Instagram has grown from a social media app to a viable sales platform in a short space of time, and if you are not taking advantage of its ability to push products to consumers then you are missing out on a massive touchpoint for revenue generation. In this article, we discuss why you should use Instagram as an eCommerce sales platform with waterfall consumer financing to maximize your revenue potential.

Why You Should Be Using Instagram

The value of using Instagram as a sales platform lies in the popularity of the app itself. Furthermore, the number of people worldwide that are now using Instagram to shop as opposed to other digital channels like Google Shopping. According to authoritative sources, “130 million Instagram users tap on shopping posts every month”. That is a massive figure, and if you are not using Instagram as a shopping avenue then you are missing out on a huge part of your potential consumer base. 

Furthermore, Instagram has made adding shopping features to a business profile extremely simple. The process is far less complicated than setting up a Google Shopping channel through Google Merchant Center or uploading your product catalog onto your Facebook page. The platform is extremely well-optimized, giving eCommerce owners efficient access to the benefits of using Instagram as a sales platform. 

How Waterfall Consumer Financing Encourages Instagram Sales

Waterfall consumer financing is a powerful web integration that can encourage conversions of consumers that arrive on an eCommerce store from Instagram. ChargeAfter is a leading provider of waterfall consumer financing solutions that businesses big and small partner with to leverage the benefits of online financing. The solution itself is a plugin that appears on a website’s checkout page, allowing all consumers to access it when arriving at their online shopping carts and initiating the checkout process. ChargeAfter’s waterfall consumer financing solution can give an eCommerce store’s customers access to instant loans with no additional interest at the push of a button. This is done by connecting the consumer with ChargeAfter’s network of lenders on the fly and providing repayment plans without the need for credit checks. The process ensures that consumers stay on the eCommerce site for longer and do not have to deal with third-party financial service providers. It streamlines their shopping experience, leading to an increase in conversions and Instagram sales. 

How to Use Instagram as a Sales Platform Best

Many brands have turned to Instagram as a sales platform to tap into new audiences and broaden their consumer base. But, not many of them are doing it effectively. There are several ways that you can get ahead of the competition when using Instagram as a sales platform beyond introducing waterfall consumer financing into your website. 

1. Utilize Shopping Tags

Shopping tags help Instagram’s algorithm categorize your products and send them to users that may be interested in the specific or similar categories. You can add tags to just about every type of Instagram content, and it also allows your customers to easily browse more items in your catalog without having to jump through various user experience hurdles. 

2. Encourage User-Generated Content

User-generated content on Instagram is essentially a new review strategy that can put an eCommerce platform in good stead for increasing sales. This type of content refers to content that is posted or shared by customers who have had pleasant experiences with your brand. They become brand advocates for your store, encouraging their friends and family to buy from you as well. This can have an extremely positive domino effect on revenue generation via Instagram. 

3. Collaborate With Influencers

Beyond the general public, influencers are powerful individuals that can advocate for your brand. You can collaborate with influencers to launch new products, discounts, and other strategies, associating your brand with theirs and enticing their existing following to check out your store. 

Instagram continues to grow in popularity and has quickly become a powerful sales platform for eCommerce businesses. Using Instagram and waterfall consumer financing, you can tap into new audiences and increase revenue generation. 

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Analytics are essential to making strategic eCommerce decisions, and business owners should work closely with marketing teams to make profitable decisions based on data. In this article, we discuss marketing analytics, the types of marketing analytics, and how online financing can support successful decisions based on marketing analytics.

What Are Marketing Analytics?

Marketing analytics refers to data collected on critical consumer touchpoints within a sales funnel. These analytics paint a clear picture of the buyer’s journey and give eCommerce businesses insights that prove critical to making profitable marketing decisions. Marketing analytics should be collected and reported on monthly to ensure that all eCommerce marketing initiatives are backed by strategic insight. 

