What makes E-Commerce a success in this ever growing and ever-changing online world? In this episode Jeremy Vernon interviews Chloe Thomas, the founder of E-Commerce Masterplan. Chloe is a best-selling author, keynote speaker and host of the E-Commerce Masterplan Podcast, all of which are built on her expertise and experience in E-Commerce strategy and marketing.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Why Podcast? Getting your message out, being organised, booking interviewees, generate traffic, generate customers, help E-Commerce business owners achieve their point of success sooner.

How has your podcast helped you grow your business? Content, industry awareness, perception, there’s a strong correlation between people who spend money with my business and who listen to the podcast.

E-Commerce Customer Journey: How to get people to your website, visitors, enquirers, first-time buyers, repeat buyers and regular buyers.

If someone comes to you as a potential customer and says, “Here’s my business, this is what I’m achieving so far, where do I even begin?” How do you even start that process? Trying to find out more about their business, to get an idea of the size of the business, turnover, profit and cashflow. Also, more importantly, about the team. Once I understand those things I can start offering solutions for their problems. For bigger retailers that tends to be project analysis, getting to the numbers because they’ve got the data there. For smaller businesses it’s often a case of having a series of having a series of calls, where they’ve got work to do in between times, or of course important calls.

Let’s talk Influencers. What’s your take on the meteoric growth of Gymshark? The story of Gymshark is a great one to drive us forward but it’s difficult to replicate. Being in the right time at the right place, and doing the right thing. Making the right decisions at the right time. Influencer Marketing is not something to be turned on and then forgotten about, it’s something you’re constantly working on and building relationships. It’s more like B2B sales, than Consumer E-Commerce Marketing. The influencer needs to be honest with the right skills and credibility.

25% of Sales on E-Commerce websites are driven by email, so ignore it at your peril!

Create a community feel without it being too hard to manage: For example, treat your top 5% customers a bit differently, for example give away special free VIP weekends, get them involved in the decision-making process of the business, asking them which colour to do the next range in, send them samples and so forth.

Tell your customers you have a time-limited offer ending at midnight, but don’t let it expire until a few hours after, allowing for customers in other time-zones to take advantage.

BEST MOMENTS

How has selling and writing books helped you build your business? They have a more practical impact. Each book has a free chapter to trial and additional material which requires people to sign up for, so they have a direct impact on the growth of the business and also the financial growth too.

Analysing Your Marketing Strategy (Maths Alternate): Take a sheet of paper, divide it by five and write down which marketing you’re using for each stage of the customer journey.

Where do you start on Data and Analytics, what would you recommend? There’s a lot of bright shiny objects out there which land in your inbox and distract you immediately from what you’re supposed to be doing. My favourite report is the Source & Medium Report which is in Google Analytics. It’s cold, hard data of where your traffic comes from and what it does when it comes to your website. There I can see you’ve got a great click-through rate from your emails but a terrible conversion rate off your direct traffic.

What is the Number 1 thing you could be doing right now to improving your business? Looking at your numbers, looking at what you know, what you can see your competitors doing and analysing. For example analysing whether to build an email campaign or whether to install i-Chat because you have lots of people asking questions.

How do you stay on top in the ever-changing E-Commerce world? This may be heresy to say this, but I don’t think it changes that much! At the moment everybody wants to talk about bots, now I don’t mind them, there’s some really clever ones out there. It’s not a one size fits all, it’s not something every business should have in place, not every business that should have it in place is even ready to put it in place. New tools come along, but the fundamentals don’t actually change. The key is getting your business in front of people who want your product and building a relationship with them in order to keep them buying from you.

VALUABLE RESOURCES

Customer Persuasion

E-Commerce Marketing

E-Commerce Masterplan 1.8

E-Commerce Delivery

B2B E-Commerce Masterplan

All Marketers Are Liars]

Chloe’s Next Talk

ABOUT THE HOST

Brought to you by the Co-Founders of Core-Fulfilment, one of the UK’s leading E-Commerce providers, Paul Burns & Jeremy Vernon.

CONTACT METHOD

Chloe’s Next Talk

E-Commerce MasterPlan