Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: 7 Simple & Effective Ways to Improve Your Email Open Rates
Email is one of the highest converting marketing channels today. Still. Increase your email open rate with t…
Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: 7 Simple & Effective Ways to Improve Your Email Open Rates
Email is one of the highest converting marketing channels today. Still. Increase your email open rate with these five methods.
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Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: The 3 Most Effective Marketing Strategies For Ecommerce Businesses
Ecommerce is a now a $10.56 TRILLION pie, but in order to get a slice, you need traffic. Here are the 3 b…
Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: The 3 Most Effective Marketing Strategies For Ecommerce Businesses
Ecommerce is a now a $10.56 TRILLION pie, but in order to get a slice, you need traffic. Here are the 3 best ecommerce marketing strategies. It’s big. It’s getting bigger. And it’s why we’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years talking about ecommerce optimization. For many new and even established businesses, […]
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Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: Last Minute Holiday Marketing Ideas for Ecommerce
Trying to capture your share of holiday shoppers but think it’s too late? Get inspired with these last minute Holiday mark…
Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: Last Minute Holiday Marketing Ideas for Ecommerce
Trying to capture your share of holiday shoppers but think it’s too late? Get inspired with these last minute Holiday marketing ideas for ecommerce. Attention is scarce and many brands are trying to vye for it. Most big brands start thinking about their holiday marketing ideas in March. Yes, you read it right. But if […]
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Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: Reduce Bounce Rates: Ready to Fix Your Conversion Problem?
Technically, a “bounce” is a visitor that looks at only one page, or a visitor that spends an embarrassingly shor…
Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: Reduce Bounce Rates: Ready to Fix Your Conversion Problem?
Technically, a “bounce” is a visitor that looks at only one page, or a visitor that spends an embarrassingly short time on the page. Keep reading to find out how to reduce bounce rates. A bounce is any visit for which the visitor only looks at one page and does not interact with it. This […]
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Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: To the Bat Cave! Your Own Secret Conversion Marketing Laboratory
Interested in setting up your own conversion marketing laboratory? Run your own secret science experiments?…
Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: To the Bat Cave! Your Own Secret Conversion Marketing Laboratory
Interested in setting up your own conversion marketing laboratory? Run your own secret science experiments? Brian Massey, the Conversion Scientist, will tell you how. Sometimes it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission Warning: this information will make you a more successful marketer, but may also put your immediate job in jeopardy. To be a true […]
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Find out how our team of paid social experts helped Seltzer Goods increase its revenue by 785% in just 30 days.
Editor’s note: This case study was originally published in June 2020. It has been updated for accuracy and to reflect modern practices.
In digital marketing, you never make promises you can’t keep or set goals you can’t reach.
But, in some cases, ad copy, the right messaging, and the perfect opportunity all line up to produce results that blow away any conventional expectations.
In this blog, we’re sharing an incredible Facebook Ads case study about a former client of ours, Seltzer Goods. They’re a B2C brand that sells uniquely inspired home goods for modern living.
Like most businesses at the start of the COVID-19 crisis, they saw a sharp drop in orders. But, instead of pulling back, they decided to double down and increase ad spend during this time — leading to substantial results, including:
But the success didn’t stop there. In addition to the improvements on the paid social channels, sitewide organic metrics increased significantly, too, with:
Today, we’ll tell you exactly how we made it all happen — so you can replicate these results in your eCommerce campaigns, too.
Like many eCommerce businesses, Seltzer Goods was initially hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. Their challenge to our team: Create more sales from their B2C products to offset the negative effects on their wholesale business.
Fortunately, Seltzer Goods’ products lent well to the stay-at-home orders during early 2020, especially their artistically unique jigsaw puzzles.
The brand had the right products and plenty of inventory to make a splash; it just didn’t have enough awareness of these products among consumers to create the desired sales.
So, we came up with a solution to drive the interest Seltzer needed.
The ingredients:
Although Seltzer Goods had never run campaigns before on their Facebook Ad account, we knew paid social advertising would eventually be a key to their success. So, before we even began our engagement, our team added a Facebook pixel to the eCommerce site.
This gave us a major advantage: Because Facebook had been collecting data on purchasers and site visitors for months, we were able to hit the ground running when creating well-informed ads.
