Author: LION Digital

Although the forecast of global economic recession directly affects the consumer’s behaviour on the Australian market and the tendency to save money over the festive season is observable, half of a million (570k) households on top of October’s results shopped online in November, achieving a record of more than 6 million households overall. eCommerce purchases in Queensland grew with the biggest lead of 11.2% YoY, whereas online shopping decreased by an anti-record 6.4% YoY in the Australian Capital Territory. Purchases being down by 3.8% in the last 12 months compared to the previous year is quite expected, considering that in 2021 lockdown-driven spending took place. 

Preceding the Cyber Weekend period, Click Frenzy’s sales run between the 6th and 19th of November gave a splash of 20% online purchases increase in comparison with the previous two weeks and 4.2 million households that shopped online over this period. General clothing and Beauty were the top categories, with 36% and 35%, respectively.

Despite increased foot traffic back into retail stores, Black Friday and Cyber Monday online sales events were almost 7% higher than last year’s record Cyber Weekend period. To capture a larger share of wallets, in 2022, retailers started sales earlier, which explains an immediate increase that took place a few days before the official takeoff on November 25th. Overall, during Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2022 events, between the 20th of November and the 3rd of December: online purchases surpassed last year’s by 6.6% and increased by an additional 42% compared to the Click Frenzy period; 4.9 million households shopped online which is 700k more households than during the Click Frenzy period. The most popular categories during the Cyber sales were Athleisure, Sporting & Outdoor Goods and Fashion Accessories. 

Here we share with you data from Australia Post. The results summarise the data and give insights into Australian Online Shopping trends for November 2022.

The market’s competitiveness directly affects the intensity of Online Retailers’ search for additional ways to acquire new customers and upgrade the service for existing ones to retain them. In a softening economy, it’s sensible for businesses to shop around for the best deals – better efficiency and results for the same price.

As consumers become more advanced in their eCommerce habits, they are looking for goods and services in whatever digital channel they’ve grown accustomed to. Moreover, depending on different aspects, the same potential customer could use more than one channel during their journey towards the actual purchase. When several parties with different approaches and levels of transparency are involved, managing these eCommerce marketing channels can become challenging.

360-degree observation

Once a reliable eCommerce marketing agency that manages all channels is found, the business will be able to observe the complete picture of business indicators throughout all marketing activities. Moreover, having a full view allows more appropriate budgeting for the most effective channels while keeping the rest on the minimum necessary activity level.

This is different from when several, not synchronised agencies manage the channels, and the risk of evaluating the global results wrongly and retrieving doubtful strategic insights based on fragmented information is high.

Scalability, flexibility and timely results

Data is the lifeblood of any organisation. Without data, decisions are based on guesswork, not objective analysis. When you can’t see the full picture, data is scattered and hard to access.

When the full picture is observable and accessible in one place, it’s much easier to make changes and scale in whatever direction with less loss in terms of always-scarce resources like time, money and effort.

Accumulate data and avoid ineffective overlaps

In marketing, the rule of 7 is a guideline that states you need seven interactions with a brand before a prospect decides to buy. However, this doesn’t mean that you must strictly limit the number of interactions to this specific “magic” number in all channels.

Marketing practitioners will tell you it’s preferable where it’s technically attainable, but they also raise an important issue: resources and efforts are sometimes wasted to keep impacting through an inappropriate channel or with an unattractive message.

Exclude cannibalisation

For instance, if you’re working with a performance-based partnership with a CPL (cost-per-lead) model — where the uniqueness of the attracted clients and transactions are your most significant indicator — data accumulated from different resources in one place and analysed using a uniform approach allows for more targeted exposure to your audience and avoids ineffective expenditures.

One of the biggest challenges that agencies face is channel cannibalisation. When two or more different parties separately manage channels, the appearance of the situation when these parties compete to achieve their own KPIs and eventually dilute the benefits for business is probable. For instance, SEO and SEM channels are very interconnected. The crucial part of agency work here is to ensure that paid traffic growth will not negatively affect the organic traffic through the cannibalisation of keywords and instead fill the gaps and increase the value of both channels through the Blended Search Marketing approach.

Article by

ASSELYA Sekerova –
MARKETING & PROJECT DIRECTOR

The new Google Ranking System guide defines the relevant systems Google uses and the old ones that are retired and no longer in use to rank search results.

