7 marketing strategies you need to implement today
1. Start looking into sustainable options
The pandemic sparked an interest in sustainability with consumers across the country, and now more than ever, consumers are advocating for sustainability measures with the brands they shop with. In fact, 8 out of 10 consumers say that sustainability is important when making purchasing decisions. To win the loyalty of consumers who are eco-conscious, retailers need to make every effort to go green. This can be done by:
- Utilizing reusable and ready to return packaging
- Offering environmentally friendly products and packaging to consumers
- Educating customers on how they can extend the lifespan of their products and how to dispose of them
- Shipping in bulk and using eco-friendly shipping practice and partners
- Giving customers a green shipping option at checkout
Dane Baker, Co-Founder and CEO of Ecocart, has witnessed first hand the growing popularity of sustainability.
“The percentage of consumers that are willing to pay more for their order to make it carbon neutral has significantly increased over the last 12 months. A year ago our adoption rate was 5%, and now it's skyrocketed to 28%.”
Don't forget to communicate your green efforts with your customers. They won't know that sustainability is important to your brand unless you tell them! You can promote your sustainability efforts on your social media, website, email campaigns, and custom tracking page. Don't make your customers go searching for it.
The verdict is in: sustainability isn't a trend, it's a lifestyle and to succeed in 2022, retailers will need to make it a top priority
2. Consider affiliate marketing and influencer marketing
You've probably heard of it by now, but affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy where brands reward an affiliate for each customer brought by their own marketing efforts. Partner affiliates can help you engage your current customers and also tap into new audiences.
“For every dollar spent in affiliate marketing, you're getting $6.15 ROI in comparison to $2 with traditional methods. We're seeing that roughly 15% of revenues from digital marketing channels can be attributed to affiliate marketing. At the end of the day, people are realizing that this strategy is skyrocketing in popularity and that they need to develop and invest more time in their relationships with the influencers that they work with.” -Brandon Rowe, Director of Brand and Content at Refersion.
Social commerce is taking off and affiliate marketing is at the heart of it all. If you're not sure where to start, we have a few tips to help:
- Start by choosing the right affiliates: If you want to influence your customers to buy your products, you need to choose an affiliate with an engaged audience that trusts them. The right affiliate is an expert in your field, has a strong following, and has an audience that would benefit from your products or brand.
- Influence sales with deals and promotions: Who doesn't love a good deal? Leveraging coupons and deals is not only a great way to boost affiliate sales, but they are also measurable so you can easily track how your affiliates are performing.
- Use an affiliate marketing software: Creating and managing an affiliate marketing program can be overwhelming and time consuming. A software like Refersion integrates with your eCommerce solution, manages your affiliates, and houses trackable links, coupon codes, and more.
John Erck, co-founder of Rebuy, explained how Rebuy teamed up with Pura Vida and Refersion to create an affiliate marketing strategy:
“When affiliates are driving traffic to an online store they want to have attribution for those sales, of course. And so to track that there's a URL parameter that is used and in all of the links that they share there will be a Refersion ID. You can make a rule in Rebuy's product that connects a specific Refersion ID to a data source so you can easily find out top affiliates and the most popular products."
"What's great is that you can make a seamless handoff between that link. So when a person on Instagram clicks on a link of, for example, ‘Jill's favorite products', the name Jill can show up on the website. And you can recommend products on the website without having to create another landing page. It's just one strategy you can use to really up your game when it comes to increasing conversions and creating a really sophisticated experience. It's really pretty cool.”
3. Implement referral and loyalty programs
Referral and loyalty programs are great ways to retain existing customers while also reaching a new audience. These programs also have a high engagement rate and have been shown to increase brand awareness and advocacy.
While these programs are similar in nature, they aren't quite the same thing. A referral program rewards customers for sharing your brand or a particular product with friends and family. A loyalty program rewards customers for continuing to purchase from you and earn points with every purchase.
If you're on the fence about implementing a rewards program, think about this: 43% of consumers are more likely to buy a new product after learning about it from friends on social media. More so, people are 4x more likely to buy from a brand when they're referred by a friend.
The three main points to a successful referral program are awareness, accessibility and ease of use. If you currently have a program in place, ask yourself: Do your customers know that you have a referral program? And can they find it quickly? On your website or on social media? If your answer is no or maybe to any of these, it may be time to rethink your strategy.
