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15 Best Ecommerce Marketing Automation Software & Platforms

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Marketing automation software allows you to streamline your marketing operations by replacing manual tasks with automated workflows. 

If you’re looking to increase marketing revenue and help your team work more efficiently, then you’ve come to the right place. 

In this blog I’ll guide you through 15 of the best ecommerce marketing automation software tools on the market today and help you choose the right one for your ecommerce business.

Best Marketing Automation Software at a Glance

  1. Klaviyo
  2. HubSpot
  3. Campaign Monitor
  4. Mailchimp
  5. Iterable
  6. Emarsys
  7. Listrak
  8. Dotdigital 
  9. Act-On
  10. Sender
  11. ActiveCampaign
  12. Keap 
  13. Hunch
  14. Drip
  15. Omnisend

What is marketing automation software?

In a nutshell, a marketing automation tool is a piece of software that allows you to automate marketing tasks such as lead generation, email and SMS marketing, nurturing prospects and posting to social media. 

Benefits of automated marketing platforms

On a macro level, automated marketing platforms help you increase revenue. In fact, almost 80% of Chief Marketing Officers say their main reason for implementing marketing automation software is to grow revenue.

Much of the revenue growth driven by marketing automation can be attributed to improvements in efficiency. More than 30% of sales-related activities and repetitive tasks can be automated, which frees up more time for marketing and sales teams to nurture prospects through the sales funnel.

As well as driving revenue and improving efficiency, marketing automation technology help you to: 

  • Reduce staff costs – The automation of manual tasks increases efficiency so you don’t have to hire more staff
  • Nurture leads – Keep your product or service top-of-mind using email marketing campaigns
  • Streamline reporting – Track key performance metrics in customizable reports delivered directly to your inbox
  • Align sales and marketing – Manage your marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads in one centralized hub
  • Personalize experiences – Segment your audiences and create personalized campaigns specific to target different personas across multiple sales channels
  • Increase conversion rates – Use conversion rate optimization techniques like basket abandonment email drips that trigger automatically in the platform

Bear in mind that your automated marketing platform should integrate with your tech stack.

You can integrate any of the 15 automation platforms in this blog with Yieldify’s fully managed personalization platform. For example, you may want to collect email and SMS leads, customer data, or customer questionnaire answers and pass them to your automation software.

If you choose Klaviyo, Iterable or Ometria, you can integrate with Yieldify to capture a wide range of customer browsing data – such as how customers navigate your website, which links they click, how long they stay on a page – and feed insights back into those platforms.

Choosing the best marketing automation platforms

You need to define your business goals before investing in ecommerce marketing automation software. For example, do you want to:

  • Improve audience tracking
  • Send real-time sales alerts 
  • Remarket to customers 
  • Collect more email addresses 
  • Collect more SMS
  • Personalize customer experiences

Once you’ve set your goals, calculate a budget, identify must-have features and agree internally on what you’re prepared to compromise on within your financial constraints. 

With your specifications agreed, you’re ready to start searching the marketplace. Here are three ways to narrow your search:

  1. Use a plug-in like BuiltWith to see which platform brands like yours are using.
  2. Find out which platforms integrate with your current tech stack.
  3. Check customer review platforms such as G2 and Capterra.

When you’re ready to engage with a provider, Justin Gray, founder and CEO of LeadMD, recommends asking six questions:

  • Is there an associated community?
  • What are the all-encompassing costs?
  • What will the ROI look like?
  • How extensive is the support offered?
  • How does the functionality align with your goals?
  • Does this brand have an innovation mindset?

15 top marketing automation software for ecommerce

1. Klaviyo

Klaviyo is an ecommerce marketing automation platform that helps businesses from SMBs to enterprise deliver personalized experiences across their marketing channels.

  • Pricing: Klaviyo’s pricing structure depends on how many contacts you have in your database. For example, businesses with 1k-1.5k contacts will pay $60 per month for Klaviyo’s email & SMS package
  • Ease of use: Rated 8.7/10 on G2
  • Features: Advanced retail integration with Yieldify, which you can read more about here. Personalized emails, audience segmentation, social ad targeting
  • Best for: Klaviyo is a great solution for businesses of all sizes to scale up their email & SMS marketing with more personalized experiences
Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your Marketing Automation Platform with Yieldify.

2. HubSpot

One of the most widely used marketing automation tools, HubSpot offers a full stack of sales, marketing, and CRM tools. HubSpot’s flexible marketing automation functionality integrates online and social media marketing activities – including email, SEO, contacts, and analytics.

  • Pricing: HubSpot’s three marketing hub packages range from $45 to $3600 per month
  • Ease of use: Rated 8.6/10 on G2
  • Features: Ad tracking, video content, SEO optimization, blog analytics, social media scheduling, live chat, Yieldify integration
  • Best for: Marketers who need a powerful, all-in-one tool for segmentation, contact management, push-button social media control, and report creation
Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your Marketing Automation Platform with Yieldify.

3. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is a global marketing automation tool helping businesses across a wide range of industries – including media, tech and nonprofit – to drive more revenue from their email marketing efforts. 

  • Pricing: Starting from $10 per month
  • Ease of use: Rated 8.6/10 on G2 
  • Features: Email template builder, audience segmentation, personalized experiences, email automation, analytics, Yieldify integration
  • Best for: Thanks to its intuitive drag-and-drop interface and customizable templates, Campaign Monitor is a great solution for small businesses and novice email marketers with limited experience
Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your Marketing Automation Platform with Yieldify.

4. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is one of the most popular automation platforms on the market. Though it’s widely known as an email marketing tool, Mailchimp is a full-scale marketing platform offering CRM, design, website and campaign services.

  • Pricing: Mailchimp has four packages starting from $0 per month
  • Ease of use: Rated 8.7/10 on G2 
  • Features: Customer journey builder, transactional emails, retargeting ads, Yieldify integration
  • Best for: small to medium-size businesses looking to scale up with an all-in-one marketing platform
Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your Marketing Automation Platform with Yieldify.

5. Iterable

Iterable is a growth-marketing platform that helps you form deeper customer relationships and build personalized, cross-channel experiences.

  • Pricing: Speak to Iterable’s sales team for more information on pricing 
  • Ease of use: Rated 8.5/10 on G2 
  • Features: Email and SMS marketing, personalized content, centralized data, synchronized workflows, Yieldify integration
  • Best for: Medium-sized businesses looking for an easy-to-use email marketing platform with a proactive and quick-to-respond support team
Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your Marketing Automation Platform with Yieldify.

6. Emarsys

Serving more than 1500 customers around the world, Emarsys is an omnichannel customer engagement platform built to help marketers accelerate business outcomes. 

  • Pricing: Speak to Emarsys’s sales team for more information on pricing
  • Ease of use: Rated 8.3/10 on G2 
  • Features: Cross-channel execution, integrated data layer, personalization engine, customer lifecycle management, Yieldify integration
  • Best for: Mid-market businesses who are prepared to go through a steep learning curve to make use of the platform’s full range of features
Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your Marketing Automation Platform with Yieldify.

7. Listrak

With hands-on account managers in place to provide strategic support, Listrak is a customer engagement platform that helps you deliver exceptional experiences to maximize engagement, revenue and customer lifetime value. 

  • Pricing: Speak to Listrak’s sales team for more information on pricing
  • Ease of use: Rated 8.5/10 on G2 
  • Features: Dedicated account manager, email & SMS marketing, predictive product recommendations, out-of-the-box data visualizations, behavioral triggering, Yieldify integration
  • Best for: Listrak is a great option to consider if you’re looking for an account manager to help you get the best out of a marketing automation platform
Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your Marketing Automation Platform with Yieldify.

8. Dotdigital

Dogdigital is a customer engagement platform that enables marketers to forge deeper customer relationships and grow their business with data-driven personalization.

  • Pricing: Speak to Dotdigital’s sales team for more information on pricing
  • Ease of use: Rated 8.6/10 on G2
  • Features: Social and search retargeting, live chat, product recommendations, landing page optimization, data segmentation
  • Best for: Email marketing professionals who need a sophisticated all-in-one package with a powerful drag-and-drop builder
Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your Marketing Automation Platform with Yieldify.

9. Act-On

Act-On pitch themselves as the world’s leading growth marketing company. The Act-On platform helps marketers in every industry create better brand experiences for their customers. 

  • Pricing: Starting from $900 per month
  • Ease of use: Rated 8/10 on G2  
  • Features: Email marketing automation, social media automation, SMS marketing, dynamic web forms, Yieldify integration 
  • Best for: Enterprise businesses looking for a customizable tool that integrates sales, marketing automation, and many other features
Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your Marketing Automation Platform with Yieldify.

10. Sender

Sender helps marketers bridge the gap between email and SMS lists and revenue by empowering them to grow and nurture their subscriber base. 

  • Pricing: Starting from $0 per month
  • Ease of use: Rated 8.6/10 on G2 
  • Features: Newsletter opt-in forms, drag-and-drop editor, push notifications, landing pages, Yieldify integration
  • Best for: Sender is an easy-to-use and affordable email marketing solution for small businesses
Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your Marketing Automation Platform with Yieldify.

11. ActiveCampaign

Serving more than 150,000 customers worldwide, ActiveCampaign pitch themselves as the global leader in customer experience automation.

  • Pricing: Starting from $29 per month
  • Ease of use: Rated 8.5/10 on G2  
  • Features: A/B testing, custom sign-up forms, pre-built automation workflows, goal tracking, Yieldify integration
  • Best for: Smaller businesses looking for a powerful yet affordable entry-level marketing automation solution
Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your Marketing Automation Platform with Yieldify.

12. Keap

Keap is an all-in-one CRM and sales and marketing automation platform on a mission to help entrepreneurs grow their business without the usual chaos that comes with it.

  • Pricing: Starting from $129 per month
  • Ease of use: Rated 7.2/8 on G2 
  • Features: Advanced Automations builder, A/B testing, audience segmentation, curated templates, Yieldify integration
  • Best for: With one-on-one onboarding, 24/7 chat support and on-demand training courses, Keap is made to help small businesses thrive.  
Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your Marketing Automation Platform with Yieldify.

13. Hunch

Hunch is a creative automation platform used by both brand and agency-side performance marketers to improve their social media management. With Hunch you can drive more engagement on Facebook and Instagram by building highly contextual customer journeys. 

  • Pricing: Hunch’s pricing is flexible and varies depending on a variety of performance metrics 
  • Ease of use: Rated 8.6/10 on G2 
  • Features: Dynamic video and image templates, automated workflows, A/B testing, custom reporting, Yieldify integration
  • Best for: Ecommerce retailers and agencies looking to take their paid social marketing to the next level.
Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your Marketing Automation Platform with Yieldify.

14. Drip

Built specifically for ecommerce, Drip is an email and SMS marketing automation platform that helps 30,000+ marketers worldwide drive more revenue.

  • Pricing: Starting from $39 per month 
  • Ease of use: Rated 8.4/10 on G2 
  • Features: Pre-built workflows, personalized product recommendations, social media synchronization, customizable sign-up forms, email testing, Yieldify integration
  • Best for: Small to medium-sized ecommerce sites looking to scale up their email and SMS marketing campaigns with greater personalization
Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your Marketing Automation Platform with Yieldify.

15. Omnisend

Omnisend is an omnichannel marketing automation platform that helps more than 75,000 ecommerce brands worldwide optimize their email, SMS and push notification campaigns. 

  • Pricing: Starting from $0 per month
  • Ease of use: Rated 9.2/10 on G2
  • Features: Omnichannel workflows, A/B testing, personalized product recommendations, lead generation, Yieldify integration
  • Best for: Marketing professionals who have outgrown basic email marketing and want to dive into omnichannel automation without sacrificing ease of use
Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your Marketing Automation Platform with Yieldify.

What automated marketing platform should you use? 

Naturally, you should choose the platform that best aligns with your budget, goals and ideal product spec. If you’re a small business aiming to scale your email and SMS marketing, there’s plenty of good options to consider – including Klaviyo, Drip and Sender. 

For enterprise businesses with large budgets that are looking for a highly sophisticated tool, Act-On may be the ideal solution. Irrespective of your particular business needs, I hope this blog helps narrow your search for an ecommerce marketing automation solution. 

If you found this guide to marketing automation useful, check out our rundown of the factors to consider when choosing a website personalization tool or a lead generation tool for ecommerce.


Ecommerce Marketing Automation FAQs

What is eCommerce automation?

Ecommerce automation is software that can automatically execute marketing tasks, processes, or campaigns across multiple channels to improve efficiency and drive more revenue.

Do I need marketing automation in eCommerce?

Every ecommerce business can benefit from some level of marketing automation. The most efficient marketing teams use automation to qualify and nurture leads, build workflows, manage campaigns and ultimately achieve greater ROI. Read our blog comparing 15 ecommerce marketing automation platforms here.

What are the benefits of marketing automation platform?

The main benefit of marketing automation is it improves efficiency and drives more revenue. At a more granular level, marketing automation platforms will help you: 

– Reduce staff costs
-Nurture leads
– Streamline reporting 
– Align sales and marketing
– Personalize experiences
– Increase conversion rates

10 Best Ecommerce CRM Software Tools for 2023

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Best ecommerce CRM software tools

CRM software tools help you manage your customer data more effectively and streamline internal processes in your sales cycle. 

In this blog I’ll guide you through 10 of the best ecommerce CRM software tools on the market today and help you choose the right CRM software for your business.

Software

Pricing

G2 rating

Yieldify integration?

Klaviyo

From $17 per month

4.6 out of 5

Yes

Pipedrive

From $0 per month

4.2 out of 5

Yes

Capsule CRM

From $0 per month

4.3 out of 5

Yes

Zoho CRM

From $14 per month

4 out of 5

Yes

HubSpot CRM

From $45 per month 

4.4 out of 5

Yes

Salesforce Account Engagement

From $1250 per month

3.9 out of 5

Yes

Sendinblue

From $0 per month

4.5 out of 5

Yes

Freshworks

From $0 per month

4.5 out of 5

Yes

Copper

From $23 per month

4.5 out of 5

Yes

Metrilo

From $119 per month

4.7 out of 5

Yes

You can build richer customer profiles by integrating any of the 10 ecommerce CRM platforms in this blog with Yieldify’s fully managed personalization platform. Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your CRM with Yieldify.

If you’d like a preview of how Yieldify can drive more leads and customer data into your CRM as well as personalize your customer experiences, feel free to schedule a discovery call here. One of our advisors will be delighted to share more.

Ecommerce CRM checklist

What are the must-have features in a CRM software for your ecommerce brand? We’ve selected the 10 best ecommerce CRM tools below based on these criteria:

Usability

  • User interface (UI): It’s best to book a demo with the CRM provider to get a feel for the user interface. During the demo, consider if the design is intuitive and includes all the features you need to support your marketing efforts. 
  • Usability: Is the platform easy to use? What support documents, service or training does the CRM offer? Take advantage of free trials to decide what you like and dislike in a CRM tool.

Features & Functionality

  • Analytics and reporting: Make sure the CRM system provides actionable customer insights that help grow your online business. A good CRM will let you run ad hoc reports and create customizable performance dashboards.
  • Automated workflows: Most CRMs have this built-in, but make sure yours can send automated emails to improve open rates and revenue from your remarketing. If you want to amplify your SMS marketing, or make your first steps into this area, then make sure your provider can engage mobile subscribers with automated text messages. 
  • Customer history: Does the platform allow you to?
  1. See purchase history 
  2. Analyze customer behavior 
  3. Segment audiences
  • Cross-channel tracking: Can the CRM track customer journeys across all your marketing channels?

Integrations

  • Your ecommerce website: Does the CRM integrate with your online store? Ideally, they’ll have customer case studies explaining how this works. 
  • Third-party tools: You’re probably using other marketing tools, so find out if the ecommerce CRM integrates with your tech stack. 

Value for money

  • Your budget: Does the CRM offer all the features you need within the constraints of your budget? 
  • Pricing: Most CRMs have different options depending on how many active deals or contacts you have, so make sure you select the package that meets your specific business requirements.

10 Best CRM for Ecommerce

1. Klaviyo

Klaviyo homepage

Built specifically for ecommerce, Klaviyo is an automated marketing and CRM platform that empowers brands to create personalized customer experiences. 

Top features

  • Historical viewing: Access information about every interaction a customer has had with your store. 
  • Predictive analytics: Use AI to predict when a customer is likely to submit their next purchase and how much they’re likely to spend. 
  • Combined email and SMS: Bring your email and SMS marketing efforts into one platform to drive more subscribers and sales.
  • Yieldify integration: By creating custom events and collecting deeper insights on your customers’ on-site interactions, Yieldify’s advanced Klvayio integration helps you send substantially more user data to your Klaviyo user profiles than Klaviyo alone. 

Pricing

Klaviyo’s pricing is tailored to the size of your contact list. Prices range between $35 and $1970 per month for email and SMS packages. You can get a free trial with Klaviyo if you have less than 150,000 contacts.

G2 rating

4.6 out of 5

Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your CRM with Yieldify.

2. Pipedrive

Pipedrive homepage

Trusted by more than 100,000 companies in 179 countries, Pipedrive is a sales-focused CRM tool designed for teams of all sizes. With a user-friendly and intuitive dashboard, Pipedrive is a great option for CRM beginners.

Top features

  • Manage leads: Manage your sales leads by creating and customizing as many pipelines as you see fit. Extract data in seconds to prioritize processes and make better decisions.
  • Insights and reports: Pipedrive’s sales reports are fully customizable, allowing you to monitor the most relevant metrics for your business. Use Pipedrive’s reporting tool to track deals and make revenue forecasts.
     
  • Email builder: Pipedrive’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor and ready-to-use templates help you drive powerful email marketing campaigns. 
  • Email segmentation: Reach the right contacts with the right messaging by segmenting your recipient list into subgroups. 

Pricing

Pipedrive starts at $17 per month and rises to $92 for their Enterprise plan. You can try Pipedrive’s platform with their 14-day free trial.

G2 rating

4.2 out of 5

Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your CRM with Yieldify.

3. Capsule CRM

Capsule homepage

Capsule CRM was designed to hit the sweet spot between simplicity and complexity and is well suited to small to medium-sized ecommerce businesses. More than 10,000 companies are currently using Capsule.

Top features

  • Contact management: Access the entire history of your customer interactions in Capsule’s platform. Import existing data, sync contacts in real-time and quickly access key information about your customers. 
  • Email marketing: Use Transpond in sync with Capsule to create a powerful CRM and email marketing tool. Whether you start with a blank page or modify a pre-built template, you can run automated email campaigns and monitor performance with clear analytics. 
  • Sales pipeline: Keep track of opportunities and manage your pipeline with excellent visuals and a drag-and-drop interface. 
  • Sales analytics: Monitor your sales pipeline with insightful reporting and easily export all of your data.

Pricing

Capsule has four packages ranging from $0 to $40 per month. You can access a 30-day free trial on all of Capsule’s paid packages. 

G2 rating

4.3 out of 5

Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your CRM with Yieldify.

4. Zoho CRM

Zoho homepage

Designed to empower organizations of all sizes, Zoho CRM is one of the most popular CRM systems for ecommerce brands. With Zoho CRM you can build your own platform from the ground up. 

Top features

  • Omnichannel interactions: Zoho CRM lets you centralize information and consistently make impactful customer connections across multiple channels.
  • Sales enablement: Use content management tools including sales scripts, product sheets and battle cards, manage partner relationships in the portal and plan your time strategically in Zoho CRM’s calendar. 
  • Marketing automation: Segment your audience, run email campaigns and drive more leads into your sales funnel with automated marketing tools. 
  • In-depth analytics: Zoho CRM’s advanced analytics helps you monitor every step of the sales cycle and make data-driven decisions to boost your chances of success. 

Pricing

Zoho CRM has four packages ranging from $14 to $48 per month. Depending on the package, you can access a free trial ranging from 15 to 30 days.  

G2 rating

4 out of 5

Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your CRM with Yieldify.

5. HubSpot CRM

HubSpot homepage

With 150,000+ customers in more than 120 countries worldwide, HubSpot is one of the most widely used CRMs on the market. All of HubSpot’s five powerful hubs – Marketing, Sales, Service, CMS and Operations – are united on a single platform. Here we’ll outline the features of HubSpot’s Sales CRM. 

Top features

  • Email templates: Turn high-performing sales emails into shareable templates your whole team can use.
  • Email tracking: Monitor the progress of your outbound activity so you know exactly when a prospect opens your email.
  • Sales automation: Automate sequences to target prospects with personalized emails and follow-ups at every stage of the sales cycle. 
  • Call tracking: Prioritize your sales calls, record activity and automatically log them into your CRM.

Pricing

HubSpot’s three marketing hub packages range from $45 to $3600 per month and each includes a minimum number of contacts. The price of each package will increase if you need to add more contacts. 

G2 rating

4.4 out of 5

Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your CRM with Yieldify.

6. Salesforce Account Engagement

Salesforce Account Engagement homepage

Salesforce Account Engagement is a CRM software most suited to enterprise businesses looking to scale and automate their B2B marketing strategies. 

Top features

  • Customize journeys: Personalize email campaigns and landing pages with Salesforce Account Engagement’s no-code builder.
  • B2B Marketing Analytics: Showcase revenue impact and get predictive insights that connect your marketing efforts back to ROI.
  • Prospect engagement: Sales reps get full visibility into their prospects’ position in the purchase funnel. 
  • Integrate your tech stack: Segment your prospects based on previous engagement with other marketing efforts – including surveys, webinars and video apps. 

Pricing

Salesforce Account Engagement starts at $1250 per month and rises to $15,000 per month for their Premium package.

G2 rating

3.9 out of 5

Sendinblue is a leading digital marketing platform for small to medium-size businesses that ties CRM, Email, SMS, Facebook and Chat into an all-in-one platform.

Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your CRM with Yieldify.

7. Sendinblue

Sendinblue homepage

Top features

  • Pipeline management: Monitor your deals in a centralized platform and track progress at every stage of the sales cycle. 
  • Team collaboration: Link contacts, add notes, attach documents, and assign tasks to encourage collaboration and push your team to reach sales targets. 
  • Track customer interactions: Learn from past wins and losses to refine strategy and assess where you can make the biggest revenue impact.

Pricing

Sendinblue has three core packages ranging from $0 to $45 per month. They also offer a package for enterprise businesses which starts from $800 per month. 

G2 rating

4.5 out of 5 

Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your CRM with Yieldify.

8. Freshworks / Freshsales

Freshsales Suite homepage

Freshsales Suite is an all-in-one CRM that unites sales and marketing to convert more prospects into customers. 

Top features

  • Customization: Create your own customer lifecycle stages and sales activities, store information from custom fields and manage transactions in the local currency. 
  • Marketing automation: Use A/B testing, heatmaps, audience segmentation and much more to optimize your website and drive more conversions. 
  • Multichannel communication: Build strong customer relationships across multiple sales channels – including email, phone, live chat and WhatsApp.
  • 360 customer views: Get a comprehensive understanding of your customer across multiple touchpoints and bring internal teams together around a shared view of customer data. 

Pricing

Freshsales Suite offers four packages ranging from $0 to $62 per month. 

Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your CRM with Yieldify.

G2 rating

4.5 out of 5

9. Copper CRM

Copper CRM homepage

Thanks to its integration with Google Workspace, Copper is an easy-to-use CRM that is used by more than 30,000 companies in over 100 countries worldwide. 

Top features

  • Contact management: Copper organizes every customer interaction and relevant document into one place so you can access a comprehensive view of how the sale is progressing.
  • Automated follow-ups: Stay on top of your pipeline with personalized follow-up email templates. Assign time-based tasks and set reminders in response to triggers.
  • Web tracking: For any prospect who fills out a form on your website, Copper can show you where they came from and the pages they engaged with.  

Pricing

Copper’s three packages range from $23 to $99 per month and are available to trial for free before signing up.

G2 rating

4.5 out of 5

Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your CRM with Yieldify.


10. Metrilo

Metrilo homepage

Metrilo is an ideal ecommerce CRM system for DTC brand owners, ecommerce marketers and agencies that manage the growth of DTC brands.

Top features

  • Customer profiles: Metrilo’s in-depth customer profiles give you access to purchase history and on-site behaviors, which helps you create more personalized interactions.
  • Audience segmentation: Use more than 30 filters and filter combinations to create audience segments for your marketing campaigns.
  • Email marketing: Use behavioral insights to perfectly time emails and relevant offers. Keep customers engaged and drive maximum impact from your email marketing campaigns.

Pricing

Metrilo has three packages ranging from $119 to $299 per month. 

G2 rating

4.7 out of 5 

Pass your customers’ behavioral data, email and SMS leads and survey answers straight to your CRM with Yieldify.

The benefits of ecommerce CRM

Using a CRM system helps you build more comprehensive customer profiles to shape your marketing and outreach efforts, as well as creating valuable opportunities for cross-selling and upselling. Building a stronger understanding of your clients and customers will then help you sell more of your product or service.

Most CRM systems are relatively affordable, and in the long run a good platform will help you save time and money. Rather than manually emailing, invoicing, reporting and forecasting, use a CRM to create automated workflows that trigger in response to your customers’ actions.

Choosing The Best eCommerce CRM Software

Before you choose a CRM, consider where your business is going to be in 12-18 months. Setting up a CRM is a time-intensive project, so make sure it aligns with your growth ambitions. 

For small and medium-sized businesses, Pipedrive, Capsule and Sendinblue are among the best CRM for ecommerce. They’re scalable, intuitive and don’t require huge investment upfront.

With a powerful marketing automation and sales platform, HubSpot is much more than a CRM – so it’s a great option for established ecommerce businesses. 


Ecommerce CRM Frequently Asked Questions

What is an ecommerce CRM?

Ecommerce CRM (ECRM for short) is a customer relationship management system designed specifically to help ecommerce businesses manage customer contact information, purchasing behavior, and other analytics data.

Which CRM is best for ecommerce? 

The best CRM for your ecommerce business depends on your size and potential for scalability. Pipedrive, Capsue and Sendinblue are excellent options for SMBs. Salesforce Account Engagement is made for enterprise businesses and its pricing structure reflects that. Read our comparison post outlining 10 of the best ecommerce CRM tools on the market for a more in-depth overview.

What are the 3 types of CRM?

There are three main types of CRM: Operational, Analytical, and Collaborative. 

Operational CRMs use sales, marketing, and service automation to streamline business growth. Analytical CRMs focus on gathering and analyzing customer data to improve their experience. Collaborative CRMs facilitate information sharing between various business units, such as the sales, marketing, technical and support teams.

What is EDM Marketing? Benefits & Campaign Tips

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EDM marketing complete guide

Never heard of Electronic Direct Mail marketing? You’re probably not the only one. In this blog post, we seek to define how EDM marketing differs from regular email marketing campaigns, and illustrate with real-life examples.

In 2020, 306.4 billion emails are sent and received every day worldwide. Almost everyone in the world has an email address and email marketing continues to boast the highest ROI, making email marketing strategies essential for your business’s marketing efforts.

Email marketing ROI chart
Marketing channel ROI ratings

If you’re already using email marketing – and more importantly if you aren’t – EDM marketing is the next logical step to improving your marketing efforts.

At its core, EDM marketing is all about delivering your offer via e-blasts. But upon closer inspection, we see that it is much more complex than a regular email marketing campaign.

Electronic Direct Mail marketing encompasses multiple media channels including printed marketing materials, social media, text message marketing, and even out-of-home (OOH) advertising to reinforce and retarget the message of your campaign.

Let’s dig into the ins and outs of EDM marketing and how you can implement EDM campaigns into your marketing strategy.

Contents:

  1. First up: What exactly is EDM marketing?
  2. EDM marketing vs email marketing: What’s the difference?
  3. EDM marketing campaign benefits
  4. Build an electronic marketing campaign in 7 steps
  5. Build a personalized brand experience with EDM email marketing campaigns
  6. EDM marketing FAQs

First up: What exactly is EDM marketing?

