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Hello and welcome to the final installment of the Ashop blog’s post series on tracking the Return on Investment on your social media efforts. In our first two posts we discussed the kinds of metrics that best reflect social ROI, as well as the best methods and tools for finding it. Today, we’re going to switch gears a bit, and talk about some of the best ways to improve you social returns. Improving Social ROI is all about effective content marketing which has three main pillars of success. Relevant and effective content Consumer Engagement Cohesive and cooperative strategy. Content Marketing The content that you provide for your various social media outlets should first work to align your brand with the goals and expectations of your audience. Second, it should explain the beneficial nature of something that your business does. Finally, if at all possible your content should always intrigue and incite your audience into traveling further down the sales funnel. Even if it’s only a step or two. This final point is the most important, yet somewhat less tangible than the first two. Drawing people into your sales funnel, doesn’t mean you need to convert a blog reader into a lead, or a lead into a subscriber. It means advancing your brand in any way possible to any degree possible. This can be something as simple as educating your audience as to your services and your online presence. As long as you’re staying active and positive within their spheres of attention, your content is doing its job, and will eventually show up in your social ROI metrics. This is partly why many companies and marketers have such difficulty in seeing social media as a measurable activity. Because often the results of the relationships you build through content marketing on social media platforms won’t become visible or measurable for quite some time. This being the case, it’s very difficult to say what kind of impact social media efforts will have long term. Because social media marketing is going on concurrently with all of your other more immediate marketing efforts, it can be quite difficult to nail down a specific boost in sales or profit margin as a direct result of a single social campaign. While these results can occasionally be obvious, (in such cases as promoting a specific coupon code through a single social network) they are often more subtle. This is because your shared content is always working to expand your brand, even when you’re not necessarily looking. Once a good piece of content is posted, it gets passed around and shared by your followers. Many may look at the content, and simply keep the information contained therein in mind for use at a later date. Then, after seeing multiple pieces of content that all grab their attention, they begin to warm to the idea of purchasing from your online store. Think of effective content marketing like an avalanche. It doesn’t start as anything but a single snowflake that’s trying to gather momentum. Slow at first, the flake eventually becomes a ball, and then it gets rolling. Eventually, there comes a tipping point, and the whole snow drift is in motion. In the same way, you may grab a visitor’s attention with a single post. He or she might think of the post haphazardly, or bring it up in a conversation with a friend. Once they’ve been reminded, they’ll revisit your page, and begin to take your brand more seriously. At a certain point, the visitor becomes a follower, and the momentum gets going. The follower becomes a buyer, and then spreads positive word about your brand. They share your content, and become return business, drawing other visitors into your sales funnel with their enthusiasm. Eventually a single piece of content that an individual visitor made a connection to can be responsible for a large contingent of conversions for your site. And unfortunately, you’ll never truly be able to measure that effect, or track it back to its original source except in aggregate. But that is why we spent the last two posts talking about the right metrics to measure and how best to measure them. Because social media marketing is so elusive, it’s important to find the most comprehensive ways possible to measure online activity that results directly from content shared across social networks. Consumer Engagement The second aspect of social media marketing is consumer engagement. We touched on this a bit in the last section already. This objective is the true key to social media success. By building relationships with consumers, you can ensure their engagement with your brand. Asking and answering questions, promoting interactivity, and simply participating in conversations with your customers will undoubtedly increase your social media ROI. This point can’t be overemphasized.  People crave interaction. Social media suits humanity because we are social creatures. Even the most devout introvert can’t truly thrive in isolation. We all innately long for attention, adoration, and the interest of our fellow man. As a seller and an online presence, you have the ability to provide all of that coveted social value to anyone who walks into your corner of the internet. By doing so, you not only earn yourself conversions, but your make a difference in individual lives. By engaging customers, in a small way you provide for them a sort of purpose. They have something to do because you’ve asked them a direct question. For a brief moment, their attention is entirely focused on the conversation that you’re having, and they’re usually enjoying the distraction. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be involved in the first place. I don’t mean to romanticize this largely impersonal business relationship that you’ll form with your online followers. Rather, I’m trying to paint you a picture of what the perfect buyer/seller arrangement can be. People are bored, they browse online to be educated, entertained, and engaged. If you can provide any or all of those objectives for them, gratitude is sure to follow. Gratitude is a powerful emotion that can be translated to profits in very short order. Online commerce isn’t just you convincing people to part with their money. It’s building a measure of trust between yourself and other individuals, allowing the natural human instinct of barter and trade to take place in a mutually beneficial fashion. Cohesive and Cooperative Strategy The final caveat to improving your social media ROI is effective strategy. Many marketers treat social media marketing like a different animal altogether. They isolate their online presences and fail to recognize the benefit of cohesion across platforms. Because social media ROI is difficult to nail down, it becomes an exercise in isolated strategy. “Let’s tweak this facet of our Facebook marketing to see if it’s more effective than such and such strategy that we’ve employed elsewhere. “ This kind of experimentation can be very helpful. However, it’s important to note that when all of your marketing efforts are working toward the same goal, you’re more apt to get the best results. The ideas of social relationships and consumer engagement we just discussed translate nicely to the business end of things as well. You want your social marketing efforts to be working together as a united force in order to achieve the best results. Just like people, marketing efforts work best when used in conjunction with one another. If you write a blog with good SEO, you’ll get more attention by promoting it on Twitter. Special advance notice offers included in your newsletters can and should be promoted after the fact across your social media accounts. But most importantly, the people working on campaigns that are specific to certain social media platforms need to be in constant communication with one another. You want to be the many parts of the same body, all performing individual jobs that work toward one purpose.  The key to doing this is simple organizational cohesion. So establish effective modes of communication within your organization and listen to the input that you get from your coworkers. Together, you’ll achieve far more than you ever could separately. Actionable Practices to Increase Social ROI   By following the outline presented in the above ideas, you’ll create a powerful and effective online presence, a large contingent of social media followers, and an efficient strategy for reaching them. However, when it comes down to specifics you might still need a few easily duplicable practices to help you get started. So take a look at the following list and try to decide on the best courses of action for your online store’s specific strategy. No spam- Be careful how often you schedule your posts. You don’t want to oversaturate your follower’s feeds with constant updates. Try to keep a steady flow at predictable intervals Coupons-Always promote coupons with your social media accounts. We’ve mentioned this one a lot in this series, and that’s because it’s a seriously effective tactic. Geo-Targeting with Twitter- Twitter allows you to target followers specifically by region. Mine this data, and use it to your advantage with region specific promotions. Join/Start Groups on LinkedIn- Groups allow you to intermingle with other LinkedIn users, despite the fact that you aren’t directly connected to them. If you join groups that are relevant to your niche, you can promote deals to their members. Know the Differences Between Pages and Profiles-Facebook and LinkedIn have Profiles for individual users and Pages for businesses. Make sure you start a Page not a Profile. Be Patient-Rome wasn’t built in a day. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see immediate results from your social marketing campaigns. Remember the avalanche metaphor. Use Embedded Buttons to Easily Share Your Content-All of your content should have a “Tweet” or “Share” button so that viewers can quickly repost/retweet/re-blog/re-pin / etc. your content. No Hard Selling-There’s a time and a place for everything. Don’t send a sales letter over your social networks. People don’t appreciate the hard sells when they are trying to browse for helpful or informative content. Share other people’s content- Share and share alike, right? Spreading other people’s content helps establish you as a helpful resource, and engenders gratitude on the part of the original poster. You remember how effective a motivator gratitude can be, don’t you? Don’t be afraid to repost-You’re allowed to repost your own content. It doesn’t matter if it’s old, so long as it’s still relevant. Not everybody saw it the first time, so put it up again. Just be careful not to overuse the same piece. That will border on the edge of spamming. That’s it for our post series on Social media ROI. Hopefully, you’ve learned some useful practices to take with along with you. As always if you have any questions about this or any other ecommerce practice, keep it glued to the Ashop blog, where we take pride in providing you with helpful information to advance your online store’s goals. 

