Apple’s iOS15: privacy & marketing strategy

Apple’s iOS15: privacy & marketing strategy

Apple’s iOS15 Update: One man’s privacy is another’s marketing strategy.

That’s a cold, hard fact in the digital age for those engaging in eCommerce. Tracking, the electronic following of activity by those who have engaged with your brand, has become such a norm in how commercial ecommerce activity operates that companies hardly bat an eye over engaging in it at this point.

But privacy concerns for users are real, and Apple is about to strike a blow in how business is done that could change the marketing landscape in a major way.

Apple’s new releases this fall on its Mail app on iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey devices will offer a Mail Privacy Function. According to a recent report 13.3% of respondents said they used the Mail app to open and read their personal emails. With a flip of a switch, tracking the activity of these users without their permission becomes virtually impossible. As they so often do, Apple has highlighted their commitment to innovation in this area with a humorous and engaging commercial. The introduction of such functionality could be the most substantive move yet in giving consumers control over who collects their data, but it surely won’t be the last.

Let’s look at what is ahead with these changes and what strategies you can consider for your eCommerce marketing so you can adapt.

Anti-Tracking and iOS15

A bedrock tool in digital marketing that involves tracking is the inclusion of an invisible pixel in email that is accessed by consumers. With the Mail Privacy Function in iOS15, those who open emails will determine whether that tracking data should be shared back to the source. Information like whether you opened an email, how many times it was viewed and if it was forwarded will no longer be available from any readers who choose to block them.

The Mail Privacy Function also will block the email receiver’s IP address, so digital marketing strategies that rely on mining information that way to discern the user’s location and online activities are also going to be shut out.

Another Apple innovation that is going to throw a wrinkle into established marketing tactics is an option known as Hide My Email. Users will have the capability to have Apple create an artificially-generated email address when they do things like make a purchase. That new email address will then forward to the user’s actual email, keeping knowledge of that email address away from eCommerce companies and others who would want to use it for marketing purposes.

Measures such as these that are coming with iOS15 are going to require an adjustment in tactics for those who have built their marketing around gathering intelligence about customers through these channels.

Preparing for Change

So, with these changes in the offing, what can you do to keep your eCommerce marketing efforts moving forward? A great place to start is making sure your fundamentals are in order so that you aren’t causing yourself difficulties in places that ought to still be strengths. It’s unlikely  that there will be a magic bullet approach for dealing with the changes that Apple is introducing into the market.

One good thing you can do immediately is making sure your email lists are as clean as you can make them. Don’t clutter your marketing efforts by allowing bad information in from the start. You want your marketing hitting with people who already are customers or who have shown very strong signs that they could be customers.

Another route you can take to strengthen your marketing results is moving from an approach  less reliant on email tracking to one with a more engaged approach. If you aren’t already doing it, try introducing pop-up windows on your site for visitors who may be willing to share their information because they are finding your product offerings and/or blog/articles content attractive to their desires. This kind of first-level information is always going to be better than the results you see from a tactic like tracking because you will know the user is open to receiving information and updates from you. You also have some advantage that can be used in setting up effective pop-ups in that you know what channel has brought the visitor to your site in the first place. Use that information to inform the tone and character of the pop-up you are asking the visitor to respond to.

How closely are you looking at how you communicate with your customers? People are savvy enough to know when they are being targeted by mass marketing, and are less likely to respond. By improved analysis of your market segmentation, you can create messaging that feels more personal to the target, thus increasing the chances they will be willing to respond. Apple’s efforts are meant to cut out involuntary marketing activity that potential customers are being subjected to. A great counter-strategy for you to consider in light of this is using what you do know about proven customers to create messaging to which you strongly believe they are going to be receptive.

Additional Steps to Try

The changes from iOS15 will have impacts on how you market beyond what is first apparent when you initially think about this subject. Consider, for instance, your email funnels. These funnels operate on a series of interrelated decisions involving the monitoring of how targets are responding to previous emails. If Apple’s new tactics are telling you that a prospect isn’t engaged with one of your emails when in fact the opposite is true, that is going to throw a major wrench in how your email funnel is supposed to work.

If your marketing falls utilizes these techniques, you are going to need to consider reconstructing the rules that your email funnels use for their internal decision-making.

Related to this type of approach, the need to rely more heavily than ever on testing is made apparent by this change in the market. Even with these new developments you are not going to abandon email marketing at this point. Even if Apple’s tactics are taking a segment of your customers out of the data you are making evaluations from when you test subject lines or send times, you are still going to see valid results from trends in the market overall from non-Apple users and those Apple users who aren’t using the new privacy software.

