eCommerce Promotions strategies for your online store

A lot of online stores have difficulty approaching their eCommerce promotions when it comes to their marketing strategy, a lot of time the generic advice regarding your business does not apply easily. To develop your marketing strategy for your eCommerce promotional schedule, you must use your own store data, industry data if you have reach for it, and your target audience behavior. The data that's relevant includes the touch points of your funnel, your conversion rates of that target market, and how your biggest sale performs such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Email marketing is part of the marketing cycle, and having that data in click-through is important as well.

Promotional Marketing

In a nutshell, it is a prompt for users to be uncertified to take an action in adding to the basket, adding their email to your brand subscription to gain an advantage in pricing, bundling, free gifts, or loyalty points. All this is in exchange for your business gaining that engagement and trust with a customer. Promotional lift is the increase in sales/site traffic by percentage to regular activity induced by a promotional event. Promotional lift accounts for site traffic, average basket value, conversion rate, email capture rate, and overall revenue.

The Return On Investment (ROI) for a Promotional event is based on the cost of promotion versus the promotional lift and residual loyalty the brand receives. What is reliable, is for the same season, and product/industry category, the Promotional lift can be a reliable measure. However, promotional events that have been running prior to your planned and calculated lift can be diminished due to sales fatigue.

Like all promotional marketing, the other "Ps" (Basics in Marketing 4Ps) must be considered and be present to have the right environment for a visitor to engage in your promotion. The products and services are one. Availability in size and color that the customer is looking for is another, and delivery options within expected times are too.

Marketing campaigns

A marketing cycle that fits your audience needs to be adapted to your business, your products, seasonality, and various market segments as applicable. What do you define as a conversion matter, some campaigns define a conversion as an Email sign-up, to launch their announcement over Email marketing. Some other campaigns have transactions as a conversion goal. In the end, you need engagement, and it is more than social media likes. Your marketing efforts must accumulate revenue, therefore what your customers need is a predictable way of engaging with your business. Flash Sales aren't predictable when it comes to high-value items, and can be counterproductive as financial planning and having the items out of stock for a regular sale can frustrate your audience. So how do you go about planning a Promotional campaign?

• Planning marketing cycles and funnels
• Identifying your seasonal events and studying the competitive landscape
• Have cyclical announcements so can your target audience has plenty
• A study and analysis of friction points within the funnels from bounce rates to cart abandonment
• Segment your customer base on new, returning, loyal, and abandoned so that your email campaigns can be more personal.
• Determine the types of email that you will be sending out to what groups you have identified
• Set your campaign goals in terms of email addresses to be acquired, number of conversions, average basket value, number of visitors by which channel.
• Plan product rotations by seasonal demand, based on product roadmap, production and planning.

Promotional Apps

The likes of Shopify already has many promotional features or the Shopify App store has complimentary ones. This would include discount codes being native, or a Countdown timer being an additional add-on. The Apps and features are to be helpful to accomplish your marketing cycle. For example, if you do your Email marketing for your Black Friday, the Countdown timer helps customers to know when the sale ends, so if customers pop-in, see something but need to think about it - they know when they pop back in, that the sale is on but ending soon. It helps customers make that important decision and not miss out.

Conclusion

There is something to be said about promotional simplicity and giving your audience a predictable cycle. The goal is to accumulate your loyal customers and make your marketshare grow in the products that you offer. However, this does take time, effort and investment to achieve this. It is worth noting that different promotional funnels are worth mapping, and ensuring that they cannot be conflicting, or customers double-dipping in both offers. Last but not least there is A/B testing that might be of use to see what pages, call to actions and discount thresholds will drive conversions. A frictionless checkout is not just desired, but in most cases expected with Digital Wallets to be at the ready once the basket has reached over the minimum threshold of free shipping (another popular promotion). If you would like to discuss promotional cycles, the tools that surround and support them, feel free to reach out to us at wish@thegenielab.com