Selling shizzle online – a case study
How to get your ecommerce business selling online… successfully!
For centuries, oil has long been one of the world’s most valuable resources. You may be thinking, oil?! But bear with us… Throughout history, those who’ve controlled the world’s oil supply have also controlled the world’s economy. However, in today’s “economy of data”, data is potentially more valuable, due to the knowledge and insight we can extract from it. Just like oil, raw data gains its value when it’s refined into an essential commodity. When refined, this data can drive better decision making for businesses, resulting in revenue increases, cost savings and more efficient performances for businesses. In order to gain success in today’s economy, it is without a doubt essential to utilise this data in every way, shape and form.
And in today’s world of everyone being technology zombies (especially in THIS climate, you know what we’re talking ‘bout) digital marketing through social media, email marketing and ads is a no brainer! Bonus points if you noticed the pun 😉
If you’re the type of person who needs proof then you’re in luck. We wanted to share one (of many) of our recent successes.
Cheap Work Boots is a digital marketing client of ours who sells, you guessed it, work boots! They provide a quick, convenient and reliable service for Australian trade and construction workers and understand how important a great pair of boots are for your long term health.
During a time when financial crisis was looming for countless businesses, this client had the advantage of already being set up online with smart, scalable ad campaigns.
This was supported with further marketing activity focused on leveraging other platforms also, such as consistent social media posts on various platforms, especially Facebook where we have helped grow their audiences. This has helped keep their online presence active to social media users, while we have also carried out email marketing to connect with their database and customers.
How does Social Media help with marketing?
Online stores that have a social presence have 32% more sales on average than a store that doesn’t. You can’t ignore that social media is where your customers are at! It’s an extremely relevant and powerful tool and with appropriate use of the different social channels your business will flourish.
Successful social media activity relies heavily on having great, quality content posted regularly. Don’t you hate it when you’re thinking about buying something from somewhere new and go to check out their Instagram but their latest post was from June 2019… Because we definitely do! We would recommend businesses be posting every few days to all of their platforms. If you can post daily, it wouldn’t hurt!
For Cheap Work Boots, we post to their Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts 3 or 4 times a week. We post photos of their products from all of the leading brands they stock, people wearing boots for adventuring as well as working, cute doggos on site and also #funnymemes. Since most of their customers are tradies we don’t mind getting a bit humorous. You just have to know your target audience.
How effective is Email Marketing?
Email Marketing is a proven way to connect with your customers on a more direct level, because you own your own database and you’re playing in your own sandpit! In other words it makes $$ and you know the algorithms won’t change every other day like on social. When we tailor EDM’s (Electronic Direct Mail) to individuals or groups, this helps land targeted and informative content right in front of customers. Your database is its own sandpit of customers past, present and future in the form of email addresses. Making it a goldmine for potential revenue. Campaign Monitor, (a market leader of this industry) reported in 2019 that over 124 billion emails were sent worldwide each day! There’s soooo much information available online, and by developing a strategy for your campaigns this helps to sort through the noise for your audience.
What you should do is identify the most effective time to send out content to customers inbox so your email has less chance of ending up in the e-waste bin. Remember your customers are always thinking WIIFM (what’s in it for me). Staying in contact with your community on a regular basis will build familiarity and keep in the top of their minds. No, we don’t mean spam them, we don’t like spam here, not even the canned variety. You should always provide quality content and value to build trust. All industries thrive on email marketing, especially businesses who provide exciting updates, promotions and offers, just like Cheap Work Boots. They are often holding sales, competitions and stocking new products. CWB/ ATCF Revenue recorded from emails = $3405.46 Since November
How do different types of ads help to sell?
Social media ads
It’s one thing having active social media accounts, but nothing is free these days. Social media performs best when supported by advertising. This advertising can be focused on driving traffic to the website, growing followers, increasing brand awareness, or pushing for conversions with campaign types such as retargeting. Our social media advertising for Cheap Work Boots saw months of focus on growing the followers and engagement on Facebook, making it a prime audience and platform for promoting products. As this audience had reached a reasonable size, focus has since been shifted to product promotions, with occasional ad campaigns promoting specials.
Google Ads
This has been one of the biggest contributors to traffic and sales here, with scalable campaigns that were previously set up and ready to go, including those which make use of machine learning. As a result, these campaigns were able to capitalise on increased demand and get our client’s products in front of the right people, all while having the focus of targeting maximum ROAS (return on ad spend).
AD SPEND VS REVENUE
The following chart highlights this impressive increase in performance, with ad spend in blue and revenue in red. We can see that for a comparatively very gradual increase in spend, the revenue growth has been very impressive.
Convinced? Thought so. There’s no doubt you NEED to be online right now, especially if you’re selling anything. So get online now, if you haven’t already, and stay there! As seen in Cheap Work Boots’ case, being set up long-term online with smart campaigns is proven to get results, this sort of stuff doesn’t happen overnight.
Hit us up if you’re ready to get selling online! Download our digital marketing packages here to see pricing options.
And if you’re ready for a quick chat, get in touch with our director Michael Taylor email michael@spicybroccoli.com or call the studio at +61 2 8084 5554