Your overall open rates and other metrics may go down from an impact from these new factors, but it doesn’t mean you can’t still effectively identify those email marketing practices that are performing best for your business, and that is still important information to operate from in figuring out your best strategies.

Conclusion

Users like the idea of having their data protected. Apple isn’t the only company working to roll out solutions on this front. Staying on top of these developments will require diligence.

What goes on in this space of the marketing world is a conversation that is just taking off. It’s going to be worthwhile for you as an eCommerce provider to stay on top of this topic and adjust accordingly, as it has the potential to significantly impact future business results.

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Harmonic Convergence: Creating Customer Bliss Through The Perfect Giveaway

Harmonic Convergence: Creating Customer Bliss Through The Perfect Giveaway

Successful growth in eCommerce is an art form.

Doubt it? You can find thousands of sites out there that are perfectly competent when it comes to what they sell and how they operate, but they fail to find the magic key that opens the door to sales success.

The difference, in many cases, comes down to failing to capture the imagination of would-be customers. Building a brand comes by making an impression. One approach that has helped many brands get past this challenge is the use of viral giveaway campaigns.

A viral giveaway campaign is when a brand uses its social platforms to, well, giveaway a promotional item to select participants, often  requiring social engagement and/or a participants contact information. You know those fishbowls at checkout counters that collect business cards for a free item? It’s a digital version of that. Viral giveaway campaigns can do wonders for building your customer list — if they are executed in a smart and disciplined way. Outgrow reports on a number of impressive results tied to these campaigns in 2021 alone, such as promotions that cost just 18 cents per click, contestants spending 2 minutes plus on the contest app and more than 62% sharing the contest with at least one friend.

That all sounds great, but viral giveaways have been around for a few years now, meaning there’s enough known to show there are right ways and wrong ways to go about this process. In the rest of this blog, we’ll explore what has been learned.

Building Brand Through Giveaways

The operational pieces in creating a successful viral giveaway campaign should be built on two principles:

  1. Make participation for the customer as simple as possible
  2. Make desirability of the contest align with the customers you are seeking

No matter how compelling your offer, it is always going to have to compete in a marketplace teeming with content vying for people’s attention. Once you are fortunate enough to grab that interest, you need to make action steps as simple as possible, and the benefit those actions could lead to as desirable as possible.

Giveaways can take many different forms. For the vast majority of eCommerce sites, the scope of viral giveaway you will be considering will be modest. The total value of prizes being offered could be in the range of $1,000 or less. Even at that level, you can still produce great returns from your campaign in terms of growing your customer base. Key factors which will play into the chances for success are if the promotion of the giveaway is creatively appealing (i.e. not the “same old same old” that every other contest is pushing), if it has elements which make it fun to participate in and if the appeal of the giveaway is genuine enough that people will feel good about sharing it with their friends. You want your giveaway promotions to be easily shareable.

The site Startup Bonsai offers a very good observation that you should keep in mind as you conceive of how your viral giveaway could work: People don’t necessarily like buying from brands, they like buying from personal recommendations. That is a key part of the appeal to consider in how you can make your giveaway a viral experience.

If your giveaway has a gamification aspect — that is, people’s participation is incentivized so their chances of winning grow by becoming more involved in the giveaway — you may consider creating a social share site for users. They can track their progress and see how they are faring as they pursue rewards that are part of the giveaway.

Another aspect that has proven value as viral giveaway strategies have matured is the use of a deadline element to drive participant action. You can keep prospective customers thinking about your brand longer if the appeal of the giveaway offer has hit home with them, but they also know that they only have a limited amount of time to act.

One other good point to keep in mind — don’t think just because your viral giveaway is designed for your social channels that you shouldn’t also be supporting it through your more conventional assets. Promote the giveaway through your email contact with existing customers — it still produces the best percentage in response rates of any outreach. You also need to consider the best ways to promote the giveaway to visitors landing at your site. A pop-up welcome mat message is a tactic that many companies use.

Tips for Deciding on the Right Offer

A successful viral giveaway will have at its heart an intriguing prize offer. Deciphering what this will be for your giveaway is a true make-or-break decision in how you will succeed in connecting with the customers you most desire.