What is the difference between systems and updates?

Systems are always running in the background. Updates, however, refer to one-time changes to the ranking systems. For example, helpful content systems run in the background whenever Google provides search results but may receive updates to improve performance. Other examples of one-time changes to ranking systems are core algorithm updates and spam updates.

Let’s look at the highlights from the Google Ranking System guide.

Current Google Ranking Systems

Here is a list of the Google ranking systems currently in operation.

• BERT
  Stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representation of Transformers and allows Google to understand how word combinations can express different meanings and intentions.
• Crisis information system
  Google has procedures to provide specific sets of information in times of crisis. For instance, SOS alerts when searching for natural disasters.
• Deduplication system
  The Google search engine tries to avoid duplicate or near-duplicate web pages.
• The exact match domain system
  This system prevents Google from overly trusting websites with domain names that match search queries.
• Freshness system
  Designed to display up-to-date content where it’s needed and where it’s expected.
• Helpful content system
  Makes it easy for people to see original, useful content rather than content created primarily to drive traffic from search engines.
• Link analysis systems and PageRank
  Determines which pages are the most useful in response to a query based on how the pages are linked.
• Local news systems
  Displays local news sources relevant to your search query.
• MUM or Multitask Unified Model
  An artificial intelligence system that can understand and generate speech. This powers the featured callout and is not used for the overall ranking.
• Neural matching
  Helps Google understand and match conceptual expressions for queries and pages.
• Original content systems
  Helps Google display original content, including actual reports, in search results.
• Removal-based demotion systems
  Downgrading websites based on mass content removal requests.
• Page experience system
  Evaluates various criteria to determine if a website provides a good user experience.
• Passage ranking system
  An artificial intelligence system that Google uses to identify individual sections or “snippets” of web pages to understand better how relevant the page is to searchers.
• Product reviews system
  Rewards quality product reviews by experienced writers with insightful analysis and original research.
• Rank Brain
  An artificial intelligence system that helps Google understand the relationship between words and concepts. Allows Google to return results that contain different terms than the exact words used in the query.
• Reliable information systems
  Google has several techniques for displaying reliable information. To promote authoritative pages, demote low-quality content, and reward high-quality journalism.
• Site diversity system
  Prevents Google from listing its web pages from the same website in the top search results on two or more listings.
• Spam detection system
  Processes content or activity that violates Google’s spam policy.

Outdated Google Ranking Systems

The following systems are marked for historical purposes. They are integrated into other systems or part of Google’s primary ranking system.

• Hummingbird
  A significant improvement from the Google ranking system was introduced in 2013.
• Mobile-friendly ranking system
  Prioritised content that plays better on mobile devices. It has been incorporated into the Google Pages interaction system.
• Page speed system
  Prioritised content that loads quickly on mobile devices, introduced in 2018. It has since been incorporated into the Google Pages interaction system.
• Panda system
  Prioritised quality and original content, introduced in 2011. In 2015, it became part of Google’s primary ranking system.
• Penguin system
  Downgraded websites that use spam link building, introduced in 2012.
• Secure site system
  Prioritised HTTPS-protected websites, introduced in 2014. It has since become part of the Google Pages experience.

Article by

Leonidas Comino – Founder & CEO

Leo is a, Deloitte award winning and Forbes published digital business builder with over a decade of success in the industry working with market-leading brands.

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Succeeding with engaging marketing activities in the holiday season assumes thoughtful planning of customer acquisition and retention strategies and their creative realisation. To help you get started, LION compiled a list of initiatives grouped into:

• Tactical – organised by readjusting standard channels and tools that are typically already in place in the majority of eCommerce companies, and the outcomes will be seen immediately after appliance;
• Strategic tools for customer retention need more time and effort to plan, launch and manage. However, the results are a solid base for the entire business’s longevity and subsequent scaling.

Tactical initiatives

Customer research and feedback

Generally, understanding the customer starts from target audience research and continues on the various marketing channel touch points. Capture the intention and attention of holiday shoppers by:

• Surveying to collect information about the holiday shopping plans of the customers
• Researching general shopping trends in the market
• Sharing gift lists with popular items
• Introducing holiday trends to inspire
• Running teasing campaigns
• Launching early access for loyal customers
• Optimising the purchase process.

