S N A P S H O TThinkWorks

A high percentage of retail brands are now extending their digital activities with mobile and tablet apps, engaging users on their commute and at home. ASOS and River Island are two fashion brands that are doing this really well, with their wishlist and save for later options encouraging brand loyalty.

Top Tip: You can use specific ‘App-Install’ ads to promote your app through paid search. You can target

mobile/tablet users who have not previously installed your app and the ads will take searchers to the relevant App Store to download your app. Finally, the keyword tool will suggest keywords for

your campaign based on search queries in the Google Play store. Easy as pie! Don’t forget that you can also use Facebook to target users that might potentially download your app - we have

seen great success with our Facebook App Install campaigns.

Apps

Retailers can gain insight into how people research different types of products or services before purchasing them through Google’s free interactive tool, The Consumer Barometer.

Top Tip: You can also find information on what your audience looks like or the path from researching (online/offline) to purchasing (online/offline) through the tool.

(The Consumer) Barometer

Cash on DeliveryCash on Delivery (COD) is a popular E-commerce payment option in the Middle East. Many consumers in the region do not use credit cards, so this method of payment has become a very popular way to purchase online.

Top Tip: In addition to the Middle East, retailers in many other countries, such as India and even Germany to

an extent, are offering cash on delivery as an option for their customers. If you are expanding to a new market, ensure you have fully research the online purchasing habits within your chosen market, in

order to compete with local brands.

DS3

DS3 is fantastic web-based PPC management tool with some excellent benefits for retail, including inventory management and detailed tracking which can show which of your items of stock are selling the best through PPC.

Top Tip: If you are not using it start as soon as possible. DS3 can save your production team valuable time and that time can be reinvested into other parts of your campaign. Currently DS3 can make 4 bid changes per day which is more than any other tool.

A great way for retail companies to grow brand awareness, endorsements involve celebrities who command a high degree

of recognition, trust and respect amongst the general population. Brands often use

endorsements to try and sell a lifestyle to a target audience.

Top Tip: Ensure you are fully up to speed with laws and regulations around endorsement adverts at each country you’re advertising in. In the UK, all endorsements must adhere to the ASA guidelines. Read more around regulations here: http://www.brandwatch.com/2013/10/celebrity-twitter-endorsements-regulations-allegations-and-selling-out/

Endorsements

Facebook Custom Audiences is a great feature from Facebook that allows you to target ads to users based on their email address. This means you can upload a list of your customers’ email addresses and Facebook will match up the addresses with current Facebook users to serve your ads to only those people.

Top Tip: Use Facebook Customer Audiences to upsell or cross-sell other products to customers who have already bought from you or even upload a list of your highest value customers and reward them with a loyalty scheme. You can also target customers who haven’t bought from you in quite some time with a discount to try and encourage them to return.

Facebook Custom Audiences

Google AnalyticsGoogle Analytics is a great service offered

by Google generating detailed statistics about retail website’s traffic, traffic sources

and measuring conversions and sales. It’s the most widely used website statistics

service. Google Analytics is completely free with a premium version available for a fee.

Top Tip: If you don’t use Google Analytics start now - there is really no excuse to not have GA set up even if you have other tracking platforms in place. Google Analytics has great attribution and demographic data analysis capabilities which can give you great insights and help your campaign reach the next level.

HashtagHashtags are a great way to group ideas, concepts and conversations together and are a fantastic way to make it easy for a customer to find others who are posting about similar topics they are interested in.

Top Tip: Why not use hastags to bridge the gap between brick-and-mortar

and online. For example, Ted Baker encourages in-store selfies using the hashtag #KissTed. These selfies are then posted on the

windows of Ted Bakers stores by filtering the hashtag.

Incremental sales

Top Tip: Are you using search and display retargeting lists for customers who successfully checked out? Are your messages and recommendations related to what each individual customer purchased? If ‘no’ then you have an opportunity to boost your revenue with incremental sales.

Incremental sales, which is what you get when you keep the

customer conversation going.

