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Loyalty Marketing

Loyalty Programs: What is the Return on Investment (ROI)?

Here's how to calculate the return on investment of your loyalty program. Calculate the expected ROI of your loyalty program, or your past ROI.

Francesca Nicasio

Content Strategy Manager

Every business owner understands it’s easier to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one. That’s why many merchants use loyalty programs to incentivize customers to come back and spend more with them. When done right, loyalty rewards, discounts, special early access, etc. can help to drive incremental revenue and maximize your customer lifetime value (CLV).

All that being said, it’s important to remember that loyalty or reward programs are long-term undertakings. Yes, they’re super beneficial to your company, but to reap those advantages, you need to periodically evaluate your loyalty program performance. Some consider loyalty programs to be money pits — and they can be if you don’t keep track of your loyalty program ROI.

So, let’s back up a bit: return on investment (ROI) is a financial metric that evaluates how profitable an investment is. To calculate the ROI, you need to divide the net profit by the cost of the investment, and express it as a percentage. The greater the ROI, the more profitable the investment.

To get a handle on your loyalty program’s success, you need to measure its ROI. The results will help you decide if your loyalty strategy is working or not. If it’s working, you can continue what you’re doing and double-down on your initiatives. On the flip side, you can rejuvenate poorly performing loyalty programs by optimizing offers, running referral programs, or getting customer feedback.

Listen to this post instead:

How do I calculate ROI for my loyalty program?

As with any business initiative, the success of a loyalty program can be measured by its ROI. The formula to calculate it is pretty straightforward.

Return on Investment = (Total Revenue - Total Cost of Running the Loyalty Program) / Total Cost

Loyalty program ROI calculation: A real-life example

Here's an example from a merchant we have been working closely with. I'm not going to share their name, but I can share their anonymized results so you can see how we assess the impact of their loyalty program.

Challenges in measuring loyalty program ROI

The formula for calculating your loyalty program ROI is simple enough to understand. However, there are a few challenges that can make it more difficult to accurately measure your ROI.

Attributing revenue to the right sources

One of the biggest challenges lies in capturing key metrics and pulling the necessary data from various sources — such as your marketing, sales, finance, tech teams, etc. You need to make sure that you’re attributing your revenue gains to the right sources.

For example, your regular customers are your most valuable ones, with or without a rewards program. How can you be sure their value is attributed to your loyalty program?

It can also be tricky to figure out if a purchase was triggered by loyalty program benefits or if it’s just a customer’s normal buying behavior. You need to have the right tracking mechanisms in place to be able to accurately calculate a loyalty program’s ROI.

Some of the ways to do this include using robust loyalty apps (like Marsello), discount codes, coupons, etc. to track customer behavior that can only be attributed to loyalty programs.

With Marsello, you can track the metrics like change in repeat purchase rate and increase in turnover from loyalty members, as we've done above. This will get you a much more accurate picture of your return.

It takes time to see results

Not only will you need considerable time to gather the data required to calculate the ROI, but it may also take time for your points programs to show results. Customers must first be aware of such programs, engage with them, and rack up enough points on their loyalty cards. It may take months (or more) for your loyalty program to start paying off, so you won’t know your true ROI right away.

💡 Pro tip: Rather than committing to a 3 month trial across all your sites, commit to one site for at least 1 year (expanding to other sites if you see results earlier). Starting with fewer sites but allowing for a longer time period will give you a much better indication of the impact of the program for your business.

Metrics to consider when measuring the impact of your loyalty programs

Beyond the ROI calculation above, there are many ways you can measure the impact of loyalty programs. You can look at how they affect your revenue, customer base growth, and engagement, among other things.

You could choose to measure success purely based on financial returns or through KPIs such as engagement rate, brand awareness, etc. Here are some of the data points you may need to track.

Transaction volume
Average order value
Total revenue
Cost of loyalty program memberships
Marketing cost
Purchase frequency of members and non-members

The key is to track these over time. Remember, it takes time to build loyalty, so running a successful rewards program is a marathon, not a sprint.

And before you calculate the ROI of your loyalty program, make sure you’re clear about your business objectives. What are your specific goals? Do you want to increase revenue by a certain percentage? Reduce your marketing expenditure while boosting sales? Grow your repeat customer base?

This will be essential for setting targets for your loyalty program and understanding its impact on your bottom line.

Direct ROI of loyalty programs

Direct loyalty program ROI can come in several forms, including:

Increased sales and revenue from repeat purchases

A loyalty program can significantly contribute to a business' goal of increasing revenue and profit. According to a 2023 report by Gitnux, the likelihood of selling to a new customer is less than 20%. Conversely, this probability rises to nearly 70% for an existing customer.

By enhancing customer satisfaction, fostering brand loyalty, attracting new customers, and gathering important customer data, your loyalty program can lead to tangible financial gains. You can also make informed decisions about product development and marketing strategies, further amplifying revenue.

Ultimately, loyalty programs serve as strategic tools for driving sales, revenue growth, and long-term profitability in any business endeavor.

Just ask Scotty’s Makeup & Beauty, which was looking for an email marketing solutions provider when it came across Marsello. Very quickly, the business realized the full potential of Marsello’s tools and decided to also set up loyalty programs. This resulted in Scotty’s Makeup & Beauty unlocking new audiences, increasing its customer engagement, and doubling its revenue.

scottys-makeup-and-beauty-discount

Reduced marketing costs through targeted promotions

Acquiring new customers through marketing efforts and sales outreach can be resource-intensive, consuming both time and funds. Customer acquisition costs pile up especially when leads opt for competitors.

Since loyalty programs help drive sales from existing customers, they enable your brand to mitigate the expenses linked with customer acquisition.You spend less to drive sales, which leads to a higher bottom line.

Indirect ROI of loyalty programs

Now that we’ve covered the direct ways to measure ROI, here’s a look at the indirect metrics that you may want to track.

Improved customer retention

When customers feel valued and content, they are more inclined to remain loyal and make repeat purchases. Implementing a loyalty program can significantly contribute to this effect.

For instance, imagine being a long-term participant in a supermarket’s loyalty program, accumulating rewards for discounts or free items. Such incentives foster loyalty, encouraging folks to continue supporting your brand despite alternative options.

Enhanced brand loyalty and customer satisfaction

Loyalty programs enhance customer appreciation by rewarding purchases with discounts or complimentary items, fostering a sense of value. Tailoring rewards based on individual preferences demonstrates care and enhances the shopping experience.

This helps to elevate customer satisfaction levels. Satisfied customers are more likely to return, which just goes to show the role of customer loyalty programs in enhancing overall satisfaction and fostering repeat business.

Positive word-of-mouth and referrals

Referral marketing, aka word-of-mouth marketing is a highly effective and sought-after strategy for customer acquisition. Recommendations from friends and family, along with good reviews on social media carry more weight than brand messages.

This is one of the most significant gains from loyalty programs — devoted customers become brand advocates, sharing their positive experiences and benefits received from your business. Through their advocacy, your company can gain new customers organically, without incurring any additional costs.

Data collection and insights for better business decisions

Understanding customers is crucial for business success. Rewards programs offer valuable insights into loyal customers, including their personal details and preferences. This enables businesses to enhance customer experiences and satisfaction by tailoring their services to meet individual preferences.

Bonus points if your loyalty program works across multiple channels. Going omnichannel with your loyalty efforts means you can collect data from all customer touchpoints, while providing a seamless experience no matter where or how they’re shopping.

Fashion label ALPHA60 was looking to improve its customer-first marketing efforts by providing all its customers with the same great experience. ALPHA60 brought in in-store and online sales data into Klaviyo, allowing the brand to display points balances, segment customers, and send personalized emails, no matter how customers shop.

Alpha60 earn options

By using Marsello for loyalty and marketing, ALPHA60 was able to attain a repeat purchase rate of 70%, wildly surpassing what is considered to be a good repeat purchase rate in the industry (between 20% and 40%).

Tools to track your metrics

Loyalty program solutions like Marsello give you a whole host of tools required to track metrics related to loyalty programs.

The platform's built in marketing analytics capabilities can shed light on which channels and strategies yield the best results. Plus, you can track your loyalty program performance overtime, so you can improve both in the short- and long-term.

Final words

Loyalty programs can offer substantial returns on investment for your business. The right program can enhance customer satisfaction, drive repeat purchases, and boost retention rates. It also provides valuable data and insights for informed decision-making and optimized marketing strategies.

That’s why it’s so important to invest in the right solution AND track your return on that investment. Measuring your loyalty program ROI helps you improve, so you can continue to delight customers and keep them coming back.

Need help doing just that? Check out our ROI Calculator to see how your loyalty programs are performing or talk to an expert to discuss opportunities for revenue growth.

Get advice from a loyalty expert and start driving repeat sales.

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Loyalty Marketing

6 Tips for creating a point system for rewards

READ The ultimate goal with a loyalty points system is to leverage customer loyalty & grow your business. Learn how to create rewards your customers will love.

Quick links:

The ultimate goal with a reward points system is to motivate customer behavior that grows your business. However, it is also a good way to build brand loyalty and reward your most loyal customers.

The Pareto Principle (also known as the Law of the Vital Few) states that 80% of all sales come from just 20% of your customers and that 20% are usually loyal, returning customers.

Creating a rewards program lets you focus on that valuable 20%!

If you have ever wondered

What a reward points system is,
How to set up a simple rewards program for loyal customers, and
How you can increase your revenue with a loyalty program

Then you are in the right place.

Marsello-Rewards-Point-System

What is a reward points system?

According to Shopify, rewarding points is the most common type of customer loyalty program. A reward points system is an incentivization strategy that increases spending through earning in-store points or credits.

Customers earn points on their account when they purchase. They can then redeem points the next time they shop or use them for other freebies and perks. Some loyalty programs also let customers accumulate points and move from a “regular” member to a “VIP” member in a tiered program.

Evermore Toys is a great example of a simple points rewards system. Their mission is to create high-quality toys for their customers, and they implemented an elegant customer loyalty program that increased their revenue by 738.87%.

Customers earn 1 point for every $1 they spend; when they reach 100 points they get $10 off their next purchase. Evermore Toys saw a 95% per month increase in loyalty points over a one-year period, showing that you don’t need a complicated loyalty program to get results.

Evermore Toys Points Reward System explainer page from their website

6 tips for designing a points reward system for your business

To implement a reward points system for customers, there are a few key systems you need. Your business and your customers are unique. 44% of consumers aren’t happy with rewards programs because the bonuses feel “irrelevant”. So it’s worth a bit of creative strategy!

The most successful loyalty programs are specific to your brand community and are extremely customer-focused.

Related: 7 Steps To Building A Profitable Loyalty & Rewards Program

1. Identify the main goals of your customer loyalty program

Obviously, your loyalty points system benefits your revenue potential. However, you can do so much more with it! So the first step to a successful points system is to identify what you want to achieve with it.

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself:

- - Do you want to build brand loyalty by creating a unique community?
  - Do you want to reward your MOST loyal customers by creating a tiered reward system?
  - Do you want to delight customers with unexpected surprises?
  - Do you want to encourage more spending or points accumulation?
  - Do you want people to share your business on social media or get people to refer their friends?
  - Are you going to run “points promotions” to encourage higher spending in sales?

All loyalty programs motivate particular behaviors. When you are starting out it is best to choose just one or two goals so that you can track their progress and then build from there.

Download the free CLV Calculator
Most retailers use loyalty programs to increase the average lifespan and value of a customer. Use Marsello's free calculator to quickly estimate your average CLV.

2. Determine how customers will earn the rewards

Next, you will need to determine HOW customers actually get rewards.

You might want to keep it simple like the Evermore Toys example above. They spend a dollar, they earn a point. There’s nothing wrong with avoiding complications.

Loyalty programs also offer points for customer behavior such as

- - Sharing on social media
  - Earning freebies on your birthday
  - Giving product reviews
  - Referring a friend

Take Our Bralette Club as an example. Their loyalty program members can earn points when they make a purchase, for every friend they refer, for Tweeting about the brand, and even just for getting a year older on their birthday.

Our Bralette Clubs loyalty widget on a light pink banner

Other models include tiered rewards systems. This is where members can move from regular member to VIP status once they cross a spend threshold. VIP customers could have benefits such as Double Points (every dollar is 2 points) or other bonuses like automatic free shipping.

You will also need to consider online versus in-person shopping. Can customers earn and spend points no matter where they shop with you? Using a points reward software like Marsello makes loyalty programs completely seamless across eCommerce and POS.

3. Determine how these rewards will be awarded to the customers

Once customers have earned their points, it’s time to reward them! Do you have a system for how they can claim points?

Firstly it is important to have a login for members where they can easily see their points program total. Seamless integration with your eCommerce checkout and POS is critical for a successful loyalty program. Don’t make your customers work for it!

Next, identify the timeline. Can they redeem points as soon as they earn them? Will they receive a coupon or code for their next purchase? Will you send them something for free?

Lastly, consider what form their rewards will be in. It doesn’t just have to be points they can spend in-store.

Here are a few ways you could reward your customers in a points program:

- - Offer secret sales for people with a certain number of points
  - Collaborate with other businesses to do giveaways with similar products
  - Give away freebies when they buy multiple items
  - Do live in-person events for your most loyal customers
  - Offer other bonuses like free shipping or first access to new products
  - Set up an affiliate program where they can make actual money for referring new customers

Nigerian shoe brand bCODE has an outstanding loyalty program strategy. When they first launched their online rewards, they created a double-point promotion as well as a spend threshold.

The bCODE's points promotion email campaign

With their email marketing and social media campaign, they encouraged increased sales, loyalty program sign-ups, reward redemptions, and more! They also encouraged bCode customers to sign-up by sending an email campaign that detailed how shoppers could sign up to the newly expanded loyalty program and earn points in the lead-up to the weekend’s promotion.

With a 94% increase in loyalty points spent, you know they are rewarding loyalty right!

4. Identify the value of your rewards

If customers earn points-per-dollar, you will need to identify the value of your rewards. You can categorize rewards from low to high value based on how loyal customers are.

Will they get a discount voucher? Do their points add up to free shipping? Can they move up a membership level if they reach a spend threshold?

If you have a tiered loyalty program, the value of the rewards can go up with each level.

For example, a first-tier member could earn points that add up to a discount voucher. A second-tier member could earn double points. A third tier, VIP member could have free shipping, triple points, and access to exclusive events.

Remember, your most loyal customers bring in the most amount of revenue. It is worth going above and beyond to improve their experience with higher value rewards.

Look at outdoor apparel & footwear brand Merrell NZ. As soon as you sign up for their rewards program you can start moving up the tiers. Their silver and gold tier members enjoy generous discounts when they earn a certain number of points. Merrell NZ makes it simple for members to earn points with amazing rewards and a simple loyalty program widget.

Merrell NZ's VIP tiered loyalty program online widget

5. Associate a name/brand to your loyalty program

No matter how amazing your product is, you are facing a huge amount of competition. Your customers are probably being asked to join a huge number of other loyalty programs.

To make your customer reward system stand out, we recommend branding it.

How can you make your loyal customers feel like they are part of a special community? This is where customer experience comes into play for modern business. It’s not enough to simply sell to your customers. Associating a brand name with your loyalty program makes you memorable.

For example, Marsello user Our Bralette Club has a membership loyalty program called the Peach Party. Peach Party members enjoy generous discounts and free products, and most importantly the branded name makes them feel part of the club!

6. Promote your rewards point program

Finally, you need a system for promoting your points reward program. You can’t reward customers if they don’t know it exists! Don’t be afraid to promote it everywhere online and in stores.

This isn’t just for new customers or new business. When Evermore Toys rebranded, they used a clever email marketing campaign to encourage existing loyalty members to engage with the newly branded store and earn more rewards.

Evermore Toys' loyalty program announcement email on a bright yellow banner

We have a few tips for promoting your rewards system online:

- - Let people register for an account at the checkout and remind them to sign in
  - Have a banner on your website telling people about the benefits of becoming a member and earning points
  - Let customers know on your social media platforms
  - Use an omnichannel marketing platform that combines your reward system online with your POS
  - Automate your email marketing strategy to communicate effectively with new and existing members- you need to promote at the right times to ensure high engagement!

Your loyalty program is all about serving your customers even more. Shout its benefits from the rooftops!

FAQs

How do businesses track the cost-effectiveness of their points system to ensure it's generating a positive return on investment?

Businesses can track the cost-effectiveness of their points system by analyzing customer engagement metrics, such as increased purchase frequency, higher average order value, and the redemption rate of points. Comparing these metrics against the program's operational costs provides insights into its return on investment (ROI).

Can you provide examples of challenges businesses might face when integrating a new points system with their existing CRM or sales systems?

Integrating a new points system with existing CRM or sales systems can present challenges like data sync issues, software compatibility problems, and the need for employee training to manage the new system effectively.

What are some strategies for re-engaging customers who have accumulated points but have not redeemed them for a long time?

To re-engage customers with dormant points, businesses could implement targeted marketing strategies such as personalized email campaigns reminding them of their points balance and its value, limited-time offers to boost points redemption, or introducing new, attractive rewards. Add urgency by expiring points and tiers — let customers know they have limited time remaining to cash in and receive their rewards.

Final words

A reward points system is an effective way to increase your revenue. It rewards your most valuable customers and goes beyond a transactional relationship. By branding your loyalty club, designing an easy-to-follow system, and promoting it for every new and returning customer, you will see incredible ROI on your rewards program.

If you are looking for the easiest way to set up a loyalty program for your eCommerce or in-person store, you’ve already found it. Marsello makes it simple to set up, market and run a successful point system for rewards. Start rewarding your customers with Marsello!

Loyalty Marketing Retention Marketing

Rewards and Promotions: Treat Your Customers on Their Birthday

READ How do you know it’s worthwhile to reward customers for milestones like their birthday? Read on to learn more about marketing with rewards and promotions.

As it turns out, there are very good reasons for you to treat your customers on their birthday. A study by Vibes found that 77% of mobile consumers state that receiving surprise points, exclusive messages, and birthday/anniversary content "would have a major impact on their brand loyalty."

Birthday campaigns also tend to perform better. Research by Experian revealed that compared with promotional emails, birthday messages:

- - have a 481% higher transaction rate
  - generate 342% more revenue
  - have a 179% higher unique click rate
  - See an 89% higher open rate.

These numbers tell us that birthday email campaigns can be a huge treat – for both customers and brands. So, it’s worth investing the time and effort to make your birthday initiatives shine. Read on for ideas and tips on how to do just that.

What are the benefits of birthday rewards for your business?

The biggest benefit of birthday rewards programs is that they are a win-win strategy. They put the focus on the buyer experience which benefits your best customers while simultaneously increasing revenue and loyalty.

There are several key reasons why birthday rewards should be part of your overall loyalty program strategy:

- - Firstly, birthday rewards programs increase customer loyalty. 84% of customers opt to stay with a brand that surprises them and takes a customer-centric approach. Who doesn’t like being spoiled on their birthday!
  - Secondly, loyalty programs (that include things like birthday surprises) are proven to improve customer retention rates. Even a small increase of 5% in retention can boost profits by a whopping 25-95%.
  - Lastly, you can gather personalized data on your best customers. This allows you to personalize customer experiences and again improve loyalty.

By adding birthday rewards to an existing loyalty program, you can personalize customer experiences, gather data on what campaigns are resonating with which customers, and re-target loyal customers who redeem rewards.

Free Download: 5-Minute Campaign Strategy Guide.
Make every campaign count. Every good marketing campaign starts with strategy - but it does not need to be rocket science! If you stick to what’s important, your campaign strategy can be both simple and effective.

How to prevent birthday rewards abuse

You might be asking “what if people sign up to our birthday points program with a fake birthday?”.

We have three suggestions to help stop birthday rewards point abuse.

1. 1. Apply a “cooling-off” period when people sign up to your loyalty program, i.e. don’t let people put in a birthday date that is within the first month (“What a coincidence, my birthday is TOMORROW!”). This will deter people who want “quick points” or instant freebies and then disappear.
  2. If you are using a points system, make it less than the points they receive for making an actual purchase while still being valuable.
  3. For birthday programs where you give out a freebie, make it a surprise! Don’t explicitly say what free item they will receive before they sign up. That way people will be less likely to sign up for that one specific item and you can still treat your loyal members.

Ultimately, there will always be people who want to take advantage of free points. The benefits you get from creating positive customer experiences for your loyalty club members will almost always outweigh the potential for rewards abuse.

