Marketing is the cornerstone of eCommerce success. You might have a brilliant product or offer a fantastic service, but if your brand isn’t getting in front of customers’ eyes, it’s difficult to gain any real traction.
Because online marketing is such a key piece of the eCommerce puzzle, marketing spend is often a significant expense for businesses. For brands to protect their bottom lines, it’s imperative to maximise the efficacy of marketing efforts and increase marketing return on investment (ROI). But how?
The basic answer is simple: tailoring your efforts to both your business objectives and your customers’ wants and needs. Of course, actually delivering on this premise requires a little more planning and work. Here, we’ll provide straightforward guidance and tips as we look at three strategies to increase your marketing ROI.
1. Deliver a personalised customer experience
It goes without saying that personalisation should play a key role in your digital marketing strategy. After all, 80% of customers are more likely to buy from a brand that tailors its marketing strategies to their interests. As online consumer behaviour has changed dramatically this year, it’s become even more vital for brands to stay on top of the trends and deliver what their customers want.
The way to do this is by creating strategies to react to real-time behaviour and serve effective and relevant content to customers, personalising their experience. It all comes down to the value you offer your customers, and the campaigns you implement to offer that value.
Personalisation can be integrated into your marketing campaigns even more effectively with the right tech, whether that’s dedicated personalisation tech, or integrating another tool like promotional or analytics tech with your CRM system. Depending on your needs, achieving the latter means that you are able to integrate with lifecycle strategies to engage and reward customers. For example, the right Promotion Management Platform would be able to integrate with your CRM system and tailor promotional offers to your customers based on the data you have about them, such as their browsing and purchasing history. However, we’ll get to that in more detail later!
One word of caution: there’s no question that customisation is a powerful marketing weapon, which is why you should wield it responsibly— taking and using too much information from customers can backfire if it comes across as too all-knowing. It’s important to toe the line here, so use your data wisely. A birthday offer, or tailored recommendations are generally welcomed. Anything that spooks a customer with the amount of information you carry, such as location or spend can get you into danger territory.
2. Leverage the right channels
No matter what marketing strategies you want to implement — whether that’s brand marketing, partnership marketing or performance marketing — you need to ensure you’re finding the right customers on the right channels. After all, if you’re aimlessly marketing your business on random channels, you are basically throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping something sticks.
The channels that you need to ensure you are targeting correctly include (but are not limited to) your eCommerce website, social media channels, and partnership channels like affiliate marketing pages. Once you’re on the right channels, you can then tailor your marketing around your customer, in order to deliver the customer experience they need to help push them to convert.
Track your results
It’s also important to track your results when trying to find customers on various channels. It will then help you figure out what’s working and what’s not — to help you streamline your marketing efforts going forward. For example, if posting on a particular social media channel, like Instagram, helps draw in traffic that’s converting on your website, you know you should focus your efforts there. You could then serve a promotion for those customers (more on this in the next section) and drive conversion even further!
This ensures you’re not only giving customers what they want, but also providing them with a customer experience that will help keep you in their minds.
3. Enhance your promotional marketing efforts
Enhancing your promotional marketing campaigns allows you to deliver the personalised experiences customers want — and using a Promotion Management Platform ensures that you’re able to access the powerful metrics necessary for success. Delivering a Promotions Experience that delights the customer from the start of the journey through to purchase will also help ensure you deliver a great customer experience so that they convert and and potentially return to you again — increasing your marketing ROI! At present, nearly 3 out of 4 customers cite promotions as a top factor in their online purchasing decisions.
For successful promotion use cases, check out these three examples of brands doing promotional strategies right. But here, we’ll look at some specific promotion ideas and then explain how a Promotion Management Platform can help you deliver:
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Use on-site, reactive promotions: This is a way of guiding customers through their purchasing journey through design and format. For instance, on-site promotions might be based on single-visit actions or long-term actions taken by a single IP address. This method is commonly known as retargeting or remarketing. On-site promotions are particularly useful for increasing conversions for brands experiencing a high cart abandonment rate.
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Combine affiliate marketing with promotional marketing: With affiliate marketing, you issue promotions and discounts to targeted audiences via authorised distributors, or affiliates. Partnering with social media influencers, for instance, can help expand your reach, engage new customer audiences and build lasting brand awareness. You might also partner with coupon platforms and discount websites.
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Run a loyalty programme: A truly great marketing strategy should not leave existing customers behind. As with all digital marketing, personalisation plays a significant role here — after all, your customers already know you and you already know them. Don’t make them feel like strangers! To harness the value of repeat customers, you might consider developing an online loyalty card programme or providing customers with members-only experiences and repeat use coupon codes.
You can read more about each of these 4 advanced promotional marketing strategies here.
Investing in the right tech
There’s no one-size-fits-all promotional marketing strategy that will work for every brand or campaign. To succeed in this ever-changing, ever-growing eCommerce landscape, you must be able to change and optimise your promo strategies and campaign features on-demand. Whether it's through matching customer needs or tailoring reports based on your key engagement metrics, customisation is the most straightforward way to increase ROI. And this requires the right tech.
A cutting-edge promotions platform will offer you the ability to:
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Generate and validate unique, single-use codes, allowing you full control over your promo campaigns
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Pull information directly from your existing CRM to enable better, more personalised customer experiences
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Execute a variety of creative promotion ideas
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Perform useful A/B testing
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Manage brand partnerships and allow affiliates access to key data via a secure, permissions-based platform
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Run engaging loyalty programmes to retain customers in eCommerce.
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Deliver an end-to-end solution to offer customers a smooth promotional experience
The value of expertise
When it comes to promotional tech, most off-the-shelf solutions lack flexibility, and while it’s possible to modify a tool to meet your needs, this can be a time-consuming and resource-draining process, especially if your brand lacks in-house tech expertise. For more information on this topic, check out our blog answering the question: can you build it yourself?
So, for brands that don’t want to go the DIY route, what’s the solution? A cutting-edge, Promotions Management Platform like Uniqodo makes it easy to create powerful, fully customisable promotions that take advantage of the data you already have to deliver promotions that boost your marketing ROI.
We offer:
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A comprehensive SaaS platform to help you run smarter promotional campaigns
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A team of specialists dedicated to aligning your promotions with your desired business outcomes
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Promotion Engineers devoted to building bespoke solutions for your promotions
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Advice on strategies to deliver the ROI you want
Increasing your marketing ROI is easier than you may think
Increasing your marketing ROI doesn’t have to be complicated. We hope these three strategies have provided some useful paths to explore. Remember, with a little awareness and a smarter approach, it‘s completely possible to actualise the results you want and take your business to the next level.
However, you don’t have to embark on this journey alone. When it comes to marketing your brand, there’s limitless value to be found in deploying the right tech tools and partnering with the right team. Don’t hesitate to contact us — we’re here to help!
You can read more about investing in the right tech solution to increase your marketing ROI in our free eBook — Do You Need a Promotions Engine?
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