If you put your social community at the heart of your marketing efforts, content becomes a pathway to more meaningful interactions with your audience.
The post 4 Reasons Why You Need to Start a Social Community to Promote Your Business appeared first on Bootstrapping Ecommerce.
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In our conversations with hundreds of eCommerce business owners, many have told us that their Google ads (formerly Google Adwords) campaigns aren’t performing as well as they originally thought they would, and could be working more efficiently for a lesser cost.
When setting up their PPC advertising strategy, many of these eCommerce stores assume that setting up their feed and launching one Shopping campaign containing all of their products is all that it takes to create a profit.
They are disappointed and sometimes mystified that their ads don’t drive a good return and the work that went in setting them up was wasted.
That’s when I explain that if managed correctly and implemented by pros, Google Ads can actually be a great revenue driver that will grow your business… But it takes more than just keywords and ad creative.
This is exactly what one of our clients in the camera equipment niche came to us with. Unfortunately, the agency they had been working with prior to us hadn’t been doing a great job on their Google PPC.
After we took over their PPC efforts, between Feb 1st, 2019 – August 31st, 2019, we got them a 76% increase in ROAS, from 5.61x to 9.89x, compared to July 1, 2018 – Jan. 31, 2019 when they had been working with the other agency:
Year-over-year, we got them a 56% increase in ROAS from 6.34x to 9.89x:
In this case study, we’d like to demystify the actual work involved and the combination of eCommerce PPC marketing strategies that we used to get results for this online store.
As eCommerce growth experts, our clients include not only 7 and 8-figure businesses, but 9-figure annual revenue eCommerce companies as well. Talk to us today to see if we can help you optimize your eCommerce brand’s paid search, SEO, and conversion rates.
While every client presents unique aspects of their business and different challenges, we’ve learned through working with hundreds of clients about how important it is to follow a system in order to create results, which is what we did.
When we begin running PPC for eCommerce sites, the first thing we do is audit the client’s product feed, campaigns, and other performance indicators to see what is working and what is causing issues.
This site had high search volume and a very extensive product catalog of cameras, lenses, and other camera-related equipment. Due to the store’s scale, we discovered that there were problems like incomplete/missing information about products in their Google product data feed. Their current PPC campaigns were also too broad given the different product categories on the site, which created wasted spend.
The work we determined would increase ROAS for this client included:
By optimizing each of the above, we positioned our client’s products in a way that encapsulates the customer’s entire buying journey. This resulted in less spend per click and more sales.
The product feed contains your products and their related information including: product category, brands, quantities, sizes, colors, materials, etc.
Google Shopping Ads and Display Ads are based on information that Google pulls directly from your store’s Product Feed:
This is why optimizing the Google Product Feed is so important.
For this client in the camera equipment niche, that meant making sure that information like the camera brands, their lens sizes, and so on were all present, accurate, and easily found by Google.
The site had huge potential to be shown for many different specific product queries, but Google wasn’t able to match those search queries to the product in this store’s catalog.
Fixing this meant that now when somebody searched Google for a product in our client’s catalog, such as a specific camera lens model, our client’s product was more likely to appear right there as a Shopping ad. (We optimized the product feed in a tool called Feedonomics).
A mixture of Google Shopping ads, Google Search ads, and Google Display ads is beneficial to most big online retailers.
Implementing all three often leads to enhanced product visibility across the buyer’s entire journey, from research through to purchase.
With the product feed optimized, we began restructuring the client’s search and shopping structures.
This particular industry has high search volume which makes it easier to gain traffic, but also harder to figure out the specific combination of search queries that drive the highest return.
So because of this, we created separate multiple tiered campaigns segmented by product type—creating different tiers for different product categories. In this case, a lens tier, digital camera tier, video camera tier, film camera tier, etc.
Products ads that follow customers around the web might seem annoying on first glance, but in fact, retargeting ads do convert very well and have a great ROI. Why? Because they get customers at the end of the buying cycle (once they’ve already visited the store and looked at products).
People were visiting our client’s store, but they weren’t being remarketed to. The dynamic remarketing feature from Google Shopping enabled us to automatically show ads to people who came to the client’s site without completing a purchase.
Dynamic remarketing makes use of your product feed to determine what products Google displays on its ad network. It can intelligently group different products together based on what’s likely to convert best.
An example of a dynamic retargeting ad:
Using dynamic remarketing is a fairly straightforward strategy to skyrocket eCommerce performance, and we believe it’s a must for any online retailer.
Once we saw what was working in Google, we began transferring the Google Ads changes to attempt replicating their success in Bing Ads.
