Month: July 2024

Smart eCommerce brands are constantly seeking customer marketing platforms that can keep up with their growth by scaling to their needs. If you’re questioning the efficacy of Mailchimp and wondering what is the difference between Klaviyo and Mailchimp, you could join one of over 35,000 brands that have already switched to Klaviyo, and for good reason. As a Klaviyo Master Elite partner, LION Digital is positioned to help you make the transition successfully. Our CRM specialists understand the importance of a robust, efficient marketing platform that powerfully drives audience engagement, loyalty and sales for continued growth.

Smart Sellers Need a Smart Marketing Platform

In an omnichannel environment, it is vital to reach customers on their non-linear purchasing journey and deliver personalised messages based on their tastes and habits. Klaviyo speeds up segmentation significantly by creating a consistent experience across customer touchpoints to drive sales. 

Why Klaviyo is the Preferred Choice:

1. Improved Marketing Effectiveness and Sales Growth:

By consolidating all customer data and channels into one platform, Klaviyo’s automated hyper-targeted marketing messages deliver more powerful results. This consolidation helps scale faster by ensuring that messages reach the right audience in the right places at the right times.

2. Improved Data Accuracy and Reporting:

Without the need for manual tagging, Klaviyo offers greatly improved data and reporting. Klaviyo leverages any combination of data, including all-time historical data, third-party events, website activity and predictive analytics. Unlike Mailchimp, Klaviyo segments update in real-time, providing a more precise and comprehensive view of your marketing performance.

3. Labour Savings:

Klaviyo’s powerful, flexible segmentation in real-time allows e-marketers to target forms, trigger automation, and generate segment-level reports efficiently. This live capability is a significant improvement over Mailchimp, where clunky channel-level reporting and time-absorbing segment updates can take up to two hours. 

With Klaviyo, say goodbye to endless workarounds. The platform is designed to save you time and effort, allowing you to focus on what matters most—growing your business. Klaviyo integrates seamlessly with major eCommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce, making the transition smooth and hassle-free.

4. Integrated Multichannel Marketing:

Klaviyo excels in integrated multichannel marketing, offering seamless campaign and flow capabilities for email, SMS, and mobile push. Unlike Mailchimp, which offers limited SMS and no mobile push options, Klaviyo provides a comprehensive suite of integrated marketing tools, including review collection and syndication.

5. AI Capabilities Built on Comprehensive Data:

Klaviyo’s AI tools are built on the most comprehensive dataset in the industry. The platform uses clean, organised, and historical data to learn, predict, and recommend actions. This breadth and depth of data drives AI efficiency, enhancing engagement with features like optimised content blocks, A/B testing, guided warming, and enriched SMS copy.

6. Superior eCommerce-Centric Integrations:

Klaviyo offers superior eCommerce-centric integrations, pre-built to ingest and use shopper data from over 300 platforms and eCommerce-focused apps. This includes detailed data on items, collections, catalogues, variants, and coupons, combined with third-party data like loyalty points and quiz results. This integration capability allows for more targeted messaging, driving higher engagement and conversion rates.

7. Advanced Reporting and Insights:

Klaviyo’s reporting capabilities are unmatched. The platform provides benchmarks, revenue-centric reports, customisable attribution settings, and tailor-made reports that offer a full picture across all channels. This level of insight is not available with Mailchimp, which lacks the ability to create custom reports or gain insights based on specific customer actions.

8. SMS Marketing Excellence:

Klaviyo is a leader in SMS marketing, offering sophisticated SMS automation based on nearly any eCommerce trigger, A/B testing in SMS content flows, SMS order notifications, and more. Unlike Mailchimp, which offers basic SMS capabilities, Klaviyo provides advanced SMS marketing tools that drive higher engagement.

In the overcrowded online shopping space, identifying viable methods of winning customer conversions, brand awareness, and long-term loyalty requires constant vigilance. But what if you could “set and forget” a winning strategy that brings new customers to your eCommerce store more affordably and with a greater chance of purchasing?

Our recent partnership with the innovative Shop with Friends aligns seamlessly with our dedication to client success. By installing Shop with Friends from the Shopify App Store, eCommerce websites can tap into the growing phenomenon of social shopping to do “all of the above” while winning new customers and reducing cart abandonment. 

Shop with Friends founder Kevin Hanna believes his company is a good match with LION Digital because both have proven eCommerce victories and the flexibility to meet client needs. 