Types of Marketing Analytics

There are several types of marketing analytics that eCommerce stores can assess to make strategic marketing decisions. While there are often too many to track simultaneously, marketing teams can prioritize relevant marketing metrics to track analytics that will help grow the particular eCommerce store. For example, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) businesses should keep a close watch on abandoned cart rates as these can offer valuable insight on the reasons why shoppers turn away from their stores right before making a purchase. Below are a few key marketing metrics that will yield valuable marketing analytics for online store optimization:

• Descriptive analytics
• Predictive analytics
• Prescriptive analytics

You can learn more about these types of analytics here.

How Online Financing Supports Marketing Analytics

With these marketing metrics in mind, let’s take a look at how online financing can support decisions made based on marketing analytics. 

1. Improved Customer Lifetime Value

eCommerce marketing teams can assess customer lifetime values to determine how profitable their customers are for the business. Customer lifetime value refers to the total spend an individual customer will make with an online store across all of their purchases. Improving customer lifetime values is a sign of positive customer retention, a profitable marketing strategy that requires attention. Online financing from ChargeAfter can help increase customer lifetime values as it provides many important consumer benefits. Customers are enticed by online financing as it provides an easy way to shop online, encouraging them to return to an online store to purchase again. It does this by giving them access to on-demand financing at the push of a button without credit checks and zero-interest repayment plans. 

2. Longer Time Spent on Site

eCommerce platforms should consider the time that customers spend on their sites. The longer a potential customer spends on a site, the more likely they will make a purchase. The time spent on site can provide insight into the user experience, the relevancy of branded content, the attractiveness of discounts and products, and more. To increase customer time spent on-site during checkout, integrate online financing from ChargeAfter. This integration gives customers access to instant financing options without having to leave your store to consult their bank or third-party lender. This can lead to greater sales during a business month. 

3. Higher Conversion Rates

Conversions are critical to the success of eCommerce stores. Marketing teams must look into the current conversion rates and determine avenues to grow these throughout the year. One such method is integrating online financing from ChargeAfter. The platform encourages consumers to shop as it provides greater financial aid than alternative platforms. Furthermore, the integration is easy-to-use. eCommerce platforms that integrate online financing will also yield more impactful marketing analytics as ChargeAfter’s round-the-clock customer service and data insights are a complimentary add-on to partnership packages. 

Marketing analytics are essential to making better business decisions in 2022. Online store owners should consider key marketing metrics and the insights gathered from analytics to drive success moving forward. With the inclusion of online financing from ChargeAfter, eCommerce stores will see improved customer lifetime values, longer times spent on site, and higher conversion rates. 

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Another year has come and gone, and 2022 will bring with it new growth opportunities for eCommerce business owners. Marketing trends, web integrations, and consumer-centric considerations will drive success for online stores that return to business this year. In this article, we share several tips on how to grow your business in 2022. We cover consumer financing, SEO strategies, and more ways to offer richer shopping experiences. Implement one or more of these tips to see profitable growth in the first quarter of the new year and beyond. 

1. Integrate Leading Consumer Financing

It is vitally important that, as an online store, you offer consumer financing or consumer lending options. Consumer financing is quickly becoming a mainstay checkout feature of the best eCommerce businesses. But, it is not enough to partner with any old consumer financing company. In 2022, you should consider partnering with the leading consumer financing companies on the market. ChargeAfter offers a first-class consumer financing service to eCommerce businesses big and small that wish to leverage the benefits of online financing. The service differs from traditional bank lending as consumers can instantly tap into the company’s extensive network of lenders without credit checks. Furthermore, ChargeAfter lenders offer repayment plans with no additional interest charges. These benefits, coupled with comprehensive technical support and data-driven recommendations, ensure ChargeAfter offers a stand-out service for eCommerce partners. The integration of consumer financing with ChargeAfter will promote sales at checkout. 

2. Develop Stronger SEO Strategies

All online stores need an SEO strategy. Search engine optimization (SEO) ensures that your website is visible to shoppers browsing Google and other search engines. With a solid SEO strategy, eCommerce businesses can appear on the first page of the search results for specific keywords commonly entered by consumers looking for certain products or services. You may have an SEO strategy in place, but it’s time to develop a stronger one as the new year brings new opportunities to leverage powerful Google features. You should register your business with Google My Business even if your store is completely online. This will help shoppers closer to your operational location find you quicker through location-based SEO. You should also sign up with Google Merchant Center and link your catalog with Google Shopping. This ensures that your shop is visible on Google when shoppers are browsing for specific products, also giving them the ability to purchase directly from Google. This can speed up your sales funnel, leading to profitable growth.