Examples of Birthday Rewards Campaigns

When you do it right, birthday rewards campaigns can improve customer retention, loyalty, and engagement. Whether it’s sending specialty coupons, giving out freebies, or something a little more creative, these examples hit the nail on the head.

Send a one-off special discount and build excitement

This one can seem to be a low-hanging fruit of birthday rewards, however, special discounts are known to yield quick results and valuable data when implemented correctly. If you’re new to birthday campaigns, consider starting things off with a special discount that shoppers can use on the month of their birthday.

It’s simple, straightforward, and easy to test. Just make sure to create unique promo codes for each celebrant, so you can track who’s redeeming your offers.

Offer free products on special occasions

Alternatively, you can opt to give shoppers a freebie on their special day. Some examples of brands that offer birthday freebies include Starbucks and Sephora. In fact, birthday freebies are growing increasingly common. Australian burger joint Hello Harry’s openly offers their customers a free birthday burger… with a small caveat that protects the business – the birthday burgers are free up to the value of $12.

Freebies are a great option if you want to encourage your customers to try your products or if you have samples and surplus stock to give away.

Offer creative rewards to encourage engagement

Here’s the not-so-great reality of loyalty or rewards programs: while many consumers sign up for them, not everyone participates in all the programs they join.

A 2018 survey found that almost "two-thirds of respondents actively engage with less than half the loyalty programs to which they are members.” The survey found that only 18% actively engage with all their rewards programs.

If your loyalty or rewards program is suffering from low engagement rates, consider incorporating birthday rewards to stir things up. When implemented correctly, this tactic can fuel engagement among your members and put your brand back on their radar.

Anna Beck, a Shopify Plus-powered Jewelry store with multiple resellers and stores, has done a great job at subtly incorporating birthday rewards into their loyalty program to incentivize customers but not create so much buzz that they risk sign-ups for just that reason.

Members of the program automatically get 20 points on their birthday, but with 100 points for creating a profile and 25 for completing their profile information, it’s easy to see how customers quickly earn enough points to reap the rewards.

Since they started using Marsello, Anna Beck has experienced a 728.33% increase in revenue, directly attributable to their loyalty program. And even better, they’ve developed a really thorough understanding of their customer database and how to convert them into loyal customers. They had this to say about developing their loyalty program with Marsello:

“Through the data, we’ve found that we have incredibly loyal customers. Once they make their second purchase, they are highly likely to be lifelong customers. Marsello allows us to easily reward those loyal customers for sticking around, it was a no-brainer. Anna Beck has only been an online retail brand for a handful of years, and a loyalty program was the natural next step.”

Another great example comes from Smack Bang, a Wellington-based pet products specialist is one brand that's using a powerful loyalty program to its advantage. With a 100% engagement rate and 6x ROI, the addition of loyalty marketing to SmackBang's all-over marketing tech stack really helps them to capture customers' attention time and time again.

Smack-Bang-Earn-Options

Loyalty members earn points for actions such as creating a profile, referring a friend, reviewing products, making purchases, and engaging on social media. And the benefits include % discounts off as well as first-looks at product releases.

The Smack Bang team makes sure to keep their loyalty program members up to date with emails regarding product releases, business updates, sales, events, and more! By keeping regular contact with their customers, they set the expectation that the more loyal a customer is, the better deals they’ll get. And we love that SB lives up to this expectation!

Create a sense of mystery and surprise your customers

Want to keep shoppers on their toes or still trying to figure out which reward type is the best option? Consider offering a range of rewards and surprises that your customers can enjoy on their birthday month.

That’s what the lingerie retailer ThirdLove is doing. Members of their ‘Hooked’ loyalty program get an annual free birthday gift, which remains a surprise until the customer's special day. According to the company's website:

“We’re not ones to spoil a surprise! While we won’t tell exactly what they are, they’ll change regularly and might be a freebie, a discount, or a little something special just for you.”

Surprise freebies are a wonderful way to keep your customers excited, but our tip? Don’t be tempted to fall into the trap of ‘pawning off’ your hard-to-sell stock on these customers. Make sure your birthday freebies are worth the hype and keep shoppers wanting more.

Celebrate your business’s birthday and say thanks to your customers

A nice twist to the concept of birthday rewards is to celebrate your brand’s birthday. This is a good way to mark an important milestone, and it gives you the opportunity to thank customers – both new and old.

Bare Wholefoods, a Sydney-based cafe, did just that when they celebrated their 4th birthday.

Bare-Wholefoods-Birthday-Email-Discount-Code

To mark the occasion, Bare Wholefoods sent a pre-birthday email to their customers, which included a $10 discount code along with a sincere message of appreciation. The result? The small but mighty campaign saw a 6.59% conversion rate!

By celebrating their own birthday, Rough & Bare was also able to show appreciation to the customers that keep them going – and this is such a powerful message in the wake of significant changes brought about by COVID-19.

Tips for implementing birthday rewards

We’ve talked about the different types of birthday rewards you can offer; now let’s discuss how you can take your campaigns to the next level. If you’re looking to start or further optimize your birthday rewards initiatives, follow these best practices to ensure that your efforts hit the mark:

Integrate birthday perks with your loyalty or rewards program

While it’s certainly possible to offer birthday rewards to non-loyalty program members, your campaigns will perform far better if they’re incorporated into your loyalty program.

Roping birthday rewards into your loyalty program enables you to build data-rich customer profiles. Having your shoppers’ purchase histories, shopping activities, and birthdays in one place means that you have a clear view of who each customer is. That, in turn, can enable you to improve and personalize their shopping experiences even more.

LEGO Certified Stores South Africa has done this to great success!

Screen Shot 2022-02-16 at 11.07.43 AM

By awarding customers points on their birthdays and for purchases, LEGO creates a feeling of scarcity but customers also quickly rack up the points with each purchase. This means that when customers earn a reward, it feels all the sweeter!

Automate your campaigns

Keeping track of everyone’s birthdays and setting up individual messages isn’t just tedious, it’s impossible as your business grows. Campaign automation is not only a remarkable time-saver – automation as a whole (along with personalization) has actually been pinpointed as the future of marketing.

Thankfully, Marsello has done the hard work for you and already has a number of pre-made automated flows that are easy to review and enable. One of these automated flows includes a Birthday Flow which automatically triggers an email sequence to engage customers on their birthday month. This pre-designed email series is populated with an offer of a small discount and is already tied to your customer database, so there’s no need to manually configure the campaign.

Just take a look at this example from Nigerian shoe retailer bCODE:

Marsello-Email-Automation-Happy-Birthday-Flow-The-BCode

Notice that they’ve given their customers a lovely surprise by automatically adding 5 points to their account to celebrate! We love that this campaign stands out, has a compelling subject line, and gives customers value right away.

In fact, all of Marsello’s automated campaigns are designed to be easily enabled in just a few clicks. Learn more about Marsello’s marketing automation functionality or start a free trial and explore yourself.

Test your offers

While we can certainly recommend birthday rewards and ideas, ultimately, the performance of your birthday promotions will depend on your specific store and customer base. That’s why it’s important that you test and analyze different birthday promotions to see what works best for your business.

As mentioned above, coming up with unique promo codes makes it easier to monitor the performance of your offers, as well as the customers who are redeeming their rewards.

In fact, the NZ arm of international sporting goods specialists Merrell are pros are testing all of their marketing. They had this to say when we spoke to them about their Marsello-powered marketing.

“Marsello offers automations, loyalty, rewards, email campaign segmentation, SMS. All the tools that we knew we wanted to test in stages as our eCommerce and business grows. Step 1 was swapping from [our old provider] to using Marsello’s email marketing campaigns. Step 2, we’re using marketing automation. Step 3, it’s loyalty!”

It was essential to the team to find an all-in-one tool that they could use to build their marketing functionality while also testing each and every change. And that didn’t stop when it came to building their loyalty program and testing their promotional offers!

One way you can use birthday rewards to understand your customer engagement patterns is to test which different promo types (e.g., free shipping vs. 20% off vs. $5 off) your customer responds well too. Then, it’s easy to apply similar logic to any other promotions and offers that you create in the future!

Integrate SMS marketing

While email is still the most popular channel for sending birthday promos and rewards, SMS is rapidly gaining steam – and it won’t slow down anytime soon. Industry experts are predicting SMS marketing to grow by 52% by 2023.

As such, if you’re thinking about using SMS marketing, customer birthdays present the perfect opportunity to touch base. Consumers will likely be checking their phones for birthday greetings, and having a timely text from your brand could serve as a pleasant surprise.

Just remember, SMS marketing comes with a few rules to keep in mind and not every merchant is eligible. To make sure you’re doing everything right, check out our help center on SMS compliance.

FAQs

How do businesses track the effectiveness of birthday reward campaigns over time?

To track the effectiveness of birthday reward campaigns over time, businesses often use customer relationship management (CRM) tools to analyze customer engagement, purchase frequency, and changes in spending patterns around their birthdays. If you're using Marsello, you can track the revenue generated from birthday automations over time, allowing you to optimize and see the impact of your changes.

Can small businesses without a big budget implement impactful birthday rewards?

For small businesses with limited budgets, impactful birthday rewards can be implemented by offering personalized discounts, exclusive products, or simple gestures like birthday messages that make customers feel valued without incurring high costs.

How do businesses personalize birthday rewards for diverse customer segments?

Personalizing birthday rewards for diverse customer segments involves gathering data on customer preferences and purchasing history to tailor rewards that resonate with different demographics, enhancing the customer's experience and loyalty. Remember: Don't get too granular with your segments — the smaller the segment, the more time and cost intensive personalization will be. For smaller businesses, we recommend one simple birthday reward, such as a voucher.

Final words

Birthdays can be a real treat not just for your customers, but for your brand, as well. So, take the time to create campaigns that make your customers feel appreciated on their special day.

Need help doing just that? Check out Marsello’s customer loyalty features and discover how you can engage each customer on their birthday and beyond.

Make sure to check out our comprehensive loyalty guide to ensure your loyalty marketing is up to date in all areas.

Loyalty Marketing

How Mecca Built One Of The World’s Best Loyalty Programs

READ Do you ever look at loyalty programs like Mecca's Beauty Loop and think: how could I do that for my business? The good news is... you can! Here's how.

Quick links:

Want to build a loyalty program like Mecca’s Beauty Loop, but don’t have the money or time for custom solutions?

Before building brand loyalty, you need to build a brand. And building a brand? That journey starts with the very first business plan, that spark, that idea on a napkin, that leads you to register a company and step into the wild, wicked, unruly world of retail.

So let’s forget loyalty points programs for the time being.

Look inward for a minute, and ask: Why did I start this business?

For a lot of retailers, their business started out of frustration. Frustration that you couldn’t find what you wanted at other stores, frustration about the lack of selection or curation, frustration about the customer service, concern that salespeople only wanted to sell you what they were getting the most commission for (rather than what suited your needs best).

Mecca Founder Jo Horgan shared why Mecca came to be back in 1997 in an interview for the Australian Financial Review.

“I loved cosmetics – I thought there was a real space for them that should be fun and entertaining. And yet when I went to a department store I found it exhausting, going from one counter to another,” Horgan says.

So she started to think: “Imagine the best product offer, a beautiful environment and my best beauty friend next to me taking me from zero to expert in one session…”

“That’s how I wanted to experience cosmetics myself,” she says.

The first time I went to Mecca, I admitted I used $3 foundation and substituted in cheap eyeshadow with a 10-year-old makeup brush for eyebrow pencil. The response? “Oh darling, sometimes that’s all you need to do the trick!”

He told me he often does the same… and still managed to sell me $150 worth of foundation and an eyebrow pencil. Now that’s some serious sales game.

I tried to unpack this later. The feeling I got was: He’s on my side. He knows where I’m coming from. And I can trust him.

Lesson 1: Hold on to that “why” and don’t lose sight of it. It’s your greatest brand asset.

It’s highly likely the reason you started your business is why your customer is here.

I was surprised to learn that Mecca founder Jo Horgan felt frustrated by the department store experience, just like I did. But in the same vein, it makes sense, based on how shopping at Mecca makes me feel.

Lesson 2: Points programs do not magically create brand loyalty.

A points program is one tool you can use to keep customers coming back. But the truth is, if you’re not doing anything else to support it—it’s not going to have the Mecca effect.

So, let’s take your “why” and I’m going to show you how you can build an extraordinary loyalty program with ordinary, off-the-shelf loyalty software.

How to Build An Extraordinary Loyalty Program With Ordinary, Off-The-Shelf Software

Everything here can be done using Marsello, when integrated with your eCommerce and POS software.

Step 1. Design your tiered loyalty program

Most loyalty software has the functionality to build a tiered loyalty program off the shelf. But before you jump the gun and turn it on, think about what the tiers should look like. Revisit your brand’s vision and mission, and come up with a strategy.

How many tiers are there?

Three is a good place to start. Mecca recently added a fourth tier to give those extra high spenders a more tailored experience, but we’d recommend only adding more than three tiers when you see a clear need for it.

How are the tiers structured?

Are the tiers based on spend, or number of loyalty points? And is it lifetime spend or annual spend? Generally, most retailers want their customers to maintain a minimum spend or number of points per year to keep their status. This requires the ability to expire tiers (you can do this in Marsello).

What are the rewards?

This Level 4 Beauty Looper (below) worked out that her free sample box had a retail value of $80. With 4 of these per year, plus an extra birthday box, that’s $400 for a year of free gifts. However, this person had to spend $3,500 to reach this tier. That’s an 11.4% discount, or about the same as giving away every 10th coffee for free.

The beauty (ha) of giving away free boxes, is that you mitigate price perception. Receiving a free box in the mail is a serious dopamine hit, and Mecca knows this. Customers perceive the value of the loyalty reward to be much higher than it really is. They will happily spend more to receive the reward than “risk” missing out on retaining their status by shopping somewhere else.

What will you call the tiers?

Don’t rush this part, take your time to really find the right fit for your brand. “Bronze, Silver, Gold” isn’t very creative. Mecca chooses names that really connect to its brand mission, product, and the relationship they have with its customers.

Mecca Beauty Loop

L1: Beauty Discoverer

$300-$599.99 spend per year

- 1 x Birthday gift
- 4 x Beauty Loop Boxes per year; a lovingly edited sample box for you to experience

L2: Beauty Devotee

$600-$1199.99 spend per year

- 1 x Birthday gift
- 3 x Beauty Loop Bonuses per year
- 4 x Beauty Loop Boxes per year; a lovingly edited sample box for you to experience
- Priority invitations to in-store international brand events

L3: Beauty Aficionado

$1200 - $3499.99 spend per year

- 1 x Birthday gift
- 3 x Beauty Loop Bonuses per year
- 1 x Complimentary MECCA Natural Makeup Application
- 4 x Beauty Loop Boxes per year; a lovingly edited sample box for you to experience
- Exclusive insider access to purchase new products and limited-edition collections prior to their release
- Complimentary events by invitation
- Priority invitations to in-store international brand events

L4: Beauty Connoisseur

$3500+ spend per year

- 1 x Birthday gift
- 5 x Beauty Loop Bonuses per year
- 1 x Complimentary MECCA Natural Makeup Application
- 4 x Deluxe Beauty Loop Boxes per year; a lovingly edited sample box for you to experience
- Exclusive insider access to purchase new products and limited-edition collections prior to their release
- Complimentary events by invitation
- Priority invitations to in-store international brand events

Step 2. Get everything ready on your website and in-store

Now that you’ve got your loyalty program designed, you need to make sure it’s all set up properly.

Do you have an online store and physical shops?

If so, make sure your loyalty software is integrated with your POS and eCommerce platforms. This will ensure that points can be earned and redeemed easily across all your sales channels. Marsello integrates with a range of POS and eCommerce apps off-the-shelf, no expensive customization required.

How will customers find out about it?

In-store: Train staff on your loyalty program, and make sure they’re asking customers to sign up point-of-sale. Focus on the benefit to the customer—if you’ve really taken the time to build a considered loyalty program, customers won’t be able to resist.

On your website: Make sure it’s impossible to miss! Set up a loyalty widget on your online store to show visitors how they can earn and redeem rewards, and show the available tiers. Best practice is to create a website page dedicated to your loyalty program that goes into even more detail. See Mecca’s Beauty Loop page:

mecca2

Step 3. Promote your program

How do I launch it?

Once you’ve designed your program, prepare a launch campaign. Whether it’s a ‘soft’ launch or a full-scale event—make sure your customers know about it. Marsello has all the marketing tools you need to communicate with your customers: email, SMS, automations, website pop-up forms, and more. Use these to craft your promotional campaigns.

Teaser campaign: Pre-launch, let people know something’s coming. Get people curious and excited for the launch date. For example, you could run contests or giveaways to generate hype.
Soft launch: It’s okay to do a soft launch to start off, just to test everything is working. But once you’re confident, prepare a launch campaign.
In-store promotion: Let your customers know about it in-store. Make sure staff are trained on your loyalty app and can answer basic questions about how to get set up, the tier structure, and what the benefits are for the customer.
Full marketing launch: add a pop-up to your website, send out email campaigns to your database, and promote the program on social media. You can even run a limited-time launch offer—for example, 200 extra points for signing up in the first week.

How do I keep customers engaged?

The promotion doesn’t stop after you launch the campaign! There are lots of light-touch, low-maintenance campaigns you can run to keep your loyalty program interesting. Plus, you can talk about all the cool campaigns you’re running to non-loyalty subscribers to get that FOMO going.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

Run points campaigns: For example, you could have a double points week. These are great to run in slower sales seasons, as they incentivize loyal customers to accelerate their points growth.
Hype the program on social media: Use social media to promote the loyalty program and engage with customers through interactive content and contests. See Mecca’s Beauty Loop hype in the Instagram post above!
Run limited-time offers: Offer special rewards for a short period of time to incentivize customers to participate in the loyalty program.
Build up a community: Foster a sense of community among loyalty program members through events, forums, or social media groups.
Collaborate with partners: Partner with other brands to offer joint rewards and increase the value of the loyalty program.
Build your mobile experience: Encourage customers to save your loyalty portal to their mobile home screen, so they can access their points balance and engage with your brand on the go.

Step 4. Set up important notifications as SMS messages

Your customers get so many emails, they’re missing important updates. An SMS will cut through the noise by going direct to their mobile. While you don’t want to overdo SMS marketing, automated texts triggered for important loyalty updates and reminders will be much appreciated.

Notify customers when they have a reward coming!

Whether it’s a discount in their inbox ready to redeem, or a gift coming to their physical address, let them know it’s on the way and when they can expect it.

Let customers know when their tier is about to expire

Like Mecca, you probably want customers to keep up a minimum annual spend. Expiring tiers is a fantastic way to keep customers spending to retain their status… but it won’t have much impact unless they know how they’re progressing! Send customers an automated text message to let them know they’ve got a bit more shopping to do to keep up their tier.

Let customers know when they hit a milestone

Your loyal customers will want to know when they’ve unlocked a new reward, or hit a big points milestone (for example, they’ve entered a new tier). Don’t leave them guessing, automatically deliver the good news right to their mobile.

Step 5. Keep optimizing!

The final step is that… there is no final step. Running a loyalty program is an ongoing, ever-evolving journey that you’re on with your customers. So it’s important to have fun and keep innovating as you go. Loyalty is a regular and ongoing business activity, just like marketing and sales. There will always be improvements and new ideas you can implement, so have a regular reminder set up to check in and evaluate how it’s going.

What are the top loyalty metrics I should be tracking?

Marsello’s dashboard keeps track of all your important loyalty metrics. Top things to track are repeat purchase rate and rewards redemption rate. These will show you that your loyalty program is moving the needle on sales and revenue, and getting good engagement from customers.

How do I know if my brand is doing better over time?

While Marsello doesn’t track brand impact, there are some incredible new tools you can use to measure your brand health. Take a look at Tracksuit, as one example.

Final Words

Building a successful loyalty program like Mecca's Beauty Loop starts with understanding your brand's "why." A loyalty program is just one tool to keep customers coming back, and it should be built with a clear strategy based on your brand's vision and mission.

Mecca's founder Jo Horgan was frustrated with the department store experience and wanted to create a fun and entertaining shopping experience, which is exactly what Mecca and the Beauty Loop experience provides.

Using ordinary, off-the-shelf loyalty software like Marsello, you can create a tiered loyalty program with rewards that offer value to customers and keep them engaged. However, it's important to remember that a loyalty program is only effective if you're doing other things to support it and build a strong brand relationship with your customers.