Kevin says polls are a “no-brainer” for eCommerce businesses, from start-ups to major brands. It’s easy to install and offers a wealth of opportunities. Shop with Friends mainly partners with Shopify stores with over 100K monthly visitors. The platform can be up and running within 3 minutes, and polls take users 2-3 seconds to create—1 tap to create, 1 tap to share.

What Polls Can Mean for Your Business Growth

Shop With Friends results in 20% lower customer acquisition cost (CAC), with the app’s customers averaging 26% YoY growth and more than 6 million voters engaged. Votes come from shoppers who rely on input from friends before purchasing. Shopify stores that have installed the polls have seen an increase in 4x conversions and 5x user LTV (lifetime value). 

Users can send polls anywhere on all social media platforms using the Shopify Shop with Friends app. It takes seconds for an online shopper to create and share a poll with friends, transforming it into instant viral marketing for your brand while the poll creators become your brand ambassadors. Each poll, on average, acquires 2 new customers for your eCommerce store and often proves the power of social validation for influencing hesitant shoppers.

The app’s Analytics menu tracks useful data to help identify buyer behaviour. The dashboard itemises sales orders, product engagement and performance, how many people are voting, and on which products, what type of devices customers use, customer location worldwide, and revenue gained directly through polls. These insights can help you tailor your inventories to match user demand.

Key Benefits and USPs

Compared to other customer engagement tools on the market, Kevin says, “We’re the first tool to tap into the social shopping behaviour of the younger generations”. Generations Z and Alpha do “most of their shopping from their phones and like to get input from their friends from their phones, too. 

“We’re also 100% performance-based. Shop With Friends is a ‘set it and forget it’ widget that, once installed, lives on the site and will continue to help eCommerce brands grow at an exponential rate.

Shop with Friends benefits include:

• Increase Conversion Rates: Shoppers who send a poll have a 12.5x higher conversion rate due to buyer confidence in their purchase.
• Improve New Customer Conversion: The poll recipients see that their friend trusts the brand, initiating a conversion rate 3-4 times higher for new visitors than on other channels.
• Reduce Cart Abandonment: Poll senders are 19% less likely to abandon their cart than other shoppers.
• Boost AOV (average order value): Poll senders spend about 45% more on average than other customers.
• Grow Word-of-mouth Expansion: Each poll drives about 2 new visitors to eCommerce sites.

Shop with Friends: How it Works

Especially popular with 18 to 30-year-olds, users create polls from your Shopify website’s inventory styled to your brand. Shop with Friends founder Kevin Hanna explains that the polls have been very popular for jewellery, shoes, sunglasses, handbags, and apparel, but they could apply to anything. 

The user experience for creating polls is like an online version of real-time shopping for a party dress with your bestie at a brick-and-mortar store, then taking a photo and sending it to your mum and sister while asking all three opinions. Except, Kevin discovered some astounding data from Shop With Friends, which was that in the eCommerce landscape, the users being asked to vote on the items would often purchase from the Shopify store as well.

“The Shop with Friends app appears over the Shopify website in the background, so the poll creators and voters think the poll is simply a cool feature on the site itself,” says Kevin. But, as he explains, apart from increased engagement and purchasing, once poll recipients “vote on the app, they’re left on the Shopify site. So voters who may never have visited the site before will now decide to buy something from the site” as the inventory has been given the ‘thumbs up’ by their friends. 

Some brand examples showed a 36% increase in sales from the person who posted the poll, with another 33% of their friends buying from the same site. 

Polls Prove the Potential for Social Validation

Polls are yet another initiative sparked by the drastic shift towards online spending that grew out of the pandemic. The polls users create can muscle up your brand with their virality, as they’re social and designed to be shared with friends.

As the 2020 lockdowns pushed people indoors and out of traditional shopping trips with friends and family, shoppers were still relying on opinions from the people closest to them to decide which item to buy: for an upcoming event, a social occasion, or simply to add a new piece to their wardrobe, often via group chats and sharing wish lists on shopping sites. 

Kevin has a long-established career foundation in digital marketing, focusing on customer acquisition. He started the Shop with Friends company with his co-founders as an app to take advantage of this trend of sending polls to friends, focusing on a few verticals, including travel and eCommerce. However, they noticed that eCommerce polls were obtaining the majority of engagement, at about 30-40%, and were “about what to buy, from Amazon, Shopify sites, Etsy, etc”, says Kevin.

Two years ago, the team white-labelled their app to focus on eCommerce but found the development integration quite complex. About 8 months ago, they produced the app specifically for Shopify sites, which was the “game-changer”, according to Kevin. “We went from 20 customers to 200, and instead of taking an hour to add polls on a site, we got it down to 2-3 minutes.”

