A Separate SEO PPC Strategy Reduces Marketing Effectiveness

The debate over the relative marketing effectiveness of search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has raged for years and will likely continue for years to come. The truth is that each is an important component of a sound search strategy.

More important, far from being at odds with one another, SEO and PPC are 2 sides of the same coin. Each providing useful intelligence to inform and enhance the other.  The ancillary benefits of such an integrated strategy are several. For example, combining SEO and PPC on average yields:

• 90% more clicks;
• 40% more site visitors; and
• 44% more conversions

Neil Patel, in How to Achieve Multichannel Success by Integrating SEO and PPC, confirms the benefits of this approach:

“It’s only logical to embrace the change and interact with your audience through a multi-channel strategy that integrates a PPC campaign with an SEO campaign. It’s a great maneuver to gain visibility and authority, in the eyes of your customers. And, you simultaneously reduce your customer cost per acquisition.”

Far too many marketers run their SEO and PPC strategy efforts independently of one another.  In some cases, this occurs in-house, with separate marketing teams assigned to SEO and PPC. In other cases, businesses hire separate digital agencies, each responsible for managing one or the other.  That’s generally a mistake because in doing so, companies lose the benefits of a unified strategy, including the following 5:

1. Enhanced keyword intelligence

Using Google Analytics (or a similar analytics program), you can gather key metrics about the success of your search campaigns.  For example, you’ll discover which keywords have the highest conversion rates for both your SEO and PPC campaigns. You can use the keyword intelligence you gather on your SEO campaigns to improve PPC results and vice versa.

2. More effective (higher ranking) content

Some of your PPC ads will be more successful than others, resulting for example in higher conversions.  Your ad copy is among the factors which contribute to those higher conversions. You can use the copy which informs your most effective PPC ads to help you optimize content for SEO purposes.  For example, you could include some of that ad copy in title tags, meta descriptions and page content. Among the benefits of this approach is its immediacy—whereas measuring effectiveness by SEO alone typically takes a long time, your PPC results will available quickly.

3. Online reputation management

If someone posts a negative review of your business or otherwise harms your reputation, you should try to engage with them. In fact you should engage with the good reviews and comments too. When a customer comments or reviews, comment back. This is an opportunity to show that you as a business care about the opinions of those who use interact with your business. This also offers an opportunity to control or redirect a negative conversation. Engaging with comments or reviews also offers proof to those who see it that your business cares about all interactions.   

4. Social media marketing

Social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn possess extremely granular data about prospective customers.  You can use this data to create highly-targeted social media ads and use the business intelligence data you gather from those campaigns to inform your SEO strategy.

5. Organic keyword testing

Identifying the most effective organic keywords for your SEO strategy can be a challenge.  One way to get the business intelligence you need, quickly and accurately, is to test those keywords by using them in PPC ads.   You’ll quickly discover which keywords have the highest conversion rates. You can then prioritize those same keywords to enhance SEO.

SEO and PPC Strategies Need to Work Together

If you’re a marketer attempting to decide whether SEO or PPC is better for your business, you’re asking the wrong question.  You need to ask how you can use both to enhance the effectiveness of each. As Search Engine Land notes:

“In an ideal world, we would look at both SEO and PPC. They both have pros and cons and work best when supporting each other synergistically. Where you can get SEO and PPC working together, you will often be able to drive results that are greater than their component parts.”

To learn more about the ways our eCommerce solutions for Magento and our PPC, SEO marketing services to help boost sales and grow your eCommerce business, contact us today.

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Improve Conversion Rates With 3 Simple Tips

You’ve worked hard on your eCommerce business. You’ve got a great inventory, an awesome Magento website, a few amazing business partners, and big beautiful pictures of every product. However, as important as all these things are for running an eCommerce business, there’s one factor that makes all of it worthwhile: conversions.

The process of turning interested browsers into paying customers is delicate, complex, and your store’s entire reason for existing. Naturally, with every passing month you’d like to see those purchase numbers go up. The best way to do that is to nurture conversions by optimizing your site and enhancing customer experience. To get started on ways to improve conversion rates, focus on these 3 areas: provide a user-friendly shopping experience, create a streamlined checkout process, and utilize Google Analytics.

1) Provide a User-Friendly Shopping Experience

The shopping experience becomes 80% of the conversion process as a combination of good products, appealing UI, and ease of use come together to make happy or frustrated customers. How easy is it to find something a customer is looking for? What if they don’t know exactly what they need but have a few keywords? Clearly defined and enjoyable-to-browse categories are a good start, but your site also needs an intuitive search function. Recommendations are also another great way to help your customers jump from related item to item. Magento offers several tools to help with up-sell and cross-sell techniques.