Here at Inflow, we believe in the power of the “See, Think, Do” Facebook Ad strategy. It’s served us extremely well when working with other eCommerce stores, so we used this framework for Seltzer Goods, too.
Because we wanted to reach new customers and see how they responded to our ad creative, we started with a single campaign that only targeted cold audiences (with no retargeting ads). By choosing a conversion-based approach optimized toward purchases, Facebook and Instagram would serve the ads to users who were most likely to take action — weeding out the window shoppers.
With this setup, we’d send more qualified shoppers into Seltzer Goods’ sales funnel from the very start.
When creating an ad set on Facebook, it’s easy to get lost in all the options you can select.
For Seltzer Goods, we kept it simple and opted into all devices and automatic placements. This would give Facebook and Instagram’s machine learning more options to display the ads, leading to better results for our client.
Given the lower price point of the product and the likelihood that consumers would impulse buy, we used a one-day click delivery optimization, instead of the default seven-day click optimization. (We recommend using the latter only if your product costs more than $100 or if your customers have a longer buying cycle.)
For our audience targeting, we started with an interest-based audience ad set that was closely related to the puzzles we were selling.
Then, we quickly added in lookalike audiences for three segments of visitors that took action on the site:
Having the Facebook pixel properly implemented and firing on key events such as ViewContent, AddToCart, and Purchase expedited the data collection on the seed audiences and built better lookalike audiences faster.
Pro Tip: Take note of the age of your lookalike audience. For example, a 14-day lookalike audience could look and behave dramatically differently from a 180-day lookalike audience, particularly during abnormal time periods such as pandemics, holidays, or Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
When implementing the lookalike audiences, we used the existing post ID from the interest-based ad sets. This allowed us to retain social proof (likes, shares, and comments) from the original ads, which would act as a positive signal to Facebook’s algorithm and potential buyers.
Next, we applied a clean and consistent naming convention structure from the campaign to the ad sets, the ads, and the UTM tagging on the back end of the URL. This streamlined our optimizations within the campaign and made reporting much easier.
Additionally, it allowed us to leverage the power of Google Analytics alongside the native reporting from Facebook Business Manager/Ad Manager, which is crucial in understanding your attribution models and entire audience journey.
For the best Facebook marketing results, we recommend incrementally scaling your budget over time. In the case of Seltzer Goods, we scaled up budgets by 10–15% every couple of days, as long as the ROAS was at least 5x.
A more significant increase can wreak havoc on well-performing campaigns and hurt ROAS or cost per acquisition (CPA) metrics when Facebook has to quickly adjust to new information and determine the best way to serve it.
While targeting and budget are important for Facebook Ad success, you won’t get anywhere without first having an attractive, engaging ad.
Facebook A/B testing is key to creating an ad your target audience wants to see. By testing a few options, you can combine the best creative and copy to drive sales, rather than waste money running one ineffective ad at a time.
For Seltzer Goods, we started by running two different ad creatives against the same in-ad copy.
When creating our Facebook ads, we selected single-image ads in a 1:1 ratio.
Because the majority of social media consumption happens on mobile devices, the 1:1 ratio gives advertisers the best chance of showing the ads in an optimal format to a wider audience.
This particular creative captures the fun, bright, and artistic essence of Seltzer Goods’ puzzles and makes it an ideal choice for Facebook and Instagram advertising. By capturing the user’s attention, it stops the proverbial scroll and lends itself to a closer look.
Ad Creative #1:
Ad Creative #2:
Remember, your ad creative (image, video, or carousel) is the most important factor in a successful ad. It’s the one thing that is exclusively yours and the best way for your brand to stand out in the crowded social feeds.
For this campaign, we chose to retain the same copy across both ad options for a few important reasons:
When it comes to paid social advertising, effective creative and copy are your not-so-secret weapons. Stay true to your brand, delight your customers with an ad creative, and you’ll win every time.
At the same time, scaling vertically and horizontally can also reap huge benefits. But you need good audience data to do it right.
The more recent your seed audiences, and the larger they are, the better lookalikes you can create — and the more sales you can drive through your campaigns.