Hello and welcome to the final installment of the Ashop blog’s post series on tracking the Return on Investment on your social media efforts. In our first two posts we discussed the kinds of metrics that best reflect social ROI, as well as the best methods and tools for finding it. Today, we’re going to switch gears a bit, and talk about some of the best ways to improve you social returns. Improving Social ROI is all about effective content marketing which has three main pillars of success. Relevant and effective content Consumer Engagement Cohesive and cooperative strategy. Content Marketing The content that you provide for your various social media outlets should first work to align your brand with the goals and expectations of your audience. Second, it should explain the beneficial nature of something that your business does. Finally, if at all possible your content should always intrigue and incite your audience into traveling further down the sales funnel. Even if it’s only a step or two. This final point is the most important, yet somewhat less tangible than the first two. Drawing people into your sales funnel, doesn’t mean you need to convert a blog reader into a lead, or a lead into a subscriber. It means advancing your brand in any way possible to any degree possible. This can be something as simple as educating your audience as to your services and your online presence. As long as you’re staying active and positive within their spheres of attention, your content is doing its job, and will eventually show up in your social ROI metrics. This is partly why many companies and marketers have such difficulty in seeing social media as a measurable activity. Because often the results of the relationships you build through content marketing on social media platforms won’t become visible or measurable for quite some time. This being the case, it’s very difficult to say what kind of impact social media efforts will have long term. Because social media marketing is going on concurrently with all of your other more immediate marketing efforts, it can be quite difficult to nail down a specific boost in sales or profit margin as a direct result of a single social campaign. While these results can occasionally be obvious, (in such cases as promoting a specific coupon code through a single social network) they are often more subtle. This is because your shared content is always working to expand your brand, even when you’re not necessarily looking. Once a good piece of content is posted, it gets passed around and shared by your followers. Many may look at the content, and simply keep the information contained therein in mind for use at a later date. Then, after seeing multiple pieces of content that all grab their attention, they begin to warm to the idea of purchasing from your online store. Think of effective content marketing like an avalanche. It doesn’t start as anything but a single snowflake that’s trying to gather momentum. Slow at first, the flake eventually becomes a ball, and then it gets rolling. Eventually, there comes a tipping point, and the whole snow drift is in motion. In the same way, you may grab a visitor’s attention with a single post. He or she might think of the post haphazardly, or bring it up in a conversation with a friend. Once they’ve been reminded, they’ll revisit your page, and begin to take your brand more seriously. At a certain point, the visitor becomes a follower, and the momentum gets going. The follower becomes a buyer, and then spreads positive word about your brand. They share your content, and become return business, drawing other visitors into your sales funnel with their enthusiasm. Eventually a single piece of content that an individual visitor made a connection to can be responsible for a large contingent of conversions for your site. And unfortunately, you’ll never truly be able to measure that effect, or track it back to its original source except in aggregate. But that is why we spent the last two posts talking about the right metrics to measure and how best to measure them. Because social media marketing is so elusive, it’s important to find the most comprehensive ways possible to measure online activity that results directly from content shared across social networks. Consumer Engagement The second aspect of social media marketing is consumer engagement. We touched on this a bit in the last section already. This objective is the true key to social media success. By building relationships with consumers, you can ensure their engagement with your brand. Asking and answering questions, promoting interactivity, and simply participating in conversations with your customers will undoubtedly increase your social media ROI. This point can’t be overemphasized.  People crave interaction. Social media suits humanity because we are social creatures. Even the most devout introvert can’t truly thrive in isolation. We all innately long for attention, adoration, and the interest of our fellow man. As a seller and an online presence, you have the ability to provide all of that coveted social value to anyone who walks into your corner of the internet. By doing so, you not only earn yourself conversions, but your make a difference in individual lives. By engaging customers, in a small way you provide for them a sort of purpose. They have something to do because you’ve asked them a direct question. For a brief moment, their attention is entirely focused on the conversation that you’re having, and they’re usually enjoying the distraction. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be involved in the first place. I don’t mean to romanticize this largely impersonal business relationship that you’ll form with your online followers. Rather, I’m trying to paint you a picture of what the perfect buyer/seller arrangement can be. People are bored, they browse online to be educated, entertained, and engaged. If you can provide any or all of those objectives for them, gratitude is sure to follow. Gratitude is a powerful emotion that can be translated to profits in very short order. Online commerce isn’t just you convincing people to part with their money. It’s building a measure of trust between yourself and other individuals, allowing the natural human instinct of barter and trade to take place in a mutually beneficial fashion. Cohesive and Cooperative Strategy The final caveat to improving your social media ROI is effective strategy. Many marketers treat social media marketing like a different animal altogether. They isolate their online presences and fail to recognize the benefit of cohesion across platforms. Because social media ROI is difficult to nail down, it becomes an exercise in isolated strategy. “Let’s tweak this facet of our Facebook marketing to see if it’s more effective than such and such strategy that we’ve employed elsewhere. “ This kind of experimentation can be very helpful. However, it’s important to note that when all of your marketing efforts are working toward the same goal, you’re more apt to get the best results. The ideas of social relationships and consumer engagement we just discussed translate nicely to the business end of things as well. You want your social marketing efforts to be working together as a united force in order to achieve the best results. Just like people, marketing efforts work best when used in conjunction with one another. If you write a blog with good SEO, you’ll get more attention by promoting it on Twitter. Special advance notice offers included in your newsletters can and should be promoted after the fact across your social media accounts. But most importantly, the people working on campaigns that are specific to certain social media platforms need to be in constant communication with one another. You want to be the many parts of the same body, all performing individual jobs that work toward one purpose.  The key to doing this is simple organizational cohesion. So establish effective modes of communication within your organization and listen to the input that you get from your coworkers. Together, you’ll achieve far more than you ever could separately. Actionable Practices to Increase Social ROI   By following the outline presented in the above ideas, you’ll create a powerful and effective online presence, a large contingent of social media followers, and an efficient strategy for reaching them. However, when it comes down to specifics you might still need a few easily duplicable practices to help you get started. So take a look at the following list and try to decide on the best courses of action for your online store’s specific strategy. No spam- Be careful how often you schedule your posts. You don’t want to oversaturate your follower’s feeds with constant updates. Try to keep a steady flow at predictable intervals Coupons-Always promote coupons with your social media accounts. We’ve mentioned this one a lot in this series, and that’s because it’s a seriously effective tactic. Geo-Targeting with Twitter- Twitter allows you to target followers specifically by region. Mine this data, and use it to your advantage with region specific promotions. Join/Start Groups on LinkedIn- Groups allow you to intermingle with other LinkedIn users, despite the fact that you aren’t directly connected to them. If you join groups that are relevant to your niche, you can promote deals to their members. Know the Differences Between Pages and Profiles-Facebook and LinkedIn have Profiles for individual users and Pages for businesses. Make sure you start a Page not a Profile. Be Patient-Rome wasn’t built in a day. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see immediate results from your social marketing campaigns. Remember the avalanche metaphor. Use Embedded Buttons to Easily Share Your Content-All of your content should have a “Tweet” or “Share” button so that viewers can quickly repost/retweet/re-blog/re-pin / etc. your content. No Hard Selling-There’s a time and a place for everything. Don’t send a sales letter over your social networks. People don’t appreciate the hard sells when they are trying to browse for helpful or informative content. Share other people’s content- Share and share alike, right? Spreading other people’s content helps establish you as a helpful resource, and engenders gratitude on the part of the original poster. You remember how effective a motivator gratitude can be, don’t you? Don’t be afraid to repost-You’re allowed to repost your own content. It doesn’t matter if it’s old, so long as it’s still relevant. Not everybody saw it the first time, so put it up again. Just be careful not to overuse the same piece. That will border on the edge of spamming. That’s it for our post series on Social media ROI. Hopefully, you’ve learned some useful practices to take with along with you. As always if you have any questions about this or any other ecommerce practice, keep it glued to the Ashop blog, where we take pride in providing you with helpful information to advance your online store’s goals. 

