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Episode 6

Cart to Conversion: How to Harness E-commerce Trends

About This Episode

October 26, 2023

Learn how to leverage personalization to enhance customer experiences and drive conversions for your e-commerce business.

Henry Marshall | Founder, Silvertip Digital

00:00

Transcript

Episode Introduction (00:00:00)

Just assessing kind of what the different options are within each of the different platforms and then having a mix of okay, what is the sensible thing where you’re going to invest in touchpoints, and clicks that are going to drive that revenue for your business versus the how you’re going to make sure that this is as incremental as possible, because ultimately, if you just invest in the bottom of the funnel, you’re not going to meet new people. And eventually, clicks that you’re able to acquire at the bottom of the funnel are going to start reducing, because no new people are aware of your brand less people are moving down that purchase consideration funnel.

How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:34)

But then you think about the social landscape. The research data is hugely significant when we combine all of these different touch points, so that long-term loyalty and then diving into the clicks to leads to sales, gotten to a point where it can drive better results in audience targeting, and really is what’s going to set you apart. You’re tuning in, you’re tuning in, you’re tuning in to the How Agencies Thrive podcast.

Sneha (00:00:53)

In a world where clicking a button can bring products from around the globe to your doorstep, e-commerce has become a powerhouse of opportunity and innovation. From startups to industry giants, businesses are continually adapting to meet the demands of an increasingly digital savvy audience. Today, let’s dive deeper into the world of e-commerce marketing where strategies are reshaped, challenges are conquered and innovations are celebrated. Our guest is no stranger to the scene. With a wealth of experience and insights. He’s been at the forefront of this transformative journey. Hello, and welcome to the How Agencies Thrive podcast. I’m your host Sneha Suhas and joining us is Henry Marshall, Founder and Managing Director of Silvertip Digital. Thanks so much for joining us, Henry we’re excited to have you on the show. And now I’ll pass it to you to introduce yourself, your areas of expertise and your professional experience so far.

Henry (00:01:53)

Thanks Sneha, thanks so much, really happy to be here. Yes, I’m Henry, I run Silvertip Digital, which is a sort of bespoke digital marketing agency based in London. I set Silvertip up in 2017. So, since then, we have experienced quite a lot of change in the world of E-commerce and quite a few global events as well, which have been quite an interesting scene to navigate. So yeah, really happy to be here, and really excited to talk about e-commerce and Silvertip digital.

Sneha (00:02:26)

Awesome. Thank you so much, once again. So my first question to you is about the rapidly evolving e-commerce landscape. In your view, what are some of the most significant changes that have shaped the E-commerce industry’s digital marketing strategies in the past few years?

Henry (00:02:47)

Perfect, there’s been lots of change over the last couple of years, as I’ve mentioned, I think the key things that have kind of really changed the way that we operate within e-commerce and digital marketing as a whole is privacy and the respect to individuals privacy online is so much more paramount to you know how things operate online, which is obviously perfect for what we want as individuals. And as people, I think that’s a really important thing. But it does mean that the world of digital marketing is a little bit more difficult to keep a measure of and track the sort of, you know, effectiveness of some of the campaigns that we’re running. So there’s been lots of sort of developments in terms of how we’re able to track, which platforms can track where methods of tracking all of that sort of thing. And basically, it just means that the amount of revenue that you can associate each of your campaigns is a lot lower. And if you can’t associate the revenue to the campaigns, then you are reticent to invest in those campaigns. And, you know, put media spend into them, not really knowing if they’re going to make as big an impact to your business as before. And then second to that. And related is attribution. So, you know, where if you’ve got your business revenue, and you can see your business revenue, and then you’ve got all of your different marketing channels, and you’ve got your media spend in each of those marketing channels? How do you attribute that revenue to individual channel media spend? And how do you ensure that that marketing mix is correct? And I know we’re going to talk a little bit about marketing mix in a sec. But how do we make sure that that’s correct in order for you to drive the most amount of revenue for your business? So I think that’s really a real big piece as well. And then the third thing I would say, is cost of living. So the kind of things that are happening around us in the real world are impacting massively the performance of digital marketing campaigns and digital businesses online. For example, if you’ve got a product, which is you know, super expensive, or you know, potentially quite a fair outlay of money for consumers, then that’s going to have a massive impact in terms of your conversion rates and how many prospective customers there are out there to purchase it. Conversely, during the pandemic, when lots of people were at home and didn’t have to spend money on travel, commuting to work and you know, sort of day-to-day costs that are associated with kind of going out and about, you know, they had lots of money to spend online, and therefore, you saw a massive boom in terms of the conversion rates and the performance of these online campaigns.