Electronic Direct Mail (EDM) marketing is a marketing strategy used by companies to connect with existing and potential customers. Marketers use EDM marketing to send personalized emails that build strong customer relationships, foster brand loyalty and drive conversions.

As mentioned before, however, EDM marketing is more than just email marketing.

An EDM marketing strategy uses various forms of media – email, social media, printed materials, text messages, out-of-home, and more, and tools such as lead capture software – to help build your list and convert people to customers. By using other forms of marketing communications, you can reach potential customers and reinforce the campaign message.

The versatility and flexibility of Electronic Direct Mail marketing mean that it can work for almost any business. Whether you are running an eCommerce business, a service-based business or even a non-profit, EDM marketing can help you increase your conversions and grow your email list.

EDM marketing vs email marketing: What’s the difference?

You may still be asking yourself what the difference is between EDM marketing and email marketing – both use emails to build a list and grow conversions so understandably they seem very similar from the outset.

While an email marketing campaign is just that – sending emails through a third-party provider in hopes that those emails convert customers – an EDM campaign is much more complex.

A fully-fledged EDM marketing campaign starts with e-blasts but follows up with retargeting ads to capture those that have seen the email, a supporting social media campaign, and even billboards or printed ads in magazines.

EDM marketing vs email marketing

These supporting marketing campaigns build on the message that was first sent out in the email and each works as one of the many needed brand touchpoints that will help to convert prospects into customers, and one-time customers into repeat customers. 

The marketing Rule of Seven states that a potential customer needs to “see or hear your marketing message at least seven times before they take action and buy from you.”

An EDM marketing campaign helps you reach those seven touchpoints by creating a comprehensive marketing strategy that goes beyond simple email communication as you do with email marketing.

EDM marketing campaign benefits

While a lot of the benefits of using EDM marketing are similar to those you get when using email marketing, the main difference is that multi-channel targeted campaigns generally show better results than standard email marketing campaigns

Saves time and costs

Both EDM and email marketing are extremely cost-effective – once you have your list, you can email them at quite a low cost based on a schedule you set out for your business. You can create beautiful emails using templates or the skills of an in-house design team at a fraction of the cost of creating a traditional mailer.

Time is also saved because you can do everything in-house without needing to turn to a printer or delivery service to get your message to your audience.

Builds trust and increases conversions

Being able to speak directly to your audience is one of the ways that a business can build trust with its customers – and email marketing is the most effective way to do this.

In fact, BCG study found that, for millennials, trusting a brand is second only to loyalty discounts in importance when choosing which companies to support. And a 2019 study by Edelman found that 62% of consumers are loyal to brands they trust, with another 51% stating that they would advocate for brands they trust. 

Brand loyalty chart

One of the greatest elements of EDM marketing is that you are working with a list of people who have given you their direct permission to contact them via email. They have opted-in to receive your communications, so you know that they are interested in hearing from you.

Because of this, they are more likely to engage with the content that your business sends. This allows you to build trust with your audience by sending them timely and engaging emails. And by building trust, you will be able to convert them into a paying customer.

Enables advanced personalization

EDM marketing campaigns give you the opportunity to highly personalize your email strategies based on how you segment your audience – more on that later!

Because of this, your business will be able to connect with your audience on a more authentic level, offering them information that is actually useful to them. No more sending out an email to a global audience promoting free shipping within the United States – with proper audience segmentation you can accurately address the different sections of your audience.

Traditional email marketing is all about gathering leads and trying to build a relationship with them, often with the help of a lead capture software. EDM marketing takes it one step further and tries to leverage the valuable information you have already collected to improve how you market to your target audience members.  Personalized communications are just one way to improve the customer relationship.

Build an electronic direct mail marketing campaign in 7 steps

If you’re ready to implement an EDM marketing campaign, you’re in luck – they start quite simply, and then expand as time goes on. There are 7 steps to implement EDM marketing in your business, and the process starts much like a simple email marketing campaign.

Step 1: Choose an email service provider

If you already have an email service provider (ESP) of choice, then you’re ready to move to Step 2 – congrats! If this is the first time you are implementing any kind of email marketing in your business, you’re going to need to find an email platform that works for you.

ESP integrations

If you are implementing EDM marketing campaigns, we suggest moving away from a simple spreadsheet and investing in an email marketing software – features like list segmentation, autoresponders, automated workflows, and analytics alone make it worthwhile.

There are a lot of great options out there, and you will need to do a bit of testing to see what works best for you. Thankfully, most email marketing platforms offer you some kind of free trial – VerticalResponse gives you 60 days, while ActiveCampaign gives you 14 days and Constant Contact has a 30-day trial. Both MailChimp and Sendinblue have “free forever” plans with limited features for smaller list sizes.

You’ll want to ensure that whatever platform you choose, you have the ability to segment your list and to send automated email campaigns that are triggered by parameters that you establish.

Step 2: Build your list

The success of any email or EDM marketing campaign lies with your list of leads. You want to ensure that the names on your database are legitimate and that you are consistently cleaning your list (most software can help you with this!).

If you’ve been in business for some time, you should consolidate all of your contacts into one list. Pull contacts from email accounts, your eCommerce and CRM platforms, and your existing email list. 

If you’re building your list from scratch, you’ll need to spend some time coming up with an email list building strategy. There are many email list building tools on the market that can help you turn more website visitors into subscribers.

  • Create a lead magnet – A 30-day trial, a 10% discount code, an interactive quiz – all of these work well in enticing your audience to sign up.
  • Offer multiple ways for your audience to sign up – Use lead capture forms, embed forms in your content, implement floating action buttons, and more to effectively collect email addresses on your website. 
  • Have a dedicated page for lead capture – Create a strong lead capture page and link to it from your social media profiles, ads, marketing collateral, etc.
  • Don’t forget offline – You can use your physical stores and other physical presence to get people’s emails into your database.
Shavekit's lead capture form

When building an email list at scale, there are some best practices you can follow to help improve the effectiveness of your strategies. Here are the key ones:

  1. Laser-focus your targeting – If you are an eCommerce store that sells cookware to avid bakers, it doesn’t make sense to target people who only show interest in dining out.
  2. Choose your triggers carefully – Consider the different times that your lead capture form can trigger: In exit, on timer, on scroll, on inactivity, etc. Determine how you can layer them to effectively capture the most leads.
  3. Personalize when you can – This is an opportunity to segment your list even further and deliver a personalized experience that will resonate with your audience. Use dropdown menus and radio buttons to gather additional data on your subscribers.
  4. Limit the use of CTAs – Instead of overwhelming visitors with too many calls-to-action, limit how many CTAs you have on a page or on a form. This will definitely lead to more conversions.
  5. Be transparent about your intentions – Be clear about what information you are asking for, why you’re asking for it, and how it will be used.
  6. Keep your forms simple – In general, the longer the form, the fewer submissions you’ll receive. So keep your forms as short and simple as possible. 
Lead capture form - Dropdown menu

Step 3: Segment your list

Once you’ve built your list, it’s time to start segmenting. To be able to send your subscribers the most targeted, applicable content for them, you need to segment your list accordingly. If you are having a sale on women’s dresses, it doesn’t make sense to inform your male subscribers.

How you segment your list will depend on your objectives and the information that you have collected from your audience. There are four types of segmentation you can apply:

  1. Demographic
  2. Psychographic
  3. Geographical
  4. Behavioral
The four types of segmentation

Demographic segmentation is the “who” of market segmentation. It looks at identifiable non-character traits like Age, Gender, Ethnicity, and more. For example, demographic segmentation might target customers based on their income, so your marketing budget is wasted on targeting people who cannot likely afford your products.

Psychographic segmentation is the “why” of market segmentation. It looks at your customers’ personalities and interests like Hobbies, Life goals, etc. It can be harder to identify this set of demographics, but they can be incredibly valuable in your marketing efforts.

Geographic segmentation is the “where” of market segmentation. It is incredibly easy to group your customers via physical location and it can be done in several ways: Country, Region, City, Postal code.

Behavioral segmentation is the “how” of market segmentation. It may be the most useful of all for eCommerce businesses. It does need some data to support it but most of this can be found on your website. The segments available include Spending habits, Browsing habits, Loyalty to brand, and more.

Examples of segmented customer profiles

Segmenting your list lets you address your customers’ needs, market directly to them, and send effective emails every time. It’s integral to an EDM marketing strategy.

Step 4: Create your email campaign

This is it! You’re ready to create your campaign and send an email to your list. Depending on which email platform you went with, the steps to create your campaign will differ slightly. But there are some key email marketing tips you can use when building your campaign:

  • Ditch the technical jargon – Speak directly to your audience in a language they can relate to.
  • Make your emails pop with visuals – Break up large blocks of texts with images.
  • Write a catchy subject line – Your subject line is the most important part of your email because it determines whether or not people see your email.
  • Stick to your brand – Be consistent in your email design, tone of voice, sending intervals, etc.
  • Don’t get sneaky with your unsubscribe button – Anti-spam laws are no joke, so be sure to have a visible unsubscribe button or link in the footer.

If you aren’t sure where to start when it comes to the types of email campaigns to send, these are great options for eCommerce businesses:

  • Special offer announcements
  • New arrivals / Product launches
  • “We miss you” type emails to lapsed customers
  • Holiday specials
  • Re-orders / Back-in stock notifications
  • Sale reminders
  • Introduction to your brand and USPs
Marketing email from The Bakerista

Step 5: Set up your autoresponders

Take advantage of autoresponders to help you automate your email communications. Autoresponders are emails that are sent automatically to your list based on the triggers you set within your email platform. Triggers can be:

  • A specific action, like when someone opts into your list and a welcome email is sent.
  • Timed release, like a week after signing up to your list, a discount code is sent.

If you’re looking for ways to include autoresponders in your EDM marketing campaign, try some of the following:

  • A birthday greeting
  • Bills, receipts, shipping confirmations, and other transactional emails
  • Product recommendations
  • Content built around visitor behavior on your eCommerce website
  • Abandoned cart reminders
Marketing emails from American Eagle and Everlane

Step 6: Enable tracking

If you are running a marketing campaign of any kind, you must be tracking your results. Without analytics, you can’t fully understand how your campaigns are impacting your marketing objectives. Here are some of the key metrics you should be tracking for your EDM marketing campaign:

  • Open rate – How many people open your email.
  • Clickthrough rate (CTR) – How many people click on a link in your email.
  • Click-to-open rate – Compares the number of unique clicks to unique opens.
  • List growth rate – How many new people subscribe from your list.
  • Email sharing rate – How many people are sharing your email.
  • Unsubscribe rate – How many people unsubscribe from your list.

Most email platforms will be able to give you this information – coupled with Google Analytics, you should be able to track all the metrics you need to measure the success of your EDM marketing campaigns.

Step 7: Run complementary marketing campaigns

Depending on your goals, complement your electronic direct mail campaign with campaigns on other media channels, such as remarketing pay-per-click ads, social media posts, SMS remarketing, web push notifications, print advertising, or other offline strategies.

For example, if you’re promoting a new product launch and you’ve sent an email blast to your list, you can follow it up with targeted social media ads, SMS reminders on launch day, as well an advertisement in a magazine.

Let’s look at the “Back in Stock” email example from BLANQI, a nursing and maternity brand. BLANQI sent a promotional email to let their customers know that their popular Girl Shorts were back in stock.

Marketing email from BLANQI

From there, BLANQI continued to adjust its eCommerce merchandising strategy and used a website hero image that promotes the Girl Shorts. It also served a “Welcome” lead capture overlay with radio buttons to be able to segment subscribers based on their needs.

Sign-up form from BLANQI

The brand also ran paid social media campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, as well as social media influencer sharing to get the word out.

Facebook posts from BLANQI

And finally, BLANQI sent out another email to subscribers who had shown interest in both postpartum and maternity clothing that highlighted some of the ways you can style the Girl Shorts.

Marketing email from BLANQI

By creating these multiple touchpoints and segmenting their list so they are reaching their target audience, BLANQI ensures that their customers and potential customers are aware that the Girl Shorts are restocked and on sale.

You are creating multiple touchpoints where you know your audience will be so that you can reach them more than once. The email is just the starting point.

Build a personalized brand experience with EDM email marketing campaigns

EDM marketing is a continuous effort to build a personalized brand experience through your marketing. It is all about creating trust and building relationships that convert with your customers. 

If you’re unsure of how to get started, feel free to connect with our team and we’ll be able to offer you tailored lead capture and email remarketing strategies to boost your revenue and customer loyalty.

EDM Marketing FAQs

What is an EDM in marketing?

EDM marketing is an acronym for Electronic Direct Mail marketing. It’s a marketing tactic used by companies to target a large group of potential customers and focuses on building relationships to increase overall sales.

Is EDM the same as email marketing?

Both EDM marketing and email marketing use emails to build a list and drive conversions. However, traditional email marketing mainly involves sending emails through a third-party provider in hopes that those emails convert customers. A fully-fledged EDM marketing campaign is much more complex. You may start with e-blasts but follows up with retargeting ads to capture those that have seen the email, a supporting social media campaign, and even billboards or printed ads in magazines.

How To Increase Ticket Sales for Events: 15 Fail-Proof Strategies

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Are you under pressure to increase event ticket sales? Are you struggling to spread the word about your event? Are you looking for better technology to convert website visitors into customers? Whatever your reason for landing here, I’m here to guide you through 15 strategies that’ll boost ticket sales for your events. 

There are 4 industry-standard tactics almost every company uses to sell tickets online. But if you want to truly enhance your online sales funnel and stand out from your competitors, you need to go beyond those tactics by optimizing your website too. 

With Yieldify’s personalization platform and services, you can deploy 11 powerful tactics to increase online ticket sales.

Our 15 recommendations fall into four categories: 

  • Collect more email and SMS subscribers
  • Increase conversion rates
  • Build a winning brand
  • Apply industry-standard tactics 

Together they offer a holistic, multichannel approach to increasing ticket sales for events. 

If you’re looking for a tool focused specifically on increasing website conversion rates, then check out our post covering 12 of the best CRO Tools on the market. 

15 surefire tactics to increase ticket sales online

  • Collect more email & SMS subscribers (1-3): A strong email & SMS remarketing database will help you spread the word about upcoming events, build hype and boost ticket sales. Drive more subscribers into your database with these three tried-and-tested lead generation tactics. 
  • Build a winning brand (9-11): In the face of increasing competition and PPC ad costs, it’s vital to strengthen your brand. Prove you’re a trusted ticket-selling platform with these three tactics.
  • Apply industry-standard tactics (12-15): These four tactics form the foundation of any successful ticket-selling strategy. Follow the industry standard as a starting point to increase ticket sales. 
  1. Run on-entry and on-exit overlays
  2. Display opt-in forms throughout the journey
  3. Use basket abandonment technology
  4. Social proof messaging
  5. Urgency messaging
  6. Welcome back messaging
  7. Improve user navigation
  8. Exit intent technology
  9. Use customer testimonials
  10. Brand reassurance messaging
  11. Embed video content
  12. Nail your pricing
  13. Use email remarketing
  14. Promote on social media
  15. Start a referral program

Collect more email and SMS subscribers:

1. Run on-entry and on-exit overlays

Email remarketing is crucial for ticket sales – but a strong remarketing strategy is nothing without a substantial list of subscribers.

To drive more email and SMS sign ups, start by showing opt-in forms to your customers on website entry and exit. Your customers are unlikely to add to their already cluttered inboxes without good reason, so include one of these incentivizes in your signup forms:

  • Discount code – e.g. offer subscribers 10% off on their first ticket purchase
  • Referral code – e.g. offer subscribers a 25% off ticket code when they refer a friend
  • Downloadable content – e.g. send subscribers a guide covering the best events happening in 2023 
  • Competition entry – e.g. enter subscribers into a prize draw for free event tickets
  • Resale updates for sold out events – e.g. send subscribers updates on ticket availability

If you’re in the market for a list building tool to attract new subscribers, read our post covering Yieldify and 16 of the best email list building tools on the market. 

2. Display opt-in forms throughout the journey 

With Yieldify’s layered lead capture, you can target customers at every touchpoint from entry to purchase. Embed subtle CTAs and trigger overlays throughout the customer journey to keep your opt-in form top-of-mind. Yieldify clients use these core strategies to increase email and SMS sign-ups: 

  • Floating notifications 
  • Embed on product pages
  • Slide-out (toaster) 
  • Sticky bar
  • Embed at checkout

All five campaigns improve UX, give you more opportunities to collect email and SMS subscribers, and attract higher quality leads. The logic is simple: customers who subscribe deeper in the journey are more engaged with your event and therefore more likely to buy a ticket. 

3. Use basket abandonment technology

When your customer adds a ticket to their basket, you know they have genuine purchase intent. But with concerns over pricing, availability for the event and reliability of your site, many customers abandon their basket before checking out. 

To tackle this problem, many Yieldify clients ask customers to save their basket by submitting their email and SMS details when they display exit intent. This is a critical junction in your customer’s journey – they’re unlikely to return to your site if you don’t add them to your database now.

Once they’ve subscribed, add them to your remarketing flows about the event they’re interested in. Be strategic with your messaging, providing updates on ticket availability and offering discounts to convert their interest into a sale. 

Increase conversion rates

4. Social proof messaging

Social proof is a game changer for ticket sales. It’s an incredibly powerful tool that, when used well, will all but guarantee an increase in your website’s conversion rates: Yieldify clients have lifted conversions by up to 31% using social proof. 

When we see our friends and celebrity idols at iconic events like the Super Bowl, Burning Man or Oktoberfest, it makes us want to attend too. To sell more tickets, drive interest in your event by showing how popular it is. 

For example, with Yieldify you can spotlight how many tickets you’ve sold in the last 24 hours, show customers how many people are viewing tickets right now, and use other social proof tactics to validate your customer’s interest and increase sales.

5. Urgency messaging 

Some events are guaranteed to sell out in minutes, if not seconds. But for many events, tickets will be available right up until a few days before it starts – so how do you convince customers to purchase now, not later? 

  • Tell customers what % of tickets are left to purchase 
  • Tell customers how long they have left before prices increase

By highlighting stock scarcity, you’ll remind customers that they could miss out altogether if they don’t act quickly. 

6. Welcome back messaging 

When a customer returns to your site, it’s safe to assume they’re considering buying a ticket for an event. At this stage in the funnel, it’s important you give them a website experience that acknowledges what they were looking for before.

For example, if your customer viewed Dua Lipa concerts on their last visit, ask them to pick up where they left off by redirecting them to the relevant ticket sales page. To incorporate welcome back messaging into your ticket-selling strategy, consider using an ecommerce personalization tool like Yieldify.

7. Improve user navigation

Subtle yet effective tweaks to website navigation can significantly reduce bounce rates and increase conversions – which is why it’s a key part of many Yieldify clients’ CRO strategy. 

Seamlessly guide your customers through the purchase funnel by recommending pages for them to visit based on their browsing behavior. For example, if your customer views tickets to see The Sound of Music, help them take a logical next step in their journey by redirecting them to the Musicals category.

8. Exit intent technology 

Zenreach data shows that 70% of visitors never return once they leave your site. We’ve already touched on how to drive email and SMS sign-ups when customers show exit intent, but how about conversions? 

With Yieldify, you can re-engage customers with campaigns that trigger in response to exit intent behaviors. For example, when your customer moves their cursor above the navigation bar, you can surface overlays that encourage them to continue browsing, including: 

  • User navigation experiences
  • USP messaging 
  • Customer testimonials

Build a winning brand

9. Use customer testimonials 

There are few tools in a marketer’s armory as effective as customer testimonials. 

When it comes to brand building, testimonials are more impactful than your own marketing material – so embed them generously across your website. 

The glowing words of unbiased, real-life people will create hype and show potential customers why they’ll have a great time at your event.

10. Brand reassurance messaging 

Many of your customers will be afraid of getting scammed, so you need to highlight you’re a legitimate seller and your website is safe.

Put potential event-goers at ease with brand reassurance messaging, for example:

  • Review platform ratings – Trustpilot, Reevo etc
  • Accepted payment trust badges 
  • Money-back guarantees 
  • USP messaging 
  • Third-party endorsements

11. Embed video content

Video content is an event marketer’s dream. It’s an excellent way of showcasing your event and venue online, so give customers a taste of your event with embedded videos.  

With Yieldify, you can embed video snippets from YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and any other social media platform. 

Apply industry-standard tactics

12. Nail your pricing

Your ticket prices will determine if your event is a sellout or a washout, so it’s imperative you get it right.

Our recommended steps are as follows: 

  • Calculate the minimum ticket price to break even
  • Research how much your competitors’ tickets cost 
  • Make a sales forecast
  • Use tiered pricing 
  • Incentivize sales during the lull period

Your first priority is to bring in enough ticket revenue to break even. Start by calculating the minimum price you’ll need to charge to break even using this simple formula: Total event costs / expected number of attendees. 

You should also analyze your competitors and the success of your previous events when setting ticket prices. Once you’ve taken these steps, you’ll be in a position to make a realistic sales forecast.

Once you’ve worked out your minimum ticket price, build a tiered pricing model to boost profits. For example, let’s say you need to sell 300 out of 500 tickets at $20 to break even. Once you’ve sold 300 tickets at $20, you can increase prices for the remaining 200 tickets in tiered batches to maximize profits.

Bear in mind that demand for tickets will spike when you release tickets and during the two-week period prior to the event. There will be a lull in the interim, so incentivize sales during this period with promotional experiences, flash sales and competitions.

13. Use email remarketing

With an ROI of 32:1, email marketing is the most valuable event marketing tool. 

If you don’t yet have a large and engaged subscriber base, start collecting emails using a lead generation tool like Yieldify. Our clients have driven up to 116% more leads using layered lead capture – which targets customers with customized and device-optimized forms throughout the purchase funnel. 

Once you’ve maximized your database, send emails to drive ticket sales, communicate updates and increase audience engagement. Research suggests open rates and engagement are highest on emails sent between 8pm-midnight on weekends.

A good email to drive ticket sales will: 

  • Be concise 
  • Have a catchy subject line
  • Include visuals – GIFs, videos & images
  • Drive urgency 
  • Target different audience segments 
  • Include a CTA 

14. Promote on social media

There’s a reason why 58% of marketers promote on social media before, during and after their events – because it creates excitement, builds communities and sells tickets. 

Before you create a content calendar, you’ll need to do market research to build customer personas and understand the content and social media platforms they engage with.

Use your customer personas to guide your social media schedule, but also factor in your industry. If you’re organizing an event for music, fashion, beauty or fitness, then use Instagram to boost ticket sales. For B2B events, LinkedIn is your platform of choice.

An end-to-end social media calendar should incorporate these 9 tactics: 

Pre-event: 

  • Influencer marketing 
  • Paid social promotions 
  • Announcements, reminders & deadlines
  • Contests and giveaways  

Mid-event: 

  • Leverage hashtags
  • Live event videos & images 
  • Product demos and videos (B2B)

Post-event: 

  • Repackage and repurpose content 
  • Engage attendees and build a community 

15. Start a referral program

Event organizers believe word-of-mouth or referral marketing is the third-most effective event promo tactic after email marketing and social media – a theory backed up by these stats:

  • Average cost per customer acquisition is just $1.40 
  • 92% of people trust referrals from people they know 
  • Customers are 4X more likely to buy tickets through referrals than organic event discovery

The best reward programs incorporate a high-threshold, high-reward system – a desirable reward to motivate referrals with a threshold that is difficult to attain (3-5 referrals). 

To maximize ticket sales from your referral program, use these 3 tactics: 

  • Provide unique referral links to customers on the purchase confirmation page
  • Integrate referral links into your pre-event email marketing schedule 
  • Add a page to your website outlining how your referral program works  

3 Potential Reasons For Slow Ticket Sales

1. Your pricing strategy is wrong

As we shared earlier in this blog, smart pricing is the bedrock of any successful ticket-selling strategy. Start by establishing the minimum ticket price to break even for your event, then use a tiered model to maximize profits.

Remember that you’re bound to experience a dip in sales when the initial scramble for tickets fades. When demand is low, run promotions, giveaways and competitions to renew interest in your event.

2. You haven’t considered the competition

When you set ticket prices for your event, use your competitors as a guideline for what customers are prepared to pay. If you fail to take your competitors into account and outprice your customers, don’t be surprised if you struggle for sales. 

You should also consider when your competitors are running their events. After all, your customers can’t attend two events at the same time.

3. You’re not pushing sales during the lull 

You’ve probably experienced the quiet period that occurs between your ticket release date and about two weeks before your event. But you can overcome this.

This is the time where event marketers need to get creative with email marketing and social media content.

Boost event ticket sales online with Yieldify

Using Yieldify’s personalization software and services, you can streamline customer journeys to ensure you’re maximizing ticket sales for your events. To find out more about Yieldify’s capabilities, check out our post covering 10 of the best website personalization tools on the market. 


Avoiding slow ticket sale FAQs

How to increase ticket sales?

You can increase ticket sales using a sound pricing strategy, email remarketing flows, social media and referral programs. To improve conversion rates and maximize ticket sales, consider using a website CRO tool. See our full list of 15 tactics to boost ticket sales here.

How do you avoid slow ticket sales?

Every event organizer is likely to see a dip in sales when the initial spike in demand from release fades, but there are many tactics you can use to tackle this problem, including: 

– Use personalization tools to optimize site performance 
– Run competitions and giveaways 
– Build awareness on social media 
– Offer incentives through email remarketing 

How can I sell event tickets quickly?

There is no one-size-fits all strategy to sell out an event quickly, but all 15 tactics in this blog will help you create excitement, build your subscriber lists and convert interest into more ticket sales. Some core tactics include: 

– Smart pricing 
– Email remarketing 
– Personalization
– Social proof
– Brand-building 

How to Collect Email Addresses in 21 Simple Ways

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If you’re under pressure to increase your lead generation rate, you’re certainly not alone. Most email inboxes are flooded from years of signups, so it’s harder for ecommerce brands to drive new subscribers into their databases. 

Fortunately, there are plenty of tools to help you get more leads. If you’re looking for a list building tool, then check out our post on 12 B2C Lead Generation Tools. But if you need strategic advice on how to optimize your current strategy, you’re in the right place.  

I’m here to help you collect more emails with 21 tried-and-tested strategies – all of which fit into three key categories: 

  • Use a full-funnel strategy 
  • Incentivize your customers
  • Customize opt-in forms 

Why you need to build your email list

Email marketing is an exceptionally effective way for ecommerce marketers to reduce abandonment, increase repeat orders and ultimately generate more revenue. 

For example, the average open rate for a cart abandonment email sits at an impressive 45% and increases to 69% with a follow-up email. This is a huge but often missed opportunity for brands to convince customers to complete their orders. In a market where 69% of shopping carts go abandoned, building an email database to remarket your traffic helps you re-engage lost website visitors and convert interest into increased sales.

Email marketing statistics

Email remarketing is also a significant driver for recurring business. If you collect email addresses and send post-purchase email remarketing flows, you’ll bring customers back to your site, foster brand loyalty and increase repeat orders.

Email marketing statistics

The takeaway: email pays substantial dividends. 1 in 4 people check their emails more than 5 times a day and 59% of consumers state their purchase decisions are influenced by marketing emails. In fact, the data shows you can expect a return of up to $36 for every $1 you spend on email marketing campaigns – that’s an ROI of 3600%.

