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Jesse and Rich give their predictions for ecommerce in 2019 that you can apply right away. Automated marketing is the main topic where they discuss how to launch dynamic remarketing on Facebook and Google Shopping campaigns. Both tactics are from integrations built into the ������ Control Panel and use your product information to drive the ads so they are very simple to do on your own.

Transcript

Jesse: Richard, Happy New Year!

Richard: Happy New Year to you! Had a good one?

Jesse: I did. Sleeping by probably 10:30 or so.

Richard: You watched the New York ball drop instead of San Diego ball drop.

Jesse: That’s the New Year’s for me. New York ball drop. The kids weren’t even awake. It’s all good. But with the New Year comes time to reflect and plan for a new year. And I’ve been hearing all, I mean, I’m obviously a podcast junkie, we make podcasts. Everybody else is done their 2019 predictions for the year. I want to make sure we got our couple of predictions out there, put them onto tape so we can look back a year from now on. See if we can pat ourselves in the back or be like “Man, totally missed that one.”

Richard: We going for the for sure win. Here we go in for the most tough one, the one that no one else was talking about, a little bit of both.

Jesse: We get there for sure win in there. Video will become more important. We got a guaranteed win on the board. All right, OK, Rich, let’s get risky.

Richard: I say conversational commerce in many forms, let’s narrow it down to get some more specific, will become more and more relevant. Not just a thing you heard about, what I mean by that is either bots, automation via bots in messengers, whatever, and or, more specifically, voice. Voice commerce will become a thing.

Jesse: You got bots and voice there.

Richard: Conversational commerce, basically. We’ve got into this entire time and I don’t want to go too deep, like “we’re going to see more Instagram or Facebook or Google, we’re going to see more videos.” We know all that. We’ve heard everyone talk about these other predictions. We want to go into a little more specific. Two years in a row, Alexa and Google Home have been the number one sellers at Christmas. So now I think there are enough devices in the home. We’re going to go through a few parlor tricks for the rest of the year. You and I own these already, we’re already junkies for them, but we also know they’re mostly parlor tricks like “Put the timer on”.

Jesse: Timers and music for now.

Richard: Alexa gets to be the bad guy to the kids when the timer’s done instead of us. But yeah, more specifically, it will be a thing. I think three…

Jesse: Percentage of e-commerce in 2019 comes from voice. Everything will be conversational.

Richard:Oh shoot, if you let me throw in bots too…

Jesse: Yeah!

Richard: Oh my gosh, if you let me throw in bots. I could say and especially if it’s not just America, it’s crazy numbers. I think you could end up being 25%. But if you let me throw in bots.

Jesse: We’ll write that down.

Richard: They’re buying cars in China, it’s really high. If just in the world of voice alone like “Alexa, buy my soap”, somewhere between 2 and 3 %. I still think I’m guessing high but even if it’s a half a percent right now, that would be a lot of percentages higher.

Jesse: I do think you’re high on that one (laughing.)

Richard: Not literally (laughing.)

Jesse: Pretty sure not high, but I think you’re high in your predictions. But I love it. I love voice commerce, I think that’s good for people to be thinking about like, “How do you integrate into that world”? It doesn’t mean pull over your car right now and write down voice commerce. That’s not what we’re saying, but think about it. All right, so I can be quite as bold with that. But I’m going to say my prediction is that Instagram will be the number one social media of 2019. Оbviously it’s already kind of getting there but I think that everybody has this negative feeling about Facebook. Whether it’s their continued privacy problems or the hangover of the election of 2016 or just in general people are negative on Facebook. But they totally love this totally different company called Instagram which is owned by the exact same company Facebook.

Richard: It’s amazing, isn’t it? What makes you realize: “Should I delete Facebook? Should I have more?”

