add other items to their basket at the same time. Similarly they may feel more comfortable purchasing from their preferred retailer. Offering a variety of retail options for your customers to make a purchase you increase the convenience and ease of purchase which in turn boosts profit.
At a time when the customer has become king enriching the customer experiences needs to be top priority for all brands. Ideally brands need to aim to have no more than 3-4 steps in the purchase journey from first click to final purchase. What happens if you don't provide this? Consumers get lost distracted or disengaged. And a broken consumer experience will lead to failure to convert.
Getting the consumer to your DTC or partner retailer store is one half of the puzzle solved. But what happens when a consumer lands on that product page? All too often product availability is an ongoing challenge within the store. Two ways availability can affect conversions are firstly out of stocks and secondly voids. Out of stocks account for around 8% of products online. Voids are where a product page is completely inaccessible to consumers due to technical glitch or where some retailer sites hide pages when a product is unavailable. So before any campaign is launched brands need to maximum availability across all channels and thoroughly test the end to end process.
Strong content can be a key differentiator between a good campaign and an amazing campaign. Consumers need to understand exactly what they are purchasing. Keywords imagery videos and product descriptions all contribute to more engaging product pages. Some key components that will help you get that perfect product page are:
Online reviews have more of an impact on customer buying decisions that we think. According to Reevo reviews produce an average 18% uplift in sales. Consumers are going out of their way to read reviews and half of all shoppers say they rely primarily on Amazon for reviews. So what's the best way to incorporate product reviews:
While it seems easy in theory eCommerce is a tricky business. Businesses fail all the time for many different reasons sometimes cosmetic and sometimes not. All too often businesses place so much focus getting consumers to the online store both DTC or retail partner they forgot to optimize product pages within the store itself. Keeping the end to end customer journey at the forefront of campaign planning is fundamental to achieve a winning online strategy. Interested to find out more? You can watch the full webinar recording right here.