2) Create a Streamlined Checkout Process

As everything you’ve done for your eCommerce site guides customers to the checkout, that all-important process is what makes or breaks a conversion. If it’s slow, broken, inconvenient, or confusing, customers are likely to abandon their carts and all your hard work will be for naught. A few helpful tips on streamlining your checkout process include:

• Limit the process to a single page
• Utilize diverse payment options including PayPal
• Remember names, addresses, payment options, and shipping preferences for one-click checkout
• Clear shipping options with prices and arrival dates (no surprise fees)
• Offer free shipping for orders over a certain amount

Also, consider taking a page from Amazon’s massive eCommerce handbook and allow customers to alter their orders until you’ve boxed it. After finding out you’ve made a mistake, it’s an amazing relief to be able to fix it. That gratitude will quickly overflow to positive reviews and referrals. We recently covered this topic in more detail. Read 7 tips to streamline the checkout process for more information.

3) Make Use of Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an incredible tool and one of the most useful in your entire back-end toolbox. Google Analytics gives a lot of information to use for optimization and analysis of your success. In a nutshell, Google Analytics keeps track of who moves through your page, how they move, what the results are, and a whole lot more. Four metrics to keep an eye on should be:

• Conversion Rate – How many customers are buying
• Exit Rate – How many leads are browsing, then leaving for some reason
• Average Session Duration – How much time visitors tend to spend on your site per visit
• Average Page Depth – How deeply into your site the average visitor investigates

Google Analytics will also help you monitor traffic and traffic sources. For example, a change in traffic would typically affect conversion rates – good or bad. In addition, Google Analytics will help you to understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, where and who your visitors are, and help to optimize your store for better conversions.

Improve Conversion Rates and Grow Your eCommerce Business

Optimizing eCommerce conversion rates can be a complicated task involving dozens of little changes. Moreover, the changes may or may not improve customer experience and improve conversion rates. It’s a trial and error process but it doesn’t have to be a hassle. Do your best to make the site truly enjoyable to browse, shop, and buy. When your customers find what they want, have a good experience, and the checkout is quick and painless, they will come back again and again.

Contact us for more ways to improve conversions rates, provide a user-friendly shopping experience, create a streamlined checkout process or assistance with Google Analytics.

5 Ways Social Media Can Help Increase eCommerce Sales and Grow Your Business

If you think all people do on social media is share new baby photos, pictures of their dinner, and funny cat videos, think again. However, while some do that, there are plenty of others looking for helpful information about the products and services they need.  For example, consider some of these numbers collected by Hubspot:

• 82% of Facebook visitors use the site as a springboard for external sites and information
• 63% of Twitter and Facebook visitors use the site to get news and information unrelated to social sharing, family, and friends
• About 3 in 4 users of Facebook say they go there “for professional purposes”
• Users of Pinterest, like those on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, go there with the intention of making purchases but spend on average 50% more than visitors to those other social media sites
• 90% of marketers say that their social media efforts have generated more exposure for their businesses

For millions of consumers, social media sites have become a conduit to a wide variety of non-social sites, including eCommerce sites.  Therefore, social media can help increase eCommerce sales via this new and growing crossover.

More eCommerce Businesses Are Embracing Social Media

Most merchants wouldn’t open a new brick and mortar 20 miles from the center of town.  Brick and Mortar merchants go where the customers are.  The same applies to eCommerce.  To reach and engage customers, merchants need to go where the customers are – and they are on social media.  As eCommerce Platform notes, engagement with social media equals business value:

“For Web businesses, effective social marketing represents real value. Social networks offer new ways to reach first-time customers, engage and reward existing customers, and showcase the best your brand has to offer. Your social network profiles and the content you share are as important as a business’ storefront signage and displays in the 1950s.”

How Social Media Can Increase eCommerce Sales

Social media sites provide an unparalleled opportunity to sell eCommerce products because:

• So many of your prospective customers are already on these sites;
• The majority of them are there looking for help buying the best products; and
• Social media sites provide useful tools and a wealth of data to help you drive people to your eCommerce site.

Here are 5 ways social media can help Increase eCommerce Sales on your eCommerce site:

1. You Get Feedback – Immediately

Social media is perhaps the only marketing venue which allows merchants to see what customers are saying in real time.  Business owners can even join that conversation, posing questions and raising topics to learn more about what customers think.  Notably, social media can be very successful for sales campaigns. For example, merchants can offer incentives, discounts or rewards points and see immediately if the campaign takes off.

2. It Can Improve Customer Service

Sometimes people don’t want to contact customer service directly – some consumers feel more comfortable talking about problems with a business on Facebook or Twitter. Social media allows merchants to respond quickly to customer complaints and handle the issue over the internet if the customer is more comfortable with that form of contact. Notably, if there are a large number of complaints surrounding a particular issue, it’s possible to quickly make changes and reduce issues.

