Most people trust online reviews when shopping online. Especially, if you are operating in a competitive market, it‘s essential to use online reviews to win new customers and increase your revenue. Therefore, my top tips for eCommerce marketers are:
- Customers trust customers: Grow reviews for your products by sending follow-up emails to your customers.
- Use social proof on your website: Make online reviews visible on your page, for example, by embedding them through third-party platforms.
- Improve your online reputation (and your Google ranking) by monitoring and responding to online reviews.
Listening to customers’ feedback can provide you with valuable insights about how to improve your product and increase customer loyalty.
Natalia Zaugg – Founder
re:spondelligent
I think that not enough marketers focus on the back-half of their customer journey during Black Friday. Consumers are far more loyal to brands today than ever before and this period of holiday shopping is an excellent time to possibly win new long-term customers. Marketers should focus on simplifying the customer journey as much as possible. This removal of any friction in the buying process alleviates the stressful burden of the holiday season for many shoppers. If you have an excellent digital storefront and shopping experience…that’s great! However, this short-term boost in sales does nothing for you the next quarter unless you work to create customer loyalty after the sale and Black Friday chaos. Don’t be afraid to follow up on those converted customers to thank them and show them appreciation in your own way. It will help to remind them of their great buying experience and allow you to stay top-of-mind the next time they go to purchase something in your category.
Kevin Raske – Social Media and Digital Marketing Manager
Three Roll Estate and Alma Grown
For paid search, timings and bid adjustments especially for mobile devices – this is the most basic but very important, especially if you are running paid or social ads. The last thing we don’t want to see is our ad not appearing for our target keywords during the five-day weekend. What we did in Monark is to implement ad scheduling and device bid adjustments to our PPC campaigns and utilize engagement aspects such as conversion points, shopping intent and seasonal content pages that target shoppers who are hunting for deals, bargains, and convenience to buy online rather than going to physical stores. For our ads, we use structured data snippets to list specific deals and capture the buyers’ journey through remarketing.
SEO – we implement what we called in E-commerce the Holiday SEO strategy by creating content weeks or months before Black Fiveday. Target keywords are seasonal ones like deals, promotions, bargains, gifts, etc. We create two content types – Top 10s and modified product graphics with headlines that are shareable to social media and Pinterest. Longform content is not ideal in Black Fiveday since its seasonal but YouTube video helps because it’s more engaging and it can attract more views since we have a huge fan base.
Social Media – the most important marketing channel since it can attract more users than organic and paid search. I can say that this is our secret weapon in my marketing campaigns not just in Monark but it also in my previous agencies that I’ve worked in the past. There’s a lot of new stuff that we can utilize in social media like “Live videos” where we can ask an influencer to promote our product on his Facebook or Instagram account using Live video and FB/IG stories. We gave the influencer an affinity/affiliate link that directs to our holiday SEO pages, we gain 33% of new customers from influencers who are using Live or IG stories. A well-known tactic nowadays and highly recommended especially Black Fiveday.
Email automation – another important marketing strategy and helps notify our loyal customers to prepare for Black Fiveday. It’s straight forward, we just link back to our SEO holiday content pages to drive more traffic to our website.
Jonas Belocura – Search Engine Optimization Specialist
Monark Group
Brian Roizen is the Cofounder and Chief Architect of Feedonomics, a full-service feed optimization platform that optimizes product data for hundreds of channels. He has been featured on numerous podcasts and eCommerce webinars, and regularly contributes to Search Engine Land and other industry-leading blogs. Brian graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.
