InSyte eCommerce Podcast

Positive Pants started with pop up stores and went online in 2019. Using their insights from Analytics they had a very clear understanding of who their target market was and launched their online store.  Their first campaign on Facebook and Instagram increased their revenue by 400% !! These ladies leave no stone unturned with digital marketing and track each campaign very closely in the first few days. They have made great use of Facebook A/B testing to find their best performing ads to get great results.

4AKid has been going for 14 years, the brand has overcome many challenges before e-commerce was mainstream such as payment gateways. Google is their most successful platform for sales and remarketing, they make use of various Google tools such as Google Shop and More. Facebook works well for remarketing customers who have visited their website. Ally has set up email journeys to welcome her new customers, educate them on her brand and entice them to buy while cultivating customer loyalty. 

Lessons learned from other business can be applied to e-commerce Digital marketing is like dating! You can't take a girl home on the first night, get to know your customer. Use the data from Facebook Pixel to create your next audience. Make your copy personal. You should be making your client look good, the client is the hero. Go back to basics every so often, start at the beginning and rerun original campaigns to gauge your changing audience. Understanding the lifetime value of a client can help you to remarket to the right people most likely to buy

Spaza Store has been running for 7 years. The best results have come from Facebook and Instagram. Spaza started with a broad market and narrowed that community down to create a group of people that they successfully remarket to. They use Mailerlite to send monthly emails and get a great return there. The importance of storytelling is emphasized as the brand is largely focused on upliftment as well as eradicating single-use plastics. They find customers who are as passionate about these causes as they are so that the product sells from an emotive position and not just filling a need. 

Handmade By Fynbossie started from humble beginnings using as many free platforms as possible to start the business. Bianca uses boosting posts to gauge their audience. While they have more followers on Instagram they get more website traffic from Facebook. They do not run their ads concurrently to the same audience on two platforms but rather target the same ad to a different audience on each platform for best results. Fynbossie also found that they did not need to showcase all of their products on social media but rather drive the traffic to their website for best results. Paying attention to high sales times, they boost posts according to when they know that their customers will buy.

Boerboel get a lot of organic sharing with attractive models in their photos, the eye catching content draws in their target market. Following trending hash tags and then applying them to their own business has created trends of their own. With an influencer sharing a post and engaging with an audience they got great reach that went viral. They share posts that their audience tags of themselves wearing the brand too, boosting the traction from their community. Boerboel invests in a long game with their customers engaging on various platforms to capture their attention from a young age and market to them as they grow and mature.  

Ebi registered his website from his car and started on a shoestring budget, the website is now generating more than one Mil in sales. He began with as much freeware as possible tapping into a niche market and sharing eye catching content that would gain organic sharing of his product. Engaging with customers directly gave Ebi the information that he could use to tailor audiences to market to with paid advertising. Influencers have had a big role to play in their organic sharing by tapping into their large following.

Using both print and digital they are able get customers on board their rewards program and this gives them a lot of information that they can use for targeting audiences. With strategic partners brining in customers for you, it is more about collaboration than competition. Social listening is a powerful tool to pick up in areas where your potential customers are talking about products like yours and you can then market to those potential customers Adobe tracks all the cookies and buyers journey from the first inquiry to the final conversion.

Yumm is a very visual brand and Instagram works well for them. They use #tags to drive traffic and engage with their potential fans to reel them in. Using Shoppify app KIT they have had great return. On Facebook they have had the most success with video marketing, using a Pixel they can remarket to their audience. Using MailerLite is their preferred bulk mailing platform. Focusing on high end content they draw their audience in. KIT will send a monthly mailer to customers on only new products and this mail is light on working and heavy imagery and it works!

Gitana recognizes that their brand is really visual and for this reason Instagram and Facebook work really well for them. While using a reach campaign on Facebook she can drive traffic to her website and then use Google to remarket to these customers from there. Also on Facebook she gets great return from her Lookalike audience that she pulls from her mailer subscribers. She also has great success using influencer marketing to display their swimwear and drive clicks from their pages  to hers.

