Bonus: Christmas 2015 Tips with eSeller: 3: Your Christmas 2015 Customer Journey, inc top marketing methods to test

by Chloë Thomas

Welcome to our series of 3 bonus episodes “Christmas 2015 Tips” presented by Chloe Thomas of eCommerceMasterPlan.com in association with eSeller.net designed to help you make Christmas 2015 the best yet for your eCommerce business.

We’ve created these in partnership with eSeller and for the first time ever on the eCommerce MasterPlan Podcast you can get hold of a FULL transcript (including pictures!) of each of these podcasts.

I’m coming at everything in this 3-part series with in mind that Christmas is a very busy time when you will be wanting to achieve a mix of these 3 objectives:

  • Attract new customers
  • Reactivate dormant customers
  • Make current customers better customers (higher AOVs, more frequent purchases, more purchases!)

The 3 parts are:

  1. Should you partake in Black Friday? [catch up now]
  2. Why your Delivery Strategy matters this Christmas [catch up now]
  3. Your Christmas 2015 Customer Journey – including the top marketing methods you should be using this Christmas [see below]

The full transcript of this podcast is available below.

your christmas 2015 customer journey

Click to Tweet: I just listened to “Your Christmas 2015 Customer Journey” – thanks @eComMasterPlan and @eSeller_Net

In this podcast I take you through:

  • How to work out where on the Customer Journey you first need to focus
  • What the remedy is to a problem in each area – including the marketing methods you should be testing
    • Not enough visitors
    • Not enough visitors signing up to your emails
    • Not enough first time buyers
    • Not enough repeat purchasers

The full transcript:

Introduction:

Hi everyone, I’m Chloe Thomas an author, podcast host, speaker, and consultant in the world of eCommerce. I’ve been in the eCommerce world for over 10 years, helping all manner of businesses to grow and become more successful.

If you’re listening for the first time welcome, it is great to have you here and please do check out our normal interview and update podcasts that usually come out on Monday evening/ Tuesday daytime. There’s great stuff in there and I know you’re going to find it useful. If you’re one of our regular listeners, I hope you find this changing content really interesting and useful to you. How ever many of my podcasts you’ve listened to I would love to get your feedback. Just message me on Twitter at chloe_ecmp.

This is part of our series of three bonus episodes, The Christmas 2015 Tips, presented by me, Chloe Thomas of eCommerceMasterPlan.com in association with eSeller.net. The aim of these is to help you make Christmas 2015 the best yet for your eCommerce business.

This is the third and final of our Christmas 2015 Tips podcasts. Last time I took you through “Why your Delivery Strategy Matters this Christmas”. This time I’m going to be talking about the all-important marketing, so your Christmas 2015 customer journey, including the top marketing methods you should be using this Christmas.

As you can probably tell today I have a little bit of a cold on the go so I will try to keep my voice nice and clear for you, but apologies if I’m coming across a little bit fuzzy. But the content’s great so hopefully you can hear past my stuffed up nose and we’re going to get all this great information to you.

What exactly are we going to be covering today?

Well our final session is all about what I think you should be testing this Christmas. At Christmas the volumes go up and customer propensity to buy increases as well, which makes it a fantastic time to be testing out new ideas. The winners this Christmas and on into 2016 are those who understand which part of the customer journey each of their marketing activities is focused on, which is why we’re going to be starting off by talking about the customer journey today.

What is a customer journey?

It’s the journey from site visitor to enquirer to first time buyer to repeat purchaser, because no one is really a customer of yours until they’ve bought from you more than once. They’re not really fully bought in. That first purchase is really just a test. The customer journey is what every eCommerce business should be focused on because it’s where the profit comes from. The further along the customer journey you can get someone, the more profit, the more lifetime value you’re going get from that human being.

