You have built an amazing website and stocked it with amazing products that the customers would love… but how will the people know that you have remarkable products for them?
The online arena has become quite competitive. If you have an online store then just having good products on your website doesn’t guarantee your survival or success in the market.
There is a minimum of 12 million online stores across the globe. This means if a business has to make its mark in the online world and increase its customer base, then it must create solid strategies to attract new customers and entice the old customers to continue buying from it.
Without having a successful eCommerce marketing strategy, one cannot expect a business to grow and become successful. Marketing strategies are not only needed to increase sales but also to inform the people about your brand and what it does.
If you are an entrepreneur who wants to spruce up his business’s marketing strategy without spending a fortune, then this article is for you.
The below-mentioned 11 proven eCommerce marketing tips and ideas will help you to take your business to new heights of success.
Let’s begin…
Table of Contents
11 Proven Ecommerce Marketing Tips & Ideas To Grow Your Business
1. Understand Your Customers
Before you start to formulate your marketing strategy you need to understand who your customers are. Your marketing strategy will fail miserably if you do not research your customers, their likes and dislikes, interests, hobbies, etc.
The best way to understand your customers is to observe how they behave online. You can join online communities and forums, etc. to understand the concerns of your potential audience and how you can help to overcome them. Social media platforms are also an excellent way to understand what your customers want from you.
Let’s suppose you deal in pet care items. To understand the concerns of your targeted audience you can interact with them on different online forums and learn about their expectations from a certain product. It will allow you to curate the strategy that will target them effectively. For instance, if the targeted audience is interested in a product that is reasonably priced then you can highlight the low-price of your product in your marketing campaigns.
Failure to understand your audience will make all your marketing efforts go to complete waste.
2. Mobile Responsive Website
During the past 6 months, 79% of buyers have used their smartphones to shop online. This means that an eCommerce website doesn’t have to work properly on desktop, but also on mobile devices.
If your website doesn’t display properly on mobile devices or fails to function smoothly, then you are going to lose a huge chunk of the audience who could’ve turned into your customers.
Make sure that your website works perfectly on mobile devices and loads quickly. If a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, 53% of users will exit the website.
To make your website work faster on a mobile device, compress your codes and images, and delete the unwanted plugins.
Want to make the shopping experience even better for your mobile users?
No problem! Just develop a mobile application for your website. It helps your users to access your online store with just a tap on their screens. You can even notify your users about the launch of new products or any other promotional scheme via a mobile application. Mobile applications tend to load faster than websites. This means your users don’t have to wait for the website to load completely to shop their favorite articles.
3. Update Your Website
Complicated website structure, irritating elements, bright colors, huge fonts, etc. will scare your customers away. Your website is a place where your potential audience will arrive and view your inventory. Therefore, it must look professional and have important features to make the shopping experience pleasant for the customers.
If your website is not updated with the latest features and options then your customers might not enjoy their shopping spree on your website.
To make your website attractive and useful for the audience, make sure to pay attention to its layout. Avoid using bright colors as it overwhelms the audience. Do not use a large font size as it will distract them. Keep the optimum font size to make it readable for the audience.
Try to keep your pages clean, do not stuff them with unnecessary images and videos. It annoys the customers and they will exit your website. Furthermore, keep the navigation menus simple. Not every person that comes to your website will be a tech expert, hence, create a navigation menu that can be easily used by everyone.
Include a search option in the main menu. It will help your customers to find out their desired articles in a few seconds. If your website lacks one include it to enhance your buyers’ shopping experience.
4. Use Live Chat Feature
The biggest advantage of physical stores over an online store is the interaction with the customers. A seller can greet its customers, talk to them, guide them about a product, or clear their concerns regarding a product.
This facility was not available to online sellers until the advent of a live chat feature. The majority of the successful stores have included this feature in their eCommerce stores. The live chat feature allows the customer and seller to communicate on the website. A customer can easily ask for guidance and more details about a product he is interested in buying.
By helping a person during his buying journey, there are increased chances that you will win his trust and he might become your customer. Moreover, live chats are an excellent way to generate feedback from your customers. You can ask them about their shopping experience or if they faced any sort of problem, etc. Their responses will help you to identify the key areas that need improvement to enhance the user experience.
You do not have to create the live chat feature from scratch. Numerous live chat applications can be easily integrated into your website.
5. Retargeting Ads
Before we begin to discuss this tip, let me ask you a question. Do you purchase from every website that you visit for the first time? Of course not, nobody does that.
Did you know that 98% of the buyers do not purchase from a website on their first visit? You cannot expect these buyers to return to you and purchase your products. There is a good chance that they might even forget about your eCommerce store completely and never return.
To increase conversion and grow your customer base, you must go after these people and remind them that you exist in the market and can provide them with the best items. Don’t worry, you don’t have to go to every individual’s home, or call them to request to visit your website.
Thanks to retargeting ads you can now target your previous visitors and entice them to visit your store and grab their favorite goodies.
A simple and the most common method is to run the ads on the website which your potential buyers visit.
Another way to retarget your audience is by sending them an email and reminding them about the products that they liked in the store. This marketing tip will only work if you have succeeded to secure the email address of your visitors.
6. Encourage Sign-Ups
If you succeed to get the email addresses of your customers then put them to use. Email marketing might sound dull and boring but its results are quite promising. The average ROI of email marketing is $42 for every $1 spent.
