Author: Leonidas Comino

LION Digital has been recognised for its long-term partnership with Shopify, successfully applying the Shopify platform’s best practices and generating online growth for brands like Ledlenser, OneWorld Collection, Nutrition Warehouse, and Havaianas, to name a few.

Leo Comino, CEO and Founder of LION Digital echoed the team’s excitement in officially joining the Plus roster, “We have been working alongside the Shopify Plus team for a long time and are excited to take our relationship to the next level as Digital Marketing Partners”.

LION stands for leaders in our niche, the agency standouts by hiring leaders with over a decade of eCommerce channel experience who recognise success comes from cross-channel cohesion. Having bolstered the senior leadership team with the recent appointments of Clare Graham as Head of Paid Media, joining from Dentsu’s iProspect, and Stelios Moudakis as General Manager from Omnicom’s Resolution Digital, the team is well poised to deliver on its vision to drive performance and provide exceptional client experience.

Leo Comino noted of their appointments “we are very proud of our growth over the past two years and the strategic hires of Clare and Stelios will ensure our product and cohesive client experience offering reaches new heights and reinforces our commitment to being true partners of our clients and tech partners”.

LION provides digital strategy, SEO, Paid Media, Email & Social services for some of the biggest brands in Australia and around the globe.

HOW TO CREATE CONSISTENT RESULTS COMING OUT OF THE HOLIDAY SEASON

LION stands for Leaders In Our Niche, and we are a team of seasoned and passionate eCommerce marketing specialists driven by performance and focused on providing an exceptional client experience.

We’ll be sharing practical tips that you can take away and immediately apply. We want you to be able to get consistent results coming out of the holiday season! 

People are looking for human connection, now more than ever. Being stuck at home, working from home, or just a little isolated due to the pandemic is a reality for most Australians right now. 

Brands that have used in-store experiences to create human connections in the past are now struggling to re-create the same dynamics through online purchases and interactions. 

On the upside, consumers are taking the time to open and read emails; both email engagement and performance are up to when people are stuck at home. This trend is independent of other channels, which may be down due to reduced search volume or increasing competition in paid media. 

“Consumers are taking the time to open more emails from brands. It makes sense, considering people have been spending more time at home and less time dealing with the normal hustle and bustle of daily life.” – Klaviyo.com

There’s also many first-time online shoppers who are not digitally savvy entering the market right now as their usual shopping habits have been disrupted. Personalisation and segmentation matter more than ever (i.e. we don’t want to spam our customers if they’re not engaging with our emails).  

Having the right content, for the right audience, at the right time is crucial to getting your message heard, understood and accepted. The number one reason people unsubscribe is that they receive “too many emails” 46% of people who unsubscribe put this as their reason. One reason this number exists is that many brands just email their whole list – all the time. While there’s a time and a place for this, the more personalised the communication, the better your human connection will be with your customer. Don’t fret, though, unless your unsubscribe rate is higher than 0.7%, you don’t need to be concerned. 

Not sure how you can create human connections in a digital world? Below are some practical tips that you can get started on right away. 

Replicate in-store experiences with virtual tours and consults

OneWorld Collection (we work with them) has the right idea, an upmarket furniture brand with eight stores in Australia. Since most of their customers are in metro areas affected by the pandemic, they’ve created a virtual consult where sales staff can be invited into the living rooms of their customers while still being able to demonstrate products on the showroom floor. They’ve used Calendly.com to schedule appointments to ensure all the customers can be seen and no one is waiting. 

Creating ways for customers to experience your product in new and unique ways is what will keep that human connection alive. 

Multi-channel communications with Gorgias

Let customers reach you however they want. Instagram comments, Facebook direct messages, email, live chat, SMS and any other form of communication you can think of. Gorgias can do it all. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to reach a brand that doesn’t leave another method of communication to reach them with. You may even convert more sales! I’ve personally been able to convert 25% of live chat inquiries into sales, working in an e-commerce team.

Reposition products in terms of value for their new routines

Since many lifestyle changes have had to be made for a lot of Australians, consumers don’t think about products and services in the same way they used to. Suppose you can reposition the way that your marketing; this will increase the connection between your brand and your customers. They’ll be saying to themselves, “they get me and the challenges I’m going through.”

This means for abandonment emails, include product comparisons, how-to-videos, helpful blog content or best practices in using your products. It will help the consumer realise how your product is uniquely positioned to support their new lifestyle. 