Welcome back to the Ashop blog’s post series on the investigation and application of social media metrics in reference to determining Return of Investment. Much like that first sentence, like this subject, is more than a mouthful. So to keep from biting off more than we can chew, the subject matter has been separated into 3 nicely digestible posts for your palatal pleasure. But enough of the appetitious metaphors and made-up words. It’s time to get back to business. Part one of this post series covered the different types of metrics that can help you track your Social Media ROI, but today we’ll begin a new conversation about how to go about tracking these elusive data bytes. How to Track Social ROI There are a lot of different ways to measure the most relevant metrics to your social ROI. Many popular software suites are available to keep track specifically of social media conversions, as well as all of the different metrics we went over in our last post. Google Analytics has many distinctive functions geared toward social tracking. Then there are the social marketing platforms that are specific to the network itself. This can be something like Facebook Insights or Twitter’s advanced interface for marketers, available at: ads.twitter.com. Finally, there are the sneaky backdoor methods available to everyone through simple and effective tactics like coupon codes. These broadly diverse methods each have their own merits, and bear a bit of close scrutiny to properly determine which will be most effective for a specific campaign. So let’s dive in with the different categories and see what insights we can gather. Software for social ROI tracking Hootsuite might be a silly name, but it more than makes up for that with its functionality. Hootsuite is a software package that allows you to manage all of your social media marketing efforts. It has over 6 million users, and for good reason. Using Hootsuite, you can schedule and track all of your social media mentions, engagement actions, and conversions across multiple platforms. This Handy bit of software can be integrated into Google Analytics, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Which I’d like to point out is a type of lettuce, since I feel like keeping the food metaphors going. Hootsuite schedules your tweets, charts your follower’s interactions with your content, and provides you with in-depth metrics for a variety of different subjects. It’s a very useful tool for social media marketers, and it’s extremely affordable. It has a free introductory option, as well as an $8.99 per month expanded package. There is a more comprehensive and versatile “Enterprise” package meant for large corporations that you can purchase for significantly more than that as well.   This kind of application can be very helpful to your burgeoning social media efforts. Having all of your feeds documented in one space can simplify your workload, and having all of the statistics for your various posts displayed is useful for your overall social tracking efforts. There are many other software suites with similar applications to Hootsuite, but it is probably the most prevalent. Google Analytics has embedded tracking codes that you can add to your pages in order to integrate social media metrics into your GA dashboard. There are in-depth tutorials on how to setup social tracking available through this hyperlink. You’ll want to explore all of the different options available, because tagging your different social campaigns properly to get them appearing correctly in your Google Analytics dashboard can be quite complicated. You can use the metrics you acquire through this process to better understand your brand’s position across multiple networks, and GA social tracking is actually easily integrated with other software suites such as the Hootsuite packages we discussed above. Perhaps best of all, Google Analytics can track monetary value acquired from each social network with its Conversions Reports. Though this again requires you to set up specific goals for which conversions you want to track. The setup tutorials are also available through the following hyperlink. Facebook Insights is designed to help you understand how your followers are interacting with your pages and posts. With Facebook Insights you can discover the total number of likes your page receives, the number of friends that your fans have, as well as the number of fans. You can also measure a lot of engagement actions such as: comments or shares, event responses, page mentions, tags, or Place check-ins and recommendations. Additionally, Facebook Insights will clue you in to the Total Reach your page possesses. This is the number of people that any of your pieces of content might have appeared in front of on their feeds. Total Reach also includes any sponsored ads or stories that you’ve promoted through your Facebook page. This can be helpful in measuring such intangible aspects to your social ROI like buzz and brand recognition. Twitter has a few options for monitoring your metrics on their social platform. You can watch your Promoted Tweet’s performance via their Timeline Activity Dashboard.  This will allow you to track mentions, follows, reach, and a few more relevant metrics. There is also a follower’s dashboard where you can learn about your audience’s interests and their engagement with your content. You can also use this second dashboard to gather geographic information about them, which can come in handy when promoting special offers. Finally, Twitter has a list of certified partners that serve a variety of functions. Twitter actively promotes a long list of companies that offer products or services which mesh well with Twitter data about customer behavior and engagement, as well as general information gathered from public tweets. Take a look at this list here.   Social Tracking Best Practices The advice in this section is mostly common sense. However, it can also be easily overlooked without the benefit of experience. Promote offers-This is a simple one, but if you want to take a sample measure of your social ROI, you can run some experiments with special offers. For example, you could promote a special offer with your Newsletter. Then promote the same offer with your social networking accounts. Switch up the offers with different platforms over time, and chart the results. That way you can get an idea of how your offers perform with newsletters vs. social media promotions.  This is obviously a very malleable template for experimentation, so be creative and record the results. Coupon codes- Again, a very simple method, but you can use different coupon codes for different social media sources. That way each outlet will have a specific code, and according to which code is used you’ll know exactly where each conversion originates from. Conduct surveys- If you want to know, you can always just ask. At the end of your opt-in form, attach a survey asking your customers where they heard about your company. This can help you find out additional information about your most effective sources of revenue, that you might not have gotten with source segmented traffic reports alone. Determining Social ROI Let’s not forget an important point about determining social ROI. It’s about measuring money made versus money spent. Put into a simple formula, it looks like this: Value of Social Media Marketing Efforts/Cost of Social Media Marketing Efforts= Social Media ROI So to properly determine your Social ROI, it’s very important to know how much capital you’re drawing in as a direct result of your social media marketing. Naturally, it’s in your best interest to know how much money you were making before and after developing a social media presence. This should certainly be feasible if you’ve been keeping good records, or if you haven’t yet started your social media efforts. Either way, find out where your bottom line is before taking social media into account. By doing so, you will save you a lot of time and stress by avoiding extra calculations to try to account for social media’s piece of the profit pie. To calculate your social ROI, you have to take the information you gathered from the metrics and plug them into the above formula. Let’s draw a hypothetical to get a solidified idea of how this process might work. Imagine that your site is bringing in $50,000 a month. By segmenting your traffic by source, you determine that your social media efforts are responsible for 15,000 visitors to your site in the same time period. Of those 15,000, only 1,000 made purchases. The value of those 1,000 purchases was $5,000. So one tenth of your total revenue is brought in by social media marketing. Compare that to your social media spend which for simplicity sake, we’ll say is $2,500. Thus you’ve doubled your investment. Your social media efforts are valued at 5 thousand, can be divided by the cost=$2,500. So the simple formula we’ll use is: 5,000/2,500=2. Multiply that by 100 to represent it as a percentage and your Social ROI is at 200%. Not too shabby. Of course the real challenge is finding all of the numbers that we arbitrarily made up for the purposes of the example. But again, with the proper tools of the trade, and the intelligent methods laid out for tracking the purchases from start to finish, you should be perfectly fine throughout the entire process. However, one question remains. What should you do if your numbers aren’t quite as ideal as the ones show in the example above? What if your SMMROI is hovering slightly lower? Say around .09%. At that point your social media efforts are operating at a loss. This is obviously no good. So what should you do? Abandon social media marketing as a bad investment? Well, that certainly seems like regression rather than progression. We’ll take a look at some of the best ways to improve your Social ROI in the final installment of our post series. See you next time!

  Every serious marketer is interested in social media. This data and networking giant is a largely unexplored new frontier in the world of sales. There have been a few powerfully successful marketing efforts undertaken on a large scale, but many more unsuccessful attempts at leveraging personal connections and consumer behavior in order to drive ecommerce sales. This has led to a lot of mixed reactions and opinions of varying degrees on how best to approach social media marketing efforts. However, the beta testing phase of social marketing has been going on for more than a decade now, and some best practices are beginning to emerge. Even more encouraging is the ability to track social media ROI metrics to glean potent insights as to the ways that social media users are interacting with companies and their sales funnels through gigantic networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Tubmlir. These online communities are powerful resources for marketers looking to improve reach and attract traffic to their landing pages.   Up until recently, social networks were seen as interesting and potentially valuable avenues of advertising, but it wasn’t clear to what degree social media marketing was affecting an online store’s bottom line. But as with any other frontier, the longer interested parties were allowed to explore the possibilities, the more enlightening their insights became. Now there are in place, powerful and proven effective tactics to track social media ROI. Today’s post is about finding out exactly how big the dividends your social marketing efforts are paying. What to Track When Determining Social Media ROI Tracking Social ROI has traditionally been a very difficult prospect for many marketers across myriad fields of sale. In general, there are a few important ROI metrics to track, and a few different useful tools that can help you in these efforts. Firstly, you need to find out what are some solid numbers that you can take a look through to determine your social marketing efficacy. Social Media Marketing Metrics: Ideally, you want to find out how your brand is perceived in a given community, obviously the applicable social metrics will differ across different platforms, but there are normally some numbers that are universal to a certain degree. Page Likes on Facebook for example, are roughly equivalent to Twitter Followers. Both of which are included in the first category of social media ROI metrics that you want to track. These numbers describe the amount of participation that your brand receives in a given online community. These can be things like: Google+ likes YouTube Subscribers Pinterest Followers LinkedIn Followers And the aforementioned Facebook Likes/ Twitter Followers These are important social metrics to measure your brand’s popularity and visibility. Keeping track of these metrics gives you an idea of your brand’s overall reach. The users who like, subscribe to, or follow your company’s social media presence aren't just paying attention to your actions and advertisements. They’ve also made the conscious decision to actively engage with your brand. In other words, they want to keep you on their radar, and as a direct result have appeared on yours. Now this type of engagement is a hopeful sign, but it isn’t the end of your ambitions. Now that you understand how far your reach can go, you need to take a look at how many people you can draw in. The next set of social metrics is designed to measure exactly that: the people that are paying attention to you and spreading the word as well. This is the online equivalent of word of mouth advertising. Things like: FB post likes and/or shares Pinterest Re-pins LinkedIn post likes and shares Tweets directly from your posted content Retweets YouTube video likes, shares, and number of embedded videos These are the sorts of things that dreams are made of. People are talking, and that’s the first step. High numbers in this category of social media marketing metrics mean that you’re doing a great job providing the kind of rich, inviting, and engaging content that your customers are happy to interact with. These metrics are indicative of how many people who’ve kept you on their radar, as noted above, have gone a step farther and actively engaged with your content in their various social networking feeds. The next set of metrics you’ll want to track will help you segment the attention you’re getting between positive and negative lines. They say that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but crazy celebrity recordings by the likes of Alec Baldwin, Christian Bale, and Mel Gibson disprove that theory fast, quick, and in a hurry. It’s not quite so good for business if you have a serious piece of marketing content that’s getting negatively lampooned and then proceeds to virality. So to keep on top of any such shenanigans, you’ll need to start tracking all of the following: Positive vs. negative Social Media Mentions. Number of hidden FB posts or negatively mentioned posts, which can easily be tracked on FB Insights. Further the efficacy of tracking mentions by grouping them on a monthly timeline in three categories: neutral, negative, and positive. Social conversions- these are the conversions your website receives as a direct result of social network traffic. The last metric touches on the next category of metrics, which is really a single metric from multiple sources. You want to track the amount of clickthroughs to your site via social media. And you need to be tracking these clickthroughs from every network where you have an active presence. You also need to be on as many of these social networks as you can manage, in order to expand your reach to as many disparate corners of the virtual space as possible. You, of course, need to maintain a presence on all of the major social networks: LinkedIn YouTube Facebook Twitter Pinterest Of those 5, I would encourage people to take the longest look at LinkedIn, which is traditionally the social network of business professionals, and can often have the most valuable of contacts. Though that is not to say that each isn’t important in its own right. Being able to quickly create and upload quality video content on YouTube is obviously very useful for the fact that you can easily distribute said content to all of your other social networks. Facebook has the largest potential for reaching new fans, and Twitter is arguably the fastest acting of the marketing vehicles. Pinterest is odd and I don’t understand it. But hey, with 12 million monthly visitors and a reputation for large initial bursts of traffic generated from marketing efforts, I’m probably the odd man out.   It’s all good to know what you should track, but it’s a bit more difficult to know how to go about all of the tracking. There are a lot of different tools available that specifically track and target these and other notable social media metrics, as well as some sneaky methods you can use to circumvent the usual channels of tracking. However, this is all the space we have for today, so join us later this week for part two of this post series on the different ways of tracking social media ROI.    

