By far the most common question we get asked by florists is how to effectively market their eCommerce website.
Our response is always the same four tactics:
- Google Adwords
- Search Engine Optimisation
- email Marketing
- Offline Special Offers
The most effective strategies use a mix of all four of these tactics, Google Adwords will consistently return results, whilst SEO over the long term will help get you new sales and customers at a far reduced cost.
Then once you have a good customer base you should market to them as often as practical.
Marketing Objectives
Generally you have two objectives with your florist marketing strategy:
1) Get new customers to buy from you and build up your customer base, and
2) Sell to your existing customers
Google Adwords for Immediate New Customer Acquisition & Sales
Getting new customers can be expensive, if you use Google Adwords you may find that your actual cost of Customer Acquisition can be anywhere from $10 - $20 per customer.
Google Adwords works and is immediate because most people who are searching for flowers to buy have an immediate need to buy something.
Search Engine Optimisation for Longer Term New Customer Acquisition
But longer term you want to reduce the cost of new customer acquisition and that’s where Search Engine Optimisation comes in.
If you are undertaking an effective Search Engine Optimisaion project and your organic links (the returned search results) are delivering you excellent results your cost of new customer acquisition is generally much lower.
The other thing about SEO is that even when you stop the project you will still get results.
However SEO projects are not one off things, you must continue to work on your keywords and keyphrases and ensure your rankings either continue to improve or stay in the top ten search results.
One of the single most effective SEO Techniques is to create high quality SEO Suburb Landing Pages or Local Search Engine Optimisation.
Selling to your existing Customer Base (email Marketing)
Selling to your existing customer base is always far cheaper. For example if you have a mailing list of 1000 customers and you send an email newsletter once a week it could cost you as little as $10 in email credits and the time taken to write the email and send it.
Then your cost of sale is only the cost of the email divided by the total value of sales delivered.
Some great idea for email newsletters are:
- Special email only offers
- Include a discount coupon for someone for their next order
It’s Not Just Online Either!
Every day you have loads of people walk through your store and all these people are potentially lucrative ongoing customers.
You want to get as many of these customers into your customer database as possible.
The most effective tried and true method is the good old bowl where people can drop their business cards. You can offer people a give away such as everyone who joins the mailing list in this way goes into the draw to win a free flower arrangement.
It doesn’t have to be business cards either it could be as simple as asking the customer if they want to join your mailing list and writing down their name and email address.
Conclusions
You can start to get an idea of how the four tactics we suggest do a couple of important things for your business:
1) Get immediate sales and money
2) Build up a strong customer base
3) Reduce your cost of each sale
Flower Store In a Box can help you with all of these tactics and provides the tools to make it happen.
From integration with Google Analytics and Google Analytics so you can review and calculate your sales conversion rates and true costs of new customers.
Discount coupons, special offers and specials all driving return customers to your website are all easy to create in Flower Store In a Box.
email marketing to your customers is easy and you can track the results all from within the associated tool sets.