3. Potential Customers Can Become Leads

According to HootSuite, 90% of potential consumers of your products won’t respond to cold calls. However, 76% are willing to talk via social media.  Leverage this dynamic to generate new leads to fill the top of your sales funnel.  For example, post content with links to a landing page where prospective customers provide their email address in exchange for content.

4. Customer Engagement Builds Trust

Social media marketing is one component of a comprehensive inbound strategy to increase trust and credibility.  In other words, social media posts are less about direct selling and more about customer engagement.  Notice, for example, how camera maker GoPro uses Facebook. Gopro doesn’t use social media for direct sales, but rather to show prospective buyers the quality of videos created using their product.

5. Social Media Allows for Highly-Targeted Ad Campaigns

Social media collects a vast amount of data about the people who visit their websites. Notably, that wealth of data is available to businesses to create highly-targeted ad campaigns.  Through social media advertising, merchants can direct ads to the target customers based on their activity on social media sites. Therefore, providing an effective (and cost-effective) means to drive new website traffic.

The Brave New World of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing, including social media marketing, has made it easier than ever to reach and engage with prospective buyers.  The challenge is in standing out among the tidal wave of content that already exists on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest. That requires a smart strategy, but when done right, social media can help increase eCommerce sales and grow a business.

To learn more about how social media can help increase eCommerce sales and grow your eCommerce business, contact us today.

Why is an eCommerce-Centric eMail platform necessary?

Contrary to social media fans, eMail remains one of the most effective platforms for digital marketing. The success of an eMail campaign, like most marketing strategies, is measured in terms of open-rates, click-through rates, engagement, and most importantly conversions. When done correctly, eMail will help to solidify and strengthen a brand. By adopting an eCommerce-centric eMail service provider (ESP), merchants take the first step in ensuring successful campaigns with documentable ROI.

Personalization, Integration, and Increased Revenue

A predictive analytics program with aggregated consumer data such as transactions, search, and onsite behavior, will create a personalized experience for customers. This enables merchants to send customers product information based on their actual data, getting them information on the products they are searching for at the appropriate time. A personalized eMail approach will turn new and returning customers into loyal brand consumers.

In addition to providing personalized eMail, leading ESPs integrate well with eCommerce platforms like Magento. eCommerce-centric ESPs enable seamless customer data integrations that enable powerful data-driven and targeted eMail marketing. Examples of important synchronized data would include all historical information regarding customers, orders, wishlists, cart contents, and browsing behavior.

Perhaps the most relevant argument for investing in an eCommerce-centric ESP is that personalized and relevant eMail campaigns lead to more revenue. It’s that simple.

The infographic, “eCommerce Goes Personnel” details how profitable personalized eMail can be for merchants while noting some impressive stats:

• 54% of retailers reported a rise in AOV
• 65% of merchants reported an increase in conversion rates
• 53% of retailers reported increase on returning shoppers

Similar results proving ROI was also reported by Internet Marketing, which found that a successful eMail campaign results in a $44.25 return on every dollar invested. That’s a 4300% ROI! Make sure eMail efforts are successful by investing in an ESP that provides notable personalization features and seamless Magento integration.

Best eCommerce-Centric eMail Service Providers for Magento

There are several reliable eCommerce-Centric eMail service providers that integrate well with Magento. InteractOne is partnered with three top ESPs that work well for every business size and marketing experience level.

MailChimp

MailChimp is a great option for smaller merchants that are growing their mailing lists and eMail efforts. MailChimp offers customized subscriber profiles, automated options, and measures metrics such as engagement rates or revenue and profit generated. MailChimp Mobile, MailChimp Editor, and Chimpadeedoo are mobile apps that make it easy to check reports or send a campaign from anywhere. They also integrate with hundreds of other apps.

According to their eMail Marketing benchmarks report, MailChimp sends billions of eMails a month and, as would be expected, tracks their data. As of February 1, 2017, here is their breakdown by a few industries of their average eMail campaign.

• Retail: 20.96% opened – 2.50% clicked – 0.35% soft bounce – 0.30% hard bounce.
• Restaurant: 21.17% open – 1.33% clicked – 0.24% soft bounce – 0.22% hard bounce.
• Sports: 25.41% open – 3.19% clicked – 0.46% soft bounce – 0.41% hard bounce.

Listrak

Listrak is recommended for mid-sized merchants that need more functionality than what smaller ESPs can provide.  One of the top features of Listrak is its ability to combine digital marketing platforms. The platform offers personalized, multichannel marketing strategies, and provides social media integration. By collecting data from every touchpoint, Listrak can offer insight into your customer’s future purchases, allowing you to create targeted campaigns. Other valuable features includes their Product Recommender and Back in Stock Alerts. Their interface works seamlessly with Magento and is considered user-friendly.

