FUNDAMENTALS OF DIGITAL MARKETING: MODULE 25/26

Sell more online

Once your online shop is set up, it's time to ensure everything is optimised
correctly so that customers have the smoothest user experience possible. Each
touchpoint is an important communication opportunity between yourself and your
customers: from signing and browsing to checking out and receiving promotions
about sales.

1. Creating a smooth e-commerce experience

Key Learnings
Once you’ve taken your first steps into e-commerce, your next job is to improve the
shopping experience. From getting more people to use your online shopping
basket to streamlining the checkout process, there are lots of ways to improve
your site for shoppers. In this video, you’ll learn how to use analytics to optimise: *
for different devices * navigation and search * product pages * checkout by using
customer accounts.

Video Transcript
Hi!
So, you’ve started selling online and customers are buying right from your website.
Great. But are your customers as happy as they could be? Is the shopping
experience and checkout process as smooth as possible?
We’re going to look at how you can use analytics to continually improve your
customers’ e-commerce experience. We’ll cover optimising for different devices,
improving navigation and search, optimising your product pages, and finally, using
customer accounts to enhance the checkout process.
The first step to optimising the e-commerce experience is ensuring that the
purchasing process works smoothly on all the different devices your customers
might use. These days, that means more than just laptops and desktop
computers.
Say you look at your analytics data and learn that plenty of people visit your site
from their mobiles, but they rarely make a purchase. That’s a clue that shoppers
on mobiles or tablets may not be able to properly see your product pages, or move
smoothly through the payment process. You’ve got some work to do.
One great option is to implement a “responsive design” into your website. This
type of design can adapt to different screen sizes. Or, if you want to guarantee a
more consistent shopping experience on smartphones, you could even create a
dedicated mobile website.
OK, that’s got you covered for all types of devices. Here’s another opportunity for
improving the shopping experience. Say your analytics show that lots of people
visit your home page, but they aren’t taking the next step and actually looking at
your products.
You’ll want to make it easy for your visitors to browse and find what they’re looking
for. This starts with navigation that your customers can easily understand and use.
Typically, you’ll use categories and subcategories to organise your inventory in any
number of ways.
Let’s use the example of a furniture maker. You could start out with broad
categories of, say, different rooms in a home. Then, you could add subcategories
of furniture pieces in each, like “bed frames” or “desks” or “dining room tables.”
So what’s the best way to go about this? Well, the answer is the one that your
customers like best. You can conduct formal testing to see how your visitors react
to different arrangements, or you could simply survey your friends, family and
some trusted clients to see what they prefer.
No matter how you arrange your site navigation, there will always be people who
prefer to search for something specific rather than browse through various
categories and subcategories. That’s why it’s best to cover both options and
include a search function on your website.
Your product pages are another great way to optimise the shopping experience.
What if you’re seeing that lots of people visit your product pages, but they don’t
add any products to the shopping basket?
You might add video of a craftsman in action, or a gallery of photos from various
angles to help customers get a closer look at a particular piece of furniture. Make
sure those photos are professional quality, and load quickly.
You can also write up great descriptions and provide all kinds of details and
measurements—whatever helps customers feel confident that they’re ready to
buy.
The last thing we’re going to look at is how you can optimise the e-commerce
experience by using customer accounts.
You might notice in your analytics data that customers shop on your site, and put
products in the cart, but then leave before completing their purchase. Encouraging
customers to create an account can streamline the process so this happens less
frequently in the future.
As a customer completes an online purchase, you can allow them to store their
shipping and billing information and payment preferences in an account on your
site. This will also make future purchases that much easier.
If you’re ready to get super advanced, you can also use a customer’s past
purchases, recent searches, or recently viewed products to recommend specific
items that might interest them. If they just purchased a dining room table, for
example, you might recommend the best sets of chairs to go with that design and
wood finish.
And of course, you can always reward your loyal customers with offers and
discounts tailored especially for them—lots of shopping cart solutions offer these
features by default.
To sum up: Optimising e-commerce is an ongoing process that requires a
consistent experience across devices, smart site organisation, and smooth
checkout using customer accounts.
Taking this approach will help you on your quest to provide current, and future,
customers the very best service possible.

2. Product promotion and merchandising

Key Learnings
If you have an e-commerce store, you probably offer a number of different
products. Sometimes it can be difficult for customers to find the best match for
their needs. Product promotion and merchandising can help. In this video, we'll
look at: * promoting products and specials * predicting products your customers
might like * showcasing products visitors might not normally see.

