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eCommerce Marketing Plan for Jewellers

Whether you have a newly launched store or an existing retail website selling products and services online, having an effective marketing plan will allow you to:

• Increase traffic to your website

• Gain new enquiries for sales opportunities

• Generate revenue online via product sales

I would like to say that it’s easy to accomplish with little effort but the reality is running an online business requires a constant, and consistent approach to marketing to continue to achieve sales, grow your business, and increase revenue. Why should I have a plan?

Why should I have a plan?

Having a plan gives you an effective blueprint to build the foundations of your business and keep you focused on the areas that need attention. If you are busy working on too many things at once, you can feel busy but achieving very little and in most cases, spending money with little or no gain. Each area of your marketing plan should be undertaken, tested, adjusted, and repeated to ensure you are getting the very best return on investment.

Understanding your business?

It is vitally important to understand what your business is, why should a customer buy your products, and what your goals and success factors are.

What is my business?

Clearly defining your business is important not just for you and your staff but also for your fans, followers, and newly acquired customers. If you only sell Lab Grown Diamond Engagement Rings, for instance, your content and marketing information need to be clearly focused on this area of business and the reasons why lab-grown is the best choice over mined diamonds. If you sell more cost-effective jewellery such as earrings and pendants to fashion-conscious teens, your messaging needs to be specific to their tastes and searching habits. If your business is being listed on google for general terms like jewellery then you could be marketing to the wrong demographic and thus reducing your visibility because of irrelevant and ill-targeted search listings.

Your business should be clearly defined in a single sentence so that at a glance people understand, Why you do, allowing them to instantly decide if they believe what you believe. This then leads to the How you do what you do and What you do: can you provide what they are looking for? Simon Sinek explains this perfectly in his inspiring Ted Talk the Power of Why.

Why should a customer buy my product?

An area often overlooked by many business owners. The easiest way to sell a product is if you have a genuine reason to buy it. Write down 5 reasons why your customers should buy your product. This forms the beginning of your sales message. Some examples include:

1. It empowers them to take control / take action

2. It supports their identity. Aligns with their aspirations and means they are part of something bigger.

3. They provide value and create trust and loyalty.

4. They provide a new or unparalleled experience. Create joy and memories.

5. Your products actively support charities, and foundations and create community.

6. They support an inherent need, creating a sense of satisfaction.

7. They present a quality that attracts those that value creatiity and craftmanship.

What are my success factors / Goals?

If you understand what your success factors and goals are over the next 2-5 years you can start to plan how that can be achieved. A large team with investors will have completely different goals than a newly formed company with only 2 members of staff. Revenue and growth expectations will be wildly different. Some things to consider and document and revisit and update every three months.

1. What are my revenue/sales projections for the next 12 months / 24 months and 36 months? How does this relate to average product sales value? Average diamond ring sales are approx £1500.

2. The average conversion rate for online sales for jewellery is between 0.01 and 0.1% and can be less for high-value products such as engagement rings. How many sales per month would you need to meet your projections above? Conversion rate is defined as the percentage of website visitors that buy something from your site or enquire and buy offline. For instance if you get 10,000 website visitors in 1 month and 12 sales your conversion rate is 12/10,000 = 0.0012%

3. Knowing how many sales you need per month will define how much traffic you need. For instance, if you need 10 sales per month at a 0.01% conversion rate, you need to get 1000 high-quality visitors to your website to achieve these results. Tracking your conversion rate is important so you can correlate new visitors vs returning visitors vs actual sales or enquiries.

4. Now that you know how much revenue you want, the number of site visitors you need and the number of sales you need to achieve this you can start to work out how many staff you will need to achieve these goals or how many new team members you will need to support the growth for marketing and sales.

5. If you are an established business with recurring costs and liabilities. Work backwards. Work out what your total running costs are including staff and work out how many sales per month would support your current business and what increase you would need to achieve your ideal growth over the next 1-5 years.

