As a marketing person in the ReferralCandy team, I’ve had my fair share of AHA moments. And if I ask the team as well, I’m sure they’ll say the same. Everyone in marketing knows that there’s a lot of trial and error, a lot of research required, and a lot of unknowns in this niche. 

Here’s how we define the AHA moment. It is the moment when someone suddenly realizes something that changes their perspective on marketing or helps them to improve their results.

While some seem like the basic marketing must-knows. Not everyone gets it until they “get it” you know? Some of the most common AHA moments for marketing experts include:

• Realizing that the customer is the most important person in marketing. Everything that a marketing expert does should be focused on providing value to the customer.
• Understanding that marketing is about building relationships. Marketing is not ONLY about selling products or services. It is about building relationships with customers so that they will want to engage with you.
• Learning that content is king. Content is arguably one of the best ways to attract and engage customers. By creating high-quality content that answers what customers want to know, marketing experts can position themselves as experts in their field and build trust with potential customers.
• Realizing that clean data is essential for marketing success. Clean data can be and should be used to track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and make improvements. Knowing what’s doing well and what’s not doing well gives you a clear direction on how to improve your existing strategies. 

We daresay that ninety percent of marketers have gone through all four realizations in their marketing lifetime. And today we’re going to share some of the biggest personal AHA moments from marketing experts we’ve spoken to! 

AHA Moment 1: SMS marketing works better than Email marketing

CEO and Founder of Budai Media, Daniel Budai shared that their BIG AHA moment was when they achieved more revenue from SMS marketing for a few of their ecommerce clients than from email marketing. 

Surprisingly. 

And they’re talking about 7-low-8 figure ecommerce stores! 

Their prime example was The Caveman Style, a US-based kitchen knife brand targeting the 35 to 55-year-old being active in the household. 

They’d already been managing the brand’s email marketing and had achieved around 30% of total sales from email marketing. 

In early Q4 2022, Daniel’s team migrated the brand to a new SMS tool called Recart where they set up the major SMS automations and synched their SMS campaigns with their email and content calendar. 

The team found 3 keys to their success:

• The brand used Facebook and Instagram ads to convert leads into the SMS list. This was crucial because while SMS had great conversion potential, most brands struggle to get subscribers to their initial list. 
• They made a differentiation between VIP and non-VIP SMS subscribers. And also made sure to personalize the message to each segment.
• They sent twelve SMS campaigns in November and nine in December focusing them on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas. Many brands are afraid to send these many messages but this is the time of the year to go all in regarding the quantity of messaging. 

With this strategy, they hit a total of 283,000 USD in SMS marketing revenue with 5,000 new subscribers and 16,958 SMS subscribers in total. 

That’s an 8.2 USD revenue per subscriber in 60 days!

This meant that Budai Media generated 33% of the store’s total revenue through SMS marketing in the busiest 2 months of the year while email made up 25% of their total sales.

Many people don’t seem to agree, however with this example, it does indicate that SMS marketing is not only reliable as a marketing channel but with the right strategy, it can be one of the main revenue drivers of an ecommerce brand. 

AHA Moment 2: The power of targeted pop-ups for data-gathering & personalization

Suzanne Reeves heads up the Email & Customer Lifecycle team at Reload Digital, a full-service digital marketing agency with offices in Brisbane, London, and Manila. They work with many ecommerce brands, with clients from the beauty, fashion, homewares, and luxury spaces.

And recently she’s been championing the importance of maximizing data collection in order to build a solid understanding of the subscriber and customer database and to unlock new personalization capabilities.

Every ecommerce brand knows that the sign-up form is the initial touchpoint for data collection, but it’s usually not advisable to ask for lots of information upfront. It can get overwhelming for the visitor. 

So then the question is: How can we ask for data from subscribers further down the line?

Suzanne mentioned that several options came to mind, including dedicated campaigns, questions within the welcome flow with clicks tracked to identify responses, and preference centers, but these all tend to have fairly low response rates.

So, what else?

Enter… targeted pop-ups!

The team has been working with The Dairy to level up their email strategy, and identified that for a company selling beautiful phone cases, it would be useful to know which make of phone the subscriber has in order to send relevant products. 

So she got the team to redo the form by adding “Which phone make are you shopping for?”, but kept it optional to limit submission drop-off. They then also created a targeted pop-up form to display to people who hadn’t provided this information at sign-up, and linked it to automation featuring dynamic personalized products which are sent out shortly after form submission.

The targeted form’s submission rate boasted a fantastic 16%, demonstrating the value of asking a relevant question during people’s on-site browsing. As for the linked automation, this currently has a conversion rate of 3.1%, which is nice and healthy and represents people who may not have converted otherwise.

Her last piece of advice from her AHA moment is, “I would definitely recommend trialing targeted pop-ups as an ecommerce brand—they can be used for data captures like in this case, but also for lots more including discount reminders, showcasing offers exclusive to email subscribers, and more!”

AHA Moment 3: Simple marketing audits work wonders

“99% of brands don’t have what I would consider the basics of ecommerce marketing in place,” shares Isaiah Bollinger, CEO of Trellis. 

According to Isaiah, these ecommerce brands are lacking best practices in email automation, SEO, Google ads, Performance Max campaigns, high-quality photography, high-quality product pages, social media ads, and so on. 

This led him and his team to realize that simply doing a thorough marketing audit and business analysis almost always leads to low-hanging fruit opportunities. Most of these opportunities can lead to ROI in as little as 90 days.

To wrap things up

Marketing experts who shared their AHA moments from 2022 all had one thing in common: they were all willing to experiment and try new things. They were also all willing to fail and learn from their mistakes. If you want to be successful in marketing, you need to be willing to do the same.

Here are some specific takeaways from the article:

• Focus on the customer experience. The best marketing campaigns are those that focus on providing a great customer experience. This means understanding your customers' needs and wants, and then creating content and experiences that meet those needs.
• Use data to inform your decisions. Data is a powerful tool that can help you make better marketing decisions. By tracking your results and analyzing your data, you can see what's working and what's not, and then make changes accordingly.
• Be creative. Don't be afraid to try new things and be creative with your marketing campaigns. The most successful campaigns are often those that are unexpected and stand out from the crowd.
• Be patient. Marketing takes time and effort to see results. Don't expect to see overnight success. Just keep at it, and eventually, you'll start to see results.

If you follow these tips, you'll be well on your way to having your own AHA moment in marketing in 2023.