I find many eCommerce businesses don’t really split their marketing activity between the new customer acquisition piece and the customer attention piece. That’s one of the reasons I keep talking about this customer journey idea because you really do have to work both of those if you want to make your business grow as fast and as profitably as you want it to. The smart businesses are now ‘deploying marketing methods to increase conversion from enquirer to buyer’ not ‘deploying email’. Does that make sense? So rather than going we must do email marketing they’re thinking, “Right, what can I do to increase conversion from enquirers to buyers? Great, email would be a good way to do that. Let’s build an email campaign that will increase the number of people who inquire on our website who convert to become a buyer.”

Christmas is a great time to accelerate the process of getting people through the customer journey. Everyone’s shopping, everyone has to buy gifts for somebody so it’s the time to:

• drive more traffic to the site,
• increase enquirers,
• recruit new customers,
• get our past customers to buy again, which is a key part of everything we’ve been talking about in this three-part series.

The content:

In this podcast in particular I’m going to be explaining to you:

1. how to work out where on the customer journey you first need to focus, because strangely enough we can’t do it all. We have to pick certain areas that are going to make the most difference for our business. I’m going to take you through how to do that.

2. Then the second part of the podcast is all about what the remedy is to the problem in each area, including the marketing method you could choose to test in those areas. The areas we’re going to look at are:

• not enough visitors,
• not enough visitors signing up to your emails,
• not enough first time buyers,
• not enough repeat purchases.

We’re going to go through each of those four and in each of those four I’m going to be telling you some marketing methods you could choose to test. I doubt any of you are going to test all of them, because that’d be quite frankly too much to work on in the time we’ve got remaining towards Christmas. Plus of course you want to be able to see the results and test it properly to see what’s working for you rather than just throw all the mud at the wall and hope some of it sticks.

I am going to do my level best to try and keep this podcast somewhere around the 30, 35-minute mark, so I am going to be flying through the ideas as we go through those four areas. Please, remember I’m giving you links in the transcript that will give you more details and examples. A lot of the examples I’m using are things which previous podcast guests have done, so you can listen into those to find out more about and how it’s worked for them.

Usually at this point in these bonus podcasts I’m warning those who aren’t from the UK that this is a UK focused set of examples. Today I have exactly the opposite warning, which is for all my listeners, I’m presenting my ideas to you today from a geographically neutral place. Please do bear in mind your local data protection rules before implementing some of these ideas, because I know we’ve got people listening in 30, 40 different countries around the world. I’m not going to get into data protection and sign up requirements and all that kind of stuff. So please be aware of what the rules are in your area before you start going ahead with these.

Let’s get cracking.

PART 1: How can you work out where on the customer journey you first need to focus?

Let me just have a little bit of a rant about the importance of focusing in on things. It’s very easy for you to come away from this podcast in particular with maybe 20, 30 different ideas you can implement in your business. If you try and implement all 20 or 30 of those you are going to fail, because you’re going to be spread too thinly, you’re not going to know what’s working, and both your budget, your time, and your effort, your energy, your inspiration are going to be spread too thinly. It’s really important that before you get excited about the marketing methods we’re going to run through in the second part of this podcast that you do work out which of the steps in the customer journey you need to focus on first.

Let me explain how you work that out.

Take a calendar month in your business. This is going to be going out in November, so maybe you’re going to take October. If your numbers are small of course maybe take two months, three months, four months, the last 12 months, whatever you need to be able to get some reliable numbers into this.

For that one calendar month work out:

• how many visitors did your website have,
• how many email sign ups did you get, so how much did your email list grow by if that’s easier to work out,
• how many people bought from you for the first time,
• how many people bought who had bought from you before, so how many repeat purchases you had.

Then work out the conversion between each step. So:

• how many or what percentage of your visitors signed up,
• what percentage of your email sign ups became first time buyer, or if you’re not getting many email sign ups you can do that one as the number of visitors you bought for the first time
• how many of your first time buyers bought for a second time.

This is a really, really, really simple snapshot. Of course you can work this out much more in depth, much more precisely, but what I want to give you is a quick and easy way to be able to work out where you need to be putting your focus in the run up to Christmas.