3. Optimize for Omnichannel Marketing

Having a website and a Facebook page is the bare minimum for running a successful eCommerce business. In 2022, you must develop an omnichannel marketing strategy. Omnichannel marketing involves creating consistent brand messaging across a variety of platforms to leverage sales and brand loyalty at every consumer touchpoint. You should utilize email marketing, consumer financing at checkout, branded drop shipping, social media advertising, Google advertising, and more. The more places that your brand is visible, the better. 

4. Put Your Customers at the Center of Business

Don’t just say that you put your customers first, actually deliver on this promise. As an eCommerce platform, you should pride yourself in positive customer reviews and showcase this social proof on your website and social media platforms. You should deploy customer review collection strategies to acquire as much customer insight as possible, and then make decisions to mitigate the frequency of negative reviews. Rather than hiding or deleting negative reviews, respond to them timely with sincerity and put a customer service representative on the case to resolve the issue. This is one example of how you can show customers that they represent the core of your business operations. There are many more ways to put customers at the center of your business. 

Grow your eCommerce business in 2022 with consumer financing, stronger SEO strategies, omnichannel marketing, and a consumer-centric operational model. These are the key tips to implement in the new year for a profitable first quarter.

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If your eCommerce store does not have an SEO strategy in place then you are missing opportunities to attract new customers daily. Moving into 2022, you must work with your marketing team to adopt an effective SEO strategy as it is critical to your organic click-through rates and online visibility. In this article, we offer several SEO tips for eCommerce success and suggest how online financing can support your strategy. 

Utilize Competitive Keywords

Keywords are a cornerstone of a successful SEO strategy. You must be using keywords on every web page so that Google can track and report on your SEO, potentially putting you higher up the search results so that you can attract new customers. Each piece of content that you write should be created around keywords that consumers search Google to find answers to. For example, if you sell electronics then you should consider keywords that consumers often type into the Google search engine when looking for electronics. Some keywords could be “electronic products for sale”, “the best phones to buy”, “70-inch TVs for sale”. These long-tail keywords can help your web pages and products appear when consumers search these terms. If you want to know how to do keyword research, then check out this helpful resource. Once you have your keywords ready to deploy, then install the Yoast SEO plugin on your website and follow their instructions on how to optimize every page of your website for SEO. 

Use Google’s Shopping Features

SEO goes beyond keywords, and you can improve the SEO of your eCommerce platform by using the range of Google Shopping features available to you. Specifically, the Google Merchant Center allows you to pull your product catalog into Google Shopping so that searchers will see your products as they browse for similar products or specific items in your catalog. The Google Shopping feature doubles down on your SEO efforts, prioritizing your products over other eCommerce platforms that are not using Google Merchant Center. 

How to Optimize Checkout With SEO and Online Financing

ChargeAfter offers a powerful online financing tool that gives your consumers access to instant financing options at the push of a button during checkout. Your consumers can access ChargeAfter’s extensive network of lenders without having to apply for a credit check and receive repayment plans with zero interest. Therefore, they can shop easily and quickly on your eCommerce platform without having to procure the support of their financial service provider. This streamlines the user experience, playing in favor of Google’s SEO algorithms. Furthermore, there is an opportunity to further optimize your checkout process with online financing by deploying keywords on a brand new landing page. This landing page can serve as a runway to your store and facilitate an efficient sales funnel to checkout. Using keywords that center around getting the best value when shopping, securing financing easily, and eliminating the need to use third-party financial service providers, you can attract customers with a specific interest in the benefits of online financing. This will improve your online visibility for those benefits and attract customers to this new landing page. 

