© Chloë Thomas

Originally published 2019

Kernu Publishing
PO Box 740
Truro
Cornwall
TR1 9HE
United Kingdom
All rights reserved. Apart from limited use for private study, teaching,
research, criticism or review, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored or transmitted without the prior permission in
writing of the copyright owner and publisher of this book.
 Reviews
“Everyone in your business should read this book whether they are in
marketing or not. Why? Because it removes all the smoke and mirrors
around marketing for eCommerce, channel by channel, but still delivers
for your marketing team on detail and how to plan for success. Chloë’s
candid, straight-talking and uncomplicated style makes it feel like she’s
explaining it over a cup of tea and the content delivers in spades on
practical, tangible and achievable actions that you can put it into practice
in your business right now.”
Nicola Fox, exHead of CRM, Missguided,
and Freelance Marketing Facilitator at Fine Tooth Comb

“As someone who built and runs a 8-figure (and growing) eCommerce
business, I’m often asked for advice about how to do what we’ve done.
Happily, I can now hand them Chloe’s book instead of trying --
unsuccessfully, usually -- to lay out the framework and the requirements
for ecommerce success. Comprehensive and practical, eCommerce
Marketing is a book you should read over and over and, more importantly,
put its lessons into action.”
Steven Sashen, CEO and co-founder, XeroShoes.com

“Straight to the point and in plain English. A comprehensive resource for

both the experienced marketer and the independent business owner, every
online retailer will benefit from the insight within this book”
Thomas J Vosper, Retail Director

“After reading eCommerce Marketing, I can only marvel at how she

delivers such valuable content, in such an easy to understand manner. This
is a must have book for eCommerce business owners and marketers - with
strategies and tactics which can be deployed immediately. A really
inspiring read!”
Sam Taylor, Owner, The Retail Fixers
www.facebook.com/RetailFixers
& digi Quick, digi-Quick.co.uk
 Free Gift

To say thank you for buying my book, I would like to give you access
to my eCommerce MasterPlan Virtual Summit for FREE. (usually
£449 / $549).
It’s a set of over 20 video trainings, each featuring a marketing expert
explaining how to use one eCommerce marketing method
successfully.
PLUS you’ll get the transcript of every training, AND the MP3 audio
file to listen to at your leisure.
TO DOWNLOAD GO TO
https://eCommerceMarketingBook.com/freesummit
 Acknowledgements
THE FIRST THANKS must be to the team without whom this book
wouldn’t exist. My trio of excellent book designers — Doug, Joni, Liz
— as always have done a great job; you make the creation process so
much easier.
Secondly, I’d like to thank the sponsors, Omnisend, Pure360, and
Digital Gearbox. The book would still have existed without you — but
your advice, marketing support and money have all been a real help in
getting the book into the hands of far more people and helping me
help hundreds if not thousands more retailers solve their marketing
problems.
Finally, thank you to all the retailers I’ve chatted with on the podcast,
and in the real world over the last few years — each of those
conversations have shaped my thinking about this model, and
eCommerce marketing.
Soundtrack to the writing of this book…
Lady Antebellum – Own the Night, on endless repeat, and
occasionally Ken Bruce’s Popmaster.
Thank you to the Sponsors

www.Omnisend.com

www.Pure360.com

DigitalGearbox.co.uk
 Foreword
GROWING YOUR OWN companyis the hardest thing you’ll ever do.
From digital marketing agency, to email marketing tool, to
omnichannel marketing automation platform: Omnisend’s growth
has been a journey.
Throughout this journey, there have been several pitfalls. You can’t
avoid all of them, but you can avoid the worst if you’re savvy. In my
experience as an entrepreneur, the most important thing is to never
stop optimising, and to never stop moving forward. I believe this book
will help you learn how to do that.
As the co-founder and CEO of an award-winning SaaS company
tailored for ecommerce marketers, I’ve had the opportunity to meet
hundreds of impressive people in the industry. It’s not uncommon
when someone leaves a lasting impression on me, but when someone
truly impresses me, I’ll never forget it.
I first met Chloë Thomas last year when she’d invited me to do a
podcast on rebranding your business to remove growth limitations.
However, I’ve been a long-time fan of her work. Whether she’s
crafting a virtual event, masterclass, or podcast, the content she
releases is always interesting, actionable, and relevant for those who
really need advice in this ever-changing domain.
It has been a pleasure working with her and eCommerce MasterPlan
to resolve some of the most frequently brought up problems in
ecommerce, and to educate the industry on best practices.
As someone deeply embedded in the digital marketing and
ecommerce industry, driving traffic is probably one of the biggest
priorities for anyone who sells online.
However, anyone who has actually sold online will be able to tell you,
not all traffic is created equal. You can have all the traffic in the world,
but if it doesn’t actually convert, it’s just a vanity metric.
So how do you go about attracting the kind of traffic that actually
converts? How do you make sure that your visitors are the most
qualified to purchase from you?
In Chloë Thomas’s book, eCommerce Marketing: How to Drive
Traffic that Buys to Your Website, she sets out to respond to this
question using nine pillars of marketing to do so.
Targeting the most profitable kind of traffic is not a one-off activity. It
requires strategic thought, and should be thought of as on-going
optimisation in your marketing strategy.
This book helps you with actionable tactics and foundation-building
marketing strategies that are proven across the eCommerce
industry. These are not quick tips and tricks, but rather the tried-and-
true strategies — the biggest and the best the digital marketing world
use.
Those “hacks” might be great for short-term growth, but sustainable
growth will earn you more profit in the long run, and that’s precisely
what this book will teach you to strive for.
What I hope for you is that you will take the growth strategies found
in this book and that you’ll apply them to your own business. It’s a
shame to miss out on potential, and with the right strategies in place,
there’s a seat at the table for everyone in this booming digital
industry.
Rytis Lauris
Co-Founder and CEO of Omnisend

www.Omnisend.com
 Contents
Introduction
Why Just Traffic?
The Equation at the Heart of eCommerce
How to Use This Book
PART 1: The Customer MasterPlan Model
How to Use the Customer MasterPlan Model to Improve
Your Marketing
PART 2: Core Marketing Methods
Chapter 1: Search Engine Optimisation
Chapter 2: Email Marketing
Chapter 3: Search Engine Advertising – Keywords
Chapter 4: Search Engine Advertising – Products
Chapter 5: Online Advertising - Audience Targeting and
Social Media
Part 3: Other Marketing Methods
Chapter 6: Partnerships - Including Affiliate and
Influencer Marketing
Chapter 7: Content Marketing
Chapter 8: Social Media Marketing
Chapter 9: Web Push Notifications and Facebook
Messenger Marketing
Chapter 10: Offline Marketing
Chapter 11: Use Your Products - Wholesaling and
Marketplaces
PART 4: Marketing Maxims
Chapter 12: Chloë’s Promotional Golden Rule
Chapter 13: Data Segmentation
Chapter 14: 2+2=5: The Power of Multichannel Marketing
Chapter 15: Triggered Marketing Is Great for You and the
Customer
Chapter 16: Powerful Marketing Messages
Chapter 17: Emotion Sells: Neuromarketing 101
Chapter 18: Keep Optimising!
PART 5: The Customer MasterPlan 4 Week Marketing
Transformation Challenge
What Do You Think?
About the Author
Book Chloë to Speak
 Introduction
SINCE 2004, I’VE been helping retailers increase traffic to their
website. Not just any old traffic, the traffic that buys.
When I wrote the first edition of this book in 2012, the main
problems the people I worked with had were not knowing what
marketing they could do, and how to approach each marketing
method in order to get a good result.
Now the problem has shifted. The number 1 question I get asked is:
“Chloë, what marketing should I be doing?”
Everyone knows most of the marketing options they could use, but
they get lost or paralysed trying to work out what to do and where to
focus their budgets for maximum impact.
This inevitably leads businesses to do a bit of this and a bit of that, or
nothing at all. Which means they never commit to finding the
marketing methods they should be committing their budget to.
This book is designed to help you answer the question ‘What
marketing should I be doing?’ for yourself.
Why Just Traffic?
TEN YEARS AGO, you could afford to faff about trying to decide what
to do to get traffic to your website. That’s no longer an option if you
want to succeed.
The eCommerce market just keeps growing.

The growth has outstripped that of retail as a whole, as ever more

consumers decide to spend their money online rather than offline.
Yet online retail sales remain much lower than offline sales – so, it
would be a brave soul to think this growth, this shift in consumer
behaviour is going to slow down anytime soon.
In a growing market, you have to grow at least at the pace of the
market itself, or you’re falling behind. That currently means
increasing sales by more than 10% every year.
Ten years ago, that was easy. There weren’t many online stores, and
very few were giving customers a good experience.
Fast forward to the 2010s and tools like Shopify and WooCommerce
have made setting up an eCommerce store easy, cheap, and quick.
In 2015, Richard Lazazzera wrote about how he created an
eCommerce business from scratch in just three days – not only
sorting out product, brand, and website – but also generating nearly
$1,000 in revenue.1
This is how low the barriers to entry in eCommerce now are.
It’s easy for any entrepreneur with an idea, or existing business
looking for a new route to market, to jump in, as the yearly growth in
Shopify merchants proves.

In this industry, where competition is increasing faster than the

market is expanding, not only do you need to keep growing to
maintain your market share, you also have to fight ever harder for
that growth.
Where does that growth come from? It comes from getting the right
traffic to your website.

1 Read the whole case study here https://www.shopify.co.uk/blog/34526469-how-we-built-

an-ecommerce-business-from-scratch-and-generated-922-16-in-revenue-in-3-days
 The Equation at the Heart of
eCommerce

THIS EQUATION IS at the heart of every eCommerce business.

For the successful ones, it’s at the heart of their decision making too.
If you want to increase sales, you have to increase either Traffic,
Average Order Value, or Conversion Rate.
Traffic is what the majority of eCommerce businesses — especially
the successful ones — are focusing on to drive their growth.
Salesforce analysed the growth of their eCommerce merchants to see
which of these levers was responsible for sales growth.2
On average, their customers were increasing sales revenue by 20% a
year.

The lever responsible for more than half the growth was Traffic.
Understanding your traffic options, implementing them well, and
optimising the activity are crucial to your success as an online
retailer.
If getting more traffic to your website is half the growth battle, you
can afford the time to identify the right methods, master the skills,
and do the optimisation. To not find the time would be giving up the
fight.
In my experience, improvements in traffic volume and quantity often
have a positive impact on both conversion rate and AOV, so it’s highly
likely that some of the uplift in AOV and conversion rate in the
Salesforce data was the result of better management of traffic.

How Traffic Impacts Conversion Rate

The quality of your traffic can have a massive impact on your
conversion rate.
Log in to your Google Analytics and go to your Source / Medium
report (it’s under Acquisition / All Traffic). Look at the conversion
rate of your different traffic sources – I’ll bet there’s a huge
difference from traffic source to traffic source.

In this example, it differs from 11.63% for Email marketing to just

5.88% for Google organic traffic.
Cutting the Google Organic traffic would have a big impact on overall
conversion rate, not least because it’s the biggest traffic source.
However, I wouldn’t recommend doing that!
So how can traffic increase conversion rate? It’s all about getting
more of the right people to the site, and fewer of the wrong people.
More buyers, fewer tyre-kickers.
In this case, the next steps would be to improve SEO to increase the
conversion rate of the Google organic traffic, and to find ways to
increase the email traffic.
Admittedly, this approach to improve conversion rate isn’t about
improving the conversion experience. It’s about understanding how
traffic impacts your conversion rate so that your other CRO
(Conversion Rate Optimisation) efforts can be better-focused. For
example, in this case, you’d analyse the direct and / or email traffic
only to find the most important conversion blockers and use those
traffic sources as the traffic for testing and analysis.

How Traffic Impacts AOV

The quality of your traffic can have a massive impact on your AOV.
If we get the calculator out and work out the AOV for the report
above, we see there’ s a HUGE difference in AOV from traffic source
to traffic source.

For this particular business, the two highest-AOV traffic sources are
driven by powerful segmentation and communications with
databases. The email performance is all their email marketing
activity.
If that knowledge of customer segmentation and messaging can be
replicated in other marketing channels, then AOV should increase.
Likewise, if greater traffic volumes can be generated by the email and
paper methods, the overall company AOV will increase too.

Traffic Optimisation Is the Most Important Skill for

eCommerce Growth
Once your business is up and running and customers are buying and
enjoying your products, the place I believe you should be focusing the
bulk of your resources is on finding the right traffic sources for your
business.
That means determining the traffic sources that will bring in the right
visitors, and the marketing methods that will capture their
information so that you can bring them back in again and get that
purchase.
There are many great books written on how to improve your
conversion rates, and many great books on the individual marketing
methods. But there’s a lack of guidance on how to put those
marketing methods together to create the flow of traffic your site
needs to bring you success.
When I first wrote this book back in 2012, I wanted to save
eCommerce business owners from missing out on marketing
methods that could really help them (I was fed up with going into
businesses to be told ‘we don’t do email marketing; I don’t like it’), and
to help them make the marketing methods they were using more
effective.
These days, I don’t come across many business owners refusing to do
email marketing because they just don’t like it, but I do still come
across many businesses committing these sins of eCommerce
Marketing:

Relying on just one or two marketing campaigns, rather than

marketing to the whole customer journey.
Investing the majority of resources in a marketing method
that just isn’t delivering, because everyone else is doing it
Failing to optimise — putting the marketing activity live, and
then ignoring it.

I’ve rewritten eCommerce Marketing: How to Get Traffic that BUYS

to Your Website to help you avoid these sins — to give you the tools
and understanding you need to manage your traffic well.
Whether you’re looking for more traffic, to lower your cost per order,
or to finally feel that you’re doing the marketing you should be – I’ve
written this book for you.

2 Access the full report here:

https://www.salesforce.com/form/commerce/quest-for-growth/
 How to Use This Book
ECOMMERCE AND ONLINE marketing are constantly changing, so the
book is designed to help you take the right approach no matter what
changes. It is not a click-here/do-this book; it’s a book that will give
you the understanding you need to successfully manage your traffic
and improve your results.
I highly recommend you read the whole book first, then dip in and out
of it as you need to.
Please do as many previous readers have done and, once you’ve read
it, keep it handy so you can grab it and check something when you
need to launch a new marketing initiative to overcome a traffic
challenge.
As well as the 11 chapters focused on individual marketing methods,
I’ve added a couple of extra sections to this new edition to help you
improve your marketing even more.
Part 1 is home to the Customer MasterPlan Model. This introduces a
tried-and-tested model you’re going to find really useful to help you
work out where you should be focusing your efforts to bring the
greatest improvements. It should be the start point of any decision
making or strategizing you do, which is why I’ve put it at the front! It’s
frequently referred to throughout, so make sure you read this before
anything else.
In Part 4, I’ve brought together my Marketing Maxims — the
principles and theories you can quickly use to improve the
performance of all the individual marketing methods. That includes
ideas you can use to get your marketing methods working together to
create a traffic flow that’s worth far more to you than the individual
marketing methods alone.
We wrap up with Part 5, which is all about helping you quickly put
into practice everything you’ve learnt in the book. After all, there’s no
point in reading and learning if you don’t put what you’ve learnt into
action to improve your marketing performance.
The day before writing this section of the book, I was working on an
Adwords Audit for a company that wanted to increase the customers
they acquire with Google Adwords. Christmas is a really important
season for them, so I was focusing on their Adwords performance in
the previous Q4 (Oct, Nov, Dec).
During those three months, they’d spent over £6,000 on Adwords,
and not made one single change to their account in either November
or December. It scares me to think how much of that £6,000 could
have been saved, and how many sales they missed out on through
neglecting to optimise. If I’d been managing it, I’d have been checking
the account at least weekly and tweaking keywords, ads, and bids to
reduce costs and increase sales.
The joy of the digital marketing methods (and many of the non-digital
marketing methods) is you can get results quickly and alter your
marketing activity accordingly – you can optimise!
Success lies in the optimisation.

Extra Resources
I’ve gathered together a number of templates, checklists, and extra
materials to help you manage your traffic and it’s highlighted in the
text when these are available. But before you go any further, get
quick access to all the support materials when you need them by
registering at:
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/Free.

The Podcast
A key part of optimising your marketing is keeping up to date with
how other businesses are succeeding with their marketing. To help
you do just that, I host the eCommerce MasterPlan Podcast. Every
week, it features an interview with a different eCommerce business
owner or marketer, sharing how they manage and grow their
business. Find it at eCommerceMasterPlan.com/podcast or listen via:
Enjoy!
 Part 1: The Customer
MasterPlan Model
THE CUSTOMER MASTERPLAN Model is the strategy for eCommerce
success distilled down into 6 circles and 8 arrows.

The circles represent the Customer Relationship Levels, the levels

each person on the planet has reached in their relationship with your
business.
The CLV arrow represents how Customer Lifetime Value (that’s how
much each customer is worth to your business) increases as a
customer moves through the Customer Relationship Levels; that’s
because the likelihood of them buying increases. Someone who has
bought for the first time (First Time Buyer) is worth more to you than
someone who is an enquirer on your email list (Enquirers).
The people arrow represents how the number of customers we’re
talking to drops as we move from the left-hand side to the right-hand
side. There are a whole lot more people who’ve never been to your
website (The World) than there are people who have (Visitors).
The double-ended arrow (The Conversation) across the top is a
reminder that the more consistent you keep your conversation with
your customer throughout their journey with your business, the
easier it will be to persuade them to move up through the Customer
Relationship Levels.
Stages 1 to 5 are where we should be spending our time –
encouraging customers to move from one Customer Relationship
Level to the next.
Marketing has a HUGE role to play in getting the customers to make
the leap from one customer relationship level to the next.

Stage 1: Getting Visitors to your Website

In every eCommerce business, customer acquisition is a huge
marketing focus, usually taking up the majority of resources. Which is
why there are 3 Stages focused on getting the first sale.
Customer acquisition starts with Stage 1 – making people out there in
the world aware that your business exists and persuading them to
visit your website.
With Stage 1 marketing, we’re looking to put your message in front of
people who’ve never been to your website and get them to go there.3
It’s the Stage where most marketers spend most of their time, and
where the marketing options you can use are numerous. This means
it is vital to be actively managing and optimising your existing traffic
sources and testing new ones.
To make sense of all these options and ideas Stage 1 is divided into 3
types of marketing:
 Shine a Light: To shine a light on your business and make the
world aware you exist.
Target Customer: To make your Target Customers aware you
exist and encourage them to buy from you.
Get Found: To make sure that, when customers are looking for
your products, they find you.

Many of the marketing methods used for Shine a Light and Target
Customer will be the same; they’re just used in different ways to put
the message in front of a very different audience.
I find it helps to think of this marketing breakdown as a target, slowly
getting closer to your website as their likelihood to purchase grows.

You should start by getting the Get Found activity in place, then the
Target Customer marketing, and finally the Shine a Light. The Get
Found activity is going to give you the best return on investment and
should quickly be profitable, so it’s nice to have that running whilst
you work on the other areas. Then the Target Customer activity will
probably be more profitable than the Shine a Light – so it makes
sense to set that up second.
Of course, this order also makes sense because the Shine a Light
marketing is going to result in people moving into the Target
Customer audience, and both will create people who want to find
your website!
The impact of having all three working together is much greater than
the individual parts themselves – so if you want to really succeed at
getting the right traffic to your website and making sure it’s as ready
as possible to purchase, then you should be investing in all three of
these Stage 1 marketing types.

Stage 1 – Get Found

The Get Found part of Stage 1 is all about making sure the customer
can find you when they’re looking for you or your products.
The marketing methods you can use in Get Found are pretty limited,
which makes this a pretty quick set of marketing to get set up.
They boil down to:

It’s really important to have this in place before you start investing in
any other marketing activity because these are the marketing tactics
that make sure that, once a customer has decided to buy, they can
find you.
They can’t buy from you if they can’t find you!

Stage 1 - Target Customer

The Target Customer part of Stage 1 is all about putting your
message, your brand, and your products in front of your Target
Customers.
Before you can do this, you do need to know who your Target
Customers are and have access to ways to get a message in front of
them. Identifying a useable Target Customer audience might come
from modelling your existing customer base, geodemographic
targeting, or interest-based targeting.
For most businesses this will be a mix of the following:

Advertising / articles in the magazines / newspapers / TV

shows / websites your target customers read.
Inserts in the catalogue mailings or parcels of businesses who
have a similar customer base to yours.
Advertising on Google Display Network or Facebook to
lookalike audiences of your best customers.
Working with influencers your target market responds to.
Advertising to audiences with the same demographics and
interests as your target customers.

For a business selling gourmet coffee beans, their initial test list might
look like this:

Not all of these will turn out to be great performers; it takes time to
test and optimise to find the methods and audiences that work best
for each business.
The right mix will vary from business to business.

Stage 1 - Shine a Light

The Shine a Light part of Stage 1 is about putting your message, your
brand, and your products in front of a huge audience of people, some
of whom are your target customers.
Why do this? Because some of those people who see it will be
potential customers and this might be the only way to reach them.
For some businesses, there are very few Target Customer options, so
Shine a Light will make up the traffic shortfall.
It includes many of the same types of marketing that you use for
Target Customers, but here the audience is much larger.
Sticking with the gourmet coffee example, here’s what their Shine a
Light test list might look like:

As with the Target Customer activity, it takes time to test and

optimise to find the methods and audiences that work best in this
part of the model for each business.
The right mix will vary from business to business.
Whether a campaign is Target Customer or Shine a Light really
depends on WHO is going to see it. As a rough guide, if more than half
of them are very relevant, it’s a Target Customer audience; if less
than half, then it’s a Shine a Light one. So, whilst testing, you may find
approaches that you thought would be Target Customer are actually
Shine a Light.

Stage 2: Creating Enquirers

This Stage is all about getting data you can use in Stage 3 to get
across the right messages to turn the Enquirers into First Time
Buyers.
Usually the data you’re after will be an email address, or a web push
notification sign-up, but if you are actively mailing paper catalogues,
then the aim might be to get their postal data so you can send a
catalogue to them.
It doesn’t include getting a follow of your social media accounts
because you don’t own that data, and on the social media platforms,
you’re at the mercy of their algorithms as to whether or not your
customers see your messages.
(Getting social media followers is great, but it’s not a Stage 2 activity).
Usually this sign-up activity happens on your website, but it can
happen anywhere – in your stores, at events… There are marketing
methods and tactics specifically designed to grow an email database.
For example, a viral competition where those who enter the
competition would be encouraged to undertake tasks and get others
to enter the competition to increase their chances of winning. Or
Facebook lead Ads where the aim of your advert is to get an email
address.

Stage 3: Creating First Time Buyers

Not everyone you are trying to turn into a First Time Buyer will
become an Enquirer – some will leapfrog straight from Visitor to First
Time Buyer – and that’s just fine!
Stage 3 is all about communicating with those who’ve been to your
website or for whom you have data in order to get them to buy.
Marketing methods could include:
Stage 4: Creating Repeat buyers — aka
getting purchase number 2
As soon as someone’s purchased for the first time, your marketing
focus switches to getting the second purchase.
Of course, that means doing a great job with their first order, but
there’s also marketing that will help…

Stage 5: Creating Regular Buyers from

Repeat Buyers
The marketing methods that do this are pretty much exactly the same
as for Stage 4, but the messaging may change to reflect their deeper
connection to your business.
You want to turn those who’ve bought twice into Regular Buyers
because it’s going to increase their value to you (that all important
CLV), and because there’s a huge amount you can learn from the
Regular Buyers to help you improve your Stage 1 performance.
They are your best customers, so you can learn from them by using
surveys, customer panels, social media groups, etc.
You can also use them to create lookalike audiences for your
advertising.
They can become great referrers of customers too – so don’t forget
to ask them to spread the word about your business. Many
eCommerce businesses are now recruiting great influencers from
their existing passionate customers.

How to Use the Customer

MasterPlan Model to Improve
Your Marketing
THE CUSTOMER MASTERPLAN is an invaluable tool to help you work
out where you should focus your effort for maximum impact.
It’s hard to work on improving all the Stages at once, so you should
focus on the one that offers the most opportunity. That’s usually the
one where your performance is weakest.
The model also helps you to think about the problem first and the
solution second. To think “we’re not doing as well as we should be in
Stage 1, what can we do to fix it?” not “we need more Google Ads”
when you’re working out where the focus is for the next month /
quarter / year.
There are two ways to use the Customer MasterPlan Model to work
out where you should focus your marketing efforts.
The most perfect one is to analyse the numbers — work out how well
each Stage is performing to move customers from one Customer
Relationship Level to the next. This is complex and time-consuming,
and many businesses don’t have easy access to the numbers needed
to do it.4
I’ve designed a simpler method that any business can quickly use to
identify where they should be focusing their marketing investment –
be it time or money.
STEP 1: Draw this out on a blank sheet of paper:
Or you can download the template and a completed example at
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/free
STEP 2: Write down what marketing you’re doing in each Stage of the
model.
STEP 3: If you have boxes with nothing in them, or very little in them
– then that’s where you need to focus next.
STEP 3A: (bonus step for once you’ve done this a few times) Next to
each marketing activity you’ve written down – add the month you
last optimised it. Be honest!
The most neglected area is where you should focus.
STEP 4: Once you’ve identified where to focus, look at what you’re
already doing for that Stage – is it in need of optimisation? If it’s
working well, can you do more of it? Then look through the book at
the other marketing tactics you can use in each Stage and test some
new ideas.
This analysis should be done at least quarterly to help you constantly
improve your overall business performance.
If you find you need to make changes beyond the traffic-driving
market for any Stage, then grab yourself a copy of my book Customer
Persuasion: How to Influence your Customers to Buy More and Why
an Ethical Approach Will Always Win5. It’s where I first introduced
the Customer MasterPlan Model and it includes lots of website,
customer service, and other things you can do to improve
performance in each Stage.

3 Of course, this activity does often pick up past customers, and those who’ve been to the
website before.
4 You can access the full how to for the numbers version via:
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/free
5 Original published as Customer Manipulation, and then published as Customer Persuasion.
You gotta keep optimising!
 Part 2: Core Marketing
Methods
NOT ALL ECOMMERCE Marketing methods are created equal.
Just like you should be balancing your marketing activity across all
Stages of the Customer MasterPlan model, you should also be
focusing most of your effort on the core marketing methods.

SEO
Search Engine Advertising
Email

In my experience, these drive 60-80% of traffic and sales to most

eCommerce stores.
How that splits down depends on the business, but it’s very common
to see each driving 15-20% of sales and traffic.
If, for you, one of these is MUCH bigger than any other traffic driver,
it’s time to diversify your marketing. The bulk of your traffic and sales
coming from one marketing method is never a good thing, because
something like an algorithm change or a legal shift could cause you to
lose your whole business overnight.
In this Part, I’m also including Online Advertising methods like Google
Remarketing and Facebook Ads. These methods put ads in front of
people based on what they’ve done or what they’re interested in, and
are driving some brilliant results for eCommerce businesses. I’m
seeing ever more ad spend being shifted to them from Search Engine
Advertising, so they had to be included in our Core Marketing
Methods.
To make your eCommerce business all it can be, you need to master
these marketing methods.
In this Part of the book you’re going to learn how to do just that with
chapters on:

Search Engine Optimisation

 Email marketing
Search Engine Advertising: Keywords
Search Engine Advertising: Products
Online Advertising: Audience Targeting and Social Media Ads

Search Engine Advertising has been split into two chapters because
managing keyword ads and product ads are so different, even though
the adverts end up in the same place.
Once you’ve mastered these Core Marketing Methods, or found a
Customer MasterPlan Model problem they can’t solve for you, it’s
time to move on to look at the Other Marketing Methods in Part 3.
 1
Search Engine Optimisation
SEO IS ALL about getting “free” traffic from search engines.
By “free”, I mean that you haven’t directly paid for that traffic like you
would with Search Engine Advertising on Google Ads or Bing.
Of course, search marketing isn’t actually free: you may have paid an
agency or your website builders to do some SEO work for you, and
there’s all the time you spend working on content, keywords, and
links.
SEO is a complex art that’s becoming both simpler and harder as time
passes and the search algorithms change; simpler because there are
ever-fewer methods to employ, harder because the quick wins are
disappearing.

What’s great about SEO

SEO is one of the three big eCommerce traffic drivers (with Email and
PPC). I rarely find a successful eCommerce business that doesn’t
have some investment in SEO and I come across many where SEO is
core to their performance.
Focusing on increasing the volume and quality of your search traffic
can be one of the most effective ways to grow your eCommerce
business.
The outcomes from your effort tend to be cumulative, so consistently
investing in improving your SEO will create a dependable source of
traffic, sales, and customers month in, month out.
It takes time to build a strong SEO performance, so once you have it,
it’s also quite hard for your competitors to take it from you.
BUT
It is dangerous to focus all your effort on SEO.
It’s not a traffic source that you control. Google could change their
algorithm and you could lose half your traffic overnight because of
things you’ve done in the name of SEO which you thought were good,
but which Google has now decided are bad.
In that situation, there’s no point arguing with Google; you’ve just got
to work out what you did wrong, fix it, and wait for improvement to
come.
Penalties can happen to anyone: In June 2019, the UK’s Daily Mail
newspaper, one of the world’s most visited news websites, lost 50%
of their search traffic overnight when Google made a change to the
algorithm.6

Where does it fit in the Customer MasterPlan

model?

