Category: eCommerce

The current e-commerce landscape can be challenging to navigate, to say the least. Logistics challenges, production disruptions, cash flow issues, and changing consumer behavior is creating uncertainty for many businesses. 

In our latest e-commerce focused webinar, Mason Interactive Founder, Brook Shepard, and Adrian Padron, Director of Media, weighed in on questions all business stakeholders are facing today: how to stay in the market and on the top of your customer’s mind.  We summarized the key takeaways from the webinar, including a case study of our client who successfully pivoted their strategy to drive long term revenue.  

The electric vehicle analogy

To illustrate the importance of staying in-market, Brook shared an analogy around EV’s (Electric Vehicles):

Imagine a bucket that could hold all the potential EV buyers in America.  It would be’d be a pretty big bucket.

The hard truth for car manufacturers, though, is that EV’s cost $12,000 more to produce than vehicles powered by internal-combustion engines; carmakers often struggle to recoup these costs through pricing alone. As a result, car manufacturers stand to lose money on almost every electronic vehicle sold.

So, in the current economic environment, most manufacturers are shuttering EV production and furloughing staff. “If we’re all going to buy electric vehicles soon, then they should be staying in the market and continuing to improve technology to make these cars more effective.

Now, imagine being the one EV manufacturer who continued advertising and improving their product during these months.  Don’t you think they would have a leg-up on brand recognition and product when we come out of this?  Honestly, I think that’s half the reason for Elon Musk’s outrageous tweets – he’s staying in front of the consumer, filling a bucket of potential Tesla buyers.”

The theory of customer bucket

One of the simplest and most logical ways to look at the health of your marketing ecosystem is based on the idea of a customer bucket. Think about your website as a bucket filled with water, where your customer base or the traffic you are driving to your site is the water. That bucket is full once you have healthy traffic coming to your website.

“We don’t want high bounce rates, low page view consumption, or low engagement post click,” Adrian says. The quality of your water is crucial to this. “If we’re not constantly filling [the bucket], that bucket will leak”.

Why? Because of pixels and tracking. Google and Facebook have pixels on your website that track users within up to 180 day windows, during which they will be available to you to remarket to. “If you stop the flow of traffic, you will stop the flow of the water, and so your bucket will continue to leak and eventually empties out,” Adrian explains.

Why an empty customer bucket can become a huge risk

Imagine you have let your bucket dry out, with just a handful of customers in it. You might think it will be easy to bounce back, relaunch advertising when the time is right and start generating revenue straightaway. 

In this scenario, you will A) cause significant damage to the user experience B) double your future advertising cost and C) possibly lose contact with your most-loyal, high-value customers. 

Doesn’t sound right? Let us explain to you why. 

1. Increased ad frequency will have negative impact on user experience

If your bucket doesn’t have enough users to serve your ads to, the ad frequency will increase. This will lead to a poor user experience for those in the bucket because they are constantly seeing the same messages and creatives at a higher frequency [because they are the only ones in the bucket].

2. The impact on cost metrics

When you are ready to re-enter the market, after the market surges and your production comes back to full capacity, you will now have to fill the bucket up, and also acquire customers. “Now we’re looking at higher cost per averages than we would have had we kept that bucket full with quality users in the long term,” Adrian says.

If you are experiencing cash flow issues, and your focus is on profitability, we can shift your advertising strategy to brand search and remarketing. However, this strategy can only be applied short term whereas over time, when that bucket continues to drop, remarketing performance will also begin to decline.

The biggest long term risk? As we approach the holiday season in November – December, that is the key shopping time frame when most of our ecommerce clients drive more than 60% of their annual revenue from, you can’t build an efficient strategy if you enter the season with an empty bucket. “At that point, we’re not just talking about volume, but we also need to be as efficient and profitable as possible. And that strategy is only available if you have a healthy flow of customers to begin with” Adrian adds.

3. Losing the market to your competitors

Another negative impact occurs when you stop nurturing your high value customers [the good water in your bucket], and allow your competitors to grab them into their ecosystem. If your customer doesn’t see your brand in the market, your competitor will quickly capture their interest and as a result, you have lost a customer with a really high Lifetime Value (LTV).

How to keep your bucket full (without breaking the bank)

In order to achieve the best possible results in the current environment, change your campaign objectives to drive cost-effective Cost Per Impressions (CPMs). “We know for a fact that within our internal data set, there’s a CPM trend that shows that it is cheaper to be in the market today, Adrian says. “If you implement the strategy correctly, you can get more impressions with less, and therefore more traffic to your website, he ads. 

Adrian shared a real-life example, supported by client data, on how his team pivoted strategy for a client who needed to cut their advertising budget. The new approach was to maintain a consistent level of traffic, while reducing advertising costs.

