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What is content?

Content. It’s a word thrown around a lot in the marketing world. And from the marketing point of view, I generally think of website content as the words and images on a website that describe that organization. I also think of content as images and words used on social media accounts. But while I was attending IGNITE: the ecommerce conference, I noticed everyone talking about content in a way I’d never considered: product data for ecommerce. It makes sense now, the data includes product images, tags, and descriptions in addition to product name and price. This kind of content matters just as much, probably even more than the rest of the content on an ecommerce website. It’s what helps customers decide what to purchase on a site. If an image is missing, or a product name includes a bunch of confusing abbreviations, does the customer know it’s the right product they want? Is everything organized in a way so that it’s easy for the customers to find what they’re looking for? For instance, take the example of Dove’s Beauty Bar.…

Are You Willing to Lose 1% of your Business?

Are you willing to lose 1% of your business? This one question stood out to me the most from Ignite – The Ecommerce Leadership Conference, powered by Syndigo. While brick and mortar grocery won’t be replaced by ecommerce anytime soon, grocers are currently losing at least 1% of their business to online shopping, whether it’s through Amazon, Walmart, or another competitor. In fact, a June 2019 Forbes article notes that 2% of food retail is purchased online. That number is only expected to grow as consumers become more comfortable with others selecting their fresh meat and produce. The thought of adding an ecommerce offering at your store seems overwhelming. It takes time, effort, and money to fully implement it. It can be an uncomfortable change. But as Kate noted in her recap of the event, discomfort is what leads to innovation. Innovation can lead to exponential growth. But you don’t need exponential growth right now, you just need to understand the environment. Start asking questions about costs, data files and technology integrations. Ask your customers if they’d be interested in…

Building Profitable Sales in Online Shopping

Unlike a baseball diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, if you build an online shopping marketplace, customers might not simply come to play. When a store first launches online shopping, a few customers will be ready to jump on board right away. Everyone else, however, will need some coaxing as they’re asked to change long-held shopping habits. The general rule is to get a customer to make three online grocery purchases to make them a regular online shopper. Beyond general marketing of the program, how else can you encourage online purchases? ONLINE & FACEBOOK ADVERTISINGFind online shoppers where they’re hanging out: the internet. Through online targeted advertising, retailers can advertise to a specific demographic on specific websites such as Better Homes & Gardens or Men’s Health. Highlight special online-only sale or even a certain item. The same can be done on Facebook. While a store’s general posts may be seen by its Facebook followers, you can pay to have your post shown to the people you want to see it, adjusted by age, gender, location and interests. Include…

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Trending Now: June

The heat of summer has finally arrived as the season of the sun is in full swing. People are finding refuge in the air conditioning and with cold treats and drinks. With the kids home for the summer, families are looking for activities for the kids, which can include fun in the kitchen. However, bringing multiple kids to the grocery store can be a daunting challenge and some families are looking for ecommerce as an easy solution. Here’s a look at what we saw trending in June: Special one-day or two-day deals on bottled water and other refreshing drinks were and still are a good way to get customers in the door. A retailer recently sent a text offer for Best Choice Bottled Water 24-packs and the redemption rates were around 20%. When a customer redeemed the water offer, their basket sizes increased by 50% at one store and 62% at the other. With the kids home for the summer, it’s also a perfect time to have some fun in the kitchen while teaching them cooking basics. On your social…

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Success in Text Message Marketing: a Case Study

Problem: In 2010, Yoss Thriftway wanted to find a new way to reach their customers. At the time, they weren’t interested in jumping on the Facebook bandwagon, but wanted to connect personally with their community in a different way than their competition in neighboring towns. Solution: Store management was intrigued by the idea of text message marketing, which would give them access to their customers’ cell phones, an item nearly everyone keeps nearby. 97% of text messages are read within minutes of being received, giving Yoss Thriftway a way to immediately and directly reach their customers with special offers and store news. To promote the program, Yoss Thriftway started with in-store signage, bag stuffers, and small signs at each register. To entice customers to sign up, each registrant received a text for 10% off a purchase of $50 or more, valid for the three days after they signed up. Results: In the nine years since it started the program, the store has more than 1,350 people signed up to receive text messages. The town’s population is 1,650. After opening a…

