How to Get Traffic That BUYS to your Website
Last month Scurri hosted the London Scurri Meet Up, an eCommerce Event in Covent Garden, London where we brought together industry leaders and online retailers to share knowledge. Our speakers on the night were there to give practical tips that merchants could apply to boost their eCommerce growth. We were lucky to have Chloe Thomas as one of our special guest speakers, who gave an excellent talk on how to continuously increase eCommerce sales.
We loved this talk so much we decided to put the Top 3 tips she shared with us on the night here for the benefit of our online retail readers. These logical, practical and incisive tips come from Chloe’s new book, eCommerce Marketing, How to Get Traffic That BUYS to your Website.
Chloe Thomas speaking at the Scurri London Meetup, Oct 2019.
Focus on traffic first.
Chloe shared her equation which is at the root of eCommerce success.
[Traffic] x [Average Order Value] x [Conversion Rate] = [Sales].
When Salesforce did an analysis earlier this year, eCommerce and the quest for growth, they looked at their customers’ performance over the last 12 months, and on average their sales had grown by 20%. But looking at the key metrics, for average order value & conversion rate to be driven up, traffic had to increase, to begin with.
It might seem like a no brainer, but by focussing on getting traffic to your website first, you are making sure that you are customers in the funnel. There’s no point concentrating on customer retention until you have customers to retain.
Of course, traffic comes in many guises, and there are various levels of customer relationships. Chloe shared her Customer Masterplan model, which is at the heart of her latest book, these six stages represent the stages of the customer relationship with your business.
- The world – Literally everyone!
- Visitors – people coming to your website
- Enquirers – anyone that is signed up to your email list
- First-time buyers
- Repeat buyers
- Regular buyers
Marketing efforts get focused between each of these stages and getting traffic to your website in the first place is the most difficult. Chloe breaks down the process of getting multiple types of traffic to your website for the first time into three main sections to – getting found (making sure that anyone looking can easily find you), target customer (this is the marketing you put in front of the people you know are your target) and shining a light (this the big stuff to make people aware of your presence like adverts in the tube etc.) Investing in all three of these will see them all perform better as combined, they are far greater than the sum of their parts.
Take action!
Online retailers are still guilty of irritating their customers with useless promotional messages. Chloe emphasised how marketing messages and emails should hinge on relevancy rather than frequency, citing one of her favourite marketing resource books on segmentation, automation, triggered marketing, etc. This book from 2004 ‘The quiet revolution in email marketing’ by Bill Nussey got Chloe really excited about automated marketing in the early days of digital marketing and yet here we are in 2019 still talking about it.
The point being that a lot of companies are still not taking advantage of segmentation, automation, triggered marketing etc even though its cheaper and to implement than ever. Chloe says ‘We talk a really good game in marketing but we don’t often get on and do it!’ This is why the second tip is simply to take action. Instead of talking about the importance of focusing on retention and traffic, marketing campaigns and abandoned basket sequences, you actually have to put them in place in order to reap the benefits.
Customers in this era are savvier than ever, which means marketers need to work that bit harder, to put our money where our mouths are and do the things we talk about!
Keep Optimising.
Chloe’s eCommerce Masterplan podcast always ends with the phrase, ‘keep optimising.’ Why? Because putting marketing processes in place is only ever the first step, setting up a campaign doesn’t mean you’re finished. You’ve got to look at those results and then alter bids, change keywords, improve messaging etc. If you don’t analyse your results and make adjustments accordingly, you won’t see improvements, and you will be wasting money.
Optimising is, quite simply, the process of asking these two key questions:
- If it’s GOOD: can we do more?
- If it’s BAD: Can we fix it or stop?
Optimising can be done across all forms of marketing, big and small, from tweaking bids on google ads all the way up to deciding where to focus your marketing power over the next few months.
Which brings us back to the six stages of the customer relationship – where is the weak link along this chain in your business? Ie. Where should your efforts be focused?
By using the masterplan model to discover your weakest link is and fix it, you can then move on to the next most vulnerable and the next, until you bring the whole system up a level to perform better overall.
Growth mindset.
Using this method, you can see where to focus your efforts not just for marketing but on other aspects of the business. For instance, if the weak link is occurring between first-time buyers and repeat buyers, perhaps you have to examine your delivery. Are the customers getting the right products delivered on time in the way they expect?
By using this holistic way of looking at your business, you can also determine where to focus internal efforts and which aspects of your business you should outsource. Again, using delivery as an example, if you’re using a DIY system to manage all your carriers and your delivery is letting you down then you know it’s the right time to look at outsourcing to this aspect. Partnering with someone like Scurri to who can provide an elegant solution to this problem. However, if your customer service team are performing well, then you know this is an aspect worth keeping that in house.
- Focus on traffic
- Take action
- Keep optimising
These three tips are Chloe’s recipe for continuously growing sales. By applying this mindset to your business, you can identify the areas that are individual to you and your business and use this to find the path to generate continuous incremental improvement.
Chloe’s bestselling book eCommerce Marketing: How to Get Traffic That BUYS to your Website is out now!
AUTHOR
Laura Roche Marketing Executive, Scurri
Laura Roche is a Marketing Executive at Scurri, managing social media and content marketing. Laura shares breaking news in the eCommerce space with our readers as well as sharing insights across the delivery and logistics landscape.