Performance-based Fee Structure Delivers Less Risk

The business operates on a 100% performance-based model that is free to use for the first month. Best of all, the initial 30-day free trial is extended unless the Shop with Friends App is driving at least USD$500 a month from the app, and you can cancel at any time. 

So, if your business hasn’t generated revenue from the Shop with Friends widget, you don’t pay anything, “as opposed to user-based or subscription-style apps”, says Kevin.

Kevin explains that Shop with Friends operates across 6 pricing tiers, starting from Free and increasing in incremental amounts that a business is charged each month after the 30-day assessment. “Most of our clients make 15x to 20x ROI based on our tier structure,” he says.

“There is greater flexibility in a performance-based fee structure as it’s calculated every 30 days, based on your revenue for that month. So you’re paying for the next 30 days in advance”, which future-proofs your business, “in case you experience a slow month of sales, you won’t continue to pay the higher tiers”, says Kevin.

While polls are geared towards increasing traffic and driving sales, you can have peace of mind knowing that your business can recover without suffering losses based on peak performance, which in turn has created improved client loyalty.

The Social Polls Are Just Like Shopping With Friends 

The trusted word-of-mouth referral method makes up 82% of Americans’ purchasing decisions, while 77% value their inner circle’s opinion when buying something they’ve never bought before. 

Shop with Friends has grown brand awareness and profitability for many stores, especially in America, where it was originally developed. These include 12th Tribe fashion label, Ever-Pretty US and UK wedding and formal gowns, Little Trouble children’s clothing, Erimish stacking jewellery, and Fresh Sends gift boxes.

“We are obsessed with the user experience,” says Kevin, “So we make it really fun for the shoppers themselves.”

Brands can align with new ways of shopping that bring virality to their brand via cost-effective engagement with an exponential reach, boosting sales and rapidly growing brand awareness.

At LION, we only collaborate with businesses that help you amplify your offer and increase your ROI. Install Shop with Friends from the Shopify App Store and contact us about further increasing your reach online. 

Talk to the team at LION and go from ordinary to extraordinary today!

Article by

JENNIFER MCCARTHY –
DIGITAL CONTENT MANAGER

As a seasoned eCommerce marketing agency, LION Digital strives to stay on top of industry news and follow best practices. Yet decades of team expertise in digital marketing and thousands of hours of fieldwork in SEO dictate that it’s unwise to count solely on certain universal approaches in attempts to cut corners. The recent info explosion in the form of the most massive Google Leak and subsequent disputes that it provoked in May 2024 has demonstrated how important it has been to maintain healthy scepticism, curiosity, and testing to determine the subsequent unique insights from that testing. 

A lot has been written and stated within the global SEO community regarding Google’s search documentation leak. Some went as far as to call this occasion “the greatest leak of the century.” Considering the magnitude of the leak and the professional forensics going over the information, even more will be explored and shared. At LION, our stance is: 

SEO has always been and will always be about common sense centralised around creating a quality internet environment with the best user experience. In this article, we want to highlight and support this concept.  

Now, let’s start from the beginning. 

Did Google representatives lie?

Direct communication between Google representatives and the SEO community started in 2005. The first initiatives were launched to create a place for webmasters to learn more about crawling and indexing websites and find helpful tools in one single place. Enthusiasts needed direct communication with Google to understand the best practices, and Google needed SEOs’ requests and recommendations to create a friendly environment for further efficient collaboration. Simultaneously, the market filled up niches, where Google’s reaction was not agile enough or unsatisfactory from the search engine professionals’ points of view. 

We are far from advocating in favour of Google. Still, neither the initial nor subsequent Google direct communication initiatives’ objective was to disclose fully or even partially Google’s proprietary information, which consists of the search engine’s core. Instead, they wanted to gently nudge the community in the right direction and facilitate proper thinking. Following numerous Google’s “Webmaster Hangouts”, “Office Hours”, other videos and podcasts, we presume they wanted to clarify some insights from the observations by answering questions like “Why did this happen?” but not to indicate how to manipulate the search engines flourishing at the dawn of SEO. If we look at the recent event from that angle, the significant part of the “lies” accusations in the leak-revealing statements appears in a different light. 

For instance, consider one of the most frequently applied accusations that Google denied numerous times the usage of click logs of user behaviour in the ranking. Let’s leave the PR disputes behind the brackets and presume that Google representatives assuringly confirmed that Google algorithms use clicks for ranking. What else would have prevented the appearance of the abundance of grey-hat services that imitate clicks in SERP?  