While Bing has a far lower search engine market share (2.63% as of this article’s writing), we’ve found that what works well in Google Ads can often work in Bing Ads (now called Microsoft Advertising). Why not duplicate the strategies that work in Google to capture shoppers from another search engine?
When it comes to any PPC campaign, patience and being willing to adjust along the way are important. You’ll determine the highest return queries and adjust your bids to prioritize them as an ongoing process.
In this case, we identified the highest return search queries based on this store’s different product categories, and created a tiered campaign for each category.
Here’s a visual representation of that tiered strategy. The search queries each tier drives are based on negative keywords, and we created multiple tiered campaigns for each product category:
Conversely, we apply high, medium, and low priority levels to low, medium, and high bids/returns. For context, the priority setting determines the order in which Google will cycle through the campaigns. High priority literally means Google takes this campaign into account first because it will be Google’s highest priority.
Tier 1: We placed low bids on our catch-all campaign that drives all general queries. We added negative terms to avoid targeting queries that we wanted to bid higher on in the other tiers. Set to a high priority setting.
Tier 2: We placed medium bids on search queries we found to have a higher return than those in tier 1, but lower return than the queries we want to filter to tier 3.
As in tier 1, we added negative keywords for the queries we wanted to filter to tier 3. This tier was set to a medium priority setting.
Tier 3: Knowing what the most profitable search queries are, we place the highest bids on them. This tier was set to a low priority setting.
The tiered system works because in recognizing the performance of a store’s different relevant search queries, you can have much more control over how much ad spend is allocated to each query.
PPC is a dynamic advertising practice—meaning that management is ongoing—it’s not a “set it and forget it” platform.
Adjusting our PPC strategy allowed us to achieve a year-over-year 56% increase in ROAS from 6.34x to 9.89x.
I hope this case study helped paint a picture of how a Google Ads strategy based on a systematic review and restructuring can quickly yield a higher ROAS.
eCommerce brands who work with us receive a tailored set of strategies like these to maximize their Google ads campaign budgets.
If you would like us to evaluate and improve your online store’s PPC campaigns or identify additional growth opportunities, please get in touch with us today to see if we can help.
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It’s almost the end of the year, so less ecommerce events to visit. But still, we’ve made a handy overview for you, so you know when and where an ecommerce event takes place this month in Europe.
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If you’ve been following our blog keenly, then you’ve probably noticed that we’re not the type of guys who’d miss out on the trending POS systems.
Yes, that’s right. TouchBistro is certainly one of them, at least going by the numerous TouchBistro reviews posted all over the web.
In fact, according to figures published by the company, more than 23,000 restaurants are currently leveraging the TouchBistro POS system. And guess what? The users themselves are spread out across over 100 countries and counting.
Come to think of think, that’s no easy feat, especially for a specialized POS solution that exclusively caters to the food service industry.
So, what exactly makes TouchBistro an option worth considering?
Well, if you’ve read our previous TouchBistro reviews, then I bet you already got the gist of it. That TouchBistro comes with an array of over 200 solid features, which have even earned it a place in our ultimate list of the best POS systems for restaurants in 2020.
Now, once again, here’s another TouchBistro review. A much more comprehensive one though, because TouchBistro has recently updated a couple of its core features.
Regardless of whether you’re familiar with the POS system or not, this is the ultimate TouchBistro review for you. It dives deep into the POS software and its supplementary hardware peripherals to uncover everything you might need to know – from its user friendliness plus customization capabilities, to its restaurant management functions, payment processing options, and overall pricing. In the end, we’ll even reveal the type of restaurateur the TouchBistro restaurant POS system is built for.
But first, what the heck is TouchBistro? And why are we even calling it a specialized POS system for restaurants?
While most of the other POS system solutions we’ve reviewed before offer generic, one-size-fits-all features for pretty much any retail business, TouchBistro is different. It offers both software and hardware capabilities that are optimized specifically for restaurants.
Ok. Now hang on a minute there. Restaurants alone? How then has it managed to serve tens of thousands of them?
Well, the truth of the matter is, we’re not talking about typical restaurants alone. For the sake of clarity, “restaurants” here essentially refers to any small business or large enterprise whose operations revolve around menu items. This includes quick service and full service restaurants, nightclubs, bars, cafes, food trucks, etc.
And what do these establishments stand to get from the TouchBistro restaurant POS system?
Basically, TouchBistro is a full-stack point of sale application that offers all the standard management functionalities you’d need to streamline your food service business.
That means as a restaurateur, you can turn to TouchBistro for enhanced digital order management, inventory tracking, staff management, payment processing, table management, menu management, and customer relationship management.