Pre-orders and back in stocks have also been one of the most successful email campaigns outside of sales or promotions in the pandemic. Don’t just limit these to auto-generated emails from your pre-order app or Klaviyo’s inbuilt back in stock. Use personalisation and customer behaviours to populate your emails with content that will be relevant and timely. 

Projects that you can do at home (or challenges to I imagine) have worked very well in creating connections with your audience. 

Tighten up your shipping notifications

Lastly, and probably most importantly – shipping notifications! Delays are inevitable while we’re all stuck at home, all shopping online. 

So, be especially clear and empathetic; people are stressed about their packages and where they’ll be, or if they’ll arrive in time. You can read more about Klaviyo’s recommended best practices for communicating shipping delays here. 

Not sure what Klaviyo is, or if it’s the right fit for your brand? Take a free trial via this link. 

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.

Like what we do? Come work with us

Adaptability and growth is part of LION’s DNA. LION Digital was officially launched in April 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic; this allowed us to build the business to solve today’s challenges. Over the last year, LION has created a unique agency model with a Global reach in response to the current business landscape. 

The model consists of five single channel-focused departments, such as SEO, SEM, Email, Social and Development.

Each is designated a Head of Department, a seasoned veteran with over a decade of eCommerce experience enabling LION to provide channel-specific, specialised services within a holistic digital marketing strategy. This structure and approach hyper accelerates success, generates optimal results and creates the best client experience.

Here are the main strengths of choosing LION Digital as your partner of choice during the pandemic and why we are the better choice as opposed to our competitors:

Our team is remote

This is a huge advantage when stacking us up against traditional digital marketing agencies; we are not prone to having our office shut down due to a sick team member which happened recently to a digital marketing agency in Melbourne where 40+ people were sent home. Or does your agency have a big offshore team in a European office, let’s say North Macedonia? The same concern applies there, but the risk of infection rate is higher in countries that have lower health regulations.  Our team members are decentralised eCommerce specialists from across the globe hired based on their experience, not location, so this risk does not affect us. We offer you the best of both worlds, Senior local Australian based team members leading the strategy and the client relationship who are supported by a global team that works round the clock. 

Decentralised from the beginning

Our processes and systems were chosen and developed for a remote working force, this is a major benefit to the success of our clients. Imagine you’ve built an agency for almost a decade, one that relies on your team coming into the office on a daily basis to function. This then forms the culture, processes, systems and methodologies that are all developed around a physical office. The team is hired for and accustomed to working and collaborating in a centralised environment. Many office workers do not have self-motivation and rely on the nature of the office-based work environment and their leaders to encourage performance and set the pace. Now, imagine that local element is removed; this is like removing the foundation of a building which causes significant efficiency deficits. This issue is not remedied easily because and the older the agency is the less agile they are and let’s face it, most people dislike change. Unfortunately, the loser is the client as their retainer charges remain the same and the output and results are less. LION Digital strives to hire self-motivated individuals who have clear expectations, responsibilities and result expectations set with them at the beginning of their employment and on each project. We use strategies and incentives like performance-based SEM services that have certain ROAS goals in a place where team members who work on the project are rewarded for performance, creating a win-win situation for the specialist, the agency and the client.

Elite tech stack

Not having the expense of an office has enabled us to invest heavily into the best technology stack in the market. From the best project management, CRM, accounting and marketing tools; we don’t hold back when it comes to investing in technology. Investing in good tech allows us to improve visibility across our entire operations, enabling us to scale up effectively and efficiently while supporting the needs of our growing clients. We spend more than $50,000 per year and have over 5 SEO systems that we subscribe to, and that’s only one digital channel. Our internal infrastructure is adept, allowing us to reduce risk, improve accountability and productivity to provide an unrivalled client service experience to better our rivals.