Recent Articles

Shopify COVID-19 Omnichannel Retail Retail Marketing

26 Shopify Apps for Retailer’s Grappling with COVID-19

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Post-COVID-19 retail means adapting to a changing online retail landscape. Check out our selection of apps that could help to streamline your business.

Marsello gradient over a Shopify logo. 26 Shopify apps for retailesr grappling with COVID-19

Steering your business through the COVID-19 pandemic means adapting to a changing online retail landscape. With many businesses going through a temporary slowdown, it’s more important than ever to give your Shopify customers the optimum shopping experience they deserve. View these useful apps that are designed to streamline your business operations.

Sales and Marketing

Many people have temporarily cut back on online purchases, so it’s crucial to attract Internet shoppers who are searching for quality products. That’s where top-notch sales and marketing apps can make the difference.

Marsello

Marsello can help you develop a customer loyalty program that lets you reward customer behaviors that benefit your business. You can also streamline and uplevel your marketing initiatives with automated, customizable email, promotional campaigns, and highly effective SMS text messaging service.

Benefits for Your Business

In the retail business realm, having a steady stream of loyal customers who purchase from you again and again is like hitting the jackpot. Marsello can help you achieve that by powering an attractive loyalty program plus automating your marketing and customer communications. That way, you can focus on growing your business and serving shoppers better.

Gift Box Free Gift Motivator

This handy app encourages your customers to spend a little more and receive an enticing freebie. You design the free gift framework, and the gifts automatically appear in your customer’s cart when they meet the free gift criteria.

Benefits for Your Business

Customers are often willing to spend a little more to get a free gift, which helps to increase your business’ Average Order Volume (AOV). Offering a free gift with purchase can help to build customer loyalty and encourage repeat business.

Spin-a-Sale

The popular Spin-a-Sale app demonstrates retail gamification at its best. When a visitor enters their email address, this interactive pop-up displays a spinning prize wheel that settles on a random, one-time discount. Visitors can use those discounts on your eCommerce site.

Benefits for Your Business

Visitors are likely to stay engaged with your emails and prize wheels, helping to boost your email signup rate and build customer loyalty. And, discount-laden shoppers are more likely to jump on your eCommerce site and make a purchase. This app easily adds subscribers to your Shopify customer list and automated email integrations.

Yotpo

This customer-themed eCommerce marketing platform enables you to easily collect favorable customer reviews and referrals, plus photos and videos. Yotpo’s powerful marketing tools can spur on-the-fence visitors to become enthusiastic customers.

Benefits for Your Business

Favorable customer reviews and referrals attract new customers who already have a positive impression of your business. Showcasing customer videos and photos on your website helps to strengthen your customer relationships and build customer loyalty.

Financials

Tracking your online business’ financial indicators is especially crucial right now, so arm your business with solid financial apps. Here are some suggestions.

Quickbooks Sync by Bold

This workhorse app automatically syncs your Shopify orders into your Quickbooks Online program. Data for expenses, payouts, and fees also migrate into your accounting program.

Benefits for Your Business

You won’t have to manually enter your Shopify data into your Quickbooks Online program. This system efficiency enables you to quickly obtain a Shopify financial status report.

XERO logo

Xero by OneSaas

OneSaas targets workflows that start with a specific transaction. When you create a quote, an order, an invoice, or a receipt, you only have to enter that data once. OneSaas shares that data so it’s available to all functions in that sequence.

Benefits for Your Business

Xero by OneSaas can free up your time for other higher-value tasks. And, because time is definitely money, you’ll spend less time on mundane tasks that don’t enhance your bottom line.

TaxJar Sales Tax Automation

All businesses are required to pay sales tax to their respective state and local governments. The hardworking TaxJar Sales Tax Automation app maintains daily sales tax balances due for all your selling platforms’ sales. Plus, TaxJar automatically submits your business’ tax forms before their due dates.

Benefits for Your Business

TaxJar Sales Tax Automation makes time-consuming manual sales tax calculation a thing of the past. Save valuable time crunching the numbers, and be confident that TaxJar is on top of sales tax payments for every applicable state. TaxJar submits the sales tax report to all required state and local government tax offices.

SimplyCost ‑ Profit Tracking

Tracking your business’ expenses and profit is important, but you don’t want to spend excessive amounts of time getting the answers you need. SimplyCost – Profit Tracking automatically calculates your store’s profit after considering all recurring and one-time expenses associated with your sales.

Benefits for Your Business

SimplyCost – Profit Tracking helps you save time by effortlessly calculating your store’s profits. By generating fast custom reports, you can gauge your store’s performance and determine your most profitable products. This valuable data will help you to execute better business decisions.

Social Media

Wide-ranging “stay at home” orders are keeping potential customers within their homes for weeks on end. With viewers constantly browsing their social feeds, smart retailers are executing compelling social media initiatives that will ideally translate into completed sales.

WhatsApp Chat

For eCommerce retailers, smooth order communication and processing are key to completed orders. Toward that end, the WhatsApp Chat + Abandoned Cart app provides fast customer support and order functionality. To minimize abandoned cart problems, the Abandoned Cart Recovery app sends messages that include discount codes to help complete sales.

Benefits for Your Business

Beyond WhatsApp’s eCommerce order functionality, this is a hugely popular communications platform. By blending it into your eCommerce online retail operation, you’ll gain added credibility with social media-savvy customers.

Instagram Influencer Marketing

In the realm of social media powerhouses, Instagram influencers carry a lot of clout. The Instagram Influencer Marketing app’s Carro program lists all the influencers that appear on your store’s customer, follower, and email subscriber lists. After Carro facilitates your collaboration with an influencer, you’ll be able to communicate with and supply products to them.

Benefits for Your Business

When used properly, Instagram Influencer Marketing can widen your reach on social networks. By cultivating a long-term relationship with Instagram influencers, you have highly credible allies who will help to promote your brand.

Facebook Messenger Marketing

If you’re looking for an additional marketing medium, Facebook Messenger is an increasingly popular choice. In fact, Messenger boasts an impressive 80%+ message open rate. With that optimistic backdrop, you can use the platform to generate more engagement. But do it soon before the space gets too crowded!

Benefits for Your Business

Why leverage Facebook Messenger Marketing? Chances are, you’ll reach customers and prospects while they’re browsing through their favorite Facebook channels. It’s simple, in this relaxed and familiar setting, customers may be more receptive to your marketing messages, so it’s a great opportunity to try and reach them.

Instafeed – Instagram Feed

Instafeed lets you boost your store’s online presence by adding crisp, new Instagram content. Images and videos are welcome, and you won’t need coding skills to complete this fast, easy installation.

Benefits for Your Business

Adding Instagram content to your store will encourage browsers to enjoy the photos and videos. When visitors stay longer, they’re more likely to explore your store’s offerings and purchase products.

Analytics

As a retailer, you need to know exactly what’s working (and what isn’t working). You also want to pinpoint your revenue sources, and learn about emerging financial problems, so you can make smarter business decisions.

Hotjar Install

Hotjar views your site from your visitors’ perspective and analyzes each aspect of those interactions. Note: The Hotjar Install (Unofficial) app isn’t affiliated with Hotjar. You’ll need a Hotjar account to implement this app.

Benefits for Your Business

Hotjar will carefully analyze your store’s instant feedback, feedback polls, form analysis, surveys, and conversion funnels drop-offs, among other metrics. Using that data, you can determine what is (and isn’t) working so you can make adjustments to improve site effectiveness.

Conversific

Conversific has funneled varied Google Analytics data and eCommerce metrics into one powerful app. Even better, Conversific has distilled those mountains of data into 10+ action-oriented reports.

Benefits for Your Business

With just a few clicks, you can view your gross profit, profit margins, and other reports that support profit growth and conversion. Doing so will allow you to get a steer on how your business is doing and you’ll get a good picture of your profitability and market position.

Glew: Multichannel Analytics

You don’t have time to hunt through your inventory, marketing, sales, shipping, and other functions to get the analytics data you need. Enter Glew, a multichannel analytics app that gathers all your eCommerce tools in one place. View your data via customized dashboards that enable segmentation and filtering.

Benefits for Your Business

Glew’s analytics solutions can identify your most valuable customers. Analytics results also help you to determine how (and when) to invest in channels with the best ROI potential, and develop other strategies to improve your bottom line.

Customer Service

Providing excellent customer service can set you apart from your competitors, and can help to build long-term customer loyalty. Armed with the right tools, you’ll be well equipped to provide your customers with customer service they’ll rave about.

Messenger Channel

While customers interact with your store’s Facebook Page, they can also buy products from your online Messenger store. If shoppers have questions, you can address them in Messenger. You’ll be able to fulfill Messenger-based orders through Shopify and track your Facebook sales through your Analytics pages.

Benefits for Your Business

When customers order products while chatting on Facebook Messenger, you receive that sales revenue. At the same time, you’re engaging with customers, which boosts your profile and encourages relationship building and long-term loyalty.

HelpCenter

You want to provide good customer service, but spending time on emails and live chats is time-consuming. Instead, the Help Center app posts frequently asked questions on a searchable Help Center Page. Customize the page to match your brand, and offer services in varied languages.

Benefits for Your Business

By serving your customers via the Help Center app, you’ll provide valuable details on your store and its offerings. You’ll spend much less time answering questions, enabling you to focus on helping your business grow.

Tidio Live Chat

Tidio Live Chat gathers your email, live chat, and Messenger channels together in one location. The Live Chat function utilizes intelligent bots that jump on abandoned cart issues and often save the sale via live chats and discounts. In fact, studies have shown that live chats can increase sales by 40 percent. Tidio Live Chat is available in multiple languages.

Benefits for Your Business

Tidio Live Chat is an invisible partner who never sleeps. By interacting with customers on your behalf, you’ll see increased sales and fewer abandoned carts. You’ll also enjoy easy access to your email and Messenger channels in one location.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Depending on your budget, you may need to reduce paid advertising in the short term. As a result, you’ll need to work extra hard to drive organic traffic.

SEO Image Optimizer – Auto SEO

Recognize the value of SEO-optimized images, but don’t have the time or expertise to handle these tasks yourself? With a one-click installation, the SEO Image Optimizer – Auto SEO app monitors and optimizes your store daily to comply with Google’s best image search practices.

Benefits for Your Business

This hardworking app will automatically optimize your images to comply with Google’s best image search criteria. As a result, you’ll be favorably positioned in Google’s search rankings.

Plug in SEO

The one-stop, Plug in SEO app fixes existing SEO issues with your Shopify store. The app also optimizes your blog, adds valuable keyword tools, and performs updates as search engines change their algorithms.

Benefits for Your Business

Your improved SEO position will drive more organic traffic to your store. Better-optimized SEO also helps to improve your search engine rankings.

SEO Manager

This value-packed SEO package includes varied tools, and real-time feedback, designed to help your store rank better in search engines. SEO Manager also identifies and automatically repairs your website’s broken links.

Benefits for Your Business

SEO Manager helps you to improve your search engine rankings. In turn, your store enhances its online visibility and will likely see increased traffic to your eCommerce store.

Inventory Management & Order Fulfillment

With more people shopping online, efficient order processing has become extremely important. Ecommerce merchants need an order fulfillment system that handles all transaction aspects. Brick-and-mortar stores need a proven tool that helps them to manage their curbside pickups and delivery orders.

Shippo

Processing orders through several sales channels can be a laborious process. Shippo syncs your channels so you can manage your orders on a single platform. You can also generate discounted shipping levels, efficiently track your shipments, and update your customers.

Benefits for Your Business

Shippo’s time-saving order processing and tracking app saves time and reduces your frustration factor. This all-in-one solution reduces duplication of effort, giving you more time for higher-value tasks.

ShippingEasy

If you regularly ship via the United States Postal Service (or USPS), the ShippingEasy app can save you money on domestic and international shipping costs. You’ll receive a free Postal Service postage account, plus discounted rates on all services. ShippingEasy also supports delivery to APO/FPO/DPO locations.

Plus, you can print labels in batches, avoiding laborious one-at-a-time printing tasks. As an added bonus, ShippingEasy boasts an award-winning support team.

Benefits for Your Business

ShippingEasy’s discounted USPS shipping rates will certainly save you money, and the savings will increase with your processed volume. Printing labels in batches will also save valuable time.

Stocky

Managing your store’s inventory is a balancing act. You don’t want to run out of popular products, but you also don’t want to tie up too much money in inventory. Stocky enables you to manage your purchase orders from one location, and you’ll quickly learn when it’s time to replenish stock. Use Stocky’s data to evaluate inventory and make decisions accordingly.

Benefits for Your Business

By giving you an accurate inventory snapshot, Stocky helps you to avoid spending your hard-earned cash on excessive stock. When an item reaches the “Replenish Now” level, you’ll get an immediate alert. This timely data makes it much easier to gauge your ongoing inventory needs.

Store Pickup + Delivery

Retailers of all sizes can benefit from having store pickup and delivery options, so this app is a game-changer. Store Pickup + Delivery, you can implement local delivery and curbside pickup, while keeping your shipping calendar clean and up-to-date.

Benefits for Your Business

Utilizing the curbside pick-up method saves you money on picking, packaging, and shipping costs. Local product delivery is a desirable concierge service. Social-distancing customers will appreciate these options for receiving their products with minimal risk. By offering these choices, you’ll help to build customer loyalty and encourage repeat business.

Now Back In Stock

This handy app tells your customers when their desired out-of-stock items are now available for purchase. Send alerts via email or SMS text messaging, and customize the messages to reflect your store’s brand.

Benefits for Your Business

Because the customer already wants to purchase a “Now Back in Stock” item, you’ll likely generate a sale. By obtaining the customer’s email and mobile contact information, you can add the customer to upcoming marketing campaigns. You’ll also promote customer loyalty by offering this desirable service.

Your turn

Now we’d love to hear from you. Which Shopify apps are invaluable to your store during these times? Let us know in the comments.

COVID-19 Omnichannel Retail BigCommerce Retail Marketing

BigCommerce Apps to Help You Thrive Through COVID-19

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These BigCommerce apps help to ramp up your customer service and run your business in the wake of Coronavirus (COVID-19) as it continues to develop.

Marsello-BigCommerce-Apps-Covid-19

As the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic continues to impact businesses nationwide, many eCommerce retailers know that providing customers with exceptional shopping experiences is vitally important. These useful apps can help you to ramp up your customer service and run your business more smoothly.

Sales and Marketing

With fewer customers making purchases from online retailers, it’s especially important to attract Internet shoppers who are in the market for your merchandise. Innovative sales and marketing apps will help you to convert web browsers into paying customers.

Marsello

Marsello’s customer loyalty program rewards customers for engaging in behaviors that help to grow your store. You can also use Marsello to launch promotional offers, super-effective one-off SMS and email marketing campaigns, and automated, customizable emails that trigger at the perfect time, to the right customers.

Benefits for Your Business

By implementing a well-crafted customer loyalty program and complimenting that with seamless automated marketing, you’ll build “win-win” customer relationships that will help your business grow. Worldwide, omnichannel stores (those that sell across multiple sales channels) are adapting to a new way of retail and communications with built-in customer rewards are absolutely essential for keeping your customers coming back!

Answerbase

Answering your customers’ product questions encourages them to make a purchase. Answerbase helps ease the load of this by adding a product Q&A feature to your product pages. Your team’s product experts can address questions and drive people closer to a purchase decision.

Benefits for Your Business

Answerbase helps to increase your conversions by giving them the info they need while they’re shopping. You’ll also improve SEO and organic search rankings because you’re adding quality content to your product pages.

Fomo

Shoppers often want social proof before they’ll purchase a product from an online store. The Fomo app provides that validation by showcasing product reviews and real-time orders on your storefront. After customers view a Fomo notification, they can easily add items to their shopping cart without exiting the page.

Benefits for Your Business

When shoppers see customers buying your products, they’ll likely be enticed to make a purchase. As a result, you’ll see an increase in your store’s on-page sales conversions and completed sales.

Affiliatly

Maintain full control over your affiliate program with the multifunctional Affiliatly app. Track each affiliate’s user visits and customer orders. Manage your affiliates’ earning methods and income percentages. Customize the app so it blends with your store’s appearance.

Benefits for Your Business

By definition, affiliates build links and help to promote your store. You’ll have full control over how the affiliates perform those activities and can structure your affiliate interactions to benefit your business.

Financials

Maintaining an accurate picture of your business’ financials is important, especially in today’s economic climate. These beneficial apps make it easy to view your store’s sales, expenses, inventory, and other relevant functions.

QBO

The efficient QBO app collects data about your products, orders, customers, shipping charges, taxes, and more. Next, QBO transfers this vital data directly from your eCommerce store to your Quickbooks Online account.

Benefits for Your Business

Using the QBO app eliminates the need for manual data entry. Potential data entry errors are also a thing of the past. Using this time-saving app enables you to devote your efforts to higher-level business growth tasks.

Xero

The Xero online accounting app makes it easy for your small business to copy operations data to your accounting program. Xero syncs your products, orders, customers, shipping, taxes, and other charges to your accounting software. Automate frequently completed tasks such as creating invoices, recording expenses, and generating reports.

Benefits for Your Business

Xero frees you up from endless data entry tasks, giving you valuable time to work on higher-level operations goals. You’ll also eliminate the possibility of manual data entry errors that can completely skew your accounting results.

Taxman

If your eCommerce store sells regulated products such as alcohol or nicotine, Taxman will automatically calculate and charge the correct excise tax for these product sales. You just need to define the geographic zone and tax rate, and Taxman takes care of the rest.

Benefits for Your Business

With help from Taxman, you’ll navigate an often-forgotten type of product sales tax. Even better, you’ll remain compliant with all applicable tax laws.

Social Media

With increased time on their hands, more people are browsing their social feeds, looking for something to buy. Toward that end, you should introduce compelling social media initiatives that will draw them to your eCommerce store.

Here are some BigCommerce apps that can help.

Instagram Feed by Elfsight

Elfsight Instagram Feed will blend your eye-catching Instagram content into your eCommerce store website. Use numerous customization options to match the app’s widget to your website style and color scheme.

Benefits for Your Business

Your Instagram-enhanced website will see increased audience engagement, and you’ll also get more Instagram followers. Most importantly, you’ll see a boost in your eCommerce website’s conversion rate.

ContentPlum

ContentPlum provides shoppers with multiple social feeds, and adds intriguing relevant content, to promote better social engagement and social trust. The app can be used for Shoppable Instagram Gallery, Social Hub, Social Wall, Social Contests, Social Campaigns, Media Buzz, and more.

Benefits for Your Business

By inviting viewers to engage with social media widgets on your store’s site, you’ll enhance social trust and build credibility. Because customers are more likely to buy from someone they know and trust, you’ll improve the likelihood that these visitors will turn into paying customers.

Outfy

Promote your eCommerce store’s products on up to 14 social media networks without duplicating your efforts. The highly efficient Outfy app helps you to create visually appealing product videos, high-impact sales promotions, and automated posts designed for social media audiences.

Benefits for Your Business

Outfy’s broad social reach will help to attract more viewers to your eCommerce store. Over time, you’ll see an increase in your product sales.

Social Sharing Buttons

Take advantage of free, customizable social sharing buttons for popular social media networks. You don’t need coding skills to build and load the mobile-friendly buttons. In addition, the installation process won’t slow down your store’s website.

Benefits for Your Business

By installing the social sharing buttons, you’ll see an increase in followers and social shares. This increased viewership gives you the opportunity to promote product specials and collect more emails for your marketing list.

Analytics

Generally speaking, retailers want to know what’s working and what hasn’t met their expectations. They want to maximize their revenue sources, solve their financial problems, and set themselves up for success. These powerful apps can play a key role in that ever-evolving process.

Shogun

Build custom eCommerce website pages with Shogun’s versatile drag-and-drop page builder. Professionally designed home page, landing page, blog pages, and product pages templates are compatible with your existing theme. Compare completed pages for metrics’ results, and evaluate marketing campaigns with targeted analytics.

Benefits for Your Business

Your well-coordinated eCommerce website will enhance your business’ online credibility. Concurrently, you can compare the effectiveness of different pages and marketing campaigns. The comparisons’ results will help you make adjustments that can move your business forward.

Price2Spy

Monitor your competitors’ prices with the real-time Price2Spy app. Applicable to businesses of all sizes, this service enables online retailers to track competitors’ prices and price changes. Track multiple competitors’ websites for maximum benefit. Determine which of your eCommerce store’s products can vary in price, and easily make these price changes.