Designing a giveaway is really an opportunity to demonstrate to  targeted customers that you understand what they are looking for. This is how brands connect with customers. From your perspective, it is a prime opportunity to identify interested potential customers that you know will have a specific area of interest that could be developed into a buying opportunity. From the customer’s perspective yours is a fresh voice whose potential lies in offering a product that will solve their problems in a responsible way.

An important point to consider as you think about how your viral giveaway will be structured is that the contest is not necessarily limited to only what you offer. Exciting and creative offerings often come in the form of a package of products centered around a theme. Think in terms of partners who offer related products to what you sell. You may already have existing relationships with some of those brands, or it could be a matter of reaching out to a company that you feel has this element of commonality.

It can also pay to think creatively when envisioning partnership possibilities. These case studies can give you some ideas on just how effective thinking creatively can be in generating exceptional amounts of response to your campaign.

Along with who else you might try and partner with, you are also going to have to make some decisions about what social channels are right for your offer. Here’s an article and accompanying infographic that gives you an overview of how other companies are deploying viral giveaway techniques as they go down this same road.

Do Something With the Data

Once you reach the end of your viral giveaway, you are going to be sitting on a pile of results generated by the contest. Don’t just assume all of it is equal. Contests are going to produce returns that are mixed in quality. You’ll need to take the right steps to make sure you are getting out of the process what you hoped for going in when it comes to adding on to your customer base.

Screening for returns with fake data, such as a bogus email address, will be a must. Plenty of guidance is out there already in terms of best practices for eCommerce merchants to make sure they are dealing with actual verifiable customers. You also will want a screening process in place to make sure you are not just adding duplicate emails that are already in your database. Applying the same kind of guidelines you use for keeping your existing list healthy makes sense for the new data churned up by your viral giveaway.

A few final points for closing the loop when it comes to your contest is following up with offers of discounts and other benefits to those new potential customers you’ve just gained. You know something specific now about where their interests may be directed. For instance, one of our favorite formats we’ve seen for viral giveaways is known as the wish list format — that is creating a contest where those who enter will be choosing among a series of products to tell you exactly what they are most interested in. That’s the kind of opening you were hoping for when you started down the road of creating a giveaway. Be active, be persistent and be creative in trying to court these new potential sources of business. 

Just like all endeavors you need to protect your company from any legal issues when running a viral contest campaign. There is a lot of grey area and you need to make sure that any contest you host isn’t going to put you in the crosshairs of any regulatory group. We recommend working with a legal or marketing company that has familiarity with this world and can best set you up for success long-term. 

Viral giveaways are a path for creating new business that go hand-in-hand with eCommerce. People who are seeing your offer are already engaged in accessing that information through some kind of electronic device. They are in your realm. Come up with a great offer with true appeal for them, and the returns could be just the catalyst that drives your sales results to the next level.

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The August 2021 Orange Report

The August 2021 Orange Report

August 2021 ORANGE REPORT

The August 2021 Orange Report features our best & most recent blogs and guides on Magento, Big Commerce, eCommerce, and Digital Marketing.

Here Come the Holidays – Tips to Keep Fraud Away

Minimize your exposure to fraud risks and keep fraud from becoming a disruptive factor in your relationship with your actual paying customers.

Subscription Sales Success: Tools We Recommend

ou will learn what tools are needed to make Subscription Sales offerings a reality for your customers and a money-maker for you.

Perfect Page, Poor Traffic? Why Site Speed Matters

Your site speed could be hurting your search rankings, users’ experience, site traffic, and conversion rate. Time to get that fixed.

Metrics Matter; How Tracking Data Improves Business

Ensure your analytics are set up correctly so that you can begin to digest the data based on your goals.

Metrics Matter; How Tracking Data Improves Business

Metrics Matter; How Tracking Data Improves Business

We know from everyday life that tracking data helps us to improve performance and reach our goals, whether it’s our credit scores or the miles we run. When we don’t have data, we’re blindly guessing at how we’re performing. It’s like trying to navigate without a map—you’re likely to get completely lost or take the same path multiple times unless you have the data that shows you where you’ve been or where you’re going. 

eCommerce operates the same way—we don’t know how well we’re tracking against our goals unless we have accurate, up-to-date analytics that can be checked frequently. But when we are in possession of that data, we have our business road map. Data provides valuable insights that enable us to compile reports, compare results and achieve our goals. 

In this blog we will discuss how to ensure your analytics are set up correctly and also how to digest the data based on your goals.

Ensure Your Analytics Are Set Up Correctly

Data should be the driving force behind every marketing decision and activity, but you need to ensure your analytics tracking is accurate and that attribution is set up correctly before you rely on those reports. 