Your SEO efforts will be experienced by customers on every

Customer Relationship Level, because they all use search engines!
Where you should focus your SEO effort is on customer acquisition:

Business models where it’s super-powerful

Every business selling online should be aware of how to get traffic
from the search engines.
If you do a lot of brand awareness or offline marketing (marketing
which doesn’t include a link to your website), SEO is very valuable
because it means those who want to find you can find you.
If you sell a product that a lot of people are searching for, the rewards
of getting higher rankings for your website on search engine results
pages are going to be greater.
A business with lots of content is going to find it easier to achieve
great results via SEO than a business without content – because the
search engines LOVE onsite content.
Finally, there are some businesses whose products exclude them
from paying for search traffic (e.g. Vaping). For them, SEO is essential
because it’s the only way to get in front of potential customers on the
search engines.

When doesn’t it work?

SEO has a role of play for every eCommerce business; at the very
least, you want to be in first position for your brand name.
Some product categories are now so competitive with so many sites
trying to rank for the same keywords that the amount of investment
it would take to reach page 1 means it is not worth it.
For example, if you’re a boutique fashion store trying to rank for
“denim” or “women’s clothes,” it’s going to take so much investment
and so many months to achieve a page 1 position that you’d be better
off focusing your main marketing investment elsewhere.
Saying that though, there are always longer tail keywords to go for!

Objectives
The output of your SEO investment is traffic to your site — traffic that
buys or becomes an Enquirer.
It will take months for your SEO activity to pay off; possibly more
than a year. So, you need to be committed to it for the long haul.
The ultimate objectives (whether that happens in 3 months, 6
months, or 2 years) need to be driving sales and attracting new
customers, as well as making sure existing customers can find you
when they should be buying from you.
It takes a while for your SEO effort to pay off; to make sure it does,
you need to pay close attention to the story that sits under the sales –
so look at the traffic volumes, the keywords driving the traffic, and
also how the traffic behaves on your website.

What to measure

Below are the key metrics you need to be measuring for your search
marketing; most are in the table above. The performance of your
search marketing will improve over time, so compare the trends over
time:

Visits: The number of visits via each traffic source to your

website.
Bounce rate: the percentage of visitors who leave your site
before they visit another page.
Orders: The number of orders placed by those who reached
your site via SEO.
Conversion rate: Orders divided by visits.
Sales: The value of the sales planned by those who reached
your site via SEO.
AOV: Average Order Value. Sales divided by orders.
Sales per visit: Sales divided by visits.
Impressions: (not always available) the number of times your
site appeared in the viewed search engine results pages.
Click-through rate: (not always available) Visits divided by
impressions.

SEO ranking positions

Obviously, we’d all love to be on page 1, even position 1 for the SERPs
(search engine results pages) for all our chosen keywords. But we’re
unlikely to ever achieve that. Tracking the positions of keywords
you’re focused on can be a great way to see improvement in the short
term, but these days, Google tailors each SERP to the individual doing
the search. Even if the report says, “position 1,” that is unlikely to be
the case every time the keyword is searched for.
SEO success is all about making sure you appear in front of someone
who wants to buy from you when they want to buy. So, monitoring
traffic volume and performance for each keyword is much more
important than the position you get.

How it works
A search engine is a very complex piece of software that analyses
millions of pieces of data to return the best possible search results
each time someone enters a query.
It works by making a copy of everything it can find online and storing
that in its ‘index’. When a query is entered, it uses its very secret
algorithm to work out what results from the index it should return for
that particular searcher.
Each search engine (Google, Bing, Baidu, YouTube, Amazon) has its
own algorithm and each one assesses the contents of its index and
delivers results differently. When you hear about an algorithm
change, it means that the search engine has changed the way in which
it assesses the data, for example:

Something that previously made a site important, doesn’t

anymore (or vice versa).
They have started taking something into account that they
didn’t before (or vice versa).
Or hundreds of other options.

The art of SEO is to make your site as appealing as possible to the

algorithm, so your site is picked when the relevant search terms are
searched.
It’s very hard to anticipate what the next change will be and (of
course) no search engine tells us exactly what its algorithm does,
when it is changed, or if it is changed. This is why it’s important to
focus on what the search engine is trying to achieve rather than
obsess about the individual changes.
SEO work used to be focused on getting you to position number one
by optimising your website and getting inbound links. It is now far
more complex because:
Universal Search: This means that there are now multiple ways to get
into the search engine results pages (SERPs) – map, social media,
image, video and more.
Increasingly Sophisticated Algorithms: This means that trying to
manipulate the “normal” search results (the preserve of SEO) is
becoming ever harder – the quick wins are disappearing.
Some links are bad: In 2012, Google started to penalise websites for
links coming to them from “bad” websites – making the quest for links
a potentially dangerous game.
Voice search: As Alexa and Google Home devices fuel the growth of
voice search, being in position 1 (or position zero) becomes even
more powerful because the voice assistants usually only give one
search result back.
Personalised Search: Google gives different results based on where
you are in the world (just search for “takeaway”); if you are logged in
to Google, it will also give you results based on websites you have
been to before; and all the 100s of pieces of information they have
about you.

3 focuses for SEO

Stop worrying about Google. Stop obsessing about the latest
algorithm change and worrying about position one and start building
a site that deserves to receive traffic. It is possible to spend many
hours and days trying to work out what the latest algorithm changes
mean and how to “do SEO” in order to keep your traffic volumes up.
But that’s time that could be better spent elsewhere. I prefer to keep
in mind what Google is actually trying to do.
Larry Page (co-founder and CEO of Google) described the “perfect
search engine” as something that “… understands exactly what you
mean and gives you back exactly what you want”.
This remains Google’s objective and is why the fundamentals of how
to get search traffic have never changed. Search success continues to
come down to achieving three things with your website:

Be In the search engine’s index — and listed accurately.

Be Relevant to the users’ search — your site/content/pages
contain the right keywords.
Be Important enough to appear on the SERPs – link building.

Focus on these three objectives to make sure your website provides

the best possible result for the selected keywords, so it’s always
included for the relevant searches.
Practically, this means:

‘Be In’: Use Technical SEO to take advantage of every route

into the search engine’s index you can.
‘Be Relevant’: Keyword and Content SEO to fill your website
with the right keywords and great content that customers will
appreciate.
‘Be Important’: Prove your website is the best with the
quantity and quality of links pointing to it.

Technical SEO – Be In
There are now multiple ways your site can appear on page 1 for any
given search term. Google your product category and see how many
different types of search listings Google is displaying. You may find:

Images
Google Shopping Campaign Ads
Google Keyword Ads
“People also ask” section
Map results
Research links
News stories
 And many more besides

To appear in any of these ways, you first need to be in the search

engine’s index for that content.
Getting your website set up in a way that is friendly to search engines
and makes it easy for them to understand your site is essential.
The good news is that a lot of the technical SEO tasks need only be
done once – once you’ve fixed it, it’s fixed.
Key Technical SEO tactics:
Sitemaps: A streamlined version of your website that makes it really
easy for the search engines to index you. If you’re not sure how to do
this, speak to your site builder; it varies from site to site but shouldn’t
be difficult.
Schema Structured Data: A set of tags to apply to your site so search
engines can quickly understand the data in each page – e.g. “color” for
your product colours, “gtin” for GTIN codes. Find all the information
here: schema.org.
Google Search Console: Used to be called Google Webmaster Tools.
Each search engine has “Webmaster Tools” — a way for site owners
to talk to the search engine about their site and what they are doing
right or wrong. This extra data about how well your website is doing
can enable you to get it fixed! It’s also where you submit your
sitemap.
On Google, you can also integrate your Search Console with Google
Analytics, which gives you some great data about your search
performance. You can see the number of impressions you have had
on each keyword and also which bits of your content are appearing
the most often – really useful data.
Google My Business: Another free tool from Google that enables you
to take control (ish) of your business name in the search results, and
map results.
Mobile friendly: Increasingly, customers are shopping on mobile not
desktop. The search engines want to give their users a great
experience, so if your site doesn’t work well on mobile, they will
penalise you for it, and send you less traffic.
Given that bad mobile performance costs you sales from all your
traffic, why wouldn’t you want to make it work better? A great tool to
see how you’re doing:
https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
Speed: Customers expect a site to load fast so the search engines will
also penalise you for a slow-loading website. Just like the mobile
improvements, speeding up your site will increase sales as well as
SEO traffic.
Great tool to see how you’re doing:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Keyword and Content SEO – Be Relevant

Once your website is being correctly indexed by the search engines
and they like the experience it’s giving visitors, it’s time to make sure
your website is Relevant.
To do that, you need to have the right keywords, on the right pages,
and in the right places on those pages.
Being relevant is critical. It’s about making sure your site appears for
the searches your customers are making when they want or need
your products. If you appear for the right searches, you’ll get more
traffic and that traffic will be of a better quality, more likely to buy.
The process to make your site relevant involves three steps:

Identify the right keywords for your site.

Putting the keywords in place on your existing pages.
Creating new pages and improving existing pages for
important keywords.

Getting this right can have a big and quick impact. The first time you
do it, you are finally making use of all the ‘be in’ and ‘be important’
SEO power you already have, but haven’t been utilising because your
site just wasn’t relevant for the right search terms.
Identify the right keywords
Please note when I say “keyword” I actually mean a phrase – usually
you’re going to be looking at phrases like “black dress” rather than
just one keyword such as “dress”.
There are many great agencies and tools to speed up this process for
you, but here’s the DIY version.
First brainstorm what the keywords for your website might be. Don’t
just do this yourself – ask the rest of the business. Gather them in an
Excel spreadsheet. Then add keywords that have brought you traffic
in the past (you should be able to get this from Google Analytics or
Search Console); add these to the spreadsheet. If you have PPC on
the go (or ever have), get the keywords from that as well and add
them to the spreadsheet.
At this point, you may also want to consult a few keyword tools (the
Google Keyword Tool in Google Ads is pretty good and free but is
focused on paid search results) to let them suggest keywords you
have missed. Add these to the spreadsheet.
Once you have your very large spreadsheet (several thousand is
great), you need to gather some data on those keywords so you can
see which are good and which are bad. So add the following data in,
where possible, for each keyword:

Traffic volumes: You can get the rough number of searches on

each keyword for free from Google Keyword Tool.
Traffic quality: For any keywords that have previously driven
traffic to you (via SEO or PPC), add how that traffic has
performed – bounces, and conversion data is perfect.
Position Report: Where your website is right now on the
search engines.

It will take a while to gather the data and even longer to analyse it,
but it’s worth it.
Once you have considered all the data, you should be able to see:

Which keywords offer the biggest opportunity: Those with

large traffic volumes.
 Which keywords work for you: Those that have converted in
the past and have low bounce rates.
Which keywords you are going to win on the fastest: Those
you are already ranking well for, or already getting traffic
from.

That gives you the best keywords to aim for, now you need to get
them onto your website.
Getting the keywords onto your website
Take the list of important keywords you’ve identified and work out
which page of your website would be the best home for each
keyword.
Each page should only focus on one or two keywords.
Choose a page that is already about the keyword (you don’t want to
put “curtains” on a page about wallpaper).
Try to allocate the more important keywords (the ones which already
drive sales, and where there’s lots of traffic to be had) to pages that
are higher in your site hierarchy. That probably means top level
categories or the home page.
Once that is done, you’ll probably have between 5 and 20 pages
where you want to manually place the keywords for maximum
results. The rest of the site can have its keywords optimised
automatically; that’s one of the great things you can do with an
eCommerce website.
As well as being in the copy on the page, there are a few key places on
each page you want to include the keyword.
Title tag: The most important place for your keywords as far as a
search engine is concerned (consumers don’t really see this; see
“eCommerce MasterPlan: Want m...” below).

The Title tag should be relatively short and focused (under 75

characters) and have the keywords at the beginning (apart from the
home page, where the first words should be your brand name).
For example:
Ladies Red Shoes from the shoe shop
Meta Description: Not as critical, but you do need it to be different on
every page, so it is worth doing at the same time (consumers don’t see
this at all).

The Meta Description needs to be about the page, for example:

At the shoe shop, we stock a wide range of ladies shoes in red,
including boots, slingbacks, court shoes, and sandals. Order today
for free delivery in the UK.
H tags: These should be the headings in the copy on the page. Each
page needs one H1 tag, and then more H2s and H3s as necessary.
H1s are usually the category name on a category page, or the product
names on a product page, or the blog title on a blog post.
Alt text: Alt text is the alternative text for each image and should
describe the image.
Once they are all written, you need to put them in place on the
website. You might be able to do this via your CMS, (Content
Management System) but if not, your website builder will be able to
do it for you.
Automatic tagging
For this, you will almost certainly need to brief your website builder,
it should be a one-off task for them that, once done, will correctly set
up all new pages and products in the future.
The brief should cover the following:

The automatic tagging on the pages should also work for new
pages that are created. This should be a one-off exercise.
 If a tag is supplied manually, that should overwrite the
automatic tagging.
Alt text on all product images should be set as: “{product
name}”.
Title tag on all product pages should be set as “{product name}
– {category name} from the shoe shop”.
Title tag on all category pages should be set as “{category
name} from the shoe shop”.
Title tag on all other pages should be set as “{page name} from
the shoe shop”.
Meta Description on all product pages should be set as “At the
shoe shop we stock a wide range of {product name}, including
boots, slingbacks, court shoes, and sandals. Order today for
free delivery in the UK”.
Meta Description on all category pages should be set as “At
the shoe shop we stock a wide range of {product name}, for
women, men, and children. Order today for free delivery in the
UK”.
Meta Description on all other pages should be set as “{page
name}. At the shoe shop we stock a wide range of footwear,
including boots, slingbacks, court shoes, and sandals. Order
today for free delivery in the UK”.
OR Meta Description should lift the first X characters of
product/category/blog copy.

Making these changes will give the search engines a completely new
impression of your website. That may cause a big shift in SEO
performance within a week of the changes going live. That’s simply
because the search engines now properly understand your website
and are able to show it for the right searches, so you get traffic from
the right keywords leading to more sales.
Creating new pages and improving existing pages
Quick keyword and tag tweaks across the website will make an
improvement. But there’s more you can do.
You might find that the results of the keyword analysis lead you to
want to change some of the site’s structure and create new pages
where the biggest search opportunities are.
Or maybe you’ve found that the perfect page for a really important
keyword is very weak on content – maybe it’s a great product page
but with only one line of product description, or a category page with
no text content.
If this is the case – get it improved or created! If you find a lot of these
opportunities, then use the data from your keyword research to work
out which are the most important to do first.
Don’t forget to get the keywords in all the right places on these new
and improved pages.
Once all this is done, don’t think you can forget about your keywords.
You should review them every 6 to 12 months. Did you choose the
right ones? Did they bring in conversions? What new keywords
should be included in the research (new product lines, consumer
habits, etc.)?

Link-building SEO – Be Important

Once you’re correctly in the index and have the right keywords in all
the right places, you’re in a very solid position to start the ‘be
important’ part of SEO.
The work done so far has made sure the search engines like you and
understand you. Now it’s about getting ever more traffic from the
search engines by proving just how important your website is.
Links to your pages and your website are what the search engines use
to work out how important your site is and therefore what position it
deserves on the search results pages.
Yes, that is a very simplistic way to put it, and other things factor in,
but it is the core thing you need to understand to be successful with
growing your SEO traffic.
There are hundreds of ways to get links to your website. The most
important thing is to avoid the shady tactics that might earn you ‘bad’
links that Google will penalise your site for having. To minimise the
chances of getting ‘bad’ links and maximise the impact of the links you
get, focus on obtaining quality links. Those are the links you’d want
even if SEO didn’t exist.
Here’s some tactics to get great quality links.
Bloggers: Reach out to bloggers who write content about products
and businesses like yours and ask if they’d like to review your
products.
Suppliers and Partners: Ask the other businesses you work with if
they’d be willing to put a link to your site on their site. They might
even write a blog post about your business, or let you provide them
with a guest post written by your team that they post on their site for
you.
Competitors Links: Use a backlink analysis tool (like Moz, SEMRush, or
ahrefs.com) to identify the website linking to your competitors.
Approach the sites linking to them and ask them to link to you too.
Link bait content: The absolute purest way you can gain links is by
creating content that people want to link to.
Maybe you have particularly interesting or cool products that people
like to share with their friends? Or helpful and useful blog or video
content?
Expert viewpoint round-ups are a great way to get links from the
experts featured and others. For example, if you sell kitchenware, you
could contact a number of celebrity chefs for their top egg
recipe/kitchen gadget/spice and then publish all the responses in a
blog post. Connect on social media and it’ll give you something to
share there too.
Don’t forget to tell them once the blog is live.
PR: Getting your business written about in the press, or being
interviewed on a podcast are other great ways to get links.
The great thing about the ‘be important’ part of SEO is that a lot of
the links come naturally as a part of the other marketing activity you
undertake.

Just Google, or worry about others too?

Most search marketers focus on Google because it is the biggest: it
has over 80% of the search market in the UK and in the USA. Doing
well on Google will bring the most traffic and therefore the most
sales.
Google is also the most sophisticated search engine; it’s writing the
rule book. Anything you do to be better on Google will probably be
the same thing you need to do to be better on the other search
engines.
If you are looking at international sales, make sure you are focused on
the right search engine for that marketplace. In China, the biggest is
www.baidu.com, with about 75% of the market share; in Russia, it’s
www.yandex.com with about 60% of the market share.
There are also search engines that we don’t think of as search
engines. Amazon, eBay, YouTube – they’re all search engines with
their own algorithms and their own ways to get to the top. If these are
important platforms for your business, it’s worth doing some
research on how to optimise your content there too.
Quick hint – keywords are always important!

Further resources
There are a range of useful resources related to this book, including
lots about SEO, available for you at:
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/free.
Just register for the book support materials for this book and you’ll
get access to templates, expert training videos, case studies, and
much more.

6 https://searchengineland.com/daily-mail-seo-says-site-lost-big-after-june-google-update-
asks-community-for-help-317926
 2
Email Marketing
EMAIL MARKETING IS a fantastic way to communicate with those who
are interested in your business and products. Whether they’ve
bought from you or not, email is a powerful way to drive very high-
quality traffic to your website to get the next order.
Your email marketing activity is the bedrock on which the rest of your
marketing success is created.
Many of your other marketing methods will be synced with it
(advertising audiences, cross-channel campaigns), and your
promotional plan will revolve around it.
It should be one of your best-performing traffic sources with great
conversion rates and average order values.
The return on investment should be huge because the cost of email
software is low compared with the results you should be achieving.
As soon as you have a few people on your list, you can start using
some very cheap (or free) good-quality software to email your
customers.
As your list grows, upgrade your email service provider to maximise
the sales you get by going beyond the regular newsletter. Better
software and a larger list enables you send campaigns triggered by
customer behaviour (welcome campaign, abandoned baskets, or
post-purchase) and segment your list so you’re sending the right
message to the right person at the right time.
You should also be syncing your email marketing activity with your
other marketing channels to take performance to another level, such
as Welcome campaigns where the message is repeated on push
notifications and across Facebook and Google Ads.

What’s great about Email marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to make money in
eCommerce marketing. It’s powerful because:

You get results almost instantly – people will buy within

minutes of the email launching.
You are in total control – you are in control of the products,
promotions, and stories you are putting in front of people, and
you are in control of when it goes out and which customers get
the message. This means you have a lot of influence over what
the outcomes are; which products get bought, how much you
sell, and more.
You can target specific customer groups, turning First Time
Buyers into Repeat Buyers, or Enquirers into First Time
Buyers.
It should always be profitable – there are so many levels of
technology that you should always be able to find a good
software solution at a price that means you are making money.
It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is – email can
work well for you.

NOTE – This book is all about driving traffic, so we’re going to focus
on what to do once you’ve got people on your email list. But here’s
some quick tips to help you increase your email list.

1. Make sure you are always asking for an email address.

Have a sign-up form in the footer of your website, ask in your
physical stores (if you have them), and a pop up can be very
powerful on the website too.
2. Make sure your email sign-up is obvious and compelling.
Put it somewhere it’s going to be seen and make it easy to use
(so ask for as little information as possible). Then test different
incentives: prize draws, free downloads, free gifts – see what
works best for your business.

For more on growing your email list, get our list growth checklist at:
eCommercemasterPlan.com/free.
Or get a copy of my book Customer Persuasion7 which has 20 pages
devoted to email list growth.
Where does it fit in the Customer MasterPlan
model?

Email marketing comes into its own from Stage 3 onwards – once
you’ve got that all-important email address.
Email marketing strategies to use at each Stage of the Customer
MasterPlan model:

Business models where it’s super-powerful

Email marketing is useful for all eCommerce business where you’re
driving people to buy on your own website.
It is also particularly useful if you have a product with a lot of
information to relay, or you and your team have a lot of expertise to
share.
The bigger your database, the more ways you can use email to keep
customers active and buying, so it’s also super powerful for
businesses with big lists.

When doesn’t it work?

Email marketing doesn’t work if you don’t have data. If you don’t have
an email database, you need to start building one.
I’d like to be able to put here that it doesn’t work if you abuse it. And
certainly if you over-mail, the response will drop off, but it will take
months for it to become ineffective.
Not all email strategies will work for all businesses. When I work with
a business who says, “email doesn’t work for us”, it’s usually because
they haven’t yet uncovered the right strategy for them.
For example, if you sell a ‘need’ product that customers only need
once very few years (like washing machine parts), then newsletters
might not do a lot for you. But a welcome campaign to get the email
sign ups to buy, and a post-purchase campaign that helps them make
the repair and encourages them to share on social media how great
you were to deal with could be very valuable.

Cold emailing is not worth the effort

Response rates are low and prices are high, so you are unlikely
to recruit new customers cost-effectively.
Data quality is poor, and if you go for the cheap lists, you are
going to get bad data and mailings that are a waste of your
time.
You could mess up your emailing to your own list (your
deliverability), if you mail some cold data and three people on
Hotmail hit the “spam” button; you might not get any emails to
people using Hotmail for months. That could prove to be very
expensive.8

Objectives
It’s quite simple – email marketing is all about driving sales.
Every email you send is about getting another order. But sometimes
it might be a soft sell rather than a hard sell.
For example, an email in a post-purchase sequence to get a customer
to review a product they’ve purchased is about getting reviews that
persuade more customers to buy and getting the recipient more
engaged with the brand, and thus more open to buying again in the
future.
For example, an about us email in a Welcome campaign is about
building trust with the customer to increase their likelihood of buying
in the future.
As you grow the list size and complexity of your email activity, you
can also focus campaigns on increasing AOV, activating Enquirers,
and much much more.

What to measure
From day one, email is all about the money. But to get the most out of
it, you also need to track open and click rates to improve response
further.

Below are the key metrics you need to be measuring for your email
marketing; most of them are in the table above:

Delivered: The number of emails that reach the recipients.

Opened: The number of recipients who have opened the
email.
Open rate: Opened divided by delivered.
Clicked: The number of recipients who have clicked on the
links in the email.
Click rate: Clicked divided by opened.
Orders: The number of orders placed by those who clicked on
the email.
Conversion rate: Orders divided by clicked.
Sales: The value of the sales placed by those who clicked on
the email.
AOV: Average Order Value. Sales divided by orders.
 Sales per delivered: Sales divided by delivered

Sales-per-delivered is a great stat for comparing performance across

different emails and different sequences.

How it works
The job of every marketing email you send is to get the customer to
the website.
If they don’t click to the website, they can’t buy.
There are several elements that you control in email marketing and
each has an impact on the performance of every single marketing
email you send:

Your Email Service Provider: Gets email into the inbox.

From name: Builds trust and recognition.
Subject line: Gets the email opened.
Content and structure: Gets the customer to the website.

You need to get these correct for every email you send; they form the
bedrock of your email performance and, if they are not right, your
email marketing will not drive the volume of sales it should.
Then there are the elements you can use to take performance to the
next level once your list is big enough:

Content Personalisation: Altering the content in an email

based on who will be receiving it.
e.g. Previous buyers of skiwear get the skiwear sale image,
previous buyers of hiking gear get the hiking sale image,
everyone else gets a generic sale image.
Segmentation: Defines which customer gets which email. e.g.
Previous buyers of skiwear get a weekly newsletter all about
your skiwear range; everyone else gets an all-product-
categories weekly newsletter.
Triggered campaigns: A pre-created series of emails that
automatically gets sent to a customer after they do something.
e.g. A customer who just purchased a skiwear item triggers the
 skiwear post-purchase campaign, meaning they get a series of
emails covering how to physically prepare for the slopes and
how to look after your gear.

The best email result I ever achieved was when I worked for UK
retailer Past Times. We created a segment of customers who had
previously bought fairy garden ornaments and sent them an email
specifically about a new range of fairy garden ornaments.
The email only went to about 1,500 customers, but the sales-per-
delivered was off the scale. This was a niche product, so segmenting
off the 1,500 customers to receive their own message meant we
could send the rest of the database (80,000) a more general message,
thus getting a better response from them than we’d have achieved if
we’d sent the niche message to everyone.
Of course, we also had the software, hosting, from name, and subject
line which all helped, but it was getting the content and segmentation
perfect that made the performance so strong.

Your Email service provider (ESP)

It’s critical to choose the right method for launching your emails.
Which ESP you choose will have a major impact on the performance
of your email marketing. That’s because they have a big impact on
your deliverability, but also because the functionality they give you
and how easy it is to use will impact on how sophisticated your
campaign gets.
ESPs come in very different price brackets, so you need to choose the
one that fits your needs and budget now, but also gives you the future
functionality you think you’re going to need. Changing your email
marketing provider is a big project, so you want to try and chose the
right ESP early on.
Many ESPs now increase their price as your email list size increases,
or as you start to use more functionality. So, your sales should grow
as your costs grow, meaning email marketing should always have a
positive ROI (profit), and that you can start on the best one for your
future business.
Getting into the inbox (aka deliverability) is based on how companies
like Hotmail and Gmail view the black box (IP address) and from
address (@email.yourbrand.com) that your email comes from. Their
point of view is primarily based on how they have previously seen you
and your black box perform — how many times their customers have
marked your email as spam, and how recipients respond to your
emails.
Make sure you ask any future ESP how good their deliverability is,
and how they manage it.

From Name
Thankfully, from names are much more straightforward than ESPs
and Deliverability.
Your from name is important because it has a big impact on whether a
customer opens your emails. The subject line will be the reason
someone opens, but if the from name is wrong, the customer won’t
get as far as the subject line – they’ll just pass over and delete.
The job of the from name is to be recognised and trusted by your
customers; it’s the constant part of your email marketing like the
header of your website, or the logo on your shop front.
The from name you should go with will usually be your company
name, because that is your brand, which customers have the
relationship with. For some businesses, though, it might be the
founder’s name.
If your product range is quite vast or you email on very different
topics, you might want to have a from name that changes a bit. Etsy is
a website that has a number of email communication types that
customers can sign up to; to make it easy for the customers, each has
a different from name:

Etsy Success is advice on how to sell more.

Etsy Dudes is Etsy products for men.
Etsy Finds is the daily cool-products-found-on-Etsy email.
Etsy Labs learn from other sellers on Etsy.

Choose your from name carefully then stick with it.

Subject Line & Preview Pane Text
The subject line (and any preview pane text the recipient can see in
their inbox) has one job: to get your email opened.
The best subject lines are usually either intriguing or obvious:

Intriguing = “It’s All Gone Tribal”

Obvious = “Sale Now On – Save up to 70%”

Your subject line also needs to attract the right people — those who
are going to be interested in the content and buy.
The Preview Pane text doesn’t always appear, so don’t hide your main
message in it! But do make sure it gives the recipient more reasons to
open your email.
You can find countless blogs and white papers on what does and
doesn’t work in subject lines. These are useful for one reason and one
reason only: to give you some ideas for what you might want to test.
There isn’t a perfect subject line out there; there is only the best
subject line you can use at a given time to advertise a given story to a
given data segment.
Start working out some rules for your business; key things to test are:

Case – Title Case (where the initial letters are all capitals), or
Sentence case (where just the first letter is a capital), or lower
case (not a capital in sight).
Include your brand name? It is probably already in the from
name.
Length – long or short? Every subject line should be visible all
at once, so you do need to keep it relatively short.
How obscure can you go?
Personalisation – does performance improve when you
include the recipient’s name in the subject line?

If your list is big enough, you can run a test for every email you send;
separate out some of the data (at least 10k), split it in half and send
each half a different subject line. A few hours later, send the rest of
the data using the one that worked best.
If you are going to test subject lines, select your winner based on the
performance of the whole email, not just the open rate.
We want the right people opening, not just anyone. So look at all the
stats.
Sales per delivered is critical – the total sales driven by the email,
divided by the number of people the email went to.
For example:

Even though Subject Line B had a higher open rate, Subject Line A
drove a better return, with a sales per delivered of 36.4p vs. 31.5p. So
roll out A.