Work out each of those conversions between each of those steps, so from visitor to email sign up, from email sign up to first time buyer or visitor to first time buyer if your email number is low, and from first time buyer to repeat purchaser. You’re going to be benchmarking against yourself so I’m giving you no example numbers here. But you should be able to see once you worked out those conversion rates where there’s a really low number, and where that number is the lowest that’s the one where we need to be focusing our effort on first.

If all your numbers are pretty good but you’ve just not got much traffic, then that’s going to be your focus, to be getting more visitors to your website in the first place.

Identify the lowest performing area. We’re going to fix that one first and repeat, because none of us can do everything at once.

I will be running through each of the four areas in term in the marketing methods next.

If anyone’s not sure how to read their results pull them together and email them to me at chloe@eCommercemasterplan.com and I will get back to you as quickly as I can, which may be a couple of days with a quick answer on where to focus first, because I don’t want trying to interpret the numbers to stop you from getting some great marketing in place this Christmas.

PART 2: The remedy to a problem in each area

Let’s start off with the first of our areas.

If your problem is getting visitors to your website, what should you do?

This is possibly the most difficult one of the problems to solve. It’s also kind of the easiest one to solve in many ways and the problem is, although the good thing is there’s so many different ways of getting people to your website, but the tricky part is it can be very hard to work out which one is the right one for you because there’s so many different ways of doing this.

You’ve got short term strategies and you’ve got long term strategies.

• Short term would be Google AdWords because you could turn it on and immediately you get traffic.
• Long term would be a content marketing strategy to improve your search and optimization.

Then of course you’ve got expensive options and cheap options both in time and money, so it’s really quite tricky to work out which ones to do first.

Then of course brand awareness comes into it as well, because the more that people have heard of your brand and are aware of your brand the more likely they are to react to any of your marketing. If your brand awareness is poor, then your results from everything will be less good than if your brand awareness was better.

“Great,” you’re saying right now, “Chloe, you’ve just made this ridiculously difficult.” Well, the good news is for those of you whose number one problem is getting more visitors to your website I’ve got an 11-page PDF you can download for free at eCommerceMasterPlan.com. It’s called “How To Get New Customers To Your Website”. That’s available. It’s quite easy to find it on the website. You can download that for free and get a lot more information than what I’m going through in today’s podcast.

But to get you started let me talk to you about a couple of examples that you can find out more about in the podcast that we’ve already put up.

We did a fantastic interview with Bonnie from Miso Tasty about a month or so ago.

In order to get more visitors to her website and build her brand awareness she’s used a mixture of wholesaling and PR. Her miso soup product is available in several different supermarkets in the UK, which gives her massive brand awareness and of course is going to drive quite some nice sales thank you very much. She’s also done an awful lot of PR with most of the mainstream press in the UK to build up brand awareness. It’s a powerful tactic but it takes a lot of time and skill and you’ve got to be quite good at that kind of thing usually to do it.

On the opposite side of the coin in some ways we have Dave of Lick my Dip who I interviewed, to be honest I interviewed him yesterday. Hence the cold and the nose that you’ll be hearing in that podcast and in this one. Dave runs two eCommerce businesses, Lick My Dip and Cheese Posties. They’re both subscription businesses. Currently he’s finding one of his best routes they’re getting new visitors to his website and quality visitors as well, i.e. those who are going to buy is Instagram. Maybe that’s one for you to have a look at.

Here’s my quick fire, getting new visitors, things I think are likely to bring you quick wins this side of Christmas:

1. Google AdWords, looking at keyword advertising and Google shopping campaigns. Google shopping campaigns it’s quite easy to be successful with. Keywords, you’ve really got to put some time and effort in. That’s one thing I do generally recommend people outsource because every year it gets more complicated to do well on Google AdWords.

2. direct mail. It requires a fair amount of capital investment upfront or it can do depending on the size of your list, but it remains if you get the data right an incredibly power way to get new people to your website who will buy, quality traffic again.