Mobile shopping is making a big splash in the world of online commerce. It’s an unavoidable fact, and an important undertaking for today’s ecommerce retailers. If your online store is inaccessible from any major mobile device, you’ve literally got a gaping hole in your sales funnel. If you want to plug up that hole and stop bleeding money, there are a few things you really must do. The first of these would be to take a look at your budget and see if it makes more sense for you to optimize your landing pages for mobile browsing, or go ahead and develop a mobile application for your online store. Each approach has its merits, and you’re the only one who can decide which is right for you. On the one hand optimizing a site for mobile use is very time consuming, and it will need regular maintenance to this effect. On the other, it is much less expensive than building a mobile application from scratch. Mobile aps make for more user-friendly shopping experiences in general, and they also add a certain element of elevated status to your business. However, these too will require regular maintenance, and the impetus will be on your visitors to keep their applications up to date, which may mean some long term retention problems. Still, it’s worth going over the pros and cons of these two approaches in greater depth to determine which is best for your site. Reasoning behind Developing Your Site for Mobile Use   Putting together a mobile strategy for your website might not seem like it should be a big priority, at least not at first. However, when you look at recent mobile ecommerce numbers, you find that the rate at which online consumers are shopping from their smart phones is significantly increasing every year.  Apply the same rate of growth to a 5 year timeline, and you begin to see the necessity. Having an online store that isn’t accessible by tablet, Android, or iPhone is simply courting financial disaster. If you won’t cater to the needs of shoppers on the go, then your competition surely will. Recognizing this fact is the first step to cultivating a gigantic stream of revenue that will keep you from falling behind in your mission to reach the top of the online retailer heap.   The thing to remember when getting your site ready for mobile perusal, is that you have a very abbreviated amount of real estate on a smartphone screen. You can’t count on everyone shopping from a Galaxy Note, or Ipad after all. You have to assume that some very small screens are going to have to contain each and every scrap of content you are intent on displaying. That means prioritizing, simplifying, and segmenting. Prioritizing what content on your full site carries the most weight. Simplifying the way your site looks and the ways that your content is delivered. Segmenting, not in the normal sense in which you specifically target consumers based on their behavior, location, or some other mitigating factor, but instead separating the parts of your website into clearly defined segments that can easily be browsed and recognized for their relevance to the consumer. If you can keep these three caveats in mind while designing your mobile site or application, you’ll have a much better product by the time you’ve finished.  So without further ado, let’s dive right in with the pros and cons of mobile optimization. Optimizing Your Website for Mobile Use Mobile optimization has a few distinct advantages as opposed to developing your own mobile application. Foremost among these is cost. Optimizing your site for mobile is almost always much cheaper than building your own app from scratch. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s cheap. In aggregate, mobile optimization is going to be cheaper than developing an application, but it will still require regular maintenance, and updates every time new mobile software is unveiled. However, these updates are usually superficial and a relatively small expense for the utility of a website that works well across all devices and platforms. They are faster to implement, less expensive, and universal across different devices including: Tablets Smartphones Gaming consoles Desktops Laptops On the flip side, mobile optimized sites have reduced functionality as compared to native applications. They don’t accommodate graphics, video, and the like. There’s also no added revenue coming in from selling an application, which can notably offset the added costs of developing the app. Now what precisely makes for a successful mobile site? Consider a mobile optimized implementation of your site as a stripped down version. I’m talking bare bones here. You want as few pages as possible, and not too many bells and whistles. Because while it may take less time to develop and launch, your mobile site will load slower than normal. So that means you need to make everything as simple as possible. You’ll also be dealing, for the most part, with a vertical stack style of viewing. In other words, a skinny rectangular screen that will have room for one or two text columns, or a single text column with a picture included here and there.  If you’re planning to include sexy video content, it might be best to have your site linking to a YouTube account, so that your visitors can decide how to best view the video with their individual device. This is because certain smartphones have difficulty playing video embedded on websites. This is especially notable in Apple products, which have repeatedly stated that they do not, and will not be supporting Flash any time in the foreseeable future. While you should do your best to cram information about your products or services into the limited space you’ll have available, you also don’t want to overcrowd the small space. Having an overly busy mobile site is just as bad, if not worse, than having a sparsely populated mobile site. You want to keep a happy balance that will inform your customers of the most important information, without overwhelming them with too much text. Building a proper mobile optimized site is a chore for sure, but it’s still much easier than putting together an application. However, this hasn’t stopped many big players in the ecommerce world from slapping their brand name onto a highly functional mobile application, and for good reason. Next we’ll take a look at the good and the bad points of mobile apps, as well as a few of the best practices for their launch. Developing a Mobile Application for Your Online Store If you have the space in your budget, putting together a mobile app for your online store is a smart move. Building your own application for mobile use is an effective method of driving engagement from your users. To interact with your store on the go, it’s necessary for your customers to take the time to download. This alone means that they care enough about your store to take up that valuable space on their SD cards, hard drives, or what have you. Not to mention that if you’re selling the application in the iTunes store, people are actually paying for it. That’s commitment no matter how you spin it. Speaking of paid apps, there are two distinct advantages to selling these. One, you have an additional source of revenue coming in, and two: you have a much higher rate of conversion from a mobile app than from an optimized site. When people look to buy something direct from your mobile app, they are far more likely to convert than if they were web browsing and just happened upon your page by coincidence. Additionally, there is an issue of added functionality in which mobile applications tend to excel. When designing an application specifically for individual devices, there is a lot of creative freedom involved, this will allow you to take advantage of all of the bells and whistles included on mobile devices.  For example making your phone number link directly to a user’s smartphone’s dialing function. Or social network integration is always a popular item. People love to show off their stuff, and what better way to do that than to post about it on their Facebook or Twitter accounts? Camera functionality is also extremely popular among users, and depending on the services/products your online store offers, you should perhaps look into adding it into your application. It’s also worth mentioning that people use mobile applications for browsing specific websites at a much higher rate than they look at mobile optimized sites. They appreciate the added functionality, and are often more than willing to pay the additional $1.99 or so for the added convenience. One of the biggest cons to putting together a mobile app, is that many users who don’t want to download, will not be getting the ideal experience from your store when mobile shopping. In other words, there isn’t enough incentive for all of your site’s users to add your mobile application to their mobile device’s repertoire. This is highly unfortunate, because to truly service everyone to the best of your abilities you’ll need to invest in both mobile optimization and mobile applications. To avoid this conundrum, it’s highly recommended that you incentivize the app purchase/download as much as possible. Try using advance notice of sales and/or exclusive special offers through the application. Give it away for free if you have to. Consider it an investment in improving conversion rates, because only loyal of customers will consider getting your application in the first place. You should also take into account the fact that mobile applications are expensive to maintain. As mobile technology evolves so must your application. If the iPhone 14-S comes out, and it has a crazy futuristic psychic interface option, you’d best make a virtual reality for you online store to match it. Hyperbole is a fun way of illustrating things, isn’t it? Jokes aside, you will have to keep up with the technology market, which means consistent, if not constant, updates to your application that will be pricey. The Best Approach It’s up to you to decide how to best approach your mobile optimization strategy. However, in general the thing to do would seem to be optimizing your site first, and eventually expanding into a native application when it makes financial sense for your company to do so. It’s important to have something that caters to mobile shoppers in place, even if it’s not the ideal situation at first. As you begin to wet your beak with the waters of the mobile revenue stream, you may find that you feel more comfortable, and wish to start developing a more responsive and functional user interface through a native application. Or you might decide that your mobile optimized site is perfect the way it is, and you don’t need to waste the money building an expensive and high maintenance application. The decision will of course be situational, and unique to your business. Whatever you decide to do, you can rest assured that more ecommerce advice will be forthcoming from the Ashop blog to guide you along the way.   

