ROI focused eCommerce marketing strategy

What is ROI and What is Ecommerce ROI?

ROI Return on Investment is a metric calculated by a simple ratio of Net Income to Investment.

Ecommerce ROI is the ratio of returns we get from selling our products via an online store to the amount of cost spend on promoting them. The best eCommerce marketing strategy will get you the best return on investment.

Simple formula for ROI

ROI = (PROFIT – INVESTMENT ) / INVESTMENT X100

Interms of marketing

Marketing ROI= (Sale growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing cost

Every business needs to measure this metric, this metric help business owners and marketer to take the right action. It is useful to find out the success of the business and marketing campaigns. It helps the marketer to justify the marketing spends, distribute the marketing budget across various channels including offline.

Let\’s calculate with some examples related to digital marketing spend per month,

Investment/ COST in SEO: ₹.15000

Investment/ Ad Spend in Facebook Ads: ₹.25000

Total Customer acquired with SEO is 20

Total Customers acquired with Facebook Ads is 40

The average order value in both cases is ₹.5000

SEO ROI = ((20×5000-15000)/15000)x100= 566%

Facebook ROI = ((40×5000-25000)/25000)x100= 700%

this is how you can measure the success of the digital marketing strategy for eCommerce, with this alone you cannot choose the best channel which brings you more sales, You need to measure customer lifetime value for these channels and determine which channel is more efficient based on repeated purchase and customer loyalty, etc.

With Enhanced analytics and with Shopify/ WooCommerce dashboards and reports you can have the required data to measure your ROI. Or create custom dashboards with marketing goals and KPI with help of google data studio.

Strategy to Improve your eCommerce ROI

Know your Customer

The first thing we need to focus on improving ROI is to know your customers better. You have to build various customer persona, focus on niche or micro-groups, build funnel (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU) or map the customer journey across various touchpoints. Make your messages more personalized, stop broad targeting and target precisely by narrowing your audience.

Have a clear knowledge of who you are targeting like Age, Gender, Geographic location, purchasing power etc.

Ecommerce Marketing Plan

A Solid marketing plan or eCommerce business plan will help you improve your ROI, By creating long term marketing goals, You won’t deviate from your strategy and try shortcuts or tactics to achieve short term benefits.

Marketing strategy for eCommerce startup

Marketing strategy for eCommerce startup or any startup, while many people prefer an organic way to build social media and SEO to achieve results you need to implement on paid ads, Startups have to create a marketing strategy with more budget allocated or focusing on paid ads.

Stop Wasting time on Vanity Metrics

The business owner may ask the marketing team why we don’t have lakh of followers, Don’t focus on metrics likes followers, page/post likes, instead focus on the number of customers etc. Focus on actionable metrics, not on vanity metrics.

Focus on Email Marketing

Email marketing is the highest ROI channel for eCommerce, make sure you optimize it to the fullest, use automation triggers to build flows and communicate with customers with more personalization.

Email marketing is the best tool to push your customer from one stage of the funnel to the next stage of the customer journey.

Clean your email list and remove non-engaged users or put them in a re-engagement campaign before removing them from your contact. Focus on lead nurturing etc. Even non-transaction emails like delivery notifications can improve your branding.

Targeted Ad Campaigns

Remarketing and Custom audience are features of Facebook and Google ads, make the best use of them. You need not run a campaign targeting a new audience. You can create similar or lookalike audiences. It is best practice to run campaigns for past customers as well.

While running a campaign, it is best practice to run ads focusing on traffic, conversion and retargeting to get the best results. Running one type of ad without customer follow up is not profitable.

To get the best ROI, you need to target relevant people and bring the right traffic, that is where we use narrow targeting as we discussed. 

Also, create a loyalty and retention campaign so that you don’t miss a customer from doing repeated purchases.

Focus on Branding, Social Media, Influencer Outreach and Reviews

Branding is the most important feature to register your company in the mind of your customers, Social media is the best platform to improve your branding by responding to customers, building customer relations etc. 

Do an influencer campaign to reach your audience, choose a micro or niche influencer who can build content for your store, run a contest on Instagram to create UGC user-generated content which can build trust with the customer. Make Product reviews these social proofs will help hesitant buyers to take action on your website.

While running an influencer campaign try to give an affiliate link or tracking URL so that you can measure the success somewhat accurately.

Content & Inbound marketing strategy for eCommerce

Content is King, without content, every other distribution strategy fails, For an eCommerce website you need to have high-quality product images and product videos, You should have a lead magnet to get email id or phone number from the visitors. Content marketing should focus on all the funnel stages TOFU, MOFU and BOFU. Should create content for every stage of customers for exploration, decision marking or comparison, purchase and advocacy. Make use of exit intent pop-up and abandon cart email to get back the missed sales.

Conclusion

To build an ROI focused e-commerce marketing strategy you need to identify your customer and what they want. To build a long term marketing plan, startups should consider paid marketing initially rather than organic marketing. Track actionable metrics, not vanity metrics, niche down your customer with personalized messages, build your brand on social media to build trust. Create content focusing on the customer journey from visitor to purchase and again from purchases to the repeated purchaser and loyal advocate of our brand.