Content and Structure: The body of the email

Once people have opened the email you want to get them to the
website.
That means you need to design the structure of your email to
encourage customers to click. It needs to both make it easy for them
to click and encourage the click. There are some things that work well
in pretty much every eCommerce business’s emails:

Make sure you have some compelling text links at the top of
the email: this might be your category headings.
Quick link at the very top of the email – usually this would be a
line of text repeating the subject line (or is similar to it) that
links directly to the page on the website about the subject.
This enables the reader to quickly get to the thing they’re
interested in.
For bonus points, put this text at the very top left of the email
so that it appears in any preview pane the recipient might have
set up on their emails.
 Most recipients will click on the content at the top or at the
bottom of the email, so put your best products/message at the
top or the bottom and don’t spend too long building up the
middle.
Do include prices of the products you feature, and if they are
on sale or on offer, show the before price too.
Make anything that can be linkable a link: prices, product
name, images, all of it. BUT be thumb friendly! Many of your
customers will be viewing your emails on a mobile phone, so
don’t put links to different places too close together or make
them too small.
Trust-building elements are important too. Include a customer
review, or your overall review score, awards, or places your
business was been featured. (more on this in Chapter 17)

Text is good in emails because not everyone downloads the images.

Having a good balance between text and images can also help get
your emails delivered.
There are a few other things that are good/legally essential to include
in every email you send; this is the content you put “above” and
“below” the main body of the email.

Once you believe you have a good email designed and ready to send,
you need to check how it renders – this means how it looks in
different email systems and mobile handsets. Your email is just some
HTML coding that pulls words, images, and links together in a certain
way, and that HTML is open to interpretation. The different email
systems will interpret it in different ways, so you need to know how
well it is being interpreted before you send it to your customers.
Most ESPs have an emulating engine built into the software so you
can quickly check how your email looks everywhere it’s received. But
it’s also a good idea to check how it looks in the real world.
To do this, set up an account with each of the systems (Hotmail,
Outlook, Gmail) your customers use to receive your emails and send a
test version of your email to each of the accounts. Login to see how it
looks on mobile and desktop and with and without the images
downloaded.
When you are checking it, you want to look out for the following
things:

Does it look how I want it to?

Is it obvious what the customer needs to do next?
How did the subject line look – was it too long?

Then change your email however you need to and re-test the
rendering until you are happy.

Newsletters
The regular newsletter is where most start with their email
marketing.
It’s the email you send to everyone every week/fortnight/month to
drive sales and keep them updated with what you’re doing.
NOTE: There’s no perfect day to send it on, and no perfect frequency.
I recommend sending at least monthly, and if sales are good, up it to
fortnightly, and if sales are good, up it to weekly.
Most business start out with the oh-shit-it’s-email-day-what-are-we-
going-to-send approach, each week scrabbling around to find
something to say.
With such an approach, you’re probably driving sales, but there’s a
better way to do it that will drive more sales and reduce your stress
levels.
It’s called planning…
There should be a flow of stories pre-planned on your marketing
promotions calendar9. Some may be simple one-offs like “New Season
Online”, or “20% Off Beach Toys”; others will be a more complex
series of emails like the Christmas Campaign, or Sale.
Email marketing success comes from how well your stories flow
through the year, and how well each email explains its story. The
story impacts on the subject line, the content, and possibly even the
data selection.
As counterintuitive as it sounds, not all your emails should be trying
to sell, and this is especially true if conveying your brand or proving
you know the most about your products is part of your overall
business strategy.
Some of your emails should be purely about news or knowledge (not
that they can’t feature products, but the main message shouldn’t be
“buy this”), so it might be about a room a customer has created with
your paints, your clothes being worn by a key celebrity, or about what
inspired the product range.
These softer emails build up a better relationship with your
customers; they make them warm to your business more and trust
you more.
Of course, there is no reason why you shouldn’t have an element of
this in every email you send, but try sending just one non-sales email
each quarter.

Triggered sequences
Triggered sequences are where email marketing gets really exciting
because they enable you do some really clever marketing that, once
set up, just keeps delivering the sales for you week in, week out.
Each triggered sequence is a series of emails (a sequence) that is send
automatically (triggered) each time a customer does something that
makes them eligible to receive it.
Whilst all businesses should have a broadcast program, the right
trigger sequence varies from business to business regarding both
what to build and what content to put into it. There are differences
because of what you need to say, how many customers you have, and
how they buy.
Common triggered sequences include:

Performance enhancers
The first step to improve email performance is to take control of your
newsletter plans.
The second step is to build triggered sequences.
The third step is to embrace personalisation and segmentation in the
way that works for your business.
As with triggered sequences, there’s no set of personalisation and
segmentation that’s going to work for all eCommerce stores.
These two tactics offer a lot of different things you can do, so it can be
a little overwhelming.
Whenever marketing options seem overwhelming – go back to the
basics:
What are you trying to achieve? Can personalisation or segmentation
help you do that? And if so, how?
Personalisation
Personalising text in emails is available out of the box in all email
systems. It means you can add “Dear -___” in your emails, or put the
recipient’s name in the subject line.
Personalisation can be used for much more than just that. How much
you can do with it depends on what data you have and if you can link
it with your email database.
It’s personalisation that powers Abandoned basket sequences –
supplying the information about what the customer left in their
basket.
Links, text, images can all be personalised so that, if you have the
technology, it can be a very easy way to send more relevant emails to
all your customers without having to create lots of separate emails
for different segments.
Product personalisation is a frequently used technique to increase
email newsletter performance. The same email is sent to everyone,
but there’s a strip of products in the message that’s populated based
on the recipient’s browsing behaviour or past purchases. This is very
low-effort, but gives some great results.

Segmentation
Segmentation is a great way to improve the performance of your
newsletters.
You can use it to track performance of different customer groups to
better understand how they react to your emails. Maybe you split
each send into:
 Enquirers
First-time buyers
Repeat buyers

Then you can test mailing each group more or less frequently, sending
different offers or highlighting different products to each group.
You should also use segmentation to suppress inactive data – the
“emotionally dormant”.
If someone hasn’t opened any of your emails in over six months, stop
sending to them. They have effectively unsubscribed, and these are
the people most likely to mark you as spam — not a good thing!
You might want to mail the emotionally dormant once every three
months or so to try to reactivate them. Do this when you have a really
strong offer – e.g. January Sale, Black Friday, a Free Delivery
Weekend, or whatever message gives you the biggest response each
quarter.
It’s likely you’ll find the ‘emotionally dormant’ make up 30-50% of
your list; if you’re paying your ESP on the volume you send, this data
cleansing will be a big cost saving. In my experience of doing this, it’s
never made a negative impact on sales either, so it’s a great way to
improve profitability AND customer experience all in one go!
Find out more about this in Chapter 13.

Further resources
There are a range of useful resources related to this book, including
lots about Email Marketing, available for you at
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/free. Just register for the book support
materials for this book and you’ll get access to templates, expert
training videos, case studies, and much more.

7 Find out more at eCommerceMasterPlan.com/Books

8 Please note this is not a fact, just an educated assumption about how email is managed
by Hotmail, Gmail etc., etc.
9 You can download a promotional calendar template and access training on how to use it
at eCommerceMasterplan.com/free
Case study: Embracing the right software
enables fast improvements to sales
Dixxon Flannel sell limited edition flannel shirts to customers across
the USA. Every product they release is a limited edition; releasing up
to 3 sets of new products per month, many sell out within the first
two hours of being available.
The business began in 2013 and initially focused on growth via social
media channels. However, by 2016 it was clear that money was being
left on the table because communications with past customers and
those who’d just missed out on the latest release weren’t happening
regularly enough.
Chris Valleley was brought on to solve this problem, and the first
thing he did was to change from an email marketing software that
was clunky and hard to use to Omnisend so he could speed up the
segmentation, design and automation workload.
For the first test of the new email system, they sent one email 12
hours before the product launch was due to happen, and one when
the new products went live. The launch was a huge success and the
email activity saw open rates over 30% and click rates of 12%.
After this first success, they’ve been testing and increasing the
number of emails sent about each launch, and now 15-25% of
revenue per month is coming from the launch email promotions.
That’s included an email two weeks after a launch featuring the
products that haven’t yet sold out, which is only delivered to
customers who haven’t bought the specific garments, or very similar
ones from previous launches. When the email was sent, the product
was 75-80% sold, and a few days after the email went, all the items
had gone.
With the newsletter program up and running, they believed email
automation could help turn more enquirers into first time buyers. To
do this, they created an abandoned baskets sequence using all the
settings in the Omnisend abandoned basket template — making it
very fast and foolproof to set up. According to Dixxon Flannel’s Chris
Valleley the sequence generates “a good amount of money per month
that we weren’t getting previously”.
Hear Chloë’s interview with Chris Valleley of Dixxon Flannel at
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/podcast
 3
Search Engine Advertising –
Keywords
LIKE SEO, SEARCH Engine Advertising is about getting traffic from
search engines – traffic that brings you sales. The difference is you
pay for every bit of traffic you get and there’s no waiting to get this
traffic. Set up your ad, pick your keywords and how much you want to
pay, turn it on, and you have traffic.
Search Engine Advertising is a type of PPC (Pay Per Click)
advertising, so you pay for each click to your website.
This chapter is all about Keyword Advertising on Search Engines
(using either Google Ads or Microsoft Ads); elsewhere in the book,
you’ll find chapters about other forms of online advertising including
Products Ads, Remarketing, and Social Media advertising. Here we’re
going to focus on what you can do with Google Ads, as it’s the
platform with the most traffic for most readers.
Many a successful eCommerce business has been grown using
keyword advertising. There are now many more ways to do online
ads, but keyword ads remain a rich source of sales if you can get it
right.

What’s great about keyword advertising

Keyword Advertising can be a really effective way to quickly build a
stream of quality traffic to your website.

You get traffic really fast: You don’t need to wait as with SEO,
or until you have a big enough email database. As long as you
can afford the clicks, you can get traffic to your site within
minutes.
You are in total control: You select who sees your ads, you set
how much you are willing to pay, and you can stop it at any
time with immediate effect.
 It is very flexible: Changing things is very easy and the
changes happen almost immediately, so you can react to
changing situations fast, such as products going out of stock.

Yes, it can take a few months to find the right strategy and, as
competition increases, the costs do go up. But it is a marketing
method of phenomenal opportunity.

Where does it fit in the Customer MasterPlan

model?

Keyword Advertising can be deployed effectively at all stages of the

Customer MasterPlan model… it all depends on how you use it.

Business models where it’s super-powerful

There’s a keyword advertising strategy for every business, but it’s a
case of finding the right one for you.
Those for whom it’s super-powerful are businesses where there are
plenty of keywords and phrases that are used by searchers who are
ready to buy.
Broadly speaking that means, if you sell needs, it’s more likely to work
than if you sell wants.
 Needs: Replacement washing machine door, new fridge, new
school shoes.
Wants: Fashion, fiction books, chocolate.
If the search terms customers use are highly linked to your product,
then it’s also more likely to be effective for you. If you sell Dyson
vacuums, it’s easy to come up with a list of keywords to drive traffic
to your Dyson pages, and your site is going to be very relevant for
customers searching for Dyson vacuums.

When it doesn’t work

Keyword ads work less well for those selling wants rather than needs,
and those where there are not many keywords with a high correlation
to your products.
If you sell your own range of silver jewellery, it’s very hard to find
keywords that will work for you. One person searching for “silver
amber necklace” is looking for a small pendant on a thin chain for less
than £30, but another using the same search chain is looking for a
chunky amber necklace to complete their Viking re-enactment outfit
and has a budget for £150.
That doesn’t mean keyword ads should be avoided; it just means such
businesses will be focusing on selected keyword ad strategies
(probably brand and RLSA) and spending less time and money on
keyword ads.
Keyword ads can also be hard to make work when there is a lot of
competition for your keywords, because they increase the cost per
click which may put bidding beyond your means.
It can be challenging to get it to work for more expensive items if
cheaper versions exist, since customers tend to use the same
keywords whether they’re looking to spend a lot or a little. So you’ll
end up buying a lot of traffic that doesn’t want your products.

Objectives
The majority of your Keyword Advertising will be focused on
recruiting new customers, but it also has a role to play in making sure
past customers buy again.
Either way, it’s all about driving sales.
Given you’re paying for every click, it’s really important to watch the
costs too.
The good news is that the reporting tools enable you to tie every
penny you spend back to the marketing that caused the cost, which
makes managing your performance very doable. Before you can do
that, you need to set a profitability target.
You should set a profitability target before you turn on any ads. It
may vary between different Ad Strategies depending on which
customers you’re targeting.
There are two ways to easily calculate a profitability target for your
Keyword Advertising activity: CPA and ROAS.

CPA, Cost-Per-Acquisition
This is the total cost divided by the number of orders.
CPA = cost / orders
It’s a really simple calculation to use, and you can add a column that
works it out for you at all levels of Google Ads reporting – campaign,
Adgroup, audience, keyword, ads etc., etc. (the Column is called “Cost
/ all conv.”).
Then you can quickly see how everything is performing in your
account.

There is one problem with using CPA as your primary metric — it

doesn’t take into account fluctuations in the average order value. In
the above example, both campaigns are hitting the CPA, but B is far
more profitable than A because the AOV is higher.
If your average order value doesn’t vary across your Keyword
Advertising campaigns, then CPA is going to be a great KPI for you.
But if your AOV varies a lot, then you need use a different KPI.

ROAS, Return on Advertising Spend

Also referred to as “row-ass”
ROAS is superior to CPA because it does takes into account the
amount of money you’ve actually received, so it deals with changing
AOVs for you. That makes it a much more accurate way to measure
performance.
ROAS is the total sales value divided by the total cost.
ROAS = sales value / cost
You can also add it as a column to any Google Ads report – just find
the column called “Conv. Value / cost”

Working out your target CPA or ROAS

CPA and ROAS have a failing in common, which is that they only take
into account the click costs, excluding the cost of the products and
overheads (salaries, office space, how much it costs to pack it, store it,
ship it, or manage the Keyword Advertising account).
Therefore, you need to take all these costs into account when you
work out the target CPA or ROAS for each campaign in your account.

Each sale the website generates is split three ways to cover:

 the amount the products in the order cost you to buy in /
make.
a contribution to company overheads.
profit (what is left).

You need to decide how much of the profit you’re happy to spend on
clicks to get the order. Some businesses are happy to spend more
than their profit because they know they’ll get additional purchases
from the customer in the future; other businesses want to make a
profit on every order.
Once you know that, you can work out your CPA / ROAS target.
For example, if you’re happy to spend half the potential profit on
clicks then:

What to measure
Sales value costs and either CPA or ROAS are your key numbers for
keyword advertising.
Understanding and tracking the numbers that sit underneath these
will help you work out how to improve your CPA / ROAS when you
need to.

These are the key metrics you need to be measuring for your
keyword advertising; most are in the table above:

Impressions: Number of times your ads are seen.

Clicks: When someone sees your ad and clicks on it – taking
them through to your website (this is what you pay for).
CTR %: Click-through rate, the percentage of those who have
seen your ad that have clicked on it.
 Cost: The total cost of clicks for that line of the report.
Cost per Click (CPC): The average amount you’ve paid for
each click.
Orders: Number of orders placed.
Value: Sales value of the orders placed
AOV: Average order value. Sales divided by Orders.
Conversion Rate: Orders divided by clicks.
CPA or ROAS: To measure profitability. (See above)

You should use reports like this to compare the performance of your
PPC activity at all levels; from comparing Google AdWords and
Microsoft adCenter to comparing individual keywords or adverts.
If you are running your PPC accounts well, you will be constantly
optimising your activity, so it’s really important to look at the results
over lots of different time periods. I like to look at the last month and
the last three months simultaneously, and also to compare what’s
happening now with what happened during the same period last year

How it works
You set up an account with one of the Keyword Advertising services
(Google Ads or Bing Ads), create your adverts (text with a link to your
website), select how you want those ads targeted (your keywords,
geographic areas, and any RLSA settings), and how much you’re
happy to pay.
Your ads are then shown and each time someone clicks on the ad you
are charged the agreed fee.
Keyword Advertising accounts are VERY easy to set up (under 30
minutes, usually), but take a lot of work to get right.

Before you turn anything on…

As you set up your account, it’s really tempting to just turn on some
ads – don’t.
Before you turn any ads on you need:
 To know your profitability target (see above).
Your conversion tracking to be working.
Your strategy to be in place.

Getting the conversion tracking working is essential because without

it you won’t know how your adverts are performing.
To set it up, you’ll need to put some code onto your website’s order
confirmation page. The code should pass back to your ad’s software
(Google Ads) that an order has been placed, and what the value of
that order is.
Instructions on how to do this are easy to find in your account, and if
you can’t set it up, your website builder should be able to do it for
you.
Once that’s working, you can start planning your activity.
As an eCommerce business, you don’t want any-old traffic; you want
quality traffic – traffic that’s going to buy from you, and that you can
afford to pay for.
To get that quality traffic you need to do 3 things right:

1. Choose your strategy.

2. Set up the account structure – campaigns, keywords, and ads.
3. Optimise!

The right strategy

For each campaign you set up, you should be clear on:

Why you are running these ads.

How much you can afford to spend on these ads for each sale
you drive (CPA / ROAS).
Who you want to put these ads in front of and what you want
them to do when they see the ad.

This might look something like this:

As with all marketing, unless you know what you’re hoping to achieve
and how much you can afford to spend, you’re not going to be able to
do it well.
I’d recommending including the objectives in each campaign name so
you can’t forget.

Set up the right account structure

Something you want to get right when you start with Keyword
Advertising is to get your account set up correctly. (The following is
based on Google Ads structure, but Bing Ads works in a very similar
way.)

Working out your Campaign strategy has started the process of how
to structure your account. A few other things to bear in mind:
Campaign structure
Each strategy should be in a different campaign. Being able to see all
your strategies at campaign level means you can quickly see which
aren’t meeting targets and decide where to focus your optimisation.
If you’ve got Adgroups for multiple strategies in one campaign, you’re
going to spend a lot of time compiling reports to work out things that,
with a bit of forethought, you can get with one click.
You’re going to be checking on your Keyword Ads at least once a
week to see what needs optimising. Setting your account up in the
right way makes this a lot easier – easier to quickly see which areas
need your attention, and easier to make the right changes.
Campaign-level only settings
There are certain critical settings that can only be set at the campaign
level, or which make life a LOT easier if you only ever set at Campaign
level.
These change from time to time – so double-check them before
making the decision – but broadly include

budgets (how much you’ll pay per month/day),

devices you’re targeting (mobile? desktop?),
type of campaign (keywords, shopping, content network, etc.),
geographic targeting.

Adgroup structure
Campaigns should be structured to make the account easier to
manage; Adgroups should be structured to maximise performance.
Each Adgroup should be full of very similar keywords that can all use
the same ads and link to the same landing page. This makes the
account much easier to use and to optimise and also increases our
quality score (which brings costs down).
The Quality Score (QS) is used by Microsoft and Google to assess the
quality of your adverts. It is a score out of 10, given at keyword level;
10 is best and to get 10, your keywords, ad, and landing page need to
be in harmony.
For example, the keywords in this Adgroup should have a good
quality score:

But in this Adgroup will have a bad quality score:

Quality Score helps to determine where your ads appear, so a good

QS means you will get a higher position (and more traffic) for less
money.
A strong Quality Score is really important if you want to get the most
traffic and best-quality traffic with your click budget. All the
optimisation tactics we are discussing in this chapter support
improving your QS.
It all starts with Adgroups set up well.
Now that you’ve worked out what your structure is going to be, it’s
time to start getting everything set up. The next two sections focus
on the bread and butter of your Keyword Advertising campaigns –
Keywords and Adverts.
Keywords
Which keywords you chose and how you use them is a big part of how
successful you will be on Adwords.
After all, it’s the keywords which determine who gets to see your ads.
Above we looked at how best to group them in Adgroups, but how do
you select them in the first place? There are 10,000s of keywords you
*could* bid on.
Start small: As tempting as it is to set up hundreds of keywords and
turn them all on, I recommend starting small and expanding the list of
keywords as the results come in. ‘Following the money’ by building
out the keyword areas that show the most potential.
For example, if your bestselling products are thin wardrobes, you’d
start with an Adgroup with one keyword: thin wardrobe.
Once it’s live, watch the Search Terms Report to see what search
terms people are actually using AND which are converting.

The good keywords you find should either be added into the Adgroup
(for example thin bedroom wardrobe) or be added to a new Adgroup
all on their own (if one of the keywords was narrow wardrobe, that
would be added to a new Adgroup all about narrow wardrobes).
If the thin wardrobes Adgroup performs well, you’d create new
Adgroups with keyword groups that focus on other features of the
thin wardrobes. Maybe a set for each wardrobe width (30cm
wardrobe, 50cm wardrobe, etc.), or a set to focus on finishes (thin
pine wardrobe, thin oak wardrobe).
If the Adgroups about your thin wardrobes don’t work well, move on
to do the same thing with another product.
By starting small, you are able to make decisions based on actual
performance data. Because it’s a small list of keywords, you’ll be
spending less money and have more time to optimise.
Control your negatives: When looking at the search terms report, you’ll
also see completely irrelevant search queries. Negative keywords are
how you fix these errors and avoid spending money on clicks from
people not looking for your products.

Sticking with the thin wardrobe example you might find these ‘bad’
keywords:

Free thin wardrobe

Narnia wardrobe costume for thin person

Rather than add the whole of each search query to your negative
keyword list, try to add individual words that will eradicate a whole
host of irrelevant search queries. With the above, I’d add free and
Narnia; that way, our ads won’t appear in front of anyone using a
search query that includes either free or Narnia.
You’re going to add most of your negative keywords at Adgroup level,
but some negative keywords deserve to be used across your whole
account (free is a case in point). In this case, add it at the Campaign
level, and don’t forget to add it to all campaigns.
Check for negatives daily when you first put keywords live, and
weekly after that.
Split out brand: One of the oldest questions in PPC is this — should you
bid on your own name? The short answer is yes.

Being in first position and having the paid ad gives you much
more of the screen, thus increasing the chances of being
clicked on.
Some people click paid ads; some click non-paid.
It’s not very expensive – you should be paying a lot less than
 10p per click and the ROI should be huge. So, it’s a fairly cheap
insurance policy to make sure your customers find your
website.

But if you are going to bid on your brand terms, do it in a separate

campaign and report on it separately. A brand campaign will often
have a CPA under £1 – that’s a phenomenally good performance. You
don’t want that making your overall results look better than they are.
The keywords in your brand Adgroup should include your brand
name, your website address, and common misspellings: both phonetic
and typos. At eCommerce MasterPlan, we bid on keywords such as:
ecommerce masterplan, e-commerce masterplan, ecommerce
blueprint, ecmp, Chloë thomas, etc.
Try to keep brand terms out of your non-brand campaigns. If you see
them coming up in the search terms report, then it may be
worthwhile adding your brand as a negative to those campaigns and
creating a separate campaign to focus on {brand name} {product
category} keywords.
Match Types: Keyword match types are a fundamental part of
optimising your keyword advertising.
Start at broad. If a keyword performs well, test it as the other match
types too, because you’ll get a different response from each.
It’s perfectly normal to have red dress, “red dress” and [red dress] all
running in one Adgroup and driving conversions.
It’s also fine to realise that only [red dress] works and have an
Adgroup with only [red dress] in it.
Adverts
Once the keywords have done their job to get you in front of the right
people, it’s the job of your adverts to make the right people click.
Text Ad Structure: Adtext has evolved a lot in recent years, but it still
boils down to three fundamental parts.
In each Adgroup, the ads should reflect the keywords – if it’s your
‘narrow wardrobe’ Adgroup, the ads should include the word ‘narrow’
but not the word ‘thin’.
Beyond that, there’s a lot of testing to find the perfect Adtext for
each Adgroup.
Generally, I recommend getting the keyword optimisation right
before starting on the Adtext testing; once you’re ready for testing
the ads, the first things you should be testing are:

Only test one of these at a time within each Adgroup. When you learn
something that it is possible to roll out, do that, but check that
performance really does improve across the account; don’t just
assume it will.
Landing pages: The layout of an eCommerce site restricts how much
you can change your landing pages. After all, if you are bidding on
“Trousers”, you want to link to the trousers category – there’s not
much choice beyond that. But where you do have options, it’s always
good to test them; see which traffic converts best on each page.
Ad Extensions: One of the biggest developments in keywords ads
have been Ad Extensions. A whole host of things you can set up that
Google will add as it sees fit to your adverts.
Here they appear as one-liners:
And in this example together they take up more space than the main
ad:

Commonly used extensions include:

Sitelink extensions – extra links to help the clicker get to the

right place on your site faster.
Callout extensions – like sitelink extensions without the link,
so a great way to provide extra detail.
Location extensions – great if you have a physical store.
Call extensions – adds your phone number to the ad to make it
easy for mobile users to phone you.
Price extensions – add your products and pricing to the ad.
Promotion extensions – add a coupon code or deal to your ad.

Different extensions are set up in different ways, and some only

appear when your ad is in specific positions on the search results
page. Oh, and Google controls whether or not they appear at all. All
you can do is set them up and keep your fingers crossed.10
I’ve seen ad extensions create really great performance
improvements, and I’ve also seen them add a LOT of cost without
necessarily bringing in any extra sales.
If you’re going to use them… make sure you optimise them.
Optimisation
Where your ads appear and how much you pay for your traffic is
constantly changing because consumers change their habits and
other advertisers change their ad settings.
That means you need to be constantly keeping an eye on your
keyword advertising.
At a minimum, you should be looking in each week to check that the
performance is still in line with your targets, to deal with any
problems, and capitalise on any new opportunities.
You can’t just put a Google Ads account live and ignore it; do that and
you will be wasting money.
You can get the set-up perfect, chose the right keywords, write
amazing Adtext, and still fail if you don’t optimise.
How to optimise
To make your PPC successful, you must optimise – continuously.
The optimisation process never ends and is particularly intense for
the first few months after you go live or make major changes.
Please do not turn it on and leave it!!
The job of optimisation is to tweak and change your account in order
to hit your CPA / ROAS targets. At its most basic, it means:

Identifying the activity that is failing to meet the target and do

less of it.
Identifying the activity that is performing ahead of target and
do more of it.

There are lots of levels and areas to look at while optimising:

campaign, Adgroup, keyword, extensions, landing pages, and more, so
it’s important to fully understand what is happening before
optimising badly. For example:
Our Target CPA = £20
Our Women’s Campaign is performing at CPA = £40
Should we turn it off?
Let’s look deeper:
Within the Women’s Campaign, all Adgroups have a CPA under £20,
apart from the Jeans Adgroup, which is at £60.
Should we turn the Jeans Adgroup off?
No, let’s look deeper:
Within the Jeans Adgroup, we have 10 keywords; 5 of those are
performing within the target, 4 have yet to drive a sale, but we’ve
only spent £10 on them. The problem is the keyword “Jeans” which is
achieving a CPA of £70.
By looking deeper, we have identified that the only issue in the
campaign is the keyword “Jeans”. The only thing we need to do is
make changes to that keyword, turn it off, or lower the bid.
Optimising up and down
Optimising PPC is one area where no matter how many hours and
years you spend doing it, you’re always learning – I can’t fit all that in
one book! What I can provide you with, though, is this handy guide to
the most common forms of optimisation – understand these and
you’re far ahead of most PPC account owners.

These are the most important ways to optimise your account. Take
the time to master them.
Stay in control of your testing
The danger with PPC is that there’s so much to test you just go test
crazy and have so many tests running that you can’t work out what’s
causing any good or bad results.
To control this, keep a record of what you are testing (as simple as a
Word document or actual notepad) and remember to check it.
It takes a while to optimise an account and during that time you will
spend a lot of click-cost testing. To avoid this, test and optimise some
of your planned activity and only turn on more once you have that
optimised. The more you spend, the faster you’ll optimise, so limiting
the number of tests will speed up your learning.
If you need to drive 1,000 clicks through an Adgroup to optimise it,
the total cost of those clicks is £500 (at 50p per click) and if your
budget is only £200 per month, you are going to do much better if you
spend months 1 and 2 getting one Adgroup right. By month 3, you’ll
be driving sales pretty effectively. Then you can start the
optimisation process again with Adgroup 2. This also means you can
factor in what you learnt with Adgroup 1, so it should be quicker and
cheaper to optimise Adgroup 2.