21 ways to collect email addresses from website visitors

  • Use a full-funnel strategy (1-9): To maximize your chances of getting a new subscriber, you need to target customers at every stage in their journey. Show opt-in forms from website entry through to exit with these 8 strategies. 
  • Incentivize your customers (10-17): Customers rarely provide their email address without receiving something in return. Give customers a reason to sign up with these incentives.
  • Customize opt-in forms (18-21): Generic opt-in forms will limit the number of email addresses you can collect. Make your brand stand out with these 4 customization options.
  1. Layered lead capture
  2. Overlays on entry
  3. Display a floating action button
  4. Display a sticky bar
  5. Display a slide-out (aka toaster)
  6. Embed on product pages
  7. Embed at checkout
  8. Display an overlay on inactivity
  9. Display an overlay on exit
  10. Get a discount
  11. Get back-in-stock reminders
  12. Save your cart
  13. Win a reward
  14. Get a free download
  15. Get a free sample/gift on next order
  16. Be the first to hear about promotions
  17. Find your perfect product
  18. Personalize forms to your visitors’ browsing behavior
  19. Display device-responsive forms
  20. Run forms with on-brand design and copy
  21. Run page-specific forms

Use a full-funnel strategy

1. Layered lead capture 

Why give yourself just one chance to collect your visitors’ email addresses? With layered lead capture, your opt-in forms carefully accompany customers on their entire journey, giving them the option to sign up at different stages in the purchase funnel. 

A typical layered lead capture strategy looks like this: 

  1. Entrance overlay
  2. Floating button or toaster
  3. Embedded messaging on product page 
  4. Opt-in CTA at checkout 
Examples of Yieldify email capture

Yieldify pioneered the layered lead capture strategy and has helped thousands of brands collect more email addresses with it, including:  

2. Overlays on entry 

On-entry overlays have long been the bedrock of email collection strategies. Ask customers for their email when they land on your website with a large, eye-catching opt-in overlay. To drive the maximum number of signups, you’ll also want to A/B test the copy, design and placement of your forms. 

3. Display a floating action button

If a customer closes your on-entry overlay, it doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t subscribe. If they’re a first-time visitor, they’ll likely want to learn more about your brand before signing up. Show a subtle floating action button in the corner of the page to quietly remind visitors that joining your mailing list is still an option. 

Not only can this strategy earn you more subscribers, it can also generate more sales too. For example, leading D2C houseplant retailer The Sill worked with Yieldify to improve their lead-to-customer conversion rate by 126% by using floating buttons in their email collection strategy. 

4. Display a sticky bar

A sticky bar is a page element fixed to the top, bottom or side of your page. They help you to keep your signup form visible without compromising the user experience. You can use a variety of triggering rules – from website entry to page depth – to display a sticky bar.  

Check out the sticky bar California-based fashion brand BYLT Basics used to collect email addresses with Yieldify. 

BYLT Basics sticky bar

5. Display a slide-out (aka toaster) 

A slide-out form – or toaster – sits on one of the edges of your site and expands when you tap on it. They’re similar to floating buttons but even more discreet, helping you keep your signup form tucked away but still in your visitors’ field of view. For example, home furniture store Heal’s used a toaster to drive more signups with Yieldify.

6. Embed on product pages

When visitors click through to one of your product pages, it’s a good sign of interest – and a great opportunity to collect their email address.

Use a discount code or another incentive to draw attention to your email opt-in form. The allure of a discount at this stage in the purchase funnel will typically increase your chances of gaining a new lead – as well as your chances of driving a conversion.

7. Embed at checkout

Your checkout flow is the most delicate stage in the purchase funnel, so don’t distract your customers with anything that could get in the way of them placing their order.

With that in mind, embed a subtle opt-in CTA to get customers into your database. For example, offering a discount code in exchange for an email address could be the extra incentive they need to finalize their purchase. 

8. Display an overlay on inactivity 

Your customers get distracted by the smallest thing when shopping online – but don’t let that damage your email collection strategy. Recapture their attention with an eye-catching email overlay that triggers after a set period of inactivity e.g. after 10 seconds. 

Make sure you choose a time period that matches the page and device your customers are on. For example, customers reading blog posts will likely be inactive for longer periods of time – particularly on desktop – compared to a customer browsing a product page. 

9. Display an overlay on exit 

No matter how engaging you make your website, visitors will inevitably exit – whether from your homepage, your product pages or your checkout. There’s a high chance they won’t return once they leave – so this is often your last chance to collect an email address. 

Whether your customer has just entered your site, spent time getting to know your brand or reached the checkout, you need to show them an opt-in form before they exit. For desktop users, the overlay should trigger when your customer moves their mouse over the toolbar. For mobile and tablet users, you can trigger an on-exit overlay when they change tabs – they’ll see it when they return to your site.

Incentivize your customers

10. Get a discount

Ecommerce websites have given away discounts in exchange for email addresses since online shopping began – and they’re still the go-to incentive if you want to build your database.

Because so many brands offer discounts in exchange for signups, you need to match the competition to stay competitive. You’ll have to sacrifice margin on your customer’s first order, but that’s a small price to pay to add them to your email remarketing flows.

11. Get back-in-stock reminders

Your most popular products are bound to sell out from time to time – but you can still turn a lack of stock to your advantage. 

Give customers the opportunity to join your email database and find out when a product they’re interested in is back in stock. That way you can add a new subscriber to your list and increase your chances of converting.

12. Save your cart 

When your visitors find the products they’re looking for and add them to cart, it’s likely they won’t check out straight away, but that doesn’t mean they won’t convert later on. If they show exit intent at this point, show an email opt-in form offering to save their cart contents, then send them a basket reminder email. For example, Ariat ran this save your cart experience using Yieldify’s technology as part of a lead generation strategy that drove 10X more email signups.

13. Win a reward

Gamification is a hot marketing tactic right now. Many brands run lead capture campaigns asking customers to submit their email for the chance to win a reward – such as a gift card, discount code or free gift. Some popular gamification incentives you can try include: 

  • Spin to win
  • Click to win 
  • Lotteries
Blue Illusion's wheel of fortune

14. Get a free download 

Offering your customers downloadable content is a great alternative  to discount codes. Not only do downloads help you get more subscribers, they also help you grow brand awareness.

If you’re going to offer downloadable content, remember it’s important to provide something genuinely useful. For example, CJ Wildlife offered their audience a wildlife guide in exchange for an email signup as part of a strategy that drove 58% more leads with Yieldify. 

Meanwhile, Philips ran a similar campaign with Yieldify to offer their customers a beard guide.

Philips' content download with email signup

15. Get a free sample/gift on next order

Gaining trials is a big problem for many brands – particularly those in the beauty industry. Unlike browsing a brick-and-mortar store, customers often struggle to gauge quality and suitability when shopping for new products online. You can remove some of their doubts by offering to add free samples to their next order in exchange for their email address. 

You may lose out on a small amount of margin but the increased product exposure could win you a long-term customer. Check out how Kiehl’s, the global health and beauty brand, incentivized signups with Yieldify.

How Kiehl's drove signups with free samples

16. Be the first to hear about promotions 

Shoppers are always hunting for discounts but they don’t necessarily know when your next sale season starts. Email remarketing is the most effective way to tell customers about your sale periods, so drive new subscribers by telling them they’ll be the first to know when you drop prices. 

17. Find your perfect product 

Incentivize customers to complete a product quiz and submit their email in exchange for personalized product recommendations. Many ecommerce brands that Yieldify partners with – particularly in health, wellness and beauty – use quizzes or questionnaires to guide customers to the products that most suit their needs. 

Customize opt-in forms 

18. Personalize forms to your visitors’ browsing behavior

You’re even more likely to collect email addresses if you personalize your opt-in forms to your customers’ browsing behavior. Segment your audience and serve up campaigns that make your customers feel like they were made just for them.

Test the following personalization strategies – and watch your email list grow: 

  • Segment new vs returning users: change your opt-in form copy to reflect your customers’ position in the funnel
  • Pull images from product pages: embed images of customers’ recently browsed products into your opt-in forms
  • Category interest: use messaging related to the category page your customer is viewing – e.g. a beauty brand could ask a customer to “subscribe to see more skincare products” 
  • Acknowledge your customers’ referral source: personalize your opt-in form copy for customers arriving from paid social ads

You can use these strategies to give your brand the edge over generic opt-in forms. Using Yieldify’s technology, Petal & Pup personalized their opt-in forms for customers landing from Facebook ads as part of a strategy that increased email leads by 116%. 

Petal & Pup's form for Facebook customers

If you’re interested in personalizing customer journeys beyond lead capture, check out our post on the 10 best personalization tools for ecommerce brands.

19. Display device-responsive forms 

Whether it’s a laptop, mobile or tablet, your customers use a variety of devices when shopping online – so your opt-in forms need to adapt. Create device-specific forms to drive the maximum number of signups. 

20. Run forms with on-brand design and copy

Your email opt-in forms should match your brand identity. That means your copy should reflect your tone of voice and your designs should follow your visual guidelines. 

Lacoste ran this on-brand email sign-up with Yieldify, including their products in the design and a brand reference in the copy.

Lacoste's on-brand overlay

21. Run page-specific forms

Go one step further with customization by creating page-specific forms. With Yieldify, tailor your opt-in form to the category page your customer is viewing. For example, Philips worked with Yieldify to display lead generation forms including beard trimming imagery on pages featuring shaving products.

How to time your lead capture forms?

Timing is key to your lead generation strategy – the goal is to present the right message, to the right customer, at the right time. But when is the optimal time? The best way to find out is to A/B test different triggering rules on your website. 

Check out these 6 triggering rules you can test to grow your email database. You can use all these triggers (and more) with Yieldify lead capture:

1. On inactivity

Set your lead capture campaign to trigger after a period of user inactivity, e.g. after 15 seconds. That way you can re-engage visitors who might have switched to another tab or put their device down. 

When they return to your site, you can collect their email address with an attention-grabbing form.

2. On timer

If you show an opt-in form the moment someone lands on your website, especially their first interaction with your brand, you interrupt their natural browsing flow. 

Trigger your campaign when your visitors have been on the page for a set amount of time, e.g. after 30 seconds, so they have time to get to know your brand – they’ll be a warmer lead and more likely to share their details.

3. On exit

Set your campaign to trigger when your visitors move their mouse off the page i.e. when they show exit intent. They might be about to type a new URL, close your tab or click ‘Back’ to a different site. 

On-exit strategies catch customers just before they end their session so they’re usually your final chance to collect an email address – encouraging them to ‘Save Your Cart’ or offering a discount can be particularly effective.

4. On scroll

Similar to time spent on page, an on-page click (or a tap on mobile) is a positive customer engagement with your site, whether it’s to play a video, view a product or open a menu. 

Set your campaign to trigger after your customers interact with your page – then you’ll increase your chances of collecting their email address.

5. On click

Similar to time spent on page, an on-page click (or a tap on mobile) is a positive customer engagement with your site, whether it’s to play a video, view a product or open a menu. 

Set your campaign to trigger after your customers interact with your page – then you’ll increase your chances of collecting their email address.

6. On hover

When your visitors hover over elements on the page, they may be considering their options or they may be unsure of something – it will often depend what kind of page they’re on. 

For example, hovering on a category page might point to customers being indecisive about which product to choose. At that point you could display an email capture form to get their email address in exchange for a product questionnaire or a free product guide.

Capture email addresses with Yieldify

I hope this blog post has provided you with some actionable tips to help you collect more email addresses. You can use all 21 strategies with Yieldify’s personalization technology, which hundreds of brands rely on to increase their lead generation rates and optimize their CRO strategy.

If you’d like a preview of how you can optimize your email capture strategy with Yieldify’s fully-managed, all-in-one personalization platform, feel free to schedule a discovery call here. One of our advisors will be delighted to share more.


FAQs

What is the best way to collect email addresses?

The best way to collect email addresses is by asking customers to subscribe using opt-in forms. To collect the maximum number of emails, use a layered, full funnel strategy to target customers throughout their journey. If you need a tool to help you drive more email subscribers into your database, check out our post on the 12 best B2C Lead Generation Tools. 

How do I collect email addresses from customers?

Collect email addresses from customers using strategic signup forms throughout the customer journey. There are many ways to increase your email database, but a core strategy will typically include: 

– Entrance overlay
– Floating button or toaster
– Embedded messaging on product page 
– Lead capture at checkout 

A/B test your designs, copy, placement, triggering rules and targeting rules to ensure you’re driving the maximum number of signups. 

17 Top Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Tips

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All good ecommerce marketers know even the smallest conversion rate uplift can be worth its weight in gold. It’s a game of marginal gains, and I’m here to help you increase your CVR, hit your targets and get ahead of your competitors with 17 CRO tips.

These 17 tips fit into four key categories:

  • Gold standard CRO
  • Brand-building CRO
  • Customer re-engagement CRO
  • Discount-centric CRO

All of the tips below will help you turn more website visits into sales. But if you’re looking to convert more visitors into email and SMS subscribers, then check out our post on the 12 B2C Lead Generation Tools. Otherwise, let’s get started with CRO.

How is ecommerce conversion rate calculated? 

Calculating your website conversion rate is fairly straightforward. Go to your website analytics platform, take the total number of conversions, divide it by the total number of visitors and multiply it by 100.

Conversion rate = conversions/number of visitors × 100 

For example, if you have 10 conversions from 100 visitors, your conversion rate is 10%. 

17 CRO tips

  • Gold standard CRO (1 & 2): Two absolute must-action tips. By helping you gather audience insights and streamline customer journeys, these strategies drive conversions as well as build stronger relationships with your customers.
  • Brand-building CRO (3-8): These five tips will bring customers closer to your brand. With ecommerce businesses struggling to generate a healthy ROI from paid advertising, brand building for long-term growth has never been so important. 
  • Customer re-engagement CRO (9-15): Short attention spans are a major problem for ecommerce brands. Use these seven tips to keep customers engaged at every stage in the purchase funnel. Regardless of how established your brand is, your customers get distracted browsing online. 
  • Discount-focused CRO (16 & 17): I’d always recommend you start with strategies that don’t eat into your margins. But there’s a time and a place for a discount. My final two tips will help you drive more sales during promotional periods.
  1. Personalize customer journeys
  2. Start A/B testing
  3. Highlight your brand’s USPs
  4. Embed social proof
  5. Use trust badges
  6. Leverage customer reviews and testimonials
  7. Improve your website navigation
  8. Highlight your payment options, shipping prices and returns policy
  9. Tackle browse abandonment
  10. Stop cart abandonment
  11. Re-engage inactive users
  12. Incorporate welcome back campaigns
  13. Show recently viewed products
  14. Use anti-price comparison technology
  15. Use tab copy change messaging
  16. Countdown timers
  17. Progress bars

Gold standard CRO

1. Personalize customer journeys

It takes more than a good product to convince customers to buy from you. You also need to build relationships with visitors to drive conversions – and you can’t do that without personalizing customer journeys. Indeed, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who recognize, remember and provide relevant offers and recommendations. 

To give your website visitors personalized customer journeys, turn to a personalization platform. The best personalization tools reveal insights on your audience behavior – so you can understand how your visitors navigate your site and what they’re looking for – and help you adapt your website so you can respond with relevant content.

Think of personalization as a way of replicating in-store experiences online. For example, Pureology, the world’s leading professional color care brand, worked with Yieldify to guide visitors to a haircare quiz on their site, asking them to share their hair type, color and texture. They then recommended products and sent remarketing content that was personalized to match their responses – and increased their conversion rate by 27%.

2. Start A/B testing

If you’re not using A/B testing and A/B/n testing to optimize your website content, then you’re likely missing out on conversions, losing revenue and falling behind your competitors. For example, something as subtle as the placement, design or triggering of a call-to-action (CTA) could be costing you hundreds, if not thousands, of sales every month. 

By testing different website changes against each other, you can sense-check assumptions and guarantee you’re converting the maximum number of browsers into customers.

Take it from someone who knows a thing or two about growing a business, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

“If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness.”

With Yieldify, you can run A/B tests at every stage in the customer journey to optimize your conversion rates. If you’re driving significant levels of traffic to your site, then Yieldify also offers A/B/n testing – which allows you to test five variants at the same time and gather more customer insights more quickly.

Brand-Building CRO

3. Highlight your brand’s unique selling points

As the cost of digital advertising rises and the competition for paid ad space intensifies, it’s harder for ecommerce brands to generate the same ad spend ROI they could a few years ago. At the same time, consumers increasingly prefer to buy from brands that share their values

Together, these shifts mean ecommerce brands have to invest more in brand building. Those who don’t adapt accordingly will eventually need to slash prices and sacrifice margins to keep up with the competition.  

To build brand affinity and customer loyalty, make sure your website visitors are aware of your value proposition. Deploy USP banners to build brand prestige, show your key values and provide information about your products and services.

For example, Brunehilde Mancino, E-Merchandising Manager at Made in Design, worked with Yieldify to show USP messaging on their ecommerce site,  increasing Pay-Per-Click conversion rates by 7%. 

4. Embed social proof 

Social proof is one of the most powerful tools in an ecommerce marketer’s armory. When we see our friends, peers and idols do something, it gives us confidence to follow suit. 

Just look at the rise of New Balance. Suddenly, the formerly dorky dad brand is all around us – and it’s not only because they have a leading product and inventive marketing campaigns. A-list celebrities like Timothy Chalamet, Rhianna and, Leonardo DiCaprio have been pictured in their sneakers, inspiring fans to get their own – a prime example of social proof in action. 

For ecommerce brands, you can leverage social proof in different ways. For example, you can drive urgency, validate your customers’ choices and ease their concerns.

Try these social proof strategies to boost your website conversion rates:

  • Highlight product popularity 
  • Spotlight stock scarcity 
  • Display review platform ratings

Many Yieldify clients have achieved major conversion rate uplifts by adding social proof to their websites, including: 

5. Use trust badges

Like social proof, trust badges also remove customers’ doubts about your brand or product. The key difference is you typically use trust badges to give customers confidence in your payment systems, data security and shipping & returns policies. 

Use these trust badges to give customers key information about your brand: 

  • Free shipping and returns trust badge 
  • Guaranteed Safe & Secure checkout badge
  • Third-party endorsements
  • Accepted payment methods 
  • Money-back guarantee

6. Leverage customer reviews and testimonials

Customer testimonials fall under the social proof umbrella too – and they’re a highly effective conversion-driving tool. They build confidence in your brand and provide a credible insight into your product – website visitors are more likely to trust customer reviews than your own marketing material. 

Show customer reviews and testimonials on your site to win new customers, strengthen loyalty with existing customers and increase conversion rates

Take this example from Spongelle, an up-and-coming international personal care brand. By embedding a rotating GIF with rave customer reviews into their site, they increased conversion rates by 14%. 

We’ve touched on this already: your visitors’ attention spans are short. So, if they can’t easily navigate to the product they’re searching for, it won’t be long before they move on.

To combat this problem, you need to guide visitors seamlessly through the purchase funnel. 

For example, Clarins worked with Yieldify to guide visitors on their category and product pages to a virtual skin consultation, before recommending them products that met their skincare needs. This strategy increased conversion rates by 11%.

Instead of leaving customers to sift through hundreds of options looking for a suitable product, Clarins replicated the in-store experience by listening to the customer’s needs and  bringing the right products to them.

8. Highlight your payment options, shipping prices and returns policy

When potential customers (particularly first-time visitors) land on your site, they’ll likely have a number of questions:

  • How much does delivery cost?
  • Can I use a buy now, pay later option? 
  • What is your returns policy? 

These questions are a barrier to conversions – so provide the answers early in the customer’s journey. 
For example, HSTV, a serial award-winning multichannel retailer, lifted conversion rates by 15% by surfacing an overlay on product pages to tell customers they can check out using Klarna.

Customer re-engagement CRO

9. Tackle browse abandonment

According to Zenreach, 70% of first-time visitors never return once they leave your website. Browse abandonment is a nuanced problem for ecommerce marketers, but most customers don’t return for one of these reasons: 

  • Your product didn’t meet their needs
  • Your brand was unconvincing 
  • Your website was difficult to navigate 
  • They were comparing prices
  • Your products were out of their price range

People make snap decisions while browsing online – and closing a browser tab is easier than walking out of a brick-and-mortar store – so you need to respond faster to stop potential customers leaving your site. 

For example, use eye-catching overlays that trigger when a customer shows exit intent. Leveraging Yieldify’s technology, Skinny Tan does this well with an overlay that guides customers to category pages before they exit, increasing conversion rates by 4%. 

10.  Stop cart abandonment 

Getting customers to stay on your site, browse through your products and add something to basket is a battle in itself. Once you’ve won that, you face a new challenge: cart abandonment. Across all industries, the average cart abandonment rate is as high as 70%. That means just 3 in 10 customers will complete their order after adding an item to the basket. 

The good news is that these customers are already engaged and very likely to buy. In most cases, it’s simply a matter of when, not if, they’re going to convert. But how do you reduce your cart abandonment rate? 

Drive your customers to check out using these strategies: 

  • Send basket reminders
  • Spotlight buy now, pay later options
  • Send discount reminders
  • Use delivery incentives
  • Dynamically scrape images from cart

11. Re-engage inactive users  

Tackling website inactivity requires a more strategic approach than browse and cart abandonment. Inactivity often tells you customers are browsing multiple tabs at the same time. The chances are they’re considering your brand alongside your competitors, so you need to recapture their attention as soon as they return. 

Convert inactive browsers with:

  • eye-catching overlays, 
  • basket reminders and 
  • discount incentives

Sometimes all you need is to give the customer a subtle nudge in the right direction, as Philips did with this basket reminder.

12. Incorporate welcome back campaigns

If a visitor comes back to your site, you can safely assume they’re interested in your products. Build brand affinity and lift conversion rates among your returning visitors by acknowledging them with ‘welcome back’ strategies.

You can adapt these strategies depending on where your visitors are in the purchase funnel. For example:

  • Offer discounts after a set number of website visits
  • Surface email & SMS optin forms 
  • Show basket reminder messaging
  • Drive urgency through stock scarcity messaging

13. Show recently viewed products 

Finding a product you want to buy can be time consuming when shopping online. Once a customer finds what they’re looking for, it’s unlikely they’ll check out straight away – but that doesn’t mean they won’t convert later on. 

By spotlighting your customer’s recently viewed items, you can streamline the path to checkout and drive significant uplifts in conversion rates. 

For example, embed a “Recently Viewed” carousel into your site to keep your customer’s favored items top of mind.

14. Use anti-price comparison technology

We’ve all been there. You’ve found a great product on one website but you’re sure other retailers probably stock the same one cheaper. So you copy the product name, switch tabs and paste it into Google search. Bingo: it’s on sale at a better price elsewhere. 

Almost every ecommerce brand faces this problem and, aside from eating into your margins by price-matching competitors, you might not think there’s an obvious fix. But with Yieldify, you can combat this problem by identifying when a visitor is comparing your prices and triggering your USPs. 

15. Use tab copy change messaging

Most customers compare products and prices before making a purchase, typically jumping between websites on their hunt for the best product. 

Your brand will often get buried in a sea of tabs during this consideration phase, but it’s possible to bring visitors back to your site with Yieldify’s tab copy change technology. 

When a customer browses another site, you can set the tab copy for your website brand to alternate between the original tab title and dynamic copy. The alternating messages will draw attention back to your tab and keep your brand front-of-mind.

For example, if a customer browsed away from your website with two items in their cart, the tab title would read “You have (2) items in cart!”. 

Discount-centric CRO

16. Countdown timers

Everyone loves a discount, but slashing your prices during promotional and holiday periods isn’t always enough to guarantee conversions. You’ll naturally see an increase in sales, but you’ll still have hesitant customers who need a nudge in the right direction. 

To maximize sales, use countdown timers that display how long a customer has before the promotional period ends. The premise is simple: the closer it gets towards the deadline, the more likely the customer is to purchase. 

Away from promotional periods, countdown timers can also be used to incentivize sales by counting down towards other deadlines. For example, Laithwaites use a countdown timer to show customers the time remaining to secure next-day delivery.

17. Progress bars 

During promotional periods, it’s typical to offer free gifts, delivery incentives or discounts once a customer’s basket value passes a certain threshold. To get the most out of these offers, you need to show customers how close they are to the minimum spend – and that’s where progress bars come into play. 

Not only will progress bars lift your conversion rate, they’ll boost average order values by encouraging customers to add more to cart. 

Like countdown timers, progress bars aren’t limited to promotional periods. For example, Carte ZERO, a no-fee credit card owned by Advanzia Bank, used progress bars to incentivize customers to complete their on-site credit application form, resulting in a 10% uplift in new customer acquisition. 

Increase Ecommerce Conversion Rate with Yieldify

I hope this blog has given you actionable tips on how to increase conversion rate on your ecommerce website. If you’re lacking the time or resources to optimize your ecommerce site, Yieldify is an excellent fully managed platform – with all the capabilities detailed above – that can help you drive major uplifts in conversion rates. 

If you’d like a preview of how you can optimize your CRO strategy with Yieldify fully-managed, all-in-one personalization platform, feel free to schedule a discovery call here. One of our advisors will be delighted to share more.


1. What is ecommerce CRO?

Ecommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of generating more sales through website optimizations. Most ecommerce marketers use CRO tools to convert more website visitors into sales and revenue. Though every tool has its own distinct set of USPs, a good tool will provide these core features: 

– Fully managed service 
– A/B testing
– Personalization features
– Data analytics 
– Lead generation

2. What is a good ecommerce conversion rate?

According to data from BigCommerce, average ecommerce conversion rates hover around 2.5-3%. Any website above the 3% threshold is performing very well. If you want to improve your conversion rate, consider one of the 12 best CRO tools on the market right now. 

3. What is an ecommerce CRO strategy?

An ecommerce CRO strategy is a set of optimizations that marketers use to convert more visitors into sales. A/B testing and data analytics form the foundation of successful CRO strategies. By gleaning insights into how website visitors respond to different experiences, marketers can confidently make changes that streamline journeys and increase conversion rates. Most ecommerce brands will use a CRO tool to refine their strategy.

17 Email List Building Tools You Need to Grow Your List

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Building an active and engaged email list should be a top priority of every website owner. But how do you do it?  When it comes to email list building, there are several tools out there that can help you do this. We’ve analyzed the top 12 and how you can use them.

Never underestimate the power of building an engaged email list. This list will be the first to receive special offers, blog posts, webinar invitations, new product launches. They will be loyal fans, brand advocates and therefore highly likely to convert.

If you’re actively sending traffic to your website it could be argued that this is of little value if they aren’t transacting with you or at least giving you their contact information.

From pop-up customizers, to lead magnets and even marketing automation software, it’s never been easier to quickly build an email list.

You just need the right tools to do so. Here are our top picks:

  1. Yieldify
  2. Mailchimp
  3. Klaviyo
  4. Rafflecopter
  5. Attentive
  6. Optinmonster
  7. Thrive Leads
  8. Hello Bar
  9. Typeform
  10. Outgrow
  11. VoilaNorbert
  12. SignUpAnywhere
  13. ChatBot
  14. Sleeknote
  15. Trustmary
  16. Mailmunch
  17. Leadpages

Why You Need To Build Your Email List

With over 3.9 billion daily email users registered and 47% of marketers stating that email marketing is their most effective marketing channel, it’s obvious that email list building is now an essential requirement for any modern business.

In a study by DMA, they found that 91% of marketers rated email marketing as an important part of their marketing strategy.

By actively building your email list you’re building an audience that wants to find out more about you and stay up to date with your latest offers and news. These are essentially “warm” leads that have a much better chance of converting than a brand new click from a Paid Search ad.

When you build your email list you’ll be able to consistently find new leads, nurture prospects, and eventually convert visitors to customers.  

While building an audience on Facebook or LinkedIn is a quick way to get in front of potential customers you’re essentially “renting” the audience. But by building your email list they are yours and can become one of your greatest fixed assets.