SEO is essential to a successful eCommerce business, and you should be thinking about how to leverage an effective SEO strategy so that you can attract new shoppers during the festive season and into the new year. By utilizing competitive keywords, using Google’s powerful shopping features, and optimizing your checkout and other landing pages with online financing and related keywords, you can build an SEO strategy that works for your business and grows your sales. 

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Omnichannel marketing, or multi-channel marketing, is a strategy whereby brands clearly identify and deliver a holistic user experience via a myriad of marketing avenues. The strategy if deployed by the best eCommerce brands, and online store owners should consider the potential for eCommerce growth with omnichannel marketing in 2022. Adopting a clever omnichannel marketing strategy can set businesses apart from their competition, helping leverage greater sales and return on investment (ROI).In this article, we explore how you can utilize omnichannel marketing and discuss whether or not waterfall consumer financing is an essential addition to your strategy for the new year.

The Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing provides brands with more opportunities to immerse consumers in their brand lifestyle. It is a powerful strategy that businesses can harness in 2022 to deliver better advertising campaigns. The following expresses the key benefits of omnichannel marketing:

Improves the Consumer Journey

Businesses that deploy omnichannel marketing improve the user journey for their consumers, making their shopping experience far easier and increasing the likelihood of landing the sale. Using a diverse sales funnel of branded content at every touchpoint, businesses can position their brands as leaders within their industry and keep their services or products front of mind for their customers and potential consumers. 

Provides Stronger Analytics

Omnichannel marketing strategies give eCommerce businesses access to stronger analytical data on their consumers. Brands can track every touchpoint and metrics associated with the wide range of consumer-centric decisions. Using an omnichannel marketing strategy, brands can determine where their consumers are coming from, why they action specific areas of the sales funnel, and what they do after purchasing. Having access to these insights, marketing teams can make informed decisions that lead to longer customer lifetime values. 

Improve Customer Service

A positive customer service experience is critical to eCommerce success, and brands can improve their customer service with the implementation of omnichannel marketing. Omnichannel marketing calls for the automation of many areas of redundant customer service. For example, a chatbot can facilitate efficient communications with customers that have general queries and questions. A customer service representative is, instead, needed when problems require greater attention. This can save businesses money as they downscale their customer service budget while optimizing the user’s experience with customer service through the quick and reliable answering of common questions that users may have as they navigate the omnichannel brand experience. 

Support Omnichannel Marketing with Waterfall Consumer Financing for Greater Sales

As a massive part of omnichannel marketing involves supporting and improving consumers’ experiences with your store, you should consider additional tools to facilitate a better omnichannel marketing strategy. One such method is integrating waterfall consumer financing.

Waterfall consumer financing is a solution shared by leading fintech buy now pay later (BNPL) platforms like ChargeAfter. The service includes a financing option at the checkout that consumers can utilize to purchase goods. It differs from traditional financing models as it allows businesses to leverage ChargeAfter’s already existing network of lenders. Your consumers do not need to consult third-party financial service providers to procure financing to make their orders. Nor do they need to undergo credit checks and they receive comprehensive financial coverage with zero interest.

This is a very appealing strategy that supports the omnichannel marketing consumer journey as it is easy-to-use and accessible via a button at checkout. The streamlined process ensures that consumers convert as quickly as possible, generating greater revenue each month. 

Moving into 2022, it is essential that you integrate waterfall consumer financing at checkout to improve your omnichannel marketing strategy and experience greater sales after the festive season.

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Another year of business, another festive season to attract new buyers. You are bound to have deployed marketing strategies and marketing campaigns to draw the attention of consumers this holiday season, but have you considered how to retain those customers moving into the new year? This is critically important as customer retention is more affordable than customer acquisition. If you are not yet sure how to improve your customer lifetime values in 2022, then check out this article on how consumer financing and other tools can help you retain customers after the festive season.

Integrate Consumer Financing for More Sales

Consumer financing from ChargeAfter is one of the most effective integrations to improve sales and retain customers in the new year. If you are not aware of consumer financing already, then it is high time you consider implementing the powerful strategy in the new year to improve your customer lifetime values. With consumer financing, your consumers have access to on-demand financing at the push of a button during checkout without having to leave your store. They do not need to chat with their financial service providers to acquire a loan, pay extensive interest on their repayments, or apply for a credit check. This ensures that more consumers are able to access funding when shopping with your eCommerce platform and facilitates customer retention by giving your shoppers a reason to shop with you again. 