Your Website

Should you work on your website or your traffic first? Personally, I’d rather have a website that is 80% perfect that can be updated over time and spend time working on obtaining traffic than delaying traffic building to make a perfect website. Even just a delay in one month can set your traffic and potential revenue back a great deal. If your site covers these areas as a priority then you can start working on driving traffic to your website.

Your website should instill confidence and authority leading visitors through your website to browse and buy with ease.

1. Eye Catching Home-page

2. Clear contact details including phone number and email address

3. About page Company Story or History

4. Clear Navigation, Links to collections, and Products

5. Simple and clear product pages

   • High-quality images,

   • Simple and obvious pricing

   • Title and reference number/ SKU

   • Description (add as much detail as possible) and Specification

   • Ensure you have edited your SEO title and Description for all pages and products to be relevant and descriptive

6. Testimonials / Case studies or ideally live reviews from Google or Trustpilot

7. Easy to understand Delivery and Returns Policy

Important: Regularly test your website. Go through the checkout in full to see if there are any blocks in the process, and check enquiry and contact forms to ensure they are delivering the information to your email.

Channels for Effective Marketing

There are three effective ways to attract, build and grow traffic to your website. Pay close attention to each of these areas and you will grow your traffic to your website which should see a surge in enquiries and sales.

1. Search Engines

   • Pay Per Click PPC Ads

   • Organic Search Engine Results

   • Onsite and Offsite SEO

   • Link building

2. Social Media Marketing

   • Paid Advertisements

   • Organic Growth and building an audience

3. Content Marketing

   • Create unique and original content

   • Email Marketing

Search Engines

Google processes around 6300 searches per second which is nearly 5.6 Billion searches per day. This means there are plenty of opportunities for your business to be found in national and local searches for specific search terms related to your products and services. The work you do to target these search-related terms is pivotal in your growth and success online.

PPC Ad Campaigns:

The simplest and quickest way of getting customers to your website using search engines and paid placement of ads.

Organic Search Engine Traffic

With Google processing over 5.6 Billion searches per day, natural search engine listings of your website products and pages are a fantastic resource for getting relevant and targeted customers to your website. When someone searches a specific search term the search engine will display a list of results based on the relevancy of the content. If your content is engaging, authoritative, and more suitable for the user, links to specific pages or blog posts will display higher in the search results.

SEO should be seen as a priority exercise in your company's marketing strategy to build your brand organically over time. The more articles, content, guides, FAQs, specifications, news, and noteworthy pieces you publish the more likely your content is to be ranked by google above your competitors.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is a powerful way to build an audience, followers and fans or build a community of like-minded individuals that become ambassadors of your products and services. Each social platform will have a slightly different user base, e.g Linkedin is typically professional’s browsing during the day and is more business orientated, whereby Facebook is more social with people browsing during their downtime. This can affect how they might interact with your posts or adverts.

Paying for traffic through Social Media

Unlike PPC ads through search engines like google which display ads to customers looking for specific search terms, Social media companies like Facebook and Instagram will post adverts to people within a demographic e.g age, gender, location etc. in the hope that they like what they see or read and interact with the post. Adverts require a daily budget and a specific plan to target a particular set of individuals with your message, product or offer to obtain a result. This may be clicking through your website or signing up for your newsletter. Once you have built up an audience of people who have interacted with your brand you can then re-target these potential customers with reminders or specific offers to convert them into paying customers. It is generally advisable to work with an ad agency or contact the social media team themselves and request some help in setting up your campaigns to achieve a higher return on investment.

Building an Audience through Social Media

Social media can be leveraged in two ways to grow your business, increase website traffic and enquiries about your products and services.

1. Vanity Metrics: a term used to show a brand with a large following. This value makes you appear more popular and authoritative. This can give high-value signals to potential customers giving confidence and a wow factor. You can grow this figure by setting up ads to target ‘LIKES’ and ‘FOLLOWS’ rather than traffic to your website.