However, the customer journey doesn’t end with the purchase! 37% of respondents claim that more than five and 33% – more than three purchases are needed to create solid brand loyalty. Therefore, post-purchase communications are invaluable contributors to the overall business management process. Why did customers buy this particular product? What is the level of their satisfaction? How do they use the product or service? If they don’t use it, then why? What is the definition of customer loyalty specifically for your company? Moreover, remember that enriched data and an extra occasion to be in touch with the customer is another perfect way to cross-sell.

Encourage users at the right moment to create an account

The importance of account creation for repurchasing and increasing the customer retention rate is apparent. The problem is that the mandatory creation of an account could be an issue because many online shoppers prefer to purchase as a guest, so asking to create an account could prevent them from placing their first orders. However, you can suggest an account creation immediately after the first purchase is completed and even simplify the process by applying the information from the details of this order.

Send only value-adding emails

There is a list of must-have emails to start:

• Welcome email
  Don’t miss the opportunity of using the email with the highest possible open rate of 50-60% at its maximum capacity. Personalise it apart from just using the name, but applying the details of the purchase and incorporating the personalised suggestion of similar products and services blocks.
• Content email
  Send a selection of relevant content in different formats to maintain customer engagement even after holiday sales seasons: promoting new offers, bundles, and special gifts to a specific segment of the target; sharing relevant content from the company’s blog and establishing the brand as a thought-leader in the industry; interacting with the audience by surveying and asking questions about the experience with the brand; updates about new products and information that your audience will find valuable.
• Upsell email
  Existing customers already have a history of successful experiences. Therefore, they trust the company and are more eager to purchase again. At the same time, the data collected during the previous order allows one to personalise subsequent communications easily.
• Abandoned cart email
  The goal is the suggestion to proceed, provide some promo code that could be applied to gain additional perks or simply show that the company is ready to receive feedback.

Emails can help to build customer relationships before and after purchases, but only if they add benefits to the customer experience that holiday shoppers probably wouldn’t want to miss. Worth putting yourself in the client’s shoes and asking, “So what?” – the question client asks when reads the email, critically assessing the information and the relevance of the received stimulant to act.

Retarget ads on social media

Apart from organic coverage that could be gained through appealing social media posts and encouraging the clients through various communication channels to follow and engage with the brand, as one of the best customer retention strategies, consider plugging in the social media’s retargeting power, which allows showing ads on social to people who already somehow were engaged with the website starting from those visited it once to those who dropped the cart.

Discount or credit for those who return

When the margins are low, applying discounts or credit strategies could negatively affect the bottom line. However, sending them for existing clients’ next purchases or retaining those who haven’t purchased for long could be a winning strategy to increase customer retention rate. Considering the amounts on discount and credit as a way to cut customer acquisition costs, increasing thought as a standard discount of 10% up to 20% or even more doesn’t seem excessive.

Strategic initiatives

Boost your customer support to the next level

A proper level of customer support became an unspoken golden standard for the highly-competitive eCommerce field. Online shoppers are most likely unpleasantly surprised if the company doesn’t match these standards. However, creating additional value could add to communications with clients an element of surprise and delight that puts the business, in the eyes of this particular customer, in a special place, spotlighting among the competitors:

• Sustainable 24-hour service
  Attract customer support agents, sourcing them across different time zones to provide outstanding 24-hour service alongside sustainable working conditions.
• Live chat
  The flexibility of the time to send the request and receive the responses makes live chat the communication type the eCommerce customers prefer over the phone and email communications.
• Omnichannel customer service options
  An omnichannel customer support strategy guarantees that you have agents spread across multiple channels, ready to meet and provide timely and eligible support to customers where they are.
• FAQ page and store policies
  Big holiday sales seasons are the sources for a large amount of data collection, and it is an omission not to use insights to make the next year’s customer experience more advanced. Collect, analyse and systemise the information about the most frequent queries related to the business on FAQ pages and predefined store policies, and the next holiday sales season may proceed much more smoothly.

