The New Key to Digital Marketing Success for Jewelers in 2021

If there is one thing we learned in 2020, it's that the online presence for all retail businesses is the most important factor for generating revenue. It doesn't mean that all transactions happen online, but it's the primary catalyst for business to funnel through.

You may be thinking your website is the only factor to your online success, and in fact, it is one of the most crucial pieces of your digital footprint. However, we need to look the website as the hub and all of the other spokes working in unison that make up the entire scope of your business online. While a website that is not optimized for conversions is going to yield less than satisfactory results, we are going to cover the holistic solution. In past blogs, we have covered in great detail how to build an affective website, including how Shopify can be the platform that jewelers should choose in 2021. Here are a few of our past blogs and a webinar you can reference that will give you a blueprint for an ideal website. It will also allow you to learn more about our vision and actionable plans we put into place for our clients at GemFind, and what set us apart as an agency in the jewelry industry.

Key Features For A Successful Jewelry Store Website

Benefits of Choosing Shopify for Your Jewelry Store's Website Platform

Webinar Replay with AGS: How to Build a Website that Generates Sales for a Jewelry Store

How to Turn Your Website Into a Lead Generation Hub

The New Key to Digital Marketing Success

Here at GemFind Digital Solutions, we have been running successful digital marketing campaigns for jewelers for many years but we witnessed a shift in 2020 that was made more apparent than in years past. The main factor was most likely, that while everyone was at home due to Covid-19 stay-at-home orders nationwide, more online shopping was being done. As retail therapy may have provided a much needed relief from the monotony consumers were feeling, opting for shopping as opposed to going on trips became the norm in 2020. Jewelers also began to feel the need to pay more attention to this segment of their business for the immediate time being and years to come.

Taking these factors into consideration, we ran campaigns ranging from simple to extremely advanced and the jewelers that had the most success had one noticeable difference; they had a complete funnel for their business built. If you are asking yourself what we mean by a funnel, you may remember the old sales funnels in sales and marketing training which requires several touch-points and closing techniques. Digitally, a funnel represents the process of marketing to a target audience and taking them through a series of events that facilitates their online experience until they are ready to purchase, otherwise referred to as the 'buyer's journey'. A simple way to look at is by segmenting the funnel in sections such as top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel. The top being the "awareness" stage, middle being the "consideration" stage and the bottom being the "decision" or "conversion" stage.

One of the major differences between a traditional sales funnel and a digital marketing funnel is that a digital funnel is all focused around automated ways to nurture customers throughout their buyer's journey, while the traditional sales funnel is all controlled by a sales person.

Marketing Automation & Full Funnel Marketing

To break down the key to digital marketing success in 2021, we need to break down the funnel-- and how this applies to a jewelry store. To not sugar coat it, the success is following this model:

1. Fill your funnel with quality leads
1. Search Engine Traffic - If you follow our blogs, webinars or content we put out, you probably know why we put so much importance on search engine marketing and that is the 'intent' factor. A consumer typing in "Engagement Rings Near Me" indicates the searcher has intent to purchase an Engagement Ring. This is the core reason why starting with search engines is so important. In order to get a significant amount of traffic, you really need to be doing both organic Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search (PPC). If you are unsure about what that means, please refer to one of our past blogs.
2. Email Lists - Your email list is one of the most valuable assets you can have a jeweler but most jewelers we speak to don't realize that it can be used in dozens of ways that can help fill a funnel. First of all, you can load your email list into Facebook as a custom audience so you can deliver ads to them on Facebook and Instagram. Second, you can use that list to create a lookalike audience, which is an audience determined by an algorithm that Facebook has created in order to find shoppers with similar browsing and buying patterns as your original list of customers.
2. Use Dynamic Ads to keep your customers in your funnel. Dynamic Ads are the most effective type of retargeting ads to deliver to your website visitors. There is a bit of set-up involved, but once you have it running, your marketing automation kicks in to continue delivering relevant ads to your audience in order to encourage them to make a purchase. In order to set this up, you need to load your products into Google Merchant Center and in your Facebook Catalog. If you use Shopify, there is an automated way to make this happen for both of these platforms. Once you are set-up, your past website visitors will see your ads which contain products they viewed on your website displayed on potentially millions of websites that they visit that are a part of Google's Display Network, including on other major search engines like Yahoo and Msn. Additionally, when your website visitors log into Facebook or Instagram, they are going to see those same products. So you can be sleeping and your retargeting continues to work for you, for every customer that visits your website!
3. Use Lookalike Audiences to constantly add quality users into the funnel. As mentioned in point #1, you have to start with filling the funnel with quality traffic and part of that reason is so you can use automation to keep adding more potential quality customers into the funnel. Lookalike audiences allows your audience to continue to grow from all of the important core sources as it finds those new potential customers that mirror the original list based on their buying and browsing history.
4. Use Email Automation to continue the nurturing and customer relationship development. Tools like Klaviyo are taking the ecommerce world by storm because of how simple it is to create automated email nurturing campaigns based on website visitors behavior. By setting up automated emails, you can send similar items to products they viewed or send offers on the specific products they were interested in. Also, utilizing abandoned cart emails if they added something to their cart but didn't complete their purchase in order to remind them to complete it. Email automation is one of the most under-utilized components jewelers need to be using but it's importance cannot be understated as it acts as the final catch-all to your website visitors to keep your funnel bulletproof.
5. Always Use Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Once you have your funnel set-up, monitor your website traffic's analytics and make informed decisions for changes based on holes you see on your website.
6. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Keep following this method to create the most complete digital marketing success strategy.

In Closing

All of these components used in conjunction together will help ensure your marketing success but it is not mean to discount all of the topics we didn't cover such as being active on social media, doing your standard email marketing, doing your events and using all of the other tools in your toolbelt.

At GemFind, we are experts in creating, implementing, monitoring, and optimizing digital strategies for all of our clients. If you would like to consult with us on your strategy for 2021 and learn more about our offerings please reach out to us!