RLSA, Remarketing Lists for Search Advertising

RLSA is one of my favourite Google Ads tools. It stands for
“Remarketing Lists for Search Advertising” and that’s exactly what it
does – enables you to use your remarketing audiences to improve
your keyword advertising.
That means you can set up an Adgroup so that your ads are only seen
when someone from a specific audience searches for the keywords in
that Adgroup. To put it another way, you can decide what keywords
to bid on at different stages of the Customer MasterPlan model, so
long as there are at least 1,000 people in the relevant audience.
Setting up an RLSA Adgroup
The good news is that it’s almost exactly the same as setting up any
other Adgroup…
Campaign: To make things easy to set up and manage, put RLSA
Adgroups targeting the same audience in the same campaign. For
example, one campaign for Site Visitors who’ve never bought,
another campaign for those who’ve bought in the last 6 months.
Keywords: Set these up in just the same way as you set them up for
any other Adgroup.
Adtext & Extensions: Set these up in just the same way as you set them
up for any other Adgroup.
BUT bear in mind you are not allowed to make it clear in the Adtext
how you’ve selected the audience – so no “Come back”, “30% off your
second purchase”, “We know you like trainers”.
Also, when it comes to the extensions, chose the ones that will be
most useful to the audience you’re targeting. If you’re targeting First
Time Buyers, you might not need extensions for your Delivery and
Returns policies.
Audience: This is where the essential difference is. If you don’t set this
bit up right, it’s not an RLSA campaign.
You can define the audience at Adgroup or Campaign level. The
process to do it is exactly the same.
Go to the “Audiences” section and select the audience you want to
use for the Adgroup/Campaign. When you set this up, you MUST
select the “Targeting” option.

Ideas for successful RLSA marketing

There are so many different ways you can use RLSA to improve your
keyword advertising performance. Here’s some of my favourites:
 When Google Ads are too expensive (like in the jewellery
example above), focus all your keyword advertising on RLSA
audiences.
When existing customers are buying from the competition
because you can’t afford to bid on the big category search
terms (like ‘wardrobe’, ‘furniture’, or ‘silver jewellery’), bid on
those keywords for an RLSA audience of ALL your past buyers.
Testing new ideas – even if everything’s going great with your
Keyword Advertising, you can use a big RLSA audience of all
site visitors to test out new ideas before rolling them out to
the world.

What all these strategies have in common is that they help you
achieve a positive result by:

Reducing the size of the audience who can trigger your ads
when they search your keywords. Less searchers means less
cost.
Hugely increasing the quality of the audience who can trigger
your ads when they search your keywords. People who’ve
previously been to your website are considerably more likely
to buy from you than those who’ve never heard of you.
The higher-quality audience is more likely to click on your ads,
which increases your CTR, which is one of the factors that
influences Quality Score, As the Quality Score increases, the
cost of your clicks falls and the position of your ads on the
search results page improves.

You risk less budget, put ads in front of an audience who are more
ready to buy, pay less for the clicks, and get a higher page position.
You won’t get the same volume of traffic from RLSA that you can get
from standard keyword ads, but it should perform a whole lot better.
Optimisation
All the same optimisation techniques should be used to improve your
RLSA activity – negative keywords, keyword expansion, adtext
testing, etc., etc.
One extra optimisation technique is optimising your audience.
If your first RLSA test is with an audience of people who’ve been to
your site in the last 60 days but haven’t bought, and it works well, try
expanding it to the last 90 days. If it doesn’t work well, reduce it to 30
days, or to only those who looked at more than one page.

Further resources
There are a range of useful resources related to this book, including
lots about Search Engine Advertising, available for you at
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/free. Just register for the book support
materials for this book and you’ll get access to templates, expert
training videos, case studies, and much more.

10 This a great guide to how to use them https://blog.tryadhawk.com/google-

adwords/adwords-ad-extensions/
 4
Search Engine Advertising –
Products
THE LAST CHAPTER was about using keywords to put adverts in front
of people searching for your products on search engines like Google
(via Google AdWords), Yahoo, or Bing (both via Microsoft
Advertising).
There’s another way to get adverts onto the search engines, Product
Listing Ads, also known as PLAs or Shopping Campaigns.

In this chapter, we’ll focus on how to manage them on Google Ads. If

you also want to manage them on Microsoft Ads, it’s very similar.

What’s great about Shopping Campaigns

Product Advertising puts the actual product and price in front of the
searcher. Anyone who clicks should have a good understanding of
what products they’re going to find when they get to your site, and
that should increase conversion rates.
You have the same control of your advertising as you do with
Keyword Advertising, choosing which products appear as adverts,
how they appear, and how much you pay for your traffic.
Product Advertising can be a great way to drive customers who are
ready to buy to your website.

Where does it fit in the Customer MasterPlan

model?

Product Advertising is all about making sure that when a searcher

wants your products, they find your products:

Business models where it’s super-powerful

There’s a product advertising strategy for every business, but it’s a
case of finding the right one for you.
It works best for companies where the customer’s searches are very
similar to your product.
A motorbike owner who wants to raise their bike up to make working
on it easier is probably going to search for ‘paddock stands’; if you sell
paddock stands, then you’re going to be calling the product the same
thing as the term the searcher is using. That makes it easy to get your
product ads in front of the right people.
The closer the search terms match the name of the product, the more
powerful product advertising will be for you.

When it doesn’t work

When product ads don’t work for a company it’s usually because they
haven’t optimised their advertising. They’ve just put it live and left it.
Put in the optimisation work, and you should find a structure that
works for you.
It’s impossible to set up product ads if you can’t create the right type
of product feed to get your product information to the search
engines. If your website can’t export the necessary information, then
you’re not going to be able to use product advertising.
A poorly created feed will also limit the performance of your product
advertising.

Objectives
The majority of your Product Advertising will be focused on
recruiting new customers
Given that you’re paying for every click, it’s really important to watch
the costs too.
There are two ways to easily calculate a profitability target for your
Product Advertising activity. CPA and ROAS. Full details of how to
choose the right one for your business and how to calculate them are
in Chapter 3.
Often, Average Order Values are lower with Product Advertising
than with Keyword Advertising because these customers buy fewer
items. If that’s the case with your advertising activity, then make sure
your profitability target for Product Advertising is altered to take
that into account.

What to measure
This is exactly the same as for Keyword Advertising – so please refer
to Chapter 3 for this information.

How it works
You set up an account with one of the Search Advertising services
(the account you use for keyword advertising is perfect), create your
product feed, import it into the Advertising account, group your
products ready to be advertised, select how you want those ads
targeted (geographic areas, and any RLSA settings), and how much
you’re happy to pay.
Your products are then advertised and each time someone clicks on
the ad you are charged the agreed cost per click.
Setting up Product Advertising is more complicated than setting up
Keyword Advertising, and it takes a lot of work to get right.

Before you turn anything on…

Before your advertising can go live there are some things you either
need to do, or should do, if you want to set yourself up for success:

Know your profitability target (see above).

Make sure conversion tracking is working (see Chapter 3).
Verify the feed being imported into your advertising account.
Set up account structure set.

There are no strategy decisions to be made in Product Advertising

because there are so few options compared to Keyword Advertising.
The only strategy that matters is knowing what your profitability
target is and optimising to meet it.

The Feed
I find The Feed is easiest to think of as a massive spreadsheet that
contains all the information about your products.
It should always be up to date, so it’s best to have it created
automatically by your website and put in a location that can
automatically be picked up by Google.
The Google Product Feed has been active for over a decade, so most
eCommerce platforms have been adapted to make the creation of
this feed pretty straightforward.
The feed for Google Ads has become something of an industry
standard with many other platforms accepting it to power what they
can do for you. For example, feed aggregators like LinnWorks and
marketplaces like Fruugo accept it; you can use it to submit your
products for free to the search engine PriceSearcher11; and Microsoft
Ads even recommends it to power its own Product Advertising.
Given all the places you might end up using it, and because it’s central
to the performance of your advertising, you really should take the
time to get it set up right.
Whether you’re using an App/Plugin to create it, or you’re briefing
your site builder to make it bespoke for you, there are some key
things to consider.
Make sure you’re giving Google what they need
The feed requirements are quite strict so make sure you’re providing
all the information that’s needed in the right format.
Some key fields to pay attention to:

Matching the product landing page: Some fields (including

title and description) require that they match what is on the
product page, so don’t create them specially for Product
Advertising.
Image requirements: These are pretty specific, so worth
checking.
Availability: This is a required field through which you set
each product to ‘in stock’ ‘out of stock’ or ‘preorder’. You may
want to set ‘out of stock’ to any items with less than 5 units,
rather than just fully out of stock lines. This will prevent you
from accidentally advertising products that have gone out of
stock, or that you would sell-through without the advertising
costs.
Price / Sale price: Be careful to get these right.
Google Product Category: Every product you sell must be
allocated to one of the Google-defined categories – full list
here:
https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/1705911
GTINs: The Global Trade identification number — every
product has to have the number assigned to them by the
manufacturer.
You can find the full product data specification here:
https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/7052112?hl=en-GB
It’s quite user-friendly, and well worth a look-through.
Make sure you’re putting into the feed what you need
The Feed is central to how well your adverts are going to perform.
Keywords: You don’t get to pick the keywords your product ads will
appear for.
What search terms each product appears for is based on the words in
their product title and product description.
What you put in the feed has to match what’s on your website, so you
can’t go and keyword-stuff your feed.
If your products are well set up with great titles and descriptions,
then you’ll be fine; but if they’re not, you may find your ads don’t
reach their full potential.
A common challenge here comes when you omit a keyword from your
product titles because it would get repetitive on the website, but it’s
an important keyword for ad placement. For example, if you are a
maternity wear brand, you probably don’t put “maternity” into every
product title. The customer knows they’re on a maternity website, so
why would they need to be told? But when it comes to putting the
products onto the search engines, it’s a really important keyword.
Should you add ‘maternity’ to every product title? Or not?
There’s no right answer, but it’s well worth a test.

Product Type, Brand, and Custom Labels

Bidding the same cost per click for every single product in your feed is
probably not the way to maximise the performance of your Product
Ads.
Within your product Advertising campaigns, you need a way to
quickly group together products that are similar. They could enable
you to quickly group all your high-margin products, your paddock
stands, or all your Dyson vacuums.
There are 7 fields in the feed you can use to make grouping your
products easy.
Product Type
This is a field that Google uses to better understand your products. It
should contain your own site category structure, which can make it
super-useful for grouping products in Google Ads.
Be warned that, although you can submit all the categories a product
is in, you can only use the first one submitted to group products.
Brand
If the product has a brand, it should be in this field.
You can then use that to create groups of products from each brand
in Google Ads.
If your products don’t have brands, then don’t use this field.
Custom Labels 0-4
The five Custom Label fields are there for you to use however you
want in order to better group products for your advertising.
There are pretty much no limits to what you can do with these fields.
The only restrictions are that each product can only have one value
for each custom label, and that you can only have 1,000 different
values in each custom label (I challenge you to reach that!).
These are commonly used to group similar products, and improve
profitability, here’s some examples:
To group similar products:

Colours – whilst there is a ‘colour’ field in the feed, it has to

match the name of the colour on the product page. E.g., “burnt
sunset”. You can use a custom label to group all the reds
together, or all the blues by filling it with the basic colour of
each item.
Product Types that get missed in the Product Type field – this
could be for higher level or deeper level categorisations.

To Improve Profitability:
 Margin – flag whether each item is “high margin” “medium
margin” or “low margin”. Then you can bid more on products
with high margin, and less on those with lower margins.
Price points – flag each item as per its price point grouping:
e.g. 0-10, 10-20, 20-30. etc. You may find it’s not worth
bidding on any products under £20. This custom label will
enable you to restrict bidding on them.

The best use of custom labels varies from business to business

depending on what you sell, and what information you can get into
the feed.
The first time you set this up, give it your best guess. Once you’ve run
some ads, you may find you need other information to be passed
along in these fields; if so, change your feed accordingly.
Getting the feed into Google Ads
Once your feed is ready, you submit it to Google Merchant Centre.
Create your free Merchant Center account here:
https://www.google.com/retail/solutions/merchant-center/
To make integrating with Google Ads easier, use the same email
address to set up Merchant Centre as the one that ‘owns’ your
Google Ads account.
Then submit your product feed to Merchant Centre; there will
probably be a few errors to fix the first time you do this. Work
through the errors until they’re happy with your feed.
Finally, you can link Merchant Centre and Google Ads to get your
product data ready to turn into Ads.

Set up the right Account Structure

It is as important to get this right for your Product Advertising as for
your Keyword Advertising.
Campaigns
“Shopping” campaigns are a unique type of Google Campaign, so you
can’t mix keywords and product Adgroups in the same campaign.
You’re going to be checking on your Product Ads at least once a week
to see what needs optimising. Setting your account up in the right
way makes this a lot easier – easier to quickly see which areas need
your attention, and easier to make the right changes.
Campaign-Level Only Settings: There are certain critical settings that
can only be set at the campaign level, or which make life a LOT easier
if you only ever set at Campaign level. These are the same for Product
Advertising Campaigns as for Keyword Advertising Campaigns12.
Campaign Priority: Campaign Priority is a Product Advertising specific
Campaign-Level setting that you can use to great effect to optimise
your results when you have multiple Product Advertising Campaigns
with the same products in them.

This setting exists for you to tell Google which Campaign to listen to
when working out how much you’re willing to spend on a click for that
product – Google will use the bid set for the product in the highest
priority campaign in which it exists.
Once you have more than one Product Advertising Campaign, it’s
essential to have the Campaign Priorities set up right.
Inventory Filter: Inventory Filter is another Product Advertising
specific Campaign-Level setting, enabling you to restrict the products
in a campaign. If you don’t use it, then your Campaign will include ALL
the products in your feed.

Not all businesses need it. It’s particularly useful for creating
Campaigns focused on an individual Brand or an individual Product
Category, or when you want to focus budget on a specific set of
products.
You can filter the products using the Product Type, Brand and
Custom Label fields we explored earlier.13
Adgroup & Product Group Structures
Within a Campaign, you have Adgroups, and within each Adgroup you
have Product Group(s).
Each Product Group is a subdivision of all the products eligible to be
in that campaign (see Inventory Filtering above).
Your two biggest tools to optimise Product Advertising are bids and
negative keywords. How effective they are depends on how you set
up your Adgroups and Product Groups.
Bids can be set and managed at both Product Group and Adgroup
levels, but negative keywords can only be set at Adgroup level (or at
Campaign level).
This is crucial for deciding whether to set up a group of products in an
Adgroup with other Product Groups or in an Adgroup of their own.
Grouping your Children’s Dresses and Women’s Dresses in the same
Adgroup means you can’t use negative keywords to stop your
Children’s Dresses from appearing in searches for women’s dresses;
setting each up in its own Adgroup would enable you to manage the
negative keywords much more effectively.
This leads many to argue that the ‘perfect’ way to structure your
Product Advertising account is to have one sku per product group,
and one product group per Adgroup. This would give you maximum
control over bids and negative keywords, but unless you’ve got less
than 50 products, it’s a LOT of work to set up and manage — time it’s
probably not going to be worth putting in.
Below is the starting point I recommend; it helps you make the most
of the tools available to you on day one, whilst not taking huge
amounts of time to get set up.

Best Sellers Campaign: A Campaign with one product per Adgroup to

enable you to focus your optimisation efforts on your best-selling
products.
Start with your top 10 bestsellers, and once you’ve got them working
well, add your next 10 bestsellers and so forth.
Brand / Category / Margin Campaigns: This is a set of campaigns all set
at the Medium level where you’ll be exploring the best way to
segment your products.
Start with your best guess – probably brand or category unless all
your products are the same brand/category in which case it will be
margin level.
Set up one Category per Brand or Category or Margin Level, then set
up Adgroups and Products to further divide the relevant products.
All Products Catch All: This Campaign acts as an early warning system
to potential future great product ads! It should be just one campaign
with a low priority and a low cost per click. With one Adgroup that
has just one Product Group in it – the default for all your products.
Adverts & Keywords
Nothing for you to do here – it’s all automatically worked out from
the Products feed.

Optimisation
Product Advertising requires constant optimisation. At a minimum,
you should be looking in each week to check that the performance is
still in line with your targets, to deal with any problems, and capitalise
on any new opportunities.
The optimisation process is particularly intense for the first few
weeks after you put new Product Advertising live.
Negative keywords
For the first few weeks new products appear in your Product
Advertising, checking the search terms report to identify new
negative keywords to add to the Adgroup or Campaign is essential.
It’s even more important to do this for your Product Advertising than
your Keyword Advertising because Google is working out what
keywords to show your ads for based on the product names – that
always throws up some really crazy terms you really don’t want to be
paying for.
Whenever you put a large number of new products live, you should
be checking for negatives daily.
Optimising up and down
Once you’ve got the negatives under control and you’re confident
your product ads are being shown for the right searches, it’s time to
start the process of improving performance to hit your profitability
targets.
To optimise beyond the negative keywords, there are three things
you can do to improve performance.
Bids: If a Product Group or Adgroup is performing well – increase the
bid to get more traffic.
If it’s not – lower the bid to hopefully bring it to a level where it will
hit your CPA or ROAS.
Change the Account Structure: Is the activity at the wrong Priority
Level? Could you try grouping the products differently? Should you
split your advertising to manage mobile traffic and desktop traffic in
different campaigns?
Optimise your Feed: Improve the data you’re giving Google to improve
the quality of your ads and where they appear. Imagery, product
titles, descriptions and the rest!
Then there are advanced strategies that might be worth trying.

RLSA can be useful if performance is poor or to capitalise on

good performance.
If you’re advertising in Europe, then Google’s Comparison
Shopping Service (CSS) is a way to expand performance once
you can’t buy any more traffic effectively on your initial
Adwords account.

The optimisation process is what will make your Product Advertising

successful to invest in it.

RLSA, Remarketing Lists for Search Advertising

This works with Product Advertising in just the same way as it does
for your Keyword Advertising.
See Chapter 3 for details of how to get this set up.
Ideas for successful RLSA marketing
The big difference with RLSA for Product Advertising is that there is
really only one strategy that works, putting your adverts in front of
an audience who are more likely to buy.
There’s two reasons you might do this:

When just geographically targeted Product Advertising is too

expensive, focus all your product advertising on RLSA
audiences.
 When your Product Advertising is going really well, and you
want to increase your chances of getting your products in
front of your best prospects.

CSS, Comparison Shopping Service

This is only available when advertising in the EU where Google has
been forced to open up the Product Advertising inventory to other
comparison-shopping providers. You can see them listed as “By…”
under each ad.
This means that in the EU you can double the visibility of your
products by running your product ads via both Google and another
CSS, or two different CSS. In the image above, eBay have the same
product appearing twice – on the far left via “By Shopping…” and in
the middle via “By McDiscou…” massively increasing the chances
their product will be the one that’s clicked on.
You can find a list of the CSS partners here:
comparisonshoppingpartners.withgoogle.com/find_a_partner/
If you’re thinking of going down this route, have a listen to our
podcast episode all about CSS strategies at:
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/google-ads-ccs-podcast/

Further resources
There are a range of useful resources related to this book, including
lots about Search Engine Advertising, available for you at
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/free. Just register for the book support
materials for this book and you’ll get access to templates, expert
training videos, case studies, and much more.

11 https://www.pricesearcher.com/gb/content/upload-form/
12 See Chapter 3
13 Plus the fields Category, Item ID, Condition, Channel and Channel Exclusivity – we
won’t be getting into those here as they’re not relevant for the majority of eCommerce
businesses.
Case Study: Sometimes it pays to outsource,
and it ALWAYS pays to optimise
Univar Speciality Consumables distribute high-quality industrial
consumables from world-renowned brands, serving a wide range of
industries from automotive, to painting and decorating.
They believed Google Adwords (both Keyword Advertising and
Product Advertising) was going to be a key marketing channel to
grow their eCommerce business. They started off building and
managing their Search Engine Advertising in-house but failed to
generate a profitable return on either their Keyword Advertising or
Product Advertising campaigns.
In the course of running the Search Advertising themselves, they
realised that to maximise the performance would require the learning
of many new skills and dedication to regular maintenance of the
account. The most sensible way to hit their targets on time would be
to outsource to someone who already had the required skills, and
who was focused on successfully managing Google Ads day in, day
out.
They chose the Google Ads Expert Agency Digital Gearbox.
Digital Gearbox were given the brief to:

ensure Univar Speciality Consumables were getting engaging

adverts in front of the people who are actively looking for the
products and brands they sell.
run the account to hit a healthy profitability target.
increase the number of daily website visitors.

Every target set has been achieved. In the first 6 months alone:

Orders increased 172%

Revenue increased 293%
Clicks increased 121%

That’s better traffic, conversion rate, and AOV! What’s not to love
about that?
The achievements were so impressive that Univar is now a year
ahead of its 5-year eCommerce growth plan and recruiting more staff
to deal with the growth.
How was all this achieved?
The Digital Gearbox team reviewed the existing activity and set
about a program of optimisation:

Regularly reviewing all bids and keywords.

Improving Adtext and Adgroup structure to improve Quality
Score, which increased CTRs.

They also expanded the number of Stages of the Customer

MasterPlan model that the advertising was being used for. Initially,
the activity was focused on Stage 1, and almost exclusively on the Get
Found element of Stage 1.
They expanded the advertising to include:

More Stage 1 activity by using Online Advertising with the

Google Display Network to turn Target Customers into
website Visitors.
Stage 3 by using Remarketing audiences to get past Visitors
back to the site to become First Time Buyers.
Stage 4 & 5 by using Remarketing audiences to get past buyers
to buy again.

All these steps are ones you’ve learnt about in this book, but should
you be doing it yourself or should you be putting an expert in charge?
If you’re excited to learn how to do it yourself – go for it! If it’s your
bag, there is a lot of satisfaction to be had in making an advertising
account work really well.
If you want to fast-track the optimisation and make sure your
advertising is doing all it should be for your business, then best to hire
an expert. You can find a selection of ways to do this in Chapter 18.
 5
Online Advertising - Audience
Targeting and Social Media
THE LAST TWO chapters have been about putting adverts in front of
people searching on search engines.
Many eCommerce businesses find that by expanding their
advertising beyond the search engines gives them a fantastic new
source of traffic and sales. Many others find that advertising on social
media is a far better route to profitable customer acquisition than
search is for them.
Putting advertising onto other websites and social media platforms
allows the adverts to be targeted at people based on who they are,
what they’ve done, or what they’re interested in, rather than what
they’re searching for.
In this chapter, we’re going to focus on two types of online
advertising: Social Media Advertising (where we’ll focus on
Facebook) and Display Advertising (where we’ll focus on Google).
We’ll consider them together because they operate in very similar
ways and offer many of the same opportunities.

What’s great about Online Advertising

Online Advertising enables you to put your business in front of
people who don’t necessarily realise they need you and your
products.
The targeting options (how you create the list of people who’ll see
your ads) and the ad formats are now so myriad that there’s a
solution for most businesses. Although finding the right one for you
can be a little challenging.
The size of the audience you can put your ads in front of is almost
infinite, you’re not restricted by the number of searches on your
keywords.
You have huge control over your advertising because you select how
the audiences are created, where the ads appear, what the ads look
like, and how much you’re willing to pay. Frequently, you can set a
cost per acquisition for the ads to run to, meaning it should always hit
your targets.
You get to influence an audience you don’t even pay for. Using
Display Advertising (where you pay per click, rather than Facebook
Ads where you pay for impression), you’ll often get people who’ve
seen your ad convert even if they didn’t click on the ad.
Using Remarketing Audiences, you can target ads at people based on
where they are in their relationship with your business, making sure
they get the right message at the right time. Remarketing strategies
I’ve worked on have seen substantially higher AOVs than normal
advertising activity and frequently double-digit conversion rates too.

Where does it fit in the Customer MasterPlan

model?

Online Advertising enables us to put the right message in front of the

customer at each stage of the journey:

Business models where it’s super-powerful

As with Search Engine Advertising, there’s an Online Advertising
strategy for every business. It’s a case of finding the right one for you.
That’s harder to do with Online Advertising than Search Advertising
because there are so many more options.
The fundamental difference between the two types of advertising is
that with Search Advertising you’re putting your ad in front of
someone who’s actively looking for something, whilst with Online
Advertising you’re putting your ad in front of someone who’s busy
doing something else – reading a newspaper, following a recipe,
looking at cat videos on Facebook.
Therefore, your ad and your product need to be able to distract the
customer from what they’re doing and convince them that looking at
(and buying) your products is a better use of their time.
The more distracting your products are to the people you’re putting
the ads in front of, the more likely they are to work.

When it doesn’t work

Online Advertising tends to be far less effective for businesses selling
‘boring’ products; purchasing them just isn’t more interesting that
whatever the person was doing when your ad appeared in front of
them.

Objectives
As with all our Advertising activity, the key objective is achieving our
profitability target. So, you’ll need to set either a CPA or a ROAS for
your various Online Advertising strategies too.14
Online Advertising is very adaptable so you might be using it to get
new customers, or to encourage existing customers to buy again.
You should expect to achieve a better profitability level with activity
targeted at First Time Buyers or Enquirers than targeted at getting
people to your website in the first place.

What to measure
This is very similar to Keyword & Product Advertising – so please
refer to the Keyword Advertising chapter for this information.
When it comes to the Online Advertising you should also be aware of
a couple of extra metrics.

View Thru Conversions: Often someone will see your ad, not
click on it, but still purchase – View Thru Conversions is how
you attribute these sales back to the advertising activity.
CPM: Often you’ll be paying per 1,000 impressions rather than
per click. Make sure you know what you’re paying for and
manage the ads accordingly.
Impressions: The number of times your ads are seen; if you’re
being charged on a CPM basis, these are more important than
if you’re being charged per click.
Frequency: The number of times each person sees your ads,
on average. There’s usually a sweet spot for this, so if
performance suddenly starts dropping, it’s likely to be because
your ads have been seen too many times by the audience
members.

How it works
You set up an account with one of the Online Advertising platforms
(Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, etc.), identify your audiences to
target, create your adverts, set how much you’re happy to pay.
Your ads are then shown to the audience you’ve chosen to target and
you’re charged the agreed fee each time someone clicks on the ad or
sees the ad, depending on what charging method you’ve signed up
for.
Success with Online Advertising comes from getting your adverts in
front of the right people (your targeting) when they are in the right
place (which starts with your choice of advertising platform).

2 types of targeting
Audience is the name used for the groups of people you’re going to be
showing your ads to, your targets.
Most methods of targeting for online advertising fall into 2 types of
targeting.

What you know about the person – “Remarketing”.

What the platform knows about the person – “Interests”.

Remarketing — What you know about the person

You are selecting audiences based on their interaction with your
business.
Remarketing enables you to advertise to people who have already
been on your website in order to bring them back to buy from you
again. This is done by dropping a cookie on the computer of people
who visit certain pages of your site. Most eCommerce websites will
convert at far less than 10%, meaning that at least 90% of visitors
leave without giving you any information or buying. Remarketing
enables you to advertise to those who leave.
On some advertising platforms, you can also upload lists of your
customers to create audiences to target, so remarketing targeting
isn’t limited to just what you can capture with cookies.
Interests — What the ad platform knows about the person
Generally, this is focused on picking from a list of available interests
or selecting by demographic (age and gender) or geography.
This can enable some very clever advertising: for example, if you sell
wedding favours, you can target people whose Facebook relationship
status is “Engaged”; if you sell equestrian clothing, you can target
people interested in horses. If you sell stair lifts, you can target those
aged over 70.

Online Advertising Platforms

Platform choice determines where your ads can appear, and some
platforms give you access to multiple places to put your adverts. This
isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but some of the biggest are:
In this chapter, we’re focusing on Google Ads and Facebook Ads as
they are where the majority of eCommerce Online Advertising
budgets are spent.

Before you turn anything on…

As you set up your account, it’s really tempting to just turn on some
ads – don’t.
Before you turn any ads on you need to know:

Your profitability target (see above).

Conversion tracking is working (see Chapter 3).
Cookie dropping tags are in place on the website to create
your Remarketing audiences.
Account structure is set up.

Putting Cookie Dropping tags in place on the website

Tagging your site means putting some code on it to drop cookies.
Until you have dropped cookies on people, you can’t start any adverts
(because you have got no one to show them to), and until you’ve put
the tracking tags on your site, you won’t be dropping any cookies.
The code is available from your advertising platform. On Facebook,
it’s called the Facebook Pixel and on Google Ads the remarketing tag.
Amend your privacy policies
With remarketing, you’re going to be capturing people’s information
in order to market to them, which means you need to make sure that
this is covered in your privacy policy and any cookie permission pop
ups you are running.
Once that’s working, you can start planning your activity.
As an eCommerce business, you don’t want any-old traffic; you want
quality traffic – traffic that’s going to buy from you, and that you can
afford to pay for.
To get that quality traffic, you need to do these things right:

1. Choose your strategy

2. Identify and create your audiences to target
3. Create your ads and put them live
4. Optimise!

The right strategy

As with any new online marketing tool, it is really tempting to just go
and get stuck in. But Online Advertising is a marketing method where
sitting back for a bit and considering your plans can really benefit you
in the long run.
For each campaign you set up you should be clear on:

Why you are running these ads – what problem are they going
to solve for you?
How much you can afford to spend on these ads for each sale
you drive (CPA / ROAS).
Who you want to put these ads in front of and what you want
them to do when they see the ad.