Own the responsibility even if others are to blame

The customer experience contains different stages, elements and actors. The customers cannot and shouldn’t have to be able to separate these elements. Therefore, they apprehend the experience as a whole, and if something small licks, the overall customer experience impression could be damaged. Being able to own the responsibility for clients’ difficulties and turn the negativity into positivity should be one of the key methods in customer retention strategy and loyalty management.

Personalise the customer journey

The main point of difference for an eCommerce business could be creating a customer journey that feels as if it was explicitly designed with customers in mind and was tailored to the specific customer’s need. Improve the customer retention rate by differentiating the company from its competitors and making loyal customers flow away harder:

• Positive emotions and entertaining experiences
  Gamification on the website, reusable packaging and other ideas at each stage of the customer journey – positive associations make the company product or service much more memorable in the customer’s mind.
• Unexpected gifts and thank you notes
  Miniature versions of the product samples or personalised and branded thank you notes with a handwritten signature included in the order are a striking touch perfectly appropriate for the holiday seasons and birthdays.

Return policy as the security guarantee to clients

92% of consumers polled claim they will be ready to buy from the online store again if the product return process is easy. It is connected to feeling secure from the risks of wasting money and extra time beyond what was already invested on an item that can or cannot match the requirements or the initially stated product description. Remind online shoppers that they can trust you if they’re not satisfied with the product, and they will be more likely to buy from your business, even if they’re unsure about a product.

A good return policy considers all conditions when a request can be qualified and specifically underlines the situations when it cannot be qualified as a return. Ensure ahead that the return policy is clear, reasonable and fair. 

Customer loyalty program – never dying classics

A sustainable customer portfolio contains a balanced range of new and retained clients. The strategies for working with retained clients consider the frequency of purchases as the key indicator to focus on. The importance of customer loyalty and engagement cannot be overestimated. The essence of customer loyalty programs is to reward the customer for various actions, from authorising the credit card and actual purchasing to leaving a review and inviting a friend. What effort should be rewarded and how – depends on the business model specifics and strategy. Regardless, customer loyalty programs are proven to be one of the most efficient ways for customer retention.

Subscription service

Subscriptions provide regular revenue for the business by locking people into purchasing monthly. Moreover, they keep existing customers constantly engaged by delivering personalised experiences, and it shouldn’t have to be mandatorily the entire business model for the online shop. For example, for eCommerce cosmetics retailers, monthly subscription boxes could include miniature versions of the best-selling products.

Conclusion

We hope these LION tips will help you succeed in highly competitive holiday season markets!

Whatever initiatives to retain the customers you choose, uphold a data-driven and creative approach. Don’t forget to measure the efficiency of your efforts and distinguish valuable insights to adjust and change the direction if needed. Last but not least – select dedicated partners in your technology stack.

At LION Digital, we value relevancy the most in complex customer retention strategies. Although we make agnostic recommendations based on customer needs, we recommend Yotpo who is a quality service partner, to help accelerate our clients’ growth by enabling advocacy and maximising customer lifetime value. Yotpo includes the most advanced solutions for SMS marketing, loyalty and referrals, subscriptions, reviews, and visual user-generated content – you can choose depending on what customer retention strategies you want to apply.

Given the influx of volume to the website, Yotpo heavily emphasises leveraging all the first-party data collected during the holiday promotions for post-holiday communications to make smarter, segmented audiences for email and SMS flows. Make this data work for you and provide hyper-personalized marketing to your subscribers. For example, get them back on site with a new product that complements one they have already purchased.

Article by

ASSELYA Sekerova –
MARKETING & PROJECT MANAGER

As the cost of paid media advertising has increased over the last 2-3 years of exaggerated eCommerce usage, we have seen Cost Per Clicks (CPC’s) rise at an exponential rate as businesses scramble, fight to acquire market share & increase top-line revenue. As a result of this, we saw the ability to maintain a decent Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) be put in a comprising position were to maintain the ROAS, the business may have to sacrifice top line & paid media revenue contributions.

This now has created a fork in the road that feels like more of an ultimatum for the business, that it must either choose an acceptable ROAS with slower revenue growth of 5-10% YoY… or a historically below average ROAS with strong revenue growth of 20-30% YoY. A common example that you may be focusing on the wrong goal is if your ads account ROAS is growing, but your full site revenue may be stagnant or even in decline over the same period.

