Don’t Just Sit There, Do Something Social…ideas from Jeffery Giesener – CEO – ShoppeSimple
Over the last several months, I have been sharing ideas on what to do to help grow your Social Business. The reason ShoppeSimple created Surround-Sound Social Business™ is that we believe that social media is not just about Facebook or Twitter. It’s about socializing and monetizing all of your marketing channels (Website, email, PPC/SEO, Affiliate, Shopping Cart/Check Outs, Catalog, Mobile, Facebook, Twitter, Retail, digital couponing and Barcodes/QR codes). Building your Social Business means driving social media horizontally across and through your business.
At the core of building a successful Social Business we have discovered an inherent weakness. What is it?
- Products are too hard for consumers to buy
- Content is too hard for consumers to find
Ask yourself . . . why should it take multiple clicks for consumers to find the content and products they want to buy?
That’s a key marketing challenge and it exists within and across every one of your marketing channels. If this were not the case, then why does MarketingSherpa report that on average across all online merchants 70% of opened shopping carts never get closed. Ouch!
What is your shopping cart abandonment rate? Do you know? I would suggest you do your own user-experience testing and if you are not satisfied with your user-experience determine its causation and mitigate it quickly.
The challenges you identify will likely bubble up into a few categories as they did for us.
- Inflexible IT departments, website navigation or website development
- Internal Search issues
- Existing internal channel silos, channel infighting and lack of cross-channel internal communications
- Marketing and Web Development objectives not in sync
Simplify consumer engagement and your payback will come
As a merchant you need to focus on simplifying consumer engagement and providing a fluid means for the consumer to have conversations with you. Your sole purpose should be getting consumers what they want, where they want it, and when they want it; AND making it easy for them to share your content with their friends and family on any social and mobile platform including all of your marketing channels.
Do this and you will generate more orders at lower cost, higher average order, increased frequency of ordering, and you’ll generate significantly more new customers who are seeing your brand message daily and sharing it with their friends.
ShoppeSimple has proven this formula works equally well for all merchants.
Take steps now to protect your business for the Holidays
Here are 3 key programs you can implement quickly which will make a major difference in your Q4 2011 results.
1. Monetize Facebook
According to Hitwise, each Facebook Fan is worth 20 visits to your website per year. The incremental site visitor increase is compelling if you convert just 2% of your Facebook Fans into website buyers. Do that and you are going to bank a very large new sales channel from Facebook. Done right, you should begin seeing results during this holiday season!
The bankable dollars from your Facebook Channel will grow over the next 18 months as your Likes and Fans continue to grow.
Are your Facebook Fans turning into dollars today? Are your Facebook Fans even coming to your website?
It is no longer acceptable to say my Facebook Channel is not generating revenue and blame it on the claim . . . “my customer is just not on Facebook.” It’s no longer acceptable to believe Facebook is not generating traffic and dollars for merchant businesses. And if you choose to wait, your competitors will gain at your expense!!
Now is the time for you to profit if you simply turn your thinking.
Consumers Can Personalize Their Facebook Experience Using ShoppeSimple
Consumers now have the opportunity to add a personalized shopping store on their consumer Facebook page (not on their Wall) with new content daily distributed directly by your business. And this is not about turning full-price buyers into deal buyers. You are in total control of the content you distribute. Now your brand and new content can be on your consumers’ Facebook page every day. The analytics will prove how much they love it too with higher average order values, higher conversion rates and an increase in order frequency.
2. Launch a ShoppeFans Facebook Affiliate Program
I’m sure your business has a traditional Affiliate Channel and that it provides a significant contribution to your business. But have you thought about enabling your Fans on Facebook to be compensated for enjoying your brand, your products and ultimately sharing your offers with their Fans and friends? Have you wanted your Facebook page to go viral but struggle to conceptualize how? Do you want to enable conversations about your business that lead to sales and move all of your Facebook traffic back to your site for ordering?
You can do all of this with the ShoppeFans program for Facebook.
ShoppeFans is our proprietary Affiliate program for Facebook. It’s completely turn-key taking care of all the details including intake of affiliate, approvals, tracking and payments. It works seamlessly with other ShoppeSimple Social Business solutions too.
ShoppeFans works like your traditional Affiliate program but does something even better. It can rejuvenate your traditional Affiliate Channel as your affiliates can now receive new product arrivals, deals and any content they want you to distribute to them on a daily basis. No longer are you forced to just do banners or free shipping offers or couponing. Now you can build dynamic landing pages that drive higher conversion rates, higher average orders and more new customers. Build a viral sales force of social fans who are excited to sell your products and pocket a commission from your brand.
3. Lift PPC Results with Social Business Keyword Solutions
Last week’s blog post on Search…Land…and Bank really hit a nerve with many of my readers. And that’s not surprising as our research this summer told us it would.
For most ecommerce businesses, regardless of whether they are .com or multi-channel, Adwords is either the number one or two channel from an expense perspective. I suspect your PPC channel is similar and that it also drives a significant amount of your overall online revenue which was true for our research subjects too.
As a further statement of its importance, how many of you could go cold turkey on Adwords for a month? What hit would your revenue take? Point made.
Since last week’s blog we’ve presented our Social Business Keywords solutions to some significant Adwords users. Users who were in need of help because Cost Per Order was not aligning with their profitability requirements.
These merchants were concerned about
- Their internal IT organization
- The lack of ability to make on the fly PPC program changes
- The concern over keyword bidding in Q4
- Having too little if any control over conversions or optimization opportunities especially during Q4 when their sites are all locked down
You can mitigate, even eliminate, all these concerns through our Social Business Keywords solution right now. Here’s why…
- Your Marketing Team can implement this without needing your IT department
- Targeted landing pages are created on the fly that optimize your consumer search experience and increase PPC ROI
- No more waiting helplessly in Q4. Your PPC/SEO Team drives their own destiny.
A ShoppeSimple Offer to Help
Working with ShoppeSimple Surround-Sound Marketing gives you the marketing agility you need to build your Social Business. Just imagine if you could free up your IT marketing queue AND still give your marketing department the horsepower it needs across all of your marketing channels to drive their own marketing initiatives all in time to make a difference this Holiday season.
We invite you to protect your Holiday business by testing ShoppeSimple. We will have testable solutions in place in less than 2 weeks. Yes that fast. And we absolutely guarantee your satisfaction or you don’t pay us a dime, So, what do you have to lose?
To have the ShoppeSimple Team personally help your business for the holiday simply give me a ring at 612-349-2740 or email me personally by clicking here.