Kay Auster | Performance Marketing

The main problem in eCommerce
projects is the complexity - especially as soon as you try to scale.

In my opinion when you try to make an online business successful the approach always needs to be considered holistic. Everything is connected at any time.

What does holistic mean?

Consider an E-Commerce project more like an organism. So an holistic approach contains the individual direct shop related things like tech, legal & finance, all digital marketing activities and all its content related things because they belong together and the interaction of all those things is "The shop".

Your Ad-spend influences the amount of your daily visitors, your margins influence your ROAS, the average cart is pending on your products, prices and upsell strategy. Your customer service influences the thoughts and behavior of your customers. Your payment options influence the trust. Your checkout process influences your conversion rate. And your Content influences your overall Performance - theoretically as well as practically - big time. All your Ad-texts are simply Content, your Social Media posts are Content as well and your product descriptions and category texts are definitely Content. Every reply from your Customer Service and all E-Mails you send out are Content too.

There you do not really need to care too much about how smooth your Checkout process works or how you can increase your average cart value, how to increase your conversion rate for certain categories or strategies how to increase the ROAS in your Ad-campaign or how to really lower your abandoned cart rate etc - these problems mainly occur when you run a hard selling webshop focusing way more on Ad-approaches and less on organic - making E-Commerce in big parts a total different ball game. The reason for that is quite simple: usually the amount of money being spend for Ads by an E-Commerce project is by far the highest compared to any other activity like SEO, Social Media posts or E-Mail Marketing. Unfortunately that's also the main reason why the most "One for all"-approaches from some marketers usually are simply not working for certain shops. After all relevant basic digital marketing actions are set up you will generate data sets. That's usually when the optimization process begins pretty quick. Good evaluation contains also the right interpretation of the available data from all kind of reports. From Ad-reports to SEO-reports & from the relevant shop KPIs. Also very important shop specific things need to be improved continuously by and by. After certain optimizations you usually reach the point where you want to scale everything. That is usually the point when you need a bit more than standardized strategies & tactics of Digital Marketing.

What does holistic mean?

I consider an eCommerce project more like an organism. Everything is connected. So an holistic approach contains the individual direct shop related things like tech, legal & finance, all digital marketing activities and all its content related things because they belong together.

Your Ad-spend influences the amount of your daily visitors
the average cart is pending on products, prices and upsell strategy
Your payment options influence the trust
Your checkout process influences your conversion rate
etc etc

And your Content influences your overall Performance as well - theoretically and practically - big time.

all your Ad-texts...Social Media posts...product descriptions and category texts...every reply from your Customer Service...all E-Mails you send out...etc etc...are simply nothing but Content...

Means optimizing and scaling any eCommerce project can only be done with a holistic mindset.

eCommerce projects are a direct selling environment - who cares about organic?

There are general Digital Marketing actions and there are things, actions, strategies, tactics or KPIs way more relevant for webshops. Digital Marketing standards in general are always needed for any website or webshop. It needs SEO and proper rankings, a funnel strategy, brand awareness, landing pages, good lead management etc you name it. But on a "normal" business website - you have to care way more about organic approaches. A webshop supposed to be direct selling environment. There you need to care much more about how smooth your Checkout process works or how you can increase your average cart value, how to increase your conversion rate for certain categories or strategies how to increase the ROAS in your Ad-campaign or how to really lower your abandoned cart rate etc - these problems mainly occur when you run a hard selling webshop focusing way more on Ad-approaches and less on organic - making eCommerce in big parts a total different ball game. Almost everything is very individual, directly connected and influencing other things immediately plus usually the amount of money being spend for Ads in an eCommerce project is by far the highest compared to any other activities, tactics & actions. Unfortunately that's also on of the main reasons why the most "One approach for all" from certain marketers usually are simply not working for certain shops.

Basic Digital Marketing

No matter if you´re routing for a more organic- or Ad-based approach - these things - let´s call them the Digital Marketing Basics - will sooner or later come up and should be taken care of in certain ways. Each topic has relevance and should be involved in any kind of strategies & tactics - no matter if it is a "normal" website or a more "hard selling" focused webshop. It is a bit simplified and broken down to 14 points - but it will turn into a way more complex setup as soon as you combine different approaches for Strategy & Tactics to optimize and scale in eCommerce.

Strategy is asking for the "WHY"

Tactics are asking for the "HOW"

Target Group
Analysis

You need to be where your potential clients are and you need to know what exactly they are looking for. It is all about your target group. There is the focus, there are the people that are going to buy your products/services. The more we know about them the better. From there we create and develop the ideal Buyer Persona. The generated data allows you to get rid of useless content and focus on what you potential clients want, need or demand. The generated data allows you to create the very important process of Content Evaluation and providing the Content you really need.

