May 4th Marketing Ideas to Rocket eCommerce Conversions

For the millions of Star War fans across the world, May 4th is a special day. The fanbase has elected this day as Star Wars Day for the pun on the franchise’s now legendary catchphrase “May the Fourth be with you”. As our tribute to this day, we channeled some Jedi wisdom to come up with four May 4th marketing ideas to give your eCommerce results a boost.

May 4th Marketing Ideas for Your eCommerce Store

All of the ideas can be implemented any time, but you can opt to maximize the effect by implementing it with a touch of Star Wars. ?

1. Make cross galaxian partnerships

Forget about the starships, lightsabers and all the cool bots, Star Wars is all about the power of friendships and alliances. That’s the source of real strength that enabled the main characters to take on the mighty Empire.

“We have powerful friends. You’re going to regret this.” – Leia

So why not try to adopt partnership as a form of sustainable growth for your online business? The idea is to seek complementary services and organizations that can benefit from cross-promotion of offerings. For example, if you’re selling kitchen appliances or cooking tools, then partnering with a local cooking school can be an effective way to reach a common audience — people who are interested in cooking.

There are multiple partnership structures you can consider, such as:

• Product bundling. Offering complementary products in a bundle, like a gift box.
• Partnering on Event. Planning and holding a promotional event together is a good way to raise immediate brand awareness for both partners.
• Partnering on Competition. Creating a joint competition is another way effective way to co-promote the brands.
• Joint content production. Brands can join together to create some phenomenal contents together. For example, outdoors tour agencies can work with a sports brand to develop expert advises on hiking, climbing or any other outdoor activities.

Just keep in mind to avoid promoting potentially competitive products when considering a partnership.

2. Use the force to your advantage

The rebellions in Star Wars spread via words of mouth and joined together through a common cause. The force, in our case, is the existing customer base you have already garnered. The loyal base of your customers who are happy with your product or services is a great force that can draw mass influence to your brand awareness. It’s a powerful marketing channel because people tend to trust the opinions of other people as opposed to any direct brand promotions.

“I’m one with the Force. The Force is with me.” – Chirrut Îmwe

Ways to harness such referral marketing power includes:

• Solicit customer reviews, and promote the positive ones.
• Make your product experience shareable. With 1-click to share tweets or social mention tools.
• Encourage user-generated content. This can be anything from Instagram photos, videos, FB posts or each blog contributions.
• Direct referral program. And offer a reward to the customers who share your products with friends and families.

3. Enter battlefront with your best technology

“Don’t worry about Master Luke. I’m sure he’ll be all right. He’s quite clever, you know… for a human being.” – C-3PO

Like the trusted R2D2 and C-3PO in the Star Wars saga, bots and automation can be a real game-changer in the competitive eCommerce battlefield. AI-driven marketing automation can help scale your customer engagement with a personal touch at any point of shopping journey.

Many of the eCommerce sales processes follow a repeatable pattern that can be automated with a marketing automation tool such as Contactpigeon. For example, welcoming a new subscriber or alerting a customer to repurchase a product can be on auto-pilot.

Some more automatic marketing ideas for eCommerce are:

• Welcome a returning visitor with a unique greeting on site
• Recoup abandoned carts
• Run reactivation campaign to inactive customers with a targeted offer
• Alert visitors on sales to the items they viewed but didn’t purchase

Leveraging the right tools can not only help you save time (imagining welcoming every new customer manually?!?) but enable you to gain visitor insights in a much more scalable way. In turn, these insights can be used to generate uber targeted campaigns that lift the average conversion rate of your store.

4. Open to new possibilities, adopt a multi-channel approach

One lesson we learn from Star Wars is to keep our mind open to new possibilities. This help broadens our horizons and, therefore, reach. This attitude can be applied to new ways to reach your target audience.

“You can’t stop change any more than you can stop the suns from setting.” – Shmi Skywalker

Be aware of the new channels and areas where your potential customers may be – whether it is via Instagram, snap-chat or blog space – and try to gradually incorporate those channels into your marketing stack.

A few channels that you may not have tried are:

• Push notifications
• Messengers
• Youtube

To optimize the multi-channel approach, two things are key:

1. Integration across the channels. To do that you need a strong CRM or unified solution that can interact with all the channels you’re present in. This way your customers indicated interests and behavior on one channel can be a source of input to your coherent marketing campaign.
2. Delivering a seamless customer experience. Your offers, tone of voice and the general brand message should be consistent across the channels. This provides a more coherent marketing and branding towards your customers.

React, Adjust and Evolve

Lastly, just like the rest of the galaxy, the online eCommerce landscape is constantly adapt to new consumer trends and technologies that redefine traditional best practices. The way to be is to continuously seek new wisdom to evolve the way you market. We hope that these May 4th marketing ideas can serve as a catalyst to spark new inspirations for your eCommerce store.

Best of luck, and as always, May the Force be with you.

via GIPHY