Missing Images in Your Online Shopping Store

As the online shopping onboarding process gets close to launch, a somewhat surprising task falls on the shoulders of the retailer: gathering missing images for items that don’t already have a picture in the ecommerce provider’s system. The ecommerce provider will have national CPG images, product descriptions and nutritional information imported from a number of international databases. The provider will also comb through your store’s data to match available images to items that don’t have an image because of how the items are labeled or abbreviated in your backend system. Once that’s complete, a store will most likely be in the 80% image match range. (Most stores launch with an 80-90% match rate. It’ll never be 100%.) The retailer is given a missing image report and it’s usually overwhelming at first glance. It will probably have thousands of items listed, but you don’t need to get pictures for all of them. Many of the items in the list are things you no longer carry or rarely ever sell. You don’t need to worry about those. What’s the likelihood you’re going…

The Stew and What It Means for You

Sometime in December, New York Times food writer Alison Roman published a new recipe for Spiced Chickpea Stew with coconut & turmeric. By late January, it had gone viral on Instagram, gaining millions of fans who gave the recipe it’s own hashtag: #TheStew. What made people want to try this recipe and share this post? It’s easy to make, hard to mess up, uses ingredients that people have in their pantry or are easy to find in any grocery store and it looks pretty. But we can find a deeper meaning behind this. It turns out millennials are growing up and staying in more. For years, we’ve been told we those millennials that we thought were eating out all of the time are settling down, having kids, and looking to cook for their families. They want to create restaurant-quality dishes at home that are healthy, easy, and relatively quick. That’s good news for the grocery industry. Social media has transformed the once solo activity of home cooking into a social experience, shared with friends via Instagram pictures and Facebook posts.…

Trending Now

Trending Now: February

It’s time for our second installment of Trending Now! I’ll make this quick before something else takes the place of these items currently taking the internet by storm. I spend too much time on social media and follow a ton of food accounts, so I guess that’s not such a bad thing after all! Here’s what I’ve noticed lately: Rumors: Word is spreading that grocery ecommerce isn’t taking off as fast as expected and stores aren’t making as much as they had hoped. I have lots of thoughts about this. At the VMC show last week, a member said to me, “I know online shopping isn’t going away, this is a long-term play,” and he’s right. It’s definitely not a silver bullet to save a struggling store and it takes a lot of effort on the part of the store to make it successful. It’s not a “if-you-build-it-they-will-come” scenario. You have to let the right people know about it, entice them to try it, and then you have to impress the heck out of them to keep them coming back.…

Disappointment in Online Grocery Shopping

This blog post started as a recap of recent news in the online grocery world. I got about halfway through last night and decided to finish today. Then I tried to shop for groceries online over my lunch hour. Let’s talk about that. I’m having a party to watch football at 11AM tomorrow morning, so I want to pick up my groceries on the way home from work this evening. Those egg casseroles need to sit in the fridge all night, after all. Online grocery options on my way home or near my home are currently limited to Hy-Vee, Walmart, and Instacart. I’ve used Instacart in the past, and as a customer I’m not wild about their product markups and service fees. So I thought I’d check out Hy-Vee’s service. After filling my online cart, I go to check out. I realize they have the wrong store selected, so I change it. After making the store change, I see I can’t pick up the groceries until the 6-7PM window. That’s later than I want to pick up, so I change…

Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?

At a recent marketing event, the speaker said something offhandedly that resonated with me. He asked, “with every marketing message and every channel, is the juice worth the squeeze?” Your customers are faced with hundreds, even thousands of messages in the form of texts, calls, ads, social media posts, etc. If you’re not standing out or struggling to get engagement from your marketing efforts, what can you do differently? Test different email subject lines and calls to action, try different kinds of social media posts or consider paying to boost your posts. Make an effort to improve what you’re doing to connect with your target audience. For some independent grocers, social media channels haven’t been worth the investment. For others, social has been a huge boost to their businesses. If it’s not working, try something new, then try again. Not seeing any improvement? Maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze and your audience would rather get texts or emails instead. Your weekly emails with a link to your circular might be doing well, but maybe your email with a special…