eCommerce Mission Control

Hello,

Welcome to the latest edition of the eCommerce Mission Control Newsletter from Astronaut Party Inc. We spend our days growing eCommerce brands. Every week we learn new approaches, strategies, and tactics and share them with you in this newsletter. Feel free to reply with feedback.

Up and to the right,

Luke & The Astronaut Party Team

Are Landing Pages Always Better?

By Beth Teutschmann

Landing pages are a staple in the digital marketing landscape, often lauded as a necessity for success.

And this is usually true….unless it isn’t. 

We’re big advocates of landing pages, but we also recognize that they aren’t perfect for every situation, brand, or product. 

Here’s an example of one of those situations.

An Example Landing Page Fail

One of our clients sells patented tools that make regular machinery and automotive maintenance much easier—for professionals and hobbyists alike. 

They sell for $40 or less and solve a specific problem for the user, making maintenance easier, cleaner, and faster and helping save other resources. 

These products are wildly popular among their customers.

We tested landing pages for each product to help our client gain incremental sales and new customer reach. 

Specifically, we tested out a Listicle style landing page (you know, the kind that highlights product features and says something like “5 Reasons Why You Need X”). 

The Results

The Listicle landing pages failed abysmally. The standard PDPs generated upwards of 25% more revenue per visit than the Listicles.

So what went wrong? Here’s what we think happened. 

1. The products serve a specific use case that customers can immediately see value in. They don’t need to be convinced to buy, they just want to buy it and use it and make their lives easier. 

2. The products have a lower price point. Both products are under $50; customers don’t need to be wined and dined like high ticket sales to determine whether or not they need to buy it. 

3. Overall, this client has a really short funnel. Customers see the product and buy it; they don’t walk away and think about it for a week or so and come back. Again, this isn’t a high ticket product, customers don’t need to consider their options very long. 

How to Know When a Landing Page is Right

To know if a landing page will help, consider the following criteria:

• Funnel Length - For products with longer delay from introduction to purchase, landing pages can help move people down the funnel. But if they are very quick, like in the example above, sometimes adding more content slows buyers down or distracts them.

• Price - Generally the more expensive the product, the more influence a landing page will have on a buyer’s desire to purchase. Lower priced products often benefit from more product information, but less pitching and sell.

• Use Cases - If your product only has one use case for one type of customer, landing pages may be less important. If many people might use your product, creating landing pages by use case or audience makes a lot of sense.

• Product Complexity & Education - If the product needs a lot of explanation, landing pages can be a huge help. But if a couple of pictures and a description communicates enough about your product for someone to buy it, a longer landing page may get in the way of purchase.

The Bottom Line

If customers are already convinced they want the product, they don’t need a list of five reasons to convince them to buy it. They already know what those reasons are simply by understanding the product and how it works. Sometimes, buyers just want to buy.

Third-Party Audiences: What are they, and are they worth it?

By Carlo Burriesci

We always seek ways to get the most value from our media buying. One emerging trend is using outside data providers to identify new and existing audiences. These third-party audience providers often combine your existing data, either from your website or customer file, with their own data sources, which are often from private sources. The idea is that their data source can help better identify and target your best customers. All partners have different and sometimes overlapping data sources. And, of course, you pay a premium to work with each of these partners, and their pricing structures are different.

The Players

Over the past year, we’ve worked with the following partners:

• Black Crow: Uses predictive AI to identify website visitors that are most likely to convert and repurchase. It then creates lookalikes of top-of-the-funnel audiences based on the behavior and characteristics of your best customers.

• Windfall leverages a vast amount of publicly available data to enrich your customer file and create lookalikes of your best customers. It helps increase knowledge about your customers, increase retargeting reach, and identify new top-of-the-funnel customers.

• Proxima: Leverages a database of Shopify transactions from thousands of stores across millions of individuals to create lookalike audiences of people who buy similar things as your customers. This can help you find new customers with similar buying habits that you wouldn’t have reached otherwise.

• Quorum: Leverages mobile phone location data around retail locations to identify buyers with similar interests for targeting on programmatic (Display/Native/CTV/OTT/OLV) and social media channels.

• Others: There a bunch of other players out there as well, including Shopify’s own Audiences.

Our Takeaways from Using Third-Party Audiences

If you are thinking about using third-party audiences, be aware of the following:

• Results across prospecting and retargeting will vary: And different partners have different strengths. We’ve found that sometimes, the partners that pitched off of better retargeting strength actually performed better at the top of the funnel, as well as the reverse. This was unexpected and sometimes counter intuitive.

• Value might not be just ROAS: With Proxima and Windfall, we see benefits (e.g., higher LTV, customer profiles, higher AOV) that, with the right budget balance, can justify their use.

• Communication is key: If audience performance falters, discuss this with your account reps. They’ll work with you to brainstorm new audiences to test or ways to optimize current ones.

• Know that performance changes over time: They all pitch on how great performance is at the beginning and try to get you on a long-term contract, but that doesn’t mean the performance will last as long as the contract.

When to Use Third-Party Audiences

• When you want or need more reach - For some accounts and spending levels having a new audience is very helpful.

• When you’ve plateaued in efficiency - If you’ve tried everything else and think a better audience could increase performance, there is little downside to trying these.

• When the technology is compelling - Many providers add identity resolution or other features that can help the overall business.

Are these audiences necessary for success? Probably not, but they can sometimes increase performance between 10 and 30%, and for certain scale ad accounts, this makes sense.

Joke of the Week

What type of books do astronauts read?

Comet books.

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