As with all marketing, unless you know what you’re hoping to achieve
and how much you can afford to spend, you’re not going to be able to
do it well.
I’d recommend including the objectives in each campaign name so
you can’t forget.
Take it back to the Customer MasterPlan Model – which Stage are
you using Online Advertising to help you with? What message do you
want to put in front of what customers? And what CPA or ROAS does
that advertising need to achieve for you?
Often your strategies and budgets are very interlinked with the
audiences you’re able to target…
Set up the right Account Structure
All the principles of account set-up from the previous two chapters
are relevant here too.
Try to keep different strategies in different Campaigns.
On Facebook. make sure you pick the right advertising objective for
each Campaign.
Stage by Stage that will probably be:

Picking the right objective helps the Facebook algorithm optimise

who sees your ad to get you the maximum return from your budget.
(In theory at least).

Targeting Using Remarketing Audiences

To make this work, you need to be providing the information you
have about people’s behaviour to your advertising platform.
There are two ways to do this (and you’ll probably do both).
Via Cookies (see above) that track behaviour on your website. In
this case, you do your audience segmentation on the advertising
platform.
By uploading customer lists to the advertising platform. In this
case, you segment your audience BEFORE you upload it to the
advertising platform.
Using cookie-sourced data
Your audiences based on cookie data can be segmented by which
pages have been visited and how recently they’ve been on your
website.
Before your ads can show, each audience you create needs to contain
at least 100 people. In planning your targeting, you want to choose
groups of pages that will enable that to happen – so for some low-
traffic websites, you might only be able to use one audience of
everyone who’s been to your website. To check how quickly you are
likely to get 100 people on any set of pages, look at the page views
count in Google Analytics – how long does it take to get 100 visits? If
it is over a month, it’s probably not big enough to target.
Recency segmentation is great for improving ad performance
because the more recently someone has been to your site, the more
likely they are to engage with and respond to your ads.
Which pages they’ve visited enables you to segment the audiences
based on:

What they’re interested in: The content of the pages they

looked at.
Their likelihood of buying: How deep they got into the
website, which you can use to segment Visitors from Enquirers
from Buyers.

People go through your site from Home page, down to Category

Page, down to Product List Page, down to Product Page. So you can
segment based on how deep they get.
Using customer-list-sourced data
This is a great way to target customers based on purchase history
(what they’ve bought) or which Customer Relationship Level they’ve
reached on the Customer MasterPlan model.
The potential segmentations are only limited by what you’ve got in
your database to segment by.
Many email marketing systems (like Omnisend) now enable you to
sync your email marketing lists and segments with the advertising
platforms.
So you can put the message a customer is receiving this week in your
Welcome Campaign in front of them via online ads too.
Refer back to the strategies you want to use online advertising for –
what remarketing audiences could you create that would be
relevant?
Record them together with their estimated or current size and how
likely you think they are to work.
This might look something like this for your Stage 3 activity:
Targeting using Interest Audiences
On each platform, you are creating audiences of people who you
think will be interested in your products because of their interests.
How you do it varies from platform to platform, but in each case,
you’ll be selecting from their list of predefined interests on each
advertising platform.
There are potentially hundreds of these that could be relevant for
you. To make sense of them, I recommend you spend some time
looking at what audiences you COULD use before you decide which
to use in your advertising.
Literally log in to Google or Facebook, grab a pen and paper and do
some searching!
On Google in the Audiences Section, you’ll find options like:

Affinity Audiences based on peoples’ interests and habits. E.g.

“Frequently visit beauty salons”, “shopaholics” or “luxury
shoppers”.

In-market Audiences based on what people are actively

researching or planning. E.g. “handbags”, “gift baskets”, or
“wedding planning”.

On Google, I find it easiest to browse through the targeting options.

On Facebook you’ll probably do a mix of searching and browsing.
Facebook provides options such as:

Demographics goes far beyond age and gender into

relationship status, life stage, job titles and much more.
Interests is very wide ranging! Includes “Dresses”, “Yoga”,
“DIY”, or “Gardening”.
Behaviours covers a lot of topics including one for “Engaged
shoppers”, “Friends of football fans”, and what mobile phone
people use.

As well as using Audience targeting on Google to target people based

on what Google thinks they’re interested in, you can also use Topics
to place ads on content related to certain subjects.
Like Facebook, it’s probably easier to search than wade through all
the options.
Once you’ve got your big list of ideas, create a table like the one you
created for the Remarketing targeting options to help you decide
what to start your testing with.

Targeting using Hybrid Audiences

There are some audience options that don’t fit neatly into
Remarketing Audiences or Interest audiences, or which combine
elements of both…
Overlaying interests on a remarketing audience
This is a bit like using a Remarketing audience in search (RLSA) in
order to improve performance or test new keyword ideas. This time
you’re using your Remarketing audience to test Interest targeting
ideas, or adding Interest targeting to a Remarketing audience to
improve performance.
Lookalikes or similar-to
On Facebook they are “lookalikes” on Google they are “similar-to”.
This is when you ask the ad platform to create an audience of people
who are like the people in one of your remarketing lists.
For example, upload a list of your buyers and create an audience of
people who are just like your buyers.
Sometimes these lists have an amazing performance, sometimes it’s
appalling – but it’s always worth testing.
Use WIDE targeting to create a Target Customer audience
Sometimes none of the available interest targeting options are useful
to you or provide enough data for you to hit your targets.
In this case, it might worth using very wide targeting (e.g. “everyone
over 18 in the UK”) to create an audience of target customers.
On Facebook, you can use the people who watched a video as a
targeting audience. So you could put a video ad about your product in
front of a big audience, and then use the list of those who watched
the video to drive traffic (and sales) to your website.15
If you can’t produce a video, you can also do it by creating a blog post
about the problem a product solves, then advertise that blog post,
using cookie data to create an audience of those who visit the blog
post, then selling them the product in the next ad.

Setting up your Adverts

Once you have identified the audiences you want to target (and
created them if they’re Remarketing audiences), it’s time to set up the
adverts and link them to the audiences.
Your online advertising appears in lots of different places, so the ad
formats vary a great deal.
On Google
Your adverts will be appearing on the content network – here each
website owner chooses what size space they are going to make
available for adverts. They also choose what type of ads they are
going to allow: image, text, or video, etc. To avoid excluding yourself
from the site and to have the best chance of success, you want to be
using as many of the ad formats as possible.
As a minimum, make sure you’re using text ads – they fit all spaces.
Once you are using images, start with every size and see which works
best for you.
On Facebook
There are a wide variety of ad types, but all of them include
images/videos and text.
In the first instance, pick the one that will help you get your message
across most clearly.
Then it’s a case of testing different images and text.
Ads that interrupt
Whichever platform and ad format you chose, remember this is
interruption marketing. Your ad must distract the person from
whatever they were already doing online, and that’s usually the job of
the image.
Once you have their attention, it’s time to convince them to click, and
that’s where your copy comes in.

Setting up your Adgroups and Ad sets

This is the part of the campaign where you tie your ads and targeting
together, set your bids. and turn it all on.
On Google, your ads and targeting and bids are all set up in your
Adgroups. Your budgets are set at campaign level.
On Facebook, your ads, targeting, bids, and budgets are all set at Ad
set level, giving you maximum flexibility in how you set up your
account.

Dynamic Remarketing
With Dynamic Remarketing, you allow the ad platform (Facebook or
Google) to create the adverts based on your product information, and
the audience based on what people have done on your website.
If you’ve got your remarketing site tagging set up and a product feed,
you’d be crazy not to test Dynamic Remarketing.
On Google
The product information for the ads is taken from the same product
feed you use for Google Shopping Campaigns.
The audience is chosen using the additional Dynamic Remarketing
tags – so make sure you’ve got them set up right before you test it.
Full set-up guide from Google is here:
support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6077124
On Facebook
The product information for the ads is taken from a product
catalogue, so you’ll need that set up and feeding into Facebook.
Depending on your website platform, that might be as easy as a few
clicks.
The audience is selected using the normal Facebook Pixel code.
Full details and a training course from Facebook are here:
www.facebook.com/business/ads/dynamic-ads

Optimisation
The two big areas for optimisation in your online advertising activity
are your adverts and your targeting.
The biggest improvements are usually found in optimising the
targeting – finding the right people to put your ads in front of.
Once you’ve found the right people, it’s time to find the right ad to get
them to take action.
For the first week a campaign is live, start with your best targeting
guess, and test different images for your ads. You’ll find very different
performances from different images, so this will quickly give you a
couple of good images to work with whilst you perfect the targeting.
Once you’ve got those good images, focus on improving the targeting.
Once you have a great audience, then work to improve the ads you’re
putting in front of them and improve response.
It gets hard to work out what changes worked and what didn’t if
you’re optimising both ads and targeting at the same time.

Targeting
The most important thing to remember is that you are optimising a
group of people by trying to find the selection criteria that pulls
together a group of people who will respond well to your advertising.
Optimising Remarketing Audiences
Start with the demographic and geographic reports: Often there are age
ranges that perform poorly on all your audiences. Identifying them
makes them something you can exclude from all future tests — an
account rule if you like.
The same can happen with geographic regions. In the UK, you might
find Wales performs poorly, in which case turn off all your ads in
Wales. In the USA, this can be a great way to optimise as you may find
a number of states perform really well compared to all the others, so
focusing all your activity on those few states to start with can be a
great move.
Tweak your Audience Selection Criteria: If you are using an audience of
people who bought in the last 6 months and it’s hitting your
profitability target, then it’s probably worth advertising to the next
group of past buyers. Set up an audience of people who bought in the
last 7-12 months and set up a new Adgroup/Ad set for them so you
can monitor their performance separately.
If the 7-12 months audience works well, go for the 13-18 months and
so on.
On the other hand, if you’re using an audience of all the people
who’ve ever subscribed to your email list but have never bought, and
it’s not doing so well, then try cutting that audience to only those who
subscribed in the last 12 months. If that still doesn’t work, cut it to 6
months and so on.
If you’re using the cookie targeting to create the audiences, then
recency is still a great way to expand or contract your audience. You
should also be using what pages they’ve looked at. If you started with
everyone who’s been to your site, but haven’t bought, and it’s not
doing so well, then segment that into those who reached checkout
and those who didn’t and so forth.
Add interest targeting criteria: If you’re still struggling to get an
audience to perform, then add successful interests into the criteria.
This often improves results and can be especially useful in the
weakest audiences like the people who only made it to the Home
page, or those who signed up to emails more than 12 months ago and
never bought.
Optimising Interest-based audiences
Start with the demographic and geographic reports.
Just as with Remarketing audiences, these can make a quick
improvement.
Compare Performance between your different Interest selections: Back
when you were deciding what interest targeting to use, you identified
lots of ideas to test – these should be set up as separate tests so you
can compare performance and work out which work well for you.
Test new audiences based on the performance of those you’ve already
tested: Often an audience you didn’t think would work does great, in
which case it’s usually worth diving back into the big lists of what you
can target to find some new audiences similar to that audience to
test.

Adverts
This type of advertising is interruption marketing – you have to grab
the attention of the person, distract them from what they were
already busy doing, and then convince them to take action.
The good news is there’s plenty you can test!
Make sure you run A/B tests with your ads – run multiple versions of
the ad in front of the same audience at the same time to find out
which works best.
When doing this, try to only test one part of the ad at a time,
otherwise you won’t know what made the difference.
Start with testing the images, then the headlines, the calls to action,
and then the rest of the text.

Placements
Where your ads appear can have a big impact on results.
Decisions about placements should be made purely on results
because you are making decisions about how your target audience
responds to your ads on that platform or website, NOT on how well
that website or platform performs for you.
On Google
There are several places you can control where your ads appear.
Content exclusions in Campaign Settings: This is where you can protect
your brand from appearing where you don’t want it to.

The centre column should probably be turned off for every campaign
you run.
Placements: This is where the optimisation happens.
Clicking on “Where ads showed” will give you a list of all the places
where your ads appeared (e.g. mail.google.com, dailmail.co.uk,
youtube.com, Bloomberg.com) and how they performed.
The places where the ads performed badly you can add to your
“Exclusions” list – just like negative keywords!
The places where the ads performed well you can ‘upgrade’ to a
managed placement and then control the bid for that website
separately to maximise performance.
On Facebook
There are four platforms where your ads might appear – Facebook,
Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network (websites and
apps that have given Facebook their ad space to sell to you).
Within each platform there are different places your ads can appear
like the News Feed, Stories, or search.
Monitor how your ads perform on each and turn off the ones that
don’t work for you.
You may find it’s worth creating ads specifically for Facebook or
Instagram or Messenger to maximise the performance on teach
platform.

Further resources
There are a range of useful resources related to this book, including
lots about Online Advertising, available for you at
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/free. Just register for the book support
materials for this book and you’ll get access to templates, expert
training videos, case studies, and much more.

14 See the section on these in the Keyword Advertising Chapter 3.

15 Have a listen to our podcast interview with Nikolay Piriankov of Taylor & Hart who use
this tactic to drive sales of engagement rings https://ecommercemasterplan.com/taylor-
hart-nikolay-piriankov/
 Part 3: Other Marketing
Methods
IN THIS PART, I’m
going to introduce you to the other eCommerce
marketing methods.
Some of them will work for you; some of them won’t.
You will have to try them out to find out.
Which makes it extra important to take the time to make the right
decision about what to try. Read the following chapters carefully,
listen to some of the relevant podcast interviews, and before deciding
which to try, go back to your Customer MasterPlan Model.
Where are your weak spots?
What is the problem you need to solve?
Find the marketing methods that can help you fix the weak spots and
solve the problems.
 6
Partnerships - Including Affiliate
and Influencer Marketing
“WHY ARE AFFILIATES and influencer marketing here? Why don’t they
have chapters of their own?” I hear you cry…
Each of these are just different ways of going about partnership
marketing, and thus the main skills to get it to work are the same.
Rather than explaining the same thing three times, we’re going to
cover it all in this chapter.
The only differences are where you look for your partners, the
technology you use to make it all happen, and how you pay for it.
All of them involve identifying the right people/websites/social media
profiles to partner with. The partners now have an existing audience
who are likely to be interested in your business and want to buy from
you.
You’ll need to build a relationship with the people at the partner to
find out how you can best work together to achieve both your goals.

Where does it fit in the Customer MasterPlan

model?

It’s all about Stage 1.

How likely is it to work for you?
In one form or another, partnership marketing can work for any
business, of any size, in any marketplace (not just eCommerce).
How well it will work for you depends on:

Can you find partners you would like to work with to promote
your business?
Are they willing to work with you, with terms that work for
both of you?

Assuming you can find partners you like and who are happy to send
you traffic in return for what you can afford to give them, then the
scale of success is going to be dictated by the amount of traffic those
partners can drive to you.
In the How it Works section are tips for finding great partners, but
before you do anything else, use them to quickly find out if there are
partners out there you could work with.
If there are a lot, then Partnerships is probably going to be a good
strategy for you. If there aren’t, move on to something else.

Objectives
Partnership activity should be purely focused on recruiting new
customers.
It’s probably going to be a low-cost, low-risk marketing method for
you with a Profit Target at break even or better when you can track
the results.
What to measure

Measurement for Partnership Marketing uses the pretty standard

traffic performance stats. You want to know how much traffic you get
from each partner, or each tactic you’re using with them, and how
well it performs.
Different pieces of partnership activity will come in at different
speeds. An email will be done within a week, whereas an order
confirmation link may be in place for 12 months – so be sure to
compare results fairly.
Some Partnership activity is very easy to track, as affiliates
management software will give you all the stats you possibly want.
But Instagram posts often don’t even have a link on them, in which
case you have to make an educated guess at the results by recording
when the post went live, what it featured, and record relevant sales
over the next 24-48 hours.

How it works
Whichever Partnership method you end up using, the process is
essentially the same.

1. Identify potential partners to work with.

2. Talk to them – open dialogue — and find out what they want;
agree to terms.
3. Run the tests.
4. Evaluate results and repeat.

The “talk to them” part makes this a very different type of marketing
from most of what we are used to in eCommerce marketing. You
actually have to work one-on-one with someone and build a
relationship to get the results you want.

The 3 main types of Partnership

Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing partnerships are the least reliant on building a
relationship with your partners.
They’re usually run via an ‘Affiliate Network’ (e.g. AWIN, or
Tradedoubler) that gives you the ability to find affiliates, advertise
your offering to new affiliates, and track all the activity.
You reward your affiliate partners by paying them a commission on
sales they send to you. That’s great for hitting profitability targets, as
you only pay when sales are created.
While a lot of affiliates are people who have websites on a certain
topic that they are looking to monetise, there are also a lot of voucher
code sites, cashback sites, and other general-interest affiliates. Some
of your affiliate marketing may be targeted at getting in front of a
specific group of interested customers, but with most of it you won’t
have a lot of control over what traffic is sent to your site. But of
course, the affiliate doesn’t get paid if the traffic doesn’t buy.
You don’t have much control over what customers are driven to you;
with some of my mail-order clients, I have found that over 70% of all
people buying via the affiliates channel were repeat customers. It can
be expensive if you’re not keeping an eye on your results and
encouraging your affiliates to send you the right type of traffic. That
might be by working with them, by incentivising new customer
acquisition, or by ending your partnership with affiliates who only
send back your own customers.
If you have a product that’s attractive to many people, this can be a
very quick way to generate a high volume of sales and build your
business.
Influencer Marketing
Unlike Affiliates, the success of an Influencer Marketing partnership
is all down to building a relationship with your partners.
Different partners will be able to do different things for you and will
want to be rewarded in different ways – this is not a one size fits all
scenario.

It’s crucial to find out what they want, and how they like to work with
brands – go into each relationship eager to learn, not dictating terms.
Always assume you might end up working with the influencer for
years to come.
Other Retailers
Partnerships with other retailers are all about swapping.
Usually no money changes hands; instead you do something for them
and they do something for you.
The organisations you partner with should be targeting the same
customer base as you but offering something different.
If often takes a while to find another retailer who’s happy to Partner,
but when it works, it can be a cheap and reliable way to recruit good-
quality new customers year after year.
Common ways to work with another retailer include:

Parcel bouncebacks: You put a flyer about their business in

your parcels; they put a flyer about you in their parcels.
Order confirmation email bouncebacks: You put a banner
advertising their business which links to their website on your
order confirmation email; they do the same for you.
 Order confirmation page bounceback: Same thing, but the
links appear on the order confirmation page of the website
instead of in an email. This one is particularly good because (i)
they have already bought from you today, so you’re not going
to worry about sending them somewhere else, (ii) they are in a
buying mood, so they should be a good prospect for your
partner.
Email advertising swaps: You include details about them in
one of your newsletters, and they do the same for you.

When undertaking any of these with another retailer, be clear on

when it’s going to happen, and the volumes that you’re swapping. E.g.
“10,000 order confirmation emails starting 1st September”.

Identify potential partners to work with

There are different ways to go about finding Affiliates, Influencers,
and other Retailers to partner with. Whichever method you’re using
look for the following:

A good brand fit.

An active site/profile – you don’t want to waste time speaking
to partners who can’t drive you traffic volume.
Achievable partnerships – targeting David Beckham or a
Kardashian is probably unrealistic.

Identifying Affiliate Partners

Often, you’ll start by putting up a listing on your Affiliate network to
attract Affiliates to see who comes to you.
It also pays to be proactive.
Use the search functionality provided by your affiliate network.
Ask your contact at the affiliate network to introduce you to relevant
affiliates.
Use a tool like Publisher Discovery to find out who your competitors’
affiliates are. It’s at:
www.publisherdiscovery.com
Identifying Influencer Partners
There are Influencer Marketing agencies who broker deals on behalf
of retailers.
You can simply search for them on Google or use a particular social
media engine.
Or you can advertise for them to contact you on sites like Influencer
Bridge (www.influencerbridge.com).
Many retailers are now turning their customers into Influencers! So, a
great starting point might be to ask your existing customers if they’d
like to become a partner.
Identifying Retailer Partners
You’re looking for stores who are similar in size to you and whose
customers are also your customers, but who don’t sell a competitive
product.
A great place to start is by considering which brands your customers
also shop with. A simple way to find that out is to ask them! Just run a
customer survey to find out where else they shop.
This data can be super-helpful when starting the dialogue with them
too. Being able to say, “We know 1/3 of our customers also shop with
you – fancy helping each other grow?” is a great opening line.

Talk to them – open dialogue, find out what they

want, agree to terms
If you’ve created a big list of potential partners, pick 10 to focus on
for your first campaign. Pick those who have a great brand fit, and
good traffic volumes.
Once you have your chosen 10, it’s time to contact them.
Call them, email them, DM them on Twitter, send them a letter,
connect on LinkedIn – it can take a while to get to the right person
and get a response. Don’t be afraid to follow up.
It is crucial to get the first contact right: be friendly and not pushy.
The person you’re approaching might not have ever been approached
in this way before, in which case you’ll have to convince them that
partnering is great as well as convince them to partner with you.
Find out what they want, answer their questions, and be patient. It
can take a long time to build up the relationship to the point where
they’re happy to do the deal.
Throughout the negotiation, be careful to make sure that what you’re
giving them in return is going to be worth it for you. Getting a deal
done is not as important as getting a good deal done.
Once everyone’s happy, make sure you get everything in writing. You
don’t necessarily need to go to the lawyers, but make sure there is a
document you are all in agreement on. Include all the details: time
scales, what’s being done, volumes, tracking codes, etc. When
partners fall out, it’s almost guaranteed to have been because
someone assumed something was agreed that wasn’t – so make sure
you’re all clear on all the details.
Talking to Affiliate Partners
Often you won’t talk to them at all, but the best results happen when
you do, so it can pay to push for a meeting.
Talking to Influencer Partners
Creative freedom can be a really important part of any deal; they may
want to create content that works in their tone of voice or in their
style of photography, which can be a deal-breaker. So be ready to
give away creative control.
The results are likely to be much better that way too!
Talking to Retailer Partners
These deals can take years to pull off, especially if the retailer you
want to work with isn’t aware of this type of partnership marketing.
But when you find the retailer who wants to do it, it can all be live
within days! It’s worth persisting.

Run the tests, Evaluate results and repeat

As your first partnerships go live, you’re going to learn a lot about
what you like doing, and what you don’t. That’s super-important to
know for creating deals with the next partners you contact.
You also need to monitor the results from each Partner and from
each tactic if you’re running multiple pieces of activity with different
partners.
Let the Partners know how their activity has performed, including in
comparison to other similar activity as it will help them do a better
job for you in the future.
If the results are good with a partner, use them again.
If the results aren’t good with a partner, move on and try someone
else.

Further resources
There are a range of useful resources related to this book, including
lots about partnership marketing, available for you at
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/free. Just register for the book support
materials for this book and you’ll get access to templates, expert
training videos, case studies, and much more.
 7
Content Marketing
CONTENT MARKETING CAN be used to improve both conversion rate
and traffic. In this chapter, we’re focusing on using it to increase
traffic, BUT these tactics should also have a positive impact on
conversion rate.
Great content on your own website attracts traffic through better
SEO performance, and because other sites chose to link to it.
Great content on places other than your own website sends you
traffic just like advertising does.
Here are some of the key benefits of Content marketing:

Providing great content will mark your website as a fantastic

source of useful information, not just another eCommerce
website, which really enhances your brand and customers’
perception of you.
Once built, it’s very hard for a competitor to copy you.
Content is essential to a successful search strategy. It will act
as “link bait”, encouraging other people to link to your website.
Getting content on other sites usually means a link to your
site, which will help your SEO.
Great content is an essential foundation of a social media
strategy – social media is all about sharing and conversations.
So, you need something to talk about and something to share
that your customers want to hear about – that’s the job of the
content.
It’s a way to use the great knowledge that already exists
in your business.

However, it does take a lot of time and effort to build a good content
base and the task never ends.
Where does it fit in the Customer MasterPlan
model?

How likely is it to work for you?

Content marketing will have a positive effect for any business; but
that doesn’t mean it’s always worth doing. You have to invest a lot of
time (and often money, too) getting your content created and
distributed.
Will content bring you enough sales to be worth it?
There’s no easy way to answer that question because there are
thousands of variables. But there are some circumstances in which
content is less likely to be effective for your business if you sell cheap
commodity products – like toothpaste, bottled water, pencils. These
are products that people just want to buy; they are cheap enough that
it’s not worth shopping around, and they don’t need extra
information on them. People aren’t going to be interested in
consuming the content, and if it’s not being consumed, it’s not worth
creating. To succeed with content here, you need a very exciting idea.

Objectives
The impact of your content marketing will be hard to measure; it’s
very hard to tie it directly back to sales.
It may take a long time (6–12 months) before you see real sales gains,
so an objective to create X pieces per month can be a great way to
stay on track.

What to measure
Content will impact on lots of other areas of your marketing, making
it hard to isolate and track exactly what impact the content has.
If your content is working, you should see growth in both SEO traffic
and Referral traffic in your Google Analytics reports.
If you’re distributing your new content via social media, you should
see an increase in social media performance too.
For content that’s on your website, you can measure how much the
content is consumed to get an idea of which content is appreciated
most by your customers. Look at video plays and blog post pageviews.

How it works
Whether you want to put the content on your own site or persuade
someone else to let you put it on theirs, you need to go through the
same process to work out what to create, and then take it all the way
to being live:

1. Identify content ideas

2. Select the best content format
3. Decide where to put the content
4. Create the content
5. Distribute the content
6. Repeat the process for the next piece of content

Whatever way you chose to publish and distribute your content, a

regular program of publication will amplify the results.
One blog post won’t do it; you need to commit to X/month.

Identify content ideas

There are usually far more ideas for pieces of content about your
business and your products than you realise.
Brainstorm with key people in the business: the owner, buyers,
marketing, customer services, merchandising, website team, etc. Ask
them:

What content do we already have?

What content would our customers appreciate having on the
website?
What stories are there around our products?

Take the answers and extrapolate them.

Frequently I come across eCommerce businesses whose first two

blog posts were giant pieces covering everything anyone could ever
want to know about the product. And then they can’t think of
anything else to write about.
That’s completely the wrong way to go about it because it creates
content that’s hard for people to consume, hard for the search
engines to understand, and uses up all your ideas very quickly.
Each idea from the brainstorm is really a starting point to identity a
number of different topics that can then be used as multiple pieces of
content.
For example:
Use this process with each idea you collected from your colleagues
and you’ll have hundreds of content pieces you could create.

What format
Content is anything you put publicly online that can be consumed
(read, watched, listened to) and shared, so it could be:

Infographics – pictorial displays of data.

A Blog or Article – written content, peppered with photos and
videos.
Videos – from 2-minute product reviews, to hour-long
company vlogs.
Photos – including graphics created from photos – like
collages of outfits or room layouts.
Buying Guides – useful guides to help your customers.
Customer Reviews – yes, you don’t have to create all the
content yourself.
Or something else!

A content piece will usually have a natural format fit, as in the photo
shoot example above.
Often a content piece may fit into multiple formats – that’s a good
thing! Frequently, if you create a video or photography, you’ll use
them off site to encourage press coverage or social media activity,
and on site as part of a blog post or look book.
Just remember that there’s no point in creating content for the sake
of creating content…
Every piece of content you create should do at least one of these
things, if not all of them:

Be something people will read and want to share – on social

media or by linking to it.
Reflect your brand well, support what you stand for, and
position the business as an expert in the product category.
Help sell the products – removing barriers to conversion, like a
sizing guide, or a catwalk video.
Appeal to your customers.

Where it would be best to put the content

For each content piece you’re going to create, consider if it is best
used:

On your website.
On another website you control.
On someone else’s website.

On your website
For most businesses. the centre of your content strategy is your blog.
A blog can host pictures, text, audio, and video, which makes it really
versatile. Plus, you own it entirely – being in control means it’s always
working for you.
Blog content is very easy to syndicate and feed into your social media
activity using RSS feeds.
Ideally, your blog should be located at www.yourdomain.com/blog;
then the search engines see it as part of your website and the extra
SEO value your blog attracts helps your whole website.
If you can’t set it up that way (usually this is because of hosting
issues), then use blog.yourdomain.com: this will be classed as a
separate website by the search engines, so you’ll be starting from
SEO ground zero. BUT if you can get it performing well, you’ll take
over more of the search engine results page real estate because both
your eCommerce site and your blog can rank for the same search
terms.
On another website that you control
Whatever format your content is in, there is a site you can create an
account on to publish it to get extra visibility and links back to your
website.

Videos can be shared on YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook.

Text (blogs and articles) can be republished on Medium.
Photographs can be used on all your social media channels.

This will get your content in front of many more people and start
driving people to your website, to the product page, or the blog
where you share similar content.
Sometimes you’ll only put the content on these platforms; other
times you’ll put it there as well as on your own site; or you can put the
full version on your site and a shortened version on these platforms.
There’s no perfect way to use them – it all depends on the piece of
content and how each platform works for you.
On someone else’s website
When doing this, there are big overlaps with SEO link building, PR,
and Partnership Marketing.
This could mean encouraging them to create some content about you.
You can do this by sending out a press release to bloggers or the press
or giving a blogger a product to review or photos they can use for a
blog post.
Or it could mean being a guest on someone else’s platform. Writing a
guest blog, or article that they publish, or being a guest on a
podcast.16
Some content pieces you’ll only ever want to put on your own
website; others you’ll want to put everywhere or only use on other
people’s sites. There’s no right or wrong answer; just do what feels
right for your business.