For example, you might set up Amazon Pay on your eCommerce website and decide you want to track what kind of visitors utilize that payment method. However, if Amazon Pay was attributed to referral traffic in analytics, that would need to be resolved before you could rely on those attribution reports. 

It only takes one data point being off to throw everything else out of whack.You must ensure everything is set up correctly before you begin.

Set Specific Goals

Tracking data is about more than just checking your page views and visitors to see how much traffic your website is getting. To really learn and grow your business, you need to set specific goals to measure specific actions that users take on your website. As the great business manager Peter Drucker said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” 

As an eCommerce website, you could have a number of goals, including increasing sign-ups or account creations, but your main goal will likely be increasing your conversion rate and other revenue related objectives. To do that, you will need to track micro-conversions and engagement leading up to a purchase. That means you will want to look at the time on page, exit rates on specific pages, product performance, checkout behavior, and individual goals you set up in analytics.

Measure Your Achievements

Depending on your goals, there are a number of things you can measure or track that are relevant to any eCommerce business. Let’s take a look at some of the most important Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) you should measure on a continuous basis.

  • Conversion rate: the percentage of visitors that end up making a purchase. eCommerce conversion rates tend to average around the 1-2% mark. Aside from sales, conversion rates can also apply to any action that you want a customer to take, from signing up for your subscription emails or clicking on a specific button. 
  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): tells you how much you are spending for each new customer acquired. Understanding this data helps you to optimize your advertising expenses.
  • Bounce rate: shows the percentage of customers leaving your site within at least 15 seconds. Paying attention to your bounce rate can help you establish how well your homepage and landing pages are performing and may show you where modifications need to be made to improve this. 
  • Average order value (AOV): tells you your customer’s spending behavior when they visit your site and is one of the most important metrics to keep track of when it comes to your business.
  • Cart abandonment rate: shows the percentage of shoppers that are adding a product to their cart and then leaving your site without making a purchase. Knowing your rates can help you optimize your checkout process and initiate actions to recover buckets of lost sales.

Keeping an eye on these metrics can help you determine where you should be focusing your advertising spend, or partnerships you could potentially form with other websites to increase traffic and grow your audience. And keeping tabs on your search results enables you to tweak and improve your SEO, which can improve your traffic volume and quality. 

Check out our blogs Six eCommerce eMail KPIs Merchants Need to Measure for Success and How to Analyze Google Ads Data After the Death of Average Position Ranking for more information on measuring your achievements with data.

What analytics tool should you use?

Whether you are a small or medium-sized business, an easy-to-use customer analytics tool that meets the needs of your eCommerce business goals is highly recommended. A few available options to consider include:

  • Google Analytics is best for eCommerce businesses who want to analyze their website traffic and receive some metrics such as sales conversions, product performance, customer acquisition, and various customer behavior. The best part about this tool is that it is completely free and customizable. 
  • Search Console is best for eCommerce businesses who are looking to track the overall health of their website. 
  • Crazy Egg is best for eCommerce businesses whose goal is to optimize their conversion rate. This consists of tracking customer moves and seeing how visitors interact with their site to help build an overall better experience.
  • SEMRush is best for eCommerce businesses looking for direction to help improve their SEO strategy (monitoring keywords and rankings) and grow their online visibility faster.

Conclusion

Nowadays we have so much data and so many ways of measuring our performance that it can almost seem overwhelming to begin with. But one of the worst things you can do as a business owner is to overlook your data and continue to operate blindly. 

If you’re feeling inspired to set some goals and grow your business, our team can help you identify some valuable targets and set up accurate tracking to monitor your progress and achieve your objectives.

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Connect with one of our experts today to discuss your eCommerce needs!

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Holiday Season 2021: Tips to Keep Fraud Away

Holiday Season 2021: Tips to Keep Fraud Away

In Part One of our Subscription Sales blog series we covered why you should consider adding this offering to your eCommerce platform. Here in Part Two, we’ll talk more about how you can make such an offering a reality for your customers.

(Here’s the 10-second recap from Part One: Subscription Sales are booming in popularity for eCommerce competitors because they can create a recurring revenue stream that makes customers happy and, once operational, require little additional management oversight. And here is the full first article if you’d like to catch up.)

Let’s take a look at solutions offered by two of the most popular eCommerce platforms, Magento and Big Commerce, in supporting a Subscription Sales option for you.