Remarket With Powerful Advertising Campaigns

Many eCommerce brands continue to run advertising campaigns for new audiences. But, there is much to be said about remarketing campaigns that target consumers who are already aware of your brand. This is an incredibly cost-effective advertising strategy as it is easier to win over consumers with an understanding of your brand than it is to attract completely new buyers to your store. Remarketing campaigns are possible with social media advertising, Google display ads, and several other marketing channels. They allow you to target customers that have shopped with you before, helping you leverage consumers that may have not purchased your products in quite some time. 

Offer Incentives and Loyalty Programs

Incentivisation and loyalty programs are used by many eCommerce brands across industries because they are easy to implement, affordable, and beneficial. They improve sales by encouraging shoppers to become engaged customers that continue to return to your store for more. You can offer discounts and other forms of incentivization to loyal brand consumers who can drive up average order volumes and values after the festive season. 

Make Email Marketing a Priority

There are likely thousands of untapped consumers that belong to your email database that isn’t shopping in your store. These could be consumers that subscribed to a newsletter years ago or people that have shopped once and not again. Either way, you can use email marketing to attract individuals that have already expressed an interest in your brand and the products or services that you offer. Using tools like Mailchimp, email marketing can be a great avenue for increasing customer retention as it allows you to jump directly into the mailbox of valuable warm leads. You can entice purchases or clicks to your website with clever headlines, great resources, and discounts or promotions during your email campaigns.

Customer retention is critical to eCommerce success after the festive season, especially considering the influx of new buyers to your website during the holidays. To drive greater return on investment with your customer retention strategy, you can integrate consumer financing from ChargeAfter, remarket with advertising campaigns, offer loyalty programs, and utilize email marketing. 

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Google remains a stalwart platform for product searches as more and more shoppers at various stages of the sales funnel turn to the search platform for product information, prices, and deals. For this reason, utilizing Google Shopping alongside your eCommerce platform is a surefire way to reach shoppers that are unaware of your brand, searching Google to compare offerings, and those that are seeking solutions to solve their problems. To get in front of consumers and build more brand authority, especially on the search engine, eCommerce platforms must understand and integrate with Google Shopping alongside consumer financing options that will help improve sales. In this article, we discuss Google Shopping and how consumer financing can support your online business growth. 

What is Google Shopping?

Google Shopping refers to the product search engine wing of the international search engine platform. The platform allows consumers to browse, compare prices, and even shop a range of products drawn from the catalogs of billions of online stores across the web. This gives business owners a new revenue stream, enabling SEO functionality to position products in front of the competition. Furthermore, Google Shopping enables paid advertising to ensure that online stores can compete for consumer attention when inputting specific search terms into the search engine. Another benefit of Google Shopping is that eCommerce platforms can redirect traffic to their website from Google, creating a seamlessly integrated online shopping experience from search to collection exploration and purchasing. 

Why Should You Sell on Google?

There is a strong case to be made in favor of selling on Google alongside your eCommerce platform via service providers like Shopify, Bigcommerce, and Magento. For one thing, the search engine prioritizes Google Shopping listings in search through SEO and advertising enabling businesses to shut out competition and put their products front and center of their target markets. The feature also allows shoppers to purchase from businesses websites or Google itself with the Buy on Google function, creating seamless and efficient user experiences that are critical to eCommerce success. 

How to Utilize Google Merchant Center

The Google Merchant Center (GMC) enables businesses to list their product inventories on Google Shopping features. The following guide shares how to get your products on Google Shopping so that you can improve your eCommerce success:

1. Create a Google account
2. Verify your business with Google My Business
3. Create a Google Merchant Center account
4. Verify your website
5. Provide your business information
6. Include product information
7. Complete the Buy on Google setup
8. Connect with Google Ads
9. Run a campaign

Ensure that every aspect of your Google Shopping functionalities is SEO-friendly as this will help Google recognize your eCommerce platform as a leading company within your industry. 

