It may sound counterintuitive, but advanced social media for eCommerce tactics actually have nothing to do with social media. Yes, you read that right.
Social media platforms are just another set of channels that allow you to promote your products and sell, but it’s just a channel at the end of the day. To effectively maximize your business’ revenue and profitability, it’s not about tweaking a small element of an Instagram ad or even about the budget. It’s all about thinking like a strategist.
To become a true strategist, creating a killer and highly effective social media strategy, there are a few tactics to master, and our team at Catapult Revenue is here to tell you exactly how it’s done.
The first focus of a strategist is generating a sale to get a customer. No, not for a profit, but a customer.
To truly boost your eCommerce brand or store, you have to grow your customer base and simultaneously focus on getting customers for life. By making customers life-long shoppers, you can maximize their lifetime value which is a key component of a successful eCommerce business.
As we said, lifetime value, or LTV, is the process of making a customer a life-long shopper with your eCommerce business, ensuring they consistently come back for more through the years, making your business a go-to shop. This is the focus of a true strategist, as they are willing to outspend competition on customer acquisition costs with the key knowledge that it’s not about one sale but maximizing the order value of every sale and the number of transactions.
When doing social media for eCommerce, focus on customer acquisition in the context of lifetime value and maximizing order value for a truly advanced social media strategy.
Calculating your current lifetime value is essential to understanding your impact and success with your strategy. Improving LTV in digital marketing is an important goal and one that we can put a number to. But how is this done, and what does it mean? Don’t worry. It’s not too complicated.
If you’ve been in business for a few years and using a platform like Shopify, calculating your LTV isn’t too complicated. We share a post all about this topic here, which will walk you through the process of calculating.
The number you find for your LTV should be much higher than your average order value, showing that you’ve sold to your customers several times. If you don’t, you’re facing a different problem, or let’s call it an opportunity, to work on maximizing your number of transactions with your customer base.
When focusing on social media for eCommerce, it’s important to focus on three key steps — customer acquisition, maximizing average order value, and maximizing lifetime value. Once you master these three pillars, the other tactics will be minuscule compared to what you can achieve by focusing on these three aspects.
Let’s break down the importance of each.
When we talk about customer acquisition, we are talking about getting as many customers as possible, profitably. This is essential to building a customer base that you can then sell to repeatedly over time, maximizing the LTV.
Maximizing each order ensures you get the most out of every sale, boosting each customer’s cart with add-on products. A great way to do this is with a well-thought-out product line. This means having products that easily build on one another, so customers quickly understand why they may want to add on an additional item to their cart.
You can seamlessly incorporate this before checkout, sharing a few last-minute products that go great with the one they’ve chosen to increase their order value.
As we’ve said before, lifetime value is essential to a growing business. By building a customer base that always comes back to you for more over the years, you have a guaranteed go-to-market to share your products with over the years, not only maintaining the success of your business over time but getting more from individual customers through the years. Sure, a one-off sale is great, but those that come back for additional, high-order value sales are even better.
This comes down to having continuity of products that a customer can buy from your catalog. Similar to the average order value, a great product line with products B and C that can build on their product A will ensure the customer keeps shopping with you.
To maximize your average order value, there are two key tactics to consider — cross-selling and upselling. To better understand the best methods to maximize average order value, we define each of the tactics below.
Can we increase the quantity of whatever the customer wants to buy so we can sell more at once? Selling at a discount so that a customer buys more than one can be an effective method to do so.
Additionally, consider if there are any complimentary products that you can sell alongside product A, like product B or C. You can do this by showing what other customers bought when buying product A, or once they click “checkout,” show the customer another product you’re selling at a discount. If they are in the buying mode, they are much more likely to add this additional product to their cart.
Unlike cross-selling, upselling is when you increase the customer’s cart value by prompting them to select a more expensive version of the product in their cart or add on service. This is a great, quick way to increase their order value.
To increase the lifetime value of a customer, as we said, you need continuity of products that a customer will buy through the years. There are two ways to promote these items — through social media and email.
Many eCommerce brands neglect email marketing or do it ineffectively. Emails from brands that you’ve purchased from can be incredibly effective while also cost-efficient. Think of how many emails you can send a year. Even with just once a week, that’s 52 emails translating to 52 reminders to former customers that they should come back and shop with you. Even if the customer makes just one or two purchases, this is a great gain from such an inexpensive tactic.
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Ultimately, when driving growth for your eCommerce brand, it’s important to focus on all three methods — customer acquisition, maximizing average order value, and LTV — to have an advanced, effective social media strategy.
If you don’t have the internal team to handle an advanced social media for eCommerce strategy, don’t worry — our team at Catapult Revenue is here to help. Contact us today at 312-625-0447, and we will improve your social media strategy for a boosted customer base and lifetime value, resulting in major business growth.
What You Need to Know to Be Successful on Social Media It may sound counterintuitive, but advanced social media for eCommerce tactics actually have nothing...
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