Benefits for Your Business

Price2Spy's comprehensive pricing reports will display incremental market changes. The reports will also show whether your competitors are ramping prices up or easing them down.

Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange provides insights into your'eCommerce store’s functionality. View visitor recordings of site transactions, and learn why some shoppers don’t make a purchase from your store. To change that, Lucky Orange helps you answer visitors’ questions through live chat and offers live view to co-browse with them to help them find the product they need.

Benefits for Your Business

When you learn why most site visitors don’t convert to paying customers, you can take steps to turn the situation around. By tweaking your eCommerce site, you’ll be well-positioned to increase your conversions and sales.

Customer Service

Top-notch customer service can help you rise above the competition and promote long-term customer loyalty. Adding the right communications tools to your eCommerce retailer’s toolkit can streamline the process and convert customer questions into sales.

LiveChat + Product Cards

To chat with shoppers while they visit your eCommerce store, install the LiveChat + Product Cards widget on your website. You can also provide product suggestions and assist customers through the buying process.

Benefits for Your Business

The LiveChat + Product Cards app enables you to interact with shoppers while they’re actively engaged on your eCommerce store’s site. When you answer their questions or provide other customer support, you increase your chances of making a sale.

Quick Facebook Chat

Social messaging platforms, including Quick Facebook Chat, are fast becoming preferred communications venues. With Quick Facebook Chat, your customer can easily use Facebook Messenger to get product-related assistance and gain satisfaction.

Benefits for Your Business

By using Quick Facebook Chat, you’ll avoid the need for third-party live chat agents. Customers can “Like” your store’s Facebook page from the chat window, which increases their engagement. These Messenger encounters can also help you to cross-sell products and introduce new items.

Live Chat for Slack

While you’re on the Slack communications platform, use the Live Chat for Slack app to chat with visitors. Customize the chat backdrop with your logo and other helpful visuals. Then, send visitors directly to your eCommerce store. While they’re browsing your site, convert them to email list subscribers and followers, and ideally to paying customers.

Benefits for Your Business

By putting Live Chat for Slack into your communications mix, you’ll save money on a third-party chat platform. You’ll also maintain better control of the customer conversion sequence, increasing your chances of turning visitors into paying customers.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

You may need to temporarily tighten advertising purse strings. To get customers to your eCommerce sites and brick-and-mortar stores, you must take steps to drive organic traffic to your business.

FavSEO

Let’s say you edit, optimize, and analyze your eCommerce store’s titles and meta descriptions for categories, products, and pages. FavSEO streamlines that process, enabling you to perform those operations at a single location. You’ll also uncover new keyword opportunities, track your keyword rankings in Google, and submit your sitemap for review.

Benefits for Your Business

FavSEO’s one-stop optimizing tool saves you valuable time, freeing you up for other important tasks. By tracking keyword rankings and getting an SEO audit, you’ll improve your SEO program’s effectiveness. In turn, this helps to increase your store’s visitor traffic.

ProSEOTracker

Optimizing your SEO metadata and content and managing your blog and SEO issues is easy with ProSEOTracker’s one-stop SEO hub. Monitoring your competitors, and working with Google Analytics or AdWords, are simpler tasks when you’re not visiting multiple websites.

Benefits for Your Business

With your SEO analysis and optimization resources in one place, completing SEO-related tasks will be a less laborious and time-consuming process. You’ll also realize increased efficiency by viewing the data from one location.

SEO Rich Snippets

Search engines (including Google) often display extra features on your eCommerce store’s search results. These features, such as product prices, review stars, and availability, work together to make the search results more useful and increase clicks to your site.

Benefits for Your Business

With the SEO Rich Snippets App, you’ll be able to create FAQ pages, “How To” pages and Video structured data that combine to increase your site’s appeal. Over time, these features will bring extra traffic to your store, and should help to increase your sales.

Inventory Management & Order Fulfillment

With “stay at home” orders in place, consumers have plenty of time to browse and buy from eCommerce retailers. As such, you must have a reliable order fulfillment program so customers get their products on time.

Lightspeed

Manage your eCommerce + physical store’s inventory with Lightspeed’s cloud-based sales and inventory app. Edit product features in bulk, and reorder stock automatically. Lightspeed Retail also sheds light on key retail metrics in real time to help you make the best decisions.

Benefits for Your Business

Lightspeed’s one-stop POS, inventory, and retail management system puts an end to tedious product entry and tracking work. At the same time, you’ll have access to a powerful cloud-based sales and inventory tool that provides all the data you need to keep your physical shop and eCommerce store’s inventory under control.

Sendle

The small business-friendly Sendle app enables affordable door-to-door package delivery. When Sendle integrates with your online store, you’ll receive live shipping rate quotes that you deliver to customers. Sendle also enables efficient order processing and tracking. Oh, and Sendle’s delivery service is 100 percent carbon neutral.

Benefits for Your Business

Sendle’s combined shipping rate quote, order processing, and package tracking services offer your customers an all-in-one shipping solution. Sendle is also a time saver, as you won’t have to wait for delayed shipping rate quotes that could delay order completion.

Endicia

If you regularly ship products via the United States Postal Service (USPS), the Endicia eCommerce integration offers several helpful services. With your no-fee Endicia account, you’ll save up to 51 percent compared to USPS Retail and USPS.com Click-N-Ship prices. Give your customers real-time USPS shipping quotes, and print shipping labels from your computer.

Benefits for Your Business

The Endicia eCommerce integration will save you money. In addition, offering real-time shipping quotes and printing shipping labels gives you control over each step in the process.

Store Pickup + Delivery by Zapier

The Store Pickup + Delivery by Zapiet app invites customers to decide how they want to receive their purchased products. The customer can opt for traditional shipping, local delivery, or in-store pickup.

Benefits for Your Business

By offering the customer several product receipt options, you’ll likely be perceived as highly responsive to their needs. That favorable attribute can play a key role in building customer loyalty.

Your turn

Did we miss anything? What other BigCommerce are helping retailers through COVID-19? Let us know in the comments.

Campaign Marketing Marketing Tips COVID-19 Email Marketing Omnichannel Retail Retention Marketing Retail Marketing

How to Encourage Ecommerce Sales Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

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To help you navigate post-pandemic retail and knock it out the park, we’ve compiled some tips on using online channels to encourage sales and engagement.

No matter what type of retail store you have, there’s a high chance that your business has been severely affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

Cities all over the world are enacting ‘Safer at Home’ orders and quarantine measures, and these actions have left many retailers no choice but to temporarily shut down their physical operations. Some countries are even requiring businesses to close unless they’re deemed an essential service.

With most consumers staying home, it’s quite evident that the only way to reach them is through digital channels.

Here are some tips on how to use online channels to encourage sales and engagement during this period.

1. Keep your channels tightly integrated

If you have an existing brick-and-mortar store and want to bring your sales online, the first step you should take is to integrate your online and offline systems.

Doing so will help you set up your sales channels correctly, so your inventory and sales data will be synced between your physical and online stores. Plus, you’ll save time from having to re-enter your product information and you can eliminate human error due to doubling up on data entry.

It’s best to use systems that are already compatible with each other, so get in touch with your POS solution provider and ask them about the eCommerce platforms that they integrate with. Be sure to discuss the types of data that are synced between systems and talk to your provider about how to get set up quickly and efficiently.

For best results, choose solutions that can also connect to your marketing software, so you can seamlessly launch email, SMS, and customer engagement campaigns for driving sales.

Pro tip: Did you know that Marsello integrates with leading POS and eCommerce platforms? Connect Marsello to your existing solutions so you can easily automate your loyalty marketing efforts and deliver a seamless customer experience.

2. Promote relevant products

The needs of your customers during the current coronavirus health crisis have shifted, so your marketing has to evolve along with these changes. Part of doing that involves promoting products that are relevant to what your shoppers are experiencing.

Go through your current catalog and look for items that consumers need at this time. For example, if you’re a furniture retailer, then now would be a great time to promote your office products, since most people are working from home. Selling books or gift items? Look for products that people would help people navigate what could be a high-stress situation.

Here’s an example from the crystal store Energy Muse. Since many people are experiencing coronavirus stress and anxiety, Energy Muse recently sent out informative content on how to use the crystal Black Tourmaline to alleviate negative emotions.

What’s good about Energy Muse’s message is it led with informative content. Rather than a hard sell, the email’s first call to action took people to a video in which Energy Muse’s founder-led viewers through a guided visualization to relieve stress and anxiety.

And should people choose to purchase the crystal, there’s a second CTA towards the lower part of the email.

Energy Muse uses a one-off email campaign to communicate clearly with their customers.

Note: While this tactic can be effective, your marketing efforts shouldn’t be exploitive. For example, if you’re an apparel retailer that’s suddenly selling hand sanitizer, you’ll only forge distrust with consumers – and potentially get your ads banned.

Sites like Facebook are prohibiting exploitive tactics in ads by banning promotions for things like face masks.

If you’re planning to market relevant products, stick with items that are already in your catalog or ones that are truly in line with your brand.

3. Tap into influencer and community marketing

Digital content consumption is likely to increase in the coming days and weeks as more people turn to the web. Consumers are spending more time on websites and social media – with most doing it to pass the time, keep up with the latest news, and seek inspiration and entertainment.

Consider tapping into that online attention by teaming up with influencers or even your existing customers. Send them product samples or create joint content pieces together.

Encourage your community to tag you in their posts. Emphasize the fact that with many businesses being forced to close, customer engagement (even if it comes from no-cost actions like liking or sharing posts) goes a long way.

Check out this post from home decor store Pretty Little Home, which thanks customers for the support that the community has shown the business.

Pretty Little Home uses influencer marketing to reach out to more customers.

“Whether it’s a like, tag, share, or order on the website... It really means the world especially at a time like this,” read the post.

4. Spread the goodwill

We’ve known for a while that good deeds and corporate social responsibility can drive customer engagement and loyalty. That’s why if your business can afford it, consider launching an initiative designed to help those in need during this crisis.

It can be a charitable campaign, a special offer for the less fortunate, or even a job opportunity. One brand that’s doing this well is the fitness store Gymshark. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, many gyms have been forced to close their doors, resulting in trainers and fitness instructors losing their source of income.

To help out, Gymshark announced that it’s offering an hourly rate to personal trainers struggling to find work. Trainers would be doing online workouts in partnership with the brand and earn money while they’re at it.

The post was widely shared on Instagram and thousands of people liked and commented on the post.

Gymshark offers personal trainers a covid-19 deal.

5. Constantly reassure your customers

Building trust is more important than ever. You won’t be able to drive sales if shoppers don’t feel safe and secure buying from you. That’s why you need to constantly reassure your customers about the health and safety precautions that you’re taking to keep everyone safe from COVID-19.

How often are you cleaning and sanitizing your store? What are you doing to protect your staff? What measures are you taking to protect your customers? Be specific and outline everything in your customer communications assets (e.g., email, social media, in-store signage).

A good example of this practice in action comes from LA Cafe in Downtown Los Angeles. While the restaurant is closed to diners, LA Cafe still accepts online orders that can be picked up or delivered.

To make people feel safe about ordering, LA Cafe published a detailed post outlining everything that it’s doing to address COVID-19 concerns.

The LA Cafe uses Instagram and social media to communicate COVID-19 changes.

6. Run promotions

If sales are slow (and they likely are during this period), it may be a good idea to run a promotion to entice people to buy.

Do note that you’ll be competing with plenty of other brands for shoppers’ attention, so you want your promotions to be as relevant as possible. The best way to do this is to send offers based on each customer’s shopping history and brand interactions.

Consider the case of the designer footwear retailer Bulo Shoes, which couples Marsello's loyalty program with email marketing automation to send marketing messages that are always on-point. With Marsello’s help, Bulo Shoes’ automated emails are set up in segments based on customers’ previous behaviors. The store runs separate automated campaigns for first-time customers, abandoned cart recovery, lapsed customers, and to wish customers ‘Happy Birthday’.

By sending automated emails that are triggered by customers’ actions, Bulo Shoes are able to reach out to customers in the most relevant and timely way, and thus maximize both revenue and customer engagement.

Bulo Shoes use automated emails to run promotions that target their customers following actions like making a purchase.

What if you can’t sell or fulfill orders?

The new measures and policies around COVID-19 have been particularly tough on SMBs that are deemed “non-essential”. In addition to store closures, some businesses have been forced to shut down their offices, facilities, and fulfillment centers to slow the spread of the virus. In such cases selling and fulfilling orders – even those made online – isn’t achievable at this time.

If you’re in this predicament, try the following tactics:

Delay shipments and offer generous rewards

If you can still technically sell online but are unable to fulfill orders, you could run special promotions to get people to buy. That’s what Madame Fancy Pants, a Wellington-based retailer is doing. Due to the coronavirus, the team at Madame Fancy Pants are unable to ship out products in the time being. But they’re still taking orders online, with the commitment to fulfill those orders once isolation measures have been lifted.

To encourage people to buy, Madame Fancy Pants sent out a one-off email campaign using Marsello. The email lets their customers know that Madame Fancy Pants will be rewarding shoppers with double loyalty points for their full-priced purchases.

Madame Fancy Pants keeps customers up to day using Marsello’s One-off Email Campaigns

Enable Wishlists

Another tactic for keeping your customers interested and excited while you’re unable to fill their orders is to allow them to create wishlists of the items you usually stock. Check out our recent blog on top apps for Shopify for ideas on which apps you could use to integrate this feature into your store.

Wellington-based pet products retailer, Smack Bang, have done a wonderful job of communicating this recent update with their customers through their social media channels. Check out this Facebook post (note that they’ve even pinned it to ensure customers see the update) that lets their customers know that although they’ve had to shut up shop with the COVID-19 lockdown enforced in New Zealand, their customers can now create wishlists on the Smack Bang online store.

Smack Bang uses Facebook to let their customers know that they can now create wishlists.

Consider digital products

If possible, sell digital products like ebooks, digital art, online consultations, or even courses.

One retailer that’s currently promoting digital products is Vroman’s, Southern California’s oldest independent bookstore. Like many other retailers, Vroman’s had to temporarily shut down its operations because of the coronavirus.

To continue driving sales, Vroman’s is encouraging shoppers to purchase its ebooks and audiobooks instead, and the bookshop provides instructions on how to do this on social media and on its website.

Sell gift cards

If you’re not offering gift cards online yet, now is the time to sell and promote them. Digital gift cards give your customers the chance to support your business so you can secure much-needed income. In turn, your shoppers can enjoy your products and services once this crisis is over.

Consider the example of Pink Marble Studio, which offers lashes, nails, and waxing services. The company recently started offering gift cards online that customers can redeem at a later time.

Retail tip: For more results, sell these gift certificates at a discount rate to further entice your customers to make a purchase.

Keep up with social media and content marketing

Just because you can’t sell online, doesn’t mean you can’t connect with your customers. Maintain an active presence online by regularly updating your social media accounts and sharing valuable, ‘non-salesy’ content with your audience.

Doing so will help you grow your platform, traffic, and follower counts so that when business picks up again, you can hit the ground running.

We love this example from Australian wholefood retailer, Bare Wholefoods:

Rough & Bare uses Instagram to update customers and encourage them to keep shopping.

Bare Wholefoods cleverly show that they’re still actively and safely delivering customers’ orders with a photo of outgoing orders ready for shipping. They add a message of genuine gratitude to their customers for their continued loyalty and support. Updates like this help customers to feel confident that they will get the products they’ve ordered, and also gives them the morale boost of knowing they’re helping support the local economy.

Notify customers with stock updates

Chances are you’ll find that changes to shipping or production translate to slower restocking times – you may even find yourself out of stock or running low before you can restock, but there’s plenty you can do to keep your customers shopping with you.

We’ve mentioned using wishlist tools that enable customers to create lists of items they’d like to buy that aren’t currently available, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Why not let your customers know when their desired items are back in stock and actively prompt them to shop with you.

Online multi-brand retailer, The Iconic does a great job of this. When an item or size is out of stock, customers with a registered account are prompted to automatically at the item to their wishlist and sign-up for a ‘back in stock’ email, all through a beautifully designed pop-up. Notice the clever addition of product recommendations that may get customers to shop in that session anyway.

The Iconic ties their Wishlist and Back in Stock tools to create a seamless experience for customers.

It’s tough, but hang in there

We know that the current retail environment can feel far from ideal. The best thing to do right now is to focus on things we can control. If you’re a retailer, these include your customer communications and marketing messages; do your best to stop on top of them, so you can keep driving sales.

Omnichannel Retail BigCommerce Retail Marketing

16 BigCommerce Apps that Can Help You Run a Better Retail Business

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BigCommerce have an impressive selection of apps available to support BigCommerce stores. Read on to find the best BigCommerce apps to meet you

BigCommerce Top Apps

BigCommerce is cementing itself as a popular eCommerce solution offering merchants a range of competitive features, no transaction fees, and an incredibly user-friendly platform.

Whether you're a brick and mortar shop looking to go online for the first time or have already run eCommerce sites in the past, you'll get the hang of BigCommerce in a snap.

The platform also offers an expansive selection of apps that easily integrate to support merchants – no matter whether they need solutions for accounting, inventory, or sales.

An expansive selection is great, of course, but of the hundreds of apps in various diverse categories, a little guidance can go a long way in selecting those that are going to best support your retail business.

To save you hours sifting through reviews and user information, we've gone and done it for you and found the best BigCommerce apps to meet your store's needs.

1. Lightspeed

Point of sale, inventory, and reporting tools are a must for every merchant, both online and offline, and Lightspeed brings users all of those tools – POS, inventory, and reporting, as well as customer engagement – to remove the hassle of managing a business.

The Lightspeed app makes it easy to manage sales, customers, products, and inventory from one easy to use platform. BigCommerce merchants can integrate with Lightspeed, so their sales, inventory, and customer data are synced seamlessly across both platforms.

Lightspeed and BigCommerce give you everything you need to power your retail business online and in-store.

With these two solutions, you can remove the complexity out of going omnichannel. You can on top of your sales, stock, and customers while Lightspeed POS and BigCommerce stay perfectly in sync. You can even sell on your favorite social media and marketplaces!

- Francesca Nicasio, Content Marketing Manager, Lightspeed Retail

2. Marsello

Engaging and communicating with your customers is a MUST if you want to keep them coming back, and this one of the reasons why you want to have Marsello in your retail toolkit.

Marsello is marketing automation and loyalty software that enables you to run personalized, data-driven campaigns at scale with added tools like customer segmentation and feedback collection. You can use Marsello to create email and SMS campaigns tailored to each user based on their purchase history, behavior, and previous interactions with your brand.

On the loyalty side, Marsello lets you create a rewards program that works seamlessly across your eCommerce and brick and mortar shop, so your customers can earn and redeem perks no matter where or how they're shopping!

3. Xero Accounting

Accounting is a task that very few business owners enjoy. However, thanks to the beautiful integration of Xero Accounting on the BigCommerce platform, accounting need not be a chore.

Your store can be easily connected with your accounting software for a seamless flow of information, with your online and offline data and accounts perfectly in sync. Xero covers payments, payroll, inventory, invoicing, expenses, and performance reporting, which is all mobile compatible for quick insights.

4. ShipStation

Importing, managing, and shipping orders is an arduous process that requires tech power to reign in and refine. ShipStation is just the tool to cover BigCommerce users.

With ShipStation, eCommerce merchants can import orders from all selling channels into a single platform, manage them with custom automation, and ship through all the best carriers. The platform also makes returns easy, allows for next-level branding and marketing, and offers first-class user support.

With ShipStation, you can say "goodbye" to copying and pasting. Seamlessly sync your orders from BigCommerce and all your selling channels into a single platform to automate nearly every step of your shipping process. Save time and money with the fastest, easiest way to get products to your customers and provide an exceptional post-purchase experience and a little peace of mind with your own branded tracking page.

- Adam Foster, Content Marketing Director at ShipStation

5. Shogun

Successful eCommerce stores need sites that visually stun and captivate audiences. Shogun enables BigCommerce users to create this through their powerful page builder and content management system.

BigCommerce users can build landing pages, blog pages, product pages, and more with the intuitive Shogun drag and drop page builder. These pages are then easily optimized to perform through AB testing, and once in use, the system also provides analytics and marketing features to schedule campaigns, and measure performance.

Bigcommerce merchants have discovered that the simplicity of using our page builder not only gives them control over their storefront, but it's also helping them save on costs by greatly reducing development hours and time to market. It's empowering their marketing teams to maintain and implement site changes quickly without having to submit engineering tickets.