Here at LION Digital, we have seen both of these scenarios play out & neither of them is good or bad, right or wrong. Your agency should be having an in-depth conversation with your monthly/quarterly about what your true business goals are overall. It needs to be about more than just monthly budgets, monthly revenue targets, new product launches & increasing awareness of your product/service. We need to be setting goals for 1,2,3 years into the future & then reverse engineering them to work out micro checkpoints that will lead you to your macro goal. This may seem like common knowledge but somewhere along the line, digital marketing has been misconstrued that more money & big changes equal big returns & big improvements. Sadly this is not true.

This put digital media agency’s in an interesting position where they can no longer pump out a 1 size fits all approach & even the small businesses entering the online market need to have an in-depth understanding of what they are looking to get out of their marketing.

Firstly, let’s break down what is Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) & if it is the right goal for the business at this stage in its life cycle.

When we have a new client start at LION, the most common strategy we implement is to spend 1-3 months optimising the account to an acceptable ROAS we have set with the client & doing an in-depth technical audit to ensure that when it comes time to scale, that we don’t have any issues behind the scenes that will hamper our ability or cause amplified inefficiencies. This is the most common issue we uncover in new accounts we onboard from other agencies, they have tried to scale in the past but the agency hasn’t done anything apart from putting the budgets up & hope for the best. Although some technical aspects may be time-consuming for LION lay a solid foundation by mastering the basics, we have found this is the only way to ensure long-term success.

Once we have created a stable foundation, we begin to set multiple KPIs, benchmarks & goals to work towards in manageable steps. One of those KPIs is ROAS & it can be looked at in two ways based on your business/industry/season/market conditions:

• Firstly, you may use ROAS as an indicator of inefficiency to protect your margins. This has been important for the last 2-3 years with increasing supply issues, logistics costs increasing & margins getting thinner.
• Secondly, you may use ROAS as a floor metric for performance that you do not wish to drop below while trying to maximise revenue.

Neither of these approaches is good or bad, right or wrong. You simply need to be honest about what would benefit the business in the short vs long term.

In terms of what approach you chose & what the ROAS could look like are vastly different from one industry to another. The main points that drive differences are:

• Cost Per Click (CPC), driven by the level of competition
• Average Order Value (AOV) of your online business
• Total Ad Spend Budget (Cost) Allocated across the account
• Types of campaigns running, Brand/PMAX/Shopping/Remarketing/Display/Search

It’s important we cover this, as these metrics will heavily influence your ROAS metric & overall results. The most overlooked point is simply what types of campaigns are running & do they align with the goals/approach you’re working towards. This point is the bread & butter of why there is a trade-off between ROAS & Revenue.

For example, if we were to focus on ROAS, the budget split would be more towards retaining market share, retention, loyalty & efficiency of ad spend. This would likely skew the spend towards PMAX/Shopping/Remarketing & maybe some niche search campaigns.

On the flip side, the more the ad account tracks into the generic search keyword territory, the competition is going to be higher, the conversion rate will be lower & ad costs will likely increase. The results will be similar if the ad account tracks more towards Display ads, Youtube & broad awareness marketing.

However, these campaigns still have value & will likely contain the highest % of people who haven’t yet bought from you. It’s imperative that if you do decide to spend money on these campaign types, you have price competitiveness, stock availability, unique selling points, reasons to buy from you over a competitive & lastly, a suitable budget for a minimum of 1-3 months of ad run time.

That last point is crucial as paid search is vastly different from social ads in that the longer your ads run, the better your reputation, expected clickthrough rate & bounce rate becomes. This will improve your ad relevance in the eyes of Google & allow you to creep up the paid rankings over time. Unfortunately, in paid search in 2022, there is very little likelihood that dropping $10k into broad keywords on Black Friday is going to reap the business any type of results if you don’t have any form of foundation from previous months’ work.

Article by

Sam McDonough –
Paid Media Director

Where to find eCommerce business, product and service reviews?