3. Facebook advertising. I continue to be really impressed by results I see from Facebook. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to which businesses it does work for on, which ones it doesn’t. It’s quite an easy one for you to have a go at and test yourselves so I strongly advise you to have a go at Facebook advertising. Just be really careful with the segments that you target, your targeting selections and make sure they’re spot on for what you want. Don’t worry about going too niche though because the Facebook algorithm is very good at putting the ads in front of the right people for you so you don’t have to go too far with your targeting.

4. Programmatic Advertising. This is a bit more expensive and this I think it works for those who have relatively good amount of traffic already, is programmatic advertising. This is where a third party agency put code on your site identify what your buyers are like and then find other people on the net to put your ads in front of, who are like the people who already come to your website. I hope that made sense.

But that’s something which Andrew Wilson uses, our first ever podcast guest. He runs Allergy Best Buys. He used that a lot with a company called Sub2 in the UK. He’s had some fantastic results in growing his business using that.

5. Widgets. To go even more ninja or to go properly ninja actually in the world of getting new visitors, this is a bit of a long term strategy and you’ve really got to have a good idea to make this one work is Maxwell Scott Bags who we interviewed within the last month on the podcast. William and his team have built a widget. They sell beautiful British leather bags and luggage, and they created a widget which anyone can embed on their website, which of course links back to them and which it gives you the cabin luggage size restrictions for any airline in the world. Genius idea and I think that’s going to be a fantastic SEO and traffic strategy for them. But that is a bit ninja and you’ve got to try really hard to think about a website widget that’s going to work for you.

That’s if your problem is getting visitors to your website. Loads of ideas there. Please don’t try and do all of them. Pick the ones you think will work best for your business and work through those.

Next up we’ve got…

If your problem is converting visitors to signs up what should you do?

Well the first thing to say on this is always remember that in one way or another you have paid to get every person who comes to your website there.

Either they’ve seen your brand awareness articles, your PR, they’ve seen you in SEO, but in some way with time or money you have paid to get every single person to your website who’s been there. We want to try and capture the details, as many of those as possible, and we need to start building that trust piece so they start understanding who we are and so they want to interact with you.

We’re going to talk more about trust when we go into ‘if your problem is getting the first purchase’. Right now I’m going to talk about how we can try and get as many signs up from our visitors as possible. Basically the answer on this one is email signup pop-ups. There are many different ways of doing this. You can have strips that go across the top of the screen, the bottom of the screen.

You can have pop-ups, interstitials. They get called all different kinds of things and like boxes, but basically a reasonably aggressive way of going please sign up for our emails.

The most aggressive version of this I’ve seen is what Wet Shave Club do, another one of our podcast guests. They manage to get their visitors to website conversion to email sign up to 8%. 8% of people come to their website sign up for their emails and they have a countdown message across the top of the screen which is incentivized. You get a discount if you sign up to their emails. They also have a big warning message when you try to leave the site to encourage you to leave your email.

Lots of businesses are using these now. They’re very common place. If you’ve gone to the eCommerce MasterPlan website, you’ll see we have one. We’re currently testing that trying to work out the best way to deploy to get the best results, but I cannot emphasize enough that you’ve paid for every single person you’ve got to your website. You need to make sure you’re capturing their details in order to be able to market to them and build the trust to get them to the point where they’re ready to buy from you.

Of course that does partly also involve cookie tracking and remarketing, that kind of stuff, which we’ll talk a bit later about in one of the other sections, but what you really, really want is someone’s email address. So if your problem is converting visitors to sign ups you need to get a pop-up installed.

The first step to doing that is to speak to your website people and find out what you can deploy. If you’re on Shopify, Magento, et cetera, then it’s a lot easier to install because there will be some kind of plugin that you can add quite quickly quite simply.

If your problem is getting the first purchase, what should you be doing?

Our third problem, and now we’re getting into the slightly more longwinded ones, so hopefully I can manage to still keep this all within our 30, 30 to 35-minute time limit, but we’ll see how we go. I reckon I’ll just bullet point these for you. Here we go. Our third problem.