Agency scalability

Let’s face it, digital marketing is on every businesses lips who are (especially those who are late to the party) are throwing money at solving their customer acquisition problems. Most local agencies rely on the local digital marketing talent pool in Australia, which has all but dried up and now their hiring efforts have come to a grinding halt. Digital marketing resources are now scarce, and the market is screaming for more people; we sometimes have contractors asking for hourly rates in excess of $400 p/h which is ridiculous. LION is a global business and we hire based on talent and experience, not location. We are not affected by the same barriers as traditional agencies which means that we can still select the creme of the digital marketing community but on a global scale. Most traditional, local Australian digital marketing agencies are now at full capacity and cannot find staff, and yet they still continue to take on new clients. We know of situations in agencies where individuals are managing over 50 clients causing significant neglect and loss of investment. 

eCommerce specialisation

If your focus is eCommerce then your business does not have time to work with a generalist agency. Is your agency partner a true specialist? Try navigating to the client list or case studies section of their website and you will discover that most are not. Imagine the lack of efficiency of a digital marketing specialist from a general marketing agency who start the AM working on a client generating some insurance leads, then home loans and new house sales, and maybe some retail and eCommerce focused client in the afternoon. As you can imagine this jack of all trades approach does create hyper-accelerated growth. LION’s eCommerce brains trust and partner support network and industry knowledge is all eCommerce. This is why LION is exceptional at helping clients navigate the murky waters of digital marketing by also providing trusted advisor recommendations alongside our suite of services. 

It is crucial to understand that moving to a remote model from a traditional one would require a massive adaptation of the established processes. With such a challenging time for all of us, we are keen on embracing organisational agility and helping businesses not fall apart, develop eCommerce and bring the best to this world. We hope that the pivots we’re making now — will allow us to build our best ideas and provide better support for our clients, users, communities, partners, and customers. We will build a strong foundation and ensure responsible and sustainable growth in the long run.

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.

Like what we do? Come work with us

The main power of SEO is to drive traffic and sales to your company’s website. If you’re like many eCommerce online businesses, you may be having difficulty using your website to drive high-value sales to support the organisation’s growth. Your website should be the most powerful tool in your arsenal, but if you don’t implement the correct supporting strategies to generate the visibility the site needs, customers will never see it and instead turn to your competitors for their products.

SEO isn’t only about driving additional Organic visitors to a website, it’s also about improving the User Experience which can improve the results of every other channel. 

One example is that SEO may include the creation of additional Sub Category or Landing Pages to service new customer segments. These new pages can improve user metrics such as Pages Viewed & Time on Site but most importantly Conversion Rate which affects all traffic arriving on your page (and site).

For example, creating a page with content for your range of red midi dresses may help to rank in the organic results for the keyword “red midi dresses” but that same page can also serve as a landing page for campaigns featuring red midi dresses across Paid Ads, Email, Social and Display Ads.

How easy it would be to convince your management to invest in SEO if you’re working at a tech-forward company that understands the value and importance of SEO. But what if the situation is otherwise? Let’s discuss significant reasons for SEO investment and explain how SEO will bring your company higher revenue and help them reach their business goals.

Step 1. Show the outcome

Consider showing the intended result to the management. Make sure to connect your outcome to business goals.

Quote: “We can achieve [outcome] in [timeframe] by investing in SEO.”

Propose a specific outcome and don’t pull it out of thin air. It needs to be realistic. 

Step 2. Explain the logic

The next step would be explaining how and why you believe investing in SEO will lead to the proposed outcome.

Using data at this stage is very important.

If you work in eCommerce, you dig into your Google Ads account and find that you’re bidding on 25 keywords for $15,000 per month. Google Analytics shows you traffic that is responsible for $50,000 per month in sales. And if you can rank organically for these keywords with SEO, you can get that traffic for ‘free’.

Most web pages that rank organically in the top 10 for a popular keyword also rank for 100 of other keywords, which is better because ranking organically will probably drive more sales than ads.

Prepare the top-ranking page for each of your target keywords and check the Traffic Value metric. You could estimate the potential revenue increase from investing in SEO — then present that to your boss. 

Step 3. Create a roadmap

The success of the previous two steps brings you to this level – which is to understand how to achieve the promised results. It’s easy to get confused with SEO jargon here, so try to stay focused on the big picture.

Try to keep things simple. 

Communicate two things here:

1. What you’re going to do and why 
2. What will you need for resources (tools, employees, agencies)

Resources usually include freelancers, employees, freelancers or tools. In other words, anything you’ll need to execute your SEO plan.

It is also worth considering who will manage and train new employees and freelancers. Demonstrate to your management that you have everything planned and that your plan is realistic.

Step 4. Talk about the figures

There won’t be any green lights for a project that’s unlikely to generate a return on their investment. Now’s the time to answer that question.

It won’t be as effective to list a bunch of resources without showing their cost. The process is pretty straightforward: price up all the resources in a spreadsheet. SEO tools and software usually shows public pricing pages. Just pick one that’s right for you. 