  In the world of ecommerce, it’s very common to be concerned with attracting unique visitors. Online retailers are always looking for big injections of new capital to keep their businesses expanding. And there’s nothing wrong with this line of thinking. Unique visitors are a vital part of cultivating a successful online store. The trouble only begins when the value of unique visits outweighs the efforts at customer retention. It’s one thing to have an endless stream of new visitors, if you’ve got that going you’re in good shape already. However, wouldn’t it be preferable to keep at least a portion of those unique visitors coming back on a consistent basis? The returning customers form a core group of supporters from which you can extend your reach and grow your business. Today, we’re talking about the best ways to measure and improve brand loyalty. That means utilizing effective analytics, and implementing user-friendly strategies that will promise to cut back on your customer attrition, thereby turning your brand into a commodity that your customers will enthusiastically support. First, let’s define our terms. What is brand loyalty, and what do you need to know about customer retention? These phrases are really synonyms. They both mean that the customers your online store is attracting are going to be return business. Customer attrition, on the other hand, is the amount of loyal customers that you end up losing for one reason or another. These are somewhat immaterial expressions that need to be quantified in more concrete terms. That’s where your handy dandy metric measurements come into play. There are several different helpful metrics for measuring brand loyalty, and we’ll be giving you the lowdown on what they are, and how you should be using them to maximize the lifetime value of your customers.   LVC Speaking of the lifetime value of a customer. That’s the first metric you’ll need to understand. This metric is, of course, an estimate. That is unless you’ve been in business for 70+ years and have kept exemplary records for individual customers. But then, if that were the case, we wouldn’t be talking about ecommerce anymore, but regular brick and mortar retail. So assuming that you aren’t ageless and omniscient, let’s begin with the formula for evaluating a customer’s lifetime value. Customer Lifetime value (CLV) = (AVG profit per year x number of years)-acquisition costs     This next part is very important; this formula will only be effective if you have an accurate grasp of your profit margins. Profit margins are something you should be keeping close track of anyway. So consider this an added incentive for good bookkeeping, (like you really needed one more.)   Measuring CLV will help you to take a big picture approach to your business. You’re not living from paycheck to paycheck; you’re trying to build an empire. So try not to think about your customers in terms of single orders or purchases, but instead realize that every customer can be a repeat customer, if you approach them the right way.   One way to get a grip on how many repeat customers your business will have, aside from keeping contact lists and opt-in subscriptions to your newsletters and such, is to measure your NPS.   Net Promoter Score Net Promoter Score is the measurement your customers give your website, rating their satisfaction with your services. However, while they’re rating you, you’re actually categorizing them.  It works like this: before finalizing a purchase you put in an optionally answerable survey. You just ask your customers how satisfied they were with their shopping experience. A simple score that your customers give your site from 1-10 can reveal how big a cheerleader they’ll be for your business. With an NPS in place, you can gauge how much word of mouth advertising you’re likely to produce-- or how many bad reviews.   The general breakdown for Net Promoter score goes a little like this: A score between 9 and 10 is repeat business. They enjoyed their experience and they’ll be back. They’ll probably even go to bat for you with their friends and possibly attract other visitors to your site. Scores between 7 and 8 are satisfied customers, but would probably be susceptible to your competition’s marketing ploys. You don’t have their complete trust and happiness in your brand. Not yet.  A score of 1 through 6 is trouble. These people were not happy with their experience and are likely to talk negatively about your company in the future. It might not be a bad idea to reach out to these people and see if any amends can be made.   Reduce customer attrition It’s much easier to convince a returning visitor to buy than it is convince a unique visitor to do the same. And when we say easier, we mean much less expensive. Part of the cost of running a business is new customer acquisition. If the customer is already acquired, you can relax the budget a bit when trying to re-convert. That’s because the initial advertising that put your brand in view for your return customers has already done its job. These folks are aware of you, and are fond enough of you to have already made a purchase. If everything worked out well for them once, there’s no reason to assume it wouldn’t be the same way again. In these cases, the only thing you have to worry about is keeping the competition from wooing them away with a better offer. Think about it this way, working to keep customer attrition at a minimum is like trying to fill up a leaky bucket with water. You want to plug up as many holes as you can so the bucket will stay fuller for longer. If you’re not plugging up the holes, you’re essentially just pouring profit down the drain. So how do we go about trying to reduce customer attrition, and working to improve retention? Let’s take a look. Ways to Measure and Improve Retention It’s better to know where your retention rate is at before developing a plan to improve it. So first we need to talk about how you can measure your brand loyalty. Google Analytics has a helpful feature to do just that. Using Google’s Loyalty reports you can measure: Loyalty- that is the number of visits within a given time period. Recency- How long ago was the last time your repeat visitor looked at your site? Length of visits- This is the amount of time that the repeat visitor stayed on your site. And Depth of visits-the number of different pages visited during the length of the visitor’s stay. Measuring these metrics can give you a good idea of how many loyal customers you have, how often they’re visiting your site, and how engaged with your brand they are during their visits. It’s an extremely helpful report in determining what your customer’s are interested in, and how to best keep them interacting with your business. For example, using what you know about your loyal customers in aggregate, you can target all of the ones that stayed on a certain product page for a certain length of time. Let’s say you segmented your loyal customers by visitors to a single product page within the last week. Further segment that group to those who stayed for over 5 minutes without completing an order. These were people that were on the fence, but couldn’t commit to the purchase. Assuming that you have their contact information from the former purchases that they’ve made, you can reach out to these customers with a special offer email. Traditionally, these sorts of highly targeted email campaigns have been extremely successful. But beyond looking for that extra conversion, you can keep a customer happy by working to meet a need. We’ve already touched on this somewhat, briefly mentioning that an opt-in signup for your mailing list and newsletter is a fantastic way to keep customers engaged. You can also have a registration or subscription situation in place. That way your visitors will be more inclined to become loyal customers once they’ve made their first purchases. That means you need to offer some incentive to registering beyond just finishing the transaction that they’ve decided to make. Having their information stored for easy return purchasing is sometimes incentive enough. However, your visitors might also resent having to give out more of their personal information than is necessary for online shopping in the first place. In that case, an incentive to register for your online store could be something as simple as free content. Helpful how-to information or an educational e-book is the perfect fit for something like this. Another way to build customer retention is with a reward program of some sort. Special offers and exclusive deals for membership can have a powerful allure. So don’t feel hesitant to sacrifice a little capital in order to improve retention. Remember that it will make you a lot more profit over the customer’s lifetime. You also shouldn’t overlook the power of social media to keep customer attrition at a minimum. Social media allows you to have a real relationship with your visitors, and build a brand loyalty based on individual interactions rather than favors done on a mass scale. Promoting client loyalty with simple strategies like these can go a long way in building your online store into an ecommerce powerhouse. So don’t be shy about interacting with customers. They appreciate the individual attention, and if so enticed, they’ll become valuable lifetime customers who will pay back the difference many times over. So remember to keep customer attrition down and brand loyalty to a maximum by continuing to get the best ecommerce advice available on the Ashop blog. 