Using these strategies, we saw great success with Seltzer Goods’ campaigns, including a 4.5x ROAS (9.68x ROAS with Facebook attribution) and less than $10 CPA ($4.87 with Facebook attribution).
In total, this campaign accounted for 25 percent of Seltzer Goods’ monthly revenue. Sitewide sales during this period, however, were equal to the total from the last seven months of sales — a 785% monthly increase.
So, what did it mean?
Our Facebook Ads campaigns didn’t just affect social revenue. It also affected other channels, too.
After everything was calculated, Seltzer Goods’ paid social ads only accounted for 25% of the total revenue generated in this 30-day campaign.
That leaves another 75% of the generated revenue unaccounted for, which we can attribute to other channels — organic, direct, and referral traffic — that also experienced significant increases in performance.
In other words, Facebook and Instagram ads can (and often do) have a quantitative and qualitative positive effect on other channels, too.
Below, you’ll see Seltzer Goods’ top-level source data for organic, direct, and referral traffic, comparing the first month we launched our initial Facebook campaigns to the month before.
In addition to the new cost-per-click (CPC) traffic, direct and organic channels skyrocketed in both traffic volume and conversion rate (185% to 533% and 351% to 903%, respectively), suggesting both an increase in demand and intent.
While we acknowledge that this particular time frame was opportune for puzzle vendors, we also know that no marketing effort exists in a silo. While other eCommerce clients have also seen increased demand, traffic volume, and transactions as a result of COVID-19, Seltzer Goods is a unique case — because the only marketing change we implemented was focused solely on Facebook and Instagram ads.
Our paid social campaigns increased the exposure of not just Seltzer Goods’ puzzle products, but also the brand as a whole. With that increased awareness came backlinks and referral traffic from BuzzFeed and Architectural Digest, as well as a better-established social media presence for the brand.
Using Google Analytics, we also saw that some of the referral traffic (such as that from BuzzFeed) found Seltzer Goods through Facebook and Instagram ads. It was quality traffic, too; for referrals from BuzzFeed, users, conversions, and conversion rates increased by 1,206%, 1,001%, and 18%, respectively.
The trend continued when we examined the organic side of these social platforms. For example, the organic Instagram referral source saw an almost 1,700% increase in traffic and transactions — which speaks to an increased level of engagement and intent from the users consuming Seltzer Goods content.
Google organic also showed strong improvement across the board. With a conversion rate of more than 6.6%, we wanted to dig a little deeper.
Below, you’ll see a comparison between organic traffic during the time period the ads were running and the previous period — a 183% increase in users.
At the same time, we saw:
Naturally, we wanted to know what types of queries were surging in organic traffic. What we found was highly encouraging for anyone struggling to convey the value of Facebook beyond the platform’s attribution model.
For analysis, we split the site’s organic search queries into two primary categories and subcategories:
Upon slicing the data further, we saw impressions for “Brand Queries + Puzzle” jump 931%, with an 831% increase in clicks.
Even more exciting: The non-brand segment of puzzles showed nearly a 200% increase in impressions, accompanied by a 1,134% increase in clicks — the segment with the largest increase in CTR (315%).
So, not only did the paid social ads have an impact on the volume of branded search queries in the search engines, but they also had a remarkable impact on the intent of those queries (further reflected by the increased conversion rate).
While this is a smaller portion of traffic, it reflects the target market we were engaging and lends credence to paid social’s impact as a branding effort. Remember: There were no active SEO adjustments made during this time that would have had an impact on organic traffic.
This data is particularly encouraging for two reasons:
Let’s be honest: It’s very likely that Seltzer Goods would have seen an increase in puzzle sales, given the demand brought on by COVID-19.
However, without these strong Facebook and Instagram ads campaigns, the results would not have been as explosive across all digital channels.
This new brand awareness that led to links and brand searches probably wouldn’t have increased to such a degree, nor would we have expected the lifts in organic social, either.
It’s hard to parse the exact impact, but we strongly believe that we took a wave of potential performance and turned it into a tidal wave of sales.
Ultimately, Facebook and Instagram ads accelerated the incredible increase in traffic, expansion in traffic portfolios, and improvement in purchase intent. By combining relevant targeting and strong creative that embraces both the brand voice and the advertising platform’s capabilities, we were able to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.
