Planting seeds for seasonal marketing

How does your marketing grow? The core should always be made up of a plan for the long-term view with evergreen and perennial content. Annuals should only be added as needed to meet current trends.

That sales and marketing should be aligned is indisputable. But that the sales department should dictate marketing is definitely disputable. 

My experience an SaaS startup for eCommerce businesses crystalized that recognition for me.  Initially, I worked on content planned with the CEO and produced some solid, evergreen pieces. However, when  a VP of marketing whose background was in sales and not in marketing came in, she pushed everything into a short term perspective.

This was manifested in constantly pushing content around coupons and discount codes to drive customers to purchase. Pushing promotions is the ultimate short-term marketing effort designed for immediate sales alone.

While discounts are definitely a big part of retail sales, they should not be the sole strategy used by sellers who want to cultivate long term relationships with customers. The goal of marketing is not just to convert customers based on sales for the week or occasion but to win loyal customers with a high customer lifetime value (CLV) who have your brand top-of-mind when they're ready to purchase even without a coupon as part of the deal. 

Perennial vs. annual planting 

Building a relationship with customers on the basis of marketing is like planting a garden. You can go for the quick wins of instant color and results for the season by planting annuals. That's the marketing done from the perspective of people who come from sales who always favor immediate results. 

But for real value, you plan perennials, which will deliver blooms of color year after year. That's what a true marketing perspective takes into account.

 
A perennial perspective doesn't mean ignoring seasonal opportunities. On the contrary, it sees the value of planning for repeated returns in all seasons with marketing messages and content that are relevant for that time of year and that occasion that will recur. 

Yearly holiday vs. pandemic holiday

Notice that I referred to an occasion that will recur as forming the core of your marketing. That doesn't mean that you ignore current trends altogether but that you recognize that they are transient. That means they they won't deliver the same bang for your marketing bucks as the perennial marketing you plan.

 Nothing illustrates that better than the mistake many businesses made in going all-in on pandemic messaging while ignoring their need for evergreen content. 

This is particularly striking in the content of the content marketing that the startup I worked for decided to feature for Halloween. There was no pre-existing content for that holiday's importance to the world of eCommerce on the site, so I created an evergreen holiday piece on different  possible approaches to fall and Halloween marking. 

Thinking only of the short-term, though, the VP demanded a different piece that explicitly centered around the pandemic's impact on Halloween. That's what was put on the site, and that bit of annual color is of  no interest to anyone today. 

For a business that already had created core content, including standard seasonal and holiday content, it would have been a strategic move to some pieces that centered around the impact of the pandemic on the industry and its customers in 2020-2021. In fact, it would have been smart to use some of that to link to their more traditional content to point out the need to adapt to the times with new strategies and approaches.

However, for businesses that were just building out their content, devoting all resources to pandemic-centered content with only masked people shown on their site was a mistake. If they failed to move that content off the main pages of their sites in the past year or two they were showing their own failure to adapt to the changing needs of the time. 
 

From multi to omnichannel marketing

Photo by Pickawood on Unsplash

Not all marketing strategies deliver the same rates of returns. Omnichannel marketing outperforms single channel at the rate of 2.5x.

To get to that, it’s not enough to build an easy-to-navigate eCommerce site supported by marketing campaigns that reach out to them on various channels. All those components have to be integrated to work together through an omnichannel strategy.

The ROI of Omnichannel Marketing 

The returns of omnichannel marketing over single channel are quite impressive, according to the data offered on Clickz:

• Engagement rate: 18.96% on omnichannel vs 5.4% on single-channel

• Purchase frequency: 250% higher on omnichannel vs single-channel

• Average order value: 13% more per order on omnichannel vs single-channel

• Customer retention rates: 90% higher for omnichannel vs single-channel

One channel doesn't cut it

Most eCommerce businesses today do not rely on only one digital marketing channel. When competing for customer attention, you need to reach out to them in different ways in the hope that what they didn’t click on an email may still get a click on SMS or an ad served on social media.

 In a survey by HBR (Harvard Business Review), 73% of respondents said they use multiple channels during their shopping journey. That includes email, SMS, MMS, social media, as well as searches on the site.

The challenge for retailers is maintaining coherent and consistent communication that makes the most of the different ways of connecting.  A Facebook or Instagram ad may be what first grabs the customer’s attention, though they may need some follow up to convert to the level of putting together a shopping cart with an email or MMS  message that offers personalized recommendations.

So why do we call this omni and not just multichannel?

Multichannel marketing is simply messaging that a brand uses across various channels to try to increase its reach. In contrast, omnichannel marketing is not just about sending the messaging out across the different channels but linking up the data on feedback on each one back to the customer to personalize the experience through responsive adaption. 

Customer interests are not static but constantly changing as they respond to contextual triggers. Brands that utilize omnichannel use big data analytics to update customer data and adapt  each message that goes out accordingly. An omnichannel approach adapts to such shift to make marketing messages as relevant as possible.

Timely texts

Emails remain an important marketing tool for all businesses, especially eCommerce. However, widespread smartphone use makes texts a very effective way to get attention, as they work off a device many people keep at hand for most of their waking hours. 

Text messages the perfect medium for sending time-sensitive information. That includes:

• Announcement of new product drops, especially if one of the benefits you offer SMS subscribers is early access to what’s new.

• Promotions for  same-day  flash sales, particularly if they are set for certain times like noon to three. 

• Notification that something they wanted to order is now back in stock or is now on sale.

• An urgent notice that their selections in a cart they abandoned are in danger of selling out.

Channeling Success with Targeted Communication

Targeted messaging is much more effective than generic messaging. The basis of that communication is identifying customer segments, and it can get even more relevant with personalization with product offerings and promotions selected specifically for that customer’s interests.