Very few metrics are more important than your ROI. Return of investment is used to determine which of your efforts are producing worthwhile results, as well as those that are turning out to be mainly worthless. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to track ROI in certain ventures. Social media for example, is a notoriously difficult ROI to follow. But never you mind the nay saying. We’re trying to remain solution oriented even in the most indomitable of circumstances. So strap in and suit up, we’ll be focusing on the many methods of determining the exact value of your investments. Why should I track ROI? For most of you, this is probably a no-brainer. It’s far more difficult to think of a single valid reason why you shouldn’t track an investment’s return, than it is to give you a comprehensive list of all of the benefits that tracking your ROI can have for your business. And because it’s always better to work smarter rather than harder, we’ll be going point by point through the benefits, both subtle and obvious, of tracking Return of Investment. Think first about your organization as a human body, that of a professional athlete, who must always be in peak condition for world level competition. Think about your ROI as a monthly diagnostic performed by medical personnel. You’re trying to see exactly where your body is performing, and what it’s missing. If your diet suffers, then you won’t be able to run a sub 5-minute mile any longer. If you aren’t getting enough rest, you won’t be able to clean and snatch 400 lbs. It’s a slippery slope, if you don’t keep track of exactly how each vital component in your health and nutrition is interacting with the whole of your body, then some aspect of it is going to break down when you push it too far. The health of your organization is the same way. Your overall reach, customer engagement, marketing, advertising, sales, and customer service components work together to keep your company’s heart rate healthy while you’re pushing the organization to its limits. To be certain of y our organization’s overall health, you’ll need to keep a close eye on each of these, and experiment with different variables to see what increases the end return of each. Versatility There's a variety of different marketing channels, and ROI can be tracked for most all of them. Just check out this graph of some of the most profitable digital marketing channels on average Return of investment is an effective metric for many reasons, but its proclivity is what sets it apart the most. You can calculate ROI on nearly every action your business takes. Whether it’s a keyword you pay to rank for, as we discussed in out last post about the new Ashop UI, or perhaps the elusive effects of measuring social media returns. ROI can be applied in numerous capacities to offer you multitudes of powerful data bits that can help you make informed business decisions. Profits Let’s get down to brass tax. Everyone gets into the ecommerce business for one reason: they want to make money. Profit drives innovation, commerce, and every other factor that puts business of any kind in motion. The single greatest strength of ROI as a metric is its ability to measure the true profit value of an investment. Knowing the amount of revenue your company produces is one thing, but knowing exactly how much of a percentage change each action you take produces in revenue is quite another. ROI exists to give you the lowdown on your profits that you can’t get just by looking at bottom lines. Complete Metric Let’s go back to the human body metaphor for a moment. When going in for that monthly diagnostic, you don’t just measure your blood pressure, heart rate, height, weight, and call it a day.  You check blood levels, hormone levels, and an overall full body check. What is your insulin doing? Is your bone density holding up okay? You want to make sure your business health is measured in the same way, and that’s what ROI is for. ROI is what we like to refer to as a Complete Metric, and just as the title suggests it gives you a fuller picture than many other metrics do in isolation. How to measure your ROI Now that we’ve established the “why” behind ROI measurement, we can start digging into the nitty-gritty to discover the many methods behind the “how.” The Simple Stuff—and Some Complications In general, there is a simple formula to measure ROI.  You take the difference of the cost of your investment and your sales after implementing a new promotion, and then divide the difference by that same cost. Once you’ve got that number, you multiply it by 100 to express ROI as a percentage. Fairly easy to follow, yes? It looks something like this: [(R-I)/I] x 100= ROI I= Investment cost, R= revenue earned from sales Using this simple ROI formula, you can draw, for the most part, very accurate conclusions about the efficacy of your marketing efforts. Let’s imagine an example to give you a better idea of what we’re talking about. Let’s pretend that your online store sells widgets. You’re rolling out your brand new widget model for the year, and you're going to start an email marketing campaign that reaches a sizable amount of customers from your contact list. You’ve targeted each recipient according to feedback you’ve received as well as their tracked behavior on your site. So let’s say that this email campaign targets 1,000 different people, all loyal customers to your site. The email is personalized to each customer using a mail service that fills in their names, and the tracked behavior they’ve exhibited in the past. For example the introduction might go something like this: “Hello Samantha, Because you bought last year’s model of our patented mega-widget, we thought you might be interested in our brand new hyper-widget…” Now that you’ve got the template designed and the targets locked, the bill for this venture comes out to a nice round figure of $4,000.00. You send out the blast and of the 1,000 people 800 clickthrough to your site. You must have done an exemplary job of targeting.  Of the 800 people 500 made orders for the new hyper-widget. The hyper-widgets sells for $30.00 a pop. So you got $5,000.00 out of the promotion. So let's plug in the numbers to find your ROI: [(5,000-4,000)/4,000]x 100=25  So your ROI =+25% Easy stuff. Unfortunately, there are a few other contributing factors that take this simple ROI formula, and turn it into a complex process that can leave your brain numb. The biggest problem for marketers concerning ROI is time. Short-term campaigns are easy to measure. You know how much you spent, you can see the impact of said campaign in your quarterly report, and you’ve got easy to digest numbers explaining the increased revenues. Long term investments and effects are a whole different ball game. A long-term promotion takes a while to build momentum; your profits may shoot up initially, level out, then drop, and then rise again due to a number of factors. The longer the campaign goes on, the more difficult it becomes to quantify. Another thing that makes ROI difficult to deal with is the number of variables that interplay to drive up your sales. Fluctuations in market, bugs in your site, supply/demand, incidental costs associated with the product, overhead costs, and a numerous amount of other issues can all affect your profits. It can be difficult to isolate a single factor and assign praise or guilt for a change in ROI. Even though there you've got these complicating factors, they can be overcome through precise planning, and good bookkeeping. To keep ahead of the time curve, you simply have to measure your metrics on a schedule. Perform ROI measurements on a set schedule, and keep track of the overall trends rather than the day to day changes. Precise metric tracking, such as is available with Ashop’s system of integrated metrics, can help you determine the outside factors that have affected your sales in the short term, while still allowing you to keep your eye on the big picture ROI over longer periods of time. Your Personal Efforts Aside from leaning over your computer screen and bean-counting, there are some other ways to more subjectively ascertain what your ROI might look like. A lot of this is simple stuff that can have some complex implications for your marketing efforts. You can begin by asking your customers questions. Things like: How did you hear about us? What was your first exposure to our business? What made you decide to buy this product? All of the answers to these questions can provide you with interesting insights as to how your customers are interacting with your online presence, and where you can focus more of your efforts, as well as where the money you’ve spent is providing you with the greatest ROI. There are other interesting ways to track customer interaction, and its effects on your ROI, such as different landing pages for different campaign efforts, using unique coupon codes for each campaign, and grouping tracked customers by the different sources of their exposure. Taking these simple steps will help you gather numerical data about how many of your customers are coming from your different points of contact. Software Tools Measuring ROI is a difficult process for human beings without any sort of mechanical assistance. Using different computational implements can streamline your work and help you spend minimal effort, while receiving accurate information about the metrics that matter most to your business. We’ve already mentioned email marketing, and how helpful a service like MailChimp or Silverpop can be. And if you’re a regular reader or customer, you know how proud we are of our own software that allows us to calculate our own return of investment in various circumstances. There are literally dozens of software options out there for you to choose from that can help you measure your ROI in a variety of ways. Though we’re sure you’ll understand that ours is the best and most helpful. Your ROI is for sure your first and best resort for finding out a particular promotion’s effectiveness, and should be utilized as often as possible when developing sales and marketing strategies. It’s the number one metric for savvy online marketers and is undoubtedly a permanent mainstay in the ecommerce vernacular. Learn it, use it, and love it.  That’s all for now. Keep coming back to the Ashop blog for more helpful information to build your ecommerce empire

