Have you taken the time to look at your website recently to see how it looks from a customer’s perspective? Have you ever been through your e-commerce website as a secret shopper?
Unfortunately, many companies create a website or invest in a new platform and never take the time to go back and do this. Sometimes, they’ll get lucky and won’t come across any major issues while other times they may be missing out due to broken links, obvious typos and graphics that don’t work. And no matter how successful a website it is, it can still afford to be assessed and tweaked where necessary.
So, to make sure your marketing strategies are maximized, check them regularly, at least every six months. This will help you to evaluate how your website is performing and whether there’s anything you can do to improve the user experience.
Here are just some small strategies that could result in big money savers for you and your company:
Shave Off Some of Your SEM Expenses
Your SEM (search engine marketing) strategy has been implemented for a reason – to attract those all-important visitors to your website. However, over time, your SEM platform could become saturated with keywords that just aren’t as relevant any more or aren’t directing enough traffic to your site to make them worthwhile. SEO Specialists can suggest and implement improvements, like updating your backlink profile for example.
Every once in a while, take a look at your terms to see if they’re really worth spending any money on, removing any that aren’t. It’s better to put more budget towards the keywords that are performing than spreading your budget thinly across lots of keywords that aren’t bringing you the best results. In certain circumstances the opposite can be true, like when you have many products on offer in competitive niches.
5 Tips to Nail Down Your 2016 Digital Marketing Budget
Create Calls-to-Action in Your Emails
Email marketing is a must but do all of the emails that you send to customers come with a clear call-to-action? Any transactional emails you send can be tied into your marketing efforts without being too salesy. For example, an order confirmation that’s sent via email could have a call-to-action which asks customers to rate their experience or to review their products once they receive them.
By optimizing each individual touch point you have with customers, it’ll help to increase your engagement and enhance your marketing strategies without you having to increase your budget.
Ultimate Email Marketing Part 1 – My Email Marketing Strategy
Audit Your Landing Pages and Search Ads
You may have different agencies working on various aspects of your marketing strategy or you may have changed your brand’s standards over time, which is why it’s important to perform an internal audit every now and again.
This will help you to make sure your message is consistent and that the designs and colors you are using are the same throughout. If you’ve got old landing pages that haven’t been updated or you’ve got different designs in your ads, this could send the wrong message to the customer and could end up costing you money and customers. And while you’re performing this audit, it’s worth checking that all of the links you’ve got in your landing pages are working too and that any ads you’re running are still relevant. If you can’t do this audit yourself, it may be worth getting a staff member to do it as their time spent doing this could save you a lot of money in the long run.
9 Google Analytics Tips to Improve Your Marketing
Optimize Your Checkout Page
Your checkout page is responsible for converting sales, so it’s important that it’s fully optimized in order to capture those last-minute conversions. Look through the fields you have on this page and see if there are any that you could remove. This will help you to save your customers’ time by allowing them to check their items out as quickly as possible without filling in unnecessary details or ticking irrelevant boxes.
A lot of companies don’t optimize their checkout pages because they feel all of the hard work has already been done but by making these simple changes it could skyrocket your sales. Include testimonials and reviews to provide added peace of mind to your customers and make sure the design of the page flows with the rest of your site.
How You Can Build an Email Marketing List as Quickly as Possible
Create a File Full of Marketing Inspiration
There’ll always come a time when you need a bit of marketing inspiration. And in order to make sure you’ve got lots of inspiring things to look through when this time comes, create a file full of cool things that you’ve seen that have inspired you. It doesn’t matter whether this is a bit of copy you’ve seen on a competitor’s website or it’s a beautiful landing page you stumbled across – place it in a file that you can refer to at a later date. This could provide you with your next big marketing idea!
5 Tips for Connecting with Your Audience
Louis Shepherd is a small business owner who has taken on the role of marketing manager. Not afraid to share her successes and failures with like minded business owners, her articles appear around the web.