No matter how responsive your customers are to emails or texts, it’s important to remember that a single channel does not fit all customers under all circumstances. You need to adapt to the needs and context of the moment to deliver the right message through the right medium.. 

For example, you could have a customer who has subscribed to both emails and texts. Even though sending an SMS is fast and easy, it's not an appropriate medium for longer messages. You also can use both channels for reminders say of an upcoming promotion or a price drop on something they have looked at but didn't end up adding to cart or that they added it to the cart but failed to complete the transaction.  

On that basis, you can get the right offer to the right person at the right time, and through the right channel.

Related:

Think Marathon Rather Than Sprint When Planning Content Marketing

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Make Your Content as Accessible as Possible

What Edison Can Teach Us About SEO

7 Ways to Grab Customer Attention in Subject Lines

CRO is Like Basketball

Ryan George shows best and worst marketing practices

 If you If you are not familiar with Ryan George, then check out his YouTube Channels. Screen Rants, which offers commentary on films in the guise of pitch meetings in which spoilers abound, has nearly 8.5 million subscribers (and millions of views on his take on Spider-Man: No Way Home in which he reveals, among other things, how long it takes to watch five movies to get all the connections in this one).

The  Ryan George channel has 1.38 million subscribers. One of the recent videos on that channel contains fundamental points about the customer's experience. In What Shoppiong on Amazon Feels Like, he nails both best practices and worst practices for effective marketing. 

Best practice: conveying the sponsor message 

The brand paying George for the video is mentioned at the beginning but only very briefly. That means that even if you don't want to sit through an  extended description of the features and benefits SayMine.com boasts of, you will at least have heard of it. 

That's a win-win solution. By placing the more extended description at the end, he's removing the irritation people have from being forced to watch an ad before they get what they want, something that is not likely to make people develop more positive feelings for the brand. 

I touch on the downside of withholding content from your audience in Make your content as accessible as possible.

The brand still gets its spotlight with a brief mention in the beginning and in Ryan George's description of the video. Plus when he delivers the spiel about it, he does so in a kind of tongue-in-cheek manner consistent with the Ryan George brand. He delivers it in the guise of the "adstronaut."

Worst practices: irrelevance, keyword-stuffing descriptions, and information overload

Within the video, the role of Amazon shows an obliviousness to what the shopper wants and needs that highlight the worst practices of pushing products and services on the shopper that are irrelevant to his current needs. He's shopping for a chair and is not interested in video recommendations.

When he finally does get to see chairs, all of them are identical despite showing different brand names with variations on descriptions. Those of us who have shopped on Amazon know this is accurate but just to prove it, I'll put a screenshot from Amazon below:

Compare that with one of the ones in the video:

Content writers, take note! These product descriptions exemplify an SEO strategy that forgets about how the text sounds to  the human reader .

While all that may not overwhelm the shopper, attempting to make sense of the thousands of reviews may do so. That is also not an exaggeration. One of the chairs I checked on the site had over 23.5K ratings. 

Talk about information overload! A few hundred would be more credible and manageable than the huge number of reviews that certain products show on eCommerce sites.

Audiences loved this video because they could so relate as customers. Marketers and online sellers should pay attention because the humor here works because it is true. Turning off shoppers and losing potential customers due to bad practices is no laughing matter. 

Related:

Amazon uses snail mail for direct mail and Seeing stars

How this year's Black Friday is different

We made it November, and now holiday marketing is in full swing already. In fact, many marketers didn’t even wait until after Halloween to get the season started. 

The attempt to push holiday marketing early happens every year, and so Black Friday has evolved and stretched to pretty much all of November over the past several years. Yet there were always some holdouts who would for the super deals on doorbuster specials available in stores only on the day itself. 

Recollecting Past Black Fridays

That phenomenon is what prompted my father-in-law to get up before dawn to  bring home two play kitchens for his grandchildren. I don’t recall what price he paid, only that he believed the savings to be worth the trouble. 

It goes beyond saving $20. He enjoyed the thrill of the frenzied excitement surrounding Black Friday sale events.

As the National Retail Foundation (NRF) reported last year, “Thanksgiving weekend draws nearly 190 million shoppers, spending up 16 percent.”  That year online shopping outstripped in store shopping: 142.2 million vs. 124 million. 

There were always some traditionalists who like to see what they buy in real life and who expect better deals in stores. That’s particularly true of those of older generations who are loath to order online ever. 

New for 2020

This year, though, likely the figures will shift to more online shopping and more shoppers making completing their purchases before the big weekend still referred to as Black Friday.  The challenge for retailers will be not to lose out on the sales that shoppers would come into stores for at a time when people are still skittish about crowds.

However, adapting to the reality of life under a pandemic when many stores were closed for months forced even a lot of the old-school shoppers to embrace the ease, convenience, and safety of online shopping.

That shift is going to reshape Black Friday 2020. Even if stores wanted to revert to the old model, the concerns about rising cases this season and the general advice not to pack a lot of people together means there is no concentrated shopping frenzy at most retailers.

Read more in This is Not Your Father’s Black Friday

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A digital strategy for growth in the biotech sector

QIAGEN is a German life sciences and diagnostics firm that has customers in more than 100 countries. Given the trend toward e-commerce in the biotech sector, which has emerged in the past few years, it became clear to the company's management that future growth called for a digital strategy that included online self-service.

To achieve that goal, the company partnered with TCS and used SAP Hybris solutions to design, engineer and launch a new global Web shop. The shop plays a central role in allowing QIAGEN to effectively serve its customers, according to  Florian Wegener, head of eCommerce.

- See more at: http://www.baselinemag.com/networking/web-shop-enhances-customer-experience.html#sthash.kaDE8mSn.dpuf