Emails land directly into your customers’ inbox and there is a wide chance that he is more likely to view it as compared to other promotions and posts on social networking sites.
Therefore, do not lose the chance of marketing via email. Email marketing also has one added benefit that is unavailable in other marketing channels i.e. creating personalized messages. If a business creates posts on social media, it will be viewed by every type of audience. However, in email marketing, you can create messages and offer deals, discounts, etc. according to the liking of your customer.
To reap the benefits of email marketing, you would first need the email addresses of your customers. Now, the question here arises why would they give it to you? Many people do not share their email addresses online because of the concern of getting spam emails.
If you want your customers to share their email addresses with you, then you must give them a good reason. Offer them something in return for their email address, for instance, a free trial of an application or a tool, or a discount voucher, etc. Moreover, make the sign-up option on your website clear and visible. It should be prominent enough to catch the attention of your users.
By marketing through email you will witness an increase in your sales and traffic on your website.
7. Promote Customer Reviews
Allow your satisfied customers to do the marketing for you. It is an effective and inexpensive method to gain the attention of a wider audience and lure them to become your customers.
It is a common behavior of online users to check for customer reviews before visiting a place or ordering something online. If there are favorable and positive reviews then a user’s buying decision is influenced and he will end up ordering the goods that have good reviews or ratings by the customers.
84% of people read online reviews and then decide about buying a product or not. If you have not published reviews on your website then your audience will take time to put their trust in you. To let your visitors know that you have excellent products and customer care service, strategically place the reviews and testimonials of your users on your website.
When people see that the customers of a business are satisfied with the quality of the product, shipping, customer service, etc. they are tempted to order the goods and get the same benefits.
You can also allow your customers to post a review on your social networking sites such as on Facebook, Instagram, etc. Your potential audience on social media platforms will be influenced to visit you and explore what goods you have in store.
8. Social Media Marketing
Social networking sites are immensely popular after search engines such as Google and Bing. In 2020, approximately 3.6 billion people were present on social networking sites. The number must have plummeted this year.
Making your business’s profile on social media you get access to a huge audience from the entire globe to market your brand to. So, if you do not have a profile on Facebook or Instagram, then create one right away!
Social media allows businesses to connect with their followers and promote their brand to them. Gone are those when marketing was only done by promoting goods and services. In today’s era, people are more interested in knowing about the brand, its objectives, methods, values, etc. Social media platforms are an excellent way to show your audience who you are and how you conduct your business activities. You can also answer your customers’ queries and concerns without going through the process of emailing them.
And that’s not it!
You can even integrate your website directly with social sites such as Facebook. It will allow the people to view, or order the goods without leaving the social site. Isn’t it great?
9. Offer Free Shipping
Who doesn’t love free products and services? The answer is no one.
Free shipping services have proven to increase sales. Shipping charges are a big turn-off for customers. They do not like to pay the business for delivering their ordered goods to them. Try to come with a solution to include the shipping charges in the product cost and offer free delivery to your customers.
If you cannot offer free delivery then try to keep the shipping charges low and be upfront about it with your customers. Do not disclose the shipping charges when they are on the checkout page. They will feel deceived and exit your website. Moreover, be very clear about your shipping terms and conditions to avoid any inconvenience later. Mention the days that will take to deliver the goods, if possible, keep them updated when you dispatch their parcels, or if there is any delay from your side.
10. Sell Your Products On Third-Party Site
If you are a small startup and do not have enough resources to market your brand then it is an excellent choice for you to use a third-party site, like Etsy, eBay, Amazon, etc. to sell your products.
Building an online store is not free. A person has to build the website, purchase the domain and hosting services to run the website. If you are on a strict budget and cannot afford to build a website, don’t worry. You can still sell your goods and earn profits.
Websites like Etsy and Amazon require the sellers to create an account and pay a minimal amount of fees. You can upload your goods on the website and the rest would be taken care of by the third party website.
It will market your product, retarget the customers, and increase the sales of your products.
11. Optimize Your Checkout Process
It is a heart-wrenching moment for a business when the fully-loaded carts are abandoned by customers before checking out. Your perfectly structured website, high-resolution images, remarkable products, etc. would be good for nothing if a person leaves the website when he is just a step away from finalizing and placing his order.
If a checkout process of a business is long and never-ending, then the users will quit the idea of shopping from you. This is similar to shopping from a physical shop. If there is a long queue at the billing counter, or buyers are required to register themselves, etc. then the customers might exit the store if they don’t need anything urgently.
Make sure to optimize your checkout process to minimize the cart abandonment rate. Do not ask for irrelevant information such as age, profession, gender, marital status, etc. which are not required for processing and shipping the orders.
Moreover, instead of having one long page that asks for the information, divide the content into several small chunks and display a progress bar at the top. Progress bars will help to keep your customers patient and let them know how close they are from checking out.
Conclusion
The most important tip for creating an eCommerce marketing strategy is to stay consistent. Even if you apply all of the above tips and tricks right away, you won’t see the results overnight. Stay consistent and continue to improve your products and services to boost your sales.
What other eCommerce marketing tips can help a business increase sales? Share it in the comments below.
Author Bio:
Ricky Hayes is the Co-Founder and Head of Marketing at Debutify – free Shopify theme, helping dropshippers build high-converting stores in minutes. He is a passionate entrepreneur running multiple businesses, marketing agencies, and mentoring programs.