Sneha (00:05:22)

Henry, as you mentioned, if we could move a little and talk about the media mix, you know, with the rise of multiple online platforms and touchpoints, could you paint a picture of what the media mix should look like with paid social search and programmatic?

Henry (00:05:37)

Yeah, absolutely. So I think there’s still definitely a place to invest in each of the different channels, each channel has their own sort of benefits and risks associated with implementing marketing budget in each. But I think you can still get performance marketing data. So you can still see revenue and sales associated with different campaign types and different campaigns and that sort of thing. So you can still to a point, invest your marketing in your marketing budgets in each of these different platforms. And, you know, you can kind of get by in terms of some of the data that you’re getting from each of those different platforms. What’s key, though, is understanding kind of how your overall business performance looks with when you’re looking at a specific marketing mix. So for example, if you’ve got X revenue, and you know what your marketing mix is, in this month, maybe if you invest in, for example, more top-of-funnel activity like programmatic or PPC, generic or something like that, where you know that that traffic is relevant to your business, and you’re serving a nice message, and you’ve tried and tested that message in terms of its effectiveness, then you know, that the traffic that you’re acquiring with that change in media mix is going to have a positive impact in your business. The way that you measure that is by month by month is looking at what your top-line revenue does. And if you’ve got data in terms of your customer acquisition, if you’ve got data in terms of, you know, if you’ve got different customer cohorts that you can track over time, then you can start to say, right, okay, well, these are the customers that we acquired with this media mix. These are the customers that were acquired with this media mix. And how do they compare? Are we, you know, is investing in programmatic and PPC, generic and YouTube and all these sort of top-of-funnel activities? You know, are we getting that incremental benefit of appearing in front of the new audience outside of things that we were doing before, sort of, there’s a lot more trial and error, because there’s less data for you to see the direct impact of, you know, some of the campaign types in these platforms. But there’s still a lot of different ways that you can kind of measure the overall impact. And you know, the fundamental thing that’s really important for every business is what the top line is, what the bottom line is, and how your marketing mix changes to affect the changes in both of those metrics

Sneha (00:08:09)

Would you like to add anything about certain channels being suited better at different stages of the funnel? Basic question, if somebody is just starting off, you know, trying to market their e-commerce brand, or what would you say to them? Like, how do they approach the funnel?

Henry (00:08:27)

As I said before, like each channel has their own merit. So for example, with Google ads, you can see you have like bottom of funnel campaign type. So that’s when you’re bidding on your own brand term. So you’re bidding on your brand term plus product or your specific product names or things like that, if people are searching those terms than they are in other mind to purchase from you. And then you’ve got more top-of-funnel activities such as generic keywords, where people are searching, for the type of the product, that they’re not necessarily thinking of your brand, or they’re not necessarily thinking of, you know, the materials or the qualities or the benefits of your specific product, but they are in the market for that product. So you can look at each channel. And you can say, right, these campaigns are going to drive more return on ad spend. Because those people are more likely to purchase having like navigated to your business via those touch points. But you’re also not going to that’s going to be the least incremental way of like implementing your advertising. So if you want to get in front of as many new people as possible and grow your business that way, then you need to look at things that are top-of-funnel. And you can do that with every channel. So PPC, we’ve used that example. But you’ve also got things like programmatic where you’ve got prospecting activity versus the retargeting element. In paid social, you’ve got something similar where you can kind of Prospect based on different targeting methods like interests and things like that, versus people who have been on the website or interacted with your ads interacted with your page, that sort of thing. So I think just assessing kind of what the different options are within each of the different platforms, and then having a mix of okay, what is the sensible thing where you’re going to invest in touch points and clicks that are going to drive that revenue for your business, versus the how are you going to make sure that this is as incremental as possible, because ultimately, if you just invest in the bottom of the funnel, you’re not going to meet new people. And eventually, those, the clicks that you’re able to acquire at the bottom of the funnel, are going to start reducing, because no new people are aware of your brand. And therefore, a sort of move, less people are moving down that purchase consideration funnel.

Sneha (00:10:43)

Wonderful. Thank you. And if I could move away from that, and bring the focus on personalization, which has become your cornerstone of successful e-commerce marketing, I think contextual could play a big role here. So if you could elaborate on its role in enhancing the overall customer experience and also driving conversions? What do, you know, what do you have to say about contextual in general? And do you think programmatic or any other channel here has an edge?