This is because email marketing is one of the best ways to nurture an engaged audience. This engagement is what boosts business revenue through increasing customer lifetime value. 

Research shows that for every $1 spent on email marketing, expect an average return of $42. This is the highest return on investment for any digital marketing channel.

Further research has shown that almost 50% of customers actually want to hear from their favorite brands every week – just make sure you’re writing intriguing email subject lines when you reach out.

To summarize:

  1. Building an email list gives you an engaged audience that’s fixed. They will always be there ready to receive product updates and special offers.
  2. They do want to hear from you
  3. You will likely get a positive ROI on email marketing activity

So the next question is, how do you go about building your email list?

17 Of The Best Email List Building Tools

If you’re a budding entrepreneur or business owner it can be hard to know which list building tool to choose from with so many available. 

We’ve compiled a list of our best-rated list building tools on the market and an overview of their features to help narrow down your selection.

1. Yieldify

Yieldify is a fully managed personalization platform that helps ecommerce businesses generate more revenue by engaging their customers with personalized experiences. Their lead generation functionality is a highly rated feature that will help you build your email and SMS lists.

Top features

Fully managed service

With a fully managed service, Yieldify’s service team will handle your list building strategy for you. You’ll get expert support from a dedicated account manager as well as a team of graphic designers, technical engineers and quality assurance specialists. 

Together they’ll help map out your strategy, set up and monitor campaigns, and optimize performance.

“Even though we have a very complicated funnel, the entire Yieldify team – including product, design, and engineering – have worked with us to help increase conversions. Stellar team!”

Custom, on-brand forms

Yieldify’s graphic design team will create forms for you with custom copy and creative to match your brand guidelines – on mobile, desktop and tablet. 

You can also add custom elements to your forms – including free text fields, radio buttons and dropdown menus – to capture visitor data such as gender, preferred products or clothing size.

Audience segmentation

Yieldify’s audience segmentation functionality lets you reach different customer groups by setting custom combinations of targeting and triggering rules. That way you can direct your list building campaigns to the right customers at the right time with the most tailored messaging. 

Their targeting and triggering rules are comprehensive, including segmenting by new vs returning visitors; referral URL; session number and time on page.

A/B and A/B/n testing

Yieldify’s A/B and A/B/n testing engine lets you test up to 5 different list building forms against each other at the same time. That means you can settle on the best performing optin messaging, design, placement or incentive faster and drive the maximum number of sign-ups.

Integrations
Yieldify integrates with all major email service providers (ESPs) and SMS providers so you can be sure your leads get saved in your database. They also have an advanced integration with Klaviyo – which you can read about here.

Pros of Yieldify

  • Count on expert service: Yieldify’s service team is second-to-none in the lead capture and personalization industry. Read their G2 reviews to see what their clients say
  • Capture 20% more leads: You can generate 20%+ more leads on average with their layered lead capture feature vs a standard lead capture approach
  • Run personalized campaigns: Improve your user experience and maximize sign-ups by using segmentation to adapt your optin forms to different stages in your customer journeys
  • Gather comprehensive data analytics: Gain deep insights into your customer behavior with Yieldify’s customer journey reports (called Sunburst charts) as well as their in-depth campaign reporting
  • No developers needed: With their easy-to-integrate tag and no-code campaigns, you can get your first list building tests live within 14 days – no developers required

“I view Yieldify as a data analytics company as much as a lead generation and personalization platform. It sets them apart.

Cons of Yieldify

  • Not an ESP or SMS provider: Yieldify lets you capture emails and phone numbers but you can’t send email or SMS marketing from their platform

Pricing

Speak to Yieldify’s sales team for more information.

2. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that helps you grow your email lists with unlimited free sign-up forms. 

Top features

Customization: The plugin allows you to create targeted landing pages, overlay popups, and embedded sign-up forms within your ecommerce platform – and automatically integrates the designs with the brand theme.

Personalization: All of Mailchimp’s user-created landing pages, popups, and sign-up forms are personalized to maximize conversions.

Segmentation: Users can be categorized into relevant campaigns based on their behavior.

Integrations: Mailchimp integrates with WooCommerce and many other ecommerce platforms.

Pros of Mailchimp

  • Highly versatile: Mailchimp’s list building tool is suitable for freelancers, startups, mobile apps, developers and ecommerce brands
  • Award-winning support: Mailchimp’s support team is available 24/7 to guide users through platform problems and queries
  • Free version: You can trial Mailchimp’s basic features with their cost-free plan

Cons of Mailchimp

  • Complicated interface: Mailchimp’s interface is not the most intuitive and can be difficult to navigate 
  • Limited reporting: At its price point, Mailchimp’s reporting capabilities are lacking sophistication

Pricing

Mailchimp’s pricing is tailored to the size of your contact list. Pricing for Mailchimp’s premium package starts at $299 per month. They also offer a free version with their most basic features.

3. Klaviyo

Specifically designed for ecommerce, Klaviyo is an email service provider with a focus on marketing automation.

Top features

A/B testing: Optimize your optin forms by running tests to determine the most effective messaging, design and placement for your audience.

Segmentation: Groups users by their behavior, open rates, bounce rates and demographics such as age and location.

Adaptive forms: Set your forms to pop up in the middle of the browser window, sit at the side of the page or open via a small widget.

Social integrations: Seamlessly integrates with Facebook to maximize social media marketing. 

Pros of Klaviyo

  • Shopify integration: Shopify customers report a seamless experience integrating with Klaviyo
  • Template library: Choose from 50+ ready-to-customize templates that have been optimized to build subscriber lists

Cons of Klaviyo

  • Customer service: Some clients have been disappointed by the speed and quality of communication from Klaviyo’s support team  
  • Steep learning curve: Klaviyo’s self-service platform is relatively complicated and takes time to learn

Pricing

Klaviyo’s pricing is tailored to the size of your contact list. Prices range between $35 and $1970 per month for Email and SMS packages, but you can trial Klaviyo for free if you have less than 150,000 contacts.

4. Rafflecopter

Rafflecopter is a unique email list building tool that helps customers create contests and giveaways. 

Top features

Giveaways: Rafflecopter enables brands to build lists by running giveaways across websites, social media and blogs.

Custom theme designs: Customize the design of your giveaway to keep it on-brand.

Pros of Rafflecopter

  • Speed: Launch your giveaway within minutes using Rafflecopter’s pre-built features 
  • No coding required: No IT expertise is needed to use or install Rafflecopter, making it highly accessible to any ecommerce brand

Cons of Rafflecopter

  • Limited platform: Rafflecopter only enables you to increase your email lists with giveaways

Pricing

Rafflecopter packages range from $13 to $84 per month.

5. Attentive

Attentive is a leading SMS marketing solution that empowers brands to build strong customer relationships with personalized text messaging. 

Top features

Multiple sign-up units: Attentive can increase your SMS lists on your mobile and desktop websites, through your social media channels, via email remarketing and more.

Design editor: Customize sign-up units to align with your brand.

Deliverability: Message customers in your SMS list at scale and track performance in real time using Attentive’s data dashboard.

Pros of Attentive

  • SMS-first: A leading solution for anyone looking to specifically build their SMS list 
  • Managed service: Every Attentive customer gets a dedicated account manager from day one

Cons of Attentive

  • Analytical discrepancies: Attentive’s reporting suite doesn’t always accurately align with results in Google Analytics and other analytics platforms

Pricing

Speak to Attentive’s sales team for more information on pricing.

6. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is a leading self-service lead generation and CRO tool which helps companies grow their email and SMS lists. 

Top features

Templates: 400+ optin form templates to choose from.

Drag and drop builder: Anyone can create sign-up forms from scratch with or without coding experience.

OptinMonster University: Get access to online courses, webinars, downloadable cheat sheets to grow your database.

Pros of OptinMonster

  • Variety of strategies: OptinMonster offers everything from geolocation targeting to gamified wheels to help customers increase their email and SMS lists

Cons of OptinMonster

  • Learning curve: Clients have reported a steep learning curve to understand how to maximize OptinMonster’s features effectively

Pricing

OptinMonster packages range from $16 to $82 per month.   

7. Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is a list building tool that is designed primarily for integration with WordPress and WooCommerce.

Top features

Design: Thrive Leads’ drag-and-drop editor enables you to create impactful designs that drive more leads.

Advanced targeting: Show the most relevant messaging to your audience.

A/B testing: Test different lead forms to find the most effective messaging, placement and design.

Actionable insights: Thrive Leads provides analysis on how your optin forms are performing over time.

Pros of Thrive Leads

  • Multi-use: You can install The Thrive Leads suite on up to 5 different websites
  • 30-day money back guarantee: If you’re unhappy with Thrive Leads, they’ll give you a refund within the first 30 days of signing up

Cons of Thrive Leads

  • Platform limitations: Thrive Leads is exclusively a WordPress plugin and isn’t compatible with Shopify or other providers

Pricing

Thrive Leads costs $299 per year or $99 per quarter depending on your billing preferences. 

8. Hello Bar

Hello Bar is a popup tool that creates exit-intent popups, timed popups, and floating signup bars to convert more visitors into leads. 

Top features

Customization: Choose from hundreds of pre-built themes, or customize any element of the sign-up form to align with your brand. Hello Bar’s design assistant tool also matches colors, fonts and styling with your website’s design.

Targeting: Increase your email lists by targeting visitors based on their location, traffic source, time and more. 

Tracking: Create custom reports with the data you need to measure performance effectively.

Pros of Hello Bar

  • Seamless integration: Hello Bar’s one-click installation requires no code. It easily integrates with WordPress, Shopify, Mailchimp and other platforms and tools
  •  Variety of popups: Every Hello Bar plan gives customers access to five different types of popups

Cons of Hello Bar

  • Customer support: Hello Bar have a detailed knowledge base to answer customer queries, but there is no access to telephone support 

Pricing

Hello Bar packages range from $0 to $99 per month.

9. Typeform

Typeform is a web-based platform you can use to create anything from surveys to apps, without needing to write a single line of code.

Top features 

Quizzes and surveys: Typeform collects leads by inviting visitors to answer questions about anything related to your product.

Adaptable questions: Follow-up questions adapt according to previous answers.

Slack integration: Your colleagues are immediately notified when a new lead completes the questionnaire.

Pros of Typeform

  • User friendly: The platform is well designed and robust 

Cons of Typeform

  • Customer support: Typeform’s support team can be slow to respond 

Pricing

Typeform offers five types of plans, with prices ranging from free to $77 per month. You’ll need to contact their sales team for pricing information on their enterprise plan.

10. Outgrow

Outgrow is a content creation tool that allows you to make contests, surveys, giveaways, and quizzes.

Top features

Chatbots: Outgrow’s chatbots make you available to visitors 24/7, helping to convert potential customers into leads round the clock.  

Quizzes: Access more than 1 million stock images powered by Unsplash to create visually stunning quizzes that encourage participation and build your email lists. 

1000+ integrations: Outgrow integrates with Mailchimp, Hubspot, GetResponse and thousands of other marketing tools.

Pros of Outgrow

  • Quality of support: Outgrow give plenty of support and guidance during the onboarding process and have a highly responsive, 24/7 chat system
  • Design: The depth and variety of design tools available makes it both easy and enjoyable to use

Cons of Outgrow

  • Feature limitations: Many of the best features are not available unless you upgrade to the business plan 

Pricing

Outgrow plans range from $14 to $600 per month. Enterprise businesses will need to speak directly with Outgrow’s sales team for a quote. 

11. VoilaNorbert

VoilaNorbert is an email finding tool – all you need is your prospect’s name and the company URL to find an email address.

Top features

Fewer bounces: VoilaNorbert’s 8-step verification process filters email addresses from your list to ensure you’re targeting the right people.

Better sender score: Improve your sender score by ensuring emails land in the primary inbox.

Increased deliverability: By improving your sender’s reputation, you increase the chances of getting emails to land in the right inbox.

Pros of VoilaNorbert

  • Reliability: VoilaNorbert has a 98% deliverability score

Cons of VoilaNorbert

  • Free trial: You can only acquire 50 leads for free before you need to sign up to a paid version

Pricing

VoilaNorbert pricing starts at $49 per month for their Valet package and rises to $499 per month for Counselor. 

12. SignUpAnywhere

SignUpAnywhere is the flexible way to increase email and SMS lists and is used by businesses, organizations, restaurants, bars and charities.

Top features

Templates: From satisfaction surveys to product feedback and email sign-ups, SignUpAnywhere has a variety of templates to choose from.

Works without WiFi: SignUpAnywhere forms sync data even when you’re offline.

Pros of SignUpAnywhere

Anytime cancellation: Flexible pricing means you can cancel your subscription at any time

Cons of SignUpAnywhere

No social proof: There are no reviews on G2 to gain insight into how satisfied customers are with the product

Pricing

SignUpAnywhere’s pricing ranges from free to $70 per month for their Corporate package. 

13. ChatBot

ChatBot is an all-in-one platform to create, deploy, and track chatbots across channels. 

Top features

No-code builder: Easily build your chat bot’s response formats and actions using the drag and drop builder.

Testing tool: Preview your chat bot experience before setting it live.

Customizable widget: Align your ChatBot widget with your brand and site design.

Pros of ChatBot

  • Easy integrations: ChatBot easily integrates with LiveChat 
  • User-friendly: The learning curve is small and users can quickly get up to speed with the platform

Cons of Chatbot

  • Sophistication: There are more intelligent chat bot tools on the market, albeit typically for a higher price

Pricing

ChatBot’s Starter package is $52 per month, with prices rising to $424 per month for their Business package. Contact the ChatBot team directly for more information about their Enterprise package.

14. Sleeknote

Made by marketers, for marketers, Sleeknote positions itself as more than your average pop-up builder.

Top features

Reduce cart abandonment: Surface optin forms to customers with items in their basket when they’re about to leave the site.

Gated content: Incentivize sign-ups with forms that give customers access to content in exchange for their email address or SMS.

Integrations: Sleeknote is integrated with 1200+ tools.

Pros of Sleeknote

  • Money back guarantee: Trial any of Sleeknote’s plans and receive your money back if you’re not satisfied after 30 days

Cons of Sleeknote

  • Tracking: No campaign performance tracking with Sleeknote Lite

Pricing

Sleeknote has five available packages ranging from $49 to $374 per month. 

15. Trustmary

Trustmary leverages the power of social proof and customer testimonials to improve lead generation by embedding reviews into optin forms. 

Top features

A/B testing: Pit different testimonials against each other to determine which quote drives the highest number of leads into your email and SMS lists.

Triggering: Surface lead gen forms to website visitors based on page URLs, acquisition source, UTM tags, devices, timing, new vs returning and more.

Templates: Trustmary’s optin forms have already been tested and optimized to ensure you maximize sign-ups.

Pros of Trustmary

  • Multi-purpose: Allows you to collect customer testimonials and subscribers simultaneously

Cons of Trustmary

  • Limited forms: Trustmary lacks the variety of optin forms provided by other list building tools 

Pricing

TrustMary’s Solo package is totally free, and they have three more packages ranging from $99 to $499 per month. 

16. Mailmunch

Mailmunch is a lead growth and email marketing service for bloggers, solopreneurs, startups, and enterprises.

Top features

Optin forms and landing pages: With Mailmunch you can drive more subscribers into your lists by customizing optin forms and landing pages.

Template library: Choose from hundreds of free optin forms and landing page templates. 

Imagery: Mailmunch integrates with Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay to provide customers with thousands of royalty-free images.

Pros of Mailmunch

  • Versatile: Mailmunch is suitable to all industries and verticals

Cons of Mailmunch

  • Customization: The landing page builder is clunkier to use than the optin form builder

Pricing

Access Mailmunch’s Premium marketing solution for $13.99 per month.

17. Leadpages

Leadpages is a landing page and squeeze page builder that doubles up as a comprehensive list builder. 

Top features

Conversion guidance: Leadpages’ performance predictor assesses the effectiveness of your landing page before you publish and gives you recommendations for improvement.

Unlimited lead collection: There are no limits on list growth with Leadpages.

Rapid page load: Leadpages claim their landing pages load 2.4 seconds faster than other leading page builders, which bodes well for your SEO and PPC quality scores.

Pros of Leadpages

  • Customer support: Weekly hands-on coaching sessions help customers to quickly get up to speed with the Leadpages platform 
  • User-friendly: The Leadpages platform is highly intuitive and features an extensive library of pre-tested and optimized landing page templates

Cons of Leadpages

  • Desktop-focused templates: Leadpages have a shortage of templates with a mobile-first design

Pricing

Leadpages standard version is $37 per month and their pro version is $74 per month.

List Building Tools Compared

Tool

G2 rating

Pricing

Service

A/B Testing

Email & SMS

Yieldify

4.7 out of 5

Fully managed

A/B & A/B/n

Email & SMS

Mailchimp

4.4 out of 5

From $0 per month

Self service 

X

Email

Klaviyo

4.6 out of 5

From $35 per month

Self service

A/B 

Email & SMS

Rafflecopter

4.2 out of 5

From $13 per month

Self service

X

Email

Attentive 

4.8 out of 5

Speak to sales

Fully managed

A/B 

Both, SMS focus

OptinMonster

4.1 out of 5

From $16 per month

Self service

A/B

Email & SMS

Thrive Leads

4.5 out of 5

$299 per year

Self service

A/B

Email

Hello Bar

3.5 out of 5

From $0 per month

Self service

A/B

Email

Typeform

4.5 out of 5

From $0 per month

Self service

X

Email

Outgrow

4.8 out of 5


From $14 per month

Self service

X

Email

VoilaNorbert

4.6 out of 5

From $49 per month

Self service

X

Email

SignUpAnywhere

No rating

From $0 per month

Self service

X

Email

ChatBot

4.5 out of 5

From $52 per month 

Self service (Enterprise package is fully managed)

X

Email

Sleeknote

4.3 out of 5

From $49 per month 

Fully managed

A/B

Email & SMS

Trustmary

4.6 out of 5

From $99 per month 

Self service (Enterprise package is fully managed)

A/B

Email & SMS

Mailmunch

4.5 out of 5

$13.99 per month 

Self service

A/B

Email

Leadpages

4.2 out of 5

From $37 per month

Self service

A/B

Email

Choose the Best Email List Building Tool for Your Business

The right list building tool for your business depends on your objectives, budget and bandwidth. If you need a fully-managed platform with market-leading features, Yieldify is a perfect solution to help you drive more email and SMS subscribers. Either way, I hope this blog has helped you find a tool that meets your requirements. 

If you’d like a preview of how you can build your email and SMS lists with Yieldify’s fully-managed, all-in-one personalization platform, feel free to schedule a discovery call here. One of our advisors will be delighted to share more.

Email List Building Tool FAQs

What is a list building tool?

List building tools are software solutions that help ecommerce businesses drive more email and SMS subscribers into their databases. To increase long-term sales and revenue, list building tools primarily use pop ups to acquire contact information from website visitors. If you want to secure more email and SMS leads, speak to Yieldify’s sales team.

What are the top email list building strategies?

While there is no one-size-fits-all email list building strategy, it’s important to incentivize sign-ups using tried and tested techniques including: 

Discounts 
Free gifts 
Gated content 

You should also make sure your sign-up forms are visually appealing, adapt to customer journeys and don’t interfere with the user experience.

The 5 Best Trust Badges To Boost eCommerce Conversion Rates

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How trust badges boost eCommerce conversions | Yieldify

Trust badges could be the key to increasing your eCommerce conversions. But what are they and how can you use them to your advantage?

In this article, we will explain all there is to know about trust badges, from what is the best, where to add trust badges and how they can help boost sales.

We’ll cover:
1. What Is A Trust Badge?
2. The Best Types Of Trust Badges
3. How Trust Badges Can Improve Conversion Rates
4. Which Trust Badges Work Best?
5. Where To Place Trust Badges
6. Free Trust Badges

What Is A Trust Badge?

trust badge is a badge or seal you can place on your website to build customer trust. They work in a similar way to social proof software by alleviating potential customer hesitancy.

Trust badges are traditionally visible during the checkout process, but a new trend of placing them directly on the home page is gaining traction. 

These trust badges let website visitors know that your page is legitimate and that any data they share will be collected through secure third-party service providers. Because the trust seal company has agreed to place their badge on your website, customers will know that all the processes taking place are safe and secure. 

Get a free pack of trust badges from Yieldify. Click image to download!

Usually, trust badges denote security features that keep credit card details and other private information safe. These badges come in different shapes and sizes and signal different things to potential customers. 

The best types of trust badges

There are five main types of trust badges that you can add to your website. Each one has a different meaning and is used for a different purpose – you can use all five types of trust badges on your site simultaneously, it all depends on what you are trying to achieve.

1. Guaranteed Safe & Secure checkout badge

Arguably the most important type of trust badge, the secure checkout badge is the seal given when you sign up with a company that provides an SSL certificate. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protects the internet connection and the information that is shared across that connection.

This badge indicates that your checkout process can be trusted: the information is encrypted and your customer’s credit card information is safe and secure. This kind of trust can help to improve your conversions. Customer data breaches have become a lot more common and publicised in recent years, from a DDoS attack to phishing scams and more, these are all terms customers will likely have heard now. So any potential customers will need to be sure they can trust you and that you take their data security seriously.

There are many safe checkout badge options, but the most trusted and recognized badges quickly let your customers know that your site can be trusted. Possibly the most well-known SSL badge is from Symantec – you may recognize them better as Norton, VeriSign or LifeLock. You can also get trust badges that are recognized the world over from PayPal and Shopify. 

Data security will always be one of the biggest concerns for online shoppers, especially when credit card details are concerned. Adding trust badges, such as the Verisign trust badge can help build customer trust.

Safe Checkout Badges are most effective when displayed near your “Add to Cart” buttons and on your checkout page

2. Free shipping and free returns trust badge

Introduce feelings of trust and safety in your customers with a “Free Shipping” and/or “Free Returns” badge. By letting your customers know that they can receive and return any products ordered without any additional fees, you take away some of the perceived risks of ordering from an online store.

This badge has more flexibility in placement and can be used effectively in an array of places across your website. We recommend having a Free Shipping and Free Returns badge on all “Add to Cart” and “Checkout” pages. It can also be effective on your homepage – consider adding it to your header – and on your Frequently Asked Questions page, or a dedicated Shipping and Returns page.

Gaining the trust of your customers is incredibly important. By offering free shipping and free returns, you are letting your customers know that not only do you believe in the quality of your products, but you also value their happiness and satisfaction above all else. 

This trust badge is a perfect accompaniment to a Money-Back Guarantee Badge, if you are choosing to use one.  

3. Accepted payment trust badges

When people see a recognizable brand, it helps them feel more confident – that’s why accepted payment badges are so effective. When you have Mastercard, Visa, American Express, and PayPal badges as your payment options, you boost the level of trust in your website with just a few logos.

A study conducted by ConversionXL found that when people are familiar with a brand they have a perception of security. “For the most part,” the study said, “greater familiarity also meant a greater feeling of security.” 

You can place these buttons in the footer of your website, and you can also have them listed on your payment page.

4. Third-party endorsements

Third party endorsements are all about showing that your business is credible – because these programs usually involve an application and review process, they signal to people that you are an established business. If you can’t think of any third-party endorsement badges, think about the Better Business Bureau Accredited Business and Google Customer Review badges – two of the most trusted examples.

A third-party endorsement badge does take more work. As mentioned earlier, you need to submit an application, be reviewed, and approved before you can add the badge to your eCommerce site. 

But the extra work is worth the extra payoff as these badges can have a drastic impact on your conversions. Think about when you shop on Amazon – you look for highly-rated items with lots of reviews and even an Amazon Best Seller badge if you can. Think of these third-party badges in the same way. They signal to your customer that others have had a great experience buying from your online store. 

These trust badges are usually placed in the footer of your website and should be more prominent than the accepted payment badges.

5. Money-back guarantee badges

Possibly the most effective trust badge of all, the money-back guarantee badge all but completely eliminates the fear and perceived risk of buying a product or service online. While this doesn’t address any of the technical security issues, it does let potential customers know that you have their best interests in mind.

This is a free trust badge, you can make it yourself so that it matches your branding, or you can find a free downloadable version online and quickly add it to your own website.

If you can use money back guarantee badges, you should display them loud and proud.. You want to make sure that every single customer sees it and takes note. It should be in the same places as your Safe Checkout Badge – near the Add To Cart button and the Checkout button.  This can help ward off any potential shopping cart abandonment.

Can trust badges improve your conversion rates?

In the digital world, it is normal for people to be wary of online shopping – we’ve all heard the horror stories of people losing their identities, their cash, and more simply buying a product online. 

When someone comes to your eCommerce website for the first time, they are being introduced to your brand. If they have never interacted with your brand before, this is their introduction to your business. You want to ensure that they know your eCommerce website is a safe, secure place. And of course, you want them to complete their purchase.

On average, 75% of potential customers who visit an eCommerce site abandon their cartsTrust badges will help you tackle shopping cart abandonment.

There are a variety of reasons why almost three-quarters of customers don’t complete their purchases – this study from the Baymard Institute outlines the major factors.

Almost 1 in 5 respondents said that they didn’t trust the website with the credit card information and that is why they abandoned the checkout process. With 18% pointing to the lack of trust in an online store, it’s clear that building that trust is an integral part of increasing your conversion rate.

A survey conducted by Econsultancy asked consumers the factors that influence their trust when shopping from an online retailer they don’t know very well.

There were a lot of different elements that played a role in building trust, but the most important factor was having trust badges displayed on the website. A whopping 48% of respondents said that trust badges reassure them that the site is secure and trustworthy. 

48% said trust seals are crucial in building trust on eCommerce sites

The same survey found that 76% of respondents said trust seals affected their sense of trust in a website. Another 61% said that they had not made a purchase because there were no visible trust badges or logos when they went to a website. 

If you run an online business trust badges tend to be a quick and easy way you can showcase website security. For eCommerce businesses ensuring customers are comfortable paying online is vital to their success and growth. As the data above shows, they can make quite a big difference.

Which trust badges inspire the most trust?

Each trust badge has its pros and cons, but all of them have been shown to increase trust and conversions – which is why they’re a common feature offered by top CRO tools. So how do you know which badge will be the most effective for you?

With regards to online security and safe checkout badges, the brand that you choose has a large impact on how much reassurance it gives to your customers.

In a study conducted by CXL, the three most recognized branded trust badges for safe checkout were McAfee (79%), Verisign (76%), and PayPal (72%)

Data: ConversionXL

Brand recognition is important, as it is correlated with the logos that give customers the most reassurance. Once again PayPal, Verisign, and McAfee topped the list (in that order). The results show that the gap between the recognizable brands and the others is considerable.

PayPal, Verisign and McAfee are the three most recognizable trust logos

If you are in a position to offer a money-back guarantee, it is one of the most powerful trust badges you can implement. Visual Website Optimizer put a “30-day money-back guarantee” badge on a site and saw a 32% increase in sales over an 11 day period. Let that sink in: it took less than two weeks for VWO to see their sales increase by more than a third after adding a free badge to their site. 

Free shipping badges and offers have been shown to increase sales by as much as 90%Red Door saw a 90% increase, 2BigFeet saw a 50% increase, and Comscore saw a 16% increase once they’ve added free shipping trust seals on their websites.

The best solution is to use a few trust badges together. That will have the biggest impact on your conversion rate. Crunch the numbers to find out which badges are most cost-effective for your business. 

Where do you put trust badges?

Trust badges can be used throughout your website but will have the most impact where users may still have initial doubts about purchasing from you or are required to give personal information.

For example, placing secure checkout badges on the payment page of your website will show users you can be trusted with their data and their transaction will be safe.

If your product has won any awards this is, of course, the best place to put those trust badges.