Jobs

Top Tip: Are you bidding on your own / a competitor’s brand keywords? Have you added “jobs” as a negative keyword (also “careers”, “vacancies”, “positions vacant”)? Save PPC budget and improve ROI by limiting your PPC Ads to show only for keywords with a commercial intent.

Jobs - the wrong type of traffic (unless you are a recruiter).

Key Season

Top Tip: Prepare, prepare, prepare. Make sure you stay one step ahead of your competitors and have some budget behind November in order to capture the search queries on SERPs ahead of the Christmas period as many customers plan on snapping up a bargain during Black Friday and Cyber Monday! You can target people through GSP and increase CTR on shopping campaigns by implementing voucher codes to your feed!

Without a doubt, Q4 is the most profitable time of year

for retailers. In 2014, Latitude’s retailer clients reported

higher sales in November than December, no doubt influenced

by the increased popularity of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Lifetime Value of a Customer

Top Tip: It’s not only essential to understand who your most valued customers are, but it’s also important to

understand their habits and how you can apply this information to your campaigns to find lookalikes. You can do this for example with the help of companies like Callcredit, who can analyse your data

sets and tell you who look similar to your existing customers - this data can then be plugged into your marketing campaigns to help you drive more revenue and hopefully loyal customers as well.

Retailers are starting to wisen up to the value of retaining a customer for life, not just a single purchase. We’re observing more and more retention marketing tactics these days with VIP customer offers, store cards and loyalty points all playing their part.

Mobile

Top Tip: Make sure your website is mobile optimised - if the site does not display a mobile friendly tag you will see huge traffic losses on your organic traffic. This is not the only reason however to get your site up to scratch, as 41% of consumers use mobile in the beginning stages of their research process and follow up on other devices.

For many retailers, mobile has already overtaken desktop as a method of online shopping, making it more important than ever to make sure the mobile

version of your site is optimised.

November

Top Tip: Start planning your strategy in the summer and analyse the customers that came to your site last year: tailor specific offers to that audience but also identify where you have potentially lost out - can you create new targeting buckets with different messaging? Is your whole marketing strategy aligned? The sooner you can plan the more money you can make.

November has taken over December for many retailers as the biggest month of the year. Black Friday sales hit the UK in a big way last year, and it looks like they are here to stay.

Occam’s Razor

Top Tip: Do your customers get all of the necessary information they need to make a purchase, or do you flood them with distracting jargon, clauses and conditions? Keep it simple and help your customers to make good decisions; the reward is higher conversion rates and more repeat business.

A byword for cutting away unnecessary information (and also a very useful blog for online retailers).

Personalisation

Top Tip: Don’t let your audience fall into a filter bubble, which can occur when we only get exposed to information on the Internet that a company or website has deemed is relevant to us. This therefore means there is a lot of information that we may want to view, but are not being exposed to.

Is it possible in retail that by suggesting certain items to our customers, we are limiting their choice and perhaps even discouraging them from purchasing?

It can’t be denied that some level of personalisation is a positive thing, but it can be difficult to decide where to draw the line. As with anything in marketing, the solution will probably come down to testing to understand where the ‘sweet spot’ for your audience is.

Personalisation is the process of altering the content a user sees on site to make it more relevant to them. This could

be recommended items, previously viewed items,

specific offers based on the geographical location and

much more.

QR codes

Top Tip: Facebook started rolling out the Place Tips feature in June 2015 which provides tips at the top of the News Feed for Facebook users when they enter a business or landmark. You can request a free Bluetooth beacon from Facebook to enable this for your business

Truly out of vogue in 2015. Clever alternatives to QR codes include applications such as Blippar,

iBeacons and SnapTag amongst many more.

Retargeting

Top Tip: Remarketing can work incredibly well. It gives marketers the power to interact with the customers who have already shown an interest in your brand. Now you just need to reconnect with them in order to encourage them to place an order on your website. Make sure you have an AdWords or GA tag placed on your site ASAP, as you need to get at least 100 people in your list before you can start. Make sure your creative is eye catching and enticing in order to give the customer the best possible reason to revisit your site and place an order – ensure your CTA is visible and clear.