Buyer Persona Development

The more defined, the better. Knowing your targets is crucial for any business. The more defined the better. The clearer the picture the easier to approach. The properly defined Buyer Persona provides the frame what you need to do and how you need to approach them. Your ideal customer is a fictitious person which your product/service is perfectly suited for. A marketing persona is then created based upon this ideal client. A persona represents a subset of your target market. You give them name, a profile, demographic info, job title, pain points, aspirations, the channels they use and phychographic details. Do you provide the right answers at the right Touch Points? Is the content that you provide what they are looking for? Do you go with any strategic approach or just hoping for the best?

Competitor
Analysis

You need to know what your competition is doing. The more - the better. Knowing your ideal customer is only the first step. You also need to know with whom you are competing. How much do you really know about your competitors? Most companies will monitor their competitors' business activities, some more than others. I can help you to enhance the competitor information that you have at hand. I help you to find out what you need to focus on to go ahead or how to close the gap(s) levelling up. We can create performing strategies out of these data sets and develope the appropriate measure for your business.

Funnel Installation & Optimization

You need to guide your visitors to the right points. Visitors on a website normally get guided to a certain point throughout different funnel stages. There are lots of marketing- and content funnels out there and Online Businesses not understanding the general Funnel structure normally can hardly generate relevant traffic, leads or sales. The idea behind all of this is almost the same: Attracting people, engage people, make them convert and make them your client by letting them purchase whatever you offer. What many online businesses forget: it needs different Content for each stage. The funnel stages: 1 AWARENESS 2 ENGAGEMENT 3 EVALUATION 4 PURCHASE

Ads / PPC/ Paid Media Search & Social

Ads are non organic - so it needs a solid data based approach and detailed research. Ads in any form such as PPC campaigns in search engines or social media channels do not generate organic taffic. That seperates the PPC approach a bit from the general content approach. Unfortunately, for so many online businesses their Ads approach is nothing but a waste of time and money. From channel management, campaign creation, data analysis for the campaigns up to performance evaluation - most of the times the results are not satisfying.

Leads: generate, capture & nurture

Often I've heard: "We cannot generate enough Leads, because we do not have enough traffic." Total wrong logic approach. Lead Management is one of the biggest issues in todays online businesses. The right Content enables you to generate Leads. Segmentation allows you to talk to them. MQL & SQL Leads need different Content approaches at different stages. No optimized automations can lead to wrong approaches. Cold Leads are no Leads at all because they are not data based. Online performance is pending on what Content you provide to your Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and to your Sales Qualified Leads (SQL). No segmentation - no performance.

E-Mail Marketing
automation

Very often the installed automation leads to spamming the visitor. Automating some things is a good approach. But it definitely needs a solid setup. The main reason for that is that the involved department is not aware of the technical processes behind it or no proper lead segmentation is involved in the background. There are different leads and they need different attention within the funnel. To define with different flows who gets what when from you - fully automized can be challenging. Bad lead segmentation if you are dealing with 3rd party providers like klaviyo, MailChimp, Omnisend or similar is one of the main reasons for a failed automation process.

Social Media Strategy & Management

Wondering which social networks are right for your business? The golden rule to win business via social media is to be where your potential customers are. The aim is to grow the presence online through gaining more followers via social media, then engaging and nurturing those followers to become fans or customers. It can be used for business as well as brand awareness. But in Social Media it needs a clear plan and strategy to prevent that irrelevant Content is only created for the sake of creating Content. Use Social Media channels doing best for your business.

(UI/UX)-User Interface & User Experience

User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) design have a huge impact on your performance. Is the experience for the user on your website smooth and intuitive or clunky and confusing? In short: a UX design decides how the user interface works while the UI design decides how the user interface looks. Both together have definitely an influence on your conversion. That's what makes UI/UX always a huge factor and gives it a certain importance within an online business performance.

SEO

Good SEO provides the relevant data to create strategies and tactics for your marketing and your strategic content. Dedicated content people in charge should understand almost all aspects of SEO. Especially using the right SEO tools and understand the generated data. Good (!) SEO is definitely important. For your rankings, your organic traffic as well as for understanding what your competition is doing and to create the right content your target group is looking for. Long tail keywords, semantic, keyword competition, search intention, volume or your linkbuilding strategy are deciding factors where SEO provides the right and important data.

Brand Awareness

Brand awareness might not directly sell online but it is another factor to take care of. Let's consider you are looking for new specialized people to hire in certain areas? Need a special developer for a bigger new project quickly? During the hiring process the Brand awareness is always a factor of how attractive you might be as a potential employee. Especially when looking for rare talents in a special market or niche. Beside the HR context there are several other topics where Brand awareness is important and relevant. In general - do not forget: Google loves Brands.