Take Your Cues from 2020

The logical place to start in planning a strategy for your 2021 holiday season is a look back at your site’s performance during this same span in 2020.

No doubt, 2020 was a year unlike any other we’ve seen in the brief history of the eCommerce era. Fueled by the realities of the pandemic, online holiday shopping spending surged by a whopping 32% last year.

You surely looked at the good that came to your site once the holidays passed, but did you do proper diligence examining negative issues like fraud? That kind of analysis is the place to start for your 2021 holiday planning. The site Payments Journal suggests two very good questions you should be asking:

  1. What kind of transactions generated the most fraudulent activity on your site and through what channels did they come in from?
  2. What negatives resulted from this activity that hindered your ability to serve your legitimate customers?

You need to be looking at the act of prioritizing fraud prevention for the 2021 holidays now as what it really is — a way to safeguard all your business transactions, for the benefit of both your business but also your true customers.

Is Fraud on Your Radar Now?

We’ll take it as a given that you are deploying some level of fraud protection now. Yet, it’s important to ask yourself what you are learning from those efforts. Do you just accept that a certain amount of fraudulent activity comes with the territory, just as any business is going to have some losses? Or are you taking a bigger-picture approach and considering how your efforts to prevent theft could also be spilling over to prevent sales?

A perfect example of where this can occur is in activity known as false declines. It occurs when an actual paying customer gets blocked from checking out because something about the transaction has tripped your fraud protection. Data from Magento shows just how damaging this can be — your newest customers, the ones  you have worked so hard to attract, are 5-to-7 times more likely to have transactions declined by fraud tools, and up to 40% of those who go through this ordeal will go on and make their purchase from one of your competitors.

Clearly, this is a vulnerability you want to have a handle on going into the holiday shopping period.

Striking the right balance when it comes to chargebacks is another challenge. You have banks and credit cards on one side who are monitoring your chargeback ratio to make sure you are being vigilant in protecting against fraudulent sales. On the other side, you have the interests of customers, who have high expectations to get through the buying process with as little friction as possible.

Because so much is riding on keeping parties on all sides of this equation happy, you need to be frequently monitoring this component of your business. And the odds are that if you don’t have a good strategy and are struggling with this in August, it could be a much more troubling problem when sales volumes skyrocket in November.

Magento considers this kind of risk one of seven problems they identify as growth-killers for eCommerce operations.

Other Action Steps on Fraud to Consider

Limiting the damage that comes with fraud has human elements to it.

You, of course, want to have a high-performing anti-fraud component built into your eCommerce operations. Most of the time today that is going to involve some level of AI technology. However, you can’t simply expect to let that technology run on autopilot and consider the matter fully contained.

Your customer service personnel can be an important part of your fraud defenses — if they are being trained in what to look for. Now is the time for that training to ramp up. A customer service rep well-versed in how your site operates and also in the type of tactics that fraudsters often resort to can be a key aspect in your anti-fraud efforts.

The value of human involvement also goes up another level in your operations when you make fraud identification a priority Those whose jobs involve monitoring business flows and trends for your eCommerce operation also have a role to play. In their case, they need to be aware of how your anti-fraud programs work. They also have to be able to recognize unusual activity and discern when trends are developing that are pointing to a possible increase in fraud.

The best backstop you can offer in successfully supporting both your anti-fraud software and your employee efforts is to review your operation’s anti-fraud policies and make sure they are appropriate for the kind of business you are engaged in. It is not a one-size-fits-all type of consideration. Those opportunists looking to commit fraud would love to find loopholes in your operational policies that make their efforts easy. It’s part of your job to make sure you aren’t helping them in this regard.

Work Now So You Can Fully Enjoy the Holidays Later

You’re hope is that you are going to be very busy once the holiday season rolls around. And the odds are great that you will be, one way or another. You will be busy selling your products and building your customer base by making people happy, or as the alternative you don’t want, you’ll be busy putting out fires because your sales process is falling victim to those engaged in fraud. 

One study from last year showed that fraud attempts in eCommerce were up by 69% year over year. Simply relying on the same anti-fraud approaches you used during the 2020 holiday season will likely leave you at risk for becoming part of that sad statistical group later this year.

Now is the perfect time to make sure your exposure is as limited as you can reasonably make it. Make it your goal — have your updated fraud strategy fully ready to roll before that day arrives when you see the first Christmas decorations of the 2021 season showing up in a store near you! If you would like assistance with that effort, we’d be happy to help.

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