- Phill Moorman, Director of Marketing, Shogun

6. Lucky Orange

Understanding why your visitors don't convert is the most valuable tool to enable you to make changes to your business to ensure that they do. Lucky Orange helps you to do this.

Lucky Orange eliminates guesswork and gives merchants clear insight into how to optimize their site for more sales. They do this by tagging and tracking visitor behavior in all areas of the site's usability with Sales Chat, Recordings, Form Analytics, Dynamic Heatmaps, Polls, and more.

“BigCommerce merchants use our software every day to find ways to turn more visitors into customers. The most important thing we want merchants to understand is that getting more people to “add to cart” isn’t guesswork. You don’t have to rely on assumptions to find the problems people are running into on your website when you can watch a session replay of exactly where a person clicked and scrolled on your site or look at form analytics to see where most people are getting stuck and abandoning your website.”

- Danny Wajcman, Chief Operating Officer, Lucky Orange

7. Pulse Commerce

Order and inventory management, when done well, significantly increases business performance. While it's the universal goal of merchants to boost business performance, managing orders and inventory can require a helping hand.

Integrated with BigCommerce, Pulse Commerce helps merchants with real-time visibility and control of their inventory, orders, and customers across all sales channels – i.e., in-store, eCommerce website, and marketplaces. With a 360-degree view of each customer order and interaction history, modifications are easy, and issues resolved quickly.

8. Zonos Checkout

Dealing with customers abroad can prove challenging, but there are tools like Zonos Checkout to simplify the process for merchants and make international transactions and interactions much more streamlined.

The Zonos BigCommerce integration makes cross border transactions simple with landed cost, localization, and compliance to enhance the buying experience for international customers. The Zonos app covers duties and taxes, currency conversion, payment solutions, and fraud coverage.

9. Rewind Backups

Without backups, an unexpected crash or hack can bring down your entire eCommerce business. Without a backup, there is nothing to bring back, and a new build may be required. To ensure that never happens to your store, you can leverage Rewind Backups.

Rewind Backups on BigCommerce completes daily, automated backups to keep essential data stored, secure, and retrievable should something unexpected occur. It also allows you to quickly undo unwanted changes in just a few clicks, eliminating the need for CSV exports and saving significantly on downtime.

Rewind® protects the data that runs your eCommerce business. BigCommerce backs up its platform – not your store. This means product catalogs, pages, themes, and more can be lost should something go wrong. Human error, malicious attacks, or third-party apps can all compromise or accidentally delete your data. And recreating a store can take hours, even days. With Rewind, you can quickly undo unwanted changes and never worry about making an irreversible mistake again.

- Ryan Gibson, Content & Comms Manager at Rewind.io

10. AfterShip

In need of shipment tracking and delivery updates software? Look no further than the Aftership app for BigCommerce users, which supports all your carriers, including UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, and 400 more.

The free Aftership app allows BigCommerce users to track all of their shipments in one place while giving their customers a powerful delivery experience where they can check the delivery status, and submit requests in just a few clicks. Tracking pages can also be customized with the merchant's logo, store URL, and imagery to boost brand recognition.

11. Printful

Want to sell custom-designed apparel and other goods but don't want to hoard stock? Printful, through BigCommerce, is a print-on-demand dropshipping app that allows merchants to print branded products, without needing ever to have them in-house.

Printful helps with free design templates, warehousing, order fulfillment, and discounted samples so that merchants can try products before they sell them, as well as 24/7 customer support.

12. Kudobuzz

Positive product and brand reviews have the power to boost conversions and compel new customers to buy. It makes sense, then, to use them on your eCommerce site, wherever possible to influence your customer to act.

Kudobuzz makes this process easy. Through the Kudobuzz app, BigCommerce users can collect reviews from social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and more, to then show them on the eCommerce site via clean, customizable widgets. Reviews from other apps are easy to import into Kudobuzz for future use.

13. Pixlee

Customer content is a powerful tool to harness in the exercise of branding. Just as customers trust the reviews of their peers, they also trust the social pictures of their peers using products that they are considering.

Pixlee helps BigCommerce users to connect with and leverage customer content to deliver personalized content in any marketing channel. The platform allows merchants to connect with their customers, collect customer-created content identified through tagging or hashtags, gain permission, and publish, all from one place.

14. Skubana

Skubana is a distributed order management platform that facilitates fulfillment, inventory, and business intelligence for brands operating across multiple channels.

Through BigCommerce, Skubana synchronizes data from sales channels, warehouses, 3PLs, POS systems, and wherever else it can be found, so that merchants can focus on what matters: customer experience. With Skubana, merchants can sell direct-to-everywhere, automate operational responsibilities, and transform multi-channel complexity into singular clarity.

15. LiveChat

Instant customer service chat is powerful to resolve questions and help customers move through to make purchases. The LiveChat chat widget for BigCommerce makes it incredibly easy to set this up and go live.

LiveChat allows brands to communicate with shoppers while they browse, answering all incoming sales and support questions, and even making product recommendations in the live chat widget. The app comes with a pre-installed chat dashboard and lets merchants monitor the results of the chat activities, right in the BigCommerce dashboard.

16. Affirm

Alternative payment solutions are becoming increasingly more common across the world, and of them, buy now, pay later (BNPL) is one of the most widely adopted by both customers and merchants.

Affirm is one such app that integrates with BigCommerce and allows shoppers to pay their goods off over time, giving merchants the ability to secure more sales, while offering more agile solutions to their customers. The Affirm app shows customers what their payments could look like based on their shopping cart price. And on the backend, it provides merchants with insights into their customer's journey and preferences.

Final Words

While there's no magic bullet that can solve all your retail problems, the apps mentioned in the post can certainly help you take your business to the next level. Whether you have a brick-and-mortar store, an eCommerce site, or both, you can use the solutions mentioned above to streamline your operations, increase customer loyalty, and boost your bottom line

Shopify Omnichannel Retail Retail Marketing

13 Shopify Apps to Take Your Retail Store to the Next Level

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Shopify has a growing marketplace of apps and solutions that can boost your business' revenue and reach. Read about our top picks for 2020 and beyond.

Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms, allowing merchants to create an online store in just a few steps. In addition to giving eCommerce and brick-and-mortar store owners all the tools they need to build, launch and grow their business, Shopify also has a growing marketplace of apps and solutions that can extend the capabilities of the platform. With the developments of Coronavirus (COVID-19), now is the perfect time to be analyzing which apps will help you to master the management of an omnichannel store.

To date, the Shopify’s app store offers upward of 2,400 apps to its users, and on average, 33,000 are downloaded each month.

But not all apps are created equally, and with 2,000+ to browse, it can be challenging to find which app is going to get the best results for your business.

So, we've saved you the hassle of browsing thousands of solutions and identified the 13 best Shopify apps to get you through marketing, analytics, accounting, staffing, merchandising, and much more.

1. Marsello

When it comes to loyalty marketing and automation for your Shopify store, look no further than Marsello.

Our app equips you with powerful tools that can help you run delightful marketing campaigns across physical and digital channels. Want to set up a loyalty program that seamlessly works online and offline? We got you covered. Need to send targeted messages via email and SMS? You can do that too!

Marsello also puts the power of AI at your fingertips. The platform uses customer segmentation to organise and track customers based on their shopping behavior (i.e., purchase history, recent interactions, etc.), helping you to run the right campaigns at the right time.

2. Kiri - Helpdesk and Helpcenter

eCommerce support is critical to keeping customers on your site, engaged with your brand, and moving through to purchase. Kiri assists with just this through the use of artificial intelligence.

Kiri allows store owners with an eCommerce site to increase their profits and customer satisfaction with automatic replies, intelligent sorting, and assessing the customer value and risk, so support staff know which conversations to prioritize.

3. Smart Wishlist

Wishlists enable customers to identify and store items they like. Smart Wishlist helps merchants to make this process as smooth as possible, even before customers have registered or logged into your site.

Smart Wishlist is a simple tool that gives customers the ability to add to their wishlist in just one click, no sign-in needed, and no coding required from merchants.

4. Tagalys

The Tagalys Personalized Recommendations app for Shopify allows you to tailor the product categories and recommendations shown on your website, based on the interest of the user as well as what’s trending.

Tagalys lets you create data-driven product listings and recommendations, so your website displays products that shoppers are most likely to buy. Product recommendations on your online store, in turn, keeps customers on your site and helps to increase conversions and revenue.

5. Easyship

Shipping is a crucial piece of the eCommerce business puzzle, and finding the right shipping solution can help businesses to save drastically – both their time and money.

The Easyship app for Shopify gives merchants access to low shipping costs all over the world. With more economical shipping costs offered to customers, the barrier of freight is removed, paving the way to increased conversions and more repeat purchases, not to mention cost savings for both sides.

6. SEO Booster

Being seen online is the primary battle in building a customer base. To be seen, your eCommerce site needs to be search engine optimized and to be optimized, you either need an in-house team, or you need systems working to support you.

SEO Booster by Secomapp helps eCommerce sites to boost their SEO with no prior SEO skills required. With a number of automatic functions, tools, and insight features, the SEO Booster app helps your site to set up SEO like a pro.

7. SEO App ‑ Setup Optizen

We've said it already: SEO is critical to getting seen online. But, thankfully, there are many ways that eCommerce businesses can improve their SEO, and SEO App - Setup Optizen is one handy app to help you do just that.

SEO App ‑ Setup Optizen by EcomXSEO allows merchants to add content below product grids on collection pages, which boosts the relevance of the page, making it more SEO friendly and thus better ranking. With the SEO App ‑ Setup Optizen app for Shopify, you can include more internal links and heading tags, bringing validity to improve product page rankings.

10. Bulk Products Editor

Editing product information in bulk can be a nightmare, no matter whether it's tens of items or thousands. To counter this, SpurIT developed Bulk Products Editor for Shopify users to streamline the process and make it possible to edit in bulk from one page.

Through the app, merchants can edit product and variant details in bulk, with just a couple clicks, all from the same page. This could be bulk tags, vendor details, product titles and descriptions, SEO information, or bulk price changes.

9. Staffy

With smoother staff management, retail store owners and managers can focus less on admin and focus more on important work – such as growing your online and offline sales, keeping your customers happy, and strategizing where to take your business.

To that end, Staffy is a Shopify app that helps you stay on top of employee management, scheduling, and payroll. With quick and easy shift scheduling, salary calculation systems, payment integrations, and team communication tools, Staffy is an all-rounder system for sites managing staff.

Staffy is a platform that is made to ensure teamwork productivity and payroll in Shopify. It's designed for merchants that rely on remote teams, physical employees, and/or POS store retail employees. Staffy's time tracking capabilities ensure that employees are working during business hours, no matter if they're at home, or at your fulfillment center. Staffy also comes with in-depth integrations to provide key features and insights such as custom made reports, one-click payroll, project management tools and more - all while being fully integrated with your Shopify system.

- Harel Ishay, CEO at Staffy

10. Matcha

They say content is king, but unfortunately, it can also be tough to measure, and many eCommerce businesses have historically struggled to learn what content is converting.

With Matcha for Shopify, merchants can see exactly what content their customers respond to and what impact this content has on their revenue. With these insights, Matcha also assists merchants in creating content strategies with conversion, not just engagement, in mind.

11. PriceWhiz

Applying changes to products can have a significant impact on how they sell, and this can be particularly difficult to track. PriceWhiz gives Shopify merchants an app to easily measure these changes by setting goals that measure how long it takes to sell an item against how long you want it to take to sell.

With better measurement, eCommerce owners can make smarter decisions through experimentation, rather than guesswork, with a full report on the number of orders from each product line within the goal time.

12. Conversific ‑ Store Analytics

Analytics tools are what makes the Internet go round and allows eCommerce businesses to get ahead of their competitors. For Shopify sites, Conversific ‑ Store Analytics is the analytics tool of choice, bringing up actionable analytics and reports so that merchants can make sense of and harness their data.

With no need to develop technical skills, merchants can optimize for traffic and conversion, access benchmarking and insights tools, and master Google Analytics to boost their online sales.

13. Product Questions and Answers

The modern consumer is a research savvy, internet literate individual with a penchant for seeking answers to hunt down the best deal. Answering questions all day, however, is time-consuming for merchants or customer service teams; hence Product Questions and Answers become so valuable.

With this free app on Shopify, eCommerce site owners can create product-specific FAQ sections on various product pages. Not only does this answer consumer questions, but it also helps with SEO and product questions and answers.

The biggest benefit [of Product Questions and Answers ] is it helps merchants maintain the FAQ page for each product on their respective product pages. Plus, questions and answers are rendered via In Page HTML and via JS rendering. This helps Search Engines read the content of the pages more efficiently.

- Amit P Jivani, CEO at Simprosys InfoMedia

Bringing it all together

Retail success requires you have a strong presence on both physical and digital channels. If you’re a brick-and-mortar store looking to go online, then installing some of these apps from the get-go will help you kick off on the right foot. Already have an online store? These apps will optimize it further so you can take it to new heights!

Campaign Marketing Email Marketing Marketing Automation Retention Marketing Customer Feedback

How to Improve Email Deliverability: 9 Proven Steps

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Ensure your emails are delivering exactly how you expect and learn how to stay out of your customers’ spam folders with our 9 tips for deliverability.

We talk about email marketing quite a bit here on the Marsello blog, and for good reason – it continues to be one of the most effective ways to drive sales and engagement for retail brands. That’s why it’s so important to continuously build your list, optimize your copy, and run winning campaigns.

However, all the optimization in the world won’t help you if your messages aren’t being delivered. And the truth is that a significant chunk (20% according to Return Path) of emails don’t even reach the inbox.

But you don’t have to be part of that statistic. By implementing the right steps and best practices, you can maximize your email deliverability and ensure that your messages actually hit the inbox of your audience.

Read on to learn exactly what you need to do.

1. Improve your email sender reputation

Think of your customers’ inbox as an exclusive club that bans shady characters. When the gatekeepers deem a sender as having a poor reputation, their messages are sent to the spam folder.

When it comes to sender reputation, email service providers typically look at two things: your IP reputation and your domain reputation.

Here’s a breakdown of these two components and how you can improve them.

IP reputation

Emails are sent from an IP address – a unique identifier that ties a device to a specific network. Think of it a bit like a fingerprint for your emails. It tracks where emails come from, the reputation of that ESP (email service provider) and the email account itself. If you have a reputation of sending spammy emails, there’s a good chance that messages sent from that IP will be automatically flagged as spam and your emails won’t land front and center in your customers’ inboxes.

In the world of eCommerce and physical store email marketing, brands can send emails using a customized domain name if their marketing provider has this function (Marsello makes this easy for retailers. Learn more here).

How can you improve your IP reputation?

Marsello-created graphic of a computer monitor with tick embedded over it

Choose a good email marketing platform – If you’re opting for a custom domain (also sometimes referred to as a shared IP address), make sure you’re using a reputable email marketing platform. The best-in-class email marketing companies work hard to keep the reputation of their IP addresses in top shape by giving their users the tools and education they need to comply with anti-spam laws.

Most email marketing platforms also have systems that prevent abuse and spam. Marsello, for example, has an abuse-prevention system called SpamAssassin, which checks for spam traps, abuse complaints, and hard bounces.

Marsello-created graph of inclining graph

Gradually build up your IP’s reputation over time – If you’re using a dedicated IP address for your email marketing efforts, you’ll need to build and maintain its reputation yourself.

Much like with building financial credit, developing a solid IP reputation entails having a solid track record of sending high-quality emails. This means having high open rates and minimal spam flags from recipients.

If you’re using a new IP address for your emails, you can build up its reputation by only sending messages to a small but active list of people who love your brand. This will help boost your engagement metrics, which sends the message that you’re a high-quality sender.

In turn, this boosts your reputation, which ultimately increases your email deliverability.

Marsello-created graphic. An outline of a person with a smiley-face in a conversation bubble.

Monitor your reputation – If you’re suffering from poor email deliverability and you think your IP address is the culprit, then use a tool like Sender Score to check the IP’s rep.

Sender Score lets you enter an IP address, and its system will score it based on how reputable it is. The higher the score the better the reputation.

Sender Score's homepage allows you to check the sender reputation for your web domain

Domain reputation

When it comes to domain reputation, your messages are evaluated based on your sending domain, instead of, or in addition to your IP address.

Email service providers have different metrics for evaluating messages, but Gmail (arguably the #1 email provider in the world) seems to favor domain reputation over IP.

How can you improve your domain reputation?

Build up a good rep – A good domain reputation must be earned. Just like with building your IP rep, your domain needs to come across as reputable and high-quality for email service providers to not flag it as spam.

You can do this by sending high-quality messages to an engaged user base and increasing your metrics over time.

Monitor your domain reputation – Check your domain reputation using a tool like MX Lookup Tool, which checks a domain against common blacklists.

MX Lookup also allows you to check your domain reputation.

2. Steer clear of spam traps

Spam traps are email addresses used by email service providers to catch malicious senders. They look just like a typical email address, but they’re not used by a real person. Their only purpose is to catch spam, so when a person or company sends a message to a spam trap email, the provider can flag or blacklist the sender.

There are a number of ways that providers can set up spam traps. They include:

Pristine traps – A common one is called a pristine spam trap, which is an email address that is publicly displayed on a website BUT isn't visible to normal users. Pristine traps are meant to capture bots that are scraping the web for email addresses.

Expired or inactive email addresses – These are email addresses that have been deactivated by the company that issued them or by email service providers. In some cases, companies and providers may decide to reactivate these email addresses for the purposes of catching spam.

How to avoid spam traps

Spam trap email addresses can sometimes end up on the list of senders with good intentions. Here’s how you can ensure that your list stays spam-trap free:

Don’t purchase email lists – The email addresses that end up on lists for sale are often obtained through unethical means (like scraping the web). When you buy a list, you may end up with a handful of spam trap emails on your hands.

Clean up your lists regularly – A great way to make sure that you don’t have spam trap emails on your list is to prune it. Identify emails that have no engagement over the last six months or so, then remove them from your list.

You should also clean up email addresses that have returned a hard bounce (i.e., when emails are undeliverable). Hard bounces indicate that an email address is no longer valid, and should thus be removed from your list. Some email marketing platforms do this for you automatically, so check with your provider to see if this is a feature they offer.

3. Make it easy for people to opt-out

Giving people an easy way to opt-out seems counter-intuitive, because most email marketers want to keep people on their list.

However, making users jump through too many hoops just to unsubscribe is doing you more harm than good.

Here’s why:

When people can’t easily unsubscribe from your emails, they may end up marking it as spam – which, as you already know, will hurt your email deliverability.

So, resist the urge to hide the unsubscribe button. Instead, have a clear, clickable link on all your messages, and allow your subscribers to opt-out in just a click or two.

Check out this footer from the email of PetConnect. A standard location for the unsubscribe button is at the bottom of the footer, and PetConnect keep it simple. The last piece of their email gives readers the option to unsubscribe. While it’s not advertised and encouraging for customers, it is easy to find, underlined and simple to understand. Although with emails that cute, who’d really want to unsubscribe?

PetConnect adds an 'unsubscribe' button to the bottom of their emails.

4. Customize your ‘from’ name / sender field

One of the reasons you may have poor email engagement rates is that people don’t recognize you when your messages hit their inbox. When users don’t know the sender, they’re more likely to delete the message without reading it, or worse, mark it as spam.

That’s why you should ensure that your sender name is consistent with your brand and is easily recognizable by users.

If you’re marketing yourself as “Bloom Skincare” then you shouldn’t send messages from “Jane Smith”. Instead, have your brand name in the “from” field of your emails – i.e., “Jane from Bloom Skincare” or “The Bloom Skincare Team”.

This email from CAUSEBOX serves as an excellent example of a retailer that uses a real person behind each email, while still including their brand name.

A CAUSEBOX email sent from Hannah at CAUSEBOX

5. Avoid misleading subject lines

Another temptation you may have is to write intriguing or exciting subject lines without having content or offers that actually live up to the hype.

Avoid this tactic at all costs.

While ‘creative’ subject lines may get people to open your message, they will likely mark your email as spam if the content doesn’t deliver on the subject line’s promises.

Instead, find ways to write exciting subject lines while still being upfront with the email’s content.

Take a look at the following email from GILT, an ecommerce site that sells luxury goods. The subject line – $99.99 Sunglasses SALE. Believe your eyes – is straightforward and tells customers exactly what they’re getting. But it’s also cleverly written and compelling because, well… who doesn’t like $99 designer sunglasses?

