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The Future of eCommerce Marketing for 2020 Virtual Summit Recap

Derric Haynie
Nov 20
10
 mins
Aug 22, 2020
November 20, 2023 2:30

Sponsored by:

About

Things are changing quickly...

And no, this isn't another Coronavirus marketing guide, you can find those some place else. We're talking about the long-term sustainable changes and trends that will impact all of Ecommerce and all marketing teams regardless of any tragedies.

To check out the entire virtual summit, go here. Or follow along below to get the sessions and some brief recaps.

Here's the session list:

How Live Chat Can Increase Revenue by 13%

A talk by Derric Haynie, Chief Technologist, EcommerceTech

Overview:

The reason real-time conversations works. How to create a "sales" team inside your customer service department. The 6-step strategy for increasing revenue by 13% with real-time live chat conversations.

Summary:

Live chat focuses on the pre-sale conversation and flips your customer service department from a “business cost” to a powerful sales force. By actively responding to comments made on social media ads and posts, you increase your chances of getting a sale by reaching the right person, at the right time, with the right message. Executing on live chat effectively can increase your gross revenue by 13%, and faster response times lead to higher conversion rates. Here is a 6 Step Strategy for building out your live chat:

 

  1. Build a detailed FAQ or knowledge base section.
  2. Create a detailed chatbot that can answer and mitigate most common questions.
  3. Create a sales training guide for your team.
  4. Use the users purchase and browsing behavior to indicate a pre-sale or post-sale ticket and segment your support team into pre-sales and post sales to best allocate the ticket.
  5. Have humans ready to respond to tickets within 90 seconds in real time.
  6. Profit!

The Ecommerce Conversion Masterclass

A talk by Ryan Pinkham, Director of Marketing, Privy

Overview:

Why email marketing is the fastest way to grow your online sales. Where to get started with email marketing for your business. 3 marketing plays every brand should run.  On-Site Conversion Rate

Summary:

Growing your email list and building out your email marketing are essential for growing the customer base of any business. Most brands only see 2% conversion from first time web visitors, meaning 98% of visitors leave without making a purchase. The amount of time and money spent to attract these visitors requires a plan to continue marketing to them after they have left your site. Email continues to drive the highest returns for Ecommerce brands and if you capture prospects' email addresses you will have the opportunity to convert them over and over. 

There are multiple tactics you can use to capture email addresses:

  1. The Welcome Email - Used to build a list of future customers from first time website visitors in exchange for a discount off their first purchase.

  

2.The Cart Saver - Stops cart abandonment by triggering a pop-up offer as soon as a visitor’s mouse starts to move away from completing their purchase. 

 

 

3. The Birthday Gift - Celebrate customers' birthdays and drive future sales by offering them a discount or free item for their birthday.

 

 

4. The Paid Traffic Converter - Target people coming from a specific campaign - like a newsletter, Facebook or Instagram ads with a spin to win offer. 

 

How to Drive $800k (with 25X+ ROAS) By Combining Facebook Ads and Messenger Marketing

A talk by  Soma Toth, CEO, Recart

 

Overview:

DTC brands are heavily dependent on paid media to acquire customers and penetrate new markets. However, they often lack profitability and end up in a constant cycle of buying new customers.  As paid media is driving up customer acquisition costs, it's making it more and more necessary for businesses to look for new avenues to get their message out there. From this talk, you'll learn what innovative brands are doing to lower their acquisition costs and how you can invest more in retention marketing strategies like Messenger marketing.

 

Summary:

Finding a way to make your message stand out from the rest of the noise is getting more and more difficult. Companies have to think creatively to be heard and utilize different tools to reach their customers. Typically, ecommerce messaging consists of Emails, SMS and now Messenger marketing. Emails allow for an excellent experience, with low engagement (lots of competition). SMS is effective for notifying customers of information they don’t have to engage with, providing for a positive experience but low engagement. Messenger marketing provides the high engagement of SMS with the excellent experience of Email marketing. And when you market and engage with people on messenger, you can see 77% higher open rates and 11% higher click through rates than with email. 

There are 3 Main Pillars of Successful Messenger Marketing

 

 

1. Messenger Ads

 

 

2. List Growth

 

 

3. Flows and Re-engagement

TikTok 101 and e.l.f. Case Study

A talk by Evan Horowitz, CEO, Movers+Shakers

This video has been removed as per request of the presenter.

Overview:

Learning from literally the world's most successful Tik Tok campaign, #eyeslipsface with E.L.F., which his agency created, get a look at how Evan Horowitz thinks about TikTok and how to use it as a major channel for your brand.