Create content
There are many different ways to create your content.
Whether you chose to do it in-house or outsource to specialists, the
most important thing is to make sure it gets done.
A content calendar that sets out what’s going live and when is
essential to keep the activity on track. Take into consideration the
lead times for each piece. If it takes two weeks to get the research
done for a blog, it needs to be started at least three weeks before you
want to make it live.
There are many tools that make creating content easier:

If you hate writing but talking about a subject comes easily to

you, record your blogs and use Rev.com to have them
transcribed.
Have Lumen5 automatically turn your blogs into videos.
Or use Repurpose.io to turn audio into lots of different
formats.

If something in your content creation process is taking ages or you

just hate doing it, there is either someone or some technology you
can use to sort it out.

Distribute content
Once the content is live, you still have work to do. You need to tell
people it’s live.
Whether the content is on your site or someone else’s, you should
share it on social media, although you’ll probably do more of that for
your content than for other people’s.
New content on your website should also be shared in your other
marketing channels, such as email, push, etc.
Repeat
Your content calendar should be keeping you on track to publish
content regularly.
Every few months evaluate the performance of what you’ve done so
far.

What worked well on social media?

How much has traffic from SEO and Referrals increased?
Which blogs/videos/other have had the most engagement?

What can you learn from these results that will help you create better
content in the future?
Feed all of this into your next brainstorming session.

Further resources
There are a range of useful resources related to this book, including
lots about content marketing, available for you at
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/free. Just register for the book support
materials for this book and you’ll get access to templates, expert
training videos, case studies, and much more — including several
interviews with retailers explaining exactly how they go about
creating their content.

16 I’m always looking for retailers to be guests on the eCommerce MasterPlan Podcast –
so if you fancy it, please do apply at:
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/podcast
 8
Social Media Marketing
THIS CHAPTER IS about organic social media. So if you’re looking for
paid social media advertising, see Chapter 5.
Social media provides a fantastic opportunity for conversations with
your customers, to understand them better and build a stronger
relationship with them. What you learn from that will help all your
marketing activity.
It can also help get traffic to your website.

Where does it fit in the Customer MasterPlan

model?

How likely is it to work for you?

You can be the most talented social media marketer in the world, but
if your customers don’t want to talk about your products on social
media, it’s not going to work for you.
It’s also not going to work if you haven’t got anything to say (if you
feel this way – go back and re-read the Content Marketing chapter).
There is nothing more detrimental to a customer’s perception of your
business than a dormant, unloved social media profile. If you are not
going to commit to engaging in the conversation, don’t start it.
To succeed, you need content to share, a customer base passionate
about your products (or at least interested), and the right social
media platforms to focus on.

Objectives
Like Content marketing and SEO, you need to commit to doing it for a
few months before you’ll see much impact, so objectives for activity
help you to keep going when not much is happening.
Organic social media probably isn’t going to ever drive much traffic
directly to your website.
Social media drives just 2.8% of traffic to the top 10 ecommerce
retailers in the UK, USA, and Australia. And it doesn’t drive more than
11% of traffic to any of them.17
What it is going to do is build brand awareness so that when someone
needs a product like yours, they remember to get it from your store.
It’s also going to help you better understand your customers because
it’s going to create conversations with them, and that greater
understanding will help improve all your marketing activity.

What to measure
Traffic to Your Website
Even though the traffic volumes to the site will be low, you should still
measure it and how it performs.
The traffic sent to your website by social media will be reported in
your analytics from various sources. Some will be from the URL of the
tool (e.g. Twitter.com) and some will come in tagged as the tool you
are using (e.g. Twitter/Twitterfeed). Make sure you are gathering all
the sources together.
Platform Performance
To understand how to increase the traffic and to see how your
activity on each social media platform is performing, you need to
record what’s happening on each platform.
There is a wealth of statistics available in social media. I have found
the following structure the easiest way to compare performance
across channels and keep the data at a manageable level. You need at
least one of each of these types of metric for each social media
channel you are actively using.
Productivity: A way of tracking the actual impact of your social media
activity, the sales and website visits.
Engagement: How much your customers engage with you on social
media.
Scale: The size of your social media audience – you need some
volume here in order to drive enough Engagement to increase
Productivity. You want this to keep growing, but only with quality
followers – if they are not engaging with you, there is no point in
having them.
Activity: What did you do? You need to track what you did in order to
see how that increases Scale and Engagement, and therefore
increases Productivity.
With a lot of these metrics, you can only get them by noting them
down on the day they occur, so you need to make sure you keep up to
date with compiling your social media performance.

How it works
Social media is “a group of internet-based applications that … allow
the creation and exchange of user-generated content.”
I like this definition because it’s so simple and using social media is
simple. It’s just about communicating with like-minded people about
things that interest you. Assuming you are interested in the products
you sell and that your customers and potential customers are also
interested in those products, it should be easy. Shouldn’t it?
No matter which social media platform you choose to use (Facebook,
Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, or whatever launches next year), to be
successful you need to grow your followers and increase their
engagement with you by:

1. Choosing your social media platform(s).

2. Deciding what to share.
3. Growing your followers.
4. Using tools to make it easier.
5. Encouraging your customers to do it for you.
6. Optimising.

Choose your social media platforms

To get started, you don’t have to dive in with both feet. Yes, go and
register all your companies on all social media platforms to make sure
you have your name when you want it, but don’t think you have to
start using them all straight away.
To work out which social media platforms you should focus on, look
into what your customers are already using and where your
competitors are succeeding.
Learn from your Customers
What is your target audience (your customers, potential customers
and those talking about products like yours) already doing on social
media?
Look at your website analytics. Do you already have traffic coming to
your website from social media tools? If so, where from, and how
does that traffic behave?
Use the traffic sources data in Google Analytics and do a filter search
for each of the social media platforms (change the date range to the
last 12 months).
If you are getting lots of visits from Facebook, then that would be a
good platform to start on! If there is quite a bit of traffic, you will also
be able to see which pages of the website are being linked to – that
will give you an idea of what content your audience is already sharing
on social media.
Take a look on the social media platforms themselves to see how
much discussion is already going on in your subject area.
Identify some keywords to search for, these might include:

your brand name.

keywords that describe your sector.
product names and category names.
your competitors.

You’ll soon find out if there are conversations already happening,

what topics they are on, and who’s talking about them.
Summarise this in a table:

If there is nothing, think long and hard about your product on social
media. Did you pick the wrong keywords? Can you start a
conversation that people will want to join?
Learn from your competitors
It’s really easy to find out how much traffic your competitors are
getting from social media. Just go to Similarweb.com and search for
each competitor (it’s free) and you’ll get a breakdown of where their
social media traffic comes from – each a percentage of their total
social media traffic, NOT of their total site traffic.

Note: The impact of Instagram will be underreported because so

many posts can’t contain links and this data is based on traffic.
Do this for 5-10 competitors. If you can’t think of any, search for your
products on Google and pick some more from the results. Then
collate the results in a spreadsheet.

In this data, you will probably see some standout social media
platforms that work for all or most of your competitors. These would
be a good place to start, but before you do, go and check out the
competitor’s social media profiles to see how they’re doing it.
If there are high numbers in the report, but not much going on with
their profile, then it’s probably down to Influencer marketing activity.
Based on the research into your customers and your competitors, you
should have a good idea of what platforms should work for you.
You may decide that you want to at least establish a profile on several
sites, but concentrate your efforts on one initially. That can be a great
way to go as you will get real feedback on how quickly each grows for
you and can redeploy your resources accordingly.

What are you going to share?

Whilst doing your platform research, you’ll have identified some good
posts and topics, and acquired a sense of the type of content that will
create engagement in the space.
Content that performs (gets engagement and shares) is content that
invites discussion and provokes opinions, and most importantly,
triggers an emotion.
Pictures of individual products don’t work unless they’ve got a good
story to them – “finally back in stock”, “new in”, “the X you’ve been
waiting for”.
Product montages work better: a room set, a recipe, an outfit,
because people can relate to them and see how they would or
wouldn’t fit into their own world.
Videos generally get more engagement than images, and images
generally get more engagement than text. But there are always
exceptions to the rule!
Do you have (or can you easily create) content that will generate
comments, discussion, sharing, and emotions?
If the answer is no, head back to the Content Marketing Chapter 7,
and check out some of the many social media resources we have for
you at eCommerceMasterPlan.com/free.
Once you have a range of ideas, it is time to start sharing them.
Initially aim for 2-3 posts per week, then increase as engagement
grows.
Don’t forget to engage with those who respond!
Hashtags
Hashtags are any word or phrase (without any spaces) with a # before
it. E.g. #ecommerce #ecommercemarketing #businessbook
They’re used to pull similar content together on the social media
platforms.
How much impact they have and how best to use them varies for each
platform, so once you’ve chosen your platforms, Google “best
{platform} hashtag strategy” to find the most up to date advice on
how to use them.
There are two main ways retailers use them:
Linking posts to relevant topics: This means adding a popular hashtag
to a post you’re putting live so that anyone interested in the topic of
the hashtag sees it.
If you’re posting about tulip bulbs, you might add #springbulbs #tulips
#tulipbulbs. Or for a post about a new kitchen diner set that looks art
deco, add #interiordesign #kitchendesign #artdeco.
ONLY use hashtags relevant to your posts – jumping on a trending
(popular) hashtag that has nothing to do with your post will not work
and may backfire.
Creating a hashtag to collect customers posts together: To create a
hashtag, you just come up with some words and add # in front. You
don’t have to register it anywhere, you don’t have to ask permission,
you just have to come up with it.
BUT it is worth seeing if anyone else is using it before you start –
would be awful to accidently ‘create’ a hashtag that’s already being
used for something irrelevant or potentially damaging to your
business.
If you’re asking customers to post pictures or videos of them using
your products, you need to create a hashtag to tie all of that together.

Grow your followers

No point in creating great content if no one ever sees it! So you need
to grow your followers. You don’t want any-old followers; you want
those who are just like your customers.
Here are three great ways to get people just like your customers to
follow you.
Promoting your social media platforms within your existing
marketing
Put links to your social media profile pages on all your customer
touchpoints:

On the website in the footer, or maybe the header.

In your email marketing, and service emails.
On any physical marketing materials, and within your physical
retail stores.

One piece of social media that every ecommerce business should

embrace is share buttons. Share buttons are the buttons you see on
each page of a website that enable visitors to easily share the content
through their social media pages.
Share buttons should be on every product page and on your blog
pages too; this makes it really easy for customers to share the great
products and content they are finding on your website with others.
Getting the buttons in place is usually pretty easy. Either you go to
each social media tool and access their code and put that in place, or
you can use a plugin to gather all the code into one place for you.
This is pretty much a one-off task; once it’s all set up, you don’t need
to worry too much about it.
Pay for followers
Within the advertising options on each platform you’ll find the ability
to set up ads where the CTA is “follow us”.
These are a great way to quickly grow your followers. As long as you
pick highly relevant audiences to target, the adverts should prove
very effective.

A great ad audience to start with is past visitors to your website.18

Share great content
The best long-term strategy for growing your followers is to keep
sharing great content.
This will get your existing followers interacting with it, which will put
it in front of more people who (if it’s relevant to them) will in turn
become your followers and start interacting.

Use tools to make it easier

There are lots of tools you can use to make your social media easier
to manage. Which is going to save you a LOT of time.
Scheduling Tools
These enable you to set up social media posting days, weeks, months
in advance.
They come in all shapes and sizes. Some can manage multiple
platforms; others specialise with one or two. There are even some
that automatically generate the content for you or set it up to be
recycled and used multiple times.
It’s worth trying out a few to find the one that works best for your
needs.
Three to look at: SocialBee, Missinglettr, Buffer
Image Resizing and Graphic Design Tools
Getting your images the right size for each social media platform can
be a faffy job. It’s not always worth paying a graphic designer to do
social media graphics for you.
There are many social-media-specific, easy-to-use graphics tools that
create great-looking artwork.
Three to look at: Canva, RelayThat, Stencil
Keyword and Brand Monitoring Tools
Keeping an eye out for mentions of your brand, products, and
keyword mentions can be really helpful. There are tools that will alert
you, and others that stockpile the results so you can review them
later.
Three to look at: Hootsuite, Brandwatch, Synthesio
Customer Service Conversation tracking Tools
As your profile grows, you will start to get customer service enquiries
via social media. It can be hard to keep track of them all, so a good
tool will make life a lot easier.
It might already be a part of your existing customer service
management tool, so check that before you start using something
else.
Three to look at: Sproutsocial, Zendesk, Freshdesk
There are lots of options for each one: some are free, some you pay
for, but spending a little time now finding the right ones for you and
putting them in place will save you lots of time later.
If you find something is taking you a lot of time or you just don’t like
doing it, there’s probably a tool for it.

Encourage the customers to do your social media for

you
Social media is all about interesting conversations, so getting
customers who are interested in your products sharing their
thoughts about them on social media is a great way to expand your
social media reach. Getting traffic from posts you didn’t create is just
as valuable as getting traffic from your own posts.
Share buttons on the website are a good start.
Encouraging those who’ve bought a product to share their
experience with it (by photo or video) with a specific hashtag is a
great way to spread the word about your products and creates a
stream of testimonials you can share on social media and use
elsewhere in your marketing.
Those customers who do it really well should be invited to become
part of your Influencer Marketing activity.

Customer service on social media

Sooner or later, your social media activity will attract customer
service queries, so you need to be ready for these. Here are a few
handy tips to make sure you are prepared:

Involve the customer service team from the start, and make
sure they understand how you are going to be using social
media. Listen to what they think about how customers will
respond.
Make sure they are ready to get involved as soon as you get
customer queries coming in. Include them in the training
process.
It is fine to ask a customer on social media to email more
details to your customer services so you can deal with the
issue more effectively.
Try to get back to any customer service comments within a
few working hours.
Take a look at your existing customer service response times.
If you are not getting back to emails within 24 hours, you are
likely to get lots of messages on social media. So try and speed
up existing response times so that customers don’t have to
resort to social media.

One of my clients launched a competition on Facebook but hadn’t

briefed the store staff, so the first few comments were complaints
that they couldn’t enter! By including them from the start, you can
avoid such embarrassing incidents.

Optimising
Check the results and change your strategy as you need to.
Do more of the content that gets engagement, whether it’s a type of
post (text vs image vs video, update vs story) or a type of content
(product room set, competition, or blog shares) that works best.
Do less of the posts that get no engagement.
In this chapter, I’ve covered the fundamentals of social media
because they don’t change and you need to get them right to succeed.
There are always things changing in social media, so you need to keep
up to speed with the latest developments on your chosen platforms
and test new ideas.
I find the best site to do that is at:
www.socialmediaexaminer.com

Further resources
There are a range of useful resources related to this book, including
social media, available for you by going to:
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/free. Just register for the support
materials for this book and you’ll get access to templates, expert
training videos, case studies, and much more.

17 Data taken from Similarweb.com for August 2019.

18 Find out all about social media advertising in Chapter 5
 9
Web Push Notifications and
Facebook Messenger Marketing
EACH OF THESE marketing methods could be considered the ‘New
Email Marketing’ because they enable you to do pretty much
everything you can do with email marketing (Newsletters, Triggered
Sequences, segmentation, etc.).
There are two key areas where they differ:
How a customer signs up: For Web Push, they click on a pop up on your
website, for Facebook Messenger they message your Page on
Facebook either whilst on Facebook, or from a widget you add your
website.
How interactive they are: The only thing a recipient can do with a Web
Push notification is click on it to get to the URL you’ve chosen to send
them to. This makes it quick and easy to get customers right where
you want them.
With Facebook Messenger ads, they can (and will!) reply, as it’s
basically a chat tool after all! Which means you can set up interactive
automated message sequences that vary based on what the customer
responds with. These are called ‘chatbots’. This can make it hugely
powerful, but also risky – you have more you may need to set up, and
customers may get frustrated talking to a bot.

Where does it fit in the Customer MasterPlan

model?

Surprisingly enough these are very similar to Email marketing.

How likely is it to work for you?
Putting messages in front of your customers and future customers is
always going to be a great way to get sales, and these are two extra
ways you can do just that.
At the time of this writing, eCommerce businesses are being
surprisingly slow to adopt these two marketing methods. In my
experience, it’s because of fear — fear of a new marketing method
they don’t understand (this chapter should sort that out for you…)
and fear that customers won’t like it.
Over Christmas 2018, I ran tests of Web Push Notifications for four
eCommerce businesses. The standout performer was the business
who was most nervous about the test. They had customer services on
standby as the first message went out ready to deal with a barrage of
hostile phone calls. Not one was received.
Always better to be prepared for a backlash that doesn’t happen,
than not be prepared for one that does.
I completely understood their nerves too. The business is Serious
Readers (www.seriousreaders.com) who target those with
deteriorating eyesight, mainly the over-60s, with lights that make it
easier to read. They also do a large proportion of their customer
recruitment offline, so their customers aren’t necessarily very web-
savvy.
Not only did they not get one single complaint from their customers
once we added the sign-up pop up to the website, and started sending
notifications out, the results of the Welcome Campaign alone put the
activity into profit with Click Through rates of over 10% and a
conversion rate of 13%.
Not bad considering the audience size only reached 600 just as the
two-month trial ended.
Don’t let fear stop you from testing something that could have really
impressive results.

Objectives
This is all about driving sales. Every message you send is about
getting another order. But sometimes it might be a soft sell rather
than a hard sell.
For example, with the Serious Readers campaign, we focused almost
entirely on alerting customers to new blog posts they published
about the latest eyesight and light news. The only time we got salesy
was to alert customers to the Christmas delivery deadlines.
What to measure
These marketing methods are all about the money. But to get the
most out of them, you also need to track how many people see each
message, and how they interact to improve response further.

How it works
Just as with Email Marketing, you need to go through these steps to
make it work for you:

Build a subscriber list to market to.

Send ‘newsletters’.
Send Triggered Sequences.
Optimise.

Build a subscriber list to market to

These are marketing methods which your audience have to opt in to
receive. That means you need to make it easy for them to opt-in…
Web push notifications
To make your Web Push Notifications Marketing Work you need to
put some code onto every page of your website.
This code will both track what pages your subscribers go to (so you
can segment your audience later) and enable the pop up that will ask
visitors to your site to sign up for your notifications.
You can then set up how you want that pop up to function in the tool
you’re using to manage your Web Push Notifications. You can use a
standalone software system, or many email marketing systems (like
Omnisend) now have Web Push Notifications built in. If yours does
use that option, it will enable you to do much more than you can with
standalone tools.
You don’t have a lot of options – so it’s very quick to get live!
Facebook Messenger marketing
In the Messenger section of your Facebook page you can respond to
messages, but to enable Facebook Messenger Marketing you need to
use a 3rd party software tool. Just like with Web Push, if your email
system has it, use it with them. If not, there are many standalone
Facebook Messenger Marketing (or chatbot) platforms you can use.
Each will give you a range of easy-to-use buttons and widgets that
will encourage customers to message your page (which is how they
sign up) from your website, blog posts, and anywhere you like, really!
They may also have a “comment to subscriber” tool you can use in
your Facebook posts to turn those who comment on a post into a
subscriber too. For example, put a post live that says “Comment
‘newcat’ to receive a PDF copy of our new catalogue with a 10%
discount code”, each person who comments ‘newcat’ will be
automatically messengered the new catalogue and the discount code.
You can also use Facebook Ads to grow your subscriber list – just run
an ad where the call to action is to Message you.
Segmentation
As your subscriber list grows, you’ll be able to segment them into
different audiences based on what actions they’ve taken on your site,
and via your messaging.

Send ‘newsletters’
The first few messages you send will probably be ‘newsletters’. Just
like with email marketing, these are messages you send to everyone
about something that’s going on in your business.
Web Push Notifications
One of my favourite things about Web Push Notifications is how
restrictive they are.
You can’t do a lot! Which helps you focus on the key messages, and
means they take a lot less time to set up than email newsletters do.
As you can see, when they appear on the browser the customer used
to sign up, they don’t take up a lot of space.
All you can set up are:

Title: 96 characters.
Message: Up to 255 characters, although the first 100 are the
most important.
Landing page URL: Don’t forget to add the UTM Parameters —
aka the Google tracking codes — so you can see what sales it
leads to.
Image: 192x192 (this is the little brand logo you can see in the
example).
Big Images: 600x400 px, only used on Chrome browsers (v56
and newer) and will get cropped on Android devices.
CTA Buttons: Text & URLs, only used on Chrome browsers.

That’s it!
Facebook Messenger Marketing
The end results looks like just any other Facebook messenger
message.
All you can set up are:

An image (if you want to put one in).

Your message.
A call to action button – text and URLs.

Every recipient will be able to see the whole message – it’s not
restricted by browsers like the Web Push Notifications are. So it’s
worth spending some time getting your copy spot on. And don’t
forget the emoticons!
Really important: In every Facebook Messenger Message you send,
make sure you include “Reply ‘STOP’ to unsubscribe at any time”. This
is the only way your audience can unsubscribe without it potentially
harming your relationship with Facebook.
With Email marketing, you own the list and no one can stop you from
using it. That’s not the case with Facebook Messenger Marketing. If
Facebook believes you’ve been abusing the system, they will suspend
not just your Facebook Messenger Marketing, but your whole
Facebook Page, which is linked to your ads too.
I have lost a Facebook Page and Ad Account and Group. I got caught
disobeying the Facebook duplicate personal accounts policy (I had
one profile for life, one for business), and Facebook killed off the
profile I used for business with no ability to get it back. That meant I
lost my Facebook Page, Ad Account, and Group (because I was the
only person with access to them, and I no longer existed).
It’s very annoying, and not good news for your business – so don’t let
it happen to you. Send useful, quality messages, and ALWAYS include
the unsubscribe instructions.

Atomically message about your latest Blog Post

With both Web Push Notifications and Facebook Messenger
Marketing, you can set an automation that will create and send out a
message every time you put a new blog post live! Takes less than 5
minutes to set up and then happens forever.
A great way to quickly put more non-salesy content out there.

Send Triggered Sequences

Basically, you can do everything you can do with Email.
If you’re going to be creating sequences via multiple marketing
methods triggered by the same action (e.g. abandoned basket
reminders via Email, Push, and Facebook Messenger), then be very
careful that they work together, not against each other.
With an Abandoned Basket Triggered Sequence you may want to put
the same message in front of them at the same time on every
marketing method.
With a Post-purchase Sequence designed to get another order, you
might want to stagger when the messages arrive to prolong the
impact.
Facebook Messenger marketing
Facebook Messenger is fundamentally a chat platform which means
recipients WILL reply.
The good news is that you can create triggered sequences with logic
branching so that what someone receives alters based on what they
click on, or what they reply.
That might excite you or overwhelm you! Either way – start simple
and small and build it up as you find areas that work really well for
you and the customers.

Optimise
There’s plenty to optimise with each of these channels.
To start with, you’ll be aiming to find out if these are marketing
channels that your customers appreciate and work for you.
If you establish that one of them is, then move on to creating
automated content, increasing your list size, and improving the
content you put out there.

Further resources
There are a range of useful resources related to this book, including
lots about Web Push Notifications and Facebook Messenger
marketing, available for you at eCommerceMasterPlan.com/free.
Just register for the book support materials for this book and you’ll
get access to templates, expert training videos, case studies, and
much more.
 10
Offline Marketing
OFFLINE MARKETING IS mainly used by eCommerce businesses to
provide something they can’t achieve as successfully online.

Scale: Getting in front of more people, getting hold of a bigger

list, increasing response.
The right audience: People it’s hard to get in front of in the
right way online.
Customer retention: Bringing past customers back to buy
again.

There are a LOT of different ways to get traffic for your eCommerce
business offline. We’ll focus on four of the best in this chapter. All
four should be able to bring you new customers or repeat customers
at a price you’re happy to pay.
Direct Mail: Sending a card, a letter, a catalogue though the postal
system.
Inserts: Placing a flyer or catalogue in a newspaper or magazine, or
another business’ direct mail pack.
Off the Page Ads: Placing an advert in a magazine or newspaper that’s
designed to generate an order.
Bouncebacks: Placing a flyer or catalogue in your product parcels, or
those of another retailer.

Where does it fit in the Customer MasterPlan

model?
How likely is it to work for you?
Offline marketing requires a different set of skills than online
marketing. so if you’ve not done it before, hire an expert to help you.
This is especially important when it comes to buying lists to mail to,
doing deals for inserts and off the page ads, and designing your
mailing pieces.
The mail order industry has been around for over 100 years and in
that time, they’ve really nailed the design principles that create sales.
Get yourself a specialist before you design the artwork.
For Stage 1 activity, if you pick good lists and create a design that
works, it should be effective.
For Stages 3, 4 and 5, I struggle to think of any business that wouldn’t
benefit from mailing its existing customers – even if it’s just a
postcard to tell them the Sale is on.
Offline Marketing can suck up a lot of cash because you have to pay
for the design and print and postage costs whether or not the activity
is successful. It often takes a few rounds of testing to work out what
the right lists and places to insert are, so don’t embark on offline
marketing to cold audiences until you’re ready to invest a substantial
sum in your marketing.

Objectives
Offline marketing (even the Stage 1 activity) is about driving sales.
You’ve invested a lot of time and money in creating the campaign and
you want to get your money back plus a tidy profit.
To maximise the number of new customers you recruit, you might
choose to let your cold activity (Stage 1) be unprofitable, achieve a
negative CPA. But your offline marketing to your existing buyers
should be at least break even.

What to measure

Track the performance of each audience and each version of your

artwork so you can see how to improve performance in the future.
Success or failure all boils down to your Cost per Acquisition (or
ROAS if you prefer).
Allocating the orders back to the right offline marketing methods can
be a challenge. The customers aren’t clicking a link you can track
before they place their order. Precise allocation is always going to be
a little clunky when you’re trying to match offline and online activity.
Here are the best ways I’ve found to do it.

Direct Mail – Matchbacks and Offer Codes

Matchbacks
A Matchback is where you match the post addresses of the people
who ordered within 6-8 weeks of a mailing launch date back to the
mailing files you sent the direct mail piece to.
It’s usually a manual process, and thus only really worth doing once.
It’s the most accurate way to work out how each of your lists
performed, but it doesn’t give you quick results. If you need to place
orders for the lists for your next mailing before the time is up, it can
slow down your optimisation.
Offer Codes
For this to work, you have to be willing to incentivise the sale (Free
P&P, 10% off, etc.), and be able to provide each different data source
with a different code to get the offer. E.g.:

0-6m buyers code = AA23

6-12m buyers code = AB23
List bought from X = AC23

Your website also needs to keep track of which orders had which
code used so you can access the data easily.
This is a ‘real-time’ way to track response, but no matter how
generous your offer is. many of the respondents will fail to use it and
leave you unable to track their response back to your mailing activity.

Inserts and Off the Page Ads – Offer Codes, and

Custom URLs
Offer codes are the main way businesses track insert performance.
You can’t use matchback because you don’t have the addresses of the
recipients of the insert.
Custom URLs
If your insert is a just a flyer, or a small 4-page piece that focuses on
one or two specific deals, you may be able to get the recipients to use
a specific URL to access the deal.
For example, a flyer that features one great product with a buy one,
get one free offer that’s only available at yourdomain.com/deal1257
You can then track the visitors to that page and their conversions OR
set up that URL to redirect to one landing page with the offer on,
adding tracking code to the redirected link in order to have the insert
performance appear in your source/medium report on Google
Analytics.
As with Offer Codes, this relies on you being able to put a different
URL onto the inserts that go into each different magazine or
newspaper you’re inserting into.

Bouncebacks – (Matchbacks), Offer Codes and

Custom URLs
If your bounceback is a whole catalogue, then use Offer Codes to
track response.
If it’s a single product promotional flyer, you can use offer Codes or
Custom URLs.
A matchback analysis can be useful for tracking the performance of
bouncebacks placed in your own parcels because you have the
address details for those recipients.

How it works
For all four of the methods we’re focusing on, you have to create the
marketing piece you’ll put in front of the customer (postcard, flyer,
catalogue, advert), and identify and gain access to the relevant
audiences (lists, newspapers, magazines, parcels) before you can send
it out.

Creating the marketing piece

If you have never done any volume direct mail before, I strongly
recommend you get someone involved who has experience with the
type of marketing piece you’re creating, as they will be able to
improve your performance and save you a lot of money and effort
along the way.
Whatever size your marketing piece is, it MUST convince the
recipient they want to buy and clearly explain how to do that. Product
photography, sales copy, and call to action are crucial.
To see how others are doing it, buy some weekend papers and
request catalogues from mail order businesses in your sector and
country.
Direct Mail
What you send could be anything from a simple postcard to a several-
hundred-page catalogue.
A postcard costs a lot less to design, print, and mail, but the response
rates will almost certainly be lower.
Consider what you want to achieve, how much you can afford to
spend, and how much sales that expenditure will need to generate.
That will help you work out how large a mailing piece you’re going to
create.
Don’t forget to check how size and weight will affect the cost of
postage. Accidentally making a piece 5mm larger than a cost-
effective size could cost you £1,000s.
Once you have decided on your mailing format, you need to start
creating your campaign. To have time to get it right, start this at least
eight weeks before you want to post it.
Here are a few things it’s worth knowing about direct mail and
catalogues before you start:

Printing costs are ruled by the 4-times table. The better the
number of pages in the catalogue fits into the 4-times table,
the cheaper it will be to print (per page). If you can divide it by
16, it’s going to be better than if you can only divide it by 8.
Therefore a 64-page catalogue is much cheaper per page than
a 56-page catalogue.
Print your cover separately, using heavier paper than used for
the contents. So, your 32-page catalogue becomes a 32-page
catalogue with a 4-page cover.
With a heavy cover, you can get away with a much lighter
inner paper – saving you money on paper and postage.
Consider going naked. If you mail your catalogue without any
polywrap, it will save you money and you can get some
environmental discounts too. Some companies have also
reported that it increases response.
You can rent space in your mailings. If you are sending out a
mailing in an envelope or polywrap, you can allow other
businesses to insert a leaflet and they’ll pay you for the
privilege. Speak to your list broker if you are interested in
doing this.

