Marketing is amongst the very first things a business considers when launching an e-commerce store. Once the products they want to sell are finalized, they begin to question how to drive more traffic to their online store and convert it into maximum sales. Every e-commerce business wants to increase the traffic on its website and, eventually, the conversions. But even after they have put together the basic strategy, it may still become challenging to select which marketing tactics they should begin with.
The most effective e-commerce marketing is always the result of effectively targeting the right audience. Therefore, marketing strategies should always be tailored to based upon a specific group’s interests, needs, and spending habits. Without a target group to focus on, your marketing will fall flat.
If you are also struggling to pick the best e-commerce marketing strategies that would help you drive traffic, conversions, and sales and feel stuck about where to begin.
Here, we have put together an overview of effective marketing tactics to help your business. The ideas to implement these tactics themselves run the gamut from straightforward acquisition to generating maximum sales. Start with implementing one or a combination of these strategies and figure out which one works the best for you to drive sales. So buckle up, and let’s begin.
1. Optimize Your Product Pages
This simple action plan makes it easy for your customers to get what they are looking for by a thousand folds. If your online store is inadequately designed, it can cost you a lot of customers. But what exactly does a below-par designed e-commerce website look like? Besides appearing deceiving, it also lacks a clear value proposition, hard-to-read font, or confusing navigation.
Even when you’ve improved the dimensions above, you could still be making a few design blunders. The questions to ask include:
Are the products properly segmented, or are too many products put on a single page?
Is there a perfect balance between text and visuals?
Is the ‘add to cart’ button easy to locate?
These are just a few of the many other things that you should consider. If your theme and UX aren’t converting well, consider redesigning your website for better user experience.
Apart from the design, Product Data works as the cornerstone of any online store. The product page is where your customers will evaluate the product and decide about buying any particular product. A significant problem with online businesses, mostly smaller and emerging ones, is underestimating how much investment and efforts need to create superior quality product data and display that data in a user-friendly manner on the online storefront.
A well thought out catalog data creation process can help your customers identify the right products more promptly. While better data will improve the category structure, product pages, sidebar filtering, conversion rate, and search capabilities of the website.
One more aspect to consider is to invest in optimizing your e-commerce product pages with filters and improved descriptions. If a customer is presented with pages of products and no means to sort them as per their need, they will inevitably lose interest. It is equivalent to how most people would never look past the third page of a Google search page. There is simply too much choice and not enough detail. This is why a filter is required to bring desirable products to a specific user on your online store. Some usual ideas for filters could include price, size, color, style, etc.
Customers want to understand any product before they move forward to buying it online. Also, they want to make an order or purchase that is as quick and easy as possible. By allowing them to filter your products and giving them a thorough description makes this feasible. Products with detailed descriptions that are also SEO-friendly will be easier to find and understand for both consumers and search engine crawlers. Eventually, a website that guides a customer and makes a decision more straightforward is much more likely to generate higher sales than one that does not.
2. Up-sell and Cross-sell to Boost On-Site Engagement
For many e-commerce businesses, cross-selling and up-selling can be more effective than acquiring a new customer. Sometimes your customers don’t know that a premium product or a bundle of products is available, or they may simply need more reasons to understand why they will be a better fit for their needs.
To understand cross-selling better, suppose one of your products has an alternative made with slightly better quality material or loaded with more features? In such cases, make sure to emphasize the difference and ask, in the right places, if the customer might want to upgrade to a premium product. This, in simple terms, is cross-selling.
Similarly, for up-selling, there are two primary considerations to keep in mind to maximize your sales:
- Make sure your up-sell products are related to the original product.
- Be perceptive of the foreseen price range of the customers.
Your product or service has to fit the customers’ original needs and requirements, and they may not be diligent about a higher price point once they have an anchor price in mind. An anchor price is basically the first number a customer sees, and it is the number upon which they compare other price points. For cross-selling, the new product must be a discernibly better fit than the original for it to be worth the additional cost.
By selling more or selling better products to every customer, you increase the average order value (AOV) per purchase and make a break in your overall sales.
3. Personalize the Experience from Beginning to End
Personalization is an effective marketing tactic to drive online sales. By utilizing behavioral data gathered from their past actions and preferences, personalized experiences can be served to the visiting customers.
Personalization has the potential to lift sales as much as by 10 perfect, but the opportunity is more astonishing than that. Since only 15 percent of e-commerce companies are using technology to its fullest extent.
