How to Design a Winning Campaign Strategy (Part 1: Attracting Visitors through In-App Tools)

Becoming a successful eCommerce seller isn’t just pure luck and choosing the right product to sell. It’s succeeding in campaigns, campaigns, and campaigns! Of all the campaigns platforms invite sellers to join, you must choose wisely. The campaigns need to be right for the product category, the promotional discount you can offer, and your revenue target. This series of articles will explain how to design a winning campaign strategy. This first part will explore how to attract visitors to your online store.

Just like offline stores anywhere else, the total revenue you will get will depend on the number of visitors, the rate of conversion, and the amount of basket size on average. Your increase in revenue will be directly related to the increase in each of these factors.

Visitors

Nobody is going to buy your product if they’re not visiting the page where it is sold. In order to drive visitors to your site, you need to set up an effective product display page (PDP) and utilize both in-app and out-of-app marketing tools.

PDP and search

Having an effective product display page requires you to have a lot of high-quality images. Both the quality and quantity need to be sufficient so that a customer who cannot see the product physically feels like they still get a good idea of what it is they are purchasing. Low-quality images will just discourage customers to even click and choose your products from the search results in the beginning. As 40% of customers go through search, a product name that features most searched “keywords” will attract more visitors to the PDP. For product descriptions and highlights, you need to strike a balance among short, sweet, and informative. Looking at your closest competitors will give you a good sense of how you should structure your descriptions.

Products

Customers go through either search, category, or promotion modules in order to select the products they want. A minimum of 10 SKUs (stock keeping units – item level that takes into account product size, color, and variations) is recommended to ensure a steady stream of visitors. The greater the number of products, the greater the number of featured categories, the higher the chance of attracting visitors. This can be implemented by product line expansion into sub-categories or supplementary product addition to the current product pool. For example; a store selling pet food might as well sell pet accessories.

It is important to pick the campaigns and sales that are the right fit for your brand and your strategy

Campaign participation

By offering promotional discounts at the SKU level, a seller will be eligible to join campaigns. In return, platforms will provide vouchers, ranking boost, and a campaign page for SKUs that join campaigns. Knowing your own products and knowing what you need is essential to knowing what campaigns you should join. Category campaigns are mostly joined when you are seeking to expand your customer base from within the same category (either new customers to the category or existing customers of your competition) as you will be featured on a campaign page along with your competitors. If you are a new, growing brand, this is a great chance for you to gain new customers. Flash sales a.k.a. traffic machine are mostly joined by a loss-leader product in the shop for the sole purpose of gaining a greater number of orders so that both the hero product and the store is ranked higher in search results. (Statistically, 80% of total orders come from the first two page scroll search results; the higher you are ranked, the higher the chance of conversion). Finally, a campaign that every brand (especially non-commodity items) should join is the mega and double-digit campaigns where customers are looking for big-ticket purchases at a deal. With great support from platforms in both heavy vouchers and out-of-app advertisements, this helps bring in 10-20X more visitors to the platform than normal days.

Drawing more visitors to your online store is the first step to growing your revenue. The design of your PDP, the number of products listed, and campaign participation can all help generate traffic for you. Apart from these in-app tools, there are also several external marketing tools that can act as catalysts in increasing your visitor counts, including Google (SEO and SEM), Facebook/IG, and affiliate marketing (Shopback, KOL, etc). These tools will be covered in detail in the next part of this series.