How to Build a Smarter eCommerce Marketing Strategy for Agencies in 2023?

E-commerce sales are expected to reach $6.3 trillion by the end of this year.

If you want a slice of this lucrative pie for your business or your client’s businesses, you need to step up your marketing game.

No. 1 step?

Evaluating your e-commerce marketing campaigns.

• How did they perform in the first six months of 2023?

• Any room for improvement or solid results for clients?

• Feeling like a digital marketing maestro or a lost llama?

Want to end this year on a high note and exceed all your sales and marketing goals? Read on.

In this article, we've outlined 5 ways you can navigate the dynamic e-commerce landscape, emerging marketing trends that you need to keep your eyes on, and how to avoid end-of-year marketing stress.

Prepare for descent: How digital marketers are handling e-commerce growth?

E-commerce has no intentions of slowing down, so businesses need to double up on their marketing game.

Data shows that while global social media ad spend in 2021 was a whopping $116 billion, it is forecasted to grow to $262 billion by 2028.

Which channels are seeing growth?

According to Channable’s data, Google Shopping feed (39%) is the top channel used by e-commerce businesses followed by Bol.com (37%) and Amazon (18%).

In verticals, Home and Garden (74%) is closely followed by Fashion and Apparel (73%).

This shows that 2023 is all about diversifying your sales channels. If your clients do not have a presence on Google’s Shopping feed, it’s time to start now.

How are marketers preparing for business growth?

By working with feed management tools. The more sales and marketing channels you create for your clients, the more the need to tap into feed management tools.
Channable customers have an average of 9 sales channels and 87% have at least one active export feed. In 2022, the highest number of orders processed for one client via Channable was almost 472,000!

Feed management tools like Channable are all-in-one tools that help with dynamic search ad campaigns, export feeds, and marketplace channels. Channable’s PPC tool directs your customers to your chosen landing pages, increases ad relevance, and creates more high-quality keywords.

How marketers are using social commerce?

When talking about social commerce, Meta is the most popular marketing channel for most Channable customers, with Pinterest and TikTok following closely behind.

Dive into your data

By the end of 2023, 1 in every 5 people will buy online.

How can marketers handle the e-commerce boom?

Automating first-party data

With Google phasing out its use of third-party cookies, the need for a first-party data strategy is critical.

As Andrew Lolk, SavvyRevenue’s founder aptly says, “We see it so often that businesses do not know what is coming from where. This is essential data needed to make informed decisions on strategy.”

However, manually sorting out key metrics and going through business analytics is a tedious job. If you want to accelerate your business growth in 2023 and beyond, make automation your best friend.

How can marketers automate first-party data?
By using feed management tools.

ClickBoost and Artefact both saw a 19% increase in CTR after they started using Channable to automate their feed management and create PPC campaigns.

Shifting towards POAS

With limited budgets and a need to boost growth, businesses are increasingly tracking POAS (profit on ad spend) to increase total profit values.

POAS takes both cost and order combinations into account. This approach provides clients with a clearer understanding of the overall value generated throughout the customer lifecycle.

So, if you haven’t been evaluating this metric, now’s the time to pay attention, and start including it in your data analysis.

When businesses make the shift from manual to automation, they use feed management tools like Channable to scale their marketing campaigns globally. One such example is online lighting retailer dmlights. They decided to scale their business and advertise globally.

Enter Channable. They automated their campaign feeds, started tracking POAS, and scaled their search campaigns over several different countries.

The result?

• 70% increase in POAS Year over Year (YoY)

• 130% Increase in total profit values (YoY)

Leverage these disruptive marketing trends

In this ever-changing world of e-commerce, businesses who pivot with the changing trends are the real winners. This way they can adjust their strategies, allocate budget, and shift focus accordingly.

So what does the future hold for e-commerce businesses and marketers?

Diversify marketing strategy

Global inflation is looming, which means now more than ever marketers need to use multiple marketing channels to boost sales.

Social commerce has no intention of slowing down

97% of Gen Z consumers say social media is their top source for shopping inspiration.

For businesses, personalized video content on platforms like TikTok is still reaping excellent rewards.

With Meta shutting down their live streaming programs, businesses might need to make a switch to more traditional forms of influencer marketing, with engagement and user-generated content being on prime focus.

Using a feed management tool to centralize your campaign management allows you to collect first-party data, identify top performers, streamline performance, and gain a full overview of all your campaigns.

And the best part, it saves time, too!

All the time saved can then be used for scaling marketing activities and business growth.

Explore voice commerce

From Alexa to Siri, millions of smartphone users are using voice search to shop online. Last year alone, voice shopping exceeded $20 million in sales.

But, does voice search really work?

Absolutely. 93% of consumers are satisfied with voice assistants.

Savvy marketers are quickly jumping on the vice shopping bandwagon. It not only facilitates a personalized shopping experience for consumers, but also provides you with a ton of first-party data (everything from the first research question to purchase delivery notifications).

In-store experiences are back

After a sabbatical during COVID, brick and mortar stores are seeing an uptick in popularity. Big companies like Amazon planned to open more brick and mortar stores post-covid.

As an agency for e-commerce businesses, explore various forms of virtual and augmented reality to create an in store experience for consumers online.

Navigate the e-commerce currents with a feed management platform

Creating impactful marketing strategies requires time, especially in times of constant change.

Manually performing tasks, processes and campaigns can take up a lot of your time, which can be spent productively on business growth.

The solution?
Automation.

Automation saves you time and helps reduce campaign errors

Once your feed is automatically organized and optimized for different channels via a feed management tool, you can then move on to PPC campaigns. Most feed management tools like Channable help create dynamic PPC campaigns across different ad formats and even countries. All of this at once click.

With a highly optimized feed and PPC campaigns automated, you can spend your time analyzing your campaign data and finding gaps to improve campaigns.

How can Channable help?

As an agency, Channable offers you a centralized view of all your client accounts. This helps to view which ad campaigns are working and which ones are tanking, all at one glance. This not only reduces your workload considerably and keeps you on top of all client’s feeds, but also helps you identify errors that you may miss otherwise.

Time to decompress: Rest & relax even as Q4 approaches

With Q4 looming ahead, it’s time to accelerate your marketing strategy.

Multiple holidays, annual sales, religious celebrations, and New years are all excellent opportunities to end this year on a high and boost profits.

Share your marketing insights and plans with clients

Inform your clients of the current trends and outline how you can leverage them to create campaigns for the last quarter. Now is the best time to start experimenting with new trends so you know well in advance what’s working and what's not for your Q4 campaigns.

Keep the following questions in mind when devising a highly optimized, results-driven strategy for your clients for the last quarter.

• What are your goals?

• What holidays will you promote based on your target audience? Some holidays like New Years work for all regions. Other, more religious holidays depend on your region and your target audience. So be very specific.

• What channels do you want to run the holiday campaigns on?

• What forms of content do you want to create for these channels?

• What is your budget?

• How soon do you want to start launching your marketing campaigns? A survey by Service Management Group reported that 42% of respondents said that they plan to start their holiday shopping early in the season. So you want to be prepared for that.

• What kind of data do you want to monitor and how?

• How do you plan to measure the success of your campaigns?

Swim to shore: Final thoughts

As a marketing agency with multiple clients, you have a lot going on. There are campaigns to plan, marketing audits to do, data to track and metrics to monitor, and marketing trends to experiment with.

To do all this, you need to free up your time from performing menial tasks. Use a feed management tool like Channable to,

• centralize your campaign management and collect first-party data

• Get a full overview of all your campaigns to identify top performers and streamline performance.

• Automate feed maintenance and free up time to focus on innovative marketing campaigns.