You can consider the location for personalization to create an experience catered to where your customers are from the world. An excellent example is where businesses have added their “what’s popular” carousel of products, but personalizes it with trending items local to every visiting customer, along with price conversion in their currency.
Based on where the customers came from, what they were looking for, whether your store has just the right product or not. You should focus on making it easy for your potential customers to find the solutions they came looking for. Every e-commerce business wants to re-target a visitor before they leave their site. Make sure of that through the popup to notify them that you have something contextual to offer. For this, thinking like the customer will help you formulate your tactic.
4. Leverage Social Media Platforms
In any given second, Instagram or YouTube, or Google can alter anything with their algorithms, which results in cutting down the reach or is very difficult to find altogether. Every online business is familiar with this. But if you are training your customers to come to your online store with your strong social media presence, you know that you are the first thing they look up every morning when they reach for their phones. When you get control over that, you’re least affected by the whims of the social media platforms. Therefore, it is crucial to own that communication and information platform to acquire targeted customers.
Social media networks act as a golden corridor for e-commerce businesses. Customers are using social media to discover products and to get and share honest feedback than ever before. Devising these platforms is an excellent platform to reach out to your potential customers. However, different social media channels offer diverse opportunities and require specific marketing strategies to deliver the marketing message across and generate traffic and sales.
For example, for a brand with highly visual, premium products of fashion, decor, or design segment, Instagram and Pinterest provide a better medium for engaging consumers with visually appealing imagery. Facebook is exceptional to tell stories, seed fun and quirky content that gets shared and liked by people, and leverage viral marketing techniques. For hitting into current trends and reaching out to an actively engaged audience, Twitter counts highly. For DIY products, create product videos viral, or train customers to use the product, YouTube is a great medium. Reddit is perfect to brainstorm content regarding your products or services and your marketing messages without getting overly sales-driven.
Therefore, understanding how to use different platforms for organic marketing and paid marketing campaigns are required to develop relevant strategies for your e-commerce business.
5. Win back the abandoned cart customers
You’re losing dollars every time a visitor abandons their cart without completing the transaction. And this assertion is backed up by various studies. Customers add products to their carts but abandon them just before the checkout process.
One easy and effective e-commerce marketing idea to reduce the recurrence of abandoned carts is an email campaign, which can convince your customers to make a return visit and complete their unfinished purchase. Or come up with the problems they might be facing while making the online purchase.
Using quirky subject lines and emails with additional product suggestions, you can try to get customers to return to their carts. Craft an email that lures your customers to return to their abandoned carts by merely reminding them of what and why they considered purchasing in the first place. And that is why on the Checkout page, putting a popup offering a specific discount is valid only if they complete the purchase in the next few minutes. Based on the concept of urgency, this one is very simplistic and works well on reducing cart abandonment.
Once the customer makes the purchase, they enter the so-called “buying mode” and are around 80 percent more willing to repurchase something, so don’t miss out on this chance. If you don’t use fancy software to generate product recommendations based on user behavior, just put your top-selling products there. But for the beginning, you could start by manually adding your top-selling products as recommendations.
6. Offer Referral Discounts and Programs
Referral discounts are the classic marketing tactics to promote your online store, especially to reach new customers. There is no better advocate for your e-commerce business than a satisfied customer. That is why referral programs work best in every manner. Referred customers have 16 percent higher lifetime value per customer (LTV) and 18 percent less churn than those acquired by other means. And these are customers who are the backbone of any influential, fast-growth e-commerce business. If you haven’t started an e-commerce referral program, you will definitely miss out on that potential growth.
Store discount coupons are excellent for Referral Offers since they offer a high motivation to make the first purchase. You can offer similar discounts to the converted customers to keep this going for the long term. Emails are a great tool to put this to work. Send your customers an email directing them to refer their friends and the reward they would get in return.
7. Improve your Email Marketing Campaigns
It is worthless to simply capture a bunch of email addresses and let it be like that. You then need to send valuable regular emails for the tool to be an effective e-commerce marketing action.
Don’t overlook the customers who have made their first purchase. The more value and attention you pay to them after they’ve bought something, the more likely they will become intensely loyal brand evangelists who will not only turn into satisfied repeat customers. On top of that, they will also go and tell their friends about how great your products or services are.
Send them a thoughtful follow-up email with reasons to purchase from your online store again. Whatever way you make it happen, make your customers feel that you value and care for them. The key to any successful business begins with good relationships with their customers and not merely the transactions.