Your homepage is also a great place to put trust badges to instil overall confidence and trust in your brand. New users who are searching for your brand will most likely land on this page so it will be important to showcase reviews, awards, or any other badges here.

For eCommerce websites, you have a lot of options when it comes to trust seal placement with potentially all the above options being relevant.

Trust tends to be tested the most when a customer is about to make a purchase. So the checkout page naturally is very important.

CXL looked into customers’ observational patterns when they were preparing to make online purchases, and it turns out they are quite similar. They search for quick reassurance.

You’ll notice the pattern is pretty much the same across each checkout option, they scan the page looking for quick reassurance they can trust the website and continue with the purchase. So you need to make sure they are easily visible during the micro-moments where trust may waver.

Free trust badges you can add to your eCommerce site today

There are many options when it comes to trust badges. Some of the most esteemed badges don’t come cheap – McAfee Secure, for example, starts at $15/month but scales up as the size of your store grows. If you’re running an online business hopefully one of the below options will be of use to you.

Shopify trust badges

If you have a Shopify eCommerce store, then this app available through the Shopify App Store is the perfect addition to your website.

With this app, you have access to 670 different accepted payment badges in a variety of design styles. You can easily drag and drop your trust badges to your product pages. If you’d like to have the badges in more than one location on your site, you can upgrade to premium and have your accepted payment badges on your cart page, homepage, and the footer.

PayPal trust badges

If PayPal is one of the ways you accept payments, their free trust badges are a perfect way to start increasing your conversions. 

With downloadable PNGs as well as source code available, you can have a PayPal badge up on your eCommerce store today. They have three different types of badges available:

  • Return Shipping is On Us
  • Backed by PayPal
  • Support Small Businesses 

Convertful trust badges

With 60 free badges that cover 6 major sales objections, Convertful’s free downloadable PNG badges are great for any eCommerce store. Each badge comes in five different styles, so you can find something that works with your store’s design.

Convertful looks at the problems that customers identify that lead them to abandoning their carts and tailor their badges to solve those problems.

Badges include:

  • Free Shipping & Free Delivery to combat those that feel the extra costs are too high.
  • Express Checkout to avoid losing the 35% of people who abandon carts when they have to create an account.
  • Secure Payments for those worried about sharing their information online.
  • Fast Shipping & Delivery for those worried about slow shipping times.
  • Money-Back Guarantee to instill trust in your product and services.
  • Payment Options to list the variety of payment options you accept.

TrustLock.co trust badges

TrustLock.co has over 120+ free website trust badges that you can use on your eCommerce store. You must link back to their homepage to use them for free, but that is a small price to pay for a somewhat recognizable badge. They also provide some that are ideal to place on your checkout page as discussed above.

The free trust badges include:

  • 100% Money-Back Guarantee
  • Guaranteed Safe Checkout
  • Fully Secured SSL Checkout
  • AES 256-BIT SSL Secure
  • 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee badge
  • 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
  • Best Price Guarantee
  • Free Shipping
  • Credit Card Processor Logos
  • PayPal Logos or Stripe Logos

The free badges do not have the TrustLock logo featured on them. To access badges with the logo you need to pay for a premium account, which costs anywhere from $9 to $20/month. 

In conclusion

You have approximately five seconds to build trust with your potential customers. Trust seals can instantly start this process.

Ultimately eCommerce customers want to know that when they are shopping online brands take website security seriously and personal data is not at risk. As we have highlighted these trust seals can have a big impact on your website.

Make sure to leverage trust badges on your website, and use the different types highlight strategically across your website to quickly build trust with your customers, increase conversion rate and ultimately drive more sales.

Not having trust badges on your website is simply a bad idea.

Trust Badge FAQs

What is a trust badge?

trust badge is a symbol or icon placed on your website that ensures your visitors that the page is legitimate and all processes are safe and secure.

Where do you put trust badges?

Trust badges can be strategically placed throughout your website to help increase conversion rates. For example, on your homepage, product pages, during the checkout journey & payment page.

Do trust badges work?

Numerous studies have shown that trust badges can increase conversion rates. For example, In one survey 48% said that trust badges reassure them.

How To Drive As Much As 820% More Revenue With Your Klaviyo Remarketing

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You’ve got your sign-up forms running. Your email and SMS lists are growing. And you’ve set up your core Klaviyo remarketing campaigns.

But when your email and SMS messages land in your subscribers’ inboxes, you’re not getting the engagement you were hoping for.

The issue is this: your audience has grown and you now have multiple subscriber types. That means subscribers with lots of different interests, on different journeys, with different needs. It’s no longer a few subscribers with similar browsing preferences.

The solution? More user data to create better segmentation. Which means you can then send more targeted, relevant Klaviyo campaigns.

The advanced Klaviyo integration

With Yieldify’s advanced Klaviyo integration, you can send substantially more user behavior data to your Klaviyo list than with Klaviyo alone – and could increase your remarketing revenue by as much as 820%.

Save more subscriber data in your Klaviyo profiles

1. Capture custom events

With Klaviyo you’re already capturing a lot of data on your subscribers – demographic data such as their names, email addresses and phone numbers, as well as behavioral data such as emails opened, products added to basket or orders returned.

With Yieldify’s advanced Klaviyo integration you can go one step further: capture custom tracking events. With custom events, you get to capture the subscriber data that’s most valuable for your remarketing campaigns.

Track a subscriber’s behavior and pass events to their Klaviyo profile to trigger highly segmented Klaviyo flows

A custom event could pass data to a subscriber’s Klaviyo profile when they: 

  • Hover over product photos on a category page. They’re probably in the consideration phase. If they exit, you can send a browse abandonment email with the products they hovered over.

  • Exit the page after browsing the page for e.g. more than 60 seconds. They’re most likely developing an interest in a product and would welcome an abandonment email to help them resume their journey.

  • Become inactive on the payments page. They might be hesitant about checking out. They could benefit from an email highlighting your Buy Now Pay Later options, payment encryption and data compliance.

  • Move to a different browser tab. They could be comparing prices on a competitor’s website. A discount email could persuade them to complete their purchase with you.

  • Select an option from a dropdown menu e.g. a travel destination. You can be pretty sure they’re considering traveling to that city. Add them to your city guide email sequence.

User exits after spending e.g. 60 seconds on a page and triggers your browse abandonment email

As long as the data is in your site or sits in your data layer, there are hundreds of custom events you can pass to your subscribers’ profiles with Yieldify’s Klaviyo integration.

The result? You’ll build up your subscribers’ Klaviyo profiles with the most important data and send your customers Klaviyo campaigns that feel like they were made just for them.

2. Capture how your subscribers interact with your Yieldify personalization campaigns

If you sign up for a full package with Yieldify, you’ll get access to the advanced Klaviyo integration and to Yieldify’s complete range of personalization tests. 

That means you’ll get all the benefits of Yieldify personalization, be able to track how your subscribers interact with those personalization tests and send them relevant, segmented emails.

For example: 

  • When subscribers share their product interest by tapping one of multiple CTAs on an overlay, you can assume they’re interested in that category. You can then engage that audience with an email or SMS follow-up promoting products from that category.
When a user taps the “Best Sellers” CTA in your Yieldify overlay, send them a follow-up email with your Best Sellers
  • A high returns rate can be one of your biggest costs. When subscribers add several sizes of the same item to cart, you can automatically display a “Size Guide” campaign with Yieldify. You can then trigger a Klaviyo flow to send those users a customer service email with size advice.

A subscriber adds several sizes of the same item to cart, triggers a Yieldify campaign with a “Size Guide” video, then triggers a Klaviyo flow with size advice.

When you send more responsive messages, you’ll get happier, more loyal customers.

Drive as much as 820% more revenue with personalized remarketing flows

With the advanced Klaviyo integration, capturing the subscriber data that’s most valuable to your brand means you’ll segment your audiences even better, and better segmentation means you’ll send more relevant Klaviyo campaigns. In turn, more engaging messages drive increased revenue. You could lift your remarketing revenue by as much as 820% with more personalized messages.

Ecommerce marketers at brands like yours trust the advanced Klaviyo integration

How to get started with the advanced Klaviyo integration

To start driving more remarketing revenue with the advanced Klaviyo integration, speak to a member of the Yieldify sales team today

4 Marketing Hacks to Battle High Bounce Rates and Low Engagement

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Battling bounce rates is an ongoing fight for any marketer. In this article, we lift the lid on 4 lesser-discussed ways to reduce bounce rates and increase engagement on your website.

Bounce rate is one of the biggest conversion killers around.

It robs you of your chance to convince prospects that your products are worth their time.

According to ClickTale 34% is the average bounce rate for e-commerce sites. If your site has a higher percentage of users who don’t stick around, then you may have a problem.

Google Analytics defines bounce rate as the “percentage of single page sessions”. An accurate description, but one devoid of useful application. We like to think of bounce rate in more actionable terms: the opposite of engagement. Our work has shown that the more engaging a site, the lower the bounce rate.

Pretty simple, huh? All you’ve got to do is increase engagement and, by extension, you’ll be increasing conversions.

Well, whilst simple in theory, it’s difficult in practice. In this article we’ll run you through a few of the lesser-known tactics proven to increase engagement and reduce bounce rate:

#1 Attract the right visitors
#2 Relevant landing pages 
#3 Proper use of overlays 
#4 Use storytelling elements 

What You Probably Already Know

We don’t want to spend too long on a well-trodden path here. However, in the spirit of being thorough, here are the basics on reducing bounce rate.

  • Optimise your pages for different devices. There’s nothing worse than trying to navigate a fiddly desktop site on your mobile.
  • Page load time. Modern consumers are impatient. If your page takes too long to load, they won’t need to bounce because they’ll have given up before seeing what you have to offer!
  • Provide engaging content. Engaging content is key to capturing attention. The problem is figuring out what your audience finds engaging!
  • Logical layouts. There’s no point in having the best content if no one can navigate your site.
  • Internal links. See the bolded wording in this article? Some of these links go to other Yieldify articles and are key in reducing bounce rate; the longer someone stays on your site, the more likely they are to convert.

Whilst the above is good advice it doesn’t bring much to the conversation. So, let’s move on and take a closer look at how you can better reduce your bounce rates.

#1 Attract the right visitors

Quantity does not beat quality.

Yes, you may be seeing a high bounce rate but securing more traffic isn’t the answer. Broadening your keyword selection or utilising paid traffic sources isn’t going to help with the problem.

All these steps do is attract a wider yet less qualified audience. Instead of seeing your bounce rate go down, you’ll likely see it go up because you’re marketing to the wrong crowd. Trying to sell to anyone and everyone doesn’t just bring a poor ROI, but it will also skew your data.

Let’s put it in real life terms. Imagine you run an e-commerce store that sells TVs. Your goal is to attract prospects who are searching for TVs, so you optimise specifically for TV related keywords. Don’t branch out and also target DVD or blu-ray keywords unless those are also in your product line.

Why? Because it attracts the wrong audience. Sure they’re related products, but someone looking for a blu-ray player likely already has a TV. You might get them to land on your site, but they’ll bounce as soon as they realise you don’t sell what they’re looking for.

You end up having wasted a lot of your money on a failed campaign and have stats which don’t accurately represent the true problems with your site. The bounce rate instead represents your inability to attract qualified prospects.Optimising based on these stats will only lead to further failure.

You shouldn’t care if you can’t convert people who have no interest in what you’re selling. You should be targeting your research and messaging to those who have an interest. These are the people who will help refine your marketing and increase your bottom line.

#2 Relevant landing pages

Does traffic from Facebook have the same needs as traffic from search engine results pages (SERPs)?

Nope.

These are two different sources of traffic and have vastly different needs. You need to optimise your landing pages to better reflect the needs of the traffic you’re receiving.

It’s a complex issue to get your head around, however Tyson Quick, CEO of Instapage, sums up the issue nicely. “A Google AdWords click is typically coming from a visitor who is directly looking for a solution to a specific problem they’re already aware of, while a visitor from a Facebook or Twitter advertisement is typically still in the problem / solution discovery phase. The post click experience should reflect this mindset.”

That means one generic landing page for all your traffic isn’t going to work. A landing page that explains the solution only will convert well with SERP traffic, but will have little to no impact on social traffic unaware of the problem you’re solving.

It boils down to the fact that different traffic sources are all at different stages in your funnel when landing on your site. You wouldn’t push a new prospect to purchase on their first visit, just as you wouldn’t waste time building desire with a prospect who’s ready to purchase.

If your landing pages aren’t optimised to specific stages of your funnel, you’re going to struggle to keep your prospects from walking away.

#3 Proper use of overlays

Overlays are the Marmite of the conversion world. But love them or hate them, they work.

The key to a successful overlay campaign is presenting a personalised, relevant offer or incentive at the right time. If you indiscriminately bombard a user as they enter your site with impersonal overlays featuring irrelevant offers they’re going to bounce. And rightfully so.

The best overlays feel like part of your user’s journey. For example, an overlay timed to trigger as your prospect is leaving your site doesn’t interrupt their browsing experience. Instead it captures attention and gives them a reason to stay, like this example from Virgin Trains:

Virgin Trains conversion rate optimisation

But timing is only half the battle. You’ve also got to ensure that the overlay presents a useful, relevant offer.

Keeping to these two key tenets has helped us achieve amazing results with exit-intent overlays.

#4 Use storytelling elements

Storytelling. It’s not just for bedtime with the kids.

People from all ages and backgrounds can’t help but be drawn in by a captivating tale. It hooks attention and holds interest like no other method can.

However, we’re not saying that every page you write should be some epic fable of how your company achieved X or overcame Y. What storytelling in marketing refers to is understanding how your prospects assimilate and understand information.

In short, modern users don’t read. They scan.

We’re busy people who have no interest in spending thirty minutes getting to grips with the ins and outs of a product or brand. We want the key points, and we want them now.

Good storytelling understands this and uses visual cues to better explain the story. You can’t rely on large blocks of text to tell your story. You’ve got to utilise key visual cues including image placement, sub heads and proper spacing to highlight the key elements that tell the story your prospects want to hear.

Giving an overview with these elements hooks attention. Once that attention is hooked you need to ensure you’re following the golden rules for marketing storytelling:

  • Make your prospect the hero. No one cares about what you’ve achieved or overcome. They do care however what you can help them to achieve. Make sure the story is focused on their goals and journey.
  • Be honest. Prospects are too smart for tall tales and grand claims. They’ll see right through it and label you a charlatan.
  • Be Concise.You might have hooked attention with your visual cues, but that doesn’t mean our prospect isn’t busy. Get to the point and save everyone time.

It’s a complex approach and can be difficult to understand. To help outline the process here’s a great example of storytelling from Hiut Denim that get’s you on board with the company’s ethos and establishes them as experts in their field.

Conclusion

Reducing the bounce rate of your site hinges on your ability to create an engaging and relevant experience for your prospects.

That doesn’t mean using clickbait-esque headlines or trying to force your message on new prospects as soon as they land on your site.

There needs to be a cohesive journey from initial referral source through to purchase page. Coupling this cohesion with a prospect centric message is key to creating an engaging, relevant experience. An experience which will lead to a reduction in your bounce rate.

However, reducing your bounce rate is only the first step in your optimisation process.

Whilst bounce rate can destroy the success of your business, tackling the problem means nothing if you’ve not got anything of substance at later stages.

If you’re currently suffering from a high bounce rate and aren’t sure where to start, get in touch with us to learn more about the commercial benefits of exit-intent overlays.

Cross-Selling Defined With 5 Smart Strategies & Examples To Boost Ecommerce Revenue

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Cross selling strategies | Yieldify

Five effective ways to both delight customers and increase average order value using smart cross-selling strategies.

In this article, we’ll cover the following on cross-selling:
1. How cross-selling works
2. Examples of cross-selling
3. Cross-selling vs Upselling: What’s the difference?
4. Why cross-selling is important
5. Cross-selling case study
6. Cross-selling strategies
6.1. Behavioral segmentation
6.2. Map the customer journey
6.3. Show supplemental products
6.4. Use social
6.5. Use order thresholds
7. Our closing thoughts

When it comes to increasing eCommerce sales, there are many levers you can pull. Some, like promotions and discounting, are effective in the short-run. Whereas others may take more time to implement but are known to bring long-term value and a sizable uplift in revenue.

Flooding your funnel with new customers is one way to go. We’ve explored it in more detail in The New Rules of Customer Acquisition ebook. However, as the old fable goes, it is five times more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones (yes, it’s still true in 2020!).

Reactivating cart abandoners is another good tactic to increase revenue. According to data from 41 different studies containing statistics on eCommerce shopping cart abandonment, the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is 69.57%.

That’s 7 out of 10 potential purchases going to waste. 

However, this time we decided to explore cross-selling, a tried and true strategy to increase average order value (AOV), boost revenue, and even improve customer experience. 

But first, let’s take a look at the terminology.

What does cross selling mean?

Cross-selling is a marketing strategy that persuades prospective customers to purchase ancillary products.

What are ancillary products?

An ancillary product is a complementary add-on product that is acquired when purchasing the original product. Ancillary products are very popular with health care and insurance providers, but they have been largely adopted by online retailers as well.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s get dig into cross selling and how it all works….

How does cross-selling work?

We’re sure that you have seen many cross-selling examples on the web, even if you didn’t recognize them as such. Marketplaces like Amazon utilize cross-selling very effectively by recommending related products based on your search.

To better understand how cross-selling and ancillary products work, let’s take a look at a couple of examples of cross-selling strategies from different industries.

Examples Of Cross-selling Strategies

Examples Of Cross-Selling Strategies

Cross selling happens every day, and you may not even realize you have been enticed by it.

Examples of cross selling include:

  • Fast food restaurants asking: “Do you want fries with that?”
  • eCommerce websites showing “customers also bought”
  • A mobile phone retailer suggesting a customer buys a new case for their new phone
  • An electronics retailer suggesting gadget insurance with a new laptop purchase

Cross selling is everywhere in the world of retail and eCommerce. Let’s look at some examples in more detail.

Going back to mobile phones, an online telecom shop that cell phones and devices can try and cross-sell phone cases, wireless headphones, etc to those looking to buy a new iPhone.

AT&T uses cross-selling on product pages

For an online fashion retailer, this could mean selling compatible products that help complete the look. A premium bags and accessories brand Coccinelle offers to buy metal charms if you’re buying a bag, whereas Adidas shows you the complete outfit.

Cross-selling example from luxury fashion brand Coccinelle
Adidas uses cross-selling to help customers complete the look

Selling beauty products? Cross-selling applies here too. When browsing for lipstick on beauty retailer’s MAKE website, we see recommendations to buy lip primer as well. Buying a razor on Aesop will prompt you to consider a shaving brush and a shaving serum.

MAKE uses cross-selling to offer ancillary makeup products
Cross-selling example from beauty brand Aesop

Cross-selling is irreplaceable for brands that sell high-value but low purchase frequency products. A classic example comes from the mattress company Casper. A business that started purely with high-quality mattresses ranging from $395 to $2,995 has expanded to sell bed frames, pillows, and bedding.

Cross-selling functions within financial services as well. For example, in banking, to cross sell means that when you open up a checking account, they will offer you to open a savings account as well.

Cross-selling vs Upselling: What’s the difference?

Before we jump into exploring the best cross-selling strategies, let’s clarify one thing that often comes up as confusing. How is cross-selling different from upselling?

What is upselling? Upselling is a marketing strategy that persuades prospective customers to purchase higher value products or upgrade a product or a service. In other words, whereas cross-selling is often associated with the McDonalds-popularized quote “Do you want fries with that?” upselling means taking your initial order and flipping it for a combo meal.

Take all the aforementioned cross-selling examples. If we were to upsell, we would:

  • Offer iPhone 11 Pro instead of an iPhone 11.
  • Offer a medium-sized bag instead of its smaller version.
  • Offer to purchase in a bundle instead of individual products.
  • Offer the premium mattress vs the original.
Upselling example from beauty brand Glossier

Why is cross-selling important?

Imagine you run a business whose best selling product costs $10 and brings in $10,000 per month. You’ve been tasked with increasing overall revenue so you focus on an expensive optimization campaign aimed at new customer acquisition.

After a lengthy campaign, you managed to secure a lift of 10% in overall sales, or an extra $1000 per month. Not too shabby.

However, a company with the exact same sales record decides instead to focus on a cross-selling campaign. For every $10 item that was added to a cart, they recommended an ancillary product worth $5. The campaign costs next to nothing to implement and is up and running in a fraction of the time of your optimization campaign.

The effectiveness of cross-selling varies, but if we assume this campaign hits a 35% success rate (the same as Amazon) then monthly revenue goes up by $1,750. That’s an extra $750 every month for a fraction of the work and cost and in a far shorter time span.

Cross-selling really is one of the most effective ways to increase overall revenue. However, don’t assume it’s as easy as simply offering more products to your prospects.

Cross-selling Case Study

If you’re looking for more reasons to embark on a clever cross-selling strategy take a look at this case study from one of our clients. Skyn ICELAND.

After analyzing their customer journey we found opportunities to drive more conversions through cross-selling. We targeted visitors purchasing Hydro Cool Firming Eye Gels, utilized Yieldify’s flexible targeting feature to recommended a complementary product.

This resulted in a +23.1% uplift in conversion rate and boosted order value by 14.94%.

You can read the full cross-selling case study here

How to create an effective cross-selling strategy?

Your primary concern with a cross-selling campaign should be ensuring that your offer is relevant. You’re aiming to offer more value to the customer, not to cause hesitation and unnecessary friction.

If a prospect adds an exercise DVD to their cart, you’d have little luck offering them smoking paraphernalia or a double chocolate gateau. Those items may well reduce overall conversions.

Finding cross selling opportunities isn’t exactly easy. Thankfully, there are five effective cross-selling strategies that should also help you zero in on the perfect products to offer.

1. Use behavioral segmentation

In a nutshell, behavioral segmentation lets you create customer cohorts and serve personalized offers based on the behavior they exhibit on your website.

What this means for cross-selling is that you can group your website visitors or existing customers based on the pages they browse and the products they view (their behavior), thus better understanding their goals and challenges. You can then serve your product recommendations in real-time making them relevant right there and then.

2. Map out your customer journeys

Even the most relevant offer can flop if served at the wrong time. Creating a customer journey map helps you identify the best touchpoints for repeat interaction and cross-sell.

Let’s say you’re Nike and you have a customer who’s already bought a pair of cross-training sneakers from you. They’ve also downloaded your Nike Training Club app. A week has passed and they’ve returned to your online shop several times to look at more cross-training products. They’re actively interested, so it’s probably a good time to follow up.

Example of cross-selling from Nike (via Really Good Emails)

Knowing their past purchases and their activity online tells you what ancillary products to offer and when. This greatly increases the chances of your cross selling efforts working and increasing revenue.

3. Offer supplemental – but not essential – products

In certain industries, the usefulness of products can be greatly enhanced with a few small extras. Take the tech sector as an example. The variety of add-ons and enhancements available make it the ideal industry for cross-selling supplementary products.

For instance, a customer purchasing a TV would likely be happy with nothing but the television itself. However, their enjoyment of the product may be enhanced with a wall mount, HDMI cables or a brand new sound system.

Offering add-ons rather than must-haves is also beneficial to the customer experience. Cross-selling will not work effectively if the client is irritated that they won’t be able to fully use the original product without actually purchasing ancillaries.

4. Take the social approach

The social approach differs a little from every other method of cross-selling. It’s used most notably by Amazon with their “frequently bought together” section on every product page. It’s interesting in that it doesn’t rely on predetermined algorithms, product sets, or “expert” recommendations. It uses the browsing and purchasing behavior of the wider customer base to offer dynamic product couplings.

It’s an incredibly effective method as the product combination suggestions are often not connections you’d traditionally make or recommended by industry pros, yet still work incredibly well together.

5. Order thresholds

This is one of the most popular cross-selling techniques and can be seen at every level of product sales. It’s technically not cross-selling as you’re not actively recommending a supplementary product to your prospects. You are, however, incentivizing them to spend more by notifying them of an order discount threshold such as the below.

Whilst not technically a traditional method of cross-selling, it’s incredibly effective in increasing AOV and overall revenue. It formed the lynchpin of a campaign we ran for M&S France which brought a 13:1 ROI and over 3,000 new leads.

By offering this deal you’re creating a win/win scenario for everyone involved. You as the company are increasing your AOV whilst the customer, despite spending a little more money, is getting incredible bang for their buck. Coupling this with the traditional cross-selling technique of suggesting supplementary products can have a profound effect on your overall AOV and revenue.

What does cross selling result in?

If done right a cross selling initiatives can have a lot of positive results. Remember cross selling isn’t just for new or prospective customers, it can work even better on an existing customer.

  1. Increased customer lifetime value – If you’re using your customer purchase data effectively you should be able to suggest genuinely useful complementary products. This leads to an increase in customer satisfaction and ultimately lifetime value.
  2. Increase in customer loyaltyIf customers purchase additional products they are becoming more and more invested in your brand, if these products continue to satisfy or exceed their expectations you’ll see an increase in customer loyalty.
  3. Push specific product lines – If there are specific product lines that are not performing as well as you would like, if you can find a suitable match a cross selling promotion could help increase sales.
  4. Increase in revenue – All of the above points will ultimately result in an increase in revenue for companies that effectively use cross selling promotions.

Closing thoughts

Whether you decide to take the traditional approach and recommend specific products for your cross-selling campaign or in fact rely on a bundle or offer to sell more products and increase AOV, you need to remember the golden rule of cross-selling:

It’s all about increasing value for the customer by promoting related products.

Stop thinking about what’s going to bring the biggest lift for you as a business and instead look at what provides the most value. You may end up recommending products that bring a smaller AOV increase, but you’ll create a far better campaign that will stand the test of time and continue to bring a good return for months or years to come.

Cross Selling FAQs

What are some examples of cross-selling?

Examples of cross-selling include: Showing “you might also like” or “complete the look” product recommendations. At very easy example is the cashier at a fast-food restaurant asking “would you like fries with that?”

What is cross selling and up selling?

Cross-selling simply shows customers related or complementary items that they may find useful. Upselling actively encourages customers to purchase or “upgrade” to a higher-end product than the one they are currently viewing.

Why is cross selling important?

Cross-selling is a very important marketing tactic as it can drive considerably incremental revenue by capitalising on customers current purchase intent by showing additional products that the customer will also find useful.

Holiday Marketing Statistics: 5 Takeaways from 2020

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Find out the key holiday marketing statistics from peak season 2020 and discover our top tips to beat the Q1 slump.

2020 was truly a year for change, especially when it came to the eCommerce sector.

With COVID-19 acting as a strong catalyst for growth, retailers witnessed website traffic and consumer demand reach unparalleled levels. This was amid a monumental shift in shopping behavior as the world’s population became locked down at home in a bid to control the coronavirus.

With this in mind, we felt it fair to assume that peak season was likely to be one for the record books. So, in October Yieldify commissioned a research study, gathering opinions from 400 eCommerce leaders and 2000 consumers* to predict what might happen in the coming holiday season.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how those predictions matched up to reality. Starting with the top 5 holiday marketing statistics and takeaways:

1. Despite an uptick in website traffic to eCommerce stores, conversions decreased by 2% year-on-year. Thus, underlining the crucial need to deploy conversion rate optimization tactics. (Data source: Yieldify)

2. Consumers continued new exploratory shopping habits. 58% of Cyber Weekend purchases were made by new visitors vs the 29% predicted, which presents a retention challenge to retailers post-holiday season. (Data source: Klaviyo)

3. Higher consideration was given to online purchases this year, averaging 6.3 online sessions vs 5 in 2019. With more touchpoints to contend with, customer journey mapping will be more relevant than ever. (Data source: Yieldify)

4. Discounts declined in value and popularity in 2020 with 5% fewer emails featuring discount-related subject lines and 30-39% discounts yielding the most consumer interest. Proving that marginal sacrifice, while effective, is not critical to success. (Data source: Yieldify & Klaviyo)

5. Finally, email marketing proved a crucial channel for Cyber Weekend. Over 165 million emails were sent on Black Friday alone, which were directly responsible for 537,000 orders placed. This adds emphasis to having an effective lead capture strategy all year round. (Data source: Klaviyo)

A season of higher clicks but lower conversions

In line with all expectations, consumers hit eCommerce websites hard over the holiday season and sales skyrocketed.

