The days of face-to-face shopping may appear to be fading, but one phone call could give your e-commerce business the competitive edge over your toughest competitors. We’re joined by CallRail to talk strategy on how to compete in today’s e-commerce industry and how to increase sales with call tracking.
What you’ll learn:
- The latest trends within the E-Commerce Industry.
- How to level the playing field in the battle against Amazon.
- Expert strategies using call tracking to optimize your digital marketing campaign for sales.
E-Commerce Trends
It’s no surprise, the businesses of buying and selling online is consistently on the rise.
- Online sales are projected to account for 17% of all retail sales within the next five years.
- 80% of online shoppers made a purchase in the last 30 days, showing that e-commerce has become a part of daily life for the majority.
The Amazon Effect
If you’re an e-commerce business, you know Amazon–and whether you sell on Amazon or not, it has an effect on your business.
Over 50% of e-commerce sales during the 2017 holiday season occurred on Amazon. 
As a seller on Amazon, when a consumer buys your product, you don’t own that customer—Amazon does. When a consumer converts on your website, you own that data, and you can choose to reengage them and bring them back to your brand. Amazon protects its consumer data well and doesn’t care if a customer buys your product again, it cares if they buy on Amazon again. Regardless of your place with Amazon, it is impacting e-commerce today as well as the future.
The Lifetime Value Effect
Whether you’re a retailer or a brand that sells on its own site, understanding the importance of customer lifetime value is a huge advantage to the success and longevity of your business.
Once you figure out how many times a customer comes back and buys from your brand, you’re able to start looking at that customer differently. You’ll likely have competitors looking to profit off of the first order that comes through and not even worrying about future orders. Some of them don’t have a way of getting the customer back to their brand and buying from them again, so they’re constantly acquiring new customers through marketing.
If you don’t have repeat purchasers or you don’t have a way to do that, you need to be thinking about how you’re going to get your customers to come back to your brand. For example, you can introduce new product lines or buy partnerships to bring new products to your site that customers can come back and buy.
Companies that can look at lifetime value can spend more on their marketing to acquire a customer. If your first order is $100 but you know they’re going to buy two more times over the next six months after that first order, that gives you $300 of revenue to start looking at to base a marketing budget off of. This mindset and practice allows you to look at future revenue and invest in it now.
Optimizing For Sales
We’re going to shift gears and talk specifically about AdWords and how you can use that data to spend more efficiently in Google.
Granular Data
We see a huge increase in performance when brands we work with transition from general campaigns to granular campaigns and ad groups. Meaning, campaigns that are structured so detailed that you can control your budget thresholds for different pieces of your account or product or service lines. You have the ability to get down into the data and identify keywords and search queries that are really driving a high value and adjust your spending. That data acts as levers for you to push and pull to create very specific goals for return on ad spend (ROAS) and budget.
Brand vs. Non-Brand
This is your starting point. Everyone should have a brand campaign and a non-brand campaign in an AdWords account. Some companies hate having a brand campaign because they can’t justify spending money on it when they already rank first, organically. Even with our client, the Dallas Cowboys, a brand name known across the world, we saw an 8% drop in revenue when we turned off our brand campaign. That was enough to show us its value. In addition, the conversion rate on paid search ads are typically higher because we can drive them to more specific pages.
Call Tracking
Many think, as online transactions grow, the need to communicate over the phone will diminish. The realty is, there is a certain consumer who wants to talk on the phone. Companies using call tracking have a leg up and an extra lever where they can see and control another set of data. It’s valuable data that allows you to step on the gas in certain areas you see it working when you don’t get the online revenue. For example, if you didn’t have call tracking, you’d think that keyword isn’t very effective because no one bought anything online but it turns out that keyword led to a lot of long and engaging phone calls. With a system like CallRail, you can see the revenue off of those phone calls.
Follow Your Own Path
Every business caters to a different audience, so don’t feel pressured to do certain things just because your competitors are doing them. Just because a company is bigger, doesn’t mean they are smarter or knows what they are doing. If your competitor is using call tracking, it may make sense to test it but make sure to look through your own lens because it’s likely your goals, margins, and operations are going to be different.
