I must admit that I’m not particularly a big fan of ‘New Year’s Resolutions’. Why wait for the year to change before embarking on your fitness journey or starting a new diet when you could also do it on April 11th or October 27th?
However, the holidays are the perfect time for ecommerce marketers to regroup, analyze last year’s data and roll out your new strategies. It’s also a great opportunity to complete those tasks you’ve had in your pipeline, like revamping your website or getting ahead on your content calendar.
As such, this post firstly serves as a reminder to keep working towards your 2019 goals. Chances are that you might’ve already even forgotten that your set yourself a New Year’s Resolution. So I’m here to remind you to follow through with them.
But most importantly, this post is mainly here as a list of ways you can start your year off on the right track and maintain your success throughout 2018.
1. Look at last year’s results
The best way to have a successful 2019 is to improve on what you did in 2018.
You can start by looking at your email and social media marketing campaigns. What performed well and what didn’t? How can you improve these existing campaigns?
This is also something you do throughout the year. Continually improve your campaigns by using A/B testing and seeing what aspects work best with your customers.
2. Personalization
At this stage, you’re probably sick of us talking about personalization. But just like a parent reminding their children to eat their veggies, I’m here to remind you that it’s important to implement personalization in your marketing.
Personalization used to be one of these trendy new strategies that would get you ahead of the competition. However, personalization is now something you need to use in order to not fall behind the rest of the pack; because it’s become so easy to implement, more and more people are making use of personalization to effectively market to customers.
Email marketing is a create way to start incorporating personalization for great results. We’ve covered email personalization before in a previous post The Greatest Benefits of Email Personalization for E-Commerce. We also had some of Melbourne’s Top Shopify Experts share 5 E-Commerce Personalization Tips with us to help you create a personalized online shopping experience for your customers.
Essentially, you should use your customers’ data to serve them personalized content. Show them personalized product recommendations through email, social media and on your store.
By basing your personalization on their activity (what items they’ve clicked on or looked at) and purchase history (what items they’ve bought, to show them similar items or remind them to replenish), you’ll be sure to see a lift in engagement and transaction rates – 75% of consumers are more likely to buy from you if you recognize them by name, remember their preferences and offer them relevant recommendations.
Machine learning is a valuable tool at your disposal. Implementing it now is a great strategy, allowing you to compete with other stores and helping you to implement personalization to a much greater degree that has been previously available.
3. Grow and maintain your email list
Email is a pretty important marketing channel – in fact, it’s the second most effective one after your website and has a higher ROI than any other channel. On top of this, email allows to directly communicate with your customers and send personalized content.
To make this effective, it is of course important to grow and maintain your email list. While you might have a respectable email list at the moment, you need to be constantly removing your inactive subscribers and keeping your list clean.
As subscribers stop interacting with your emails, the first step of action is to attempt to re-engage them with a win-back campaign. If this fails, removing them from your list will help you to retain a good deliverability rate and mean you’re not wasting your money sending emails to inactive subscribers that will never open them.
In order to replace the subscribers you’ve removed, you will also need to continually collect news leads for your store’s email list. You can easily grow your list with pop ups, email collection forms on your website and as well as through Facebook ads.
You can also read some of our posts that cover 5 Steps to Supercharge Your Store’s Email List Growth or 5 Little Known Ways You Can Grow Your Store’s Email List for more tips on how you can acquire new leads for your list.
4. Content, content, content
If you don’t already have a blog up and running on your website, there are a few reasons why you should set one up.
Firstly, it can help to boost your SEO rankings. It can also help you develop a stronger relationship with your customers as well. By providing them with news, updates and helpful content, this helps to instill trust, assists them in their purchase process and even works to position you as an expert in the field.
If a written blog (like ours) isn’t exactly a fit for the products you’re selling, you should still be providing your customers with supplementary information to assist them. If you sell clothes or cosmetics, you can add still a look book or style tips section to your website. If your store sells electronics, try writing regular reviews of new products. Food e-commerce stores could post recipes. The possibilities are endless.
The emphasis of your posts should not necessarily be to sell your products, but to provide your customers with helpful content. This principle should not be tied to just the content on your website. Emails and social media posts shouldn’t all be about marketing your products – share tips and advice as well. Don’t be afraid to branch out into video content either – 43% of customers want to see more video content from marketers.
I mentioned earlier on that the holidays are the perfect time to plan out and get a head start on your content calendar. Now is the time to keep building on your content for the rest of the year.
5. Keep up to date with the trends
Often we can be so busy doing our own thing that we forget about what’s happening around us. But it’s important to know what’s going on. How are your customers and their needs changing? What new software solutions are being developed? What trends are happening online?
The best way to stay up-to-date is to do research. You’re probably well aware of what your competitors are doing, and hopefully in tune with what your customers want. But keep track of the influencers in your industry and what trends are happening, and stay up-to-date with the latest software solutions that’ll help you to stay ahead of the competition.
Conclusion
Sure, you might set yourself a tonne of New Year’s Resolutions and do everything you can to start your 2019 on the right foot. But the reality is that no matter how much planning and goal setting you do, you never know what’s going to happen this year. In fact, the best way to develop your marketing strategy for your ecommerce store is to keep testing, make mistakes and learn from this.
Regardless, we at SmartrMail wish you and your marketing efforts all the best in 2019.