This is making sure the people who come to your website are buying for the first time, those who sent you emails are buying from the first time to increase the number of people you’ve got in your buyer list and of course the money you’re making.

Christmas is a great time to getting the first purchase from people because people are in that buying mindset and they’ve got to buy all those gifts. Getting this first purchase is both about kind of a call to actions and the conversion rate optimization that you’re doing on the website, to use all those psychological tactics to get people to buy, but it’s also heavily about building trust with people.

In order to help you get the first purchase, if this is your major problem and the one you need to be focusing on or your major opportunity maybe and the one you need to be focusing on in the run up to this Christmas, I’m going to divide my advice for you into two parts:

• The first is I’m going to run through the onsite things, the things you can do on your website to improve the likelihood of someone converting, these kind of conversion rate optimization tactics.
• Then I’m going to go into offsite, so the marketing areas you should be looking at.

Onsite.

First off, is your site easy to use?

Test it. It’s amazing what simple things can make a massive difference. Just reminding people of your last order dates or reminding them that they’re able to buy from you online, reminding them of your guarantees, of your speed of purchase, of the fact the sites the products are in stock. Maybe do a little bit of user experience testing, get a couple of people in and get them sat down at a computer and watch them try and use your website, and every time you want to go, “No, no, no, click there instead, no you need to click there,” that’s a blocker. So you need to be fixing that and making your site easy to use.

As I mentioned in my update podcast from Internet Retailing conference a short time ago this is really, this piece is the key thing that several of the speakers there were talking about. They run big old businesses, big high street popular businesses in the UK. The team at Jigsaw which is ladies fashion their aim is to remove friction from the buying process. That’s what they work on, week in week out they are trying to remove the friction from the buying process. It’s as simple as that, find the friction and fix it.

Second up for onsite improvement is trust building.

Trust I think is a topic I’m going to be talking a lot about in 2016. Trust comes in many guises. Basically what we’re trying to do is explain the customer sufficient amount about our business that they start to like, know, and trust us. We want to make sure any guarantees we’ve got are really easy to find and are right there for them so start to trust us.

We need to make sure the site looks like it’s modern and up to date and cared for. You don’t buy from sites that look dated because you assume there’s something wrong with them. You need to make sure your postage charges are nice and clear, that the prices for the customer are clear. Stock information is another way of building trust, especially around Christmas people are like, “I need to know I’m going to be able to get it in time.” People want that, want to know they’re going to be able to receive it.

We were talking about in the delivery strategy podcast, the second in this series of three Christmas 2015 Tips, it’s going to be really important this year because people don’t trust the couriers, they don’t trust delivery. So you’ve got to make sure that you’re giving them the guarantees and the clear stock information, the clear postage information and timings.

Building trust is also about putting customer reviews and testimonials aka social proof on the site. Again from the Internet Retailing Conference Shop Direct were showing how they have social proof popping up on the screen. As you’re looking at a product you’ll see floating into screen the fact that 120 people are also looking at this product, so many people bought it yesterday, this is what someone said about it on Facebook. It’s really powerful stuff and it really works. I’ll make sure there’s a screen grab of that in the transcript for you.

Dave of Lick My Dip was talking in his interview with me about how important it is to build that community feel, to be giving your prospective customers great information and great insights for free, to get them to feel like they’re part of your community even before, in his case even before your site, your eCommerce business goes live, start to build that passion, that base of people who are going to want to buy from you. That’s all really part of the trust piece.

Trust as I said I think it’s going to be a big, big topic in 2016 that I’m going to be bringing to people of how to build trust because I think it’s such an important part of improving conversion rates.

Next up then incentivizing your first order. This is a more simplistic practical approach to doing it. We talked about pop-ups and we’re talking about getting more enquirers. Miso Tasty who I’ve already mentioned in the world of branding, they actually use a pop-up to encourage the first order. Bonnie was telling me on the podcast all about how she uses the pop-up to offer a discount to encourage people to take that first order, to encourage them to put trust in Miso Tasty and test them out. It’s very interesting idea and quite a quick and easy one to put in place.