Statistics from 950 of their retail clients from the months of January to March of 2016 revealed the following:

• The average open rate increased by 13%.
• Triggered messages such as browse and cart abandonment had, on average, the highest open rates which ran around 28%.
• Back in stock alerts had very high open rates of 48%!

Dotmailer

Dotdigital is recommended for larger merchants that have established extensive mailing lists, eMail campaigns, and need to implement greater personalization. Dotmailer can follow a customer’s history including their wish list, cart contents and browsing habits. The ESP can also build integrated branded data acquisition surveys, create unique coupon codes, and provides “hot prospects” reporting. Another notable feature of Dotmailer includes their abandoned cart series.

Dotmailer notably invests time into analyzing and helping merchants improve their marketing metrics across the board. According to their 2017 “Hitting the Mark” benchmark report, Dotmailer found that out of the 100 retailers studied, “many brands are failing to migrate beyond basic email marketing methods and move towards tactics that are proven to drive up ROI and customer satisfaction.” The report also found that many top brands were missing out on proven ROI boosting methods with only 40% of the brands included in the study providing abandoned cart reminders.

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Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment for Magento

If you own an ecommerce business and your shopping cart isn’t functioning as well as it should be, you’re losing business, period. The truth is that some of the consumers who abandon your shopping cart will come back, but some won’t—these are the ones who left not because something’s burning on the stove, but quite likely, because they became frustrated with something that happened on your website.

According to eMarketer, almost 75% of all online shoppers worldwide abandon a shopping cart before they make a purchase—and some portion of them never come back. The aggregate value of all the products in abandoned carts in 2015 was more than $4 billion, according to Business Insider. To increase sales, you need to determine the problems which lead to cart abandonment and fix them. Following are 7 ways for you to streamline checkout and boost shopping cart conversions:

1. Use breadcrumb navigation

Online shoppers often want to move quickly to another product in the same category or to a different product entirely. Make it easy for them to move around your products pages using breadcrumb navigation, a site feature which shows them how the page they’re on is related to previous pages. For example, if you sell clothing online, and someone is on a page displaying Nike running shoes, the breadcrumb thread (often in the upper left-hand of the page) might be Shoes/Athletic/Running/Nike. Each piece of the breadcrumb thread is clickable, making it as easy as possible for users to move around your site, and that means they’re also more likely to buy.

2. Put customer service within easy reach

If someone’s having a problem, they don’t want to waste time trying to figure it out on their own. Make it easy for them to reach a human being. You could add a chat feature to your site, or you could make it easy on yourself by simply including your phone number on every page of your website. LessEverything tested the effectiveness of doing this and found that simply adding your phone number increases conversion by almost 2%.

3. Include product ratings and reviews  

A study from CompUSA found that 63% of online shoppers are more likely to make a purchase if product pages include user reviews. That just makes sense—people want to know if a product does what it’s supposed to, and if other people had problems which they might encounter if they buy it. One other tip: it takes more time, but make every product description unique and as compelling as possible. Having duplicate content on multiple pages hurts SEO.

4. Don’t make visitors hunt for the add to cart button

You’ll notice that eCommerce giants like Walmart and Amazon make the add to cart button prominent and easy to find, and you should do the same. Make sure the add to cart is surrounded by white space and in a distinct color, like orange, and that the type is in a large, bold font.

5. Add a secondary call to action

Of course, you don’t want anything to detract from the add to cart button, but some of visitors won’t be ready to buy. Give these people a second option, like “save for later.” The mere fact that shoppers have saved a group of products increases the likelihood that they’ll come back and purchase some or all of those products. The next time they visit your site, you can remind them of their saved items and ask if they’re ready to add these to their cart.

6. Let shoppers “edit” their carts

If someone is reviewing their order prior to purchase and changes their mind about one or more items, give them the option of deleting those items or saving them for later. Let’s says someone has added 5 items to their cart, but wants to remove one. If you don’t give them the option to do that, they’ll probably junk the entire order and possibly go to the website of one of your competitors.

7. Let shoppers know all prices upfront  

One of the biggest reasons for cart abandonment is shoppers seeing pricing surprises just before they hit “place order.” If you think hiding shipping charges or taxes will make shoppers more likely to add items to their carts, you’d be right—unfortunately, it also makes them less likely to complete the purchase. Be transparent about all costs, and the true total, as soon as possible in the process.

7 of every 10 of your online shoppers is abandoning your shopping cart – that’s not acceptable.

Hitting the industry benchmark for shopping cart abandonment means that 7 of every 10 of your online shoppers are abandoning your shopping cart – that’s not acceptable. To surpass the industry average, you need to partner with Magento development experts who understand user experience (UX) and know how to create sites that load quickly and are easily adaptable for future changes. To learn more about the ways our Magento ecommerce site design, development and maintenance services can help you optimize your online sales, contact us today.