All of these elements are critical in running a successful digital marketing campaign that has wide-reaching impacts across the entire digital ecosystem.
“Inflow helped us quickly increase eCommerce sales in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. A multi-year strategy for growing sales and conversions was suddenly kicked into high gear. We really love their responsiveness, effort to understand our business, and determination to deliver the highest ROI possible.” — Gay Lam, Seltzer Goods
That said, this success wouldn’t have been possible without something worthwhile to advertise. With several products that radiate fun, brightness, and positivity, Seltzer Goods kept its advertising messaging and creative true to its brand. It delighted its customers by offering great experiences and first-class customer service, including handwritten notes with the purchases — all of which led to a COVID success story.
Follow this formula with your own brand, and you’ll win every time.
Want an expert to do it for you? Our team can create paid social media advertising strategies that impact your digital ecosystem, measure your results, and put you on a path for continuous improvement. Request a free proposal from us anytime to get started.
Read more of our Facebook Ads case studies below:
Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: The 20 Most Recommended AB Testing Tools By Leading CRO Experts (2021 Update)
Which ab testing testing tools are preferred by fulltime CRO experts? These are the tools they…
Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: The 20 Most Recommended AB Testing Tools By Leading CRO Experts (2021 Update)
Which ab testing testing tools are preferred by fulltime CRO experts? These are the tools they use to deliver results to their clients.
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Increase your ROAS and spend less on your Google Ads campaigns with the strategies in this eCommerce case study.
Editor’s note: This case study was originally published in 2019. It has been updated for accuracy and to reflect modern practices.
In our conversations with hundreds of eCommerce business owners, many have told us that their Google Ads campaigns aren’t performing as well as originally thought — and could be working more efficiently for a lesser cost.
Many of these brands assume that setting up their product feed and launching one Shopping campaign containing all of their products is all that it takes to create a profit.
Spoiler alert: It takes a lot more than that to create a successful eCommerce PPC strategy.
If managed correctly and implemented by pros, Google Ads can be a great revenue driver to grow your eCommerce business — but it takes more than just keywords and ad creative to bring it to fruition.
Today, we’ll show you how to make it happen, by demystifying the combination of eCommerce PPC marketing strategies that we use to get results for dozens of online businesses.
In the following case study, we’ll cover:
It was this common scenario — frustration in their subpar Google PPC campaigns — that brought this client to our doorstep.
As an online retailer in the camera equipment niche, they needed to improve their Google Search and Google Shopping campaigns for an investment return on their substantial spend.
Six months after Inflow took over their PPC efforts, we helped them exceed that goal, with a 76% increase in ROAS (5.61x to 9.89x) from their previous agency’s work.
Even better: Year over year, we netted them a 56% increase in ROAS, from 6.34x to 9.89x.
So, how did we do it?
Keep reading to find out.
Our clients include not only seven- and eight-figure businesses, but nine-figure annual revenue eCommerce companies, as well. Talk to us today to see if our eCommerce marketing experts can improve your brand’s PPC advertising, search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, and conversion rates.
While every eCommerce store presents unique advantages and challenges, by working with hundreds of them, we’ve learned just how important it is to follow a system.
Before we do anything else, we always start with an audit and analysis of the client’s product feed, campaigns, and other KPIs to see what is (and isn’t) working.
For this client, their website had a high search volume and an extensive product catalog of cameras, lenses, and other camera-related equipment. But, due to the store’s scale, there was incomplete and missing information about those products in their Google product data feed. Their current PPC campaigns were also too broad given the different product categories on the site, which created wasted spend.
So, we created a plan to increase the client’s ROAS through the following steps:
By optimizing each of the above, we positioned our client’s products to encapsulate the customer’s entire buying journey — resulting in less spend per click and more sales.
The Google product feed (found in Merchant Center) contains all of your products and their related information, including:
Google Shopping Ads and Display Ads pull this information directly from your store’s feed to populate its search engine results pages (SERPs). This is why optimizing your product data feed is so important.
For this client, we had to ensure that information (like camera brands, lens sizes, and so on) was all present, accurate, and easily found by Google.
Because of their massive product listings, the site had huge potential to be shown for many different specific product queries — but, due to the limited feed data, Google couldn’t match those search queries to products in the store’s catalog.
