PriceSpider’s shoppable solutions are a powerful tool that can bridge the gap between your media and the retailer’s product detail page (PDP) to ensure a smooth, customized customer journey that drives conversion.
But to make landing pages a true extension of your brand that works for – and within – your overarching strategy, you’ll need to develop and execute a comprehensive plan. In this article we’ll guide you through 5 best practices when using shoppable solutions, from tactics you can use at different stages of the marketing funnel, to understanding audiences, to creating campaign messaging and selecting channel mixes and retailers.
1. Understand where shoppable solutions fit into your marketing funnel
PriceSpider’s shoppable solutions enable you to drive conversion at every stage of the marketing funnel. However, there’s no campaign strategy that will work at every stage. Here’s how to leverage shoppable solutions correctly depending on the goal of your campaign and which stage of the marketing funnel you’re trying to target:
- Awareness: Add shoppability to awareness campaigns to enable spontaneous shopping and drive instant sales, especially for lower-priced products. Make sure you have a firm grasp of what type of awareness campaign you’re running; if it’s for a product category, special offer at a retailer or clearance promotion, you may want to leverage a brand-based shoppable landing page.
- Consideration: When building a shoppable landing page for the consideration stage, add as much product content as you can. Play around with header images and test different media types—whether it’s image, video or text-only. Another great way to keep customers focused on buying your products is to add product selectors if your product comes in different sizes, colors or shapes.
- Decision: In the decision phase, use add-to-cart or click-to-retailer functionality for a fast path to purchase. You can also leverage shoppable’s integrations with Google Tag Manager and Tealium to retarget to your customers, or use shoppable landing pages to retarget customers who visited specific product detail pages.
- Loyalty: Use shoppable landing pages to facilitate repeat purchases through emails, referrals and QR codes on packaging.
2. Understand and cater to your audience
Delivering the right message to your intended audience involves several considerations. Who are they? What are their needs based on geographical location and time of year? What stage have they reached in the customer journey? While you may already be leveraging shopper personas and audience data in your own shoppable campaigns, here are a few other points to keep in mind:
- E-commerce maturity: Different countries have different levels of ecommerce adoption—for instance, in the US, ecommerce accounted for more than 21% of retail sales. When considering your audience’s location, plan around their shopping habits and adoption levels—prioritizing campaigns in areas with advanced ecommerce usage.
- Timing/seasonality: Align your promotions with seasonal shopping behaviors. You may want to promote gloves in winter or shorts in summer, or push more campaigns during the end-of-year shopping rush. We also recommend running small-scale campaigns on special occasions, like a dog food promotion for International Dog Day.
- Targeting: The quality of your campaign’s targeting is a critical factor for its success. When building a new campaign, ensure that you’re reaching out to relevant audiences and that your messaging and visuals are clear and tailored for that audience. The key is to maintain clear campaign goals and to stay focused on a specific part of the funnel as described above.
- Retargeting: When building an ideal omnichannel experience for your customers, targeting strategies help you earn their attention, but retargeting strategies help you keep it. By setting up GTM or Tealium tags with your shoppable landing pages, you can retarget your customers based on the actions they take on your shoppable landing page—instead of just pushing impersonal general campaign messaging. Use different media channels to stay relevant to your customer and provide them with the information they’re looking for.
3. Choose the right channels for your campaign
Once you’ve laid out your goals and taken audience needs into consideration, you can make decisions on which media channels suit your campaign best. Whether it’s digital advertising, content, print ads or QR codes on your packaging, the key is to empower your customers to buy your products from their retailers of choice—and that’s where shoppable landing pages come in.
Keep in mind that different channels excel in different areas. If your goal is to drive higher clickthrough rates (CTR) on your ads, social media is usually the better channel than display ads. While Facebook is a great way to engage with mass audiences, other key social platforms like Pinterest and Twitter may drive higher conversion rates for different brands, and should be considered when assembling a media plan.
4. Choose the right retailers and products for your campaign
Here are a few factors to consider when selecting your campaign’s retailers and products:
- Product qualities: Understand the time-to-purchase and price factors. For example, since it takes longer to decide to buy a computer than a lipstick, you may need to focus on building more robust awareness and conversion campaigns for the computer.
- Retailer strategy: To send quality leads to your retailers, we advise that you display price and stock availability in your shoppable landing pages. This will help you to send quality traffic to your retailers and provide a better customer experience.
- Inventory and stock: PriceSpider’s Where to Buy and shoppable solutions can pull data on all online inventory in addition to local in-store stock. By working with retailers, you can ensure specific products are in stock at selected shops throughout the campaign, providing a consistent customer experience.
5. Adopt copy and creative best practices
- Static images:
- Use simple, clear images, making sure not to add visual clutter with multiple subjects.
- Frame the image using the rule of thirds, separating the image into 9 sections and keeping the most important part of the image in the middle section. Don’t cut off parts of the subject unless it’s intentional.
- Use a palette with 1 or 2 dominant colors.
- Videos:
- Show your product within the first 3 seconds of the video.
- Your video should work well with both sound on and off (use closed captions or on-screen text).
- Optimize for the right platform, keeping in mind file formats, resolutions, and aspect ratio best practices for different platforms.
- Copy:
- Ensure that all copy develops the story or drives action towards your goal.
- Make sure at least two retailers are displayed on page load.
- Ensure that your ad’s CTA aligns with the content on your shoppable page.
- Remember that messages with a sense of urgency or promotion are more likely to convert to sales.
PriceSpider’s shoppable solutions offer a comprehensive approach to streamline the customer journey. By carefully selecting media, crafting targeted messages, optimizing landing pages, and choosing the right products and retailers, brands can significantly boost conversion rates and overall customer experience.
For more information, check out our definitive guide to shoppable media ebook.