  Normally on the Ashop blog we try to stay away from talking ourselves up too much. We aim to be a helpful resource to our customers, not just a hard sell site. But with our brand new user interface having just made its debut, we feel like we can take some time to pat ourselves on the back and go over some of the cooler features and benefits that we’ve worked so hard to provide for our fans. With all of the online commerce platforms out there, we want to express our appreciation for you, our loyal customers, in as many ways as possible. One of those ways is by working hard to put out a quality product. That's something  which we can confidently say we’ve handily achieved. So today we’re going to take an introductory look at our new UI, some of its major features and benefits, and the best ways to put this software to use while building your very own online commerce empire. So let’s get down to business and see what new exciting idiosyncrasies are in store. Smoother Aesthetics We won’t be spending too much time on this subject, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least briefly mention our intentions for (and pride at) the look of our brand new UI. The sleeker look of the Ashop system may be the least important of the changes we’ve made, but it’s certainly the most attractive. To put it simply, these changes have been made for your enjoyment and our vanity. We truly believe that Ashop is one of the first of the next wave of online commerce platform software suites, and to this end we’ve worked hard to make it look the part. While a distinction of human effort has always been straight lines and hard angles, it seems like the aesthetics of the future are turning toward a more earthy and organic look. So to stay current, we’ve rounded out all of our sharp edges off to give a smoother and more relaxed impression to all of the user interface’s dashboard pages. In the title graphic, you can see how this attractively plays out on the metrics page, which coincidentally is the subject where we’ll be turning our attention to next. Metric Driven System We’ll start looking into our improved functionality by bringing out the big guns first. Our specialized metric driven system is the pride and joy of our new interface. It allows you to track every ecommerce metric of any importance, in a familiar and easily digestible format. It’s not dissimilar to the Google Analytics structure, but it allows for analysis in much greater detail. What really sets our product apart is the degree of segmentation that’s possible. You can compare any metric you like on the timeline of your choosing: this week’s sales vs. last week’s sales, this month’s vs. last month’s, even this year’s vs. last year’s. You can make custom ranges to compare whatever metrics you like across whatever time periods you wish. This is so you’ll be able to compare your sales and marketing efforts in either broad or narrow terms, depending on your needs.  To go even further, you can actually segment metrics by category as well. Unique visitors by source, conversion rate by brand, average Revenue Per Visit by category or product. These itemized lists allow for a great deal of variation in the way you combine and segment your metrics.  With a little practice, you will find yourself getting lost inside of the gigantic amounts of data at your disposal.  Fortunately, you'll also be able to organize this data on your dashboard. That way you can find the metrics you deem most important quickly and easily.   Though perhaps you would like a more specific example of how you could best utilize this functionality. So let’s take a look at how you might decide to track your ROI on a particular marketing campaign using the new Ashop UI. Using Ashop's UI to Track ROI   Tracking ROI is all about measuring your conversions. Not just sales conversions either. Though the term "conversion" is often pigeonholed into the narrow definition of number of sales, it actually refers to any positive outcome resulting from a customer interaction with your site or marketing efforts, so long as that interaction holds value to your end goals.   So let’s put this knowledge to good use. Consider this hypothetical: you’ve paid out X amount of dollars into an SEO campaign with the goal of increasing your unique visitors. Specifically, you’re trying to rank for 10 new keywords on your site's different landing pages. By going to your Ashop dashboard and clicking on your unique visitors metric, you can then customize the date range to measure the time period when this campaign went into effect. Furthermore, you can scroll down to the Dig Deeper dropdown menu and breakdown your unique visitors by the segment titled: Keyword (Organic). This will show you a list of unique visits that came about as a direct result of visitors entering in your ranked keyword to their search queries. Pretty cool, huh? Now you know which keywords are performing, but why stop there? Since you know how many visitors these keywords are bringing in, wouldn’t you like to know how many of those visitors are making purchases? I’ll bet you would. Head back to your metrics page, and click on sales. Segment it by the same variable, Keyword (organic), and see how this list matches up with the previous one. Now you know exactly how many unique visitors each keyword is bringing in organically, as well as how much money the same keyword is responsible for producing. So all you have to do next is determine whether the number of sales brought in by your 10 new keywords is greater than the X amount of dollars you spent getting them to rank highly as search results. This is how you track conversions from the start of your sales funnel all the way to the finish, and determine your ROI using the Ashop Metric driven system. The best part? This is only one of the many ways you can use the metrics to determine advertising effectiveness and cultivate your ecommerce business. Let’s talk a bit more about that. Using Metrics to Determine Your Advertising Budget   Revenue Per Visit as compared to profit margins will help you determine what you should be spending on specific aspects of advertising. Go to your dashboard and click on the revenue per visit metric on you metrics page. Take a look around at all of the different information available to you. As you can see there’s a lot to take in. You’ve got the average, minimum, and maximum amounts which are based on your daily sales/visitors. You also have a graph charting this performance over your date range, just like you did with the unique visitors and sales pages we went over earlier. You also have the Dig Deeper drop down menu to segment your RVP against different variables. So to use RVP to determine your ad budget, go to the Dig Deeper menu and click on campaigns. There you have each of your created campaigns and the amount of revenue they are producing, as compared to the total number of visitors to the site within the date range you’ve selected. This list will be ordered from greatest to least profitable. Taking this knowledge into account and comparing it to your profit margins, you can now ascertain how much flex spending you have for each category. For example, if you have a PPC campaign producing an average of $3.00 per visitor in sales and costing you $1.50 per click, not only have you doubled your investment, but you have an extra 1.50 to bid on that advertisement. This will increase that successful ad’s exposure to different users, drawing more visitors to your site, and putting more dollars into your revenues. Not too shabby. However, I’m sensing that you’d like to get into even more specified detail. So let’s discuss the use of metrics on your product pages to measure individual product performance. Integrated Metrics On your dashboard there’s a tab labeled Inventory. Clicking on it will reveal a dropdown menu with the heading Products. Clicking here will bring you to your overview of different product pages. Clicking on a specific product will bring you that product’s performance metrics. Here you can take a look at all of the relevant information surrounding any of your products like the number of visits to the page, the amount of revenue that page is drawing in, and your conversion rate. Using this information, you can determine which of your products need a boost in advertising, or which are total non-starters. The latter of these might need to be removed from your inventory permanently. You can even make comparisons between products and draw ever more enlightening conclusions.  Also under your Inventory menu is a another subheading named Variant Templates that bears some looking into. Along with the integrated metrics on your product pages, you can customize products by creating a group of variant templates. This way your customers can choose from a variety of different options when it comes to your products. For example, if you’re selling clothes, you would want to create a size variant and a color variant. Unless you’re selling one size fits all spandex that is. Assuming you're not caturing to an exhibitionist audience though, you would want a small, medium, and large set of groupings. You can create as many other variants for each of your products as you need, and even combine several at a time for your customer's convenience.  You can just imagine all of the numerous applications that this data might have in your business model. However, this is only the beginning of the Ashop online commerce platform’s usability. We could talk about the many forms and functions of this software for days upon end, but frankly it would turn this already lengthy post into an overly voluminous eBook. Instead, we’ll just conclude here, and offer our support team’s services for any further questions, comments, or product-related feedback you might have. Drop us a line using the live chat box, our contact email, or by visiting the community forum. We have certified professionals monitoring all three channels, and they’re anxious to help you with whatever questions or difficulties pop up. So thank you for indulging us in our post about the invaluable applications of metrics using Ashop’s online commerce user interface. We worked very hard to bring a quality product to market, and now that it’s finished we just couldn’t help putting out some self-aggrandizing content. This is only the beginning, so keep up with the latest Ashop news by following us on our various social media outlets. 