Summary:

TikTok offers a new way to reach your customers through authentic, off the cuff, engaging short form mobile videos. It has unprecedented reach and campaigns with TikTok consistently break the 1+billion views mark. This platform invites creativity and brings people together around different themes and competitions. And the demographic of users continues to age up with the fastest growing segment currently being 35-45 year olds. 

There are 4 main success strategies for a TikTok campaign. 

 

  1. Organic Presents - This is structurally similar to what you see on other platforms, basically setting up a brand page. 
  2. Influencers - Like on other platforms, but more economical and enthusiastic than other sites influences. *It is important to select people who are currently influencers on TikTok as they have better native content and will be viewed as more authentic. 
  3. In-Feed Ads - Again, structurally similar to what you see on other platforms, however, you have to create content specific for this channel. Utilizing the same ads you’ve used on Facebook or Instagram will not resonate within this medium. 
  4. Hashtag Challenge - This is the bread and butter of TikTok campaigns and is really only seen on this platform. These campaigns are fun, based on what is happening in the world that week and can generate participation on a massive scale (engaging with and advertising your brand to 100,000+ people). These challenges have to have a clear prompt, invite creativity, be fun and have engaging music to be successful. 

Turning Customer Service From a Cost Center into a Revenue Generator

A talk by Philippe Roireau, Head of Business Development and Partnerships, Gorgias

Overview:

How Marketing teams can work with customer service to increase ROI. The value of retention marketing through live chat and social media comment response. Automation in Customer Service to scale cost effectively.

Summary:

A customer's experience with your business is crucial for your growth and success. A recent study found that 79% of online shoppers would take their business to a competitor within a week if they had a poor customer experience. That means the stakes are high for every interaction and you need to capitalize on every moment. Optimizing your customer support team through automated and live chat can improve customer experiences and monetize interactions, leading to increased ROI. 

When you reply to a customer about something as common as “where is my order?” it provides a great opportunity to give more information and upsell. You can remind them of how many points they have in their loyalty program, or provide a new discount for their next purchase. Every conversation should be aimed towards getting that next interaction. Companies that take advantage of the time they get in front of a customer can see increased conversions and ROAs. You can turn your customer service center from a cost to a revenue generator by doing the following: 

  • Optimize Customer Support by automating all frequently asked questions to free up agents time to focus on opportunities for conversion and upsells.
  • Open New Communication Channels by being available through Facebook comments, messenger, SMS, etc.
  • Monetize Customer Interactions by utilizing messaging that incentivizes customers to engage and purchase on your website.

Boost AOV by Showing the Right Products During the Customer Journey

A talk by Xavier Armand, Co-founder, OrderBump

 

Overview:

What products to show when. How to leverage retail psychology online. How the biggest e-tailers capture incremental revenue.

Summary:

Delivering the right message, at the right time, to the right person is the most challenging and fundamental component of marketing. Regardless of what you are selling, you have to maximize every opportunity you have in front of customers to drive sales. Utilizing different tools and messaging to upsell and cross sell people on your site is a fantastic way to improve the customer experience while at the same time increasing your average order value. 

 

There are three fundamental rules for increasing your average order value:

 

  1. Slow down your shoppers! Use your web pages real estate to clearly educate consumers about your ENTIRE product line. In physical retail stores, this is done by forcing customers to walk by/through the majority of your products before they can reach the checkout line.
  2. Newness attracts shoppers. Take care to amplify new products and use them as hooks to your existing products. Example: Including new products in bundles with related popular items. 
  3. Take advantage of your checkout page! Utilize your cart and the checkout page to increase units per transaction and average order value. You can do this by upselling low-decision making products as cart add ons or providing a discount or free shipping by adding additional items to your cart (like spending $50 to get free shipping). 

Throughout every step of your customers journey, from the homepage to the checkout, you should be upselling and cross selling to them. Below are some tips for updating pages on your site to increase your AOV.

 

1. Homepage 

  • Offer messaging about savings and offers for bundles.
  • Educate the customer about the products available for savings and bundles. 
  • Deliver a clear path to discover your offers and deals. 

2. Product Listing/Collections Page

  • Include content on savings and bundles for customers to see as they review your products.
  • Prioritize bundles/kits and focus on the value they deliver - clearly indicate whether the value is financial savings or an enhanced product experience. 
  • Example: Ballsy clearly shows a bundle at the top of their product page, emphasizing the discounted value of the bundle vs. buying the products individually. 

 

3. Product Detail Page

  1. Highlight cross sell and upsell opportunities right on the page.
  2. Example: Anne Taylor created a “where it with” section at the bottom of a product displaying other products/accessories that would match. They then linked the recommended products for customers to learn more about them. This tool raised their AOV from $138 to $185. Make sure you don’t just have “add bundle to cart” as the customer option. You must provide links to the actual products so customers can learn more about them. 

