A Strategic Plan for Business Implementation: 3 Steps to Getting Business Growth Done
Too many ideas. Every entrepreneur or business has too many ideas. If there is not a good way to focus and prioritize these ideas then often times none of them get done (at least not well).
Ryan Deiss at Digital Marketer lays out a simple framework for prioritizing your business goals, the importance of aligning your team to a single mission, and how to incorporate product management methodologies into your workflow. Hooray for business sprint planning!
How We Helped Skreened Achieve a 360% ROAS in One Month on Their Google Shopping Campaign
InFlow shares a pretty cool hack they used for a t-shirt retailer, Skreened, to capitalize on trending searches. Even if your company doesn’t sell pop-culture gear this is a great tactic. By breaking your PLA campaigns into multiple keyword buckets, and putting your highest bids toward product-focused keywords you should be able to boost your overall ROAS.
Ecommerce Trends: 147 Stats Revealing How Modern Customers Shop in 2017
BigCommerce breaks down the numbers on eCommerce shoppers. Some interesting ones…
- 67% of Millennials and 56% of Gen Xers prefer to shop online rather than in-store.
- Millennials and Gen Xers spend nearly 50% more time shopping online each week (six hours) than their older counterparts (four hours).
- Parents spend more of their budget online in comparison to non-parents (40% vs. 34%) and spend 75% more time online shopping each week.
- 43% of online shoppers have made a purchase while in bed.
12-Month Ecommerce Marketing Plan (With Real World Case Studies)
With the new year just days away, it’s a great time to get organized. Sumo put together a series of monthly actions you can take to keep your business moving ahead.
Tripwire Marketing: From Bankruptcy to Over 1 Million Dollars in Profits in One Year
Tripwires are a tactic that have gained a lot of momentum in the marketing world lately. The idea behind them is that you can offer small, low-priced products or incentives to move the customer further into the funnel toward a larger purchase. However, the customer has to give you something in exchange for that offer…could be a few dollars or just an email address.
This is counter to the way many large retailers operate. Most sellers offer a blanket 20-30% discount to all visitors to their site. This can give away huge chunks of their margin and trigger a “discount spiral” when just a fraction of those customers needed that push to purchase.
This article (written by savvy marketer, Drew Sanocki of Nerd Marketing) goes deep on some of the tactics he deployed at $100MM Boston retailer, Karmaloop. As their acting CMO, he was able to resurrect them from unprofitability by implementing a series of tripwires and focusing on the “right” customers.
Must read for any retailer struggling with discounting.
Sumo Growth Study: Supreme Streetwear’s Insane Success
The Sumo team is at it again with another great brand teardown. This time, its the legendary streetwear brand, SUPREME.
The surprising thing here is that they do almost nothing the conventional way. No traditional digital marketing or website UX practices. Instead, they rely on exclusivity, celebrity endorsement, and product scarcity to drive a frenzy of fans toward their products.
While you may not be selling anything as “hot” as SUPREME, there are a bunch of ideas embedded here. I’m definitely going to tuck their Reddit strategy away for later.
The 19 Most Innovative Ecommerce Brands of 2017
The culmination of BigCommerce’s annual innovative brands competition judged by a “who’s who” of eCom experts. It is a reminder that brands with small teams and limited resources can do amazing things. Each brand highlights one or two specific “innovations” and you can drill into a case study format to get the details.
Some of my favorites were…
#2 Bob Johnson’s Computer Stuff (yes, thats the real name) who re-architected their pdp’s and checkout flow based on customer research and chat data.
#4 Beer Cartel who really figured out the whole content vs. commerce thing, and well…beer.
Exactly How Andie Swim Went from Idea to Over 1,000 Orders in 9 Short Months
Warning…you are going to have to overlook some of the blatant BigCommerce marketing sprinkled in.
However, there are some good messages. Mainly, that you should be constantly looking for inefficiencies and opportunities in your business and finding ways to solve them. Retailers of all sizes deal with an endless stream of new challenges. Breaking through those roadblocks is what separates the successful companies from the failures.
From Zero to $13 Million in 12 months – Koala.com’s Growth Strategy
After reading this, I’m not shocked that Koala.com has been able to grow so quickly. They’re doing a lot of things right including creating engaging content and videos, slick retargeting funnels, trust-building and testimonials, and creating a sense of urgency around pricing and promotions. Get a notepad ready, lots of great ideas here.