Now, to facilitate all these functions, the Apple iPad based POS software provides tools for daily sales analytics and reports, split tabs, split tickets, tableside ordering, order transfers, menu customizations, credit card processing, customer loyalty programs, and much more.
The goal here is to boost your overall customer experience while making restaurant management much easier and faster. That’s why TouchBistro even attempts to increase convenience through its local network support, mobile iPad software, as well as 24/7 customer support.
Which such a mobile framework, it even becomes easy for your employees to coordinate customer orders right from the tableside. In fact, customers don’t even have to walk to the counter for anything. They can pay for their bills and receive receipts from the comfort of their tables.
Sounds like something you’d want to try out? Can business owners really use TouchBistro to improve their restaurants’ customer experience and possibly attract better reviews on TripAdvisor? And how easy is it to install TouchBistro in the first place?
Let’s find out the truth by reviewing the main features in detail…
TouchBistro is like a cash register that runs entirely on Apple’s iPad and iPad Mini tablets. If you’ve tried out the modern breed of POS systems, then I bet you’re already familiar with this approach. The whole point is helping you manage your restaurant business more conveniently through mobile operability.
Sadly, however, you won’t find an Android version for the TouchBistro POS software. So, forget about running the application on your Samsung tablet. You either settle for the Apple iOS version, or drop the TouchBistro idea altogether. There are no two ways about it.
It’s not all bad news though. On the bright side, at least you won’t have to always rely on an internet connection to run your POS system.
And that’s, in fact, one of the things that set TouchBistro apart from its competitors. Instead of providing SaaS solutions that are entirely cloud-based, TouchBistro comes as a locally-installable app.
What this means is, you should be able to run all the main POS system functionalities directly from your device without relying on cloud hosting. Just install TouchBistro onto your iPad and voila!
But what happens if you have several iPads in your restaurant?
Well, interestingly, you still won’t need the internet to sync your POS system data across the devices. It turns out there’s an app called TouchBistro Pro Server, which you can easily use to establish a local network connection between all your iPads. So, of course, you should be able to proceed with your operations even when you’re running a large restaurant with multiple staff iPads.
The only kicker is, TouchBistro doesn’t provide in-house card processing. That means you’ll need a valid internet connection to process your customers’ payments.
But then again, the entire process is fast and effortless, thanks to TouchBistro’s well-designed interface. The whole layout is quite sleek and it’s built to offer the simplest-possible routes to managing your restaurant business.
I guess another reason why it’s incredibly smooth could be the fact that TouchBistro is not exclusive to business owners and their employees alone. Yes, that’s right, it’s also designed to interact directly with customers.
Therefore, its overall navigation framework, as well as the accompanying tools, are placed neatly to help you serve your customers faster and more efficiently.
Check-splitting, for instance, has been simplified for both single and multiple customers. It only takes a couple of clicks to distribute items and split checks accordingly.
Don’t get me wrong though. Although the default interface is pleasant and user friendly, TouchBistro doesn’t restrict you. You can go ahead and customize pretty much anything to customize the overall outlook based on your preferences. It allows you to adjust even the button arrangement, redesign your menus, and apply custom modifiers.
Right off the bat, TouchBistro allows you to set up your own floor plan based on your restaurant’s overall table arrangement.
Now, the best way to proceed would be creating a layout that resembles even the seat placement. This shouldn’t be difficult at all, since the table management function provides a visual system for design plus coordination of operations.
And from the look of things, TouchBistro seemingly manages to prioritize ease of use without compromising the corresponding management functionalities. Therefore, you should be able to easily do stuff like reserving tables, shifting items from one table or seat to another, introducing or eliminating seats from a table, as well as moving customers between tables.
You can also count on TouchBistro to keep tabs on the tables at all times, consequently helping you assess your employees’ performance levels based on their table numbers.
And speaking of the numbers, of course restaurant owners would want to have their tables fully booked at all times. That would be the first step to generating good returns.
But then again, customers don’t just come from nowhere. You have to entice them with exceptionally great food service. And that begins with an attractive menu, which is quite achievable with TouchBistro.
The menu management function here allows you to create your own custom list, complete with unique menu items, as well as modifiers. And for better sales numbers, you could even consider introducing upsell prompts, which would then appear automatically to guide your employees on various supplementary suggestions they can offer customers.
It doesn’t end there though. TouchBistro gives you additional opportunities for boosting sales through its promotion tools. Bars, for example, might want to capitalize on happy hours to attract revelers.
Speaking of which, another feature such establishments would really appreciate here is TouchBistro’s bar tabs management.
Then when it comes to full service restaurants, it’s possible to set up a flexible coursing system that supports varying customer order sequences. And as your staff work on the subsequent course orders, TouchBistro will be tracking their progress to help you evaluate the order completion times.