Now, when a shopper searches Google for a product in our client’s catalog (such as a specific camera lens model), our client’s product is more likely to appear right there as a Shopping ad.
Hot tip: You can easily optimize your feed using a tool like Feedonomics.
We recommend a mixture of Google Shopping ads, Google Search ads, and Google Display ads for most big online retailers. Implementing all three often leads to enhanced product visibility across the buyer’s entire journey, from research through purchase.
So, with their product feed optimized, we began restructuring the client’s Search and Shopping campaigns.
Because this particular industry has high search volume, it makes it much easier to gain traffic to ads — but also harder to determine the specific combination of queries that drive the highest return.
To address this issue, we created multiple tiered campaigns segmented by product type. In other words, we built different tiers for different product categories — in this case, a lens tier, digital camera tier, video camera tier, film camera tier, etc.
Product ads that follow customers around the web might seem annoying at first glance. But, in fact, retargeting ads convert very well and have a great ROI.
Why? Because they market to customers at the end of the buying cycle (once they’ve already visited the store and looked at product pages).
Before we came on board, shoppers were visiting our client’s store but not being remarketed to. Using Google’s dynamic remarketing feature, we automatically displayed ads to customers who left the client’s site without completing a purchase.
Dynamic remarketing uses your product feed to determine which products Google displays on its ad network. It can also intelligently group different products together based on what’s likely to convert best.
Using dynamic remarketing is a fairly straightforward strategy to skyrocket eCommerce sales and brand awareness, and we believe it’s a must for any online retailer.
Hot tip: Combine your PPC retargeting strategy with your paid social media remarketing data for cross-platform efficiency.
Once we saw what was working in Google, we began transferring those changes to attempt to replicate that success in Bing Ads (now called Microsoft Advertising).
While Bing has a far lower search engine market share than Google, we’ve found that what works well in Google Ads can often work in Bing Ads, too.
So, why not duplicate the strategies that work in Google to capture shoppers from another search engine?
Of course, this exact approach may not work for every eCommerce business — but, given the lower advertising cost of Bing, it’s always worth the experiment.
When it comes to eCommerce PPC campaigns, patience and willingness to adjust along the way are important. Over time, you’ll identify the highest-return queries and adjust your bids to prioritize them. However, it’s an ongoing process.
In this client’s case, we identified the highest-return search queries based on this store’s different product categories — and then created a tiered campaign for each category.
Below, you’ll find a visual representation of that tiered strategy. The search queries each tier drives are based on negative keywords. For maximum return, we created multiple tiered campaigns for each product category.
Replicate our tiered approach for your Shopping campaigns by following these steps:
Review historical performance in Google Analytics by running search query reports, going back at least six months. Identify the queries or query combinations that have driven the highest revenue or ROAS for your brand in the past.
Identify which terms of these high-return terms have churn (and which don’t). Then, decide which ones you want to filter into Tier 2 or 3.
Because your business and target audience are unique, take note of any patterns or trends that pop up during your review.
For example, with this client, we saw a pattern of queries containing certain modifiers that tended to convert well. So, we identified the revenue and ROAS for those terms for more informed campaign planning.
Organize any found patterns in a spreadsheet list containing the search query, revenue, and ROAS numbers.
Once you have all the data, it’s time to optimize your Google Shopping campaigns. For this client, we used priority settings, bid stacking, and negative keywords to create tiers.
The basic premise is to apply low, medium, and high bids on search terms with low, medium, and high returns — thus optimizing your cost-per-click (CPC). Conversely, apply high, medium, and low priority levels to low, medium, and high bids/returns.
For context, priority setting determines the order in which Google will cycle through the campaigns. High priority literally means Google takes that campaign into account first.
Here’s how this tiered system played out for this client:
We placed low bids on our catch-all campaign that drives all general queries. We also added negative terms to avoid targeting queries that we wanted to bid higher on in the other tiers.
We set this tier to the “high-priority” setting.
We placed medium bids on search queries we found to have a higher return than those in Tier 1 (but lower return than the queries we want to filter to Tier 3).
Like in Tier 1, we added negative keywords for the queries we wanted to filter to Tier 3. This tier was set to a medium-priority setting.