On that account, Email marketing is all about forming that relationship with your customer. There are several email campaigns you can use to grow that relationship. These 5 are the top most autoresponders email types that you must set up for your online store:
- Welcome Emails
- Onboarding Emails
- Browse abandon and abandoned cart Emails
- Email receipts
- Lead nurture Emails
8. Make an Impression on New Customers with Wishlist Reminder
Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools for making sales and generating loyal customers. Begin by actively promoting your blog, newsletter, and other capture methods to get as many subscribers possible.
One type of email that you must add to your list of e-commerce marketing lists is the wishlist reminder email. It is closely related to the abandoned cart email, but different. Both are designed to convince customers to take the final step in purchasing the products they intend to buy. It may work as the final trigger they need to finally make the purchase by sending out this email.
Here’s a list of occasions that are perfect for sending wishlist reminder emails that your customers will appreciate:
- Share informative content to help them get the most out of their recently purchased items.
- Send welcome emails as soon as the customers log-in to your website or subscribe to your newsletter.
- Offer exclusive promo codes and discounts.
- Send regular newsletters to alert them of newly launched, discount offers, product tips, and, when suitable, company news.
- Run a Buy One, Get One (BOGO) campaign in festive and holiday times to promote gifting solutions during the season.
- Send appreciation emails to your highest-value customers along with a personal note expressing your gratitude for their trust.
- For customers who visit your website but don’t make a purchase, ask about their experience and how you can improve it by sending solicit feedback email.
9. Engage Visitors with Live Chat
This is one more high-impact way to engage with your visitors and customers outside of email. Many live chat tools offer you to target browsers on individual pages after being on your website for a certain length of time. Also, if they have arrived on your site through an email newsletter. Live chat also permits you to have direct conversations with your customers so that you can answer and address customer queries and concerns right while they’re planning to purchase.
Utilize the live chat tool to engage prospects and inform current customers regarding their order status without contacting them over email. With the help of chatbots, you can also cut down on phone volume to answer all the questions. Live chat is also a compelling way of collecting customer data.
10. Dwell on Sales Forecasting
If you are planning on expanding your product collection or categories, then you should evaluate market demand and see if it is actually worth the cost. You can do that by a variety of approaches. It includes geographic validation, keyword research, social media trends, and much more. Another creative way to test out your target market is by pre-selling items to see how many customers show interest or place pre-orders.
If you’re attempting to determine which of the products to be released to, one way is to create pages for all of them, using high-quality product images and compelling descriptions for each one. After that, list them on your site as “out of stock” and examine which product gets the most attention in terms of clicks and back-in-stock notification requests. That’s the one to sell. This is just one way, depending upon your online business type, you can formulate the best to suit your business.
11. User-Generated Content is Gold
Customers tend to trust the reviews and feedback of existing customers and their experiences, so reviews and ratings matter more often for any e-commerce business. Using emails to get feedback after a product has been delivered to a customer should be a crucial part of your CRM strategy. User-generated content (UGC) generates social proof, and when prospective customers see that, they feel more confident in making the purchase.
User-generated content (UGC) such as ratings, unboxing, tutorials, product reviews, and comments can generate trust and interest, generating sales. Therefore, make sure you integrate tools for reviews, ratings, and comments on your e-commerce store with a valid authentication system for the actual customers. This, added with word of mouth and referral marketing, also can take your e-commerce business to the next level.
12. Focus on the Entire User Experience for Better Mobile Optimization
According to Statics, by 2021, more than half of all online purchases are expected to happen on mobile devices. Therefore, optimizing your online store for mobile means more than having a responsive design interface. It means you must design the site with mobile visitors in mind from start to end.
For instance, having a bigger add to cart button on all mobile product pages makes it easier for the customer to add product(s) to their cart without zooming and scrolling all the while. When a customer lands on any particular product page while using their smartphone and scrolls down, the “add to cart” button must appear at the bottom throughout the time. This saves the customer from having to scroll all the way back up/down, likely losing their spot on the page. You might also add the images in a different format and size, making it faster for mobile visitors to load product images and more comfortable zoom in.
You have to really invest your time to use your website as a customer would on various devices, including phones, tablets, and even small-sized laptops. Even if your design is optimized, in general, there is a good chance that your product images, product descriptions, content, and check out procedures may not be.