Inserts
The marketing piece you use as an insert has to do exactly the same
job as a direct mail piece.
Usually weight isn’t a consideration when designing an insert; the
cost to insert is the same whether it’s a postcard or a 64-page
catalogue.
If a company is doing both Direct Mail and Inserts, they’ll often use
the same marketing piece for both. It’s a lot cheaper to run off
another 100,000 copies of a marketing piece you’re already printing
than set up a print run for a brand new one.
Off the Page advertising
To create successful Off the Page Advertising, use a specialist Off the
Page Advertising agency. They’ll know how to create the artwork
that gives you the best possible chance of success.
Usually it’s only advertising one product, with a great deal that
encourages the reader to buy now. Very clear calls to action are a
must; often an Off the Page Advertising piece will include a postal
order form just to make it really clear that the customer should buy.
Bouncebacks
For cold Bouncebacks (the ones that aren’t going into your own
parcels), you can use exactly the same marketing piece as for Inserts
or Direct Mail.
For Bouncebacks in your parcels, you can use the same, or add
wording such as “…off your next order” to make it clear the offer’s for
them and get that second (or third or fourth) order.

Selecting the audience

Getting the marketing piece right is really important, but it’s your
choice of audience that will make or break your campaign.
Whatever the data legislation rules are in the geographic area you’re
targeting, do this legally please.
Direct Mail
Every mailing will probably include a mix of data you already have
(your house list) and cold data that you have bought or swapped.
Your house list contains two basic segments. Those who’ve never
bought from you (the ‘Enquirers’), and those who have (the ‘Buyers’).
You have to decide how many of each you’re going to mail. Generally,
buyers are more likely to convert than Enquirers, and recent data is
more likely to convert than older data. Don’t be scared to go far back
in time to lists of buyers who last purchased 3 or 4 years ago, since
they can still perform better than cold lists.
When making your house file selections, remember that to keep your
business growing, you need to recruit new customers, so you should
mail at least some of the Enquirers.
To continue topping up the house file, you also ought to do some cold
mailing.
If you’re going to all the effort to create the mailing piece and
organise the mailing, it’s not a lot more expense or effort to test some
cold lists.
To find them:

Would any of your retail partners (see Chapter 6) be willing to

swap data with you?
Would any of your retail partners be willing to rent you data?
Speak to a list broker. Explain who you are targeting; they will
provide you with a list of suggestions for data you could swap
or buy.
Speak to the data cooperatives. These are businesses who
compile vast databases from which they can create a list of the
type of customers you want, usually based on geodemographic
profiling and past-purchase behaviour across other members
of the cooperative.

Remember that, if a cold list has a total of 100,000 people you could
mail, you don’t have to mail them all. Test 10,000–20,000, and then if
the list works for you, roll out to the rest in your next mailing.
Swapping or Renting Lists: One of the best places to get cold data is
from another eCommerce business. Most do rent their data; even
better than that is if they are interested in your data and then you can
do a swap. They allow you to mail 10,000 of their customers and
rather than paying them, you allow them to mail 10,000 of yours.
Data swaps usually start from 10,000 0–12-month buyers, so you
need to have had 10,000 people buy from you in the last 12 months
who are happy for you to sell their data.
If you are afraid that you may lose customers to the other company –
well yes, you might. But you may lose them anyway and they may lose
customers to you. I know a lot of business owners who have shied
away from swaps for exactly that reason; almost all of them are now
engaged in swapping data with competitors and wish they had done it
years ago.
Inserts
To identify what magazines and newspapers you want to insert your
marketing piece into, start by asking your customers.
Run a customer survey that asks what print publications they read
offline. If your existing customers are reading a magazine or
newspaper, the chances are that lots of the other readers would want
to buy from you too.
Take the list of target publications to your list or insert broker. They
will know which take inserts, how much it’s going to cost, and help
you finalise your plan and place the orders.
Off the Page advertising
Use the same research you used to identify your insert targets to
identify your Off the Page target publications.
Give this information to your Off the Page agency, so they can then
get you the best deal on advertising space.
If Off the Page Ads work for you in a specific newspaper or magazine,
it’s worth having an ad ready to go in case they have any last-minute
ad space they need to fill – you can get amazing deals that way. Just
make sure it’s a product you always have in stock.
Bouncebacks
Finding companies who will put your marketing piece in their parcels
is very similar to finding cold lists.

Would any of your retail partners (see Chapter 6) be willing to

 do a bounceback swap with you?
Speak to a list broker. Explain who you are targeting and they
will provide you with a list of suggestions for retailers you
could pay to have your marketing piece put in their parcels.

Whether swapping or renting space, be clear on how quickly the

bouncebacks are going to be distributed. If you’re both going to
bounceback 1,000 catalogues, you want to make sure the retailer has
enough orders over the next month to 6 weeks to get them all out.

Optimisation
Optimisation is a lot slower with offline marketing than all our online
marketing methods, because you have to wait for the next mailing
campaign before you can change anything. It takes months and years
to make changes, but that doesn’t make it any less important to do so.
Mailing Pieces
There’s LOTS you can test in the mailing pieces, but it’s a complex
process and it involves splitting lists and creating multiple mailing
pieces for each campaign. That can also make it costly, so you need to
be certain you’re testing the most important thing each time.
If you’re doing catalogues, main sure you analyse the sales by page
(i.e. how much sales of all the products on each page brought in). Your
best pages should be the cover and the back page, next best are pages
2-3 and the inside back cover spread, then the middle spread. If these
pages aren’t doing great, then you need to move some products
around.
Audiences
Every time you mail you should select your audiences based on how
they have previously performed and test new audiences.
This is where huge improvements can be made, but remember you
should always be doing some cold activity to grow your business in
the years to come.

Further resources
There are a range of useful resources related to this book, including
offline marketing, available for you at:
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/free.
Just register for the support materials for this book and you’ll get
access to templates, expert training videos, case studies, and much
more.
 11
Use Your Products -
Wholesaling and Marketplaces
THIS MAY STRIKE you as an odd chapter to have in a book about
driving traffic to your own website.
If you have products that are unique to your business, and you can
get other retailers to sell them, those retailers’ customers will
discover your products and might buy from you direct next time.
Having a product purchase in the acquisition channel makes this a
very profitable way to get buying traffic to your site, but don’t think
you’ll covert all those product buyers to buy direct from you in future.
Getting your products listed and sold on marketplaces (like Amazon,
eBay, or Fruugo) or sold by other retailers can be a great way to
create awareness of your brand, and if you get the product packaging
right, you can also use it to drive traffic to your own website.

Where does it fit in the Customer MasterPlan

model?
How likely is it to work for you?
Here we’re using the products and their packaging to do your
marketing. If your products aren’t unique to you or they don’t have
packaging you can put messages on, then this is going to be hard.
You’re also going to commit to driving a volume of sales via these
channels that aren’t your own site. Whether that’s wholesaling
(selling products in bulk to other retailers) or listing products on
marketplaces, it is yet another skill set to learn, yet another thing that
will require management and ongoing optimisation to make it work.

Objectives
Your primary objective with any wholesaling or marketplace sales
should be to sell more products and drive a profit from the customers
of the retailer or marketplace selling your product.
The marketing that follows is about making sure the customers who
buy your products are given every chance to recognise your brand,
and that they can buy from you direct if they want to.
It’s best to think of this as a bonus rather than an own-site traffic
growth strategy on its own.

What to measure
Like Offline Marketing, it’s hard to match this activity with results.
You can give out a unique URL or code on your marketplace products,
and then ask them on the landing page where they first found your
products.

How it works
Once you know what call to action you want to present to the
purchaser, you then need to get it onto the product or its packaging.

What call to action(s) to use

Given the space available, you can often only manage to include a
URL or a brand name. Not really a call to action, but it does make it
clear who you are, or how they can find you if they want to. This is a
good approach on clothing labels and the products themselves,
because it’s so small and is something you’d be happy to have on
every product you ship, so you don’t need to create something unique
to the wholesale / marketplace channel.
Where you have space (on larger product labels, boxes, or even via an
insert with the product) you can say lots more.
A good call to action might be:

Follow us on {insert social media platform of choice here}.

Buy direct at yourdomain.com.
Sign up to our emails.

If you’re doing an insert, or packaging that’s unique to your

marketplace or retailer-distributed products, then you could add an
incentive for the purchaser to come to you next time.
There was an insert included in my most recent delivery of multi
vitamins from Amazon: “Love it?! Get Your next Bottle 100% Free”
with the URL yourdomain.com/free, which was where customers
needed to go to claim it.
They also included a “Not for you? Email support@yourdomain.com
and we will help you; no customer goes away unhappy”, which I
thought was another nice touch.
Those selling exercise equipment often package it with details on
how to download a free guide to the sort of exercises to do with the
equipment. Of course, you have to enter your email address to get
the free guide.
Using your products
Make sure your branding is clear, and if you can, add your URL.
Using your product packaging
Make sure your branding is clear and include your URL.
If you have space, also include a call to action which you’re happy to
send to your own customers as well. It might be to follow you on your
main social media channel or share a photo of them using the product
with a specific hashtag.
Using a product insert
This is where you add an incentive to buy direct. Make it clear,
compelling, and straightforward to redeem.
Before undertaking any of these ideas, double check the terms and
conditions of selling via the marketplaces you are on, or that you have
with the retailers you’re wholesaling to. Make sure adding this
marketing information isn’t going to be against the terms – you don’t
want to get kicked off a profitable platform for something on your
product packaging.

Further resources
There are a range of useful resources related to this book, including
lots about Wholesaling and Marketplaces, available for you at
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/free. Just register for the support
materials for this book and you’ll get access to templates, expert
training videos, case studies, and much more.
 Part 4: Marketing Maxims
IN THIS PART of the book, I’ve brought together a selection of
marketing practices that work with pretty much any marketing
method to increase performance. Each of these can help you increase
response rates and improve the profitability of your marketing.
Each is something that could have been a section in any of the
marketing method chapters (which would have made it all very
repetitive), so I’m grouping them here both to save repeating myself
and (more importantly) to impress upon you how powerful they can
be.
 12
Chloë’s Promotional Golden
Rule

LET’S BREAK IT down.

A promotion is the message and call to action on each marketing
piece, or marketing campaign.
What you want the customer to do should focus on their next
interaction with your business, for example:

Visit the website

Sign up to our email / push / Facebook messenger marketing
Make their second purchase
Follow us on Facebook

“As cheaply as possible” is what all your testing and optimisation

activity is about – finding the most cost-effective way to get each
interaction, how to make the marketing activity fall within your
profitability target – your CPA or ROAS.
Take into account the cost of time as well as money when working on
this.
It’s always tempting to chase better response rates by giving more
away – increasing discounts from 10% to 20%, lowering free delivery
thresholds from £50 to £20. But to do that indiscriminately means
you’re giving far too much money away, and you’ll be giving the
greater discounts to customers who would have bought anyway.
Many eCommerce sites deploy an email sign form offering an
immediate discount if you sign up for their email marketing. Is it
worth it? Is this the cheapest possible way to increase email signups
in order to increase first-time purchases?
Or would the email sign up conversion rate be just as good with some
great compelling copy, a lower discount level, or a monthly prize
draw? How would those changes affect how many of the sign ups
then go on to buy?
Don’t just give away discounts – test and identify where you should in
order to find the cheapest way to get the customers to do what you
want them to do.
When it comes to messages in your marketing methods, this often
leads to giving different levels of incentive to different segments of
your data.

Avoid the Black Friday effect

This rule can also help you avoid the group-think effect of Black
Friday, Single’s Day, etc., when you do a massive discount just
because everyone else is.
The larger retailers plan Black Friday months in advance to make sure
they’re setting up their promotions to get their customers to do what
they want them to do as cheaply as possible. They buy in product
specifically for their Black Friday event so they know what margin
they’re giving away. They select what products will or will not be
included so as not to rob themselves of full-price product sales. They
plan out which customer segments will get which Black Friday offers,
to maximise the reactivation of dormant customers. They reduce the
cost of the huge influx of orders by lowering their delivery promises
for the event and turning off speedy delivery options to enable the
warehouse the time to process everything.
Start your planning for any such event by considering what it is you
want your customers (or different customer segments) to do, and
then set up your promotions to reflect that. If you’ve got stock you
can’t shift, use the event to make the customers buy it with multi-buy
offers, and big discounts just on those items. If you’ve got a lot of
dormant buyers you want to reactivate, give them a massive discount
code.
Always remember this rule.
 13
Data Segmentation
THERE ARE THOUSANDS of ways you can segment the traffic that
comes to your website and the people on your lists.
In this chapter, we’re focusing on data segmentation using your
customers’ buying activity first – because that’s what makes the
biggest difference to performance. Then go into other online
marketing data you can use to further segment the lists.
The aim with all segmentation is to better understand your customer
database in order to work out who you should be marketing to, and
how strong the offer should be. This will help you convert more of the
worst data into buyers and save you money because you won’t be
giving huge discounts to customers who would buy anyway.
There’s a lot of testing involved to find the right segmentation mix for
each business, but it’s well worth it. Once you’ve done the testing,
you’ll have a mix of segments you can use again and again across your
marketing activity.

RFM Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value

RFM is the tried-and-tested segmentation method used by the Mail
Order industry for decades. It’s a way to segment your buyers and
enquirers to maximise the impact of your marketing.

Recency is how recently did they buy/enquire? The more

recently someone last interacted with the business, the more
likely they are to buy again. Usually each segment will cover 6-
12-months.
Frequency is how many times have they bought from you?
Never, once, three times, 10 times? Usually the segments
increase by one order each time, 0 orders, 1 order, 2 orders,
etc.
Monetary value is how much do they spend per order? If
they’ve placed multiple orders, then it’s the average of those
 order values. Usually this segment is broken into £25 or £50
bands, but that depends on your AOVs.

The exact bands you use to segment using Recency, Frequency, or

Monetary value will depend on your business and how your
customers behave.
If you find a big difference in response rates between people who last
ordered 0-2 months ago and those who ordered 3-6 months ago, then
segment that way.
Frequency segmentation is usually the same for everyone.
If you have a low AOV, you might segment the monetary value in £10
bands; if you have a high AOV, it might be £50 bands. If you find that a
lot of first-time customers spend less than £25, then your first band
would be £0-£25, then go up in the right increment for your business.
For Direct Mail Data selections, you should use all three parts of RFM
and map your customers in these segmentations in a matrix like the
one below, filling in each box with the number of customers in each
segment.
You can then use this to select the best people to send however many
catalogues you’re creating to.
The full RFM approach can be a bit over the top for online marketing
activity, certainly if you’re just starting to get into segmentation!
We’re using the RFM Segmentation to predict likelihood of response.
It’s important to understand likelihood of response because it
enables you to work out how much of an offer you need to give them
to incentivise them to buy.
If someone’s very likely to buy, we don’t have to give them as good an
offer as someone who’s less likely to respond.
Recency and Frequency are the best predictors of response. With
online marketing, always start with Frequency and segment your
buyers and enquirers.

Segment Buyers and Enquirers

It’s a great first step to take because you will see an improvement in
sales by treating these two segments differently. Plus, it’s easy to tell
who has and hasn’t bought from you, so no matter how simple your
systems are, it’s almost always possible to segment your database
this way.
We treat buyers and enquirers differently because we want them to
do different things.
We want the Buyers to buy AGAIN.
They have already bought from us once, so we know a lot about them
(name, address, email, what they bought, etc.), which means we can
market to them much more effectively.
They know us; they have taken the leap of faith and trusted us to
provide them with the product/service they wanted and not to do
bad things with their data. We have treated them well, and so built up
a level of trust with them. That all means they’re very likely to buy
from us again, so we shouldn’t need to give them too big an incentive
to do so.
We want the Enquirers to buy for the first time.
They haven’t ever bought from us, we don’t know much about them,
and we might only have their email address, so we can’t tailor the
marketing to them very precisely.
To get them to buy for the first time, we’ll need to make a really
compelling offer and help them to better understand our business
and learn to trust us.
Once you’ve got these two segments, you can use them for Email
Marketing, Search Engine Advertising using RLSA, and Online
Advertising. If your systems are able to integrate the right data, you
might also be able to use it for Web Push Notifications and Facebook
Messenger Marketing.
On Advertising, put the strongest offers and most compelling
products in front of the Enquirers, and your normal messages in front
of your Buyers.
With Email Marketing, you’ll be using these segments for your
regular Newsletters. This doesn’t mean you have to create two
newsletters every week, as many weeks you’ll still send the same
message to both. But I’d suggest sending it out once to each segment
so you can start seeing how they respond differently. Then once a
quarter or once a month, send a strong message just to your
Enquirers.
You might find that more Enquirers buy when you’re in sale than at
other times of the year, so you might just email them about the
perpetual Sale rather than create a specific offer for them. Or you
might run a promotional code especially for them.

Adding in Recency
Working out how best to use Recency for your online marketing is
going to require some testing to find out what segmentation to use
for the Enquirers and the Buyers.
With the Enquirers, you want to segment based on how recently they
signed up to hear from you. Start by dividing it into the last 6 months,
and everyone older than that. Send the same email or advertising to
both groups and see how performance differs.
You’re looking for a cut-off point beyond which you won’t use that
data for email, or advertising. The cut-off point may be different for
each.
After you’ve tested the 0-6m and 6m+ segments, try 0-3m vs 4-6m or
0-9m and 9m+. Try out different segmentations until you find the
point at which performance drops so far it’s not worth doing the
marketing activity. Then stop using the segment that doesn’t
perform.
Yes, stop emailing people you have the right to email. If they’re not
responding, then there’s no point since you’re not going to get a sale.
More importantly, they may get annoyed with your emails and hit the
‘spam’ button, which is not good news for you.19
With the Enquirers, your cut off point will probably be somewhere in
the last 12 months.
With the Buyers, you are segmenting based on how recently they
bought from you. Start by dividing it into 12-month sections. Send the
same email, or advertising to all segments and see how performance
differs.
You’re looking for three things here:

A cut-off point beyond which you won’t use the data for email,
or advertising (just like with the Enquirers), but which will
probably be 1-4 years ago.
The point at which you need to push hard to reactivate the
customer before they drop off your list forever.
The point at which you have the most chance of getting them
to order again.

The last varies from business to business but usually fits into one of
these cases:

Immediately. In most eCommerce businesses, your best time

to get a second order from a customer is straight after they’ve
bought for the first time.
12 months after their last purchase. Especially true if you sell
gifts or seasonal items.
When they run out of the product they first purchased.
Especially true if you sell consumables like vitamins or coffee.

To find those points, change the segmentation based on the results

just like you did for the Enquirer testing.
These segmented Buyer and Enquirer lists will help you improve your
marketing response rates on all the channels where you use them.

Creating a VIP segment

Whilst working through all the Buyer Segmentation testing, you may
find you have a really loyal group of customers who have bought
recently, have bought multiple times, and spend more than anyone
else.
Putting them into a VIP segment can be a great way to increase
responses from them. It might be as simple as mailing their catalogue
in a gold envelope, wrapping their parcels with special tape, or
changing the email header. Or as complicated as allowing them
previews of new products, creating a Facebook Group just for them,
or special shipping rates.

Taking Segmentation beyond RFM Data

Of course, online marketing gives us a lot of data that isn’t tied to a
customer’s buying behaviour.
Much of this data can be used to further improve results of the
segments you’ve identified.
For the segments you’d decided not to use, these may enable to you
to use some of the data after all.
For the segments you’ve decided to use, these will help you improve
performance even more.
In each case, test segmenting the data this way, and if helps add it into
your segmentation mix.

Source of the data

This is really useful with Enquirer data because it will show you which
of your enquiry generation methods captures the best data. If you’ve
run a big competition, the chances are that data won’t be performing
as well as those who came to your site and signed up.

Seasonality
When during the year do customers buy? Do they only buy at
Christmas or only in the summer?
If you have a lot of seasonal buyers, you may choose to only market to
them at the right time of year, or test converting them to all year
around buyers.

Products
Which items in your range do they buy? Men’s clothing or Women’s
clothing or both? Jewellery or furniture? The vacuum cleaner or just
the vacuum bags?
Clicks and Opens
With email, you can track who is opening and who is clicking your
emails. This can be a great way to further segment the older
segments or identify buyers ripe for reengagement.

Website Activity
Many email marketing systems enable you to track this, as does the
remarketing code for online advertising.
You can use it to add how recently someone’s been to your site, even
if they’ve not bought, to your segmentation. An Enquirer who signed
up in the last 6 months and visited the site last week is considerably
more likely to buy than an Enquirer who signed up in the last 6
months and hasn’t been back to your website since.

GeoDemographics
This is very easy to do with the Online Advertising tools, and adding
geographic and demographic targeting to your segments can make a
huge difference to performance.

Advertising Interests
As well as adding geodemographic targeting to your segments, you
could also try adding interest targeting that you know works for you
to further refine the segment.

Where it does and doesn’t work

This is all about Stages 3, 4, and 5 of the Customer MasterPlan Model
– getting the first and subsequent orders. You have to have
someone’s data before you segment them.
You can only do this in marketing channels where you can segment
the recipients of your marketing using your data segmentations. That
includes Direct Mail, Email marketing, and advertising audiences.
Saying that… If you take your segmentation beyond the sales data,
you may be able to make these ideas work in other marketing
channels too, and earlier in the Customer MasterPlan Model.
However, the biggest gains are to be had using the sales data.
If you are just starting out and don’t have a huge list then don’t get
too hung up on this yet… until you’ve got thousands of customers,
you’re best off getting your automated activity right first.
19 See the section on this in the Email marketing Chapter 2
 14
2+2=5: The Power of
Multichannel Marketing
USING MULTIPLE MARKETING methods together creates results that
each marketing method couldn’t achieve on its own.
For example, when sending a paper catalogue through the post to
your 0-6 month house file, you should send an email to the same list
of customers a few days before the catalogue is due to reach them to
tell them to look out for it, and that they can get a sneak peak of all
the products in it online. This will increase the catalogue’s response
rate because they’ll be looking out for it, and you will still get a similar
number of orders to normal from the email.
By using the two marketing methods together, you increase your
overall sales volume without increasing costs.

Be organised
The only real barrier to implementing multichannel marketing is that
it requires us to be a little more organised than we’d naturally be. It
takes a bit of time to get the timing right, or the data to sync into the
right places to make it all possible. Then there’s often artwork that
needs to be created and customised for all the channels.
Getting the foundations in place is a lot easier now than it was just
five years ago as there are many tools out there that can be used to
do the syncing elements for you. Many email service providers (like
Omnisend) are built to enable you to sync your email marketing lists
with your advertising audiences, and your Messenger marketing and
web notifications. With them you can do it all in one place.
If you not using an email service provider that makes it that easy,
consider moving. If you can’t, then you can use additional tools like
Zapier and Leads Bridge to do the syncing.
Once the foundations are there, it’s a case of planning your marketing
a little further ahead of time so you and your team have time to get
everything ready and planning to maximise the opportunity of using
multiple marketing methods on one campaign.

The main types of multichannel marketing

The possibilities are endless, but most multichannel marketing
campaigns fit into one of these three types.

Using the same campaign artwork and messages

across all channels
It seems simple, but it can be surprisingly hard to pull off.
Optimally, you’d want to create a look and feel and set of messages
for a single campaign event (Mother’s Day, Free P&P weekend, Black
Friday, etc.), and make sure the same look, feel, and messages are
used across any channel you are using to promote the event.
Having your website, physical stores, direct mail, Facebook Ads, and
email marketing all give out the same messages and look the same
during a campaign will create a real resonance in the customer’s mind
and increase performance across the whole campaign.

Alert messages
Just like the catalogue and email example above, these are messages
you send out via one marketing method to alert customers that
something they want to know about is shortly going to be happening
in another marketing method.

The same message at the same time

This is usually used with your triggered sequences. For example, if
someone has just joined your email list and you’re giving them a 10%
discount code to incentivise the first purchase, as well as providing
the discount in your email Welcome Campaign, you could also give it
to them via Web Push or Facebook Messenger, or even Direct Mail.
Then add them to an advertising audience for the next week (or
however the Welcome campaign lasts) that will put the same code in
front of them on Facebook or any other Online Advertising platform
you’re using. Just remember to set up the audience so that when they
buy, they’re automatically removed from the advertising!

More Ideas
Run a Free P&P weekend just for your email subscribers, and
in the days before it, put messages on your social media
channels and online advertising to encourage customers to
join your email list so they don’t miss out.
If you’re doing offline marketing to target a specific
geographic region (like a cold mailing only to people in
Scotland), run Online Ads in the geographic area with the same
call to action as the cold mailing over the weekend it lands.
On Google Ads, use RLSA and an Adgroup focused on your
brand keywords to tweak your Adtext to match whatever this
week’s email marketing message is.
Run Abandoned Basket reminders via Web Push Notifications,
Facebook Messenger, Online Ads, and email. You can even do
this with Direct Mail postcards too.
When you publish and promote a new blog talking about the
problems a new product solves, create an Online advertising
audience of those who’ve visited the blog page and advertise
the product to them.

Where it does and doesn’t work

Multichannel Marketing can be used successfully at all Stages of the
Customer MasterPlan Model. There are ways to use it in all
marketing methods, but it tends to work best with marketing
methods where you can select who to give the message to, like Email
Marketing, Offline Marketing, and Remarketing Audiences.
As you plan each new piece of marketing, ask yourself, “Could I make
this more powerful by including more marketing channels?”
 15
Triggered Marketing Is Great
for You
and the Customer
TRIGGERING MARKETING IS setting up flows of communication that are
automatically triggered into action when the customer does
something.
After they sign up to your email marketing, they get an email to say
thank you, or when they visit the site for the first time in 6 months,
the following day they get an email about the product category they
were looking at, they get added to a remarketing audience that starts
showing them ads about you on Facebook, and a post card with the
same message as the adverts is sent to them in the mail.
This type of marketing is great for your business because you set it up
once, and then every time a customer does the triggering activity, the
marketing just happens! You don’t have to do a thing. Although you
should, of course, be checking the results every so often and
optimising the performance.
It’s also good for your business because it puts communications in
front of the customer that are relevant to where the customer is in
their journey with you.
What’s good for the customer is also great for your business.
Putting the right message in front of each customer at the right time
should create communications that are useful and helpful to the
customer and reduce the volume of irrelevant messages they get
from you.

What triggers the marketing?

For any of this automated marketing to happen, it’s got to be
triggered by something.
The triggers make sure each customer gets the messages at the right
time in their relationship with your business, the time we’re most able
to get them closer to buying.
To be able to do this, the triggered action need to be things your
systems can automatically detect and relay to whatever marketing
system needs them.
Common triggers include:

New sign up to a form of marketing (email, direct mail, Push,

Facebook Messenger, etc.)
Sign up to a loyalty program
Purchase
Abandoned basket
Marketing method interactions, or lack of interactions
Visit to the website
Time since they last did something

With a bit of code, most systems can now handle all of these very
easily.

What marketing should you send?

How many marketing methods should you include in
each triggered campaign?
Most often, triggered marketing activity is focused on sending emails,
but lots of other marketing methods can be part of your triggered
campaign. You can also send Push Notifications, Facebook
Messenger messages, Direct Mail, SMS — anything you can integrate
into the automated system and which you have permission to send
the customer, really.
As part of a triggered marketing campaign, you can often also add and
remove customers from your online advertising audiences, changing
what advertising messages they see from you and whether or not
you’re putting search engine adverts in front of them.
Which ones you use all depends on which ones you need to use to get
the desired outcome as cheaply as possible.
It’s usually best to start simply with one marketing method, and then
add others as you optimise the campaign, initially testing to see if the
additional channel improves response and profitability. If it does
improve performance, then can you use it more? Or is it time to test
adding a third marketing method?
If it doesn’t improve performance, then turn it off and test adding a
different marketing method.

How many messages?