It’s one of those things that’s so basic it can be easy to overlook, but customer service is really imperative to any ecommerce business. With a saturated online retail market like we have in today’s virtual reality, providing subpar service to your client’s will quickly alienate them, causing them to leave in droves. It’s in your best interest not only to provide an excellent product, but also an excellent experience around that product. If you don’t, you can bet that someone else will, and your site’s visitors will quickly take notice. The good news is providing quality customer support and care can be as easy as being sociable. Today, we’ll go over some of the basics of good customer service, as well as some of the gaffs you’ll want to avoid. Good Customer Service Providing your customers with quality service and care should be a primary focus. However, it’s easy to get lost in all of the day-to-day humdrum of running an online store. So be vigilant against complacency, and always remember that you’re there to provide reasonably priced products as well as convenience. Convenience should be your mantra, always be looking for ways to improve user interactions and experiences with your brand. The easier it is to engage with your company, the more willing a visitor will be to buy from you. This is an issue of attitude and effort. How far are you willing to go, in order to close the sale? If you responded with “the extra  mile,” you’ve probably been in the business for a while, and that’s good. You’ll know what to expect. So stretch out because we’re about to put in some serious leg work. Beyond having a winning attitude in your interactions with customers, you’ll also need to provide multiple avenues for interaction. Customer service is a multi-tiered operation. You need to have several direct lines of contact that play toward a multitude of consumer preferences. Your company should be easily reachable through all of the following channels: Phone –The fastest way for a customer to make him/herself understood. Email – Easy, unintimidating, and prompt communication. Live chat–77% of online shoppers expect this service from a reputable ecommerce site. Snail mail–Because some folks like to keep it old school, and it’s nice to give and receive a hand written letter. Use direct mail for a personal touch that really spells quality customer care. You should also set up a support forum, where your users can discuss issues, problems, or difficulties with your products or site. This allows a degree of self-help, as well as offering a great means of monitoring customer feedback and reactions to your product. Most customers begin their search for answers at your website, and if you can avoid spending man-hours directly addressing their needs, by having a DIY resource at their disposal, you’ll save a lot of time, effort, and all the accompanying overhead costs.  A support forum can be a valuable resource to both you and your customers. Another factor that should play a role in your customer service strategies is social media. Whether you’re a Facebook fan or not, you have to recognize that social networks have revolutionized the way that businesses can interact with their clients. Developing a social media presence isn’t just essential from a marketing standpoint, but it’s also a boon to the way you’re able to intercept customer complaints and get ahead of any misgivings that someone may have about your products, content, or the reputation of your brand. Being present on social outlets also affords you an opportunity to react quickly to customer complaints. Speed is a powerful force in online retail, and should be prioritized in customer interactions. Try to provide a timely response to any customer outreach, no matter how big or small. This shouldn’t only be limited to social media interaction either. No one wants to wait 5 days to receive an email reply. Keep on top of your interactions with consumers on every level, because it could be the difference between a loyal customer and a bad review. Lastly, you’ll want to manage your customer’s expectations. Don’t promise the moon if you can’t deliver. They say that hate is only love deferred, and this idiom holds true in the arena of customer care as well. When dining out, a restaurant patron isn’t going to be happy if they ordered prime rib and received sirloin. Be honest and upfront with the services that you can provide, and then look to deliver a little more than what the customer expects. A little extra care will go a long way in establishing yourself as a trusted source of consumer satisfaction. Bad Customer Service While all of the above will make you friends and help you influence people, all of the following will ostracize and disappoint the clients who keep the lights on in your office. There are certain things that any and every ecommerce success story will be sure to steer clear of. Here are a few pro-tips on the faux pas you need to avoid. Don’t make a customer repeat themselves.  It’s irritating at the best of times and downright infuriating when you’ve got a problem with a purchase. Having to move up the chain of customer support command when explaining a problem can be a real chore. This is especially true if every time you reach a new higher up, you’re forced to re-explain the situation to another uninformed employee. It’ll drive a customer bonkers, and leave them with a bad taste in their mouth. So make sure they only explain their problem once, and have that information recorded and relayed in every transfer. Or if you can avoid transferring at all, go ahead and do so. Keeping a single point of contact with a customer helps develop a rapport, and a deeper level of intimacy. One that they’ll definitely appreciate. Keep and informed staff. Ask yourself this question: if one of my employees doesn’t know enough about our brand to be a good ambassador for our company, why would I let them talk to a customer with a problem? You wouldn’t. So don’t. Train any customer facing employees properly and to the fullest extent. This isn’t a job for the inexperienced. Providing good customer service can be a frustrating and difficult job. It’s not for the impatient, the faint of heart, and especially not for the uninformed. You want your staff to answer any and all customer queries in a prompt, friendly, and efficient manner. Don’t be inflexible. Life is all about compromises. If you fall back on that tired old “I’m sorry, but that’s store policy,” every time someone asks you to go above and beyond the call of customer service, you’ll end up looking more like a brick wall than an amiable ecommerce outlet. Use customer interactions as an opportunity to let you customers know that they can sometimes trump the rulebook. This kind of customer service will pay big dividends in the long run. Try to keep these customer service crisis points in mind whenever engaging a loyal buyer. They’ll appreciate the fact that you’ve gone the extra mile, and you’ll appreciate the positive feedback they give you, as well as the word of mouth advertising that will follow. Good customer service is all about attentiveness. Listen, compromise, and conveniently acquiesce to any demands that aren’t too overbearing. Keep to a policy of accessibility, rather than insensitivity. If you can follow these guidelines, your company will be on its way to ecommerce affluence and customer service excellence.  That’s all for now, keep updated with the latest ecommerce happenings on the Ashop blog.

Welcome back to our post series discussing the best methods to build the perfect marketing budget for your ecommerce business. Last time we talked about calculating ROI and using that to inform your budgetary decisions, as well as a few of the different common areas of marketing budget spending. Today we’ll be talking about a series of different spending scenarios and some of the best practices for addressing common problems. So let’s jump right in with the next order of business. Where to Spend? Your needs define your spending. Your needs are measured in metrics, so to discover where you should be spending, you’ll need to spend some time measuring metrics. When you’re first starting out, a lot of this process will be trial and error. In the last post we talked about measuring your ROI and how it’s important to your budget. Today, we’ll be taking this underlying concept and applying it across all of your marketing channels. First you’ll need to define an initial testing budget for your marketing efforts. Along with your budget, you’ll want to define a time period for your testing phase. Once you’ve set these parameters, you can begin with your tests. This test budget and time period will be unique to your business’ goals and needs, so we’ll be working purely in the hypothetical realm from here on out. Hypothetical Marketing Budget Scenario Let’s say you’ve begun a brand new startup online store with a test budget of $2,500 for your first month. You’ve got a lot of content stockpiled from when you were planning this venture, but you’re starting from scratch in just about every other area. If you remember your list from yesterday you’ve got six different major areas to spend your marketing budget. SEO PPC CSE Content Social Media Conversion Optimization We’re starting your sales funnel from scratch in this example, so you should rank the importance of each item. You’ve got your content handled so that’s on the back burner. The areas with the highest average ROI are conversion optimization and CSE. So naturally, this is where your budgetary concerns begin.  Everyone’s list will be different according to their priorities but here’s a sample of marketing expenses in order of importance, in this specific scenario: Conversion optimization CSE SEO PPC Social Media Content You can apply a significant chunk of your budget toward making sure your landing page can convert, as well as trying to cheaply draw traffic toward the landing page. So let’s say 3/5 of your monthly budget is applied to those two areas. You hire a top notch copywriter and graphic artist team to design a stellar landing page, and you make sure that your products are appearing in the results of Google’s shopping application. You’re getting 500 page hits a day and converting 10% of your visitors, the average value per conversion is 25 dollars. Ain’t life grand? Total revenue accrued? $1,250.00 a day, and $37,500.00 for the month. Your ROI, if you remember your formula is: [(37,500-2,500)/2,500]*100=1400% Congratulations you’ve made your money back 14 times over. You go, girl. This is a great (if not an atypical and unrealistic) result. Because you’re having such awesome results, it’s time to adjust your budget. You can now afford to hire a pricey SEO expert to bring in all that juicy organic search traffic. Simply plug in your new expenses, adjust the calculations to reflect your new investment, and continue to record your results. Whatever you do, don’t forget to include your time in the calculation. If it takes you 3 hours every day to communicate and work with your SEO expert, multiply your hourly rate by three and add it to the amount that you’re investing. If you haven’t already broken your own salary down into its hourly components, now would be a good time to do so. This is obviously a grandiose example. These will not be typical results, and the math will not be so easy. There will certainly be more variables, and you’ll have to repeat this experiment over and over again, isolating each variable, and making adjustments based on your results. Selling things is supposed to be difficult. Goal Setting and Ratios Let’s assume your conversion rate isn’t going to be 10%. It’s more likely to be around 3 or 4 percent. So a natural goal for you would be to take that number up a notch. You’ll have to throw more resources, (time/money/effort) into conversion optimization. After another month of testing with a thousand more dollars spent into your conversion optimization budget, you haven’t noticed an increase in the conversions. Back to the drawing board. Turns out you’re targeting the wrong demographics for your products. Your social media strategy is slipping, and your SEO guy has targeted the wrong keywords on your website. You fire the old SEO guy, and pick up another who was referred to you by a friend. He’s working out fine. Now you’ve managed to meet that first goal, and you’ve bumped your conversion rate up to 7%.  But you’re not satisfied yet are you? This money is good, but more would certainly be better. You need to increase your reach. Your reach is the number of people that are going to be exposed to your marketing efforts. An increase in reach should result in an increase in traffic, but it won’t always. You’ll need to continue testing each and every aspect of your sales funnel, and see where you can allocate your budget dollars, (along with all of your other resources,) every time you set a new goal. Ideally, you want a consistent ratio between traffic, conversions, and investment. In other words, for every dollar you spend you’ll want x number of visitors to your site, and x percent of those visitors to be converted to sales. Ultimately, your goal should be to keep this ratio constant, rather than keep your marketing budget under a certain amount. Marketing is what drives your business and creates conversions, and a marketing budget is the means to that end. So if you are planning to limit your marketing budget, you are also essentially planning to limit your company’s growth. That’s probably not the best idea. Your marketing budget should always be flexible, and the only reasons you need to limit it, are for testing purposes, or fiscal constraints. Use what you have to as great effect as you can manage, and always be looking for new ways to exploit each dollar. The idea here is to limit the time spent and automate as much of your sales cycle as you can, so that you can enjoy the fruits of your labor, rather than continuously sow the seeds without ever letting the soil sit. If you’re struggling to keep above the red for years upon years, you either need to leave the business, or completely reassess your approach. And this method of goal setting, testing, and readjusting your marketing budget according to the metric data you collect on specific variables is an excellent method to employ in any major reassessment. That’s all the budget advice we have for now. Keep coming back to the Ashop blog for more expert ecommerce advice.