Danielle Hixenbaugh founded Bloom Digital Agency after her first experience in print media when the digital revolution was just getting started falling in love with digital marketing, becoming an expert in retail and e-commerce, and finding her home at Bloom.
Bloom Digital Agency has been a transformative force within the e-commerce marketing space. They are shattering assumptions about the ways in which an agency can relate to their customers and deliver on sales promises.
“I wanted to build an agency that does what it says while providing a supportive space for our team and partners to thrive each day,” Danielle explains.
Bloom is home to a team of passionate experts, who specialize in multi-channel e-commerce marketing. These specialists leverage their partners’ assets to create exciting and beautiful ad campaigns across Google and social media in order to reach customers via effective email and SMS strategies while leading them through the conversion funnel.
Bloom’s creative experts enjoy doing great marketing for e-commerce and creating long-lasting relationships with their partners. As a result, their partners have reaped the rewards of their unconventional strategies and decisions, one of their partners saw an increase of over 1000% in email marketing subscriptions and a 60% growth in revenue in just a few months.
Ready to learn how Bloom achieves such great returns? Danielle Hixenbaugh shares with us some of the best practices in paid media, email, and SMS marketing that have helped Bloom enhance their partners’ marketing strategies and achieve phenomenal results.
Test and Monitor All the Time
Long gone are the days when there were stable guidelines to follow in order to maximize ad ROI. Nowadays, artificial intelligence causes algorithms to consistently remain in flux.
Consequently, according to Danielle, the best practice is to continue monitoring the performance of your ads to determine what is working at a particular time and in a particular context.
“If an ad starts taking off and you’re not watching closely to push more budget into it, you’re gonna miss an opportunity,” she explains.
Furthermore, A/B testing is still an essential part of ROI growth, but should be done in a sensible way. “Testing multiple variables at the same time is silly. You’re gonna end up with an unreadable matrix of data,” explains Danielle.
“The way to do it is to test different copy with the same ad sets or the same copy with different creatives to understand what’s working and what’s not,” she illustrates.
Content is Still King
If there is anything certain in the world of paid media, it’s that content is still king. Content is directly related to the experience that your customers have with you, which is why you must leave the best impression after every interaction.
Danielle urges her partners to realize the value of quality media by saying, “You have to spend money, or at least time, on quality photography and video because wonderful ads come from wonderful assets.”
She explains, “People who are buying online can’t fully experience your product, so you need to fill the ‘gap of the senses through videos and photos.”
Be Present & Engaged on Every Channel
Content isn’t only your ads and copy. Content is anything your customers see on the Internet related to you. This includes your website, social media, blog, or YouTube channel.
You must maintain an attractive and consistent image and keep sending content their way across all available channels.
“Customers have become savvier. If they see your ads, they’ll want to see your Instagram, Facebook, etc., because they need that social proof. If you haven’t posted anything in three years, that’s a major red flag for them,” explains Danielle.
Reach Your Customers Across the Web
Imagine the typical journey of your customers when they’re online: they see your ad, click on it, and it takes them to your website. Then, they receive a text message, get distracted, remember they have to call somebody else, and you lose them completely.
98% of your potential customers do not convert the first time they see your ads or even the first time they visit your website. “People don’t just click on your ad, go to your website, and buy from you. They get distracted or aren’t fully convinced, so you need to retarget,” explains Danielle.
You must connect with them again and meet them wherever they are digitally.. This means deploying an effective campaign across all relevant channels: Facebook, Instagram, Google, etc.
“Maybe people who see your ads on their phone from Facebook will go totheir desktop to Google search for you because they find it easier to shop that way. If your competition is bidding against you on Google, then your customer is gonna end up at your competitor’s website,” Danielle says.
Email and SMS Are Anything but Outdated
On the topic of retargeting, who said email and SMS were a thing of the past?
Danielle clarifies, “If you’re not getting at least 30% of your revenue from email marketing, you’re leaving money on the table.”
Email allows you to talk to your customers directly in their inboxes and connect with them in a personal way. It not only allows you to nurture prospects that provided you with their email, but also those you want to reconvert and buy again.
Danielle explains that customers crave an emotional connection to a purchase, especially after COVID by saying, “People have grown more concerned about small businesses and consider where their stuff comes from.” Reaching your customers via email allows you to earn their trust by delving more into what makes you stand out in ways they appreciate.
On the other hand, “SMS is for your VIP list,” Danielle says. These VIPs are the people who really want to hear about you or your perks. Their conversion rates are much higher than those of any other channel, but you need to use this line of communication wisely.
“Do not annoy them. Only use SMS for important stuff, things they’d really like to know about, like discounts or repurchases, because SMS is really intimate. So, talk to them like a friend,” she recommends.
