Can free shipping help truly compel your customers to buy more often? Here is how the psychology of free shipping can encourage customer retention and boost sales.
Read More at Jeff Bullas: https://www.jeffbullas.com/the-psychology-of-free-shipping/
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Free Shipping in 2019 I have a few thoughts about free shipping for next year. - More Work
- Less Work
- Much Less Work
More Work
My team and I have done a lot of Free Shipping tests. We found the best offer in the 4th quarter is $10 above our sweet spot. Our average order values were $55 in all but the 4th quarter and $64 in the 4th. We set our free shipping triggers at $60 and $70 making customers work to earn the best deal. Less Work Free Shipping on any and everything lowered AOV but increased dollars to the bank, number of orders and new customers. Loyal customers weren't nearly as turned on by free shipping without a trigger as newbies.
We used the less work option strategically. Dog Days of summer with a new customer outreach to build the file before Christmas and we used no trigger free shipping. We used it in spots during 4Q too. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and day after Christmas were examples of days we used one-day-only no trigger free shipping. Much Less Work - free out and back The trend is free out and back. We never tested this option since my C level managers were paranoid about COGS and the chance we would raise return rates. I think the additional profit and bigger file from free out and back more than pays for any COGs increase but never made that sale. If anyone has done free out and back testing I'd love to hear about it.
Shimona Mehta, Head of Revenue Acceleration for Shopify Plus, talks about the future of e-commerce and the key trends that are shaping the space. She talks about the three key trends shaping e-commerce today: Constantly shifting consumer behaviour, the need for retailers to innovate, and the rapid growth of direct-to-consumer sales. Watch the video for insights from Mehta on what these trends mean for your business.
"When you have rising monetization, rising growth and rising data collection, it drives a lot of regulatory scrutiny whether it’s related to data privacy, competition or safety in content."
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Meeker is as close to Nostradamus as we are likely to get.
Other Retailers Take Prime Day Shots
Finally, other e-commerce retailers are getting it. They aren't allowing Amazon to create a "Christmas in summer" event all by themselves.
Better late than never, many major e-retailers are willing to compete for the first time this summer by offering competitive deals and similar "Prime Days" campaigns.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Amazon Prime isn't just for Amazon anymore.
9 Actionable E-commerce SEO Tips We like the straightforward simplicity of this list of e-commerce SEO tips. Writing better product descriptions seems obvious, but you'd be surprised how many online merchants walk by the obvious. Nothing in SEO is complicated as these 9 tips show despite their "advanced" claim. Tips such as the create "versus" posts will occur to anyone who sees what controversy does to visits (it increases them). Visiting isn't conversion and many new to-e-commerce make that simple mistake.
Our advice is not to do that.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Good list of SEO tips for e-commerce though not as "advanced" as they make out.
Global e-commerce revenues continue to grow, and brick-and-mortar retailers are feeling the heat. There’s plenty of evidence pointing to their survival, so why the anxiety? Despite all the buzz surrounding electronic and mobile commerce, 85 percent of consumers say they prefer to shop in physical stores, a 2016 study by TimeTrade (registration required) found. Even when the same product can be ordered online or purchased at a nearby store, according to TimeTrade’s data, 71 percent of us will still schlep out to the brick-and-mortar retailer to get it.
Google is allowing brands and celebrities to add content directly into search. Google's test combines "internal" and "external" searches into a powerful "branded search" result.
Marty Note - Improving Site Load Times
Let's say you own and manage a $3,000,000 website. You spend 5% of your site's top line to market on Google, with emails and content. Your $150,000 marketing budget pays for team members and vendors.
Your muliti-channel site is cooking along, but you notice customer complaints increase mysteriously on Tuesdays. Tuesdays is also when you drop emails to your 50,000 subscribers. See the problem?