A Triggered Marketing campaign can have one single message, 1,000
messages, or anything in between.
How many messages the campaign you’re working on should have
depends on how many you need to maximise the performance of that
campaign, and how many messages it’s prudent to send during the
timespan for that campaign.
With an Abandoned Basket Campaign, the bulk of the sales will be
generated by the first message sent to the customers. Adding a
second reminder 24 hours later won’t perform as well as the first
message, but it will significantly improve results.
An Abandoned Basket Campaign is a quick-burning campaign; it’s not
going to last more than a few days, so whether the third message goes
out 48 hours after the trigger, or during the first 24 hours (between
the 1st and 2nd messages) is something you’d need to test. But it’s
unlikely an Abandoned Basket Campaign would include more than 3
messages via one marketing method.
It might include more than 3 messages spread over several marketing
methods though – maybe 2 emails, and 1 push notification, for
example.
At the other end of the scale, the messages that follow the trigger of a
new person signing up to your email list can be numerous.
The job of the Email Welcome Campaign is to educate the Enquirer
about your business to build a trusting relationship with them and get
them ready to buy from you. Working out how many messages you
need to do that depends on how much you feel you need to tell them.
It can easily be up to 10 individual emails sent over a few weeks.
One of the great things with Triggered Marketing is that, however
many messages you think you will need to send to maximise the
performance of each campaign, you can put the campaign live as soon
as you’ve got just the first one ready to go! Even if you’ve planned a
Welcome Campaign of 5 emails, you don’t need to wait until all 5 are
ready, as soon as you have the first email set up you can turn the
campaign on. Sending just one of those 5 emails to new Enquirers is
going to be better than not sending them anything. Then, as you have
the other emails ready, you can add them to the campaign.

What messages should be in a triggered marketing

campaign?
The type of messages will vary greatly from campaign to campaign
and should be whatever content you need to use to get them to take
the right action.
For content focused campaigns, include the messages that will get
the customer to do what you want them to do.
A Welcome Campaign will tell the story of your business, remove
barriers to purchase (delivery information, returns, guarantees), talk
up the quality of your products, and provide a reason to trust you.
A Post-purchase Campaign might be focused on getting the customer
to share their product experience on social media.
For the campaigns that are much more focused on getting a quick
conversion (like Abandoned Baskets or Abandoned Browse), then
most of the message content will be automatically created based on
what the customer was looking at on the website, or what they left in
their basket.
Whatever you set up, aim to make each communication evergreen.
That means it’s not going to go out of date in the near future,
otherwise you’re going to have to spend a lot of time updating
content in your triggered marketing, which rather misses the point of
having your marketing automated.
Aim for the content to be evergreen for 12 months, and make a diary
note of when you need to refresh the graphics, etc. If you’re a
business linked to trends and need to include lifestyle shots that don’t
make you appear out of date, then you might need to do the updates
more often.
To keep the content evergreen, focus on linking to pages that won’t
change on your website (categories or blog posts and articles, rather
than products). Focus on subjects that will always be important in
your business to get the sale – the story of the business, returns and
delivery policies, product categories, etc.
Where possible, automate the creation of the email content to make
it more personal and up to date. For Abandoned Baskets, that would
be automatically adding all the relevant information for what’s in the
customer’s basket. If you have a searchendising tool that integrates
with your email marketing, then you can often add a set of products
based on what’s selling right now. For Abandoned Browse activity,
the content would be populated by what the customer was doing on
the site.

Should you include an offer?

Adding a discount code will invariably increase response – but is the
uplift worth the cost of the discount?
Always offering a discount can also lead to you building a database of
customers who only respond to discounts, and that’s a challenging
space to be in if you’re trying to increase profits.
This really does come back to the Golden Promotional Rule:

Testing different offers and no offers will enable you to find the
sweet spot where response is good and you’re not giving away more
than you need to for each response.
Often that leads to the first few messages not having an offer, so you
get maximum revenue from the customers who buy quickly. Then add
an offer in later messages to push those who haven’ yet converted
over the line.

Don’t forget the exits

With all Triggered Marketing activity, as well as working out how a
customer gets added to the campaign, you need to identify if they
should be removed from the campaign early or receive the whole
thing no matter what they do.
Obviously, if they unsubscribe, they’ll stop receiving it!
For a campaign like the Welcome Campaign, you’ll probably want
them to receive the whole thing, then at the end add them to your
normal broadcasts lists.
For campaigns like Abandoned Baskets, it’s crucial to stop sending
the messages once they’ve checked that basket out. You don’t want
to annoy the customer by emailing them about an order they’ve
already paid for.
In an ideal world, the Exits would happen in real time and keep
everything active. But sometimes updates between channels happen
only hourly or daily. If this is the case for some of the tools you’re
using in your Triggered Campaigns, then you can use messages and
timing to minimise the number of times a message is sent before the
exit information is passed to the right system to stop it.
A Direct Mail piece as part of an abandoned basket campaign is going
to take time to get to the customer and you can’t stop it once it’s in
the post. Therefore, it may be best to keep the messages generic and
not focused on the basket that’s been abandoned.
If purchase data is only provided to the email marketing system once
an hour at 10 minutes past, set each Abandoned Basket email to send
at 11 minutes past just after everyone who has bought their
abandoned basket has been removed from the campaign.
Triggered Marketing Campaigns to use at
each Stage of the Customer MasterPlan
Model

There are many more options, and all of the above can be split into
multiple triggered campaigns based on all sorts of ways you can
segment your customers.

Where to start
If you don’t have an Abandoned Basket Campaign, build that first.
Assuming you can set up the integrations, it’s one of the easiest to put
live and is the one most likely to bring you a great result.
After that’s live, you need to consider where on the Customer
MasterPlan Model you have a problem. You need to identify the
Triggered Campaign that you believe will have the most positive
impact on sales and build it.
Each time that you’re ready to build another one, again identify and
build the triggered campaign you think will make the biggest impact
on your sales performance.

Finding the time

Many a business fails to get into building their Triggered Campaigns
because they can’t ever find the time to do it because they’re fully
employed working on the business-as-usual newsletters and
advertising.
To build out all the triggered campaigns that could work for your
business would take a LOT of time, but to start with one, and get the
trigger and the first message set up and live, can often be done in an
afternoon.
This is marketing where you should start small. Until you see how the
customers respond to the automations you set up, you won’t know
what you should do next.
If you have a plan for a 10-email Welcome Campaign and you put the
first email live and it gets a terrible response, you’re going to be really
glad you didn’t get all 10 ready before you put it live. In this instance,
you’d create the planned second email and swap it with the first one
to see if performance improves. Rather than creating 10 whole emails
before you learn anything, you’ve put one email live and you’re
already testing and optimising and improving performance long
before you’d have created all 10.
What you learn from creating your first Triggered Marketing
Campaign and its results will help you better plan what the next
Triggered Marketing Campaign you build should be, and what should
be in it.
You don’t have to find as much time as you think you do, but you do
have to commit to finding some time to create and optimise your
Triggered Campaigns. At a minimum, I’d recommend setting aside 2
hours a week to do this.
Optimise
Triggered Campaigns are great because they work in the background
without you having to do a thing.
Which makes it very easy to forget to optimise them.
Optimisation in this case means looking at the results and deciding if
you should improve performance by doing one of the following:

Adding more marketing methods to the campaign.

Adding more messages to the campaign.
Changing the timing of when the messages are sent.
Increasing or decreasing the level of incentive to take action.
Improving the copy and imagery.

Triggered Campaigns are drip-fed as the customers hit the trigger, so

it can take a while to get enough data to be able to optimise, but that
doesn’t mean you should never do it.
Set a monthly alert to check the performance of your campaigns;
those where this amount of time provides enough data go through
the optimisation process.
 16
Powerful Marketing Messages
THERE ARE SOME messages that work for all eCommerce businesses.
If you already know about these and use them regularly in your
campaigns – congrats! I’m including them here because I still come
across a lot of businesses not doing one or more of these, and it’s
costing them sales.

Sale
In every country on the planet, there are times in the year when all
retailers go on sale.
In the UK, our big sales period is the post-Christmas January Sales, a
sales period which actually now starts on Christmas Day.
Trying to sell full-price products when everyone in the country is
being bombarded by massive discounts everywhere they turn is very
hard.
That makes it a great time of year to clear out the old stock that’s
taking up space in the warehouse, and new stock that you’ve bought
too much of and get some cash back into the business.
Sale season can also be a great time to convert some of your
Enquirers and get some of your lapsed buyers to buy again.
Remembering my Golden Rule is important at Sale time, so don’t start
off with your maximum discounts. See how much you can clear before
you give more margin away.
Key marketing messages during Sale:

Sale Now On
Further Reductions
Must End Soon

That’s three email newsletters for one event!

Nationwide events
These are events like Christmas, Mother’s Day, Valentines’ Day,
Father’s Day, Halloween.
Not all of them are relevant for every business, but if your product
makes a good gift for one of them or has products directly related to
one, you should certainly be including that in your marketing
messages at the relevant time of the year.
How much effort you put into it depends on how well its’ going to do
for you.
A business which only sells gifts will start Christmas marketing in
August. A jewellery store will start focusing on Valentine’s Day in late
January.
For you, each might just be one email, or it might be a full cross-
channel marketing campaign.
If you’re not sure how it would work for you, do a little bit around it
this year, and see what happens.

Last order dates

Telling customers about the last date they can order to get delivery in
time for an event is a marketing message that will be seen as helpful
by the customers and also drive some sales too.
For larger events like Christmas, you may be able to use it multiple
times:

One week left to place your orders

Today is the last order date for standard delivery
Today is the last order date for next-day delivery

Free delivery
Delivery costs are a huge barrier to conversion, which makes offering
Free Delivery a very powerful incentive to get the conversion.
Usually Free Delivery will perform better than the equivalent value
money off voucher or discount because it’s not just about the cost, it’s
about removing the barrier to conversion as well.
It can be used just to get sales by running a Free Delivery promotion
for a limited time, a weekend, or week.
It can also be used to increase average order values by running a Free
Delivery if spend over £x promotions.
If you aren’t using it to drive sales, you’re missing a big opportunity.

New
New Season, New Range, New Products – it’s always interesting to a
customer.
Plus, it usually drives full-price sales, and a marketing message that
brings in maximum margin is great!

Back in stock
If you have customer favourites that you only sell at certain times of
the year (like Starbuck Pumpkin Spice Latte, or Cadbury’s Crème
Egg), a big announcement when they’re back in stock can drive a lot of
full-price sales too.
 17
Emotion Sells: Neuromarketing
101
IN RECENT YEARS, there’s
been a lot of focus on how eCommerce
business performance can be improved through Emotional
eCommerce.
This is applying the lessons learned by neuromarketing scientists to
increase sales.
At the highest level, it’s about creating an emotional connection with
customers that impacts on every single part of the business. This is
hugely powerful but takes a lot of effort to put in place.20
At the more practical end of emotional retailing, there are some
tactics and messages we can all use, quickly, to improve
performance21.
No matter how big or small your company, if you can add some of
these messages into your marketing, you will see a performance
improvement.

Homophily
Homophily is the concept that people who share things in common
are more likely to be friends.
In the eCommerce space, this means that if you can demonstrate to
the audiences you’re marketing to that your business and your team
are similar to them, then that will create a connection and increase
their likelihood of buying.

Visually
Your choice of models for your product shots, and advertising images
should be people like your customers.
It also means sharing photography of the people behind the company.
Founder’s story
The About Us page on the website should focus on how your
founders and the team are similar to the target customer. Sharing
how you’re passionate about what they’re passionate about.
This example from FarmToysOnline.co.uk is perfect:
Elements of this should be included in Welcome Campaigns, ongoing
content creation, and regularly in your marketing.
That might even include creating a “World X Day” to show just how
passionate you are. For example, Green and Blue
(greenandblue.co.uk) are a business completely focused on designing
beautiful products that help wildlife, and one of their core products is
the bee brick, a home for solitary bees. They’ve created an annual
Solitary Bee week to help their cause (solitarybeeweek.com).

Urgency
Creating a sense of urgency can be a very powerful way to drive sales
without having to add extra discounts.
Urgency tactics include:

Must End Soon

Last Order Dates
Countdown Timers
This weekend only

Scarcity
Scarcity runs hand in hand with Urgency, because both are about
people’s fear of missing out.
Scarcity is focused on stocks running low, which could be:

“Only 3 left” messages on a product page.

Including a “Get them before they’re gone” section in
marketing campaigns.
“Only 3 left” at this price (after which the price increases).

Social proof
This is possibly the most powerful, because it’s all about getting your
customers to trust you.
The more your customers trust your business and your products, the
more they’ll buy from you.
There are lots of ways to increase trust – doing what you say you will,
and treating customers well is a great place to start!
Social proof is a way of proving that someone should trust you. It
relies on the fact that we are far more likely to do something if we’ve
seen someone else do it.
It should be included in every piece of marketing activity because it
has been proven time and again to increase responses and sales.

Customer reviews
At Argos (the UK’s 3rd most-visited retail website), they’ve analysed
the impact of reviews on website conversion and found that a
product page with a one-star review will sell more product per 1,000
visitors than a product with no reviews.
All reviews are good! They show that someone has actually bought
the product (someone else has done the thing you want the customer
to do), and how they found it.
Once you’ve got reviews include them in your marketing:

Your overall review score – 4.5 stars out of 5

Actual testimonials from happy customers
Selections of your top-reviewed products
Total number of reviews you have had

All these messages are going to help.

Customer reviews on social media

Customers sharing their love of your business on social media has
just the same impact as the reviews, plus the bonus that it’s putting
the message in front of potential new customers too!
You can reuse these messages on your own social media channels,
your website, and in your other marketing activity.

Bestsellers
If we’re trying to prove that it’s safe to buy from us, then focusing on
your bestselling products is a great way to do it.
These are product that LOTS of customers have safely bought, which
makes them a safe choice for future customers.
Links to ‘bestsellers’ in your ad extensions and email headers. A
campaign focused on bestsellers every few months – all helps to
increase sales.

Press reviews
If your business and products have been featured on websites, in the
press or on TV, they’ve been featured in places that the customers
already trust. By publicising that those places trust your business, you
will increase the trust your customers have in your business. Which
will lead to more sales. Examples:

“We’re featured in…” messages

Logos of the biggest ones in your marketing
A press page on the website to send the traffic to

Celebrity customers
This works in a very similar way to the Press Reviews – it’s about
showing that people of influence trust you and like your products.

20 If you want to know more, read these books: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel
Kahneman, and System1 – Unlocking Profitable Growth by Kearon, Ewing and Wood.
21 To learn more about these quick tactics, read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by
Robert B Cialdini and Click.ology: What Works in Online Shopping and How Your Business
can use Consumer Psychology to Succeed by Graham Jones.
 18
Keep Optimising!
ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING IN this book, every marketing method, every
message, every idea, has one thing in common.
If you don’t optimise, you won’t get the results you deserve.
No one on this planet can create a perfect online advertising
campaign on day one.
No one on this planet can create a perfect triggered marketing
campaign on a whiteboard.
No one on this planet can tell you exactly which SEO keywords will
bring you the best return on investment.
To say, “Keep Optimising” and commit to the idea is pretty easy; to
actually do it requires a lot more effort.
To get great results from each marketing method, you have to
optimise it.
That means running some marketing, looking at the results, working
out how to make the results better, making the improvements, and
then doing it all again.
That is the process of optimisation.
It’s a process that never ends.
As you repeatedly optimise a piece of marketing, you’ll find that
initially your changes will make a big difference, but that the
improvements slow over time. That’s great news because it means
you’ve found the right way to do that marketing for your customers,
and it means you can optimise that activity less frequently. But you
never completely stop optimising anything.

Tracking the results

The only way you can optimise your marketing in an eCommerce
business is if you know how it’s performing against your objectives.
That means you need to be tracking the results of everything you’re
doing.
Core to doing this is having:

eCommerce Tracking set up and enabled on your Google

 Analytics account, so you can see what impact every traffic
source is having on your sales (and much more). That means
you can optimise your overall marketing mix, and the traffic
sources that don’t have their own conversion tracking
systems.
Having the conversion data (number of orders and the value of
those orders) passed from your website into each of your
marketing systems (e.g. your Email systems or Google Ads).
This enables you to see everything you need to optimise for
each marketing method in one place. This usually means
adding a small amount of code to your order confirmation
pages.

It you don’t already have that working, fix it asap.

Don’t commit the sin of over-reporting

Whilst not reporting at all is of course a problem, over-reporting is
almost worse.
Over-reporting is where you spend the first two days of every month
(or 3 hours at the start of every week) compiling every stat you can
find on each of your marketing methods.
You end up creating complicated multi-sheet spreadsheets that no
one ever looks at (or at least not for more than 5 minutes).
It’s. not. Worth. It.
Spreadsheet reports should only be produced when they can help you
make decisions, or alert you to problems.

Monthly reports
Monthly reports are a great way to track trends over time and
monitor seasonality.
They should be done by marketing channel, and only record the most
important metrics:

Traffic Volume
Number of Orders
 Conversion Rate
Value of Orders
AOV
Cost
Profitability Score (whatever you use, for example CPA or
ROAS)

Nothing else – you don’t need number of emails sent or click rates. It’s
not important at this level. The point of this report is to allow you to:

See if performance has improved this month or gotten worse

for an individual marketing method since last month, and this
month last year.
Quickly compare performance between channels.

(It’s also very useful when you’re setting next year’s budgets.)
This high-level view will enable you to quickly work out where your
optimisation focus should be for the next few weeks.

If performance is great in a marketing channel, you want to

find out how to do more of it, and if there are lessons there you
can use in other channels.
If performance is bad in a marketing channel, you need to go
and find out how to improve it, or how to limit the damage.

No other stats are required for this high-level view. You can easily
access the stats you need to optimise in each marketing tool, where
you’ll probably be looking at them over different time periods
anyway, so why waste your time copying them into a spreadsheet?
To make the monthly report really useful, you should split out the
different tactics or strategies you’re pursuing in each marketing
method. Split Email into Newsletters and Triggered Campaigns. Split
Google Ads into Brand and Non-Brand, Keywords and Products.
If you are producing any other reports – ask yourself (and anyone
else receiving them) ‘Does this help us optimise performance enough
for it to be worth the time and effort to produce?’.
Commit to an optimisation rhythm
Each marketing method has its own optimisation rhythm.
Some need constant monitoring and tweaking to maintain results
(Google Ads and Facebook Ads), so for these you often have an
intensive period of optimisation when they first go live that slows
down as you knock all the rough corners off the campaign.
Others should be focused on less frequently, often only when you
have enough data to make good decisions (if you only do Offline
Marketing once a year, you can only optimise it once a year;
Triggered Marketing campaigns often take a month or two to be
triggered enough times for the results to be statistically significant,
and therefore worth paying attention to).
For those that need constant monitoring, set aside half a day a week
to check in on them and make your optimisations, ideally the same
half-day each, as it makes tracking the impact of improvements much
easier.
Some weeks there’ll be very little to do – congratulations, you’ve got
2.5 hours back! But you should still check in, because if you don’t, you
won’t know whether it needs optimising or not.
For those that need less constant optimisation, set aside one day per
month to focus on all of them, ideally a day at the start of the month
so you can use the monthly report to help you work out what to
optimise first. Again, if optimising everything that needs optimising
only takes you half the day, that’s great and at least you had the time
available to do more if you had needed to.

Don’t forget to optimise your time

Your optimisation should be focused on the big numbers – your
profitability, and therefore costs and sales.
Many people forget that money isn’t the only cost – time is a cost too,
and for many of the marketing methods, it’s likely to be the biggest
cost.
If you’re not outsourcing them, the majority of the cost for Email
marketing, Content Marketing, and SEO is the time it takes you to do
them.

Time tracking
Tracking the cost of your time involves using a time tracking tool (I
use myhours.com) to track how much time you and your team spend
on each marketing method, then allocating a cost-per-hour to each
person so you can turn that into a financial cost. Making it a financial
number makes it really easy to compare all your marketing activity.
When you set up your time tracking tool, don’t just track “SEO” and
“Email”; split each marketing method down into the different critical
tasks – like content planning, link-building, keyword research, tag
writing, technical SEO, etc.

Optimising time
Once you see the numbers, if you find there are marketing methods
that really aren’t delivering the results for the time you and your
team are spending on them, there are lots of ways to improve the
results:

Discuss with the team how they think efficiencies can be made
– they’ll probably have some great time-saving ideas to get
you started.
There are probably tasks that are not delivering any value at
all, so stop doing them. Reporting is often in this category.
Look for tools you can use to streamline processes. There’s
probably something for free, or that’s well worth the initial
investment.
Find a way to automate repetitive manual tasks.

If there are marketing methods where you’re spending very little

time, but performance is great…

Discuss with the team what else you could be doing to grow
results. Often a little extra effort can make a big difference.
Quality time
Optimising time is a much more sensitive thing to do than optimising
money.
As you start to optimise time, you can damage your relationship with
your team if you don’t handle it well.
It’s crucial to explain to them that it isn’t about measuring them
individually; it’s about making sure as a business you’re deploying
your resources in the right place.
Discuss the results with them and listen to their ideas.
Before making any big changes to how someone spends their time,
talk with them about which tasks they enjoy and which they dislike.
You may find the reason that something is taking a lot of time is
because you have someone doing it who finds the task really tedious,
whilst someone else in your team would love it. Some reallocation of
tasks between team members can dramatically change the time
results.
Pay attention to the things they find tedious and try to find ways to
outsource them. Either to technology – tools and automations — or to
people outside your business.
By doing this, you should be able to create more fulfilling roles for
your team members. It’s hard to calculate the impact of this, but it
should certainly be positive!

Outsourcing
There are two reasons to give workload to people outside your
business:

1. The skills to do the task well don’t exist in your business.

2. It costs less to get the tasks done outside your business than
within your business, and the quality of the work is equally
good.

In both cases, outsourcing is going to improve marketing

performance. In the first case because you’ve got someone more
skilled looking after the activity, which will improve optimisation and
increase sales. In the second case because, by outsourcing, you’re
freeing up a member of your team to work on tasks and projects that
are more valuable to you.
Outsourcing to agencies can be a great way to improve your
marketing performance, especially in complex specialised areas like
Online Advertising.
Outsourcing to freelancers can be a great way to get a fantastic
service at a more manageable and more flexible cost commitment.
There are lots of great ways to find freelancers including:

Upwork.com: A site where you can find specialists in almost

any field, great for project work.
VirtualStaffFinder.com: Can help you find the right part-time
or full-time virtual assistant.
Freeeup.com: eCommerce-specific freelancer hiring service.
They vet every freelancer before letting them onto the
platform and have a freelancer category for all the core
eCommerce tasks.
JustAskParker.com: eCommerce-specific task outsourcing.
For a monthly fee, they’ll handle as many marketing tasks as
you want them to.

If outsourcing seems scary, pick a simple task like writing a blog post,
and test the waters with it before outsourcing the more complex
activity.

Your whole business, not just the marketing

If you want to take time optimisation seriously, then follow this
process for everything you do in the business, not just the marketing
activity.
Often, you’ll find lots of activity that’s just not worth doing, or not
worth doing in-house. Once you’ve freed up that time, you’ve got
more time for marketing!
 Part 5: The Customer
MasterPlan 4 Week
Marketing Transformation
Challenge
IT’S ESTIMATED THAT only 10% of the business books purchased
globally ever get read. As I glance down at the bookshelf in my office,
I can believe that!!
That means you’re already ahead of the pack, because you’ve reached
the back of the book. You’re in the top 10%.
But don’t feel too smug, because if you don’t implement what you’ve
just learnt and adapt your marketing systems, then what was the
point of reading the book in the first place?
It would be a real missed opportunity if you do nothing, because
adopting the Customer MasterPlan model and continuous
optimisation as the way you approach your marketing decisions will
create a performance step change in your business.
I know you get that, but that you’re already busy doing what you
normally do. Finding the time to change things and do new things is
hard.
As is working out where to start, often the first step is the hardest.
I’ve designed the 4-week challenge to make it as easy as possible for
you to integrate the lessons of this book into your business in just a
couple of hours a week.

3.1 Steps to implement the (4 week)

marketing transformation challenge
Step 1
Visit eCommerceMarketingBook.com/quickstart to download the
Customer MasterPlan 4 Week Fast Track Kit. It contains all the
templates and information you’ll need to get started and integrate
Customer MasterPlan thinking in your marketing processes.
It’s all designed to make it as easy as possible.
Do it now.

Step 2
Commit to the 4-week process.
Get the diary out and ring fence a 2-3 hour block each week for the
next 4 weeks. Yes, start next week. Ideally do it on the same day each
week - so every Tuesday morning from 10-12 you’ll focus on the
Customer MasterPlan 4 Week Marketing Transformation Challenge.

Step 3
Read the introduction in the Customer MasterPlan 4 Week Fast
Track Kit you downloaded, then follow the instructions and complete
the exercises.
The Customer MasterPlan 4 Week Marketing Transformation
Challenge requires a little preparation, so it’s important to get that
done this week before your 4-week starts. Don’t worry - this
shouldn’t take you more than 30-60 minutes to complete.
Step 3.1
Don’t do this alone.
If you work as part of a marketing team — get everyone involved. It’s
going to affect them all in the long run, so get them involved from the
beginning.
If you work alone — find yourself an accountability partner. Maybe
someone in a different department at work, or someone working in
marketing at another retailer.
Whilst this isn’t mandatory, it will help you to implement the
Customer MasterPlan 4 Week Marketing Transformation Challenge
because you’ll have someone to discuss the process and our progress
with, and a little bit of accountability is a great way to make it actually
happen!!
Contact whoever you’re going to do this with now. Drop them an
email, a text, or give them a call and get them on board. Make sure
they can work to the same timetable as you.
The quickest way for them to get up to speed is to go to
eCommerceMarketingBook.com to get immediate and free access to
the eCommerce Marketing Crash Course - two free chapters from
the eCommerce Marketing book, the eCommerce Marketing video
training and the eCommerce Marketing audio training.
It won’t cost them a penny, and in less than 2 hours they’ll be ready
and committed to go through the process with you. You’ll be able to
support and encourage each other as you make the changes to your
marketing.
IMPORTANT
Don’t let step 3.1 hold you back from getting started. It’s more
important to start now, than it is to have a partner in the journey.
Plus, you’ll be even better positioned to encourage them to join you in
the journey once you’ve started it yourself.
Once you’ve found your accountability partners, or convinced your
team, send them to eCommerceMarketingBook.com to access the
eCommerce Marketing Crash Course. Then in less than 2 hours
they’ll be ready to join you, and probably a little inspired and eager to
get started too.
 What Do You Think?
THANK YOU FOR reading my book!
I need your input to make the next version of this book, and my future
books better.
I’d really appreciate it if you could spare a few minutes to leave me a
helpful review on Amazon.
Let me know what you thought of the book, I love hearing what you
have to say about it – the good and the bad.
Thanks in advance!
Chloë Thomas
 About the Author
CHLOË THOMAS HAS been in eCommerce since 2004, working for
retailers large and small as an advisor, marketing agency owner, and
employee.
In 2019, she was named one of the Top 50 Influencers in eCommerce
and Delivery in the UK, and regularly speaks at and chairs some of the
biggest eCommerce events in the UK and overseas, including the
Internet Retailing Conference and eCommerce Expo.
Since 2017, her focus has been exclusively on helping eCommerce
business owners and marketers to solve their marketing problems via
the work she does at eCommerce MasterPlan.
Chloë is on a mission to help as many businesses as possible so most
of her focus is on podcasting, writing, and speaking rather than
consulting. However, each year she does work with a select few
ecommerce business owners fulfilling a role that’s part mentor, part
marketing director.
She lives in Cornwall, and can regularly be found sipping peppermint
tea and writing on trains between St Austell and London Paddington.

Find out more:

eCommerceMasterPlan.com/books
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/podcast
eCommerceMasterPlan.com/Chloe
 Book Chloë to Speak
BOOK CHLOË TO speak at your event and she’s guaranteed to deliver
an insightful, engaging, and entertaining session for everyone in
attendance!
For more than a decade Chloë Thomas has been delivering
presentations about eCommerce strategy and marketing across the
UK and Europe. Always happy to tailor content to meet your
audience’s needs – she rarely gives the same presentation twice!
Covering both detailed topics (How to Structure your Remarketing
Activity) and “mesmerising” Key Note sessions.
“I found Chloë to be a very engaging speaker and what really struck me
was how long people made the Q&A session last… we were there for 45-
50 minutes.”
Andre Brown, Chief Executive, Attraqt

“One of our primary reasons for calling on Chloë to speak at our events is
that she always manages to deliver what is quite technical information in a
way that makes it easy to understand and assimilate. She has developed an
excellent speaking style over the years which is informal whilst retaining
an authoritative air and our delegates have certainly appreciated her
insight.
Always well prepared with the latest information to share, Chloë is open,
friendly and approachable – all of which makes her training sessions and
presentations thoroughly engaging.”
Jane Revell-Higgins, Direct Commerce Association

“Working with Chloë on our large flagship events has been excellent. The
content that Chloë delivered was always relevant and engaging and her
ability to be flexible with the content depending on the nature of the
audience was extremely pleasing, attendee feedback continuously reflects
this.
From an event organiser’s point of view, Chloë is a pleasure to work with,
she has never missed a content deadline or let us down on any occasion.”
Matthew Hill, Marketing & Events
Coordinator, Peninsula Enterprise
For more information visit ChloeThomas.com