According to an analysis by Digital Commerce 360, for the five days beginning Thanksgiving Day through to the following Monday, also known as “Cyber 5,” traffic rose by 26.4% versus 2019. This caused a 35.7% uplift in online site visits versus 2019 when looking across November and December as a whole.
However, amid this onslaught of new visitors came high competition between brands. Visitors approached purchases with higher consideration, and securing conversions took an average of 6.3 sessions versus 5 in 2019.

So yes, opportunities were rife to significantly increase revenue. But this placed retailers under intense pressure to make outstanding first impressions with their new audience or risk abandonment.

Overall, eCommerce websites saw a 2% decrease in conversions, suggesting that not every onsite customer journey was up to the task.

The holiday marketing tactics that did work

While it’s true that overall conversions decreased, there were a whole host of tactics that eCommerce retailers deployed successfully.

In fact, the results for 2020 further highlighted the importance of having the right marketing tactics and conversion rate optimization strategy working together. It’s clear that success simply cannot be guaranteed from sheer acquisition alone.

Back in October, our predictions showed that marketers placed high importance on email and website personalization to drive conversions. Now let’s take a deeper dive into how these tactics worked out for brands during the holiday season.

Email marketing

Over Cyber Weekend, email activity for eCommerce brands was off the charts. Record volumes of emails were sent to consumers and Black Friday proved the most popular. Klaviyo emails hit over 165 million inboxes in a single day.

And the result? Just short of 5 million orders were placed during October and November. All of which can be directly attributed to those emails sent.

Klaviyo’s client, Angel Jackets, echoed this sentiment. They saw great success from their ‘step into the New Year in Style’ email campaign.

“Email marketing worked out great for us. We use Klaviyo for email promotion. We sent a year-end email to our customers and mentioned – step into the New Year in Style. Not only the sales were good, but the click rate was also above expected.”

Syed Ali, Angel Jackets

Top tip for Q1: Make money while you sleep by using marketing automation for welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, and more. Then, hone your approach through A/B testing, experimenting with different content, subject lines, or timing of emails in a series.

Website personalization

On the Yieldify side, we implemented a whole host of holiday eCommerce CRO strategies for our client base. These ranged from list building strategies, wishlist campaigns, social proof, gift guides, and checkout reminders.

One particularly effective way we saw retailers driving urgency and in-session conversions was utilizing countdown timers.

This worked because many holiday visitors were shopping with a date in mind and were mindful of delivery delays as a result of COVID. This made counting down to delivery deadlines an incredibly effective tactic to nudge procrastinating gifters to convert.

By targeting users that had an item in their basket with a campaign visual such as the above, conversions increased by 8.5% on average.

Top tip for Q1: Effective conversion rate optimization (CRO) depends on segmenting and targeting accurately. Use behavioral segmentation to combine dozens of attributes to effectively launch messages that move your user towards conversion.

Getting more juice from the squeeze of each customer interaction

Simply put, the post-purchase experience is arguably just as important as the initial conversion. This is the key opportunity for brands to capitalize on that initial success, encourage repeat purchases, and drive higher customer lifetime value (CLV).

While 42% of Cyber Weekend purchases were made by repeat buyers, a huge 58% were made by first-time visitors. This presents a challenge post-holiday season of turning those visitors into long-term loyal customers who, according to Barilliance, are:

  1. 65.2% more likely to add an item to cart than a first-time visitor;
  2. 73.7% more likely to convert than first-time visitors;
  3. Projected to spend 16.2% more per transaction.

A tactic that we saw used successfully to do this was triggering campaign messaging on the confirmation screen as shown in the below example:

By targeting users at the very last point of the purchase journey, retailers could encourage repeat purchases while still in-session.

The ultimate goal here is to dissuade the customer from leaving your website for as long as possible by capturing their interest at the exact moment where you have the customer’s full attention.

On average, 4% of users converted a second time, while still in-session, when shown a variation of the above message.

But what about AOV?

When you consider that the average order value for eCommerce retailers decreased by $7 across the holiday season 2020 – a boost of 16.2% from returning visitors sounds particularly enticing.

And increasing AOV for both new and returning users can be as simple as featuring a progress bar.

Progress bars are a great way to help shoppers track their acquired offers, and encourage them to continue spending more to get more.

Brands that deployed this tiered tactic not only increased AOV but also saw uplifts in conversions. Thus, making it a perfect tactic to bring through to Q1 strategies.

Top tip for Q1: Lifetime value might center around what a customer does on your website, but making sure that they return is half the challenge. Use email Remarketing to send smart, behaviorally-determined cart abandonment emails to ensure that you’re always front of mind.

Have we witnessed the death of the discount?

Following on from the tactics that worked, next, let’s look at the effectiveness of the messaging used – specifically discounts.

In our peak season analysis, we predicted that approximately 30% fewer brands would be offering discounts.

And for those that did, the discount amount was projected to be less than in previous years. The most popular discount levels for 2020 came in at 11-20% and 21-30% off.

Peak season 2020 discount statistics

These assumptions were supported by a post-holiday analysis of the email subject lines sent through Klaviyo during peak season.

While discount messaging was still popular, 5% fewer discount-orientated emails were sent. Also, across October and November, the percentage of non-discount focused subject lines came in at 69.8% and 63.8% respectively.

But did this Scrooge-like take on discounts pay off?

According to our latest data insights, yes!

Looking at the average click-through rate and average incremental click sales uplift, it is clear that offering 30-39% was the sweet spot to hit. This was far less than the stereotypical 70-80% off headlines seen in previous years. In fact, interest steeply fell when retailers offered 40% off or more.

As we move into Q1, more and more brands are starting to move away from margin giveaways, and with consumer demand remaining strong for eCommerce it’s hardly a surprise.

But what other incentives can retailers use?

Ultimately the answer to this will vary from brand to brand and the challenge is to experiment until you find the one that works best for your audience.

In the below example of our client, female fashion retailer Petal & Pup, incentivize visitors to share their email address in exchange for email alerts of new arrivals.

Petal & Pup case study

With 100’s of new styles being added to the website every week and the nature of fast fashion, where items sell-out exceptionally quickly, this messaging is spot on for their audience.

In just three months, Petal & Pup achieved a 116% increase in leads captured per week. Thus, supercharging new customer acquisition to fuel future email engagement. 

Another solution for avoiding margin sacrifice unless absolutely necessary is switching up the exact time at which discounts are being presented. For example, try running tests across different points of the customer journey such as upon exit intent or upon a certain number of sessions instead of upon entry. The results might just surprise you!

Top tip for Q1: Many eCommerce retailers deploy thresholds on their sites, encouraging users to spend a little more to unlock discounts or perks such as free delivery. The problem is that many users never see them. Use content personalization to bring these messages front-and-center at the ideal moment.

In conclusion

After reviewing our selection of holiday marketing statistics, the tried and tested solution to overcoming the Q1 slump is simple: Effective customer journey optimization that combines both website personalization and email marketing together with one clear goal – revenue.

With visitors spending more sessions on-site before converting, the number of touchpoints has risen. To succeed, you need to optimize these touchpoints to encourage conversions, shorten the purchase cycle, and secure the all-important next sale. Ideally, without the need for a discount.

As the world continues to change throughout 2021, one thing is certain and that is that further change is coming for eCommerce retailers. Ultimately, it will be the retailers that can react to evolving consumer trends the fastest, with proven marketing strategies such as those we referenced, that will see the best results.

Happy 2021 everyone!

* 3 online surveys were conducted with a panel of potential respondents. The recruitment periods were 8th July 2019 to 31st July 2019 and 31st July 2020 to 21st August 2020. A total of 400 respondents completed the first two surveys. 200 respondents residing in the UK and 200 respondents residing in the US. Only senior marketers or eCommerce directors at retailers with an eCommerce presence were eligible to take part and complete the survey. A total of 2000 respondents completed the third survey1000 respondents residing in the UK and 200 respondents residing in the US. All questions within the survey were verified to be MRS compliant by a marketing research company specializing in online and mobile polling.

How To Create a Successful Ecommerce Sales Funnel + Tactics

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Do you have a robust consumer-focused marketing model? What does your customer journey look like? Can you tell me about re-engagement paths?

Let’s set the jargon aside for a moment and think about jam instead. To make jam, you need fruit and a whole lot of sugar. You boil the sugar and the fruit together for a set amount of time, and then you pour the hot mixture through a funnel into sterilized jars, which you seal to secure your confection.

“I didn’t come here to learn to preserve raspberries!” I hear you, “How does this relate to ecommerce?”

The answer? It’s all in the funnel.

Your business is a Mason jar, and consumers are the jam. You need a sales funnel to bring them in, and we’re going to teach you how to create one. 

In this article, we’ll learn about:

  • The buyer’s journey.
  • Typical barriers to purchase.
  • The four main stages of a sales funnel.
  • How to optimize each part of your marketing model.

By the time you reach a conclusion, you’ll be a pipeline marketing maven. 

Let’s get started.

What Is an Ecommerce Sales Funnel?

Simply put, an ecommerce sales funnel is a visual representation of your customer journey. Consumers enter the top of the sales funnel and move down, stage by stage until they (hopefully) become repeat customers.

Some consumers slide through the funnel quickly, going from a lead to a fan in the blink of an eye — they see something they want; they buy that thing; they become a brand advocate. Other consumers navigate sales funnels like three-toed sloths, taking months or years to reach your checkout page.

So, which consumers do you target? The answer: both. If you craft your sales funnel carefully, it’ll act as an effective conduit for quick decision-makers and procrastinators.

Every business has a unique sales funnel — but basic pipeline anatomy stays the same across the board. If you sell low-cost items (for example beauty products, apparel, toys, or pet products), your sales funnel will probably be fairly short. Why? Because the cost won’t be such a barrier to purchase. Using the same logic, if you’re in the luxury market (high-end watches, expensive jewelry, cutting-edge tech, or vehicles), your sales funnel will likely be longer.

Do You Need a Sales Funnel for Your Online Store?

In short, yes — you absolutely need a sales funnel for your online store. 

Winners keep score, and successful businesses invariably think about where their customers come from. A well-planned sales funnel can help you drive traffic to your site, improve your conversion ratio, build your customer base, and grow brand awareness.

You need data to build a funnel. And to acquire that data, you’ll need to collect email addresses with lead generation tactics. Before you begin, think about where your leads usually come from. Do people interact with your company on social media? Can you capture consumers via Facebook or Twitter ads? If you figure out where your potential customers “live,” you can target them appropriately and usher them into the top of your pipeline.

4 Stages of an Ecommerce Sales Funnel

We mentioned the sales funnel structure earlier. Now we’ll look at four main funnel components, and then we’ll talk about tactics you can use for your funnel optimization.

1. Awareness stage.

Consumers in the awareness stage are brand new on the scene. They found out about your company via Google (this is where SEO tactics pay off), or a paid Facebook ad, or an influencer. Are you a legitimate company, or are you running a scam? Do you sell a product they might like? Do they have a problem you can fix? These folks don’t know yet.

You need to make a great first impression — and fast. You need to educate these folks about your business and favourably position your brand. Think of yourself as a gardener: this is the seed-planting phase of your marketing plan.

Tactics to try out:

Use social media: Social media sites aren’t particularly effective e-commerce sales platforms, but they’re fabulous places to find new leads. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offer two main marketing tools: paid ads and pages, or profiles. You can use both avenues to grow brand awareness and boost your business success.

In a recent survey by Blue Fountain Media, 90% of respondents said that social media helped them gain considerable exposure for their companies. Search engine rankings, brand reputation, inbound traffic, conversion rate, and brand loyalty all improved after social media marketing campaigns.

“Successful companies in social media function more like entertainment companies, publishers, or party planners than as traditional advertisers.” – Erik Qualman.

Create ranking blog content: Starting a new blog is a fantastic organic marketing strategy. You don’t need a massive advertising budget to create high-quality content — you need to find your unique brand voice. Consumers regularly subscribe to blogs they find interesting, and they share posts they find relatable. If you produce good content and position yourself as a thought leader, you’ll naturally drive traffic to your ecommerce site.

Blog posts make great advertorials, too. In a nutshell, advertorials are advertisements disguised as editorial content. They read like journalistic articles and blend in with host sites — magazines, blogs, online newspapers — where they explain expensive or complicated products. Successful ecommerce companies often use affiliate blogs as advertorial hosts.


Create look-alike audiences for Facebook ads: When it comes to your marketing efforts, big data is your friend. Imagine marketing your product to 100,000 clones of your best current paying customer. Science fiction? Actually, no. Facebook Lookalike Audiences make it easy to find people whose characteristics match your existing consumer base.

You begin with a source audience — a custom group you create with page fan, pixel, or mobile app data. Facebook AI analyzes that source audience and then delivers your Facebook ad to a brand new similar audience. Hello, increased conversion rates.

2. Consideration stage.

By the time they reach this juncture, consumers know who you are and what you sell. 
They’ve identified a need — a “pain point” — and they’re looking for solutions. They begin to think about buying your product. They might decide to subscribe to the RSS feed on your blog or your newsletter. If you offer a paid content upgrade, you’ll see an uptick in interest at the consideration stage.


This is the mid-funnel phase. You have to work a little harder to get results — a call to action won’t cut it here — but you’re one step closer to checkout. You need to show these people customer testimonials, curated product descriptions, and other compelling content.

Tactics to try out:

Utilize social proof: What is social proof? It’s essentially peer pressure wrapped up in a tasteful bow. Tooting your own horn is one thing, but when real consumers praise your product, you gain genuine street cred. Trustpilot or Google reviews, on-site testimonials, and social media comments are all forms of social proof


For best results, display as much positive social proof as you can on each product page. Respond to complaints and tackle customer service issues promptly to build a good reputation. The more successful you look, the more successful you’ll become.

“When people feel insecure about something, they look around for validation. Show them that other people trust you.” – Francisco Rosales.

Optimize product pages: Great product pages drive conversions. According to a recent study by ecommerce experience platform Salsify, consumers across the board expect to see at least six good-quality images and two videos per product. Use crisp, clear, professional-looking images, and make sure they’re optimized for online use so that they load quickly.

To bump up your SEO strategy, write unique product descriptions — and make them interesting and relatable. Begin sentences with action words; tell readers how your products will improve their lives. 


If applicable, use drop-down lists and radio buttons to make customization intuitive. Make essential information (dimensions, shipping costs, etc) easy to find, and end with an enticing call to action (CTA

3. Purchase stage.

Consumers in purchase limbo want to buy — but they’re not 100% convinced they want to buy from you. Not yet, anyway. 

Your job at this stage is to make the decision as easy as possible for them. You need to prove that you’re better than the competition: you offer better products, or better shipping options, or better aftercare, or better prices.

Try adding an exit-intent popup to your page. These clever little ads appear when consumers try to leave your site: offer a discount, free shipping, or a time-limited bundle proposal to give your average conversion rate a lift.

Tactics to try out:

Reduce checkout friction: Evaluate your checkout process. Is it frictionless? Are there nasty surprises lurking in the shadows? A 2019 survey by the Baymard Institute found that half of the customers abandoned their shopping carts because of unexpected shipping fees and other unplanned expenses. A further 21% left because they found the checkout process too long and complex.

Nix hidden postage costs, enable an easy-to-navigate payment gateway, and, if you can, offer a variety of alternative payment options — PayPal, Apple Pay, Klarna, and cryptocurrency. Encourage account creation at this stage, too. Eliminate as many form fields as possible, and only ask for essential information. 

If website visitors don’t complete checkout, send them abandoned cart emails enhanced with coupon codes.

4. Retention stage.

Your sales funnel doesn’t end with a customer’s first purchase. Repeat customers are an invaluable part of ecommerce success — after all, it’s much cheaper and easier to retain a customer than to attract a new one. This vital, final part of the marketing pipeline keeps your consumer base coming back time and again.

Points-based loyalty programs, value-driven client accounts, subscriber-only special offers, and periodic customer retention email series all help maintain a healthy connection. If you run a larger company, consider using a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to nurture rapport.

“Loyal customers — they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you: they insist that their friends do business with you.” – Chip Bell.

Tactics to try out:

Implement cross-sells and upsells: Don’t be afraid to use personalized email marketing to offer existing customers upsells, cross-sells, and add-ons. You can use your subscribers’ purchase histories to hone product recommendations, reach out, and ask for feedback. Many big-name brands send follow-up emails every 30 days — not too often, but not too infrequently, either.

Many popular SaaS ecommerce platforms support loyalty plugins. To get started, simply install the app, tailor your loyalty program, and promote it as much as possible. Many ecommerce retailers also create referral programs.

Best practices for your ecommerce sales funnel

Let’s end this guide with a sales channel strategy best practice recap. Implementing these tips will help you maximize conversions on your site:

  • Make sure your navigation is easy to follow: Create easy-to-use menus that take customers where they want to go. Optimize your site search to help visitors find the products they’re looking for.
  • Make it easy to buy: Streamline your checkout, eradicate unexpected shipping expenses, and offer consumers multiple payment options (PayPal, Apple Pay, Klarna, and cards).
  • Remove hesitation: Erase as many barriers to purchase as possible. Offer free shipping and free returns, answer presale questions with a chatbot, and display security badges in a prominent location.

ecommerce Funnel FAQs

What is an ecommerce funnel?

Simply put, an ecommerce sales funnel is a visual representation of your customer journey. Consumers enter the top of the sales funnel and move down, stage by stage until they (hopefully) become repeat customers.

How do you create a sales funnel for ecommerce?

There are 4 main stages to an ecommerce sales funnel. Awareness, Consideration, Purchase & Retention. You need marketing activity specifically designed to fuel each stage of the funnel, and naturally, move people through each stage.

Wrapping Up

To create an effective sales funnel, you have to understand how each part of the buyer’s journey works — and why. A well-planned marketing pipeline can help you gain new leads, retain existing customers, and build brand awareness for a brighter future in ecommerce.

Business intelligence tools and analytics can help you understand which marketing tactics are the most successful for building a strong sales funnel. 

How to Create Squeeze Pages That Convert with 5 Real-World Examples

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If growing your email database is top of the agenda for 2021, you need to start utilizing squeeze pages.

These particular type of landing pages are a great way to quickly build your email list in conjunction with other list growth solutions 

If you’re completely new to squeeze pages, then this guide is perfect for you! We detail everything you there is to know about squeeze pages and look at some of the best examples from leading eCommerce brands, including PlayStation, Karen Millen, Subway, and others. 

We will cover:

1. What is a squeeze page
– Squeeze page vs. landing page
– Squeeze page benefits
2. Real-world examples of eCommerce squeeze pages
3. Squeeze page design best practices
4. Best squeeze page builders

What is a squeeze page?

A squeeze page is a type of webpage that is used solely to collect contact data from website visitors. The page “squeezes” information, such as email address or phone number, by offering a single conversion action.

In order to persuade visitors to share their personal data, squeeze pages often feature some type of incentive: A special offer, discount, access to exclusive content or community.

Squeeze page vs landing page: What’s the difference? 

In a nutshell, a squeeze page is a stripped-down version of a landing page. But it also serves a slightly different purpose:

  • A landing page is created to inform and can feature several conversion actions, eg: email opt-in, content download, product purchase, etc.
  • A squeeze page is created solely to generate email or SMS opt-ins.

Now, that doesn’t mean that a squeeze page equals a signup form. These pages still feature the typical elements of a landing page, such as heading, value proposition, social proof, etc.

What squeeze pages don’t usually offer is deeper navigation into the rest of the website. In other words, when you land on a squeeze page you have only two options: To convert or to exit. On a typical landing page, you’re allowed and even encouraged to navigate to other pages, including the website’s homepage.

Here’s a typical landing page layout:

Compare it to a typical squeeze page design: The latter contains a single call-to-action, does not offer deeper navigation, and puts all the focus on getting that email opt-in.

Do squeeze pages really work?

You may be wondering: But why wouldn’t I want to restrict visitors from navigating to other parts of my website?

The simple answer is that by eliminating distractions, such as links to other pages, you force the visitor to focus on the message and offer that’s in front of them right now.

As a business, of course, you need to make a conscious decision when to use squeeze pages and when are you better off with a typical landing page. The usage really depends on your campaign goals.

One such example could be a fashion brand that’s running a PPC campaign to draw attention to its newly launched newsletter. A typical landing page can feature the opt-in form, but it will also have lots of other distractions. So you’ll be better off optimizing the post-click experience to include a single conversion action: Get people subscribed to your newsletter.

Another scenario would be a wine merchant offering a free wine tasting guide as a download on their website. The download can surely be initiated via a single signup form or an email capture overlay, but chances are you need a bit more space to explain the value of downloading this free guide.

A squeeze page here serves the purpose of providing more details about the guide, and also effectively squeezing the desired information, i.e. email address, from the visitor.

5 real-world examples of eCommerce squeeze pages

Now that we’ve covered some theoretical scenarios for when squeeze pages can benefit eCommerce, let’s take a look at real-world examples. The below come from a variety of eCommerce brands: From beauty to fashion to electronics.

Malin+Goetz

As part of its Black Friday marketing strategy, beauty brand Malin+Goetz ran a giveaway campaign enticing people to “play their cards right,” or, in other words, unlock prizes by joining the brand’s mailing list. The prizes ranged from £5 off your next order to miniature samples.

The campaign was effectively promoted via multiple channels, from social media to email. It featured a responsive squeeze page that rendered well and was easy to use both on desktop and mobile.

Once the visitor has chosen their card and unlocked their prize, Malin+Goetz also sent a reminder email containing a unique code to redeem the prize. The email naturally includes a nudge to start shopping for the holidays with links to their best offers.

Notice how cohesive this entire campaign is across channels and devices. It’s simple yet effective, because the visual identity and the messaging stays embedded in the consumer’s mind.

Key takeaway from Malin+Goetz: Keep your squeeze page design cohesive with other assets, and copywriting to-the-point.

Karen Millen

Here’s another Black Friday example, only this time from the fashion industry.

A well-known retailer, Karen Millen, capitalized on the influx of peak season traffic by creating a squeeze page inviting people to sign up for Black Friday deals alerts and the possibility to win £500.

To add a sense of urgency and encourage users to sign up they have also added a live countdown timer to enforce the message of missing out. Again the design is simple with one email capture field.

Key takeaway from Karen Millen: Use interactive elements, such as countdown timers, to instill urgency.

Sony PlayStation

The launch of PlayStation 5 was a highly coveted event in the gamer community. Recognizing the high demand, Sony created a way for people to “register their interest” in the new console ahead of its official launch.

Whilst the squeeze page design is rather bare bones, this is still an effective way to collect customer data with little to no friction. 

Key takeaway from PlayStation: Include enticing, high-quality imagery of your products.

Shavekit

Shavekit utilized a couple of smart engagement tactics to get their website visitors to convert. Besides their simple and straightforward homepage, the brand also uses a browse abandonment overlay to stop people from leaving their website.

This particular overlay leads the user to a perfectly-crafted squeeze page.

Shavekit use bright and attention-grabbing imagery and feature the sign-up form above the fold where it gets the most eyeballs.

They also break down the unique selling points of their product into easily digestible bits. Even at a glance, the visitor is receiving all the information they need to know that could tempt them into subscribing.

To persuade visitors further, Shavekit also makes sure to include social proof from real-life customer reviews, supported by their social media handles. Plus, a quick FAQ section aims to remove additional signup barriers.

Key takeaway from Shavekit: Include social proof (reviews, testimonials, trust badges, etc.) to instill trust in your visitors and make it easier for them to convert.

Subway

Finally, let’s take a look at a squeeze page that is geared towards SMS opt-in.

Subway wants to keep their customers engaged with their latest offers, and to do so, they’ve created a simple squeeze page to get people to sign up to SMS notifications.

Starting with a high-impact hero image that clearly explains the offer, to a further incentive (6-inch sub for $2.99) down the line, Subway makes it clear for people to opt-in.

Key takeaway from Subway: Make sure you include links to your Privacy Policy and T&Cs in case visitors want to double-check that their data is going to be handled safely.

How to design a high-impact squeeze page: Best practices 

To make your squeeze page is highly converting and correctly optimized, there are some best practices to follow. Ensure your squeeze page includes:

1. An enticing value proposition. If visitors don’t feel that they will benefit from your offer, they won’t engage. Make sure your squeeze page makes the value proposition clear and enticing. Keep the details concise so that they’re quick to understand, but try and include as many persuasive or unique selling points as possible. 

2. Social proof. Social proof can be included on squeeze pages to instill FOMO, or to reassure customers that the exchange is worth doing. Testimonials and reviews can be added that highlight happy customers’ feedback, as can social proof counters such as “X loyal members and counting,”, or “X people downloaded in the last 24 hours.”

3. Keep it brief. A squeeze page should only contain an encapsulating headline, three or four bullet points that highlight the benefits of your proposition, and a one or two field form designed to capture email addresses without distraction. Providing too much information and too many visuals can overload your visitors with information and be detrimental to your list building efforts.

5. Obvious CTA. Squeeze pages should contain no more than one call-to-action and it should be clear but also creative. You can opt for something simple like “Subscribe” but also for something a bit more whimsical, like “Join the VIPs.”

3 tools to help you create squeeze pages faster

InstaPage: InstaPage is a dedicated landing and squeeze page builder offering over 100 already made and highly optimized page templates. Pages are easily created with a drag and drop builder and items such as buttons, headlines, images and videos, and different length forms can all be added.

ClickFunnels: ClickFunnels gives various funnel options optimized for lead capture, sales, event, and even membership funnels. However, most notably ClickFunnels includes a Squeeze Page Funnel option. This option collects visitors’ email address, then directs them to a further Thank You page when sign up is completed. The editor is drag and drop, so the pages are simple to create and can contain customizable elements like headlines, images, input forms, and video widgets.

PageWiz: PageWiz is designed to be a versatile page builder that allows for the easy creation of various marketing pages including lead capture pages and landing pages. The landing pages come with pre-installed A/B testing tools, which supply real-time stats to help you identify which pages are converting. PageWiz stands out from the crowd with its built-in lead management system. A section dedicated to leads compiles leads generated from your page, as well as sending them to your chosen email service provider. 

In conclusion 

Squeeze pages are useful list building tools that can help eCommerce retailers capture email addresses in a way that overlays and pop-ups cannot.  

Squeeze pages are versatile, meaning they can be deployed for a number of different campaigns. Merchants could set up a squeeze page to entice visitors to sign up for loyalty programs, just as travel agents could direct their audience to download supplementary guides.

Make sure the benefit of converting is clearly and concisely displayed, then ensure that you deliver on it once a visitor has entered their email address. Provided you offer something of value and you follow our tips, your squeeze page will elevate your conversions.

Content Personalization: 5 Examples to Jumpstart Your Strategy

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Content personalization for eCommerce

80% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide a personalized experience. So how do you get started with content personalization and what are some good examples for eCommerce? Read our blog to find out…

There has been explosive growth in eCommerce in recent years, with total eCommerce sales projected to reach 19.2% by 2024, a near 10% jump from 2018. However, this rosy picture is not without its thorns.

Mobile connectivity, while a godsend for consumers, can be a real challenge for retailers trying to meet – and exceed – customer expectations.