Ecommerce merchants can contribute to one of their biggest illnesses as the Kissmetrics infographic on the link shares - slow load times. Lack of speed kills SEO, community and your website if you aren't careful, very careful. Ways you can slow down your website:
* Dump emails in too big a cluster * Use your production admin UI during sales times * Don't use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) * OR Misconfigure your CDN * Huge images (less of an issue with cloud by why tempt fate) * Bad code * Too many addons, plugins and doodads haning off your blog or website every additional thing adds TIME so ask is it worth it
Now ask yourself, among ALL the hard work and cool campaigns you will create this year are you guaranteed a 10% to 20% sales increase?
Why more online merchants aren't attacking site load times with a vengence the millions they could make SO EASILY is a mystery we hope to help one of our clients, http://www.Moon-Audio.com unravel this year. We want their load times to average 2 seconds and bet that improvement will drop thousands to their bottom line.
Will report back as we evaluate ways to speed up the Moon.
There may be hundreds of tactics that you could consider content marketing. So the six content marketing tactics briefly described here are certainly not an exhaustive list. But this short list does, perhaps, represent some of the best, easiest to understand, and most common content marketing options for small and mid-sized ecommerce businesses.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Commerce - Community & Content rubicons Are CSF's
No way you win online these days without crossing one of the toughest rivers in my Director of Ecommerce tenure -- making content, commerce and community sing happily around the campfire. Good tips here and I will weigh in soon.
New E-commerce
New E-Commerce and a Video Game Steal says e-commerce merchants should steal customization, collaboration and community from video game developers and explains how.
Who are the best Magento Developers in America is the wrong question, better to ask who are the best Magento developers for our online store and brand.
35 Ecommerce Secrets in 7 Days
Time to dump every ecommerce secret we have out in the world and let them do some good. Every day this week we share 5 tips sure to help your online store make more money. B2B marketers will find some tips applicable for their online marketing too.
Monday is 5 Ecommerce Storytelling Tips
http://www.curagami.com/holiday-ecommerce-tips-magazine/?v=7516fd43adaa
5 More Secrets Tomorrow
Ecommerce Tips Magazine
How did we make over $35M in online ecommerce? Sure we tell you then you tell five people and before you know it everyone knows our secrets (cool with us). That's why we will be sharing our favorite ecommerce tips every day next week at
http://www.curagami.com
Be there or don't make as much money this holiday selling season as you could.
Crossing Ecommerce Rubicon
We are making progress on adding Woocommerce to Curagami. The goal is to cross the content / commerce rubicon. The gulf between effective content and commerce is large. The promise of Woocommerce, an ecommerce shopping cart and database appended to Wordpress, is elimination of the artificial and rapidly useless separation between content and commerce.
The Social / Mobile / Connected times we inhibit require a new approach to online commerce. We plan to relaunch Curagami.com next week. Stay tuned, join us for coffee (subscribe http://www.curagami.com/signup/?v=7516fd43adaa ) and we will journey across the rubicon together :). Marty & team Curagami
5 TIps To Cross Ecom's Rubicon
Smart merchants are beginning to cross the ecommerce rubicon between content and commerce. Discover 5 Tips to cross your online store's ecommerce rubicon.
5 TIps
* “Magazine” your content
* Curate from brands
* Curate from customers
* Lean & Visual Win
* Tie In Email, Social & Mobile
Going to incorporate @Guillaume Decugis and Scoop.it's ideas on Lean Content on this not very lean post too. I set aside some content to keep the post pinging with fresh content.
Evergreen means our team will refresh the content (or ask for help from our Ambassadors to do so) regularly. Not all content is equal. Places in our "evergreen" regularly scheduled updates category must be earned (lol).
So help 5 Tips to Cross the Ecom Rubicon earn evergreen status, or better yet contribute your thoughts and we will curate in.
Crossing the Rubicon between content and commerce is the BIG ISSUE in online retailing today. Discover our tips to cross and add yorus.
Ecommerc's future is going to be a symphony of feeds. Use SellWare.com to help manage the sell anytime, anywhere future that is coming fast.