It is a good start, but it still doesn’t tell your boss anything about ROI. Check on how to calculate your ROI.  It is harder to figure than it sounds because your SEO efforts will continue to develop after the initial project.

For example, the projected cost of your project is $6,000 per month. SEO takes time, and it is safer to be pessimistic and assume no revenue increase for the first six months before gradually increasing to $40,000 and eliminating the need for ad spend. Remember to use conservative numbers here. 

Step 5. Face myths and dispel them 

By this stage, you will probably still have a few questions and concerns. 

Let’s look at a few of them.

“Doesn’t SEO take forever?”

Surely, SEO does take time. Rankings don’t happen overnight, and anyone that says otherwise is likely selling “snake oil.” We all know that there’s no silver bullet in marketing, so explaining that something takes time isn’t necessarily a bad thing. 

“What if we get a penalty from Google?”

Indeed, Google updates and penalties are scary and quite risky. But if you’re following “ethical” SEO best practices, manual penalties aren’t something you need to worry. Google does update its ranking algorithms multiple times a year. It can negatively impact your traffic, but they’re unlikely to wipe you out completely. 

What makes the organic channel so attractive is the ROI you can get from a much smaller investment than paid campaigns. In paid campaigns, the price is dictated by the competition, and you pay for each click to your website. It detracts from the amount of revenue you can make and often leads to spending much money per conversion.

Although SEO is a long-term investment, it is a strategy worth considering as if you are ranking very well for your set of chosen phrases, you can explore reducing specific campaign budgets as you will essentially be getting those clicks for free. The investment with us will be fixed, will not change, and will quite often be much lower than your AdWords spend, so investing in SEO is a fantastic way to generate conversions and a strategic way to save money from other channels. Check out our SEO services page.

Book your strategy session with LION to determine how to make your organisation one of the most recognisable in the organic space.

Australian online shopping dipped 10% year-on-year (YOY), which is unsurprising considering the pandemic restrictions in place at the same time last year. However, if we compare to May 2019, online shopping is up 47.5% YOY.

April saw the first significant spike in online growth. Food & Liquor items and Home & Garden purchases more than doubled compared to 2019 and were the only categories that saw a triple-digit increase twice in 2020.

All significant categories saw a decline when compared to May 2020. According to Australia Post, we expect purchase volumes to remain steady through June 2021, as we’ll measure against easing retail conditions akin to those seen in 2020. 

Here we share with you data from Australia Post, the results are worth attention as they reinforce the change of the reasons for online shopping among consumers.

As online shopping continues to grow, it’s becoming more and more essential to ensure your web store’s performance is at its highest. 

Web page load speed is a crucial element to the success of your website, as not only is page speed a Google ranking factor baked into Google’s core algorithms, but it also contributes quite highly to user experience. 

With the hustle and bustle of everyday life, today’s consumer has very little patience, so as soon as a user visits your website, your brand is being judged. Poor user experience can lead to a frustrated consumer, leading to higher bounce rates (visit with no interaction) and a direct effect on the site’s ability to convert. 

With that being said, there is an abundance of tools out there designed to help you establish the issues with your website’s performance. We would personally recommend Google PageSpeed Insights; it’s an easy-to-use free tool available to any serious online business owner.

Get Your Website Into Top Gear

Website load times can be affected by a plethora of different issues that ultimately aggregate and cause a bad user experience and lower visibility in Google. As a topline introduction, we have outlined 3 below:

Server response time

Server response time is the time that it takes the server to respond to the user’s query. As soon as a user visits your website, it starts the chain of page downloads, building the page as the user sees it. With cheap server setups being the main cause, the time it takes for the server to respond can take a lot longer than needed, already putting the site at a huge disadvantage. With this, if you aggregate the server delay with inefficient high data elements to download, you can create a poor performing site. 

To avoid this, monitor the server response speed of your website using any server response tool, for example, Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Speed Test or GTmetrix. 

Unsure about what would be deemed an adequate time? Drop us an email, and we’d be happy to give you direction and advice. 

Content load speed

Content load speed is affected by the requests to and from the server to download all the on-page elements. A common trend that we see is with images, typically uploaded to the website as they are in all their glory but unfortunately happens to be a huge drain on the web page’s performance. 

Having good high-quality images is important, but you do need to strike a balance between a good quality image for the user and download efficiency. We would recommend, in order to save image data, uploading images that are the correct size for the page, saving them for ‘web’ using tools such as Photoshop and using compression software aiming to get each image down to around 200-400 KB. 