Jesse: “I deleted Facebook, and I’m using just Instagram now”. Really, you’re still using Facebook. And Facebook is going to put all their attention, all the power of their advertising and targeting in Instagram, but I think that’s why the founders left in a few months ago as their Facebook execs just kept pushing, pushing, pushing more. I wanted more the real estate on Instagram cuz that’s where the group is coming from but for marketers and for e-commerce people out there, this is actually good news. Because now Facebook advertising is super powerful, super targeted and you can do a lot of it on Instagram, but I think there’s going to be more now and then kind of part of that, obviously. If you guys are regular listeners of the podcast we talked about Instagram Shopping right now that is still free so Instagram shopping is free. Pretty much guarantee that in 2019 there’s going to be some sort of paid option to probably boosted posts or some way to, give me some way that they’re going to monetize Instagram shopping. Right now it’s free. Get on there, get Instagram on. More with Instagram stories. I don’t love Instagram stories. I hate vertical video, but I know these kids these days hold their phones up with their thumb on it. That’s the weight of vertical video. I guess, you can’t fight it. In general, I think to boost your Instagram game for 2019 is good to take away from that. What we’re seeing from that is we’re going to have a lot more people online. The barrier to entry is going to be a lot easier with Instagram and Facebook. So you don’t even really need a full store. There can be a lot more people online. Which means for everybody listening to the show, you have to up your game a little bit. The good thing is we give you all the tools here. That’s what I want to talk about today. The topic of today is automated marketing for 2019. Hopefully, if you guys are going to get your workout plans your diet plan for January, let’s get what you’re going to do for your business. I think today we talk about two strategies. These are your workout plan and your diet, things that you should Implement in 2019 and they’re both automated so…

Richard: It won’t even take the whole month to do this.

Jesse: You can do this today. This is a one-day thing, this is where you can pull over and write down a note. We’re talking about specifically Google Shopping, PPC and then Facebook remarketing, which is also PPC. They are both paid marketing things. If you’re you’re like, “I won’t pay”, then this is probably not for you. These are both paid options for traffic and what I like about them is that if there were not automated options available right now, I would advise people that I know, friends of mine, and in e-commerce world: “this is what you should do.” You should have Google Shopping set up and you should have dynamic remarketing on both Facebook and Google.

Richard: Yeah, they could literally other than having your product photos in the store, and your descriptions, and your prices, other than the basic store set up. Maybe Google Analytics then, and then these two.

Jesse: This is the first month things. This is not like “when you finally made it you should do it”, this is not like a fancy bell later on. This is blocking and tackling. These are the evergreen marketing strategies that everybody should have. Every e-commerce owner should at least have tried this for several months. If you really intend to make this a good solid business, if you just playing around like “you don’t have to do this”, but if you’re doing this to make money, these are the things you should do.

Richard: We won’t go super deep on it. But let’s just say this one thing. When you spend money on Google or Facebook, do they help you sell things? Yes. Yes, bottom line. You may not totally understand it yet. You might not totally get why we’re saying this but these guys aren’t in a business to just spin our money and not send us customers back.

Jesse: They’re not ripping you off, this is not a scam. They take your money and they send you customers back. That’s their whole business model. So, these are the best options. I would say there’s a lot of things you can do. What to start with Google Shopping first? There’re a lot of things. I’ve done all sorts of text ads for 10 years, but Google shopping for e-commerce is kind of the cream of the crop. A couple of years ago this was really hard. You hired an agency or a developer to set it up for you unless you can do XML feeds or know how to download a product feed into CSV. It’s out of date now, so forget about those acronyms. It’s very easy now, you can take your product feed inside your store, this is with ������, if you guys are on other platforms there’s maybe an option, maybe it’s not that is easy, but you should be doing this. If you’re any e-commerce no matter what platform you’re on. With ������, we have the ability to sync your product feed into a Google Shopping account. That’s fully automated. So the syncing is automated and then the running of the campaign is automated. There is more detail on some other podcasts. Search back for those. But the gist of it is everybody has created a product feed. If you any e-commerce, you have the name of the product, you have a description, you do need a fairly big description, you can’t just have five words in your description of the product. But this app takes those words and when people search, it matches up to another’s, all sorts of AI behind the scenes here that match up when people are searching on Google. If your product matches their search, you’ll be displayed on the top of Google. By the top of Google I mean it’s the picture of your product and the price and the name of the product right underneath, it’s magical.

Richard: And to be clear. It’s the picture of the product, the title that you’ve already done the work for.

Jesse: Correct.

Richard: We’re going to let you know in a few minutes how to do this. It’s literally like three steps. I think it was and that’s it like your stores already set up. This is 30 minutes and that’s only cuz…

Jesse: That’s probably putting your credit card and your address.

Richard: The whole thing from start to finish.

Jesse: I think about this too. It was advanced level feature a couple years ago, but now it’s not, it is for newbies as well. If you were like “I launch this store and do my sales, where’s my traffic”? Well, you probably don’t have any traffic cuz it’s not like Google just send people, just send traffic to your store. You have to get the traffic to it.