Although eCommerce clients use multiple channels on the internet, there are three of the most influential points for review management:

• Google. Google remains the first source to search for new businesses for 75% of consumers. Google Seller Ratings and Google My Business helps to build trust at the first point of contact for paid and organic channels. Google Seller Ratings helps improve the performance of Google paid marketing by increasing an ad’s click-through rate, thus lowering SEM’s cost-per-click (PPC). Whereas Google My Business and, properly integrated through data markup, Google 5-star ratings for individual products and services help businesses to stand out in organic SERP results and capture top-of-funnel traffic before competitors.
• Social Media. Only 36% of customers go on social to directly search for products and services, which is more than twice lower as on Google. Nevertheless, the speed of information spread and the value for the user expressed in the amount of everyday dedicated time makes social media one of the most critical sources for client reviews.
• Review sites and marketplaces. For some businesses, “Yelp” and other specialised review sites, Amazon and similar marketplaces could be the core source for customer reviews that can’t be neglected.

Trends and eCommerce customer reviews management

New requirements for trust

Preceding years of fake review generation finally gave the fruits, eCommerce prospects now frequently request if companies can fake reviews and question the perfect picture of 5-star reviews. They inspect reviews’ relevance, authenticity, recency and consistency through a critical lens, which found proof in 81% of respondents, claiming that reviews should be recent and contain relevant information to have significant influence. Hence, customers expect more balanced ratings and quality reviews from verified sources with factual insight into a business, products and services.

Average rating matters

Even if it is only a part of the bigger picture, 68% of respondents answer that before engaging with the business, they preferably search for the company with a 4 as the average star rating. In contrast, only 3% of consumers appeal to companies with 1 or 2 average star ratings. At the same time, 68% somewhat agree that a high rating could be trusted only if a significant number of such reviews support it.

Reviews before price

With the massive spread of online shopping and eCommerce businesses as a response to demand, shoppers’ behaviour is also gaining more sophistication. As a matter of fact, the most influential aspect of the decision-making process when it comes to online store choice became the reviews with the share of 40% of respondents, which overtook even the price with 27%, delivery time and free returns with 20% and 13%, respectively. Interpreting the numbers, it is an opportunity for retailers with higher prices to sell more than those with lower prices for the same goods just by having better reviews.

Fewer purchases proceed solely based on the product representation messages in marketing channels initiated by the company, and more people instead rely on the experience of others. Reviews increase the probability of unknown brands being discovered by customers and competing with top brands in their categories. At the same time, the competitiveness in the eCommerce market allows not to endure poor customer experiences, which amplifies the importance of client reviews.

Company’s response to a feedback

If there is something equally important in eCommerce client feedback management as past client experiences wrapped into words and images, it is the company’s response. Especially the one to negative feedback since the question “Do you read replies to negative reviews?” received “Yes” as the answer from 90% of eCommerce users that were approached. Most merchants seem to understand the importance of feedback, and 62% claim that they respond to all or most of the reviews they receive, in contrast to 15% that say they never or rarely respond to online reviews.

Negative reviews first

Research demonstrated that the first thing e-shoppers do while studying reviews nowadays is apply a filter for 1-star to check possible cons and evaluate the risks. Compared with the past, when an unsatisfied customer could most commonly influence people from his inner circle, the negative eCommerce review placed immediately alongside the goods and services descriptions can abruptly change the intention of any user that came on the page. Thus, responding to negative customer feedback promptly and adequately increases the positive impact on the client’s decision-making process even more.

Review collection strategy

As a part of nature, people are more eager to share their opinions in the extreme grades of perception – when experience exceeded or was below expectations. Therefore, an average customer with an intermediate level of satisfaction with the product or service is usually not eager to leave a review without encouragement. For instance, over half of respondents admit to leaving online reviews four times a year or even less, and 26% have never left a review at all. At the same time, only 5% of consumers say they never leave reviews based on a positive experience. Thus, eCommerce businesses should focus on an effective review collecting strategy that would include a 360o-degree view and engagement motivation at the final customer journey stages.

Review collecting systems

According to 81% of businesses that participated in the study, review collection systems provide a profitable return on investment.

REVIEWS.io provides tools for collecting and managing company and product reviews, user-generated content and other reputation management technologies. The system integrates with all popular eCommerce solutions, including Shopify, Google, WooCommerce, Klaviyo, Magento and many more. Reviews.io is trusted by over 8,200+ brands, such as Cake Vaay, BoxRaw, Bloom & Wild, helping businesses to grow through customer trust & advocacy.

Article by

Asselya Sekerova –
Marketing &
Project Director