6. Don’t use spammy words

Another subject line tip? Avoid spam-trigger words, phrases, and characters.

Hubspot and Simply Cast shared a long list of words and phrases to avoid, but here are the top ones that apply to retail and ecommerce:

Words like “FREE!,” “Guarantee,” and “Clearance”
Using ALL CAPS
Having “RE:” when it’s not a reply
One-word subject lines
Excessive use of exclamation points (!!!)
Excessive use of characters like “$$$”
Excessive use of emojis

7. Stick to a consistent email schedule

Irregular sending patterns can raise flags, so strive to find the best sending schedule that works for you, and avoid changing things up too often.

There are no one-size-fits-all rules when it comes to when to send emails and how often to do it. Since every company is different, you need to find a time and frequency that resonates with your audience.

One way to do is to gradually test out different sending patterns and frequencies, then measuring the performance of your messages.

When you find a good email sending pattern, stick with it.

8. Send emails that people love

We’ve covered the tech-related side of increasing email deliverability, and while the tips above are solid best practices, they won’t guarantee that your messages will be seen and opened.

At the end of the day, the best way to boost the deliverability of your messages is to send emails that people open and click regularly.

How can you do that?

Simple; send messages that your subscribers love.

Create content that’s so compelling, people actually look forward to hearing from you. It’s a simple tip, but it’s not always easy to do, particularly when you’re competing with hundreds (if not thousands) of other brands for people’s attention.

Follow these pointers and examples on how to send messages that subscribers can’t help but click:

Keep it super relevant

Segment your customers based on their demographic details and shopping behavior, and use that data to inform your email marketing.

For instance, if you know that a shopper has kids, then you can send them mom-centric emails. Or, if you keep track of the purchase histories of your customers, you can leverage their data to craft email content and offers based on their profile.

Stitch Fix did this really well when it launched its kids line, Stitch Fix Kids. The subscription service reached out to members who ordered maternity clothes and sent them an exclusive invite to the service.

marsello-blog-Improve-Email-Deliverability-keep-it-relevant.jpg

Ask for their input

Requesting for customer feedback doesn’t just help you gather more intel, it also shows that you value your customers’ opinions. Most shoppers – 71% according to this study – are happy to offer their feedback when asked. So, these types of messages will likely generate higher engagement (which is great for email deliverability – yay)!

Buda Juice, a speciality pressed juices distributor, puts this tip to good use. The company sends feedback requests to customers to measure their satisfaction. Buda Juice crafts messages that are easy to read and act on, so the whole customer experience is smooth and convenient.

A BudaJuice email which contacts customer feedback prompts

Send a timely message

Use different events and holidays as opportunities to engage with your audience. If you haven’t done so yet, create a marketing calendar with events throughout the year, and then craft seasonal content for each occasion.

Need help doing this? We've put together a calendar schedule highlighting best days and times to send your holiday email campaigns to make sure you never miss an opportunity. Download it for free here.

Marsello's holiday email marketing schedule

Here’s another tip: keep track of each customer’s birthday and send them a timely perk that they can use on their special day.

Australian clothing retailer, Búl, for example, sends members of its rewards program a $20 voucher 7 days before their birthday. To make sure customers don’t miss out on the deal, Búl also sends them an email on the day of the customer’s birthday and then a final email to remind them to use the $20 voucher. The final two emails of this flow also include product recommendations designed to pique customers’ interest and get the shopping. Read more on the success of Búl’s Happy Birthday Email Flow in their recent case study.

Pro tip: did you know that you can use Marsello to reward your customers on their birthday? When you set up "Happy Birthday Rewards" on your loyalty program, you’ll be able to automatically award birthday celebrants with extra perks on their birthday!

9. Analyze your email marketing reports

You know what they say: you can’t improve what you don’t measure.

The same thing applies to email deliverability. If you want to increase your deliverability rate, then you need to track the performance of your campaigns.

In particular, you should keep an eye on:

Open rates – This will shed light on the performance of your subject lines, so you can determine if your copy is getting people interested in reading the rest of your emails.

Click-to-open-rate (CTOR) – CTOR measure the number of unique clicks relative to the number of unique opens. It's a good measure of how an email's content has performed. A high CTOR could indicate that your subject line and email copy are working well together and reaching the right people. Conversely, a low CTOR could mean that your email copy isn't resonating with readers and there might be a disconnect between the subject line and content of the email.

Bounce rates – Pay attention to email bounces – particularly hard bounces, because these indicate that an email address is invalid. You want to remove those emails from your list ASAP to avoid falling into spam traps.

Final words

You need to take a number of steps to improve email deliverability, and while some of them aren’t sexy, they are absolutely necessary if you want to land on your customers’ inbox.

If you haven’t done so yet, take the time to evaluate your email marketing efforts. Check your reputation, clean up your email list, and review your content calendar to ensure that you’re sending top-notch messages.

If you do the above consistently, you’ll not only boost your email deliverability, but you’ll increase your reputation and engagement in the process!

Campaign Marketing Marketing Tips Email Marketing Retention Marketing

7 Ways to Create Holiday Campaigns That Convert

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Create compelling holiday campaigns with our 7 actionable steps. Learn from leading retailer examples and key takeaways.

Email may not be the newest craze in the world of digital marketing, but it continues to prove itself as the most effective channel for omnichannel businesses, particularly during the holiday season.

As marketing powerhouse Neil Patel has mentioned, email has nearly three times the number of accounts as Facebook and Twitter combined – 2.9 billion! Campaign email marketing continues to grow at a phenomenal rate, however, it’s essential that any business owner or marketer understands the anatomy of a good email and takes note of evolving trends.

Infographic showing conversion rates of email and social media marketing – 6.06% for email, 1.9% for social.

The popularity and effectiveness of email marketing are undeniable, and while that’s generally a good thing, it also presents one obvious challenge: because email is so popular, it can be difficult to stand out in the competition while staying true to brand messaging.

So how can you ensure that your emails make the cut?

To help answer that, we’re putting the spotlight on a handful of email promotions that you can use as inspiration for your own holiday marketing campaigns.

Retention first

Before you can start your holiday email marketing campaigns, it’s vital that you get your customer retention strategies sorted. Why? Because these are the long-term marketing tools that will keep your holiday season customers coming back throughout the remainder of the year.

Consider some of the following retention strategies:

Create an undeniable loyalty program – loyalty programs reward your customers for completing purchases with you and considering the high-spend rates of the holiday season, they’re a powerful way to keep your customers coming back as they see the rewards quickly. Go one step further and add VIP tiers to keep customers excited about shopping with your store again and again. Offering customers seasonal rewards can also help them to feel appreciated during a busy and expensive season. If they feel rewarded for shopping with you, the chances of them shopping with you again increases hugely.
Automate your email flows – creating automated campaigns that trigger as a result of specific actions (or lack thereof) is a proven retention strategy. Examples of these include emails that welcome first-time customers (and include a discount); win-back emails targeting a customer who hasn’t shopped with you for a certain time period (usually around 60 days); abandoned cart recovery emails designed to draw customers back who added items to their cart but didn’t complete a purchase; birthday emails that trigger on a customers birthday and offers them a small reward and discount to thank them for their loyalty.
Forms – either embedding forms or creating them as pop-ups can help to capture customer details (namely emails) and funnel those customers into your direct retention marketing channels such as email campaigns and social media targeting
One-off email campaigns – whether you’re creating newsletters, stock updates, business updates, one-off sales, or even competitions, cleverly curated one-off emails should be a huge part of your retention strategy and are a powerful place to incorporate other tools like customer segmentation (we’ll get into this more, later).
Customer feedback – show customers that you want their opinions, can take their feedback, and that you’re open to learning and growing with them. It’s important that your customers feel listened to and appreciated, and gathering customer feedback is a proven way to do this.
Boost your best email campaigns – So you’ve diligently created a beautiful holiday marketing strategy and you’ve crafted the email and SMS campaigns to match. One way that you can ensure they get in front of more and more of your customers is to give your campaigns a ‘boost’. This is where you essentially send the same campaign to those who have no opened the email after a set amount of time, but with a new subject line.

Incorporate themes into your emails

This may sound obvious, but many merchants continue to send uninspired and generic emails during the holidays. Don’t be one of them! Write and design your emails in such a way that they embody the holiday that you’re celebrating while staying true to your brand and excite your customers along the way.

So if it’s Christmas, your campaigns should reflect the joy and cheer that people experience around the season. If you’re sending emails for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, then your design and messaging should bring about excitement and a sense of urgency.

Go through your marketing emails and ask yourself the following questions:

Do they contain key holiday terms? (e.g., ‘gifts’, ‘happy holidays’ or ‘it’s Christmas’)
If not, have you considered adding a seasonal emoji to make your message more in line with each holiday?
Is your color palette in line with the holiday you’re celebrating but also complementary to your branding? (e.g., black and white for BFCM, red and green for Christmas)
Is the design of your email relevant to the season?
Is the written and visual content of your email relevant to the season?
Are you positioning your products as holiday purchases? (e.g., ‘Dresses for your next holiday party’ vs just ‘dresses’)

Here are a few holiday email examples you can use as inspiration.

OSMOSE creates an immersive theme for Chinese New Year

OSMOSE, a Singapore-based specialist in women’s fashion, knew that Chinese New Year was the perfect holiday to market to their current customers. The overarching theme of their email was the color red, which is considered a symbol of luck and prosperity during the hugely popular holiday. In fact, red is the official color of Chinese New Year. They encourage email recipients to “paint your wardrobe red” to “welcome a prosperous new year”. Check out their gorgeous customized email flow below.

Osmose's chinese new year themed featuring red-themed outfit ideas.

Area 51 keeps customers informed with holiday season in-store hours

When the holiday season came nearer last year, Area 51 took the opportunity to remind their customers of their hours over that season, but they also sweetened the deal by offering 20% to their online customers, making sure their customers knew that online shopping at Area 51 was still an option.

Brandini Toffee creates a holiday-themed product

Brandini Toffee knows the importance of personalized marketing and carefully curated customer service – and they know that these two things go hand-in-hand. To encourage customer engagement and create a personalized, holiday-themed shopping experience, Brandini created a Christmas product called ‘Red Box’ which included 1lb and 2lbs of their famous toffee. They then made the deal all the sweeter by adding free shipping on orders over $70.

Brandini Toffees Red Box email campaign offering free shipping

Alex and Ani positions their existing merchandise as gifts

Alex and Ani took one of their mainstay products and positioned it as a holiday gift. With the adorable content, beautiful design that fits their branding, and their three top products, Alex and Ani curated a stand-out email sure to be successful with their new and returning customers.

Alex and Ani created a holiday gift guide on their website

Allbirds offers a holiday-themed giveaway to incentivize purchases

Last Christmas, sustainable sneaker company, Allbirds, went above and beyond in offering customers a festive deal – they created a festive-themed version of one of their products: Christmas shoelaces. These were added as a special offer for customers who shopped during the holiday season, but not before customers were reminded to make sustainable choices with their gift-giving and purchases. We love the way they’ve included their branding, marketing, calls to action, and ethos into one snappy and beautiful email.

AllBirds email saying 'give cosy, get creative' on a grey background with a 'shop now' CTA.

UGMONK created a holiday gift guide with clever segmentation

When UGMONK released an email gift guide last year, they didn’t just stick to the mainstays of ‘gifts for mom’ or ‘his & hers’ organization. With guide sections such as ‘cozy comforts’ and ‘mountains’, they were able to curate a guide that would appeal to anyone.

PRO TIP:Did you know that Marsello's holiday email flows come with seasonal templates? No need to design an email from scratch; just take on of our best-practice templates, designed to keep your customers coming back, and then tailor to your business.

Personalize your campaigns

A well-written and beautifully designed email won’t be effective if the content is irrelevant to the recipient. That’s why you should always incorporate personalization into your campaigns.

Studies show that eCommerce emails with personalized subject lines have 29% higher open rates so really it’s a no-brainer – personalization and loyalty go hand-in-hand. And with the growth of email marketing (expected to reach an astounding 4.3 billion users by 2022!!), you should be utilizing every tool at your disposal to help you increase open rates and stay at the forefront of your customers’ minds.

So consider incorporating tricks and tools like customer segmentation, purchase history included in email content, and wish lists. Being able to easily tailor the content of your messages to each user will help you to reach them on a personal level and improve customer engagement drastically.

Take a leaf out the playbooks of these companies:

Yuccs uses clever customer segmentation to target different groups

Spanish shoe designer, Yuccs, are leaders in creating stylish, comfortable sneakers that bridge the gap between function and fashion. Because of this, they have a clear vision for their brand and how they present it to their customers. During the holiday season, Yuccs created a similar email campaign but with notable differences that catered to two separate audience segments: loyal customers and Facebook leads!

Both emails were Black Friday-themed and both were marketing the same products, however, the images and messaging were designed to cater more to the specific customer groups. Loyal customers were given the benefit of the doubt with ‘you already know’ messaging. They were encouraged to make the most of undeniable holiday prices and get organized for Christmas. Meanwhile, the segment created from Facebook Leads received an email that encouraged them to make a purchase and convert to loyal customers with the message “take advantage of our most exclusive discounts of the year”.

Yuccs' holiday campaigns with 'loyal' and 'facebook leads' customer segments highlighted.

Federation + recommends products that shoppers might like based on their browsing activity

Federation + is an infamous streetwear brand in New Zealand, and a large part of this is their dedication to forming a distinguished, stand-out brand that excites customers both in-store and online, creating a seamless omnichannel shopping experience.

Good email marketing stands out while also encouraging customers to convert. It’s that simple. There are plenty of tactics to mastering this, and one of the simplest is using smart product recommendations. Federation + does this by adding a ‘product recommendations block’ to their welcome email, encouraging customers to make a purchase with a 10% discount, followed by showcasing products that are similar to the others that customer has viewed and that customers like them have previously purchased.

Federations automated Welcome email overlaid on a black background

Barebones recommend products based on previous purchases

If you’re marketing to existing customers, then use their purchase data in your product recommendations. This is a good way to show customers that you’re paying attention to their shopping habits. And if you implement this strategy in a friendly way (like what Barebones is doing in the example below), you’ll encourage people to continue shopping at your store.

An email from Barebones that offers customers 60% off with an end of season sale.

PRO TIP: Marsello's holiday email flows make it easy to send personalized product recommendations. Simply drag and drop the product widget onto your email, and it will automatically populate with the top 3 items that your customer is likely to purchase, based on their shopping history, and the shopping histories of customers like them.

Run compelling and creative offers

In an age when numerous brands are vying for shopper attention, it’s imperative that you craft offers that are both compelling and creative.

There aren’t any one-size-fits-all promos that would work for every campaign, as your offers would depend on your customers, merchandise, and objectives. For example, if you’re trying to move slow-moving inventory, then multi-buy promotions (e.g., “BOGO,” Buy 2 get 1 free, etc.) would be the best offer type. On the other hand, if the goal is to increase order values, then conditional offers (e.g., “Free shipping on orders over $75”) would be a better way to go.

Have a think about the right type of offer for your campaign, and once you’ve decided on the type of promotions to run, inject holiday some themes to make them relevant.

Consider the following:

Flynn Skye shows shoppers how much they’re saving

You know what they say, showing is better than telling. Apparel retailer Flynn Skye puts this nugget of wisdom to good use by creatively “slashing” their product prices. Check out the image of their email below and you can clearly see the original price crossed off and replaced with their promotional pricing.

Flynn Skye advertise for cyber monday on their store with a colourful photo showcasing one of their dresses

Fossil uses some holiday puns

Last year, accessories store, Fossil, created vibrant and on-brand emails with a cute differentiator – a stand-out, festively decorated pun. They wished that their customers “have a tree-mendous holiday” and then drew attention to their early access sale and perks such as gift wrapping.

Witty content, cute imagery, on-theme colors, and simple design make this email stand out to customers and invites them to shop.

Fossil sends customers the message 'Have a Tree-mendous Holiday'

Girlfriend Collective runs a giveaway

Meanwhile, the team at Girlfriend Collective ran a giveaway and used email marketing to promote it. The subject line was direct to the point and powerful: “Free stuff! (It’s giveaway time.)” and the body of the email touched on the holiday season, with the lines like: “The holidays are stressful. Giveaways aren’t.”

Animate your emails

A cool way to stand out is by incorporating a bit of animation in your messages. Why not insert a moving GIF image in your holiday messages, to really get them to pop? Have a look at the following example:

Búl’s Colorful Flash Sale

We love the way Australian retailer, Búl, uses GIFs and block coloring to stand out while staying on-brand. Check out their gorgeous spring sale email (leading into the Australian holiday season)! It not only showcases their beautiful clothing but also their stylish email design is simple, easy to understand, and clear in intent. And it’s so simple! P.s. notice their addition of Afterpay, allowing customers to ‘wear now, pay later’. A fantastic way to entice customers into making a purchase now.

Bul uses colorful GIFs to advertise an upcoming flash sale

The Vans Holiday Gift Guide GIF

Vans really know how to stand out with their customers when it comes to creating the best holiday emails. They took the opportunity to stand out and show their creative “off the wall” brand with a GIF featuring a skater and some subtle holiday imagery. While this may not be great for mobile optimization (which is incredibly important for avoiding spam filters), Vans is a hugely popular retailer which means they have a little bit of freedom to play with less-optimized email content because their customers are likely to recognize their emails.

Van's Off The Wall uses a GIF to advertise their holiday gift guide

Instill a sense of urgency

Urgency can give your promotions an extra boost, so find ways to use it in your campaigns. Things like a looming deadline or fear of missing out (FOMO) can really drive people to act.

Use these emails for inspiration:

BioLite reinforces that sense of urgency with sale dates

Being clear about your sale terms and timing can give your customers the sense that they should buy sooner rather than later for fear of missing out.

BioLite has created this sense of urgency by reminding their customers exactly when their sale ends and leaving that reminder in bold. They’ve then gone the extra mile and suggested some of their categorized top picks.

BioLite's Labour Day Sale announcement banner on their website marketing 15% off.

Udemy uses a countdown

Want to get more visual with your FOMO messaging? Countdowns can do wonders. If you’re running a promotion that’s approaching a deadline (ideally 24 hours or fewer), throw in a working countdown in your emails so recipients know exactly how much time they have left before the deal is gone.

Here’s a great example from the online course provider, Udemy:

Optimize the timing of your campaigns

Timing may not be everything, but in email marketing, it’s pretty darn important. Showing up in someone’s inbox at just the right time can mean the difference between a conversion or a missed opportunity, so optimize the scheduling of your emails as much as possible.

The best way to do this is to rely on your subscribers’ data. Pay attention to when people are opening your messages and visiting your website, so can determine when to schedule your emails.

Read our email marketing best practices guide to learn more about suggested timing.

Evaluating previous campaign performance can also help. Do morning emails work better than messages sent in the afternoon? What about weekdays vs. weekends? Go through your past campaigns and see if you can spot patterns around timing.

Industry data can also offer insights that you can use in your campaigns. Does your email marketing provider have any data on which email time-frames work best?

Below is an excellent case study of email timing optimization done right:

eBags increases conversions by 65% thanks to timing optimization

Online luggage supplier, eBags, decided to switch up their email schedules by optimizing their timing based on when each subscriber signed up to their list.

According to Econsultancy, eBags "carried out research based on the hypothesis that if users were available to sign up to an email list at a certain time, then they would be far more receptive to receiving an email at the same time as when they signed up.”

The experiment proved to be a success. As Econsultancy reports, eBags saw the following results after the experiment:

Increased click-through rates by 20%
Increased conversion rates by 65%
Increased average order value by 45%
Increased overall revenue per recipient by 187%

The moral of the story? Well, there’s a couple! Don’t be afraid to experiment based on your customer data, and optimize your emails to suit that data. If you know that you see the best results from emails that are scheduled for 10 am on a Tuesday, then schedule away! If you’re not sure when to schedule your emails, fret not …

Marsello analyzes the shopping habits of customers at your store (and at businesses similar to yours) and then recommends the best time to send your emails.

Final words

Email marketing can elevate your campaign performance, but only if you do it right. To boost your marketing success this holiday season, keep your messages relevant and personalized and throw in some compelling offers for good measure. To top everything off, optimize the scheduling of your messages you can get in front of your subscribers at the perfect time.