Retargeting is the process of trying to get customers

who have been on your site previously back to the site to make a purchase. This can be done through email, display, Facebook, Twitter and more.

Ad formats for retargeting are also becoming increasingly

dynamic, hence more engaging for the user.

Shopping Campaigns

Top Tip: Google Shopping is taking over the search results. If you search for retail products these days, the likelyhood that you are greeted with Shopping Ads as the first 3-6 results is huge. These lovely little picture sales messages are much more persuading than text ads and are likely to increase sales. They own most of the real estate and getting your feed oprimised to show as often as possible (sometimes 3-4 results in one go) is essential. Getting your feed optimised takes a lot of tweaking but once it’s right your shopping campaign should turn into one of your strongest campaigns.

Shopping campaigns, previously called “PLAs” or product listing ads, are

campaigns which allow you to display the actual product you are offering on the Google search results (rather than

in the typical ad format). They require a feed which lists all of the products you have in your site and can be managed through Google AdWords. These have become a huge focus for Google over

the past year and are continually growing as they allow users a great deal of choice as soon as they have

completed their search.

Tablet

Top Tip: The user experience is key here - you have to make sure that you have a responsive site in place to give the user the ultimate experience. This is important, as for example tablet PPC campaigns can’t be managed seperately to desktop campaigns anymore so you dont want to waste any money on campaigns that you can optimise as well.

According to a 2015 study that looked at 40,000 Internet users across 32 countries (Americas,

EMEA and Europe), the majority of adults now personally own

a desktop or a laptop and a smartphone with nearly half also

owning a tablet! This is why it is so important for retailers to optimise

campaigns as each device has a varying level of conversion rate.

User Experience (UX)

Top Tip: Ensure you always have the consumer in mind when thinking about UX. In the retail sector, customers want to check out and purchase their chosen products quickly and efficiently. Therefore you need to ensure you have a clear login and check out as guest functionality. Another top tip would be to make the key steps visible to the customer i.e. 4 steps to complete before you have purchased your product.

User Experience (UX) or Customer Experience (CX) is the process of how

your user interacts with your site.

Video on Demand

Top Tip: When you advertise on TV, are you also thinking about your online video audience? Are you creating video ads especially for your online viewers or are you merely rehashing your TV ad? Your customers are consuming more VOD than ever before, so be there to speak to them.

TV for the Internet age.

Website Outage

Top Tip: Your approach should be considered with what you are trying to achieve as a brand. If you’ve got a well-established offline operation, push customers to visit your stores as much as you think is right, or balance it with keeping customers enticed enough to bear with you online through messages around thanking customers for their patience. Likewise, if you’re worried about people feeling frustrated or hard-done-by, consider implementing a virtual queuing system so this is no longer a problem.

While you should always prioritise work on infrastructure to avoid website

outage happening in the first place, it’s a good idea to prepare for such

occations during busy periods.

X-selling

Top Tip: Amazon are legendary practitioners of the x-sell and up-sell – how effective is your service when it comes to recommending related products and accessories?

An important tactic for closing more sales and increasing your

profit margins.

Youtube

Top Tip: While advertising on Youtube can be expensive, the platform does offer some more cost-effective ways of advertising. Youtube TrueView allows brands to pay only when someone chooses to watch their video ad, so you don’t waste money advertising to people who aren’t interested.

YouTube is gradually becoming an online destination for consumers who want to see products in action before

they purchase, such as electricals, skincare and clothing.

Zoella

Top Tip: While partnering with vloggers can be great for brand exposure, vloggers are still considered the least effective source of product discovery according to GWI’s latest trend report. Only 4% of all internet users find out about a new brand, products and services via vlogging. It’s always good to think about where your marketing budget is best spent.

Zoella is YouTube vlogger with a whopping 8 million subscribers.

She is a self made star with beauty brands fighting over each

other to get her to showcase their products on her latest video.

28www.latitudegroup.com

28www.latitudegroup.com

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