Take a look at the picture below… Not so long ago, the dissatisfaction from receiving an order like this would’ve ended with a couple of disgruntled remarks to the restaurant employee. Today it’s a whole different story: A Tweet sent out to hundreds of followers, a negative Yelp or Google review, a scathing article in some pop media outlet, or even a petition (yes, those happen!) can appear within seconds and tarnish the brand reputation for years to come.

In fact, according to Salesforce research, 67% of respondents said their standards for good experiences are higher than ever. Modern consumers expect consistency, immediate and responsive service, but above all – personalization.

In the same survey, 84% of customers said being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business. A successful online store today must not only curate high-demand products or services but also provide tailored shopping experiences and personalized content.

Let’s dive deeper into content personalization and learn from practical eCommerce examples that are leading the way in personalization.

What is content personalization?

In a nutshell, content personalization is the process of tailoring content that is visible to the customer based on their profile or preferences.

To illustrate with a basic practical example, imagine landing on an international website and having the content displayed in your native language. Ultimately, a well-crafted content personalization strategy means two friends could be looking at the same website and see different information.

There are a variety of ways to implement content personalization on your website, but they usually come down to customizing based on the following types of data:

  • Demographic datademographic data includes factors such as age, gender, race, education, employment and income information, marriage status, etc. Knowing this eCommerce businesses can show different promotional offers to single parents vs retiring couples.
  • Contextual data – Gartner defines contextual data as “any relevant facts from the environment.” When talking about content personalization, this can mean things like device or browser that is used, geographic location and weather conditions, social media interactions, etc. 
  • Behavioral databehavioral data refers to the information gathered from the activity on the website and is usually related to purchasing and usage behavior, occasion and timing, benefits-sought, loyalty, etc.

Customization vs personalization

Slightly different but often mixed into the same pot with personalization is customization. Customization is different from personalization in that customization is actively done by the user (think of actions like filtering or sorting on a results page), whereas personalization happens to the user based on rules predetermined by the business.

Think of it this way: You adjusting your screen brightness at night is customization. Your smartphone automatically recognizing the time of day and setting your screen to night mode is personalization.

The two are interconnected, however. A customer who’s always choosing to filter items by Low-High price might be categorized as price-sensitive and thus shown different personalized content than someone who filters the other way around.

Here’s an example from Bombinate, an online store for highly curated menswear clothing, furniture, and interior decor sourced from European craftsmen.

The brand is aware that it attracts various audiences and not all offers will be equally relevant. While on their website people can navigate to chosen categories themselves, it could pose a challenge to personalize communications via other channels, such as email. Bombinate found a solution.

When you sign up, you get to choose your email preferences to tell Bombinate whether you’re interested in home and furniture, men’s fashion, or both. You can also set the frequency of emails so you get content that you want and when you want it.

You’ve explicitly customized the marketing communications that you receive from the company, but the company also gets to personalize their messaging based on this explicit data.

Why is content personalization important?

We’ve already established that consumers expect personalization as part of their shopping experience. But it’s important to understand that this need is not self-inflicted.

On the contrary, online consumers are targeted by a neverending stream of promotional messages, which makes the process of shopping rather overwhelming. Studies have shown that having too much choice can be a turn off to shoppers. The term “overchoice” or choice overload, coined by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Future Shock, describes how people can experience cognitive impairment when presented with too many options

According to the Kellogg School of Management, one way to combat choice overload is to help customers narrow their options based on their preferences. People like the idea of hundreds of options but only want to be presented with the best and most relevant to their needs when it comes to decision-making. Personalizing the content on your site is the only real way to accomplish that consistently.

“Choice overload can leave you dissatisfied with the choice you made, what is often described as ‘buyer’s remorse.’ Or it can even lead to behavioral paralysis, which Bockenholt explains as a situation ‘where people are faced with so many choices that they can’t decide among them and make no choice at all.'”

Ulf Bockenholt, professor of marketing at Kellogg

Here’s a good example for financial services. A study performed by Columbia University Business School professor Sheena Iyengar featured 800,000 employees across 647 companies who were offered retirement packages that had either two options, or 59 options. When offered two options, there was 75% participation, with 59 options participation dropped to 60%.

This goes on to show that personalization matters on both the experience and conversion level. According to Yieldify’s “research into personalization trends post-COVID-19, these are the main motivators to pursue a website personalization strategy:

I’m a small eCommerce business – should I pursue personalization?

The short answer is yes. The long answer is… YESSS! Kidding.

First, let’s reiterate the fact that eCommerce has experienced 10 years’ worth of growth in only three months following the COVID-19 outburst. What this means, in plain terms, is that there’s more choice and more competition than ever before.

So if before you might’ve been the only online retailer selling freshly roasted coffee beans to coffeeholic in your area, chances are you aren’t anymore.

What’s more, you mustn’t delude yourself that you’re only competing with other coffee roasters in your area. Globalization means that shoppers can have their coffee shipped from almost anywhere else in the world in a matter of days. And don’t forget about replacement competitors, such as energy drinks, caffeine tablets, concentrates, et al.

7 inspiring content personalization examples for eCommerce

1. Aveda 

Aveda is a popular beauty brand with a significant online presence. One of the key things in providing a good user experience for Aveda is to match their products to specific concerns that a customer might have.

However, problems arise when even the customers themselves don’t really know what those concerns are. Is my skin dry or dehydrated? Do I have scalp irritation or is normal to have itchiness here and there? In the store, this would be as easy as having a consultant take a look and decide what’s what. But online it’s a whole different story…

To prevent customers from buying the wrong product or abandoning the site altogether after not being able to find a suitable solution, Aveda has been creating a series of interactive quizzes, such as their Hair & Scalp Check.

The quiz asks 10 questions about things such as hair texture, problem areas, and desired results. Then, the algorithm cross-references your answer with 4 million possible combinations and spits out personalized product recommendations, salon treatments, as well as personalized how-to content.

Aveda proceeds to invite users to save their results by creating an account on their page and promising to “make your dream” towards having dream hair that you’ve fantasized in the quiz a reality.

2. Petal & Pup

Petal & Pup is an online fashion brand that despite its small team and limited resources were able to deploy multiple personalization solutions on their eCommerce website.

By simply landing on their homepage, you can immediately notice some personalization tactics in place. For example, Petal & Pup offer website visitors to search their website by using voice control. This is particularly helpful if a lot of their visitors are using mobile devices, or if the brand has intel that their shoppers prefer to do it this way.

Another easy-win personalization tactic is currency. Petal & Pup have offices in Los Angeles and Brisbane, however, they sell globally and their website is able to recognize a visitor coming from the United Kingdom. Displaying product prices in the visitor’s currency removes the unnecessary burden of having to calculate conversion and see whether they can afford the product or not.

But Petal & Pup don’t stop there. Working with Yieldify they’ve deployed specific messaging for their loyal customers. To facilitate new conversions, the brand highlighted new arrivals based on their previous purchases. This tactic resulted in a 17% conversion rate uplift from returning customers.

Read the Petal & Pup case study to learn more!

3. Alo Moves

Alo Moves offers online yoga, fitness, and meditation classes, and is part of Alo Yoga, an online retailer of workout wear. The reason why Alo Moves deserves a spot on this list is because they’re exceptionally dedicated to content personalization.

First, every new Alo Moves’ user journey begins with an onboarding survey. This is where you can set your preferences, such as classes you’re interested in, your experience level, your goals, and even your favorite teaching style so that you’re matched up with the best possible instructor.

Once you’ve established your preferences, Alo Moves will go on to tailor their website content to match your choices. For example, this is what their homepage looks like to a logged-in user who’s expressed interest in yoga at the beginner-intermediate level:

  • Alo Moves recommends daily classes at beginner to medium difficulty.
  • Alo Moves reminds the user of classes they’ve started watching but haven’t finished.
  • Alo Moves understands that someone’s interest in yoga could mean they’re curious about meditation and mindfulness too.
  • They also recommend niche takes on yoga, like Hygge Yoga or Yoga for Golfers.

4. Adidas

Back in 2017, adidas made headlines by announcing the launch of their mobile app built around Salesforce technology to deliver personalized shopping experiences to their increasingly young customer database. The app was introduced as a means of achieving adidas’ 5-year goal to generate €4 billion from digital commerce by 2020.

The app is a replica of adidas’ online store but also has custom features like a news feed of personalized video content and articles, customized product recommendations, services chatbot, wishlist, curated gift guides, and more. The app is also supposed to get smarter and learn more about the user as they go:

“The app gets to know the consumer’s sport and style preferences and learns from his or her behavior and interaction with adidas across all our digital touchpoints.”

Joseph Godsey, Head of Digital Brand Commerce, adidas

5. Rocksbox

Rocksbox is a a jewelry subscription service that offers highly curated pieces to its membership base. According to Chanel Li, VP of Business Operations at Rocksbox, “Every single item we recommend to our customer, every single physical piece we put into a customer’s hand, we’ve specifically picked out for that customer.”

Rocksbox operates based on shoppers building their style profiles. This is done via an online survey and browsing through the company’s extensive wish list to mark your favorite pieces. Then, Rocksbox stylists sift through all the data points and curate a personalized jewelry box.

Another nifty feature Rocksbox offers to stand out from the competition is wishlisting on social media apps. Once you connect your Instagram profile to your Rocksbox account, you can wishlist items directly on Instagram and the company’s algorithm will sync them to your profile.

This creates a seamless experience for the user. And the results speak for themselves – the #wishlist idea quadrupled the brand’s following on Instagram and the overall approach to personalization has led to an $8.7 million investment

Common personalization myths you need to ignore

So far we’ve established what content personalization is, why it matters to modern eCommerce businesses, and how some of the industry innovators are using content to personalize their shopping experiences.

Last step in our guide is to debunk some of the most common myths surrounding the personalization practice.

Myth: Personalization is not very effective

Truth: According to Epsilon, 80% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide a personalized experience. Personalization has been proven to positively affect online user experience, which in return yields higher conversion rates, higher AOV, better retention, and CLV. You can see proof of that on our case studies page

Myth: Personalization is too invasive

Truth: Personalization can be too invasive, but it doesn’t have to be when done right. In fact, 83% of consumers in an Accenture study said they don’t mind giving away their personal information in order to receive a tailored experience. What’s important here is that businesses understand the value of that information, collect and store it complying with government regulations, and ultimately act upon it in a way that’s relevant to consumers.

Myth: Personalization ROI is impossible to measure

Truth: Personalization as a concept might be elusive, but its performance is highly trackable and measurable. To prove personalization success at Yieldify, we use incremental revenue reports that basically show how much more money you’ve generated thanks to deploying personalization strategies on your site.

Myth: Personalization requires a big budget

Truth: The good thing about personalization is that it’s not a cookie-cutter marketing tactic. What works for one brand might not work for another. Same way, where some brands can invest millions to develop complex machine learning personalization solutions, others can achieve just as good an impact by deploying simple content personalization tactics like email sign up forms, exit-intent overlays, dynamic coupons, etc.

Myth: Personalization requires technical expertise

Truth: The level of technical expertise needed to execute a personalization strategy will really depend on how sophisticated you want to get, and also the personalization technology that you choose. For instance, if you go with self-service solutions, chances are you’ll need to summon some help from your website developers. However, with a fully-managed service like Yieldify, all your personalization tactics are done for you by their team of account managers, designers, technical engineers, and data analysts.

How to Use Content to Drive eCommerce Sales: 5 Tried and True Techniques

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Ecommerce content marketing

Don’t let your content be drowned out by the competition. Here are five simple but effective techniques to create compelling eCommerce content that engages and converts your customers.

The internet has never been more important than it is now. The COVID-19 situation led to a massive increase in online sales, driving eCommerce platforms forward faster than ever: In three month’s time, U.S. eCommerce achieved 10 year’s worth of growth!

On the flip side, standing out from the competition has never been more important – or more difficult.

Some 24 years later, content is still the reigning king when it comes to standing out in a saturated market. And with eCommerce getting more crowded than ever before, quality eCommerce content is what can help you cut through the competition and straight into customers’ hearts (and pockets).

Using personalized content in your sales cycle is an effective method to persuade prospects into converting, customers into returning, and loyalists into promoting your business through word of mouth

Keep reading, and you’ll find out what eCommerce content to create in order to drive more visitors to your website and effectively convert it into paying customers.

5 types of eCommerce content that boosts traffic and sales

1. Educational content

Educational content is arguably the most important type of eCommerce content your business can create. Why? Because it allows you to answer audience questions about your brand and products before they are even asked: Why is your product better than others? How much does it cost? What are the benefits it provides?

But before you can create good educational content, you have to figure out what your visitors want to know.

Search Engines such as Google or Bing can provide these answers in related search phrases or commonly asked questions sections that appear when you search for your target keyword.

Let’s say you type in a search query “button-down shirt” – the SERP will show related searches, such as “button-up shirt vs button-down shirt” and “button-down shirt meaning.” What this tells you is that people want to know the difference between button-up and button-down shirts, as well as the origin of the term. Use this knowledge to create content that answers these queries and positions your business as a problem-solver in the customer’s psyche.

Alternatively, sites such as Answer the Public, an online keyword tool that collates autocomplete data from various search engines, can present relevant phrases and questions users are searching around your keyword. 

In fact, when it comes to educational content, the playing field is vast and far-reaching. You can write texts, shoot videos, draw illustrations, etc. Each has positive and negative sides, so the best approach is to mix things up. Below are some of the most popular types of educational eCommerce content that your business can make use of:

Text-based educational content

Text-based content is the most common way of informing customers about products and their uses. You can’t sell anything without some form of textual content: Product name, description, care guidelines, etc.

The length and breadth of the text usually depend on the product itself. For example:

  • If you’re selling white goods (various home appliances and other electrical goods), lengthy poetic texts aren’t going to get you anywhere. All your customers want to see are product specifications, price, customer ratings, potentially some kind of comparison chart;
  • Whereas if clothes are being sold, feel free to include descriptions that highlight the product’s comfort, unique design details, various styling options, real-life examples from customers who purchased in the past, etc.

The ultimate goal of educational eCommerce content is to provide more details about the product, how it works, and its benefits. A great example is ProFlowers – a US-based flower retailer who created an entire Florapedia® to provide their customers with in-depth flower guides.

Included in the Florapedia is their 151 Types of Flowers Common in the U.S. list complete with images, seasonality, soil needs, and more. When you hear marketers reference high-quality content this by far is one of the best examples to illustrate what they mean!

The results of this piece of content speak for themselves as well. A quick look into Ahrefs shows this piece bringing in over 16,000 visits every month.

Visual content (photos and images)

We all know the old saying about an image being worth a thousand words. The same applies to content marketing. Attention-grabbing product images can attract new customers right away, while the text provides more information.

About 60% of customers are attracted to images or presentations showing why they need the product and how it helps. This is because, according to research undertaken by the conglomerate corporation 3M, visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text. This allows your storytelling to gain speed, potentially helping consumers to move through their decision making faster. 

A fine example of this is outdoor brand Jack Wolfskin who uses high-quality shots of their clothing items in action accompanied by clear product photography showcasing the item in more detail. This allows customers to picture themselves owning the item, as well as research their unique qualities.

Infographics

Infographics are really a mix of text-based content and images. They are perfect for reaching out to a specific niche audience by showing statistical data, timelines, trends, and tutorials. Infographics provide relevant information that is easily shared across other websites and social media. You should aim to make infographics around topics and questions related to your industry. These can address common myths, or even tips that can help potential customers.

Take a look at this example from Dreams, a UK supplier of beds, mattresses, and other sleep equipment. The infographic highlights common problems people face whilst trying to get to sleep and provides actionable tips to overcome these.

Video content

Videos are still a big thing in digital marketing. Technology giant Cisco projected that by the year 2022, online video will be responsible for 82% of all consumer internet traffic – 15 times higher than the amount in 2017. Their predictions are only supported by findings from Hubspot, who discovered that 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service by watching a video

Their reason for becoming one of the most used methods of promoting products in the near future may be related to research undertaken by Insivia which also revealed that video viewers retain 95% of a message when watching it in a video, compared to retaining 10% when reading it in a text. As video content is easily shareable across all platforms, it possesses the power to captivate people for extended amounts of time.

Primarily, eCommerce videos allow you to quickly inform customers about your products and offers, nudging them to purchase without thinking twice. However, other benefits of eCommerce video marketing include their ability to drive organic traffic if they are optimized correctly for search engines. 

According to the animation studio Moovly, if a video is embedded on your website you’re 53 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google. As YouTube is also now owned by Google, uploading the right content and ensuring to have an engaging thumbnail and search-optimized titles can send traffic back to your website provided you have put the link in its description.

See UK-based folding bike manufacturer Brompton. These guys have completely occupied the top results by answering a query that’s crucial for their businesses: “fold a brompton.”

For eCommerce websites especially, videos also serve as vital tools in helping to build trust. Explanatory videos alleviate consumer fears regarding the quality of the product by allowing viewers to vicariously experience its usages and benefits, helping to sway them to a purchasing decision. 

One company that does this particularly well is Yieldify client cosmetics brand Milk Makeup with their subscriber count sitting at an impressive 92K. Their makeup tutorials go down pretty well with most clearing the 20k view mark. You can see a great example of an informative and engaging video below:

2. SEO content

Driving traffic to your website is vital in ensuring eCommerce sales. Whether the traffic is paid or organic, without it, your website will not be visited by potential new customers, let alone convert. 

For small retailers, organic traffic is of greatest importance because the costs associated with it are zero to none. How?

Well, to get organic traffic up you’ll obviously need to invest in some SEO tools, such as Ahrefs or Moz, maybe an SEO agency or a freelance specialist, outsource some content creation if you don’t have the resources in-house. However, the achievements gained from search engine optimization are long-lasting and don’t require an additional budget to support them.

On the contrary, a paid advertising campaign is only effective until it’s running. This means you only get exposure when you throw money at it – whereas with SEO you get money long after the initial investment.

To climb Google’s rankings, your eCommerce content must be optimized in such a way that when visitors type your target keywords into Google, your eCommerce site appears. In the beginning it can be a trial and error process, but some tips to help you increase organic traffic are:

  1. Optimizing landing page text, website copy, blog content, and product descriptions for long-tail keywords;
  2. Adding optimized alt-text to any product or site images;
  3. Optimizing page meta titles and descriptions;
  4. Adding well-written user-generated content to product pages;
  5. Writing blogs around popular search queries;
  6. Adding schema markup to product and landing pages.

Below we’ll detail two good examples of websites with high organic traffic. First, we have Gymshark. Gymshark is one of the fastest-growing and well-known brands within the fitness industry. Their core target market is those living an active lifestyle. 

Whilst their primary target keywords may be queries such as “mens gym clothing” or “womens gym leggings,” Gymshark doesn’t limit itself to these keywords alone. As you can see below their blog section drives a considerable amount of traffic, according to Ahrefs.

As part of Gymshark’s content strategy, they target anyone who shows they are into health and fitness. You can see some examples below.

Targeting people who search for these keywords allows Gymshark to reach their target audience, provide valuable content, and build brand awareness. While these users may not purchase on their first visit, they can be retargeted with social media ads or subscribe to a newsletter and receive email nurture sequences that will nudge them to convert later. 

Our second example comes from Best Buy. Their Canadian website has its own blog subdomain that targets non-commercial keywords that Best Buy’s target audience is searching for. As you can see below it also drives a large amount of organic traffic.

A lesson to take from both of these examples is to explore your niche and think of as much content as possible around it. As you can see, when you finally optimize everything, your organic traffic can provide results you never thought possible and drive 1,000% more traffic than organic social media

3. Gated content

Gated content is content that requires any form of information submission in order to unlock it. This usually means that visitors have to leave their email address to access content that is otherwise unavailable, i..e behind a gate.

Gated content is widely used as a B2B lead generation tactic in the form of whitepapers, eBooks, reports, etc. But it might as well be utilized by B2C retailers. In fact, all those “Subscribe to get $10 off” messages can be treated as gated content in the context of eCommerce.

In terms of eBooks, this could also link back to the informational content we mentioned earlier. Creating a product guide, or a how-to eBook could be a great way to collect customers’ email addresses and build your email list. It’s also pretty simple to do using a PDF creation tool, you’ll just need to make sure the content is good!

Another way to deploy gated eCommerce content on your site is to invite customers to pre-order something. Pre-ordering is a popular tactic among musicians and brands, especially those releasing limited edition vinyl records. However, recently fashion and beauty retailers have started utilizing the pre-ordering tactic as well. Here’s an example from Typology Paris:

4. Curated and user-generated content

The content that you create about your brand, products, and services can only go so far. You need real, unbiased opinions from your customers or subject matter experts to prove the true value that your business brings.

Curated content is perfect for that. Curated content comes in many different forms: From user-generated content (UGC) like photographs, video reviews, and testimonials to magazine features, guest interviews, etc. Depending on the format, you can republish this content on your company blog, reshare on social media accounts, include in email sequences, and more.

Two great examples of curated content campaigns come from Apple and J.Crew. Both of them utilized branded hashtags and took user-generated content to another level: Apple with its #ShotOniPhone campaign that’s turned into an annual contest, and J.Crew with its #NationalStripesDay that is now bigger than the brand itself.

6. Content advertising

The concept of content advertising is commonly confused with content marketing and content strategy. However, content advertising has to do with the promotion of the content rather than its creation.

E-commerce businesses can choose to promote their content through PPC (pay-per-click) advertising options offered by Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Google Display Network, AdSense, and so on.

It’s a good way to nurture prospects without being too pushy. By using tracking pixels to know when somebody landed on your website, you can create retargeting ads and serve relevant content until the person is ready to make a purchase with you.

Target is a brand that does this quite often. Besides retargeting customers with the products they viewed, they also run content advertising campaigns promoting useful assets, such as the Stroller Guide in the example below:

In conclusion

There are dozens of methods you can use to increase sales, but they all come down to promotion, sharing, and advertisement. To run a successful eCommerce business, you must first gain the trust of as many clients as possible, and after that, your website will be self-sustaining, and it will generate its own traffic.

You must take care of every step in the buying and selling process to increase sales and make your brand stand out in the crowd. Connect with other websites, including high-authority resources that prove your claims, and watch as your sales go up at a steady pace. Utilize everything you can to spread the word about your product, and success will follow!

6 Tips On How to Sell Luxury Items Online

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How to avoid crucial mistakes when selling luxury items online? In our blog post, we look at 5 strategies that will ensure your luxury marketing is on-point and sales-oriented.

By the year 2025, online luxury sales will have tripled their contribution to the global high-end market, exceeding $91 billion and accounting for 20% of all luxury sales made. This is because of an operating model the consulting corporation McKinsey refers to as ‘Luxury 4.0’.

In Luxury 4.0, luxury brands and retailers leverage data to better understand their customers, identify emerging preferences, and streamline the processes of transforming ideas into products.

Luxury marketing statistics

Increasingly, online shopping and digital experiences are having greater impacts on how consumers choose to purchase luxury goods. 

McKinsey estimates that around 80% of luxury items bought online today are heavily digitally influenced, with consumers engaging with up to 15 digital touchpoints in their luxury purchasing journeys.

In part, this could be attributed to the generational shift that has begun to take place throughout the luxury market. Whereas before older shoppers were the target audience of luxury retailers, newer, affluent Millennial buyers, born between 1981 and 1994, and Generation Z consumers, born between 1995-2010, are now accounting for around 40% of all luxury purchases

In 2019 alone, Millennials and Generation Z consumers generated 100% of all global luxury industry growth.

With both generations now driving sales of luxury goods, and both having grown up in the age of constantly evolving digital technological advancements, luxury eCommerce retailers have never been better placed to take advantage of, and optimize for, the digital market.

When it comes to selling luxury goods online, there are lessons to be learned from luxury fashion retailers like Net-A-Porter and Farfetch, two brands that have both successfully embraced digital luxury retail. 

FarFetch especially accredits its early adoption of technologymost notably, personalization – in its establishment as a market leader. Meanwhile, Net-A-Porter revolutionized high-end retail by incorporating mobile and artificial intelligence technologies alongside data-driven strategies into its brand identity. 

In this article, we’ll break down on how to sell luxury products online using five simple steps luxury eCommerce retailers can implement immediately into their luxury marketing and sales strategies.

6 Tips on How to Sell Luxury Items Online

1. Use personalization to drive incremental sales

In its Global Powers of Luxury Goods research, Deloitte noted that the rise of eCommerce and the availability of digital channels accessible to luxury brands were creating a consumer need for both large-scale and high-quality personalized content

Nowadays, consumers want to be treated as individuals, and this need is intensified when it comes to making high-value purchases. 

One way Net-A-Porter personalize their shopping experience is by offering EIP memberships. EIP (Extremely Important People) members unlock special privileges including a personal shopper that delivers the luxury goods to a home address, waits until the products have been tried on, and then collects any items that need to be returned. 

There are also pre-order services, abilities to shop new products 36 hours before they become available to other shoppers, private sales, and surprise gifts available to EIP members. 

Luxury marketing example - How to sell luxury items online

To become an EIP, however, it is rumored that members must have accrued around $70,000 in sales across a 12 month period. Incredibly, whilst Net-A-Porter’s EIP’s only make up 2% of its consumer base, they generate 40% of its sales

Luxury eCommerce retailers can take advantage of this high-end consumer desire and follow by Net-A-Porter’s example, even if they are only a small to medium-size business.

Segmenting audiences by their lifetime consumer value and then advertising select sales or early shopping opportunities to the highest-ranked consumers could be one way to encourage other customers to make similar purchases in order to unlock the same privileges. 

Alternatively, simply offering attention-focused customer service across the board could ensure your fashion eCommerce stands out from competitors by highlighting consumer individualism as a key-value and subsequent USP. Net-A-Porter also does this by advertising 24/7 Fashion Consultants.

When selling luxury products online, cross-sell strategies that recommend products to consumers based on their previous purchases, cart or wish list items could also be effective in delivering a standout, individualized experience.

Cross selling strategies | Yieldify

Consumers who are greeted with a personalized experience are known to spend more and are more likely to become loyal customers, leading to repeat purchases and higher LTV.

Finally, social proof tools are another type of personalization that can help you increase on-site conversions.

2. Unify online and offline experiences

Whilst digital channels and the rise of online shopping are driving factors in the disruption of brick and mortar sales, luxury consumers are still driven in-store because of brand experiences. 

Many luxury goods require an element of in-person service that can’t always be replicated online with e-commerce: Expert measurement and fitting, tailoring, customization, etc.

Stores like Gucci and Bvlgari offer shoppers plush, uniquely designed showrooms, jewelry maker Tiffany’s lets you advise with a diamond expert and customize engagement rings to your liking, whilst Burberry goes one step further by partnering with Uber to help transport customers to their nearest store. 

Luxury marketing example - How to sell luxury items online

To drive visitors into stores where they could become consumers once satisfied with having had a luxury shopping experience, it’s important to unify the connection between an online and offline presence. This is known as the reverse omnichannel strategy

Using a search engine optimization strategy known as geotargeting, you can suggest local stores to visitors upon their arrival to your site and could be one way to direct them into a brick and mortar store. 

Likewise, offering buy online pick up in-store (BOPIS) services with distinct CTAs across landing and product pages, or highlighting exclusive, only available in-store products could encourage in-person shopping.

3. Clearly signal your value

Value proposition doesn’t just extend to the benefit that your product will have on a consumer’s daily life. It also includes your brand

Products from high-end retailers are automatically regarded as high-quality and worth their money because of the luxurious connotations associated with their brand. For example, if a luxury retailer uses higher quality materials than any other brand, this is part of the perception that consumers of the brand buy into when purchasing their products. 

See how Dior instills value in their product by showcasing the unique process that goes into making each handbag:

Just like how storytelling is a key component of any marketing, if your brand is built from a particular heritage, or history, tell this story through prominently displaying your value signals or insignias throughout your online experience.

