Can You Double Your Fashion E-Commerce ROI – Pt 1
We are all now very aware that fashion retailers are feeling the brunt of the decline of the UK’s economic climate over the years and some may be thinking ‘Is it going to get any better’ and ‘Will we survive?’Many retail owners within the fashion industry (whatever your sector) joined this ever evolving industry because as cheesy as the cliché is, you have a passion for fashion. It’s what you love. So when you have invested so much hard work into building your business, accumulating the product or designs that match the ethics and heritage of your brand beautifully whether this is clothing, underwear, accessories, jewellery or footwear; you want to be rewarded with return on investment (ROI) as ultimately you need to make money!
THE BENEFITS OF PPC
INSTANT RESULTS:
- PPC has instantaneous results presenting you at the top of SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages) in Google immediately – this means you can be seen above your competitors straight away and in the fashion industry, it is a never ending race to the top.
MANAGE YOUR MONEY:
- You can track the success of each keyword as your Google AdWords campaign can tell you the CTR (click through rate), CPC (cost per click) and most importantly “Cost Per Conversion” so you can see how much you have to spend on average with each keyword before you achieve a sale and revise your budget accordingly.
TIMING:
- Time is always an issue and many success stories are a result of luck, being in the right place at the right time. With PPC you can create your own luck by managing the timing of your adverts by timing them to appear in scheduled hours of the day when you know your customer will be shopping – and can be noticed when they are in the mood for shopping! After all, if you appear in Google when they are looking for that new black leather handbag…they really were looking for you, they just didn’t realise it.
RELEVANCE:
- PPC enables you to only market to your target audience so you only approach people that would be interested in the product your site has to offer, as you select keywords of relevance to your product to bid on. This is also one of the benefits to being online as opposed to solely in a bricks and mortar store as in a store; you cannot market only to your target customer as you are constantly presented to the general public.
THE BENEFITS OF SEO
CHEAPER CONVERSIONS
- SEO does not cost you each time someone clicks on your organic links in search engines. So if you have optimised the keyword ‘womens leather handbags’ and someone’s search converts in to a sale, you haven’t got any additional marketing costs eating into the margin of your sale.
LONGEVITY
- SEO is predominantly a clever use of content. The content contained on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter has been discussed hugely recently (those of you that listen to Chris Moyles on your journey to work in the morning will be very familiar with this subject) as it has become public knowledge that any content you have ever uploaded to any website lives forever – including social network sites. This can of course be bad if what you are publishing on these sites and your own site is not very good for your company or your customer eg: If the content is negative or unhelpful. But if it is informative and relevant to your customer eg: Linking to new ranges, linking to special offers or linking to help pages then this content is very good and will always help your website for SEO purposes, as search engines will always be able to find your site from this content, score you nicely and as a result rank you higher.
ENGAGEMENT
- The entire purpose of SEO is engaging with your customer, enticing them to your site and then building a relationship with them based on their interests. This is how SEO works to improve your rankings as it is all about optimising what you already have available to your customer. The content on your site or related to your site is everything written on it, posted on it eg: Offers, visual content such as videos, images, tutorials and customer reviews. Search engines can capture all of this data and as a fashion e-commerce site your content will always be updating due to seasonal selling windows and the updating of trends/ new products which keeps search engines very happy as they like to see that you are refreshing your website and again, rank you higher for being interesting.