Knowing what the most profitable search queries were for this client, we placed the highest bids on them. This tier was set to a low-priority setting.
Why the tiered system works: By recognizing the performance of a store’s different relevant search queries, you can have much more control over how much ad spend is allocated to each query, which was key in delivering results for this client.
Many factors can influence the success of your eCommerce PPC strategy. Like with most digital marketing efforts, you’ll need to run some tests and continually adjust your campaigns for maximum return.
In our years of working with eCommerce sites, we’ve identified a few other best practices that drive sales with minimal spend.
As you set up your campaigns, consider incorporating these additional PPC strategies for eCommerce:
By identifying the highest-return queries, you can ensure less wasted budget by spending the least amount of money on low-return queries and allocating the largest percentage of money to terms you’re positive will actually drive a high return.
Negative keyword segmentation in a tiered system allows us to pay less for lower-returning queries. It’s also a helpful tool in regular campaigns for filtering out low-intent or irrelevant search terms.
After your tiers have run for enough time to gather significant data, further analyze performance by device to ensure no wasted spend.
After gathering significant data, you can use a time-of-day analysis to ensure you’re optimizing for our best-performing days and hours.
For example, if your PPC ads have higher click-through rates (CTR) in the evening hours than in the early morning hours, allocate more money to the former for a better potential ROAS.
Running Search ads built around other brands’ keywords and bids allows you to target your biggest competition. (Rest assured that they’re doing this for your ads, too.)
Don’t know who your competitors are? Start with these seven Google Ads competitor research tools.
Combine this strategy with your regular search ads to maximize your audiences and make it harder for your competitors to succeed.
Run demographic-based analyses for age, gender, and household incomes of your audience. Then, implement your bid adjustments accordingly.
While bids and budget are important in your display ad campaigns, you also need to continually update your ad copy to better target shoppers at different stages in the buying funnel. For example, newer users require more brand-focused messaging and calls to action, while previous purchasers do not.
Google is continually releasing new features and capabilities within its advertising network, like its Smart Display campaigns. Don’t hesitate to test these new features as soon as they’re released!
Being the first to implement these features will often give you a competitive advantage, as other brands may be slower to adopt these new options.
If there’s one thing to know about eCommerce PPC, it’s that it’s a dynamic advertising strategy. You’ll need to continually manage your campaigns and approach for the best results, based on what you learn from tests and past performance.
In other words, Google Ads is not a “set it and forget it” platform.
But, when you do put in the work to continually optimize and improve, the results can be well worth your time. After all, it was this ongoing adjustment to our client’s strategy that delivered a 56% increase in ROAS, year over year.
If you learn anything from this case study, I hope it’s how a Google Ads strategy based on systematic review and restructuring can quickly yield a higher ROAS for your eCommerce brand.
Want to see similar results for your business? Every eCommerce website that works with Inflow receives a customized set of strategies like these to maximize their Google Ads campaign budgets.
If you would like us to evaluate and improve your online store’s PPC marketing campaigns (or identify additional growth opportunities), request a free proposal today to see how we can help.
Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: Can AI Marketing Tools Increase Your Website’s Conversion Rates?
Discover how AI marketing tools truly work and find the answer to the question: Can they really increase yo…
Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: Can AI Marketing Tools Increase Your Website’s Conversion Rates?
Discover how AI marketing tools truly work and find the answer to the question: Can they really increase your website’s conversion rates? We may marvel that such things can be done, but we also recognize that these things require a great deal of data and the skills of some serious brainiacs to get a machine […]
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Find out what makes the best eCommerce agencies stand out and what you should look for in your next digital marketing professional.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2019. It has been updated for accuracy and to reflect modern standards.
Most people would gauge the success of any agency by its size, client list, and revenue.
But, if you really want to find the best eCommerce digital agency for your brand, you need to dig a little deeper.
As the founder of an award-winning agency that has helped hundreds of clients over the last 15 years, I know a bit about what “success” means — and it’s not about an agency’s bottom line. Instead, it’s about building an agency that people love to work for, with a list of clients who share our values, passion, and collaboration style.