Ecommerce For Everyone
There are some web marketing lessons learned best by creating an online store such as:
- Words Matter as they lead (or don’t) to conversion.
- Design Matter as it leads (or doesn’t) to conversion.
- Money Is The Best Metric.
- Money Helps Create The Best Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
- Money helps create a testing culture.
Creating a store is so easy, we developed Curagmai's Bookstore with Amazon's Associates tool in about half a day, everyone should have an ecommerce store these days.
As Rodney said in Back To School - Shakespeare for Everyone!
Read our Ecommerce For Everyone post:
http://www.curagami.com/magical-thinking/news/shakespeare-for-everyone-ecommerce-lessons/
& Visit the new Curagmai Bookstore
http://www.Curagami.com/books.html
Do you have an affiliate store you want to share? Email martin(at)Curagmai.com and we will create a gallery of cool stores for personal brands, companies and B2B marketing teams.
Learning Ecom
There are some Internet marketing lessons you can only learn if you sell something. Amazon makes it so easy to add a bookstore to your site every site should have one...if only because there are some things about web marketing you can only learn by selling online.
Curagami's New Amazon Power Bookstore: http://www.curagami.com/books.html
Vote For Your Favorite Sites
Everyone has a favorite online store AND most want online retailing to improve. Curagami is in the "improve ecommerce" business, but we can't create change alone. We need your help.
Please take a few minutes and tell us what online stores you love and why. Oh, and bet we missed some cool, great and wonderful stores so let us know who we missed and we will add your faves into our survey.
Together we can improve online commerce :). Thanks, Marty & Team Curagami
http://www.curagami.com/magical-thinking/news/favorite-online-stores-survey/
Disrupt Or Die
Sorry you are too late. You won't be able to win the tactical warfare my team and I did. Your ability to create meaningful differentiation with tactics is over. So BURN YOUR WEBSITE DOWN.
Not literally, but we need to SHOCK Small to Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs) into an important realization - it's BLUE OCEANS or ELSE. Why bother putting up a 4 page site no one will care about, share, link, like love or think about ever again after they've visited once.
Instead of wasting your TIMEM and TREASURE why not BLOW UP what you think you should be doing, discover blue oceans and create lasting competitive advantage. Costs are the SAME, but one has the shelf life of a May Fly why the other may just provide the ROI needed to do the next cool thing.
You know were we would VOTE and if you are going to miss Exinent's Ecommerce Meetup in the Triangle of North Carolina tonight you can play catch up with our Haiku Deck.
http://www.curagami.com/magical-thinking/marketing/the-new-ecommerce-meetup/ ;
Magento is a great system for building e-commerce websites; it’s not bad for marketing them either. Out of the box there are no truly bad default settings for SEO and it offers handy functions to m…
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Great "set up" tips here. We agree. Magento has no "default" bad SEO / SEM settings as some "shopping carts" do. Some of these tips were new to us and they are easy to implement / understand.
Avoiding ASP .Net Storefront
ASP Net Storefront may be good for many things but online commerce for Small to Medium Sized Businesses is not one of them. Here's why:
We do NOT recommend ASP .Net Storefront for SMB online stores.
Deep Dive Moon-Audio Web Analytics
Spending the day (and probably most of the weekend) deep diving #googleanlaytics listening for the music of http://www.Moon-Audio.com. Here are a few of the questions I like to ask every quarter:
* YTD vs. LYTD sales by product & brand.
* Site heuristics (time on, pages viewed, bounce YTD vs. LYTD.
* Top 10 Internal searches (compared to last time we looked).
* Top content.
* Referring sources.
* New vs. Returning YTD vs. LYTD.
* Growth in social.
* Most linked, shared & reviewed content (will be their Dragon Audio Cable so check against last bench marks).
* Review the funnel (top entry / exit, Recency, Frequency, Monetary RFM values).
* 80:20 rule in product sales, brands and content.
Read more about analytics deep dives on G+: https://plus.google.com/+MartinWSmith/posts/EHq6vvSJhxf
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