How Consumer Financing Helps Improve Sales

With your Google Shopping setup, you can benefit from an increase in traffic to your website. To ensure that new shoppers convert, integrate consumer financing solutions to encourage sales. ChargeAfter is a leading provider of consumer financing solutions that facilitates seamless checkout for consumers using your website. This is done by connecting your shoppers with ChargeAfter’s extensive network of reputable lenders capable of fulfilling their financial requirements. Your shoppers receive instant access to zero-interest financing options at the push of a button if your website integrates ChargeAfter’s consumer financing. The consumer benefits speak for themselves, with no credit checks and personalized repayment plans extremely appealing to the modern shopper. This integration will ensure that your shoppers turn from casual browsers to enthusiastic buyers in no time. 

Using Google Shopping and consumer financing, eCommerce stores can set their brands apart from the competition and leverage greater sales this festive season. 

Want to learn more? Reach out to us here.

Marketing metrics are a cornerstone of online success. When it comes to digital retail, business owners and their marketing teams need to be clued up on the right metrics to measure success and how to track store performance against valuable data. Now more than ever, online retail stores need to underpin every action with metric analysis in order to discover what works and what doesn’t. This is especially important as metrics provide insight into consumer behavior, the driving force behind successful online retail. In this article, we discuss how you can track your eCommerce store performance with ChargeAfter consumer financing and foolproof metrics.

Consumer Financing Tracking With ChargeAfter

Before delving into the most common metrics to track store performance, let’s look at a newer and more powerful tool to analyze your success. ChargeAfter is a leading provider of consumer financing solutions that enable businesses to attract modern consumers and encourage sales. The platform provides shoppers with on-demand financing that requires no credit checks and does not come with costly monthly interest installments. The benefit of integrating ChargeAfter’s novel consumer financing solution speaks for itself. But, how does partnering with ChargeAfter help businesses track store performance? Well, ChargeAfter provides full reporting of consumer activity at checkout to ensure that the process is seamless and successful. ChargeAfter’s team of dedicated analysts provides comprehensive feedback regarding the utilization of the consumer financing plug-in as well as how your checkout pages are performing. With this data and recommendations, eCommerce store owners can make informed executive decisions regarding their online platforms and functionality. 

The combination of ChargeAfter’s support and tracking of the below-mentioned metrics can help your online platform cut through the clutter and ensure profitable growth.

Product Discovery Metrics

Online platforms need to assess their product discovery metrics including impressions, reach, and engagements. Utilizing paid media on socials or Google, online stores can serve their content to their audience and see these metrics results improve. Impressions provide an indication of how many people are viewing your content, reach refers to the number of consumers currently aware of and interested in your brand, and engagement shows how many of those consumers are interacting with your brand. Tracking these three metrics will give you an idea of your brand authority in the eyes of your target market. 

Acquisition Metrics

Acquisition metrics refer to trackable data on shoppers that are actually browsing your online platform to buy. Marketing teams should consider the email click-through rate and cost per acquisition first and foremost. These two metrics give online stores an idea of how appealing their content is and whether or not it is leading to valuable consumer action. A higher email click-through rate and lower cost per acquisition indicate that the online store’s digital marketing activities are efficient and cost-effective. 

Conversion Metrics

Conversion metrics are some of the most important as they help online stores track the actual sales of products on their online stores. Marketing teams should note changes in cart abandonment rates, average order values, and sales conversion rates. These metrics showcase how many shoppers are making profitable buying decisions and help teams determine why others may choose to leave a shop and buy elsewhere. Conversion metrics are critical to eCommerce success, and businesses that integrate ChargeAfter’s consumer financing enable better results because of the many benefits of BNPL solutions. 

Business owners and their marketing teams can track eCommerce store performance through analysis of key consumer metrics including product discovery, acquisition, and conversion metrics. Through an assessment of these metrics and full reporting support from ChargeAfter’s consumer financing team, eCommerce companies can improve their online shopping experiences and land more sales.

Want to learn more? Reach out to us here.