Richard: We won’t go deep on this but you’re either spending money because it’s taking you a lot of time to go to the organic route, you create a podcast, you could you do whatever, all these little things to make sure they come back to you but that still takes time. Someone is going to sit there, they’re going to do it, they are going to put it all together, or you pay money. The advertising and the people who are looking for that thing that comes back to one another. Anyway, you’re going to be spending money, the difference between, why we’re talking about this specifically is that you can’t just turn on the spicket of SEO. You can’t just turn on the spicket, but you can turn on the picket of I pay $5.73 and they send me a customer, whatever, I made up a number there obviously.

Jesse: The beauty is that you can do this right away. So if you have a product, I happen to be holding a water bottle right now. It’s insulated wood covered water bottle, is that how he described it? I don’t know, but if I had a store selling wood covered insulated water bottles and you Google that right now that would be the picture of this product that would show up. It’s pretty amazing. It would take a lot of time and other ways but maybe that wasn’t the best example of a product but people can take that in right now and you can pay to have your product displayed and it’s on the top of Google with the price right there. If they don’t like it, then they think the price is too high. They’re probably not going to click on it. Just a very quick test of your store, is this going to work or not? And it’s really good for new people. To me, that should be a basic strategy for getting that first amount of traffic to your site. Definitely something to do. If you do want to do this right now, just let me tell you where I go here. So we’re inside of ������, go the All Sales channel on the left, go to Google Shopping. Depending on when you listen to this, there’s going to be some sort of promotion. As your learning, you’re getting some free money from Google on that. Definitely, want to encourage people, if you’re thinking you just need some traffic to your store, to see if it’s going to work or not. That’s the way this is done.

Richard: I love free money.

Jesse: That’s a basic strategy. You should put this in place. Watch the numbers, etc. The second step you want to talk about is ok, you got some traffic to your store. How do you close the deal? How do you get people coming back? So the second strategy is a bit of a mouthful but it’s dynamic product remarketing. You knew this both with Google and with Facebook, we’re going to focus a little bit more on Facebook with this. You can cover the two big traffic networks, but kind of backing up a little bit on Facebook marketing. If you’ve read about it or heard a podcast and things, you might be thinking “Hey, Facebook advertise, it’s kind of hard.” And it is, there’s a bunch of different options. You have boosted posts. You have to trade images, videos, carousels, instant experiences, Instagram stories messenger. Targeting options look like all this stuff that you’re supposed to know for Facebook marketing. If you’re going to be a working agency to do Facebook marketing, you have to know all that stuff. For now, forget about all of that. You don’t have to know those terms, may be an in-depth podcast another day. You can do it. We’re just going to skip to the very most productive in the best ROI like a gem of all Facebook advertising which is dynamic product remarketing. But what that means is when somebody goes to your store and they go on to the product page for the insulated water bottle with faux wood covering and they don’t buy it. When they go to that. A visitor could be that same day, could be a week or two weeks later, there on Facebook and Instagram and they see that product with the same price right in their newsfeed or there are all sorts of different ways. You can see this product.

Richard: And it’s not because they’re listening to your phone. It’s because you went to the site, and they were pixeled.

Jesse: People a few years ago: “It’s creepy, they’re on my phone”. No, this is very simple technology, it’s a pixel. I think people are used to it now. Everybody’s seen and they know, when you visit a product, it’s likely you can be targeted with later and they think it’s not like you had this giant agency behind you doing this. No, it’s actually very simple to do.

Richard: You are going to try to buy this, right, but with the reason why this retargeting is so useful is most people that go to your site — not trying to sound disheartening — but most people aren’t going to buy, correct. Like what is it, the 1 to 2% maybe?

Jesse: 1���ٴ���3%���������Դǰ�������.

Richard: When there will be conversational commerce. Where I’m going with that is we’ve all heard it whether it was our old sales manager grandfather. Whoever, it’s 5 to 10 touch points. So what did that mean back in the day? You had to make a cold call, you had to send a snail mail, you had to do all these different things. They see it on a billboard, they see it, and eventually, they’d see it enough times, they come buy it. But this is a way you don’t have to do all those things. This is what I love about these two tactics. It’s yeah, I’m going to have to do something. I’m going to go click a couple of buttons. I’m going to spend half an hour to an hour to do these two things and I’m going to spend a little bit of money, but they’re going to send me traffic cuz their business more or less, both their models are advertising and here’s something that — again I’m not trying to make people seem like that’s all bad. But it’s free and good news or bad news. If something is free, you’re probably the commodity.

