How to Use Slack to Manage Your E-commerce Inbound Marketing

So your e-commerce business is seeing a good level of growth. Your sales are increasing month-on-month due to the new inbound marketing strategy that you have implemented.

In order to achieve this growth you have employed more team members to create, implement and maintain your inbound marketing strategy. 

The strategy started well, but due to the increase in workforce size and the amount of marketing mediums used, communication between teams has become disjointed as people only communicate to each other through direct emails. This is making your business activities very opaque. 

Your SEO team are targeting keywords that is not being integrated into your blog content, and your main marketing message is becoming distorted, losing its consistency across your channels.

This fragmentation is heavily impacting the teams ability to manage the e-commerce inbound marketing activities. It is damaging your customer engagement and lowering your clickthrough rate.

Introducing Slack

Slack is a cloud-based chat tool which allows you and your team to communicate and collaborate with one another.  It is platform that “connects teams with the apps, services and resources they need to get work done.” Slack can therefore solve your communication issues and make your inbound marketing activities manageable again.

Let me tell you how…

Streamlining communication

Your inbound marketing strategy will be using a variety of mediums to attract consumers. This will include blogs, social media, SEO, PPC and downloadable content. 

Thus, many of your employees or colleagues will be working on different areas at once, all of which will need to be integrated together. Consequently, your business needs to be completely transparent across all departments so that people can ask questions, have input on each channel, and be able to see whether your other team members work will have implications on theirs.

Slack allows you to exchange direct messages with colleagues one-to-one and also in small groups. This is ideal for teams to discuss day-to-day activities. For example your content marketing team discussing their content calendar.

You can create ‘channels’ for different topics and invite as many users as you see fit. This allows you to organise your threads by different levels of your inbound marketing strategy, and different stages of your sales funnel. 

Use slack to keep everyone in your team up to date with all the latest in marketing by using a channel to exchange articles. You can do this by integrating Slack with Zest.

Here is a screenshot of Codedesign’s Slack account. As you can see it is easy to navigate between channels and direct messages.

Searchable conversations

In marketing, especially digital marketing you need be constantly staying up to date with current and future trends. This can be done through reading articles and using how-to-do guides to improve your marketing plan.

As previously mentioned, you can use the app 'Zest' to create a channel where you can post relevant articles for your team members to keep your ideas fresh and up-to-date. 

Now this scenario happens frequently. A member of the team has shared an article with you on a technique that you feel would be a perfect addition to your inbound marketing strategy. 

The problem is that it was sent a month ago...

How do you find it?

If this was an email then you would waste valuable time sifting through your inbox trying to locate the email with the article link. 

You can avoid this time trap by using Slack’s search bar to narrow down your search. 

As you can see below there are many different filters.

File sharing

Slack enables you to share files in your conversations. You can also input comments, while also being able to attach reminders to the documents you send and receive.

Tip: Integrate Slack with your Google Drive so that everything is in one place, allowing your colleagues to add their insights to your documents. This is useful when doing keyword research, coming up with content ideas and creating audits.Also, if all employees can see each others document drafts; even if it’s on a read-only basis, then your inbound marketing activities completely transparent, making it effortless to integrate your marketing channels with one another.

Integrations with other services

The most annoying thing about marketing and communication tools is that they only solve one problem, so you end up with a collection of tools all helping you with different things. This can often hinder communication as your colleagues may not be using the same tools as you to solve a problem. 

Slack also allows for integration with other apps. This can help you personalize your Slack to help your employees manage their time better and implement more effective inbound marketing techniques/decisions. 

Slack integrations you should be using to support your e-commerce's inbound marketing:

Growthbot - This bot answers your questions on marketing and sales know-hows. The information it provides is extremely useful when writing or researching the latest trends in inbound marketing.

DrumUp - Is a social media management and content curation tool. Once integrated with slack you will receive content ideas based on the keywords that you have set. These ideas can then be be scheduled straight to your social media pages.

NURTZ - This integration proof reads your content drafts for you, correcting all your spelling and grammatical errors! 

ARC - This will is our top pick for you. Arc gives brief summaries of your Google Analytics metrics through slack. This allows your sales and marketing teams to make quick real-time decisions without even entering Google Analytics.

Workast - Is a todo checklist app that allows you to assign yourself and other team members tasks. You will never miss a deadline again.

Zest - As previously mentioned Zest is a great tool to discover and share marketing content with your colleagues. Reading content is vital to make sure that your inbound marketing strategy doesn’t become rigid and outdated.

Outsourcing and Working Remotely

With inbound marketing there is always the option to outsource certain components that are better suited for a freelancer that is specialised in that field. 

An example of this if you want a designer to create an infographic for your content marketing team.S lack allows you and your team to constantly keep in touch with your designer without having to schedule meetings, enabling you to create more specific content which can lead to more backlinks and referrals. To further this Slack’s video call and screen sharing capabilities allows you to outsource areas of your business on a more long term basis as Slack keeps all your employees connected.

Use Slack to create a sales funnel strategy (B2B)

Once you have reaped the benefits of slack internally for managing your inbound marketing activities, you can then start using Slack to broaden your inbound marketing's reach! This is only applicable to B2B e-commerce companies.

You can create a sales funnel solely for slack.  Here is what your strategy should look like…

1. Attract - Get the attention of your Slack target audience. You can do this by getting invited to and engaging with Slack channels. Once you have achieved this you need to really understand what your target audience’s needs are to attract them with enticing content.
2. Convert - Now you need to convert your top of the funnel lead into a mid funnel lead. This can be done by inviting them to your own Slack channel or your website where you have opt-in email campaigns and clear call to actions.
3. Close - You can close leads through directing them to your site and close them on there. If you want to use something more engaging than emailing your leads then invite them to one-to-one conversations on Slack, or a conversation between your team and their. This opens up a personal quick fire, back and forth touch point!
4. Delight - Now you have them on a platform that doesn’t get spammed like email does, keep your customer up to date with content that will benefit them. This will make them repeat purchase and become an advocate for your brand/company. This can give you more leads on Slack.

Want to make elements of your inbound marketing strategy more effective? Then don’t hesitate to Contact Us!

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