Loyalty Marketing Retention Marketing

Rewards and Promotions: Treat Your Customers on Their Birthday

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How do you know it’s worthwhile to reward customers for milestones like their birthday? Read on to learn more about marketing with rewards and promotions.

Birthday campaigns also tend to perform better. Research by Experian revealed that compared with promotional emails, birthday messages:

- - have a 481% higher transaction rate
  - generate 342% more revenue
  - have a 179% higher unique click rate
  - See an 89% higher open rate.

What are the benefits of birthday rewards for your business?

There are several key reasons why birthday rewards should be part of your overall loyalty program strategy:

- - Firstly, birthday rewards programs increase customer loyalty. 84% of customers opt to stay with a brand that surprises them and takes a customer-centric approach. Who doesn’t like being spoiled on their birthday!
  - Secondly, loyalty programs (that include things like birthday surprises) are proven to improve customer retention rates. Even a small increase of 5% in retention can boost profits by a whopping 25-95%.
  - Lastly, you can gather personalized data on your best customers. This allows you to personalize customer experiences and again improve loyalty.

How to prevent birthday rewards abuse

You might be asking “what if people sign up to our birthday points program with a fake birthday?”.

We have three suggestions to help stop birthday rewards point abuse.

1. 1. Apply a “cooling-off” period when people sign up to your loyalty program, i.e. don’t let people put in a birthday date that is within the first month (“What a coincidence, my birthday is TOMORROW!”). This will deter people who want “quick points” or instant freebies and then disappear.
  2. If you are using a points system, make it less than the points they receive for making an actual purchase while still being valuable.
  3. For birthday programs where you give out a freebie, make it a surprise! Don’t explicitly say what free item they will receive before they sign up. That way people will be less likely to sign up for that one specific item and you can still treat your loyal members.

Examples of Birthday Rewards Campaigns

Send a one-off special discount and build excitement

Offer free products on special occasions

Freebies are a great option if you want to encourage your customers to try your products or if you have samples and surplus stock to give away.

Offer creative rewards to encourage engagement

Here’s the not-so-great reality of loyalty or rewards programs: while many consumers sign up for them, not everyone participates in all the programs they join.

Smack-Bang-Earn-Options

Create a sense of mystery and surprise your customers

“We’re not ones to spoil a surprise! While we won’t tell exactly what they are, they’ll change regularly and might be a freebie, a discount, or a little something special just for you.”

Celebrate your business’s birthday and say thanks to your customers

Bare Wholefoods, a Sydney-based cafe, did just that when they celebrated their 4th birthday.

Bare-Wholefoods-Birthday-Email-Discount-Code

Tips for implementing birthday rewards

Integrate birthday perks with your loyalty or rewards program

While it’s certainly possible to offer birthday rewards to non-loyalty program members, your campaigns will perform far better if they’re incorporated into your loyalty program.

LEGO Certified Stores South Africa has done this to great success!

Screen Shot 2022-02-16 at 11.07.43 AM

Automate your campaigns

Just take a look at this example from Nigerian shoe retailer bCODE:

Marsello-Email-Automation-Happy-Birthday-Flow-The-BCode

Test your offers

As mentioned above, coming up with unique promo codes makes it easier to monitor the performance of your offers, as well as the customers who are redeeming their rewards.

In fact, the NZ arm of international sporting goods specialists Merrell are pros are testing all of their marketing. They had this to say when we spoke to them about their Marsello-powered marketing.

Integrate SMS marketing

Just remember, SMS marketing comes with a few rules to keep in mind and not every merchant is eligible. To make sure you’re doing everything right, check out our help center on SMS compliance.

FAQs

How do businesses track the effectiveness of birthday reward campaigns over time?

Can small businesses without a big budget implement impactful birthday rewards?

How do businesses personalize birthday rewards for diverse customer segments?

Final words

Birthdays can be a real treat not just for your customers, but for your brand, as well. So, take the time to create campaigns that make your customers feel appreciated on their special day.

Need help doing just that? Check out Marsello’s customer loyalty features and discover how you can engage each customer on their birthday and beyond.

Make sure to check out our comprehensive loyalty guide to ensure your loyalty marketing is up to date in all areas.

Shopify Acquisition Loyalty Marketing SEO

Guide to Getting Your First Key Sales in 2022

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In this blog, learn how to generate quality leads for your first key sales and turn new customers into life-long brand advocates.

In retail, momentum is one of the best ways to generate your first key sales.

Getting momentum and customers early on not only puts money in the bank (so you can re-invest in your growth), but it gives you the motivation to keep going.

So, how exactly can you drive your initial sales? We’ve put together 10 ideas to help you gain paying customers as you kick-off, as well as important sales KPIs and keys to building an effective sales process in your new retail biz.

Top sales KPIs to track your progress

Tracking sales KPIs is the only way to know if you are making progress in your retail business. The sooner you start tracking your progress, the sooner you will see trends in key metrics such as customer loyalty, churn rate, and how it costs to bring in a new customer.

Below are some of the best sales KPIs you should include in your analytics.

Customer Loyalty

Your loyal customers Repeat customers spend 33% more than other customers, so it is worth focusing your marketing efforts on them specifically.

Loyalty can be measured through:

- - Net Promoter Scores (NPS), i.e. how likely they are to recommend your brand to someone you know
  - Customer Loyalty Index surveys
  - Returning customer analytics
  - Loyalty programs and points redemption (customer loyalty platforms like Marsello track this for you!)

If you can build customer loyalty from the very first sale, they will help you build momentum as you grow.

Customer Lifetime Value

The Customer Lifetime Value KPI is how much your business can reasonably expect from a single customer. You can use this to identify your best customer segments and therefore where to focus your marketing budget.

Companies that prioritize customer experience have profits 60% higher on average than those that don’t. This emphasizes the need for ongoing customer relationships and long-term investment. Loyalty is not a once-off marketing tactic.

Customer Churn Rate

Another sales KPI is your Customer Churn Rate. A high churn rate indicates that although someone has signed up, they are not sticking around. It is measured by

For retail, KPIs that go alongside churn rates are

- - Customer loyalty and NPS scores
  - Retention and returning customers (do customers make one purchase and never come back?)
  - Loyalty program redemption (are customers engaged with your brand’s rewards?)

Customer Acquisition Price

Customer acquisition price measures how much it costs your business to bring in a new customer. The lower this number, the more efficient your marketing and sales process.

Ideally, you want your average purchase order per customer to be much higher than the cost of acquiring them. This is why you should focus on customer loyalty just as much as marketing.

Average Order Value

The Average Order Value is calculated by dividing the total revenue by the number of orders placed. Tracking average order value doesn’t just give you insight into customer behavior. It also correlates with a stronger profit margin.

Using upsells, rewards points, and bonuses like free shipping thresholds are all ways that you can incentivize higher average order values when you start out.

Key elements for an effective sales process from the start

No matter what you’re selling, there are a few proven factors for success in sales. These steps integrate into any sales process, whether that is through website copy, market positioning, social media, or email marketing.

Identify customer needs clearly

Before you can make your first sale (or any sale), you need to know if your product serves your ideal customers.

This is done in the planning stage of your business. Ask questions about your product like:

- - Do you have a unique value proposition?
  - Have you done the market research? Is this something people ACTUALLY want or need?
  - Who are your competitors? What are their measures of success?
  - Why do people NEED or CRAVE your product?
  - Have you done a test run to see if there is demand before investing everything in a product?

Putting in the effort to clearly identify your customers’ needs will set you up for success with your first few sales.

Build Rapport

Prior to launching and getting sales, it is important to start building a rapport with potential customers. 68% of customers leave a brand because they feel like you are indifferent to them. Building rapport and community is crucial!

One way you can create ongoing rapport with your potential customers is to build a loyalty program. Effective loyalty programs can help build hype and a sense of belonging for your customers which all contribute to more sales.

A good example of a loyalty program community is Our Bralette Club. They have a loyalty program that not only resulted in a 278% increase in revenue generated from program members alone but also creates a fun, inclusive community for their “Peach Party” members.

Present a solution

When you boil it down, sales and business are just identifying problems and solving them for people. Whether that's showing customers how to build their spring wardrobe, selling the highest quality dog treats on the market, or helping people get into hiking by giving great boot recommendations.

Your marketing, visual assets, storefront, and website copy should all emphasize why your product solves their exact needs.

Close the deal

Once you have done your market research, started building rapport, and have a product people want, the most important step is to actually make the sale!

We have a few tips to help increase your chances of closing the deal:

- - Make your website as user-friendly as possible - According to a study by eMarketer, the only thing online shoppers like more than customer reward coupons is a quick and easy checkout process. 83% of shoppers marked this as their top priority for loyalty.
  - Set up abandoned cart emails- People get distracted, people change their mind mid-payment- increase your chances of making the sale by setting up automated email campaigns for abandoned carts.
  - Start collecting customer data - Set up a loyalty campaign that rewards loyal customers and gets them to sign in. This will help with retargeting and building relationships.
  - Create an omnichannel marketing campaign - omnichannel marketing campaigns allow you personalize and target specific groups to increase your chance of converting them to sales.
  - Sweeten the deal - How can you convert interested shoppers to paying customers? To make those first sales, consider sweetening the deal with rewards points for people who sign up and spend thresholds for things like free shipping.

Create upselling opportunities

Businesses with higher Average Order Values have higher profit margins. That’s just simple math! Creating upselling opportunities is a great way to increase the amount a customer spends in a single transaction.

Examples of upselling opportunities you could try out are:

- - Free Shipping - Let customers know how close they are to a free shipping spend threshold
  - Free Items - Give customers a free (exclusive!) gift if they spend a certain amount
  - Loyalty Points - Set up a program that lets customers earn loyalty points and rewards for every dollar they spend which they can exchange for other products or exclusive experiences
  - Similar Products - Give targeted recommendations for items usually brought together
  - Discount Bundles - Group together similar products and offer a limited time discount to buy multiple items.

10 marketing ideas to help you get your first sales

Ready to make your first key sales and get that momentum going in your new retail business? Whether you’re selling online, in person, or both, these marketing ideas will get you started.

Start marketing before you launch your products

Aim to build your audience even before you officially launch your business. You can do this by creating a website or social media account, and then posting high-value content that appeals to your target audience. You could also join relevant groups or forums and start connecting with their members.

Doing so benefits you in a couple of ways. For starters, finding an audience prior to creating your product or business enables you to validate your ideas and determine if there’s a strong demand for your offerings.

What’s more, building an audience early on paves the way for a stronger launch. If you already have an email list or existing social media followers, then you can unveil your products to an audience who already knows who you are, and are thus more likely to buy from you.

Andrew Alexander, the owner of FindaBusinessIdea.com, put this strategy to work in his own business and has seen tremendous results.

“In 2011, I was making posts on niche forums, Facebook groups, and other niche websites [...] Three years later when I released a program of mine… I already had people who were familiar with my name and what I wrote about, so the content I put out there (before I even had a product) allowed me to get my first $1,200 in sales within the first few weeks of launching my business.”

2. Be clear about your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to getting your first sales is standing out in the marketplace. If your company is brand new, it can be difficult to win over shoppers, particularly if you’re selling something that people can buy elsewhere.

An effective way to get around this is to identify your unique value proposition and then market to a specific niche that would benefit from your UVP. Doing so enables you to be more targeted with your messaging and positioning, which then allows you to cut through the noise, so you’re speaking directly to your niche.

Jonathan Prichard, the CEO and Founder of MattressInsider.com says that finding his business' UPV and niche helped keep his business from sinking.

“When I began my mattress company, I almost went bankrupt selling the same thing every other mattress company in America sold, which made it difficult to stick out. Luckily, I found the custom mattress size niche and was able to reposition the business before we went under,” he shared.

Jonathan’s key advice is to showcase your UPV in compelling ways.

“It’s a no-brainer that this is going to make you stand out from the crowd to draw people in for your initial sales. If you don’t stand out in the market you’re entering, you’re not going to get those sales that will keep you afloat, thriving and motivated.”

3. Tap into your existing network

Your current network could hold the key to unlocking more momentum in your business. If you haven’t done so yet, start reaching out to your friends, family, and existing supporters to see if they can help spread the word or send shoppers your way.

This step doesn’t have to be complicated. As Kathleen Cutler of Bespoke Commerce notes, you can get going with just a pen and paper.

“Write down your most connected friends and family who've bought from you in the past. Email them directly to ask who they might know who'd be interested in your eCommerce shop. Follow up with the referral leads directly with highly targeted and personalized communication.”

4. Create an engaging storefront (both online and in-person)

As a retail business, your storefront can either drive traffic and sales or send people packing. This is why it’s important to keep your window displays attractive and enticing. Here are some general guidelines to keep in mind:

- - Always have fresh merchandise and themes – See to it that your storefront keeps up with seasonal trends. Update your displays every week or two with new merchandise to give customers reasons to check out your store.
  - Keep elements at eye level – Decide on the products or elements that you want to draw attention to, and then position those key components at eye level. This ensures that people will immediately see the most important elements of your displays.
  - Avoid clutter – Overcrowded displays can cheapen the look and feel of your merchandise. Prevent that by keeping your display clean and uncluttered. The objective is to use your best products to attract customers, and encourage discovery while they’re inside your shop.

Here's a great example of a display following the above best practices. Created by Smack Bang, the window display incorporates clear links to the brand colors and aesthetic (which match the online store) and showcases Smack Bang's outstanding pet products by cleverly displaying them at various levels.

They've even added links to their store and socials with window decals which is a clever way to encourage social media engagement – something they reward with their customer loyalty program.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Smack Bang (@smackbangstore)

For eCommerce stores, your homepage is the online equivalent of a window display, and the same design principles apply. Be sure to showcase your seasonal products and new arrivals, and avoid cluttering up the page with unnecessary information.

Anna Beck, a Shopify Plus-powered jewelry retailer, has mastered a well-branded, visually appealing online user experience. Their online store is always tastefully-designed with a beautiful homepage banner featuring their high-quality product photography.

Anna Beck's online store with three ornate gold rings featured in a full-width product photo under the fold.

With their logo at the top of the page, a simple set of navigation options, and clear but unobtrusive banners, Anna Beck's online store feels inviting and enjoyable to explore – something that's essential for 'E-tail' success.

5. Collaborate with other companies

Consider tapping into the audiences of other retailers and brands. Identify non-competing companies that share your target customers and see if you can team up with them. Collaboration between brands and retailers is becoming an increasingly popular strategy, particularly when it comes to eCommerce companies teaming up with physical retailers.

Case in point: Australian women's ethical surf brand Salt Gypsy. Salt Gypsy started as an eCommerce store specializing in women's surfwear (swimwear that meets the needs of surfers). While Salt Gypsy has a bricks-and-mortar location, they've been able to grow their brand and make waves into new areas by branching out into technical surf equipment – namely, surfboards!

Now, numerous stores in Australia and locations around the world have teamed up with Salt Gypsy to sell their merchandise – and their boards (designed specifically for female surfers) are flying off the racks! Sometimes, the Salt Gypsy team gets a chance to pop into one of these locations like they did at Byron Bay surf store, Surfection.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Salt Mavens (@saltgypsy)

And the Surfection team is quick to cross-promote Salt Gypsy too! It's exactly this kind of co-marketing that creates life-long customers from just one sale!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Surfection Byron Bay (@surfectionbyron)

6. Team up with influencers

Research shows that 92% of consumers trust influencers more than traditional celebrity endorsements, which means that building relationships with the right individuals can pay off for your brand.

If it makes sense for your business, start identifying social influencers who can amplify your messages. Use tools such as Peg, Reachbird, and Scrunch to find the right people and create outreach campaigns.

You can engage influencers through a number of ways, including:

- - Free products
  - Content collaborations
  - Sponsored posts

For best results, throw in a special offer or discount that influencers can promote to their followers. That’s what Lokus Nutrition did when they ran their influencer campaign.

“We targeted Instagram users with audiences that matched our desired customer. We reached out to them directly and engaged an Influencer Marketing Agency to help,” explained Paul Miller, president at Lokus Nutrition. “We [then] offered a 10% discount code for our Instagram influencers to use in their posts.

7. Tap into relevant groups and websites

In addition to sending freebies or discounts to influencers, see if you can apply the same strategy when reaching out to websites and social media groups.

According to Paul, they also reached out to Facebook groups whose members matched their target market and offered a discount for all group members.

The Lokus Nutrition team also reached out to websites that were coming up with gift guides, and sent those sites free products to sample, review, and include in their guides.

Consider doing something similar in your business. Identify groups, forums, or websites that are frequented by your target audience, and then explore partnership opportunities with them.

8. Encourage referrals

Create momentum and drive additional sales by encouraging your current customer base to refer your brand to their network. To streamline this process, use a referral program that makes it easy to track referrals and rewards.

Carolina Lifestyle, a women's clothing retailer, implements this strategy quite well through their customer loyalty program. Carolina Lifestyle's referral program instantly rewards their customers with 100 loyalty points (the equivalent of $10 off in-store) for every friend who successfully makes a purchase.

The program not only attracts new shoppers, but it lets the brand reward their existing customers, which builds goodwill and brand loyalty in the process.

Marsello lets you automate the referral process with instant unique URLs for different social media platforms, email, and SMS, then reward customers for successfully referring their friends who complete a purchase.

9. Consider third-party online marketplaces

It’s worth considering if marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay are good sales channels for your brand. These websites reach hundreds of millions of users daily, so with the right marketplace strategy, you can drive additional sales.

Each website is different, but here are a few general pointers for how to succeed in online marketplaces:

- Craft compelling listings – Make your product listings as compelling as possible by using attractive images and rich media that showcase your items from various angles. You should also craft unique and compelling copy to effectively communicate the features and benefits of your items.
- Optimize your listings for search – You want your products to show up on relevant searches, so optimize your listings by incorporating targeted keywords in your titles and descriptions. Just remember not to overdo it! The key is to write for people, not bots.
- Build up a strong seller reputation – Marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay strongly favor sellers with high ratings and reviews. So, strive to build a stellar reputation by selling high-quality products at fair prices, and by providing excellent customer service.

10. Win back lost sales

Are shoppers leaving your website without completing their purchases? Don’t let those potential key sales slip away. Implement abandoned cart email campaigns to remind shoppers about the items left in their basket.

Take a leaf out of OnceWas’ playbook. Whenever someone adds an item to their cart but leaves without completing the sale, OnceWas' Marsello-powered marketing triggers an automated email flow to give the customer the opportunity to finish their purchase and even throws in the added incentive of a 10% discount.

Marsello-OnceWas-Abandoned-Cart-Email-Flow

Automated win-back flows are just one of the many ways you can implement automation into your marketing to help you get more and more sales and scale your business. Book a demo with one of our team to learn more about marketing automation and all the other features available with Marsello.

Final words

Gaining your first key sales may seem daunting, especially if you’re just starting out, but it’s completely doable! With a bit of resourcefulness and creativity, you can start winning over those initial customers and obtain the momentum you need to keep going.

Need a hand tracking sales KPIs, automating your marketing campaigns, and building engaging loyalty programs to keep those sales rolling in? Marsello is the all-in-one retail platform to help you start, grow, and scale with ease.

Marketing Tips Email Marketing Omnichannel Retail BigCommerce Customer Experience Loyalty Marketing Retention Marketing SEO Retail Marketing

SEO Series Part 3: Common Mistakes SEO Mistakes for Retailers to Know

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Solve common SEO mistakes before ever even making them with Part 3 of our SEO mini-series.

In this article, we’ll be talking about the common mistakes online retailers make when optimizing their websites for search. Many eCommerce retailers make errors during their quest to improve their SEO without realizing it. They end up sabotaging their own efforts in small ways; small errors can build up over time to become a major barrier to their top-of-page-one aspirations.

How to improve your retail store SEO ranking

Fortunately, fixing these isn’t as complex as you might think; a few quick adjustments will have you on the way to a higher ranking in no time.

Read the points below and see if you’re making these mistakes on your website:

Mistake 1: Not optimizing your product URLs

URLs might seem like a minor consideration, but they are extremely relevant to eCommerce SEO; this is because they play a significant role in how Google indexes each page of your site.

The URLs of your product pages should help search engines to work out how the different parts of your site relate to each other. This is especially important for your broader product categories (e.g. ‘dresses’). You want these categories to rank well because this is how your potential customers can access your catalog from the search engine results page (SERP).

Even the biggest eCommerce sites still make persistent errors in this area. See below this link from the clothing giant H&M:

Would you be able to tell what the item was by looking at this URL? No chance. It contains no keywords, so it’s only by clicking that you’d know the item is a V-neck dress. This is exactly the kind of link you want to avoid; it looks messy and chaotic, so no one is likely to click on it.