With your mobile visitors, you get a tiny window to make an impression and close the deal on a small screen while the visitor likely is doing other things. Therefore, it needs to load fast, be organized well, and get them moved along quickly before they get distracted or irritated. If you have a big collection of products and don’t have time to check every single of them at once. Then the best way is to start with your top sellers and work your way down the list, as your time permits. Look at them carefully from top to bottom and make sure they look amazing and present everything essential in a quick read, so you get a faster purchase.
13. Reward your Loyal Customers
Customer retention is one of the best cost-effective ways to boost online sales for any e-commerce company. According to Stitch Labs, return customers account for more than 22 percent of the revenue while making up only 11 percent of the total customer base. Even they also spend 15 percent more over a year as compared to new customers. Goes without mentioning, it makes a lot of sense to keep existing customers to make repeat purchases on your online storefront.
One way is to reward your repeat customers and big spenders through the customer loyalty program. There are many ways both you and the customers can benefit from a loyalty program. They offer them extra incentive to make a purchase, which in turn keeps your company on top-of-mind through regular reminders. Regardless of how you choose how to reward your loyal customers, and how frequently you do so. Making it a part of your marketing strategy is a vital step.
Some ways to do so include giving point-based incentives, with its own point-based currency that can be redeemed for discounts, free and fast shipping, or free gifts exclusively for loyal customers.
14.Start a Blog
High-quality and relevant content marketing are arguably one of the best techniques to attract potential customers and make your brand familiar in the market. It is a tried-and-tested tool to convert leads to customers in an organic manner. Recognizing this, you should employ a reasonable amount of time to formulate and compose informative content related to your products or services.
Any business would give anything just to see their name on the first page of Google. And having a blog can help immensely in expanding your online reach and reputation. To make the most out of it, you would frequently need to publish original and engaging content on your blog. However, merely writing blog posts and depending on Google to index may not be helpful. The possibility that your blog post stands on the first page as soon as you publish it is very faint. What you can do is promote the blog that transmits direct traffic to your web store.
These are some of the methods to increase maximum traffic to your online store through your blogs:
- Share your blog in online communities specific to your industry. For example, you can share your informative blogs on industry-specific forums or relevant threads of Reddit. This will help to grow your influence as well as drive sales for your online store.
- Tag all those people you have referred to in your blog while sharing it on social media. The chances of people sharing an article in which they are tagged are prominently high.
- Email your existing customers about the blog. The higher the number of people who engage strengthens the blog rank in SERPs.
15. Consider a combination of content marketing channels
As mentioned earlier, every e-commerce business should consider blogging regularly to connect with potential and targeted customers and rank better in Google search results. If you’re already generating high-quality content, consider actively featuring your blog on your online store too.
Also, don’t forget, there are many other ways to take advantage of content marketing than only posting on your blog space. The channels include:
Creating long-form content and guides to help customers using the products more effectively.
Podcasts to build a stronger community or feature expertise
Guests post on other websites to build awareness and generate backlinks, which also helps with SEO.
16. Influencer Marketing to Build Customers
The number suggests that 92% of people trust recommendations from individuals they follow online, even if they don’t know them over brands. With the continuous growth of the impact caused by social media and blogs, more and more people are converting to influencers to make their online purchase decisions.
Influencer marketing is reaching out to the influential figures of your niche or industry to expand your reach. You can identify an ideal influencer for your company by looking at the combination of content engagement, reach, and relevance to associate it with. There are various tools available to help you research more data and metrics about content engagement and reach. You can also reach out to e-commerce agencies that can assess you to partner with the right influencer for your online business.
Once you have made your pick and come to an agreement with the influencer, you can develop an effective strategy to promote and build relevant content through social media and other digital channels that persuade targeted visitors to become your customers.
No Better Time Than Now To Get In Action With Your Marketing Team
There are many e-commerce marketing strategies out there, but these are some of the most reliable and most effective for e-commerce businesses. These options range from free and instantaneous to those that will take months and thousands of dollars to implement. They’re all worthwhile, and they can all work on their own to grow your e-commerce exponentially.
When it comes to e-commerce marketing, the types of strategies you implement for your online business can make all the difference. Now that you have a sizable list of tactics to help you generate more traffic and improve your sales. It doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult. Just knowing and understanding the right steps to take is all you need.
That being said, your marketing strategies should incorporate a variety of different tactics that utilize both outbound and inbound marketing to target your audience ultimately. If you need any assistance to bring your e-commerce business, get in touch with us for a custom proposal.