Jesse: What you mean is using Google is free.

Richard: Exactly. I bet you, no questions asked if all of a sudden people say “I’ll pay $50 a year to use Facebook” and never have to ask that be all over it. Cuz I think they only average like $34. I won’t go deep in that but I think the average I saw a number like $34 per user, that’s amazing. They’re getting that ads cuz they’re sending people business. They’re sending people business. So, take advantage of what everyone else is doing to you and do the same thing.

Jesse: You’re just tapping into… these are two giant companies. They run the advertising world and what we talked about here was not just figured out how to go to Facebook and figure it out. These are like the gems of both of their advertising models. Right? Like this is the ones that automatically work and you don’t have to do the work. You don’t have to create an ad, you already took a picture of your product and put it in your ������ catalog. Right? So we’re just taking that same data and blasting these photos. Blasting photos bad word, but like we’re showing these photos to targeted people that looked at them, had some sort of interest and maybe didn’t buy it right then, but maybe later on, maybe a week later there is a buying mood. I think they’re better ads to me personally than other random ads. You know, I’m like, okay I was looking at…

Richard: At least you could know it’s the ad. One way I’ve been feeling about these days either do creative stuff that’s helpful for your clients or maybe an ad. Don’t try to like try to make it be both, this kind of weird.

Jesse: Or do creative stuff, get people to your site and now they’re pixeled and they’ll be remarketed, right? So this is why you want to do this. I know we talked about this earlier like all the other things you can do, we talked about another podcast, you just know, you want to get people to your site, but if you don’t have remarketing set up, you’re going to pay to get people to your site and then you’re not taking advantage of the fact that maybe they didn’t buy right then. These are two good ways, one brings new people to your site. The second one brings those same people back to your site to buy and these are evergreen strategies. Both things. You should be doing throughout the year. Have Facebook and Google, definitely get out there and take advantage of these.

Richard: It’s just as easy to set up. So go into the ������ control panel.

Jesse: This is probably going to change in a couple months. If you’re hearing this later on in 2019, we’re going to elevate this cuz we believe so strongly in it. But right now you go to the app section, the app market, you look for the app called Facebook and Google Retargeting, then follow the process. They’re going to be linking up some catalogs and there’s a Facebook pixel that needs to be in there, that’s kind of the magic secret sauce for Facebook.

Richard: But again, you’re not running any code. You’re not doing anything.

Jesse: Don’t be scared by that. But you need to follow the process there. It’s gonna take a couple minutes, but we made this very simple because we want to help people out and we know this is one of the best ways to help people out, get their store going. So that’s how you do it. These are two strategies for 2019. This is the workout, right? Like you didn’t get out in a jog. This is what we need to be doing for 2019. Our first request for you, we don’t really make many requests on this podcast.

Richard: We gave you two tips. We’re going to have two request now.

Jesse: The first one is just please do both because we believe it will make you successful. The second one. We would like to pay for 2019. Please if you’re listening to this, go subscribe via your favorite podcast player. We’re on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud. We pretty much have all the podcast players. If you listen to this on the website, please go to your whatever favorite podcast player because we want to be able to be in touch with you regularly and help you out, and that helps us know that we’re doing the right thing here right now.

Richard: It’s also good to get feedback. We’d love five-star reviews and all that stuff. You think we deserve, give it to us. You want us to cover certain things, you like when we cover certain things. We still have the email as well.

Jesse: Please, subscribe but we definitely want to get your feedback. If you think it’s a five-star, please give us a five-star review, or the comment if you have any requests for us, as you can go to ecwid.com/blog/podcast and there are comments there. You can say “Hey, I want you to cover this topic”, or we actually also have the button there. There’s a button to sign up if you want to be on the show. We’ve had a few guests on right now. We need a few more. If you want to be a guest on the show, please tell us why you think you’d be an interesting guest: you have an interesting product or a great story. You know, what else we are looking for.

Richard: We just want to help, right? It’s partially why you started at first, please go do this. We’ve been horrible at asking in return, but we just figured every time someone subscribes, rates, gives reviews, we get more info on what you like, what you would like us to cover more, all that. We just wanna keep in touch with you. We want you to be successful.

Jesse: All right guys, it gets pretty good closing thought there. 2019 blocking and tackling it out there and get these marking things going and make 2019 a year.

Richard: Sounds good. See you later Jesse.

Jesse: Happy New Year!