It is that time of the year again, budget time. Often, in a bid to save more, marketers end up snipping a little here and a little there, ending up with the ‘not-so-great’ e-commerce marketing ideas that eventually end up being a total waste of time, effort and money.
Prioritizing projects is not as difficult as it may seem, especially if you are armed with these 5 budget ‘must-haves’.
1. Newer Marketplaces
Amazon and eBay sure have larger volumes and bring in higher sales; however, newer marketplaces like Play.com, Tesco, etc. can open your horizons to newer audiences. In addition, as they are in direct competition with the legacy sites, they tend to provide a better mix of promotional and marketing opportunities to attract the buyers.
For RepricerExpress Customers, these marketplaces are just a site compatible, data formatting effort away. All you need to do is to test your best selling products, which would appeal to the audience of the respective marketplace. Many of these sites have daily deal programs to help move, deep quantity of any product you wish to unload, faster, effectively and even more quickly.
2. Visual Commerce—Google Shopping
You should have some plans for your business to include Google shopping in it. But are you really utilizing its potential to the fullest? Studies by Forrester have revealed that retailers spend 6% on Google Product Listing Ads (PLA’s), and the number of PLA’s listed has increased by 71% in 2013 from 2012. This is due to the boom in visual commerce. Sites like Pinterest have a huge user-base and are growing in popularity. Similarly, Google shopping uses the concept of visual commerce as well attracting visually motivates shoppers.
3. Invest in a Mobile Strategy
The smartphone revolution has begun! The numbers are there to prove it. Increasingly smartphone users are interacting with retail sites from their mobile phones and lesser from their desktops. Marketers now have to pay more attention to their mobile paid search bidding and committing to a mobile strategy.
With Google’s recent – Enhanced Campaigns, the mobile bid is now a derivative of the tablet/PC bid. This change requires careful consideration on the marketer’s part, to neither bid same on all devices, nor on aggregate device performance. Set up keyword performance for all devices. This will help you monitor the performance and measure the ROI you are getting with each device, making it easier to make your 2014 budget plans.
4. Make the Most of Mobile Traffic
All your ‘Enhanced Campaign’ efforts will result in enhanced traffic, but you need to optimize this traffic. Data reveals that about 97% of mobile shoppers abandon the mobile shopping cart, and that it takes about 21 steps to complete a sale on mobile devices. How can you enhance the experience for users?
Earlier, optimization and creation of separate websites for different devices was common. However, this method is expensive and requires constant hands-on management. You can opt for a responsive design for the website, where in the website detects the device of the visitor and accordingly the design and resolution of the website downloads. This makes your website work seamlessly across different platforms; and you only pay once.
E-commerce sites work on visual enhancement. The images on your webpage need to be properly sized. Rich Media solution can automatically resize images for different devices enhancing your responsive website.
5. Cross Border Trade in E-commerce
Going international is always a dream for marketers. While it is not as easy, there are programs that can help you test the international waters in terms of demand for your product.
You can use marketplace fulfilment programs like Fulfilment by Amazon. They make the products listed available to international markets, so that marketers can test the demand, and then based on that sell directly on marketplaces like Amazon.de
Wrap it all into one effort….
Systematically planning your budget requires a step-by-step approach. Evaluating the possibilities that include these five areas in your marketing budget plans could open up, in terms of enhancing your marketing strategy while keeping your budget in consideration are great. They will more than make up for the cost.