2022 has been a rocky year for eCommerce brands. Rising acquisition costs, the impending death of third-party cookies, and supply chain issues, compounded by inflation and economic uncertainty, have certainly made things a bit…challenging.
As we head into BFCM and holiday shopping season, brands need to be hyper-focused on stretching their marketing dollars efficiently. Overwhelmed by how you should prioritize your efforts? We’ve outlined key tactics for eCom brands to focus on to maximize customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty as we head into Q4.
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes
Prioritize what they want to see and buy. Understand what historically has sold well to different customer segments (new customers, existing customers, high LTV customers, and lapsed customers).
- Ensure that what you’re pushing to new customers allows for enough sampling amongst the household, with both quantity and variants (flavors, scents, colors, etc.).
- Design website experiences that speak to customers specifically in their stage with the brand. You wouldn’t speak to a new customer the same way you would speak to someone who’s been a subscriber before.
- Speak to each customer cohort differently. Try to understand the data behind each cohort, and message and merchandise accordingly.
You can make the biggest difference with the lowest lift by shifting your messaging to cater to different cohorts. Do this easily by simply changing one sentence within an email campaign that speaks to each cohort. Tag your customers and segment them through platforms like Klaviyo, Shopify Flows (if you’re on Plus), or Alloy Automation.
Apply different strategies to different customer cohorts to maximize their LTV
Taking a one size fits all approach won’t fly.
- Understand your existing customer cohorts and see what the most common second-purchase tends to be. Use that as an insight for cross-selling.
- Focus your communications on building community, advocacy, and loyalty amongst those who have purchased from you. Don’t just rely on emails to pump revenue.
- Reinforce the benefits and the why throughout the customer journey, even after someone has purchased. You want them to be able to answer, “Why did you buy X” with a story, not just because of the product’s functionality.
Put in the work now to build retargeting audiences, don’t wait
Retargeting is an effective way to re-engage with specific audiences. You don’t want to be overly reliant on email.
September & October are the months when you really want to put out content, whether you run a video ad to build a custom audience on Facebook, or a blog article you drive traffic to, or a newsletter you send to build your subscriber base -- you want to start building those audiences now so by the time Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and holiday shopping season comes along, you’re not relying on targeting or prospecting audiences, you’re going after audiences that have already become familiar with your brand and are maybe on the fence of purchase, and that promo will now get them over the fence, but you’ve done the work to get them to that point.
Optimize your landing pages
Audit & adjust your landing pages and marketing funnels - a high impact / low investment strategy to maximize revenue
- Storytell, don’t just sell. Reduce friction with education.
- Focus on high AOV offers, with good discounts.
- A/B test ad copy, headlines and ad creative using ad platforms to understand the difference in CTR, AOV, and on-site conversion rate. You’ll start to recognize how different cohorts have different LTVs based on different marketing messages. Learn and iterate accordingly.
- Build your website experiences for mobile, and above the fold.
- Think of your PDPs as landing pages, for organic social traffic. Incorporate everything you may need directly into the PDP. They shouldn’t have to leave.
- Add ample amount of social proof across the website (press quotes, reviews, UGC, etc.).
- Give shoppers the easiest way to buy to drive trial (either by discounts with subscription, or adding buy now pay later platforms like ShopPay or Affirm to your site).
If you’re on Shopify, Builder.io is a great solution because it plugs right into the CMS of Shopify, and, if you use the Facebook Conversions API, it can leverage that. Unbounce is another great solution for a simple drag & drop. It lives on a subdomain so you don’t get the conversions API (you use the pixel), but it’s very easy to get set up and running.
Site speed matters
Site speed is hands down one of the most important factors for a DTC website, especially in a mobile-first world. People don't want to wait more than half a second for a website to show. If it takes longer than 1 second, you'll lose about 87% of your visitors before the site even loads.