How to Make More Money from Your Website

In October James Aston, Managing Director of Moneyspyder, spoke at the Abacus Epsilon Insights event about how to make more money from your website.

Check out the video for great insights and common sense advice on optimising your email marketing, mobile performance, customer reviews, checkout and basket abandonment email strategy.

7 Ways to Maximise December Sales

It’s finally December and depending on your last posting dates (more on that later) there are about three weeks of Christmas shopping madness left.

Some have criticised the growth of Black Friday and Cyber Monday for cannibalising sales that used to come in December, but that doesn’t mean that sales have to steadily decline for the rest of the year. Most people - including us! - haven't started thinking about our Christmas shopping yet, so what you do this week can dramatically affect your year-end bottom line. 

1. We’ve listed our top seven tips to ensure your sales continue to grow throughout December:
2. Cart Abandon & Order Confirmation Emails - Add a juicy promo code to your order confirmation emails to see if you can get customers to buy again or return before Christmas. Change the messaging on your cart abandonment emails to remind users there is a time limit on your Christmas offers.
3. Discounts on Over-stocked Products - People want great discounts and if you get it right, you can rack up massive sales very quickly. Pick products where you have lots of stock and good margins. 
4. Boost Your Servers - If you get your marketing right you can expect a big jump in site traffic. Make sure your servers are ready for the onslaught.
5. Paid Search - Optimise your ad copy and increase your bid prices to ensure you get the biggest share pre-Christmas traffic (but don’t forget to turn down your bids after Christmas Day or you may end up paying too much for a large share of non-converting visitors.
6. Christmas Decorations & Messaging - Does your email, site and social media content offer a consistent message? Have you added some 'christmas decoration' to your normal site imagery?
7. Up-sell Your Postage Options - Can you offer guaranteed delivery after everybody else? Can you offer Saturday delivery? Use all your delivery options to your advantage. Running a last minute offer on express delivery may be the difference between an online sale, or your customer going elsewhere.
8. Is your last posting date prominent all over your website? Many of your customers - from emails, PPC, SEO, referral - will land on product pages and category pages. Having the last posting dates on your delivery details page, or your home page isn't enough. 

Have a great Christmas and let’s go for a coffee in the New Year.

The Moneyspyder Team

Moneyspyder Turns 10!

This week Moneyspyder celebrates it's tenth birthday. We're very proud of the work we've done helping online businesses grow, building industry leading ecommerce websites and helping people improve their digital marketing.

Thanks goes to our clients - virtually all of whom have been a pleasure to work with. It's been a great journey watching (and hopefully) helping you grow your business.

We're not done yet! Ecommerce is a fast moving world but some things never change; we believe there will always be a need for people to point out that the key to getting ecommerce right is to be responsive, keep it simple, and stay disciplined.

Is it too early to mention Christmas Ecommerce?

While the summer tries to make a stuttering start we thought it was about time to start thinking about how to maximise Christmas performance. As with all things, a successful ecommerce Christmas relies on careful planning and doing simple things well.

So, with apologies for bringing up Christmas in July, here are our top tips for getting prepared for the Christmas rush ahead of time:

1. Mine Your Data - Your most valuable resource for deciding what you should do next Christmas is data you have from last Christmas. Look at who bought from you and when in previous years. Use this build build segments for your email campaigns. Review what products you sold most of last year. Can these categories be expanded? Are there any categories that didn't sell well? Additionally, review which promotions worked the best; what times of year and what types of promotion were they? 
2. Last posting dates - Speak to your couriers now. You may not have checked, but Christmas Day falls on a Sunday, which means that the week before will be critical to your business. Yet with DPD stating in Feb 2016 that they where already at capacity that week, based on contracted volumes, don't just assume that all will be well for you. 
3. Embrace PPC - You might not normally use PPC but at Christmas it can be a great way to cut through the competition and boost traffic and sales. Customers are more likely to convert at Christmas which means better margins than the rest of the year. Google Shopping feeds, Remarketing Lists and image ads can take time to get right, especially if you have to go through external developers and designers so give yourself plenty of time to set these up. 
4. Optimise Mobile & Tablet - 40% of ecommerce transactions last December were on mobile of tablet. We would hope that everybody has a responsive mobile template by now but are you doing everything you can to make it easy to buy from you on mobile? Adding simple payment solutions like Paypal can give your conversion rates a real boost. 
5. Improve Conversion with Plugins - Basket Abandonment functionality and review software, like Feefo or Trustpilot, are proven to improve conversion rates. We've seen great results with both types of software. If you want to get the most out of these improvements before Christmas, you're going to have to get coding and testing soon. (The same goes for mobile and tablet changes!). We recommend a 'code freeze' in Q4 to prevent any unexpected bugs and changes taking down the site during peak business. 

Need to know more? Visit our website here or send us an email to discuss your ecommerce needs.

Adwords Changes - What They Mean For You

At the end of February Google removed the Adwords ads from the right hand side of Google search results. If you search now you’ll see three, maybe four, ads above the organic results, and PLAs and Knowledge Graph results on the right hand side. PPC results on Mobile will be largely unaffected.

So far there is very little data on how the changes will affect PPC/SEO. We’ve put together a checklist for you to make sure you are ahead of any seismic shifts in the PPC landscape.

What does this mean for my PPC campaigns?

• Check your average position - You should already be targeting the top three positions in the paid results. Increase your bids if your average position has dropped in the last three weeks.
• Improve your targeting - The big winners will be advertisers who aren’t bidding on generic keywords. If you are in a small niche, bid on long-tail keywords. Your brand terms won't be affected.
• Improve your ads - More ads will now show ad extensions. This is a great opportunity to update your Sitelinks and Callout extensions.
• Invest in Google Shopping - These change don’t affect PLAs. Now is a good time to set up Google Shopping as these ads will now be more prominent.
• Don’t neglect your reporting - It's easy to set up Adwords and never check in to see how it's doing. Use this opportunity to make sure you are getting the most bang for your buck from your Adwords.

Need help updating your PPC or making it work? We can help. Drop us a line at info@moneyspyder.co.uk.

Top Ecommerce Trends 2016

Now that we've survived the first two weeks back after Christmas, it's starting to feel like 2016 has begun. As usual at this time of year there has been a flurry of emails, blogs and articles about what is going to change in Ecommerce this year.

We've picked out our favourite, most actionable insights -

1. Smart phone revenue may finally overtake desktop revenue. If you don't have a mobile site, you need to get one. (Econsultancy)
2. Listing products on marketplaces - like Amazon - will become even more important as a way of reaching customers (Webretailer).
3. It will become even more important to look after your top customers(Ometria). What are you doing to turn your best customers into your best brand ambassadors?
4. Customers are going to become more security and privacy conscious(Mercurytide). This means you need to upgrade to HTTPS if you haven't already, and make sure you are extra clear about how you use customer data. 
5. Shipping is changing (Ventureburn). Amazon has already rolled out same-day delivery in London. What can your site offer that gives you a competitive edge on that?

Need help transforming your 2015 website into a 2016-ready business? We can help. Drop us a line at info@moneyspyder.co.uk.