Offsite

Let’s now talk offsite ways of getting that first purchase out of the people you’ve got on your email sequences and in your remarketing as well.

Email sequences, so powerful. There’s two you should have in place to make sure you’re getting that first purchase. These will help with repeat purchases in other areas of your business as well.

The first is a good quality welcome sequence. This isn’t just one email that goes, “Oh thank you for signing up for my emails, here’s your discount code.” No, follow it up with further emails, one a week, something like that, which explains who you are and what you do, and most importantly address the common customer concerns.

Shoes of Prey is an Australian business where you can design your own shoes, ladies you could lose hours to this, and yes they do ship worldwide. Lordie, I mean I’ve just had to kind of try- I talk about it a lot as an example but I have to try to avoid going there myself because I know it’s going to take me several hours to design that perfect pair of shoes. They have an amazing welcome sequence. I’m going to put images of some of their welcome sequence emails into the transcript for you. Basically each of those welcome emails takes you through and starts batting down some of those key barriers to designing your perfect pair of heels and ordering them, so just where do I start, what heel size do I want and so forth.

Then the other email sequence you should all have in place is an abandoning basket sequence and one which repeats the message and doesn’t necessarily offer an offer, because customers now to some extent expect an offer. Some of them are a bit savvy. For them who’s a savvy customer who wants to see an offer appear in the abandoning basket email then well if that’s the cost of getting them to do business with us maybe we’re happy to do it.

Make sure you’re sending out an abandoning basket email very quickly, so within an hour of someone abandoning that basket to get them to come back and purchase, and then follow it up over the next 24 hours or so. You will need to test as with everything we’re talking about. You’ll need to test to see what works best for your business, but that is a good starting point.

The other side of the offsite getting the first purchase is remarketing in all its many crazy forms.

The two I suggest you start off with are firstly CRM and remarketing lists for search advertising (RLSA). These are the two easiest least risk ways. CRM remarketing is where you put your email database into Facebook in order to be able to show Facebook ads just to the people on that list. Of course you can segment that list, so you can have a list purely of people who’ve inquired on your site, and show them offers to encourage them to make their first purchase.

Then the second type of remarketing I would try is RLSA remarketing lists for search advertising on Google which is where you can bid on those terms that you wouldn’t normally be able to afford to bid on in order to get people back to your site. So you get to bid higher for people who’ve previously been to your website in the Google keyword area. The other thing which you can now do with RLSA which was only released a few weeks ago is something called Google Match which is where you upload your email database into Google and Google will then enable you to target people on the search engine based on the fact they’re in your list.

That was a very quick run through of getting the first purchase methods, but I’m trying to keep this short and sweet and bitey. If anyone wants to know more about this, please do get in contact.

Fourth and finally then

If your problem is getting the repeat purchase what should you do?

Repeat purchase incentivisation and encouragement is something which many people neglect, but everything we’ve already talked about in today’s podcast is going to help with this problem. That’s good news. If you’ve got the problems of any of the ones at the top or the other three ones that we went through then all of those are going to help you with getting repeat purchase.
My suggestion for this are first off email.

Make sure you’re sending out regular email broadcast at least once a month if not more often. Don’t go up to twice a week. Almost nobody needs to go up to twice a week. But most people, customers are happy to hear from on a weekly or customer and prospective customers are happy to hear from on a weekly basis. Make sure you’re doing those regular email broadcasts.

Do anniversary reminders. It’s 12 months since you last ordered from us. Great to have you on our list. Are you interested in doing something else? Really easy to set up on email, and we miss you. Look fantastic, and the Hut Group are great at we miss you emails. “We miss you. Here’s 20% off. We miss you. There’s free P and P.” I’m always getting those from them. They’re great ones to be looking at.

Community is the next section.