The content loading speed is affected not only by the weight of the content itself, but also by the location of the hosting or servers. For example, if someone from Australia wants to visit a website hosted in the US, the content loading speed for this person would be pretty slow as it has far more space to travel to reach the end user’s computer. If the server needs to stay in another country for example, then we would recommend making the use of a CDN (Content Delivery Network) which can greatly improve the download speed of the pages as well as improving the site’s security and reliability. 

​Rendered page speed

Websites usually consist of different content: images, texts, videos,  scripts and so on. When visitors load the website, all content appears the way the webmaster intended it. This is what is known as a rendered page. Resources such as Javascript and CSS that are unnecessary to fully render the page can directly delay the page to its full contentful paint, meaning it expands the time it takes to fully download a webpage. Inlining CSS/Javascript or removing CSS/Javascript entirely, such as unused fonts and style, can greatly improve the download of a page.

Web page performance is important now more than ever

We’ve covered some top-level issues to watch out for, but we’ve only really scratched the surface. Web page speed is very dependent on each website, the platform and its ability to download resources quickly and efficiently. 

Free tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights are great at diagnosing causes of slow page performance, but it can be difficult to interpret that data and practically use it to fix the site without a good working knowledge of website development. But saying that, why not give these tools a go, it’s an absolute must, and it’s really worth taking that first step, especially as Google is continually pushing the boundaries of what websites should be capable of.

In our next article, we will talk about Google’s Core Web Vitals and share some super handy tips to bring your website up to scratch to stay ahead of the curve. 

Subscribe and stay tuned for our updates.

Coming up to the end of the financial year it’s a great time to analyse the past 12 months’ performance, to look for new growth opportunities, and identify any problem areas.

When conducting an annual performance review we like to look at overall performance across five key metrics (per channel).

Why these metrics? 

The recipe for generating revenue online is simple:

Increase any one metric by 10% and you make 10% more revenue.

First, we recommend conducting a Channel Analysis. 

A channel analysis is a simple table that enables us to measure performance year-on-year over each channel. The key here is to compare the percentage of users driven to a channel versus the percentage of revenue generated. 

It should be relatively similar, any vast differences may indicate a problem. 

For example, High Sessions but Low Revenue would indicate Low-Quality Traffic, a Conversion Problem, or a potential Tracking Issue.

Channel Performance Average Month (Past 12)

By extracting data by channel and month on month it can be presented visually over time in a variety of ways making it easier to analyse, absorb or identify complex information and data sets.

2.Identify other important eCommerce metrics & benchmarketing versus competitors.

Other Important eCommerce Metrics we analyse are:

New Vs Repeat Visitors / Revenue

An indication of how qualified traffic to the website is. 

For example: Attracting 10% more New Visitors should see Repeat Visitors grow by 10%, any less may indicate unqualified traffic or a problem with visitor retention.

Repeat Purchase Rate

Also an indication of how qualified traffic is, but in addition also provides insight into customer loyalty and/or performance of “post-sale” marketing activities, useful in understanding Customer Lifetime Value.

Days / Sessions to Purchase

Very simply, a measure of either how many sessions or days it takes from the first visit to purchase. This is useful for identifying potential re-engagement opportunities across Email, Social, or Display Remarketing.

Path to Purchase

Customers don’t purchase in a single visit, they often visit multiple times across a variety of channels. This is useful for identifying opportunities to re-engage or allocating budgets more efficiently. Particularly to channels that may be part of the conversion process but are not directly attributed revenue via a standard attribution model (e.g. a first or last click).

Channel Efficiency

Total Revenue generated online divided by Spend per Channel. This measure allows for channels to be analysed on a like-for-like basis, with channels that are more efficient having a greater score. For example, Email will have a lower spend, thus be more efficient at generating than channels like Paid Search for instance. This is extremely useful in allocating budgets and identifying channel performance on a like-for-like basis.

Overall analysing Annual Performance is critically important to eCommerce success, it allows an executive to identify opportunities, problems, accurately allocate resources, and plan for success. We create analytics experience on a different level, here at LION Digital called LION View. Once a client, you can have your personal DASHBOARD, that will collect all the data for you and make your EOFY easier. This completely customisable, all-in-one and simple-to-use platform will give you an overview of eCommerce channels and metrics, Keywords rankings, Google Search Console data, our 90 day activity plan and your marketing calendar all in one convenient location. Click here to find out more.