Daily Traffic/Visitors

Just generating more traffic doesn´t help. You need the right traffic. Targeted. As long as you provide the right Content with the right answers to the questions of your target group in the right channels and in the right way - your targeted traffic will increase. Only if the rest of your online business setup has a proper strategic approach and is really optimised to create Leads out of your targeted traffic you will achieve relevant results. Otherwise you only create more not converting visitors. The traffic needs to be directed through the right channels and touch points. For that it needs a data based strategy how which visitors at which touch points will receive which content. Targeted Traffic is the result of providing the right answers to the visitors needs, demands and pain points at the right time, at the right touch point.

Landing Pages

Optimised Landing Pages are crucial and deciding factors especially if it comes to non organic traffic such as paid Ads (Google, Facebook etc). With bad Landing Pages behind it those Ads are nothing but a waste of time and money. There are a few rules how a performing Landing Page should look like and the Content elements that need to be integrated. The variations are coming by the kind of product or service you offer. Landing Page optimisation is a constant process by using different versions to find out what is performing (converting) and what not. A/B testing is crucial to optimize your Landing Pages helping you to achieve your goal of getting leads and sales.

Conversion

Conversion is nothing but providing the right answers at the right touch points to your visitors. Also Conversion is based on how you structure your content and where you provide what to your visitors. Do you deliver answers to the visitors pain points and provide what they are looking for? Lots of companies just struggle with their Landing Pages, proper A/B-testing, their paid Ads and the general conversion optimisation processes. Sometimes it is also more than obvious that the whole setup is simply not made for any optimised conversion. You can start optimizing your Conversion as soon as you determined and tackled the most relevant Conversion blockers in your setup.

"If you can’t measure performance, you can’t manage performance" Peter Drucker

After all relevant basic digital marketing actions are set up you will generate data sets. That's usually when the optimization process begins pretty quick. Good evaluation contains also the right interpretation of the available data from all kind of reports. From Ad-reports to SEO-reports & from the relevant shop KPIs. Also very important shop specific things need to be improved by and by. After certain optimizations you usually reach the point where you want to scale everything. That is usually the point when you need a bit more than standardized strategies & tactics of Digital Marketing.

Then you might need to understand how to influence relevant KPIs...

Webshops need to focus and work way more intense on certain KPIs and other data to create further growth strategies or tackling potential single issues data based one after another. So if you work in eCommerce you should definitely know what different KPIs mean and way more important - how to influence them which means improving the results. A few samples for eCommerce related metrics every marketer needs to understand and being able to offer solutions, ideas, strategies and tactics for

CLV - Customer Lifetime Value

SCR - Sales Conversion Rate

CAC Customer Acquisition Cost

ROAS/POAS-Return / Profit On Ad Spend

ACV - Average Cart Value

VPD - Visitors Per Day

ACR - Abandoned Cart Rate

AOV - Average Order Value

...and work on a few things with direct shop performance impact

Beside KPIs and certain metrics some topics you can hardly find somewhere else than in a webshop with such a relevance and immediate impact on the direct business - just 8 small samples of those things potentially influencing the general performance of a webshop as soon as you installed, improved, increased, decreased, optimized or realized them.

Checkout optimization

Sales Margin(s)

Upsell & Cross-Sell

App Integrations

General Tech Performance & Code quality

Google Shopping
& Feed

Returns and broken goods delivered

MPI - Market Place Integration

And many others

Let´s talk

E-Commerce, Digital Marketing & Performance

Get in touch

Strategic Content

An overview of how I can help & support to get your Content, organized, structured, planned and managed.

Kay Auster | austermedia®

The main problem in eCommerce projects is the complexity - especially as soon as you try to scale.

What does holistic mean?

What does holistic mean?

eCommerce projects are a direct selling environment - who cares about organic?

Basic Digital Marketing

Target Group Analysis

Buyer Persona Development

Competitor Analysis

Funnel Installation & Optimization

Ads / PPC/ Paid Media Search & Social

Leads: generate, capture & nurture

E-Mail Marketing automation

Social Media Strategy & Management

(UI/UX)-User Interface & User Experience

SEO

Brand Awareness

Daily Traffic/Visitors

Landing Pages

Conversion

"If you can’t measure performance, you can’t manage performance" Peter Drucker

Then you might need to understand how to influence relevant KPIs...

CLV - Customer Lifetime Value

SCR - Sales Conversion Rate

CAC Customer Acquisition Cost

​ROAS/POAS-Return / Profit On Ad Spend

ACV - Average Cart Value

VPD - Visitors Per Day

ACR - Abandoned Cart Rate

AOV - Average Order Value

...and work on a few things with direct shop performance impact

Checkout optimization

Sales Margin(s)

Upsell & Cross-Sell

App Integrations

General Tech Performance & Code quality

Google Shopping & Feed

Returns and broken goods delivered

MPI - Market Place Integration

Strategic Content

The main problem in eCommerce
projects is the complexity - especially as soon as you try to scale.

Target Group
Analysis

Competitor
Analysis

E-Mail Marketing
automation

ROAS/POAS-Return / Profit On Ad Spend

Google Shopping
& Feed