Video Transcript
Hi there!
As you build out your online shop, promoting your full inventory of products can be
challenging. Here, we’ll examine the best ways to promote products and special
offers. We’ll show you how to predict which products your customers might like.
And help you showcase products your visitors might not normally see.
The first step is to set up your online shop. That way it’s easy for your visitors to
browse all of your products. You’ll want to create the right hierarchy of categories
and subcategories, which will help a customer navigate your site and the products
for sale.
Promoting products in an online shop isn’t too different from a high street shop.
Think about the last time you visited a furniture shop. You probably didn’t just walk
in and see a map of the shop’s aisles pointing to where the products could be
found. More likely, you walked in to see a really comfy sofa near the door that you
could sink right into.
Like a brick-and-mortar shop, online shops also display very specific, featured
products. If it’s the end of summer and kids are going off to university, the
furniture shop might have desks or bookcases on display and on sale. This is an
example of product merchandising.
You can do the same thing online, starting by promoting certain products right on
your homepage. Your promotion might be to help shift old inventory, or feature a
best-selling item you want more customers to see.
Using part of your homepage to showcase products, or even running online
advertising campaigns with dedicated landing pages, can be a great way to
merchandise online.
And that’s just the beginning. Imagine if you walked into an offline furniture store
and the front door display magically transformed based on your interests. And as
you browsed, all the promotions you encountered were customised to what you
had previously looked at.
That’s exactly what online shops can do! As visitors browse the pages of your site,
you’re collecting data about what interests them. Now, you can use this data to
predict what they are likely to be interested in next.
Think of the last time you were shopping online. You might have been shown
“recommended products” after viewing certain items, or putting them in your cart.
For instance, if you were on a custom furniture website, and you were looking at
kitchen tables, you might have seen a promotion for chairs, or window shutters to
match the room.
Many shopping cart providers, such as Magento, Volusion, Prestashop and
Shopify, offer these product recommendation engines.
Next up in product promotion and merchandising is finding ways to showcase
products that your visitors may not have otherwise been looking for. This can be a
really effective way to cross-sell.
How does this work? Well let’s imagine an office manager is looking for a new
executive desk for the big boss. Something grand and ornate. But he might not
have been thinking about matching bookcases, or custom doors. Now is the
perfect time to remind him. Promoting related products can help increase sales.
The world of e-commerce offers you plenty of great ways to make sure your
customers see and interact with relevant products on your site. You can create a
virtual display as they enter your site. Or use data to suggest what they might buy
next. So get out there and start selling!

3. Retargeting for e-commerce

Key Learnings
After shoppers have interacted with your website, product retargeting campaigns
can help you get them back by showing them related ads across the web. In this
video, we'll look at: * what product retargeting is * how product retargeting works *
tips for successful retargeting campaigns.

Video Transcript
Hey! Did you know your e-commerce website can track shopper behaviour, and
respond with dynamic advertising? And that this can be used to bring visitors back
to your shop, even after they’ve left to visit other sites?
This is called product retargeting. Now, let’s explore what it is, how it works, and
tips for running your own successful retargeting campaigns.
We’ve all browsed an online shop, put a product in our shopping cart and then, for
whatever reason, decided not to buy it. Think of the last time you did this. Did you
then suddenly start seeing ads for that product you didn’t buy on other sites
around the web? Yeah, well that’s what we call retargeting.
The way a shopper behaves on an e-commerce site can tell that shop owner a lot
about which products they’re interested in, and even what they were on the verge
of buying.
This is very useful information for your business. Because it allows you to create
very specific advertisements aimed at people who have showed interest in certain
products. That’s what product retargeting, or remarketing, is all about.
Let’s say someone is shopping online for bespoke furniture. They visit your
e-commerce site and fall in love a beautiful kitchen table you’re offering. But
halfway through the checkout process, they decide to hold off and see if another
shop had any specials first.
Luckily while they were browsing your online furniture store, you were using a
product retargeting solution. This is a small bit of code placed on the pages of
your website. This code tracks which products on that page a shopper is
interested in.
Of course, this tracking code uses anonymous methods. No personal information
is exchanged. But what has happened is that your website tracked a behaviour. It
now knows that the shopper wanted that kitchen table AND that they didn’t
actually buy it.
That online shopping behaviour is great information for you as an advertiser. Now,
you can use this information to take ACTION. This is where product retargeting
solutions come into play.
There are a number of product retargeting options out there. All of them will allow
you to collect information, and then target audiences with customised ads based
on that information.
So let’s say the shopper leaves your furniture shop and clicks over to a news
website. They’re reading an article and off to the right of the page what do they
see? Yup, your digital ad with an image of the kitchen table they were just looking
at! You may even include a 20 percent discount here too. That incentive just might
be enough to persuade them to make the purchase after all.
That’s basically product retargeting. There are many services available, like Google
Ads and Criteo. The services share some basic functions, so let’s talk a bit more
about that.
It starts with that bit of code we mentioned that tracks shoppers’ interactions. This
information is then sent to your product retargeting service.
As an advertiser, you can go to your product retargeting service and set up rules
and parameters.
So when a person browsing your site meets those parameters, the service will then
start targeting them with advertisements over one or more of the Internet
advertising networks.
Since the service knows exactly which products your shopper was interested in,
those advertisements can be very specific and dynamic.
Now let’s look at a few guidelines for running these kinds of campaigns.
First, you don’t always have to offer a discount right away. While in the earlier
example we considered price as a reason the shopper didn’t buy, in reality there
are loads of reasons people leave websites without making a purchase. And if you
always offer a discount, you could be selling yourself short.
Next, it’s good to know when to STOP showing these ads. It’s certainly possible
that the visitor found the same product somewhere else and bought it, or simply
changed their mind and isn’t going to buy it at any price. Most retargeting
solutions allow you to set limits and experiment with just how many times you’ll
show the same ad to the same person, and for how long.
As with any advertising campaign, it’s important to measure and optimise the
performance of your product retargeting campaigns over time. This means
tracking conversion rates, testing new types of ads, tweaking your parameters, and
using analytics to manage these campaigns.
Product retargeting can be a great way to re-engage visitors that might have
otherwise not returned. Knowing how it works, how to do it and how to optimise
over time can make these campaigns a great addition to your digital marketing
plan.