Simple and Proven Ways to Ensure Your Offers are Seen by Shoppers

As you kick off 2022, we are sharing some things you can do quickly and easily to improve shopper engagement. We’ve teamed up with our partner Anatta, a boutique e-commerce agency instrumental in the growth of some of the most successful CPG brands, to bring you advice on “personalization.” We are going to focus on personalization as it relates to making your offers highly relevant for each segment or cohort (i.e. a group of your consumers that share the same demographics or psychographics as well as similarities in purchasing behavior). This type of personalization can contribute to higher conversion rates and the average order value (AOV). 

 Identify your best opportunities by using the data you have on your most profitable consumers  and those channels used to best reach and convert them. If possible, identify two or three target audiences and select several corresponding channels for a multi-touch acquisition campaign. Once those audiences are identified, instead of sending all of them to your home page, consider personalizing the user experience by putting the offer that enticed them in the first place directly in front of them when they hit your site. This can be accomplished by sending a user to a landing page or a micro-site that is visually aligned with your ad assets and takes the acquisition channel’s context into consideration.

Here are a few campaign ideas to get you started: 

• A BOGO offer for your repeat customers that allows them to “buy one and GIFT one” of your products to increase your AOV and expose a new potential customer to your product. This unique approach to “buy one-get one” can work well for any number of campaign themes.
• Provide X% off for all new customers who choose to sign up to your email list. This will enable you to  save retargeting costs later by better utilizing email marketi
  ng, one of the most predictable marketing channels.
• Create product bundles with a special discount based on the audience and marketing channels.

Test heavily using tools like Google Optimize or Optimizely and make sure to set up your UTM parameters and cookies to ensure you can attribute your traffic and conversion to a specific campaign: 

• utm_medium = channel (for example, paid, organic, email)
• utm_source = individual channel / site – for example Facebook, Instagram, Youtube
• Utm_campaign = campaign name to easily identify your offer (for example, utm_campaign=holidays2021)
• utm_content = could be used to identify two different links in the same email within the same campaign (for example, utm_campaign=promo10off)

An age old marketing best practice is that any message needs to be seen at least three times in order to have any effect. We can’t say whether three remains the magic number, but seeing the message or offer once is rarely, if ever, enough. Hence, we recommend using a multi-channel, multi-touch campaign approach. 

To avoid allowing users to navigate away from the offer and getting lost browsing your entire website, especially if you have a rather large product catalogue, consider utilizing landing pages and/or micro-sites as well as utilizing exit intent modals.

If you choose to allow your users to navigate away from the offer and onto the rest of your site, make sure to establish a cookie to show specific offer codes across the entire site for visitors interested in the campaign (using the UTM parameter). This creates a highly personalized experience and keeps your special offer top-of-mind with the user as they browse your site. For example, place the offer at the top of all pages, under the add-to-cart button and on the cart page. All of this is easy to set up and test with Google Optimize.

You can be an eCommerce superhero by creating personalized campaigns and employing corresponding values for each UTM parameter and creating a custom UTM-tagging strategy for your campaign(s) to ensure accurate attribution and optimal results. Here is how we helped our joint client FOCL set up their personalized site experience:

For more information: Schedule a demo to learn more about accurate and reliable GTM tracking.