E-COMMERCE
Etsy is a thriving marketplace
It is not only about Amazon.
Etsy, a marketplace for mostly handmade items, reported its earnings for the third quarter of 2021:
- GMS (gross merchandise sales) on the Etsy marketplace totaled $2.7 billion. That’s a 23.7% increase from last year.
In case you’re unfamiliar, gross merchandise sales are the dollar amount of items sold through a marketplace during a specific time period (July, August, and September in this case).
In other words, buyers and sellers on Etsy exchanged $2.7 billion in the third quarter of 2021.
- The Etsy marketplace had 11.1 million new buyers who hadn’t purchased in a year or more. The fastest-growing segment on Etsy is habitual buyers, who purchased for six or more days and spent more than $200 in the previous twelve months.
What this means for you: Most of us have thought about selling on Amazon or eBay. If you are selling handmade items or gifts, the numbers above may make you reconsider your choices.
Google now offers ways to calculate shipping speeds and optimize ads with transaction data
Google has added two useful features to help you increase your e-commerce sales.
Custom shipping speeds: Faster shipping times = more conversions. On the other hand, inaccurate shipping times = bad reviews.
To help you avoid the latter, Google has just added two new ways to calculate delivery time in your Merchant Center:
- You can specify your shipping service, carrier, and ship-from location, and Google will calculate estimated delivery times. Currently, you’ll be able to do this for ship-from locations in the US, for FedEx/UPS, and USPS.
- You can link and authorize your partner to share historical order tracking signals within Google. Currently, this is available for CedCommerce, Sales & Orders, ShipHero, ShipStation, and Simprosys. Google will add more partners in the coming months.
Smart bidding: When it comes to AI advertising, the more data you feed the beast, the better. Google has added an option where you can upload your first-party transaction data.
Google will then use that data to optimize store sales conversions for Search and Shopping campaigns. The whole goal is for you to get more sales in-store and online.
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COPYWRITING
How to assemble attention-sucking headlines like a puzzle
Do we really need to spend time and keystrokes explaining why headlines are essential?
Come on!
Instead, let’s just dive headfirst into this post that Laura Catella Georgi shared in the Justin & Stefan Talk Copy Facebook group on how to create headlines that your audience can’t help but be attracted to.
The basics: A headline is made of different elements. And when you mix and match these elements, coming with ideas is easy.
The three standard sections of a headline are:
- Preheadline
- Headline
- Post-headline
You won’t always need them all. Although, in each one of these sections you can include different elements. This means you can create tons headline combinations.
Pre-headline:
- Call out the audience: You can either call out the avatar (For all marketers…), or call out their problem (For all marketers sick and tired of rising CPMs).
- Point or agitate the problem: “If after the iOS14 update your agency lost clients because you can’t deliver the same results…”
- Credibility: Does your product have a credible source, spokesperson, or history? “Mark Zuckerberg said this system can erase the iOS14 effect.”
- Proof: This is evidence of why your system works.
- Social proof.
- Mechanism of the solution tease: Tease is what mechanism makes your USP (unique selling proposition) work. “Thanks to a script of code you install in your server…”
- Mechanism of the problem tease: Tease the real reason why your audience is struggling with a problem, that they might not be aware of. “It’s not about the targeting or tracking, your CPA skyrocketed because you’re missing…”
- Urgency.
- Scarcity.
Headline:
- Big promise: The amazing outcome you want your customer to get.
- Mechanism of the solution.
- Story/hook tease: “How I got my ex clients begged me on their knees to manage their Facebook campaigns again.”.
Post-headline
- Address skepticism or common objections.
- Credibility/proof/social proof.
- Dismiss alternate popular solutions: “This system has nothing to do with Interests targeting, having killer creatives or upsells.”
- Timeframe/immediacy: Explain how long it takes to get the outcome.
- CTA to consume the rest of the page.
Read the whole post to check the explanations and examples Laura Catella Georgi gave for each one of these elements.
SPONSORED BY INSIGHTS
Not using a product page, but still crushing it
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- They don’t upsell. Not in the classic sense, anyway. They only do it after the sales process. We showed the details in our full deep dive.
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FROM THE CREW
Are you a thought leader in the digital marketing space? We want to work with you!
Hey there you! Are you a thought leader in our marvelous digital marketing industry? Do you have a following on social media, a blog, or a newsletter? Well, we want to work with you!
It doesn’t matter if it’s YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or any other channel. If marketers pay attention to you, and they might like our newsletter, we want to work with you.
Just fill in this form and we’ll be in touch to let you know more. Oh, and if you know someone else who could be a fit, just send this over to them too!
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
E-COMMERCE: Triple Whale is the operating system for e-commerce. One login, one dashboard, all the metrics, plus a mobile app. No more swimming through data. Try for 30 days. 100% money-back guarantee.*
SEO: Be prepared for some ranking shifts. Google has released a spam update for November 2021.
FACEBOOK: Paid Facebook groups are here! Facebook has announced a slew of features for its community products.
E-COMMERCE: “Buy now, pay later” is soon coming to a retail store near you. Zip, a BNPL provider, will issue physical cards that can be used to make in-store purchases in installments.
SNAPCHAT: Planning to use Snapchat Ads on Black Friday? Here are some tips from Snap for making the most of the holiday season.
GOOGLE: Page experience ranking is coming to the desktop.
TWITTER: Your favorite social media tool is about to get more Twitter features. Twitter’s API has been updated to support posting and deleting tweets.
GOOGLE: They’ve conceded. Google will allow developers to offer alternative payment options for their play store in South Korea.
*This is a sponsored post.
BRAIN TEASER
You use a knife to slice my head,
And weep beside me when I’m dead.
What am I?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
This Taiwanese teacher teaches math on Pornhub
If you want to teach math lessons online, YouTube is probably your choice.
Not for this guy. This Taiwanese teacher is teaching math lessons on PornHub. No worries, he’s fully dressed.
Chang Hsu is now a verified Pornhub performer with over 6,900 subscribers. His material includes some hardcore equations with a side of raw trigonometry.
Most of Chang’s videos are around 40 minutes long, which is around 3 times longer than the average watch time on the adult site.
Chang’s tagline? “Play Hard, Study Hard”. Teenagers seem to agree, with Chang’s videos receiving over 1.9 million views on the platform.
How did he come up with the idea? Chang’s idea was both obvious and a spark of genius: “I asked myself where to find my target students, say college boys, and the answer popped out: adult video platforms,” he said. Duh…