The importance of maximising conversions for growth-minded eCommerce businesses cannot be overstated. They’re not only key indicators of how effective your strategies are in the present — they play a major role in taking your business’ growth forward.
Though this blog will cover how you should amplify your conversions through developing more advanced promotional strategies, it’s worth keeping in mind that these methods will help you attain growth at a wider scale as well. Enhanced promotional experiences are critical to improving your business’ core metrics and meeting your KPIs.
We’ll take you through techniques that will optimise your product promotions so that you can begin hitting — and exceeding — your conversion targets to make your promotions more profitable, plus real-life examples of eCommerce businesses that profited off of these methods.
Use exclusivity to boost customer experiences
Exclusivity is commonly used in eCommerce customer acquisition strategies to foster a sense of fear of missing out in potential and existing customers. While this is helpful in generating conversions, you should also be considering how this exclusivity can be used to add value to your customer journeys across the board.
Making your customers feel valued by your business and seeing that through the promotions you offer instills a sense of intrigue that keeps them coming back for more and new customers eager to be part of that experience themselves.
Here are some ways to leverage that in your product promotions:
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Prioritise promoting products and/or aspects of your products that are exclusive to your brand.
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Identify your most valuable customers as per your CLTV metrics and target them with special deals like early access to new products or limited-time offers.
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Collaborate with affiliates that are aligned with your business in terms of sector and customer base to generate supercharged products and resulting promotions.
How Uniqodo helped Beauty Bay increase revenue with an exclusive access campaign
Challenge: Beauty Bay had announced a highly anticipated product collaboration with NikkieTutorials. The new product (a limited-edition eyeshadow palette) was expected to sell out quickly, and Beauty Bay wanted to reward existing customers with early access to the product before general release.
Solution: Uniqodo created a bespoke promotional journey that allowed Beauty Bay to email a unique code to customers who had signed up to get early access. VIP customers could use the code to gain access to an exclusive page where they could purchase the product before it went on sale.
What made this solution effective was recognising that a sizeable portion of Beauty Bay’s customer base was interested enough in the product to want early access, and it was crucial that this desire was addressed so that:
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Beauty Bay’s customers could feel that they’re valued and will be rewarded for their loyalty to the business.
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Customers would be given ample reason to continue purchasing from and paying attention to Beauty Bay so that they can be given more exclusive offers going forward.
Result: Over 87,000 new customer sign-ups were generated before the product was even launched, and there was a 23% uplift in promotion-related sales, further increasing conversion rates within that time period.
Amplify the impact of your multi-channel marketing to target customers
Many — if not every — eCommerce business markets their promotions through multiple channels, so figuring out how you can stand out is key to seeing greater results. There are various ways to enhance how you utilise these channels, but the running tactic to employ to start seeing maximised conversions is by thinking of how they can add to the customer journey.
This also helps increase your customer retention rate by essentially serving as reminders of what your business has to offer beyond those first interactions and, in turn, prolonging and enhancing your customer journeys.
How to improve each of your channel’s marketing strategies
The efficiency and wide reach of multi-channel promotions make them valuable to capitalise on, but also dangerous to use if your promotions aren’t controlled. The codes you’re issuing need to be unique and single-use to avoid the risk of misuse and leading to potential damage to your ROI.
Uniqodo's onsite canvas tools allow you to issue unique codes to customers who came to your website via a paid social/paid search campaign. This means your promotions are available to the audience you target with your ads and them only, protecting your ROI from over-discounting.
1. Email
Marketing statistics show that email provides the highest ROI for businesses, generating up to $36 for every $1 spent. ¹ eCommerce businesses need to capitalise on this fact by developing advanced strategies for their email marketing, which ultimately comes down to thinking about the customer journey and utilising your customer data.
Use insights such as an understanding of user behaviour on your website to know when to email timely offers, and customers’ buying history to send more relevant offers. Time-based incentives can be applied by emailing customers discounts to their abandoned baskets that are only available for 24 hours, encouraging them to log back in and complete their purchases. These approaches, coupled with banner overlays on websites, can reinforce the relevance of promotions to increase conversions.
2. Social media
Targeting via social media can be highly effective, especially when you acknowledge the value of customers who follow you in the first place. Reward your followers with exclusive offers and news, such as early alerts to upcoming promotional events. Offering rewards to followers also expands your reach by incentivising those who aren’t following you already to start following.