4. Tell your story on social media

Social media can play a crucial role in helping luxury eCommerce retailers convert visitors to consumers. An example of a successful luxury marketing campaign on social media was Burberry’s ‘Tale of Thomas Burberry’ shot by Oscar-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia. 

The microfilm featured prominent acting stars like Lily James and Domhnall Gleeson and depicted the life, struggles, and entrepreneurship of Thomas Burberry, the brand founder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D5IZtDCS5c

The film was posted firstly on the brand’s Facebook page before it went viral, generating over 15 million views and being hailed as one of the best holiday season advertisements of all time. 

For Burberry, the popularity of the film worked across multiple levels. The video generated mass engagement whilst also helping to cement the brand’s identity and USPs in viewers’ minds. All the items worn in the film were available to buy at Burberry’s store, advertising the products again, and again, across multiple channels, to multiple viewers. 

Luxury eCommerce stores can therefore use storytelling to not only engage copious visitors and potential consumers with their brand identity but to also generate engagement with their products. 

By advertising the story behind the manufacturing of certain products, visitors may be likely to invest in the perception and may visit the site to learn more about the luxury product being advertised.

5. Invest in content

As a natural accompanier to storytelling and social media marketing, pouring resources into high quality, relevant content can drive sales from both existing and new consumers.

The benefit high-quality content marketing gives luxury brands is its ability to communicate the elevated level of the brand’s aesthetic to the designated target audience throughout its language and appearance.

Content can take the form of informative blogs, well-produced videos, in-depth guides, and even emails and must give off the same feeling as handling a glossy, luxury brochure. 

Louis Vuitton produces in-depth city guides that it hails as Magazines (also available in mobile app format). These guides promote insider tips as to the best places to visit in a city that isn’t necessarily featured in tourist publications. At the same time, as advertising these revered spots, the guide does of course suggest which fashion pieces would complement which outfit, and which outfit would be best to be worn where. 

Luxury marketing example - How to sell luxury items online

These exclusive guides are not only sought after by their audience, they are bought too – at the price of $25 an edition. They work effectively because Louis Vuitton knows their audience seeks insider knowledge and this feeling of exclusivity is vital for high-end brands to capitalize on when selling luxury. 

Producing content that promotes uniqueness and has a sense of insider sheen will resonate with and then engage high-end buyers. For eCommerce retailers, one example in peak holiday season could be to release a Gift Guide that offers exclusive insight into the products that will be Christmastime best sellers. You could also adopt a similar tactic in the build up to Valentine’s Day.

As a multichannel content marketing strategy, following the release of that guide with an email marketing sequence or blog content series that takes particular products and focuses on their USPs will issue repeated, non-pushy reminders, and may drive purchases when combined with CTAs.

6. Provide Exceptional Customer Service

Customers looking to buy luxury good, whether is designer clothing, watches, shoes or accessories will all want a very good level of customer service. This can be online via your website or in a retail store.

If they are willing to pay a premium for a product they have every right to expect to be given premium customer service.

While it may be difficult to translate exclusive experiences in-store into eCommerce, there are ways that this can still happen. For example, live chats allow you the opportunity for personal styling advice and a more personalised buying experience from websites.

So if your online customer base deserves attention then give them what they want by being empathetic and responsive towards all types of feedback received. You’ll need to ensure you have quick response times and can hopefully solve any issues as quickly as possible.

So whether the complaints come through social media platforms, or if it’s feedback from surveys about their experience with your company’s products/services. You need to take it all into account.

Challenges When Selling Luxury Products Online

Whilst there will be specific challenges luxury brands will face, when selling online the “normal” issues will still be there, and may even be amplified. Below are three that would be worth addressing.

Basket Abandonment: You will have some customers who simply abandon their baskets. This is a well established fact within the world of eCommerce. So you need to make sure you are set up to counter this. Remarketing ads, basket abandonment solutions, personalization etc can all help reduce this.

Delivery: If customers are spending a considerable amount of money online they need to feel 100% confident their purchase will get to them quickly, and in one piece. This is why a reliable delivery partner is vital. It may also be worth showcasing delivery options and timeframes for peace of mind.

Advertising to the right audience: If your using advertising channels such as Facebook, Google Ads, or even YouTube to drive traffic to your website be very careful with the people you target. For example in Google Ads, you’ll want to avoid bidding on, and probably add negative keywords like “cheap” or “affordable”. Likewise when building an audience on Facebook try and build on that would focus on high-income individuals.

Where to sell luxury items online

Creating luxury brands takes time and consistency. But there are other ways you can sell luxury items online in the meantime.

1) Create your own website – Your own website should eventually be the main place where your sales are coming from. If you’re advertising online this is the place you’re going to be sending them so you need to make sure it’s ready to convert and

2) Reach out to high-end department stores – If you know where your ideal customers regularly shop it makes sense to try and get in front of them here. This could be both online and in store. Department stores such as Harrods and Selfridges could be prime targets. But if you’re just starting out you might be better off identifying smaller local stores that may wish to list your luxury items.

3) Look to sell via online platforms – Online market places such as, Current Boutique, Poshmark and ThredUp could be great places to start selling your luxury goods.

Luxury marketing case study: Turnbull and Asser

Turnbull and Asser is a bespoke shirtmaker, clothier, and tie maker established all the way back in 1885. Perhaps unsurprising for the first brand to receive the Prince of Wales’ Royal Warrant, it has a strong commitment to product excellence and impeccable service, whether from its flagship store on London’s Jermyn Street, online, or with its partners around the world.

Turnbull and Asser used the Yieldify Conversion Platform to create and deploy onsite messaging, generating new leads, increasing conversions, and improving the overall site UX. Read the full Turnbull and Asser case study here.

Key takeaways

Hopefully, our tips above will provide you with some useful ideas when it comes to selling luxury items online. Results in this area can take time as you will need to build your brand image and customer base.

Like what you’ve seen here? Download our free ‘Luxury eCommerce Blueprint’ eBook, featuring the luxury eCommerce cheat sheet, to get even more tips and advice on digital marketing and selling luxury goods online.

Luxury marketing FAQs

How do I sell high end luxury products?

The best ways to sell luxury items online are to avoid site-wide discounting, making your value signals clear, providing exceptional customer service, and making your service personal.

How do you price a luxury product?

The price of luxury items or products should reflect the key messages of the brand; high quality, heritage, and exclusivity.

How to Take Your Online Store to the Next Level With Conversational Commerce

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Conversational commerce is a hot topic among eCommerce marketers. In this blog post, we take a look at the key benefits of conversational commerce and easy steps to get you started.

In a brick-and-mortar store, having friendly, knowledgeable, and attentive sales assistants is a powerful way to increase sales. That’s been the case since the first stores in history. So how can eCommerce merchants offer that same kind of sales-boosting service, but digitally?

The answer is conversational commerce – a marketing and sales tactic based on back-and-forth digital conversation. It takes the in-store sales associate experience and translates it to an online format.

Conversational commerce example

But conversational commerce usually isn’t just a human agent sitting in front of a screen instead of behind a store counter.

Hiring a human team big enough to be available 24/7 for shoppers in all time zones isn’t practical or possible for most brands. Instead, eCommerce businesses now have the tools to automate conversational commerce using chatbots.

Let’s start by taking a brief look at how conversational commerce came about and discuss why chatbots (especially Facebook Messenger chatbots) are an ideal solution for automating this type of commerce. Finally, we’ll cover how your own eCommerce business can get started with conversational commerce bots.

What is conversational commerce?

Conversational commerce is a new sales method for the digital age. It gives shoppers a way to directly interact with brands in real-time in the format of a back-and-forth chat. Conversational commerce allows prospects to get their questions answered instantly as part of a live dialogue, instead of one-sided, delayed messaging (like email). 

Conversational commerce not only makes for a pleasant customer service experience, but it moves shoppers more quickly down the funnel toward a conversion.

Predicted chatbot use cases

The best part: Conversational commerce is easy to automate, so brands of all sizes can watch their sales go up on autopilot. Chatbots are the most widely used solution for automation of conversational commerce because they’re easy and inexpensive to build, and available to help customers 24/7. 

Facebook Messenger chatbots in particular have become extremely popular. Messenger already has over 1.3 billion monthly users, and it makes sense to meet shoppers where they are.

A brief history of conversational commerce

The term “conversational commerce” was coined in 2015 by Christopher Messina, an American blogger most famously known as the ‘inventor of the hashtag‘. Messina wrote an article about an emerging trend he’d begun to notice: Businesses were starting to invest more in messaging channels and focus on selling there.

Since then, this sales technique has exploded in popularity. It’s no surprise since people are more active on messaging apps than ever before. Users have over 7 billion conversations every day on Facebook Messenger alone. And while messaging is primarily a way for people to communicate with friends and family, they’re now interested in chatting with businesses that way, too.

Over 56% of messaging-app users globally say they’ve messaged brands to get more information in all stages of the buyer’s journey.

Conversational commerce statistics

As a result, online businesses now communicate with customers through Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and many other messaging channels. No-code, drag-and-drop software makes chatbot building easier than ever, so businesses can automate this messaging for maximum efficiency.

Conversational commerce benefits

Online stores of all kinds have started taking a keen interest in this type of commerce, especially in the form of chatbots. Let’s look at some of the benefits that conversational commerce offers:

1. Saves time and resources

You don’t need a huge team of highly trained customer service agents to be available 24/7. If you automate your conversational commerce strategy with a chatbot, it can take care of up to 80% of routine inquiries for you. Your human team will no longer have to waste time responding to repetitive questions, so they can focus on other tasks.

2. Improves customer experience

If you automate your conversational commerce efforts, customers can get instant assistance. They don’t have to search for FAQ pages or wait days for email responses from a human agent. Most common queries can be solved by a chatbot, which means instant, helpful service that will delight your customers.

48% of consumers would rather connect with a company via live chat

3. Increases sales

Conversational commerce is a great way to provide personalized product recommendations to customers to encourage them to buy. Chatbots can be set up to do this seamlessly. They can ask a few basic questions about the shopper’s needs, recommend products and answer questions about them, then share links where the user can learn more and buy.

Ecommerce chatbot example - Tommy Hilfiger

4. Offers the personalization element

When you converse with another human, you gather information about them by asking questions. Chatbots work the same way. Once they know a few things about the customer and their preferences (through the process of conversation), they can personalize future interactions

They can offer tailored product recommendations, share relevant coupons and sale notifications, and more. 80% of customers say they’re more likely to buy from a brand that offers personalized experiences, so this factor is crucial for eCommerce success.

5. Helps brands stand out

Conversational commerce is becoming more popular by the minute, it’s true. But a strong conversational commerce experience will still be a novelty to many shoppers. If you design it right, it can be the memorable element that sets your brand apart from your competition – and keeps customers coming back.

Getting started with conversational commerce

The advent of no-code tools for building chatbots has made conversational commerce accessible for all brands. Here are a few basic steps to help your eCommerce store get started:

Analyze your support queries. Look at what your prospective customers ask about most often, then equip your chatbot to handle these needs and inquiries. You can have it answer FAQs or recommend products, for example.

Use no-code software to build a free Messenger chatbot. Tools like that will make the actual building process easy and non-technical, so you can focus on engaging conversational design instead.

Add a Facebook Messenger chatbot to your website. Don’t limit your chatbot to social media messaging apps. You can utilize it in different ways by adding the chatbot to your website or linking it to your Facebook and Instagram ads, so you can reach even more prospects.

Monitor the performance of your chatbot. Look for drop-off points where users might be getting confused or missing something, and correct or streamline those areas of the chat experience.

Taking your eCommerce chatbot to the next level

Once you’ve built a basic eCommerce chatbot, there’s lots you can add to it to make it even more useful for customers (and profitable for you):

Add artificial intelligence (AI) to your chatbot. Build an AI chatbot that can handle an even larger percentage of customer interactions on its own. Even no-code software often offers this capability. AI is far less intimidating than it sounds, and almost any business can take advantage of it to improve their conversational commerce capabilities.

Gather other contact information. When you build a chatbot in Facebook Messenger, you can always reach out to the user again later. The chats are linked to their Facebook account. But since 73% of consumers shop on more than one channel, the omnichannel approach is becoming more and more important. Your chatbot can easily request and store contact information for users on other channels, so you can reach out to them via email and SMS too.

Share information about relevant promotions. Conversational commerce can help you win repeat business as well. You can set your chatbot to notify users when you’re having a sale, especially if it’s on a type of item they’ve shown interest in before. Or, it can share coupons to get customers to buy again.

Join the conversational commerce revolution

Marketing evolves fast. Your eCommerce brand needs to keep up in order to keep sales rolling in and stay ahead of the competition. Conversational commerce is already booming, so don’t miss out!


This article was written by Bojana Vojnović from Chatfuel. Bojana is a content strategist with a finger on the pulse of the world of Messenger chatbots. She oversees a content creation strategy that helps business owners take their brand to the next level.

The Complete Guide to STP Marketing: Segmentation, Targeting & Positioning

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What is STP marketing and what role does it play in boosting conversions and revenue? We look at the Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning framework illustrated by real-life examples.

Segmentation targeting positioning marketing is a core concept in modern-day marketing. Without it, marketing campaigns would be generic, have little to no personalization, and overall would not be able to convert at a level most businesses would deem effective.

Let’s delve into the intricacies of the STP Model and see how implementing this framework into your eCommerce business can yield amazing results.

Table of Contents:

1. What is STP marketing
2. The STEP formula
3. Benefits of STP marketing
4. STP marketing example: The Cola Wars
5. How to build an STP marketing strategy

What is STP marketing?

STP marketing is an acronym for SegmentationTargeting, and Positioning – a three-step model that examines your products or services as well as the way you communicate their benefits to specific customer segments.

In a nutshell, the STP marketing model means you segment your market, target select customer segments with marketing campaigns tailored to their preferences, and adjust your positioning according to their desires and expectations.

STP marketing is effective because it focuses on breaking your customer base into smaller groups, allowing you to develop very specific marketing strategies to reach and engage each target audience

In fact, 59% of customers say that personalization influences their shopping decision and another 44% said that a personalized shopping experience would influence them to become repeat customers of a brand.

STP marketing represents a shift from product-focused marketing to customer-focused marketing. This shift gives businesses a chance to gain a better understanding of who their ideal customers are and how to reach them. In short, the more personalized and targeted your marketing efforts, the more successful you will be.

The STEP Formula

If you are looking for a simple way to remember and summarize the STP marketing concept, the acronym STEP is extremely useful:

Segmentation + Targeting Equals Positioning

This formula clearly illustrates that each segment requires tailored positioning and marketing mix to ensure its success. Let’s take a closer look at each of the three steps in the STP marketing model.

Segmentation

The first step of the STP marketing model is the segmentation stage. The main goal here is to create various customer segments based on specific criteria and traits that you choose. The four main types of audience segmentation include:

  1. Geographic segmentation: Diving your audience based on country, region, state, province, etc.
  2. Demographic segmentation: Dividing your audience based on age, gender, education level, occupation, gender, etc.
  3. Behavioral segmentation: Dividing your audience based on how they interact with your business: What they buy, how often they buy, what they browse, etc.
  4. Psychographic segmentation: Dividing your audience based on “who” your potential customer is: Lifestyle, hobbies, activities, opinions, etc.

Targeting

Step two of the STP marketing model is targeting. Your main goal here is to look at the segments you have created before and determine which of those segments are most likely to generate desired conversions (depending on your marketing campaign, those can range from product sales to micro conversions like email signups).

Your ideal segment is one that is actively growing, has high profitability, and has a low cost of acquisition:

  1. Size: Consider how large your segment is as well as its future growth potential.
  2. Profitability: Consider which of your segments are willing to spend the most money on your product or service. Determine the lifetime value of customers in each segment and compare.
  3. Reachability: Consider how easy or difficult it will be for you to reach each segment with your marketing efforts. Consider customer acquisition costs (CACs) for each segment. Higher CAC means lower profitability. 

There are limitless factors to consider when selecting an audience to target – we’ll get into a few more later on – so be sure that everything you consider fits with your target customer and their needs.

Positioning

The final step in this framework is positioning, which allows you to set your product or services apart from the competition in the minds of your target audience. There are a lot of businesses that do something similar to you, so you need to find what it is that makes you stand out. 

All the different factors that you considered in the first two steps should have made it easy for you to identify your niche. There are three positioning factors that can help you gain a competitive edge:

  1. Symbolic positioning: Enhance the self-image, belongingness, or even ego of your customers. The luxury car industry is a great example of this – they serve the same purpose as any other car but they also boost their customer’s self-esteem and image.
  2. Functional positioning: Solve your customer’s problem and provide them with genuine benefits.
  3. Experiential positioning: Focus on the emotional connection that your customers have with your product, service, or brand.  

The most successful product positioning is a combination of all three factors. One way to visualize this is by creating a perceptual map for your industry. Focus on what is important for your customers and see where you and your competitors land on the map.

A perceptual map of popular clothing retailers

Benefits of STP marketing

If you aren’t already convinced that STP marketing is going to revolutionize your business, we’re breaking down the key benefits that STP marketing has over a traditional marketing approach.

Because STP focuses on creating a precise target audience and positioning your products/services in a way that is most likely to appeal to that audience, your marketing becomes hyper-personalized. With personalization:

  • Your brand messaging becomes more personal and empathetic because you have your customer personas and know exactly whom you’re talking to;
  • Your marketing mix becomes more crystalized and yields higher return on investment because you’re no longer wasting budget on channels that your audience simply ignores;
  • Your market research and product innovation become more effective because you know exactly whom to ask for advice and feedback in the development phase.

Yieldify’s recent research shows that eCommerce leaders are adopting personalization at an unprecedented rate – 74% of eCommerce sites now claim to have now adopted some level of personalization strategy. Their reasons?

Fifty-eight percent found that personalization helps increase customer retention, 55% cited conversion and 45% found that personalization actually helped minimize the cost of new customer acquisition

Finally, STP marketing levels the playing field. The framework allows small businesses and startups to find success in their niche markets when they normally wouldn’t have the reach to compete with the larger whole-market businesses in their industry.

STP marketing examples: The Cola Wars

STP marketing has been around for a long time – and it has been effective for just as long. We’re going to take a look at a real-world example of STP marketing so you can see how it has worked historically in increasing conversions and revenue.

Back in the 1980s, when Pepsi-Cola was trying to claim some of the market share from Coca-Cola, Pepsi used segmentation to target certain key audiences. They focused on an attitude and loyalty segmentation approach and divided the market into three consumer segments:

  1. Consumers with a positive attitude to the Coke brand who were 100% loyal to Coke.
  2. Consumers with a positive attitude to the Pepsi brand who were 100% loyal to Coke.
  3. Consumers with a positive attitude to both brands, with loyalty to both, who switched their purchases between both brands.

Pepsi had always focused their marketing efforts on the third segment, as it was the most attractive and had the highest return on investment. Focusing on customers loyal to Coke was considered a waste of time and money, as they were unlikely to change their purchasing habits.

However, that all changed with the launch of New Coke in 1985…

The new iteration of Americas’ favorite beverage missed the spot with a lot of loyal consumers, so Pepsi swopped in. In fact, as Mental Floss points out, “Coke’s headquarters received upwards of 1,500 calls a day, up from the usual 400, with virtually all of them complaining about the change.”

Sensing the change in consumer sentiment, Pepsi began targeting loyal Coke drinkers. The rival brand also refocused its positioning – Pepsi started drumming up the fact that Coca-Cola, supposedly, changed its classic Coke with New Coke to resemble more the taste of Pepsi. Their marketing campaigns were brutal (well, in today’s terms at least):

That same year, Pepsi announced a 14% spike in overall product sales. Pepsi was able to use STP marketing strategies to increase their market share and convert Cola-loyal customers to Pepsi-lovers.

How to create an STP marketing strategy: The full STP model

We covered the three stages of the STP marketing model, looked at the benefits and examples of this approach. While this provides you with an excellent overview of the concept, we want to get into the detail of creating an STP marketing strategy that serves your business.

Below you will find 7 steps to creating a solid marketing strategy using the full STP model.

1. Define the market

The global market is far too big and far too vast for anyone – even the biggest corporation with the most resources – to address. That’s why it’s important to break it down into smaller chunks and clearly define the part you are going after.

Typically, to evaluate your business opportunity, you will need to define your TAM, SAM, and SOM: Total Available Market, Serviceable Available Market, and Serviceable Obtainable Market.

Think of it as an iceberg. The very top peeking from under the water is your SOM – that’s the portion of the market that you can effectively reach.

SAM is is the portion of the total available market that fits your product or service offering. Whereas TAM is the total available market, in other words, “the overall revenue opportunity that is available to a product or service if 100% market share was achieved.”

For example, back when Airbnb was starting to pitch investors, they used the TAM, SAM, SOM model to explain their business potential. Their total available market (TAM) then was valued at $1.9 billion dollars and included any type of accommodation that travelers were booking worldwide.

Because their service offering was targeted more at the budget travelers who were using online booking engines to find their stay. In this case, the SAM was valued at $532 million dollars. Lastly, their SOM came in at $10.6 million dollars and signified the revenue obtainable for Airbnb.

Similarly with a consumer product, we can look at Diet Coke and say that its TAM would include the total beverage market. Its SAM would narrow it down to soft drinks, and SOM would zero in on the carbonated sugar-free drinkers out there.

There are several routes you can choose when defining a market. You can do so by:

  • Industry classification (agriculture, retail, transportation, etc.
  • Product category (apparel, health and beauty, food and beverage, etc.)
  • Country (United States, United Kingdom, etc.)

2. Create audience segments

Now that you’ve adequately defined your target market, it’s time to segment it using geographical, demographic, behavioral, and psychographic variables. 

Each segmentation variable helps you tap into a different aspect of your audience and when you use them in unison you can create niche segments that really make an impact on your overall marketing effort.

For example, if you split your serviceable obtainable market into men vs women (demographic variables) you are still left with a pretty broad audience segment. However, if you start layering other segmentation variables on top, you can create a precise audience that you can make the biggest impact on.

Perhaps you go after women (demographics) in the United States (geographics) who prefer to spend money on luxury products (psychographics) who follow you on social media or have visited your website in the past (behavior).

As you can see, this layering method creates a hyper-focused audience segment that allows you to create an extremely personalized experience. And as we mentioned before, personalization has a huge impact on the success of your marketing efforts.

3. Construct segment profiles

When you’ve landed on your viable market segments, it’s time to develop segment profiles. Segment profiles are very similar to your ideal customer personas but they act as subsets of your main persona – they are detailed descriptions of the people in each segment

Describe their needs, behaviors, demographics, brand preferences, shopping traits, marital status, and any other characteristics. Each profile should be as detailed as possible to give you and your business a good understanding of the potential customers within each segment. This will allow you to compare segments for strategy purposes.

4. Evaluate the commercial attractiveness of each segment

Cross-referencing your findings with available market data and consumer research will help you assess which of your constructed segments can bring in the biggest return on your investment. Consider factors like segment size, growth rates, price sensitivity, and brand loyalty. 

With this information, you will be able to evaluate the overall attractiveness of each segment in terms of dollar value.

5. Select target audience/s

Now that you have detailed information on all of your segments, you need to spend some time deciding which ones are the most viable to use as your target audiences. You’ll need to take into account your overall business strategy, the attractiveness of the segment, and the competition that exists in that segment.

The best way to determine the most viable segment is by performing cluster analysis. Quite a complex and technical topic on its own (check out this guide to get more insights), clustering in the context of eCommerce segmentation means using mathematical models to identify groups of customers that are more similar to one another than those in other groups.

Your ideal audience segment is one that is both large and still growing, and you are able to reach with your marketing efforts. You’ll also want a segment that aligns with your business strategy – it makes no sense to focus your efforts on a segment of men in Australia if you are phasing out your menswear and don’t offer free shipping to Australia. 

6. Develop a positioning strategy

Next, you need to develop a positioning strategy that will give you the best edge to compete in the selected target audience. Determine how to effectively position your product, taking into account other competitors – focus on how your positioning can win the largest amount of the market share.

There are several positioning strategy paths you can follow:

  1. Category-based positioning – This calls for determining how are your products or services better than the existing solutions on the market.
  2. Consumer-based positioning – This calls for aligning your product/service offering with the target audience’s behavioral parameters.
  3. Competitor-based positioning – This is a pretty straightforward approach that calls to prove you are better than competitor X.
  4. Benefit-based positioning – This calls for proving the benefits that customers will get from purchasing your product or service.
  5. Price-based positioning – This calls for distinguishing based on the value for the money people get when purchasing your product/service.
  6. Attribute-based positioning – Competitors, price, and benefits aside, this calls for zeroing in on a unique selling proposition that makes your product or service stands out from the rest.
  7. Prestige-based positioning – This calls for proving that your products supply a certain boost in status to those who purchase.
  8. Product Positioning Map – The product positioning map is a technique where the business uses visual display to show their products against competitors. This allows for an easy way of navigating and understanding which products are being represented in comparison with others, ultimately helping them make decisions about what should be prioritized or modified based on company needs.

Chose what positioning model makes the most sense based on your previous research, and which would allow you to reach your specific segment.

7. Choose your marketing mix

The last and final step in this long and winding process is to actually implement your strategy. For that, you will need to determine a marketing mix that will support your positioning and help you reach the target audience(s) that you’ve chosen.

A marketing mix consists of the so-called 4 Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. The 4Ps are one of the essential marketing models.

Lets breakdown what the 4Ps include:

  • Product takes into consideration factors like variety, quality, design, branding, features, packaging, services, availability, and convenience.
  • Price takes into consideration factors like pricing strategy, list price, penetration price, premium, discounting, payment methods, credit terms, and payment period. Are your target audience segments price sensitive?
  • Place takes into consideration factors like channels, coverage, location, inventory, logistics, and trade channels.
  • Promotion takes into consideration factors like digital marketing, public relations, social media, sponsorship, influencer marketing, content marketing, product placement, sales promotion and marketing communications. How will you communicate your value proposition to your target audience segments?

A carefully-curated marketing mix will ensure business success. However, if you do leave gaps in it, all the precious work you did at the previous stages might go to waste.

Here’s an example to illustrate a poor mix: Let’s say you want to sell a luxury skincare product to women in their 40s.

Your goal is to position it as a high-end addition to their skincare routine that targets concerns related to mature and aging skin. So you invest in print marketing and get your product featured in a couple of popular women’s magazines that skew towards the 30+ audience. You also make sure to price the product accordingly so it indicates the luxury category.

However, your packaging is cheap and poorly designed, while the product itself is sold in drugstores.

This inconsistency, which isn’t aligned with the overall positioning strategy, will prevent you from reaching your target audience in the first place; those who get reached will experience dissatisfaction resulting in negative word-of-mouth, which will eventually make your sales slumber.

Conclusion 

Using the (segmentation targeting and positioning) STP model, businesses can identify their most valuable customer segments and create products and marketing communications that target those customers. This helps you create engaging, personalized marketing campaigns that convert visitors to customers at a high rate. 

If you want to use clever segmentation and behavioral targeting methods in your eCommerce marketing strategy, get in touch with Yieldify and we’ll be happy to help!

STP marketing FAQ

What is STP in marketing? 

STP marketing (Segmentation Targeting, and Positioning) is a three-step marketing framework. With the STP process, you segment your market, target your customers, and position your offering to each segment.

What is an example of STP?

The most classic example of STP marketing is the Cola Wars of the 1980s. Both Pepsi and Coca-Cola used STP marketing to increase their market shares after the introduction of New Coke.

What are the 3 steps involved in STP marketing?

The three main steps within STP are: Segmenting your market (segmentation), identifying your target market (Targeting) and deciding on how you will position your brand (positioning)