2. Genuine Engagement: This is the most time-consuming but rewarding part of social media growth. Create regular content for each platform. Connect with your audience on a personal level. Care about the content you are creating and ensure it adds value. Content-based businesses will win over the next 5-10 years so it is important to create a social media content plan that is achievable and affordable.

Content Marketing

Your content marketing plan is important for creating long-term value and authority on your website. If your blog or page posts are consistent, high quality, educational and informative your website will start to rank higher over time as an authority in your industry. This will increase your traffic over time and work harder for you than paid ads. If you are unable to write new content on a regular basis (minimum of 1 post per month) then hire someone to create a content plan and create the content for you. Continuing to forget or leaving it to chance will end up costing you a huge number of potential visitors and customers over time.

Creating Unique and Original Content

Google has a large number of factors it uses to define the relevancy of a piece of content. It is easy to get lost in all these factors. Our advice is to start building original content sooner rather than later. This can be in the form of a blog, new pages or FAQs at bottom of existing collections.

Start creating regular content and publishing them on your website. You can then use this content in many ways

• Google indexing for search. Get found on a google search by customers looking for your products and services.

• Training guides for staff and customers to understand your products and services better. The more they know the easier it is to impart this knowledge to your customers and create more sales opportunities.

• Publish on Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, and Pinterest to grow your social audience.

• Publish on Google my business to increase local search opportunities and add valuable trust signals to your audience

• Build authority in your industry as a resource of experience, knowledge, and expertise.

A numbers game: If each good blog post only produces an average of 200 new visitors a month (in some cases we are seeing upwards of 1000-3000 per article), with an average of 2 new articles per month you could be seeing 4800 new visitors per month after a year and 9600 after two years. Compound this with visitors from social media, Google My Business, Review platforms, email marketing, and advertisements and you can see your traffic growing into a healthy source of sales and enquiries for your products.

TOP TIP: Find out what your competitors are writing by searching google for specific search terms and see what displays the highest in the search results. Study these pages and write a plan and article outline that covers this information in more detail. At the very least produce a similar content guide (be very careful not to copy the content as this can result in being penalized by google). Remember if you don’t have that particular content piece on your website then there is a good chance you won’t be listed in search engines for customers looking for that information.

Email Marketing

Sending out regular emails directly to your customers is one of the simplest and most effective ways to re-engage with them, send specific and directed offers and remind them who you are and how good your products are.

Various studies have shown that for each £1 spent on email marketing the returns can be up to £42 back. Can you afford not to invest in this practice?

Own your own information: Collecting your customer’s email addresses with permission to email them offers is a powerful tool to build and keep safe. No social platform allows this. You can create your audience but you have to pay to get access to 100% of them. It is widely known that social media platforms throttle the number of followers that see your content for free, even though you have paid dearly to acquire them. Start collecting customer names, email addresses and key dates such as DOB or Anniversary. These dates are great for future marketing opportunities.

Create a website Signup form: Most website builders will have tools to allow a signup form to display on your website. A popup can be more effective than one in the footer of the website. Keep it simple and quick to follow. A simple email address will suffice but you can add more details as mentioned above. Entice customers to sign up by offering a discount code that displays after signup. Tools like Mailchimp and Shopify Marketing have this ability built in.

Send Regular Emails: Be consistent with your approach. Once per month or every two weeks or every week. Your loyal customers will begin to look out for them. Keep offers specific and infrequent. Customers may only buy if there is a discount being offered. Use emailers to:

• Highlight new products

• Send offers and discounts

• Create brand awareness

• Give insights into company news and information

• Outline trade events or open days

• Highlight new blogs and website content

Analyze and Repeat

A crucial part of any marketing plan is to analyse and track the data. Understanding the numbers and actual return from your efforts rather than a finger in the air or an "I have a pretty good idea”. Every month track your KPIs such as traffic volume, average order value, ROI and conversion rate for instance to see where you can improve.