Occasions give you a leverage for customer engagement, holidays and special days can give us content to share with our audience. Google My business is an absolute necessity for all businesses. This free platform allows you to post, display reviews and tell customers about your business. Tracking Google Analytics on a weekly basis gives Natasha insight into her customer behaviour for remarketing. She can see which pages customers have visited and use Facebook to remarket to them. Knowing with laser point focus who her audience is, she can custom  ads directly to the perfect people to buy. Frost split their marketing efforts to push online but also promote their brick and mortar stores. Digital supports both arms of the business and having a balance to drive traffic to both is imperative.

We Are Food gets most of their business from Google and Facebook with a 50% spend split on each. Using a variety of audiences and casting a wide net to reach custom audiences, lookalike and remarketing on Facebook they drive new business and expect to see a return of R10 for every R1 spent. Following general trends they use their digital to maximize sales on occasions. They have worked with the same company for over two years so their agency knows their business so well and can speak successfully to their brand.  Affiliate marketing was not successful for them as they felt that their ads showed up in places that were not relevant to their business. With online ratings of each product they can track negative feedback for improvement of their services and those reviews are also a great testimonial to their new clients when making purchase decisions.

SmartBuyGlasses is a bootstrapped business that tracks their digital very closely. Being an established brand, most sales come from Google, they track their keywords very carefully to remove poor performing keywords to optimize their campaign. Paying attention to whether the poor performance is a keyword issue or a landing page issue rather. They also use an app called 360 to tap into their Analytics and track buyer behaviour. Breaking their market down into segments, they are able to email particular reminders for repeat business. They find mailers handy to also nudge their customers who are almost ready to buy and get that last push over the line with discounts and special offers. A cart abandonment app helps to close sales but if a customer has bought, they will remarket in a different way to keep new customers coming back to browse.    

Iamboho get most of their sales from Facebook. Their business is only a little over a year old and they are rocking it! Using Facebook catalogue Su is able to show potential buyers a different product each time she re-markets to them on Facebook. Trust technology to tell you what your audience likes! She knows just who her audience is because she started with a reach campaign and developed her community first and then drilled down to get the insights and characteristics of that audience so that she could target them correctly. Don't just leave your digital running, it needs constant attention to tweak and change as the market changes.  

Covid-19 gave Mediterranean Delicacies the push to move into E-commerce. Selling direct to the public has given them the space to showcase all 950 products vs the select few that a retailer might choose, giving the user more choice. Using a program called Christopher, they can intercept conversations with keyword marketing. Before e-commerce, they ran social media for credibility but now they have spun that around to really drive sales to the website. LinkedIn provides good B2B connections. Targeting specific job titles and companies they are able to get in front of the right customers. The email marketing helps them to clear stock urgently, in the food industry, your stock expires and you need to move that stock fast sometimes. Mailers have been most effective for fast sales for MediDeli.

With an even split between business to business and business to customer sales. Cape Coffee Beans get most of their sales from Google Adwords, using display Ads They have a return of R6-10 for every R1 spent.  Facebook and Instagram have offered R1 to R1 return in sales in the past for Cape Coffee Beans, they have a particularly niche market and having social media pages provides credibility but paid advertising is not as successful for them.  Back in stock reminds customers about items they have on back orders and this mailing tool drives sales well. On Mailchimp with weekly mailers they have a 10% click through rate!  On a different note, Cape Coffee Beans has spent time on Price Check and other pricing websites and had some success but their coffee is high end and not marketing to an audience looking for good deals.

Intrinsicurly Me get most of their sales from Facebook, she started Google after Facebook and has seen great growth from Google. Using a Lookalike audience, they get a lot of interest and not instant sales but eventual sales. They pick up clients organically in curly groups and can re-market to those customers. Using mailers and changing days that they mail customers has increased their engagement.

Claire Steir, the owner of Gift Experiences SA really knows what works for them. Their biggest spend is on Google Adwords because they get the highest sales conversions here. They track their success by sales, they are using a sale as their conversion, rather than hits to their website. This means that their highest conversion is from telephone calls with a 70-80% conversion rate. The secret sauce is constant changes on their platforms, they track their audiences and change them as the market changes. From starting off targeting super car audiences, this is their flagship audience and this is still performing well. Niche down and know who your market is. Paying attention to what works told them that they got lots of clicks to the website from Facebook and then used Google Remarketing with Search and Display Ads to bring those customers back again and that is there they pushed sales up.