 

4. Cart Page

  1. Offer relevant cross sell and upsell products with a quick add to cart option.
  2. Focus on high value products in the form of bundles and deals.
  3. Clearly indicate opportunities to unlock savings like free shipping. 

5. Checkout

  1. Offer simple, lower-priced, low-decision requirement products that are designed to sweeten a customers order. 
  2. Example: Utilizing Order Bump to offer irresistible upsells right in the checkout. Customers see the add on product and simply click “add to cart”. 

How to Use Omnichannel Marketing to Drive Customer Retention

A talk by Greg Zakowicz, Marketing Strategist & Content Team Lead,  Omnisend

 

Overview:

Why the journey is much more than email.  What channels you can use to increase loyalty and retention. How to build a 1-1 relationship at scale by leveraging more conversational channels.

Summary:

Online shoppers become lost in promotional noise. Generic, one-for-all messaging is no longer winning people’s attention and retailers must create and manage engaging content to succeed. Omnichannel marketing offers multiple touchpoints through various communication channels that unite in a single flow to create the customer journey. This offers customers a unique, personalized experience leading to higher engagement and conversion.

 

You have to get the right message, to the right customer at the right time and layering messages is how you achieve this conversion success. 

 

Website Teardowns LIVE with Kurt Elster

A talk by Kurt Elster, Podcast Host, The Unofficial Shopify Podcast 

 

Overview:

Submit your site for a quick conversion rate optimization examination and teardown by the legendary Kurt Elster.

Summary:

Your website is how you interface with your customers. A bad experience will lose you money, so it is vital that your site provides what customers need in an easy to use manner. 

Oftentimes sites get so caught up in being clever, that they forget to be user friendly. Your site needs to be clean and concise, offering customers a way to shop that they are used to. 

Have you ever noticed how most grocery stores are set up in generally the same way? They are psychologically set up to make you spend more money and this format is what customers are used to experiencing. Stores that deviate too far from the norm will find customers frustrated that they cannot find what they are looking for. The same rule applies to your website. Having a clean navigation (typically across the top of the page) directing customers where to shop for what they want, making checkout simple and providing clear images all contribute to your site's success.

Your Secret Weapon to Provide a Better Customer Experience and Drive Repeat Sales

A talk by Nicholas Wiktorczyk, Co-Founder & CEO, Spently

 

Overview:

Your store emails are one of the most overlooked opportunities you have to drive engagement and a premium customer experience for your brand. Learn why and how to take advantage of your most opened emails directly from Nicholas Wiktorczyk, CEO and Co-Founder of Spently.

Summary:

If you can’t turn one time customers into repeat customers, you will have a hard time scaling/growing your business. That is why it is vital to take advantage of every opportunity you have to communicate with your customers. 

Your average Ecommerce store can have upwards of 21 different store emails: 

 

Most of these emails contain information that the customer is specifically looking for, which significantly increases their open rates (transactional emails have a 114% open rate). Order confirmations, receipts, shipping confirmations, etc. can be used as portable storefronts to interact with your customers and drive additional purchases. See below examples of how to optimize your shipping confirmation emails with additional offers or product information.

 

Creating an Intentional Post-Purchase Experience

A talk by Adam Gardner, Strategic Partnerships, The Route App

 

Summary:

The most recent experience a customer has with shopping online will be what they remember. If it is good, that is the standard they will hold every company they purchase online from to. Most companies forget that the most recent experience a customer has with shopping from their store is the delivery experience. When and how they receive your product is the last thing they will remember. So if their package is delayed, damaged, or doesn’t arrive at all it won’t matter how excellent their shopping experience was with you. A positive shopping experience won’t compensate for the frustration of a lost, damaged or stolen package. 

Focusing on your customers post-purchase experience and having a plan to make it a positive one can round out the entire customer journey you have worked so hard to achieve. Whether you offer free product replacement for lost, stolen or damaged items; expedited shipping; or have a tool/service for doing all this for you, it is a part of your business worth having a solution for. 

One tool worth exploring is called Route. It allows you to act like Amazon without having to spend like Amazon. It is a free service for merchants that offers a better tracking experience and mitigates delivery risk. 

 

Sponsored by:

About

About the author

Derric Haynie was the founder and Chief Ecommerce Technologist at eCommerceTech.io – Where Ecommerce stores go to research, discover, and buy the right tools to grow their store. Half of his day is spent reviewing tech tools, and the other half is talking with merchants to help them discover which solutions are right for them.