Today, I’m going to share a few of the factors that have made Inflow a success in this “non-traditional” manner of speaking. In doing so, I hope to give you a more comprehensive list of characteristics to look for in your next eCommerce digital marketing agency, so you can find a partnership that brings your brand success in that more traditional sense — revenue and brand growth.
In my early days as a CEO, my goal was to create a $10 million eCommerce marketing agency. But, as I gained more experience and got to know our clients better, I realized that this kind of high-velocity agency growth threatened two key ingredients in sustainable success: client satisfaction and team happiness.
Agencies that grow “for the sake of growth” are often tempted to work with clients that aren’t an ideal fit. In turn, they’re forced to stretch staff workloads or hire impulsively to keep up with client demands.
It’s a recipe for disaster. Both staff and clients will become dissatisfied with their experience, creating turnover that no one could call a “success.”
So, Inflow took a different approach, which we call the Inflow Harmonic Triangle.
In short, we believe three aspects more accurately define the best eCommerce agencies today:
By prioritizing harmony between stakeholders, an agency can create natural, sustainable growth that satisfies both clients and team members. It’s the best experience for all parties and ensures longer-term partnerships that really allow for the experimentation (and resulting growth) eCommerce stores desire.
The video below is hosted on YouTube. If you need assistance with viewing the video, please contact [email protected].
So, how can your online business ensure you choose one of the best eCommerce web agencies out there?
As you conduct your research, keep those three aspects mentioned above in mind. While a certain amount of your decision may be made from your gut feeling, you can see those characteristics in action by looking for the following:
Many startup agencies are desperate to get clients, and they aren’t picky about where they get them. But, as mentioned above, this can lead to strain on team members and unsatisfactory results for your brand.
Instead, look for agencies that research and vet their prospective clients during the sales process. Choose those professionals who seek a mutually beneficial relationship with your business — who also take the time to understand your goals and whether or not their agency is a good fit for your brand.
For example, at Inflow, we serve a small slice of eCommerce websites — those who are mid-sized or larger, primarily sell their products online, and are looking for a long-term agency partnership. Most importantly, we only work with brands we believe in, which means we have turned down prospective clients who didn’t match our values.
When an agency is selective about its clients, you can trust that you’ll receive high-quality work from a team of experts who isn’t overladen with heavy workloads.
Remember: Waitlists aren’t bad! Instead, they’re a sign that an agency won’t sacrifice your work for the sake of bringing on a new client. While the wait can be frustrating when you’re looking for a new agency, it’s usually well worth it for the right fit.
The more selective an active client list is, the more time your strategists can dedicate to your accounts — and the better results you’ll receive.
Red Flag: Those who are solely focused on becoming bigger don’t leave much space for becoming better. Avoid agencies who rush you through the sales process and seem desperate to grow their client base.
Many online marketing companies try to become full-service agencies, covering everything under the marketing umbrella. It’s not uncommon to see an agency pitching search engine optimization (SEO) with pay-per-click marketing (PPC), graphic design, email marketing, conversion rate optimization, paid social media marketing, web development, and more.
But remember: Jack of all trades, master of none.
You’ll get much better results by working with an agency that specializes in a few areas. They can provide a higher quality of service with advanced techniques and knowledge, thanks to their dedication to a few service lines. Compare that to a “full service” agency, which will either outsource additional services to contractors or attempt to offer them at a lower standard.
At Inflow, we don’t just specialize in eCommerce; we also focus on a few core areas. This gives us a narrower focus for optimizing our lead generation and allows us to develop a deeper understanding of each service line we offer.
For those services we don’t offer, we partner with other specialized companies to make introductions for our clients that will best serve their needs.
Red Flag: Avoid agencies who promise a wide range of unrelated digital marketing services (like paid search, web design, mobile app development, content marketing, etc.) and cannot articulate the overarching strategy connecting them all.
Every eCommerce company (including yours!) is unique. A marketing agency should respect that and build a custom strategy around your industry, products, audiences, goals, and resources — not force you into a cookie-cutter plan.
Unfortunately, many run-of-the-mill digital agencies will upsell you on services that won’t deliver. (It’s another way they put their bottom line over yours.)
The best eCommerce agencies, on the other hand, will only sell you on the services that will deliver the best results for your business. They’ll revisit those other marketing channels when it makes sense to, not when they’re in need of more client revenue.