Wet Shave Club built a community of their customers. Again, you can listen to this on my podcast interview to find out more about my pocket interview with Rohan. They created a VIP Facebook group, private Facebook group just for their subscribers. They use that to get feedback. But it really binds them into this idea of a club, this idea of a community. Hugely powerful way of increasing repeat purchase.

Miso Tasty does a similar thing but not with a Facebook group. Bonnie has key customers as testers. Her top customers shall post them out new product ideas and ask for their feedback. A great way of binding in your best customers to you to increase their relationship with you to get more purchases, more purchases more frequently, and also to get them to naturally recommend you to other people.

Third idea for increasing repeat purchase is customer services.

Make sure you’re treating your costumers well the first order and every order they place with you. If they have a good experience they will come back. It’s a hygiene fact a decent customer service experience, so have a think about how you can wow them with that experience, how can you make it even better, which does kind of come into the delivery strategy piece we talked about in the last of these bonus podcast, number two. Go back and have a listen to that if you haven’t already and if your problem, major problem is about getting repeat purchases, because I talk in there about wowing the customer with the delivery.

We then have the remarketing activity.

There’s so much you can do of remarketing based on how long it’s been since someone’s been to your website, how long it’s been since they bought from you. You could do anniversary campaigns. You can do big bold campaigns and remarketing about when your sales are on and that kind of thing. There are lots of different ways you can contact those customers.

Only two more ideas left to get these repeat purchases.

The first of the last two is to make sure you’re really getting behind any big bold campaigns you can do, so really chuck everything out when you go into sale or Black Friday. We spoke a lot about that one in the first podcast, strangely enough as it was called Should You Partake in Black Friday. Go back and have a listen to that one if you want some ideas of how you can use a big bold campaign to get those repeat purchases.

Then finally in the world of repeat purchases make sure you’re mining your past customers using a data co-op to find out which of them are buying and are active online elsewhere. Then you can do postal mailings to them. This is a bit of a complex subject, but I’m not going to go into it now because we’re getting a bit tight on time, and because it takes quite a long time to explain it, but there is an update on this in my podcast update from the DCA Conference a couple of weeks ago where I was running through some of the examples that Epsilon Abacus had shared at the Direct Commerce Association Conference.

To be fair it’s probably a little bit late to be leveraging that for this Christmas but if you’ve already signed up to a data co-op in your country of choice then this maybe one that works for you. I know in some countries these just don’t exist. In Ireland there are no data co-ops so you can’t use this tactic in Ireland. As I said earlier I’m coming at this in today’s podcast from a geographically neutral space.

Hopefully you can now see that to be successful with your marketing this Christmas and beyond it’s not just about I want to do remarketing or I want to do email. It’s about what the problem that you need to solve is and then finding the right solution to fit with that. We’ve only just scratched the surface of the options here, but the real message is to think about marketing in a different way, what is the job of each part of your marketing and each campaign within your marketing. Make sure that it’s delivering the goods in the areas you need it to deliver in.

Your to-do list from today’s podcast,

  • first off, work out what your numbers are and identify the gap you most need to solve.
  • Next up, what are you already doing that should be solving the gap, and let’s optimize that and make it work harder for you.
  • Number three, what should you be doing to solve the gap, what new things could you be rolling out and test those. Please don’t try and do everything I’ve spoken about in today’s podcast because I think there’s a good year’s worth of implementation, even for a big business, in what I’ve run through today, so try and identify the bits you think will work best for your business in terms of response and in terms of ease of deployment.

This was the third and final in our series of three bonus episodes, Christmas 2015 Tips, presented be me Chloë Thomas of eCommerceMasterPlan.com in association with eSeller.net, aiming to help you make Christmas 2015 the best yet for your eCommerce business.

Thank you so much for listening,
Of course please subscribe to eCommerce MasterPlan podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and all the rest of the different podcast platforms that are out there. I think we’re on all of them. If you spot one we’re not on, please do let me know and I will make sure we are there very shortly.

Listen in for our regular weekly interviews and updates. Have a great Christmas everyone and as always keep optimizing. Bye.