Henry (00:11:14)

Absolutely. So there’s a lot of channels online, that kind of utilize contextual marketing. So that is targeting, you know, specific ad placements based on, you know, the context of that individual. So it might be interest targeting, it might be keyword targeting, if you’re talking about programmatic, it might be sort of in-market audiences, that sort of thing. So that a lot of these platforms use contextual marketing. But the thing that I would say, is, people are very sort of isolated in their specific channels. So someone might just continually use Instagram, or they might use Facebook, or whatever it might be. And so any adverts that they see in their Instagram feed or in their Meta feed, or whatever it might be, they are going to see them in conjunction with all of the other ads that they see. And it’s really easy when you kind of fall into one of these buckets that is meant to be contextual, and personalized to you. But really, so if I click on a bike post, and I fall into a, you know, a road bike bucket, in terms of advertisers targeting me, you will start to see like five ads in your newsfeed of bikes. So the contextualization of those ads is not as clever as the individual advertiser, selecting, you know, all these different interest targeting or in market audiences to show their ads to that person, because the person is going to see loads of ads of the same product, and therefore it’s going to become like not, you know, the personalization element of it becomes almost like the negative as opposed to kind of the purpose of what it’s trying to do, where you can kind of get round this is by using a lot more kind of algorithmic targeting. So based on lookalike audiences, of existing customers, where it’s not just necessarily one element of their social footprint, but there’s, you know, it’s a combination of different factors, which means that the adverts that they see in their feed, are less likely to be as kind of jarringly similar as other advertisers. But the other thing is, you know, outside of these silos of each of these different platforms sits, obviously the internet. And you know, kind of there are people who still surf the internet and look at content online. And, you know, they still browse websites. And that’s still obviously a fundamental part of how people interact with the Internet. And programmatic is such a key part of tying all of those silos together. And what we’ve seen anecdotally is, you know, all of the platform performance in Instagram and Google and all these different platforms, we actually see improve, if you tie it all together with a programmatic strategy, where basically, you know, your kind of the context is, you know, becomes a lot wider than just, you know, someone’s scrolling their Instagram feed or whatever it might be. So yeah, contextual advertising is, you know, it’s a big part of how digital marketing works. But it’s almost become a little bit too, you know, facile to, to sort of implement these strategies and kind of think they’re going to be effective. And it’s much cleverer and much, you know, it’s so important these days to make sure that you’ve got a much wider strategy that incorporates, you know, targeting people who are not necessarily just in each of these different platforms.

Sneha (00:14:43)

Amazing. Thank you. And I wanted to ask you about earning customer trust, which is vital in E-commerce, which is quite a cluttered space, if I may say so. You know, what strategies do you recommend for building credibility online, with customers having numerous options, and also a lot of concerns.

Henry (00:15:05)

So, trust online, is vital, because, you know, there’s so much that happens when someone comes on to a website and, you know, having navigated via an ad that they didn’t, you know, in some cases, they didn’t choose to see that ad, but they’ve been, you know, targeted through contextual marketing or, you know, different methods. So, if you click on the ads, and they come through to the website, then there’s a real sort of, there’s a key moment for you to kind of capitalize their interests and make sure that they’re kind of happy, you know, to continue on this journey, and in this interaction with your brand. And fundamental to that is the product and the quality of the product, the value of the product. And it’s becoming so much more important these days, to ensure that your marketing your product, you know, as it should be, in terms of, you know, it’s got to be something that adds value to people’s lives, it’s got to be good value, it’s got to, you know, there’s a real environmental edge into a lot of, you know, what people sell online these days, you know, there’s a big kind of, you know, waste issues and plastic issues and things like that, which are, you know, quite top of mind in terms of, you know, people’s consciousness of how they kind of make these buying decisions online. So you have to make sure that your product or your service adheres to a lot of these values that people place right, so the price of the product is only one element of the value that people get from that. So that’s fundamental. So gone are the days where you can just market pretty much any product online, and you can just sort of get the, you know, run a load of keywords in PPC and get the value from the data that you’re sort of able to get from there. Because it’s a lot more kind of algorithmic and because there’s a lot more privacy concerns, and therefore there’s less data, you have to lean into the quality of your product, you have to sell the value of that product in terms of it actually being valuable and actually being something that people are going to want to buy, you still obviously, there’s still a place for you know, lower price products, and obviously, like Amazon have kind of cornered the value market and the sort of convenience market in terms of their delivery options, all that sort of thing. People know that that’s going to be a seamless experience online. But so in terms of like, as an individual as a DTC brands, you know, you can use Amazon as a channel and you can use, you know, various different marketing channels, but the quality of your product and having the you know, being able to convey the value of that product to your consumer is has become a lot more important. And especially in sort of, kind of the last couple of months and years where there’s been a cost of living crisis, like people are a lot more careful with their budget and a lot more careful with money that they’re spending. And so, you know, that product really does have to make a make a, you know, a difference to our lives.