Here at Inflow, we use an agile approach for all of our clients, meaning we flex our strategy and deliverables as needed to meet our client’s goals. We recognize that business goals change over time — and we believe a client’s strategy should reflect that, not remain static.
As such, look for an agency that will customize its eCommerce marketing services and pricing structure based on what delivers the best results for your brand.
Red Flag: Avoid agencies that offer a “standard pricing sheet” with their typical services. Look for agencies that diagnose your problems and build digital marketing strategies around your goals.
The best eCommerce marketing agencies can do a lot — but they’re not miracle workers. Your chosen agency should be able to rationally and realistically discuss what they can (and can’t) achieve for your brand, given your budget and your timelines.
Part of this onus is on your team (Have you properly researched the ROI of hiring an agency? Do you understand how certain advertising platforms work?), but your agency shouldn’t be afraid to educate you, either.
Transparency and honesty from the start is the sign of a good future relationship that delivers maximum satisfaction for each party.
For example, our sales team has conversed with prospects who seemed like an ideal fit — until we got to the questions of goals, where they requested a 20-times increase in organic traffic within 12 months! When we told them that was unrealistic (even impossible), the prospect stood firm, leaving us to amicably part ways.
In short, look for an agency that isn’t afraid to address your goals in a straightforward way, even if it’s not what you want to hear.
Red Flag: Avoid agencies that overpromise and underdeliver. Ask for a strategy that realistically outlines how certain goals will be achieved.
Many eCommerce brands underestimate the personality aspect of a marketing professional. But, when you choose an agency based solely on results, you can end up with a working relationship that hinders your growth.
The best eCommerce marketing agencies employ teams who are passionate about what they do — and passionate about working with you. When you work with a team that is equally invested in your business, they’ll deliver more innovative strategies that drive real results for your business.
Here at Inflow, our strategists enjoy coming to work every single day. They look forward to brainstorming new marketing campaigns for our clients, and they’re never satisfied with the bare minimum. (In fact, it’s one of our core values.)
And our clients agree, too:
“We don’t want to be just another customer to you; we want you to understand how important this is to us and how passionate we are about it — and we’re looking for partners that share that same desire and urgency. And I think we found that in Inflow.” Jon Safran, CEO at KEH
Case studies and detailed proposals can only go so far. Trust your gut during your research process, and ask yourself: Do I get a good vibe from this agency?
Red Flag: Watch for agency contacts who are disengaged with their work, uninterested in getting to know your business, or otherwise distant in their communications. Avoid agencies that are slow to respond or ask too few questions during the sales process.
Where does the aforementioned passion come from? A welcome work environment that offers plenty of benefits and opportunities for employees.
An agency’s support for its staff is more than just tangentially related to your brand’s success. The better your agency can retain its staff, the less disruption it will suffer. With less disruption, they can focus on performing cutting-edge work, pushing the boundaries of eCommerce digital marketing, and achieving world-class results for clients.
For example, at Inflow, we provide an extensive benefits package for our team members — including a career development fund, mental and physical health support, and competitive salaries. We know that the longer an employee stays with us, the better results they can produce for our clients.
So, we make the effort to retain them, as all top eCommerce agencies should.
Red Flag: Avoid agencies who don’t actively invest in their in-house talent. Ask agencies about their employee benefits and retention rates, and don’t be afraid to do some sleuthing on their careers pages.
It’s my aim to build Inflow into one of the best eCommerce agencies out there, but I know the work is never done. After all, we don’t get to decide when we’ve hit that standard — our clients do.
So, as you’re investigating your agency options, keep the six factors above in mind. While they’re only a starting point for finding the best internet marketing agency for your brand, they can help you narrow down the thousands of options to identify the one that will deliver the full-service eCommerce solutions you deserve.
We know that option may not always be Inflow, which is why our sales team refers every prospect to the professional best suited for their needs — even when it’s a potential loss for our team.
There are hundreds of top eCommerce agencies out there, and any one of them could be the best match for your online store. You just need to do the research.
Start with the multitude of advertising agency directories to narrow down your options:
And, if you think Inflow could be the right fit for your eCommerce business, request a free proposal anytime to learn more about our custom, results-driven strategies. We can’t wait to hear from you.
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