But, make no mistake about it. Meal orders don’t always have to be completed within the restaurant. Quite a number of TouchBistro reviews are from users who claim that they’ve been able to use the restaurant POS system for managing outside catering.
In fact, you can have your customers making their orders online. However, since this is not a default feature, you’ll have to integrate an external app to enable it.
If your restaurant is expanding progressively, the good thing is, there are no limits to the number of employee accounts you can introduce from your end. You’re free to add as many new staff members as you want, without worrying about user restrictions.
And since restaurant employees usually work in varying positions, TouchBistro gives you the privilege of specifying even the roles for each new staff account. You can, for instance, assign managerial roles to the highest-ranking employees, and then reserve chef, server, or host accounts for the rest of the staff.
Then to streamline everything accordingly, you should consider setting the respective access privileges for each of these account roles. TouchBistro will subsequently apply the account rules as you add new staff members.
Now, if you need to keep a close eye on your workers, TouchBistro’s offers robust employee management tools. Its built-in timer, for example, is quite handy for clocking staff members in and out of the restaurant point of sale application, while in-app messaging facilitates communication between all the stakeholders.
It’s worth noting, however, that the default TouchBistro POS system doesn’t offer employee scheduling. But, on a brighter note, this function not entirely unavailable. The trick is to simply take of advantage of third-party integrations like 7shifts.
In addition to employee accounts, TouchBistro provides customer accounts. The principal difference between the two is, staff accounts are for coordinating and managing orders, while the latter is reserved for customer relationship management. So, of course, it would be a good idea to capitalize on customer accounts if you intend to maximize your sales opportunities.
That said, some of the details you can expect to record through your customer accounts include their preferences, purchase histories, and account balances.
For restaurant owners that would like to take things up a notch, TouchBistro has partnered with ReUp to offer a range of tools for managing customer loyalty programs, in the form of extra packages.
The TouchBistro Loyalty package, for instance, starts at $49 a month for a single reward. With it, you can collect and store customer information, as well as offer a physical loyalty card, a gift card, or maybe a key tag.
TouchBistro Loyalty Plus, on the other hand, gives you the privilege of offering multiple rewards, as well as running targeted email and SMS marketing campaigns. The only problem is, it will cost you at least $99 per month.
But, that’s nothing compared to the $189 starting price for the TouchBistro Loyalty Premium package. It combines loyalty program capabilities with CRM functionalities for a holistic, more aggressive approach. I’m talking about engaging your customers further through push notifications, and running a white label app with custom branding.
TouchBistro is not one of those POS system solutions that double up as card processors. The only way you can begin accepting payments here is by integrating a dedicated payment processor.
Now, the main options when it comes to card payments are PayPal, Square, Worldpay, and Chase Merchant Services. They are all secure and pretty reliable in facilitating both credit and debit card transactions.
It’s worth noting, however, that their transaction charges are different. So, you should compare your options accordingly before proceeding.
But, whichever service you settle for, you can be certain that your restaurant won’t have any issues accepting all the dominant global cards. Your customers can choose between contactless, dip, and swipe payment methods.
Cash is also a payment option in TouchBistro’s POS system, along with gift cards, and mobile payment services like Samsung Pay, Apple Pay, plus Google Pay.
While you’re at it, you can go ahead and split bills between various customers if they insist. Or, on the contrary, accept different payment forms for one bill.
And in case you’d want to include taxes or maybe a gratuity, you could tweak TouchBistro and have it apply the rates automatically during checkout.
Although we’ve already mentioned a couple of embeddable third-party apps, it runs out TouchBistro doesn’t support as many options as you might presume.
The few integrations it offers, however, are quite solid. They come with powerful supplementary capabilities for enhancing your restaurant POS system.
Some of the most popular apps you’ll find include; MarketMan, Wisk.ai, ItsaCheckmate, Avero, Shogo, Xero, Quickbooks, and 7Shifts.
Then to top it off, TouchBistro throws in 3 more add-on products, all of which seek to optimize the customer experience. TouchBistro Loyalty is ideal for loyalty programs and CRMS, while TouchBistro Digital Menu Board engages customers through an intuitive menu. The last one is TouchBistro’s Online Ordering, which goes beyond the standard tableside ordering system to give customers the option of placing their orders online.
It just so happens that TouchBistro steps out of its comfort zone when it comes to reporting and analytics. While you can only use the restaurant POS system on an iPad, things turn out to be a bit different when you need to view your business KPIs.