His team shifted from revenue-centric strategy (driving sales, which is an impossibility given that this client’s factory is closed) to embrace storytelling. The revised messaging, that focused on video assets and authenticity, achieved huge engagement with thousands of likes per post and a record hitting number of video views. 

The biggest win of the new strategy was maintaining a flat bounce rate despite the major shifts in the market, and thus continuing to drive not just steady volumes of traffic, but good quality traffic to the client’s website. 

Using ad creatives that emphasized social relevance and brand values, enabled the client to build trust on the brand and its products. Once the market returns back to normal, the team will shift to a remarketing strategy to engage with these new and existing customers who have engaged with the content and built a relationship with the brand during the pandemic. 

Key takeaways to adapt to your strategy

When looking at your marketing funnel, focus on consideration and awareness strategies to make real impact and drive those brand value bringing interactions to continuously drive traffic, and attract new customers. Pivot your objectives and positioning, while controlling the overall advertising cost, in order to keep your customer bucket full for the future. 

Contact our team of digital experts to help you set up the right strategy for your brand and drive online sales today, and in the future.  

Here at Mason Interactive, we stress the importance of building up your brand equity. Whether your focus is on the long term benefits of SEO or a robust PR strategy, there are numerous ways brands can build up their authority across channels and within the consumer space.

In our recent e-commerce focused webinar, Thriving in a Crisis, Katie Klencheski, founder of SMAKK Studios, highlights the many ways she has been working on building brands that connect authentically with consumers over the past decade.

Brand development has changed 

Five years ago, there was a change in the marketplace, but a shift really came to the forefront two years ago that focused on consumer sensibility. Did you know that on average, we now see 5000+ brand ads and images per day? “In a sea of brands, it takes a lot more to stand out than it used to,” Katie says. 

Brands are evolving – we used to be in a place where brands could talk about functional needs, value or quality, and the crop of emerging D2C brands over the past 10 years prove that design and personality were enough to stand out for a little while – but that alone is not enough anymore. 

Brands that embrace the idea of a higher purpose are starting to win the day

69% of consumers in the US are “belief driven buyers” who are looking for brands that align with their values and brands that connect with those values are winning. Consumers want the products they choose to have a positive impact on our planet, build communities, drive social change, foster inclusion, and meaningfully enable self expression. 

Consumers are showing up for these brands in the marketplace. Katie mentions a recent study where brands marketing sustainability are seeing 5X growth over those conventionally marketing products in their category. 

Millennials and GenZ want to work for brands that are trying to make the world a better place. Additionally, many at the top of the food chain believe that the focus on shareholder values is the only thing that should be driving corporations’ decisions. Consumers and investors are looking for brands who are going to restore a sense of community, a sense of humanity and help us heal from this moment. 

Building brands for what’s next

“In order to win, we have to take on today’s issues with solutions for the future and create meaningful relationships with consumers,” Katie adds. The success of any brand depends on its ability to own its unique white space and cultural moment. 

At SMAKK, Katie emphasizes the importance of looking at the DNA of the brand, competitors, brand audience and cultural landscape.

“Because people have a strong sense of memory to things they have an emotional connection with, this is a time when we can do things as brands that are going to build a tremendous amount of brand equity because we are doing things at a time where people will remember us for our actions.”

Brands that lead are going to emerge in a position of power and be able to engage with their audiences afterward. To thrive right now, brands need to speak this moment, and put their values and purpose in service of their audience’s needs.

Not a moment just to sell but to engage and connect

Before your brand can act, you must be clear on your foundational “why”. This is an opportunity for brands to spend time articulating “What is our purpose?”, “What are our values?”, “How does that inform the products that we create?”, and “What does that mean for our position in the market?”.

“If we understand the core of what a brand is, that should inform every action, every interaction and every reaction that that brand has across every channel that they have,” Katie adds. 

If you don’t know exactly what your purpose is and what your values are, you won’t be able to act in a way that is authentic with your consumers. Once you have defined these characteristics, only then you can begin to focus on personality, story telling, visual identity and tone of voice, and how it works across your different channels.

Here’s examples on how Mason Interactive client Dagne Dover embraces its values:

What’s next?

Last month’s campaign won’t work today. The core of who you are [as a brand] shouldn’t change, but what you are putting out in the world has to. Therefore, we need to be creative about how we are creating content.

Embrace solo content creators

Reach out to photographers with home studios or influencers to show how they engage with their product – how does your product live at home?

Break the 4th wall and show people what’s behind your company

Letters from the founder, business problems, show employees – we are all in this together. Because we are losing social connections in the real world, we are moving to social media to fill the gap. Brands have just as much real estate in our feeds, if not more, and therefore that’s exactly where brands need to be.

Be real. Now is the time to show up as humans. 

“We are going to see a ton of campaigns that focus on real humans and making meaningful content that is authentic to connect and seize this moment,” Katie concludes.