3. Affiliates
When used correctly, affiliate marketing can unlock new customer segments and revenue streams, and amplify conversion rates. Provide a streamlined journey for your customers by integrating your promotional codes with your affiliate partners’ platforms.
For example, UNiDAYS or Student Beans can provide members with unique codes that can only be redeemed when visiting your eCommerce store through a link on their Affiliates page.
4. Customer service
Enhance how your customer service teams operate to enable smoother and more efficient promotional journeys. Grant your teams access to key customer information that will allow them to directly issue, validate, and redeem promotions, streamlining experiences and improving your business’ reputation. One productive approach is to incorporate code issuance capabilities to resolve cases — though keep in mind that these codes should be kept unique and single-use to retain control over your promotions.
Pro tip: The Uniqodo platform allows for customer service teams to be integrated into the system so that they’re given immediate visibility over customer data that can then inform and enhance their ways of working.
Supercharge your metrics by enhancing customer journeys
You must ensure that every customer journey from entering your site to completing a purchase is seamless, engaging, and easy to navigate. Every accessible page should enhance the customer's journey with a clear indication of where and how to use the promotion provided at each step of the customer journey.
Use guiding techniques like supporting text describing the next steps of the purchase process for the customer and entry and exit intent pop-ups is important for how to retain customers in eCommerce.
Pro tip: Consistency is key, and you should provide every customer with a seamless journey, regardless of how they arrived on your page. Be it from your home page, an affiliate link, or email.
How Sky utilised Uniqodo to enhance customer journeys
Challenge: Sky, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the UK, was experiencing low conversion rates through their promotional campaigns being run with affiliate partners.
Solution: Uniqodo created a bespoke optimised journey for specific traffic sources to enhance underperforming journeys. This included the implementation of a canvas page that was visible throughout the customer journey, a reinforcement message that was accessible on the basket summary page, and an in-basket confirmation message.
Results: The largest traffic sources have seen conversion rate increase by more than 5X,
Target specific customers for more sophisticated marketing
Marketing campaigns that target specific customers are usually only considered for businesses and/or products that are niche and relevant to one type of customer. But to start seeing maximised conversions and greater return on your investments, you should look to how you can make your marketing efforts as targeted — and therefore productive — as possible, regardless of what your business offers.
Conduct market research to identify your target audience and gain insight into their needs and wants. This will enable you to create personalised promotions that streamline how your customers interact with your promotions throughout the entire journey. Unique, single-use codes are key to maximising conversion potential while guaranteeing optimal security.
An automated platform can make this process all the more sophisticated and productive. Uniqodo, for example, uses its Uniqodo Query Language (UQL) feature to help eCommerce businesses create data-driven promotions that react to live data. Data points like stock, capacity, or hotel blackout information can be checked to decide if a discount should be given to a customer or not. This effectively maximises ecommerce profit margins by catering promotions around whenever there is appropriate availability or capacity.
TUI partnered with Uniqodo to reduce losses and increase profitability
Challenge: Tour operator TUI was experiencing a huge loss of revenue due to specific holiday packages, destinations and dates that were at low occupancy. Before partnering with Uniqodo, TUI had basic promotional capabilities and could only run standard discounts off one destination.
Solution: Uniqodo recognised that TUI’s customers needed to be notified of promotions that were on offer and were relevant to their needs. They addressed this by creating CTAs on underselling locations, dates, and product types that were aligned to what potential customers were already searching for, improving their customer journeys. They also introduced a validation process at the checkout to ensure that codes can only be redeemed on products that are specified in the targeting.
Results: An increase of 7.4% in the conversion rate, with an impressive ROI of 10,282% on spend with Uniqodo. Uniqodo’s promotional software has since been rolled out to all holiday types and products offered by TUI.
The key is to maximise your customer journeys
Effectively promoting your products and maximising your customer journeys all contribute to the bigger picture of eCommerce success. This success begins and ends with improving your business’ customer acquisition, revenue, profit margins, and marketing ROI.
Partnering with an automated platform like Uniqodo that can run advanced promotional campaigns to improve your customer experiences will guarantee that your eCommerce growth strategies are followed through.
If you are looking for assistance on any of the above and want to have your own success story, get in touch with Uniqodo to arrange a discovery call.
¹ Litmus Resource Center: Email Marketing Guide on Email ROI | Litmus
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