Well, apparently, iOS isn’t the only platform where you can access your numbers from. This POS system for restaurants has a secondary cloud reporting app called TouchBistro Reports To Go, which comes in an Android version for tablets and smartphones, as well as an iOS version for iPad and Apple phones.
Alternatively, it’s possible to follow up on the reports through a standard internet browser. And that means you can comfortably monitor your business from anywhere using a PC.
Whichever method you choose, the TouchBistro restaurant POS system has an analytical engine that generates more than 50 different reports.
On the dashboard itself, you should be able to view your tax summaries, audit reports, labor summaries and shift details, discounts and void summaries, hourly sales heat map, gross margin by day, plus sales by day, menu item, category, section, and order type.
Otherwise, you could also opt to prepare your own custom reports, complete with custom fields, based on the specific parameters you consider to be your principal KPIs.
The current TouchBistro POS system is fundamentally built to run on either the iPad Mini, iPad Pro, or the iPad.
While you use it for managing and streamlining your restaurant business, your employees should be able to process tableside orders and payments, as well as create countertop checkout stations using their iPad devices.
Chefs and other kitchen staff, on the other hand, get to use their TouchBistro iPad apps for powering their kitchen display system. They connect with the rest of the workers’ devices through a local network for quick relaying of customer requests.
So far so good. But, it doesn’t end there. Customers too have not been left behind. They also get their own iPad POS system in the form of a customer-facing display, which is incredibly handy for visual order confirmations. Otherwise, you could also set up a dedicated self-service kiosk, through which customers would proceed to make order requests.
All these iPad devices are then networked locally through an Apple router and a MacBook computer to form a real time synchronized restaurant POS system. The Mac is the one that acts as a central server, and you can choose to proceed with either Mac Pro, iMac or Mac Mini.
Beyond that, you can complete your POS system by integrating compatible third-party hardware peripherals like receipt printers and cash drawers.
👉 TouchBistro sells a wide range of them and they include:
Inventory Management
Payment Processing
Employee Management
Kitchen Display System
Kiosk Display
Menu Management
Table Management
Clearly, the more you learn about TouchBistro, the more it becomes apparent that what they say about this software is indeed true. That the TouchBistro restaurant POS system was designed by restaurateurs, for restaurateurs.
And going by our TouchBistro reviews so far, I guess we can agree that this is one solid POS solution for typical food service establishments. Since it covers everything from employee management and customer relationship management to inventory tracking and sales analytics, it should fit right into quick service and full service restaurants.
In essence, that means TouchBistro is worth considering if you’re running an outlet like a brewery, food truck, nightclub, coffee shop, café, bar, bakery, etc.
The post TouchBistro POS Reviews for 2019 appeared first on Ecommerce Platforms.
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As an e-commerce business, you want customers to be able to reach your site any time of the day or night. So, what happens when your site is not available due to your hosting company? You lose sales and possibly customers.
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With Black Friday just weeks away and Christmas fast approaching, it’s time to start making plans for the final push of 2019 to maximise on sales. As Christmas approaches, you’ll want to consider automatically upgrading shipping methods to expedited shipping and make sure customers are aware of your last posting dates for Christmas 2019 for each service you offer.
For merchants with fulfilment based in the US, below are the last posting dates for Christmas 2019 for USPS, Fedex and UPS.
If you are looking for UK Royal Mail Last Posting Dates for Christmas 2019 you’ll find them here.
USPS |
|
|---|---|
| Saturday 14 December | Retail Ground |
| Friday 20 December | First Class Mail |
| Saturday 21 December | Priority Mail |
| Monday 23 December | Priority Mail Express |
Fedex |
|
|---|---|
| Monday 9 December | FedEx SmartPost |
| Monday 16 December | FedEx Ground |
| Monday 16 December | Home Delivery |
| Thursday 19 December | Express Saver |
| Friday 20 December | 2Day Services |
| Monday 23 December | Overnight Services |
UPS |
|
|---|---|
| Friday 13 December | Ground |
| Thursday 19 December | 3 Day Select |
| Friday 20 December | 2nd Day Air Services |
| Monday 23 December | Next Day Air Services |
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Today I am going to be talking about something I have been trying to grow in recently: leadership. Over time, I have realized that if you want to do anything meaningful, you really have to invest in and lead a team well. So in this episode, I will be sharing four books on the topic that stood out to me and explaining some of the key concepts I was able to incorporate into my company and culture.
You’ll learn:
(With your host Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com )
Flickr: Leader’s Corner
The post Learning to Lead: Four Powerful Books That Have Shaped My Company & Culture appeared first on eCommerceFuel.
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We’ve are all waking up to a new Government today, with the Labour party about to take control of the country and what should be top of your...