A messy URL also makes your site more difficult to navigate. If your customers can’t retrace their steps back to other parts of your site by reading your URLs, there’s a good chance that Google will struggle as well.

What to do instead: focus on website hierarchy

Your links should be offering a solid road map of your site. An optimized link would follow this structure:

https://example.com/category/sub-category/product

The pet care retailer Bobbie Dogs has a great URL structure – their URLs have a logical flow from the broader elements of the website (e.g., homepage, category pages, etc.) to the more specific parts (e.g., the product in question).

As such, both Google and shoppers alike will find it easier to understand what the page is all about. Check out their URL below and note the logical mapping of data within the URL; it’s easy to follow, understand and remember.

Mistake 2: Keyword stuffing your product titles and descriptions

In SEO, keywords make the world go round, so it’s a smart idea to incorporate them into your web copy. And since product descriptions make up a sizeable chunk of your on-site content, it makes sense for you to optimize them with the right search terms.

Product descriptions help Google determine the relevance of your pages in response to a search query, so it’s vital that they show up on the search engine’s radar.

But trying to write for Google instead of your customer through keyword stuffing will make your copy look stilted and awkward. Plus, the practice can really hurt your rankings because the clunky sentences make it look like you aren’t trying to be informative.

Here is a prime example from a listing on Etsy:

Keyword stuffing in an Etsy store product listing

This description is very wordy and dense, using the keyword ‘top’ multiple times. It also uses far more descriptors than necessary, making it more likely to confuse customers than inform them.

What to do instead: Sprinkle in keywords and don’t overdo it

Use your keywords moderately and only in places where it’s natural to do so. Try putting yourself in the position of your customer when you read your copy. Is it relevant, useful and compelling? If so, that’s what will make them want to stick around – and Google, in turn, will reward your website for it.

Check out this example from Triangl, a highly successful Australian swimsuit brand. In the following product page, you’ll notice that Triangle lightly sprinkles relevant keywords (e.g., ‘bikini’) throughout the content without going overboard.

Triangls product listings are concise, clear, and helps to sell their products

Mistake 3: Not having an internal linking strategy for your product pages

What often gets overlooked in discussions about algorithms is that site ranking really boils down to usability.

Translation: your site architecture needs to be on-point, and this is judged in part by how easy your site is to navigate. The purpose of an eCommerce site is to have customers buy products, so you need to gear your link structure to this end. There’s no point in only having navigational links to your site’s ‘about us’ and ‘contact’ pages. This won’t take your customers anywhere near the shopping cart! If your customer is looking for something specific, the links they come across in their searching need to be relevant and useful.

What to do instead: Improve your site’s usability with the right internal links

Internal linking really boosts your site usability. If you link between ‘similar’ product pages, whether they be companion products or products with similar features, this massively improves the user experience of your site. Keeping your customers browsing between products for longer periods sends positive ranking signals to Google, which helps you in the SEO department.

Take this example from women's fashion store, Osmose:

Osmose's product recommendations listed below their product pages

On this page, Osmose has included a plug-in that recommends similar products to customers as they browse This aids a customer’s shopping experience because they’re able to find relevant products much easier.

Mistake 4: Not optimizing your site for mobile

Having a site that isn’t mobile-optimized may not be killing your SEO rankings just yet, but in July 2019, Google will begin using a ‘mobile-first’ indexing system – this means that your site will get judged according to its mobile-friendliness. Google’s new system replaces a previous update in 2015, which used a mix of mobile and desktop signals to dictate search results.

So even though it currently makes no difference if the majority of your traffic still comes from ‘desktop-based’ searching, Google has basically confirmed that mobile is king. Moral of the story? If your site isn’t mobile-optimized, your ranking could be taking a hit in a few months’ time.

What to do instead: Implement responsive web design

Rather than having your mobile customers struggle with a shrunken version of your desktop site, you should install a responsive layout. Responsive Web Design (RWD) is the approach recommended by Google because it doesn’t create separate URLs for desktop and mobile, which can get confused as duplicate content (a real SEO headache). RWD instead adjusts to the layout needed for each user, whether it be mobile, tablet, or desktop.

Google’s free mobile-friendly test allows you to analyze each page of your website by entering the URL, providing feedback on any issues.

And here’s the good news: some of the best eCommerce platforms, including Shopify and BigCommerce, now provide responsive themes. So, it’s worth checking if you need to update to the latest version, or else switch to a custom theme.

Mistake 5: Publishing low-quality content

It’s easy to fall into the trap of ‘content for content’s sake’ to improve your ranking, particularly when it comes to your blog.

Many SEO experts agree that having a blog is an important part of SEO strategy because they’re a great tool for adding more indexed pages to your site. Google’s ‘crawlers’ treat pages as individual search results that show up if they match a query. The more indexed pages you have, the more queries that your brand will get associated with. So, it’s tempting to churn out tons of short, hastily-written content each week, simply to get your indexed page count higher.

But Google is well-aware that this strategy is used to ‘trick’ its algorithm, and the search engine penalizes websites with a high number of pages ‘thin’ content.

What to do instead: Choose quality over quantity

Switch to a strategy that prioritizes high-value content that engages, informs, and entertains your readers.

In terms of the content itself, your focus needs to be less about the semantics of SEO. Being perfectly optimized for keywords isn’t what makes a blog interesting! So, what does? Content that is well-researched and contains insights that people can use or learn from.

Check out the skincare specialist, Sigi Skin. Many of their posts are highly actionable and contain pointers that their customers can do on their own.

Mistake 6: Not optimizing your images for SEO

There are a number of key errors that eCommerce merchants make when it comes to images. They include:

Using larger-than-necessary images - It's a known fact that page speed is a ranking factor for Google. Using large images increase a page's load time, which in turn hurts your rankings.
Not having the right image titles and tags - Search engines crawl image file names and alt text to figure out what image is about, so by failing to optimize these components, you're missing out on giving Google valuable information about your images.
Using images to replace text - Some merchants use images that contain words, to avoid dealing with text formatting issues. While this may seem like a smart shortcut, it does nothing for SEO. Again, this practice prevents you from fully communicating with search engines, thereby hurting your rankings in the process.

What to do instead: Always consider SEO when using images

Optimize your image file names and alt-tags by using descriptive words. Let's say you're posting an image of a red party dress. Instead of naming it "IMG_0321111.jpg" use the file name "red-scoop-neck-dress.jpg".

The same thing goes for your alt text. According to BigCommerce, in addition to serving as "an alternative when websites can't render the image for some reason," alt text "describes the image to search engines so they can understand them."

The best thing you can do to optimize your alt text is to sprinkle in keywords that clearly communicate what the image is. Just make sure not to overdo it by keyword stuffing.

As for your image sizes, BigCommerce recommends keeping your images under 70KB. Also opt for JPEG instead of PNG or GIF, because it “allows higher quality with a smaller file size.”

Finally, avoid using images as a replacement for text. Remember, search engines determine your rankings primarily by crawling the text on your website, so make sure you have enough word-based content on there to give Google a clear idea of what each page is about.

Final words

SEO can feel like a real minefield for both new and experienced eCommerce merchants. Ultimately, though, the most important thing to keep in mind is that both you and Google have the same goal; to give your customer the best user experience possible. Focus on that and you’ll be on your way to better SEO rankings.

Have you seen the rest of the SEO Series? Check out Part One and Two in the links below.

Marketing Tips Customer Segmentation Loyalty Marketing Retention Marketing SEO

SEO Series Part 1: Getting Started With Search Engine Optimization

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From ads and influencers to podcasts and Google AdWords, we've put together several effective SEO tactics to help you get the word out about your store.

Marsello's SEO series part 1

As far as eCommerce marketing is concerned, merchants have a variety of choices. From Instagram ads and influencer marketing to podcasts and Google AdWords, there’s no shortage of tactics you can try if you’re looking to get the word out about your store.

Despite the rise of newer and sexier marketing strategies, search engine optimization – SEO for short – continues to be one of the most effective ways to get your site out there. As Search Engine Land points out, having great visibility in search engines drives awareness and traffic to your site, benefits your brand, and builds credibility and trust.

When done right, SEO can also lead to lower customer acquisition costs over the long term. Once you’ve gotten your site to rank for profitable keywords, you’ll find that people will find your store organically without you having to actively pay for them to do so (unlike with ads).

SEO is clearly an important component of eCommerce marketing. That’s why we’re excited to unveil a new article series here on the Marsello blog. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be publishing SEO-centric posts to help take your search engine presence to the next level.

To kick things off, we’re covering the basic steps you need to take to optimize your eCommerce site for search.

Let’s dive in.

1. Always start with keyword research

Keyword research is one of the cornerstones of SEO. You need to identify what terms your customers are typing into search engines like Google and what terms connect with your store, then, optimize your site accordingly by adding these keywords into your core content such as the ‘about’ sections and product descriptions.

There are a number of tools that can help you do this. One that easily comes to mind is Google Keyword Planner, a free solution that lets you search for relevant keywords.

Here’s how it works: start by entering keywords relevant to your product. So, if you’re selling tea and tea supplies, you can type in terms like ‘tea,’ ‘teaware,’ ‘tea accessories,’ etc.

From there, Google will show you each keyword’s estimated search volume and level of competition. Google will also suggest other search terms related to the keywords you entered.

Google Ad Words Keyword by Relevance tool

Note that while Google’s Keyword Planner is a solid tool, you may want to check out premium SEO software such as SEMRush and Ahrefs. These solutions can offer more granular data around search volume and provide insights into the keywords you should be targeting.

Now, the best keyword strategy will vary from one site to the next, but generally speaking, you’ll need to factor in the following things when deciding which keywords to target:

Search volume – You want to have a decent number of people searching for the keywords you choose to make the effort of finding and inserting them worth it. If a certain keyword only gets 0-10 searches a month, then it’s best to move on to other keywords with high search rates and close connection to your products/store.

Competition – The more websites competing for a keyword, the harder it is to rank, so targeting low competition search terms will maximize your chances of landing at the first page of Google.

This is where it gets challenging because the keywords with the highest search volume are typically the most competitive. You will need to do a lot of digging to uncover low competition terms with a decent search volume. Start writing a list of the keywords you’ve found and compare their search rates to their competition. Soon you’ll start finding words that fit the bill.

Relevance – This may sound obvious, but determining the relevance of some search terms can be tricky, particularly if a keyword is ambiguous.

For example, if you sell competition-level dart boards, you may think that ‘target’ is a great keyword. Unfortunately, Google thinks ‘target’ searchers want are looking for Target the department store.

You also want to go for keywords that are relevant to people’s intent to buy. Let’s say you’re selling paintings or posters. Keywords like ‘free posters’ or ‘DIY wall art’ are best avoided because people searching these terms aren’t likely to spend money on ready-made art.

Bottom line? When doing keyword research, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Get into the mindset of someone who is ready to buy your products and identify the search terms that they’re entering into Google.

2. Go beyond optimizing your content

Once you find those relevant keywords, find ways to work them into your website.

The most obvious way to do this is to spread them throughout your copy – i.e., on your homepage, about page, product descriptions, etc.

But you shouldn’t stop there.

Keywords should show up in a lot of other places, as well, including:

Your meta titles – The meta title is an HTML code found at the header of a web page. Its purpose is to tell search engines what a page is all about. According to Moz, “title tags are the second most important on-page factor for SEO, after content.”

What about your meta descriptions? Well, contrary to what some may think, meta descriptions don’t effect rankings directly. Still, it’s worth including your keywords in meta tags because Google will display them in bold on the search results page. This might lead to more clicks, which would help your rankings.

Your URL – Ideally, you want the right keywords in your domain name. For example, Red Dress Boutique (RedDressBoutique.com), a fashion boutique for women, has keywords like ‘dress’ and ‘boutique’ in the domain name.

That said, It’s not the end of the world if your domain name doesn’t contain top search terms. But at the very least, relevant keywords should be in your URLs.

For instance, on its category page for men’s running shoes, Adidas has that exact key in its URL.

It’s also a good idea to focus on accessibility. Instead of using random characters in your URLs, customize them with keywords and make it clear what the page shows.

3. Work on your product pages

Product pages aren’t usually content heavy, but there are still a number of things you could do to set them up for SEO success.

In addition to optimizing your URLs and title tags, you also want to incorporate the right keywords in your product titles, descriptions, and image tags.

Internal links can also help. Take a look at how búl does their product pages for inspiration.

This page isn’t very copy-heavy, however it includes all the information that a customer could be looking for, with a hint of keyword inclusion (for example, 100% cotton; boxy mini dress, garment). With an internal link to a size chart, búl also makes sure to link their customers to another section of their site – a powerful SEO too. They follow each product listing with an 'other products you may like' section that encourages customers to keep exploring búl's website.

4. Prioritize site structure

Google, and your customers, appreciate it when your site is easy to navigate and use, so keep your site structure simple (so long as it remains scalable).

To accomplish this, make sure all your pages are just two or three clicks away from your homepage. HausLondon, an eCommerce site that sells home furniture and lighting, is a great example of this. Despite having thousands of pages, the vast majority are fewer than three clicks from their homepage.

Haus's website featuring a simple and effective site structure

5. Answer the need for speed

Navigability helps but if your site is slow, you risk losing customers who aren’t willing to wait around.

In general, about 40% of users will leave a site if it doesn’t load within just three seconds. That means you could lose nearly half of your potential customers simply because your site takes too long to finally appear when they click on it.

Speed isn’t just about your customers, though. All the way back in 2010, Google’s Maile Ohye, reported that, “Site performance is now a factor in Google’s rankings.” She later went on to say that “Two seconds is the threshold for eCommerce website accessibility. At Google, we aim for under a half second.”

Turning SEO into an ongoing priority

Whether you already have an eCommerce store or its launch is just around the corner, it’s important to understand that optimizing your site for SEO isn’t just a one-time thing.

Instead, analyzing your site for opportunities to improve its rankings should be an ongoing effort to ensure that you're continuously getting in front of the right audiences.

Have you seen the rest of the SEO Series? Check out Part Two and Three in the links below.

Marketing Tips

Getting started with small business marketing on a budget: 8 ways

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As a small business, retail marketing can be one of the biggest challenges almost every small business owner faces. Discover these 8 tips & get inspired.

Marsello_blog_top_banner_retailer_marketing_how_to

Getting (and staying) in front of customers is one of the biggest challenges almost every small business owner faces. Not only are attention spans shorter than ever, but advertising costs are increasing rapidly, so it can be difficult to reach your target audiences if you’re on a budget.

If your small business needs more exposure, but you’re worried that your bottom line can’t handle the costs to promote your store, fret not. Here are 8 relatively low-cost advertising and marketing ideas you can try:

1. Get your local listings in order

Put your business on the map – literally. If you have a physical store and it’s not showing up on Google Maps, you’re missing out on tons of local traffic opportunities. Research has shown that 50% of consumers who conduct a local search on their phone visit a store within a day, while 34% of those who searched using their tablet or computer did the same.

Fortunately, getting your Google listing in order is free and easy. You can check out Google’s detailed instructions here, but here’s a quick rundown of the steps you need to take to set up your listing:

Go to the Google My Business website and sign in or create an account.
Enter your business information (i.e., name, street address, category, etc.).
Enter your phone number or website.
Verify that you're authorized to the manage the listing.

Also, note that Google isn’t the only directory in which you can list your business. To gain even more exposure, consider getting listed on:

2. Sponsor an event attended by your customers

Event sponsorship doesn’t have to be expensive, particularly if you’re doing it at a local level. Call your Chamber of Commerce to explore events or functions in your area and inquire about any sponsorship opportunities.

You can also use a website like Eventbrite or Meetup.com to find relevant events in your vicinity.. As Meetup organizer Shannon Liska points on Quora, each Meetup.com page has areas for sponsor ads, and organizers can charge companies $10 or $20 for running those ads.

Also, note that sponsoring an event doesn’t always have to involve cash. If you have space in your business, why not volunteer your location as a venue? If you’re selling workout gear, you could potentially host a yoga meetup in your store. You may need to open your shop a little earlier or temporarily close off a section for the class, but you’ll get the benefit of putting your products in front of relevant audiences.

3. Partner with other small businesses

You don’t have to market your business by yourself. There are likely plenty of other retailers who are on the same boat and are looking to get their business out there. So, why not come together and launch joint marketing initiatives?

Approach small businesses in your neighborhood or shopping center to see if they’d be open to any cross-promotional opportunities. Another option is to check for existing ‘Shop Small’ or ‘Shop Local’ movements going on in your community.

4. Work with influencers

Have you explored influencer marketing yet? If not, it may be time to do so, considering that about 92% of consumers trust influencers more than traditional celebrities and ads.

Working with influencers can prove to be a very effective marketing effort, and it doesn’t have to be expensive. The key is to work with individuals whose followers range from 2,000 to 50,000. Not only do these influencers charge less, but research has shown they have higher engagement rates.

According to IZEA, "People with 1,000 to 9,999 followers often have engagement rates around 7.4 percent," but by the time they've amassed over 100,000 fans, engagement rates drop to just 2.4%.

So, start exploring the influencer landscape in your industry. Identify micro-influencers in your niche and connect with them. Follow their accounts, engage with their content, and send them samples of your product. These actions can put your brand on their radar and help cultivate a relationship.

5. Encourage customer referrals

In addition to influencer marketing, you could also encourage your customers to recommend your business to their friends. Set up a referral program that incentivizes them to share your brand with others.

Buda Juice, a retailer that sells cold-pressed juices, does an amazing job at this. They've cleverly linked their loyalty program with a referral system that gives members 50 points for every friend that makes a purchase. Doing so not only encourages customers to join their loyalty program, but it drives referrals for Buda Juice in the process.

Buda Widget homescreen

6. Make the most out of your store’s curbside

Putting up a ‘SALE’ sign on your store window is great and all, but if you want truly stop people in their tracks, consider using your curbside as well. Many local shops are now using sandwich boards outside their store to promote their products.

In some cases, you can even use these boards to tell a joke or display a witty remark. Here’s an example of a clothing store’s Welcome sign in Brea, CA, which says “I wish my health insurance covered retail therapy.”

Chalk sign in front of retail store that says "I wish my health insurance covered retail therapy"

7. Go beyond advertising your products

If your current ads or promotional content aren’t working, you may want to take a second look at your call to action within you messages, to see if it’s compelling enough. Chances are if all you’re doing is advertising your products, then shoppers aren’t resonating enough with your brand.

Rather than just promoting your merchandise, start telling genuine stories or share content that promotes your values. Consumers like supporting businesses that they can relate to and one of the ways to get your brand to resonate is to share deeper stories or content.

A good first step is to talk about your values and the reasons why you started your company. Mix up your product advertising with messages about your company’s mission. You may find that doing so allows you to connect with shoppers at a deeper level, which, in turn, could drive sales.

Buda Juice, once again, does an excellent job here. In addition to promoting their pressed juices, Buda Juice devotes ample space on their website to talk about their beliefs, passions, and values. They also mention their sustainability efforts and link to the causes and organizations they support.

BudaJuice's Beliefs and Passions page from their website.

8. Run a giveaway

When implemented correctly, giveaways be a low-cost way to get the word out about your brand and drive a specific call to action.

The key to running a successful contest lies on two things: your prize and the action that participants have to take.

Before running your giveaway, you first have to iron out your objectives. What do you want your contest to achieve? Are you looking to get more email signups? More Facebook likes? Do you want users to join your loyalty program? Identify your main goal, and then design your contest to drive that objective.

So, if your goal is to increase your social media fans, then the main call to action of your giveaway would be to follow you on social.

Your prize is also critical. Avoid generic prizes like an iPad or cash. These things may drive contest entry volume, but you’ll end up attracting people who are only in it for the prize. Instead, come up with something that your target customers would truly love. Product giveaways, in-store experiences, or “meet and greet the founder” are good options here. Such prizes are sure to only attract those who have a genuine interest in your business. You may not get hundreds of thousands of entries, but you’re sure to grab the attention of the people that count.

Final words

You don’t need to have deep pockets to run successful advertising or marketing campaigns. With some creativity, you can use the resources you already have or join forces with others and get tremendous results.

Let us know in the comments your favorite tips and tricks to get a good grounding for small business marketing. What’s worked for you or your contacts? What do you wish you knew more about?

And if you’re only just starting out, good luck. Let us know how you get on!

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