“If your site wide offer is 30%, but potentially, you're only giving your referrals 10% discount, they're not going to be incentivized to refer that friend, because the friend can get a better discount just by going on the website. You really need to think about the strategy.”
— Ivette Muller, Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Friendbuy
4. Value transparency and communication
While transparency and active communication aren't new ideas, they've become more important than ever. Transparency is vital in omnichannel shopper buying decisions because customers shop with their value systems in mind. Meaning that if your brand doesn't meet those value expectations, potential customers will take their money elsewhere.
While transparency is a rather broad term, it carries a lot of weight. 94% of customers show loyalty to a brand that offers complete transparency. Transparency can aspire in a lot of ways, like social impact. That could mean speaking out on topics like Pride or Black Lives Matter, focusing on the impact your brand has on the environment, or giving more information about what goes into your products. It also means taking ownership of your actions. We all mess up, but social media can spread that information like wildfire, so we can't just wait and see anymore.
There's no perfect strategy for transparency and honesty, but it's quite simple. Your customers will ultimately ask the question, “can I trust you”? And if the answer is not a resounding yes, you may need to go back to the drawing board.
5. A/B test (most) everything that you do
While A/B testing has been around for a while, it's still crucial for success in 2022. Also known as split testing, A/B testing will help your brand determine the best and highest converting strategy. It's a great way to get real time insights and feedback from your audience. Now you may be thinking, do you really need to do twice the work? Who has time for that? We get it. But here's the thing, effective A/B testing can actually save you time and money. You don't have to test every single part of your business. Focus on specific campaigns centered around a larger goal. A few ways you can start A/B testing is through:
- CTAs: Try changing things like copy, color, and size to increase click throughs and conversions.
- Emails: If your open rates are trending downward, test out different subject lines with emojis or witty text, the frequency of your emails, and placement of your CTA.
- Ads: Try out 2 different versions of an advertisement to see which has a better click through rate. Play around with the colors, copy, and type of ad.
- Promotion timing: Test which days of the week and time your audience is most active and likely to engage.
- Personalization tactics: We already know that personalization is huge for 2022, but you need to find out what types of personalization your customers like best. Try out tailored product recommendations, cart abandonment emails, loyalty rewards, personalized subject lines in emails, and more.
- Landing pages: Similar to what we've discussed above, you can see which landing page converts more by testing different copy, color placement, page design, and more.
To put it simply: stop guessing and start testing!
"Prior to our product launch, we A/B tested between two different tier structures. So we offered 10%, 15%, or 20% off depending how much you spent. We tested putting our hero product, which was a cookware set, in the 10% bracket versus the 15% bracket and tested it with a subset of consumers. By doing that we saw a double digit increase in revenue by putting that hero product in the 15% tier with a smidge lower AOV, but the revenue difference was huge. It actually maximized our top line and bottom line.”
— Josh Knopman, Director of Growth and Digital Product at Caraway
6. Retention marketing will remain top priority
As the saying goes, your best customer is your existing customer, and with customer acquisition costs steadily increasing year after year, it remains true today. Ecommerce brands that want to win in 2022 will need to make customer retention a primary focus. The goal of retention marketing isn't just to keep your current customers, but to keep them coming back again and again and advocating your brand to others. Why is retention so incredibly important? The probability of selling to an existing customer is between 60% and 70% while selling to a new customer is only between 5% and 20%. Even more so, existing customers are 31% more likely to spend more on that average order value with your business. So, it's pretty important. If you want to refresh your retention marketing strategies, here are a few that your brand can explore:
- Reward and loyalty programs: 75% of consumers say that they favor companies that offer reward programs, so it might be time to explore that option. There are a lot of different types of programs to consider like pointbased, tiered, perk programs, hybrid, and subscription-based.
- Email marketing: Email marketing has remained a top retention strategy since the beginning, and for good reason. It's a great way to stay in contact with your customers and send personalized messages, reminder emails like when their subscription order is ready, and special offers and promotions. Some other flows to consider include a welcome series, post purchase engagement, and cart abandonment.
- SMS marketing: During BFCM'21, Caraway drove almost $100,000 in product sales through SMS marketing during an early access sale. SMS marketing is a great way to break through the “noise” of eCommerce. While email marketing is great, you have to think that your customers probably get 20, 30, 40 emails a day—so it can be difficult to stand out. Text messages have been shown to have high open and response rates and are another great way to implement personalization strategies