29/12/2014
Details on Maintaining Online Shop Promotions and Advert Campaigns
1. Find your Audience
For your advert campaign to be successful you need to work out the right audience for your products/offers. Then you need to work out where your audience are! A spectacular advert campaign for women’s cosmetics will not work to a male based audience.
Ensure to:
- Take the time to find where your audience are – don’t waste time advertising in wrong places
- Follow your audience
- Understand customer behaviour - this can greatly improve the effectiveness of your efforts
2. Don’t Interrupt
By interrupting consumers they are more likely to ignore you. You need to appear as a helpful opportunity rather than an in your face advert. You need to understand the context in which your target audience will see your adverts and how they will appear in relation to the content they are taking in.
Ensure to:
- Lead consumer to water – avoid interrupting and causing annoyance by simply just supplying a lead to your landing page where the real advertising lies.
- Ensure your advert compliments what the audience are currently consuming – you need to ensure the page on your website you send them to relates to the content they were viewing. Tailor your advert to suit the content they were consuming.
3. Relevant Adverts
Online retailers benefit hugely from retail-orientated ad servers as they solve the most challenging retail problems, such as the ability to categorise adverts based on products found on search results pages and target adverts based on brand attributes. They basically do the hard work for you and find the right audience you need for your promotions.
4. Keep in Touch with a Newsletter
Once you’ve worked to get a sale from a customer, why let them go without providing opportunity for more sales? Customer friendly newsletters are great ways to keep in touch with existing customers to advertise your new products and announce special events and other shop news. That’s why online retailers thrive on newsletters and what’s more they can be sent as frequent as needed to keep up with your business.
Here are a few tips to help you:
- Be consistent – it is always best practice to send your newsletter on the same day and same time each week so customers know when to expect them
- Short and simple – the main aim of a newsletter is to direct customers to your website, so keep your news short adding links for ‘more information’ to the website
- Connect with your audience – customers who read your newsletter like to connect with the personal side of your company, they don’t just want a sales pitch
- Grab attention – to get people who receive your newsletter to actually read it, you need to grab their attention with a good, intriguing subject line
5. Try Different types of Adverts
You often see companies create an advert and then use that one advert for months! This strategy doesn’t work well. For optimal success you need to take advantage of the flexibility of digital adverts. The best way to gain insight is to test out different options to see which works best for your business.
6. Use Product Feeds
It’s important to consider product feeds as part of your online sales and marketing strategy, particularly if your site retails many different products, or if you sell products who’s pricing and availability frequently change.
7. Cross-selling
Cross-selling is a great and often the most successful ways to promote your products online. When a customer is looking at a product for example a dress, offer them the shoes to match. Why not show them the matching handbag and jewellery too. Let them know these complimenting products are available too and the chances are they won’t be able to resist.
Successful cross-selling tips:
- Position complimenting products in a helpful, friendly manner – be subtle
- Trigger impulse purchases - make your customer aware of not just one, but a wide range of complimenting products to give you maximum opportunity of increased sales order