eCommerce marketers face a unique set of challenges when trying to successfully execute a content marketing strategy. We have good news for eCommerce content marketers, who are always looking for ways to optimize their conversions, revenue, and growth.
Our marketing analyst, Gal Salomon, recently pulled a ton of data on this subject from our content discovery platform, while our content strategy team gathered insights from a deep dive into thousands of eCommerce campaign items.
Using these insights, along with the years of experience working with eCommerce brands, we compiled Taboola’s eCommerce best practices—these cover all three stages mentioned and take a deep dive into data that reveals tactical advice for each stage.
In the process of creating these best practices, we worked closely with our clients to gain insights from them, and use them alongside our data to gain interesting information to help eCommerce brands shape their strategies.
Just because it’s more expensive, doesn’t mean it takes longer to buy.
It seems logical to assume that more expensive eCommerce products would require more consideration time on behalf of the buyer—in other words, more days in between their first click and their conversion.
It turns out that these two facts don’t have as strong of a correlation as some may have assumed, and that in fact, many items of the same price take a range of time to convert.
The graph below compares both sides of the coin—on the “y” axis, you see “days since click, to conversion,” and on the “x” axis, you see the average cost.
For example, furniture decor, despite being more expensive in terms of average cost, did not take the longest amount of time to convert.
If you’re looking to achieve a mid-funnel goal, our next piece of data will provide you with a unique strategy that may help you capture your audience’s emails.
If you’re looking for your audience to share their email, a quiz could be your best bet.
As we researched deeper into our eCommerce best practices, one unique data point emerged strongly above the rest—if your goal is to capture customer information, using a quiz works almost 3x better than a traditional landing page and email capture module.
When people are just discovering your brand, asking them to subscribe directly with a landing page isn’t something they’re likely going to find helpful—they don’t even know you yet. Giving them something in return, like a discount or free shipping, does definitely increase their chances of converting—but we found that there’s an even more effective strategy.
We’ve seen that gamifying this process—making it personal—piques their curiosity and improves the likelihood of them playing along.
The trick is to qualify this conversion, to make sure you’re reaching the right people at the right time. The secret to success lies in each of the buyer’s stages, and the best practices that will get you there.
Using Taboola to propel your audience through the eCommerce buyer journey.
There’s more data like this in our deep dive into the steps in the journey of content marketing for eCommerce customers—awareness, consideration, and decision.
In the awareness stage, your goal is to increase brand awareness and drive traffic.
This is when you want to capture interest in your product from people who don’t know you exist, or even that they could be interested in your product. Content at the awareness stage is worthless unless it qualifies your audience to move onto the consideration stage—your general content can be whimsical, but should be in your wheelhouse.
At the consideration stage, you’re trying to capture your audience’s email address.
The consideration stage targets people who know they have a certain need but don’t have a strong enough relationship with you yet to identify you as the one to fulfill it. Here you want to emphasize your value—this is where you want to personalize your qualification process, and leave incentive for your reader to leave their email (maybe with something like a quiz!).
Finally, the decision stage targets an online purchase.
The people at this stage most likely know who you are, and are primed to make a purchase. The highest converting clients at this stage are ones who leverage retargeting—they see the highest return on investment (ROI) for their campaigns.
The key to success is to optimize your content strategy for each of these stages in the buyer journey. Check out our eCommerce best practices, and explore an expanded set of data and strategies to help you succeed.
Taboola is the world’s leading content discovery platform, serving 360B recommendations to over 1B unique visitors each month on the web’s most innovative publisher sites. To Find out how we can support your eCommerce content strategy, contact us or start your campaign now.