Another considerable discussion was around a sitewide authority score similar to Moz’s domain authority or Ahref’s domain rank. One could claim that Google spokespeople played semantics, denying the existence of such ranking factor as the SiteAuthority score appearing in the leak. However, a relatively rational view allows us to conclude that these indicators have very little in common despite similar names. Google’s site authority score seems to be a much more complex concept that doesn’t rely solely on backlinks as DA and DR. Yet again, let’s imagine if Google reps had confirmed Google’s domain authority could be proven as a ranking factor in the way that the general public understood, the surge of the link purchases would be phenomenal. 

These are just two examples to give you the general idea.      

Why is the leak not fully reliable?

The API documentation described two thousand five hundred ninety-six modules with 14,014 attributes (features). There are a raft of reasons to question the reliability of the findings derived from the leak observations, and in honour of the authors, they have also been named:

• The context is limited because the modules and attributes are merely described, but there is no source code about their application, what exactly triggers them, and why.
• What is the purpose of the data? It could be equally used to generate the actual search results as well as for internal data management, search on the web or other verticals, or to train a model to predict outcomes. Originating from Google doesn’t necessarily mean originating from Google Search.
• There is no information regarding the stages in which the modules are activated and the features are used.
• There are many references to deprecated features or others with specific notes indicating not to use them further. Google’s search engine continuously evolves, and until the market is granted another leak, no one can be sure what was actively used in the Google ranking systems at that time and what was not.
• Although the signals and their nuances are somewhat evident, scoring functions are not available, and therefore, outtakes regarding the weight of the features are unknown. 
• The documentation leak contains links to Google’s corporate network assets requesting personal credentials to access additional details about the system’s nuances. Hence, the picture is far from complete. 
• There is a clear risk of falling victim to confirmation bias — searching for, interpreting, and favouring the data through the lens of pre-existing theories in a way that confirms or supports these theories rather than objectively assessing them.

Best Practices for SEO

From Google Search Central: “Google’s automated ranking systems are designed to present helpful, reliable information that’s primarily created to benefit people, not to gain search engine rankings, in the top Search results.”

Good content is, by definition, already aligned with all of Google’s requirements. Yet the outlook becomes more challenging for black- and grey-hat SEO-technique followers. They should imitate the quality: consider and manipulate the ranking factors. Even based on the scale of the modules and features that the leak revealed, it is barely possible.  

Understanding the algorithm and how it might impact search efforts is important, though not by paying the price of competing with industry players who prefer an unfair game. It is possible to not focus on the algorithm itself and instead develop sites, content, and experiences that it will reward.

Considering all that has been said and with all respect to efforts to retrieve useful data from the Google leak and interpret it, search engine optimisation was and remains about common sense, and the latest findings don’t contradict it: 

1. Understanding the target audience, identifying their pain points, aligning the content with the obvious challenges, making it technically accessible, and promoting it to audiences that resonate are key to long-term success.
2. Content that has the potential to rank continuously should be of quality — relevant, unique, and valued. It is an apparent negative signal if pages are indexed and appear in high positions in the SERP with many impressions but don’t attract user clicks. 
3. Good content is tailored, deep and original and anticipates the user’s demand.
4. The authors should have expertise and credibility to guarantee quality content.
5. Fulfil the various types of information-consuming and their representation options in SERP formats.
6. Maintain quality, order and consistency in all website elements, including content design, images, fonts, metadata, markup, alt-texts, etc. 
7. Reinforce SEO with UX. SEO is focused on attracting people to the page, while UX is about guiding them to take action on the page. It’s important to carefully consider how components are organised and presented to help users find the content they’re searching for and to encourage them to remain on the site. 
8. Google has evolved in its ability to understand the real-time world stage and evaluate credibility and authority. Ensuring understanding, credibility, and deliverability establishes a clear identity for all related entities.
9. Link building and digital PR strategy should be centred around relevancy, which guarantees interest, and around high-quality publications.
10. Don’t try to manipulate ranking through questionable techniques. As experience demonstrates, all these actions will be penalised — it is just a matter of time.  

Google spokespeople strive to support and provide value to the community within their allowed constraints. Nevertheless, the SEO Community should take Google communications as input and continue to experiment to see what works best for specific cases. 

The ranking systems are variable. To stay ahead of the competition, not only the website but also the SERP should be tested. When all critical aspects have been assessed, the best practice is to have a personalised experimentation plan for SEO, implement it, learn from it, try to replicate the success and test it once again. Therefore, the cycle remains infinite.