Sneha (00:18:01)

Awesome. And if I could, you know, ask you about any challenges and trends that you see in the near future, what would they be with respect to e-commerce, digital marketing?

Henry (00:18:16)

Yeah, so I think there’s definitely, there’s going to be more privacy issues, I think there will be, you know, there’s talk about how Apple are going to start stripping out like tracking parameters and things from URLs. And so there’s going to be a lot more sort of shift in terms of how we can measure the performance of these campaigns. And also, I think, you know, we’re seeing massive fluctuations in terms of the cost of the traffic that you can acquire through these different platforms. Because advertisers keep reducing their spend, and then increasing their spend based on kind of how competitive the market is. When it’s more competitive, the price goes up, and people’s return on ad spend. And their cost per acquisition starts to decrease, decrease in performance. Whereas when there’s less competition, all the traffic becomes a bit cheaper, and then you’re able to kind of invest a bit more because your return on ad spend is that little bit better. So we can add as there’s more of these privacy issues, unless there’s more kind of buffeting of, you know, the robustness of these different platforms, we will continue to see these sorts of variances in performance from each of these platforms in terms of the effectiveness, but ultimately, you know, people, like businesses still need to purchase traffic online, because to get organic cut through these days is a lot more difficult. You know, it’s a lot, you know, it’s not so easy to go viral on Tiktok or whatever it might be like and your organic reach on Instagram is not nearly anywhere near where it used to be. So you need to be sponsoring sort of listings to get traffic to the website, but it’s just going to be you know, against the backdrop of continued privacy issues. And the other thing as well, automation. So we’ve seen in Google massive changes in terms of their shopping campaigns where they’ve become performance max campaigns. So but the lack of control that you have over, you know, what traffic you’re actually able to target from those campaigns is, it’s really difficult for an advertiser to kind of have any real impact on that, there are some technical bits that you can do to optimize those campaigns. But in terms of the levels of insight that we had, from these campaigns versus previous campaign types, it’s just not anywhere near. So understanding what your channels are actually doing. And what that traffic’s actually doing is going to become potentially a bit harder. And also being able to influence what that traffic is doing in terms of the optimization that advertisers can do is going to become a little trickier as well. But there is still a need for these for businesses to buy traffic online. So it won’t be necessarily sort of a situation where we’re, we’re eradicating performance marketing, it will just be a little bit of how we kind of flow with the times.

Sneha (00:21:07)

Awesome. And last question, before I let you go, you spoke about, you know, understanding. And this requires a lot of consumption of information and content and keeping yourself updated pretty regularly. Right? So if someone’s starting off, or if someone’s actually been in the industry for a few years, what do you recommend as sort of the go to places to get information from? How does the marketer stay updated?

Henry (00:21:35)

Brilliant question, I think the best way is, from the platforms themselves, like Google have a Google blog, and they go into huge amount of detail in terms of what the changes to their platforms are, as a practitioner, and you know, someone who spends all day every day in these platforms, there will be times where you’ll log into it one morning, and it will look completely different from what it did yesterday. So just keeping on top of you know, that’s just the interface. So some of the settings and some of the ways that these campaigns function beneath the surface change as well. So all of these things are super important to keep on track of, on top of, there’s so much information about sort of digital marketing practitioners practice in online. So it’s just about making sure you’re reading as many sort of resources as possible. But I think that the main one is looking at the output from from the channels themselves.

Sneha (00:22:36)

Amazing. I definitely learned a lot of new things here. And I hope the listener did, as well. It’s one of the best parts of hosting the show is getting to talk to people like you with so much expertise. And yeah, thank you so much.

Henry (00:22:52)

No worries, it’s been my absolute pleasure. It’s been, it’s been awesome.

Sneha (00:22:55)

Thank you and to you, the one who stuck around till the very end listening to this, make sure you subscribe to the podcast to listen to new episodes right when they drop. If you like the podcast, share it with your teammates, it could be a cool resource to post on your work chat as a recommendation. So go ahead and do that. If you want to get in touch Write to us at academy@stackadapt.com. That is academy@stackadapt.com. We have episodes releasing every alternate Wednesday. So stay tuned. Until then, this has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. See you in the next episode.

Episode Outro (00:23:55)

Thank you so much for tuning in. This has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. If you like what you heard, then there’s three things that you can do to support the show. Number one, subscribe. Number two, leave us a review. And number three, share our podcasts on social media or with anyone who might find value in this content. If you have questions or feedback or just want to learn how agencies and brands work with StackAdapt, you can us at StackAdapt.com. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

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