Taking advantage of the world’s largest marketplace doesn’t have to be an exercise in trial and error if you follow our guide to better ecommerce marketing.
Regardless of whether you’re just starting out on the road to e-commerce success or are already a seasoned professional; e-commerce marketing can play a big part in the success or failure of your business. It can be a difficult topic to navigate and helpful information can be tough to find. Continue reading for our list of e-commerce marketing tips that can help your business succeed.
Plan Your Content Marketing Strategy Beforehand
Make a plan for how you are going to attract customers and deliver your goods to them. Make a list of all the resources you plan to use so you can have an overview of your arsenal. This list should include blog posts, newsletters, videos, social media pages, e-commerce solutions and more.
Diversify Your Social Media Outlets
There isn’t just one social media platform that you need to concentrate your efforts on, at least not in the beginning. Create pages on all the major platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, etc. to ensure you reach out to as large an audience as you can. Once you start collecting the data coming in from your various pages you can begin to streamline and focus more on the platforms that you find are really helping. It’s hard to know where your audience will come from so covering all the bases is your best bet.
Create a Personalization Strategy
The era of the “faceless company” is over and consumers are demanding a personal touch. Showcase your business to your audience through videos, employee pictures and profiles or information about your business processes. When communicating with your audience, address them personally and make everyone feel important. Let your customers be a part of your business and they will trust you more.
Create a Customer Loyalty Program
Having a loyalty program in place to reward your customers can be a major factor in having them return to your store for repeat purchases. Not only do your customers feel like they are getting a special deal, they also feel appreciated.
Continually Test Your Checkout Procedure
Constantly doing A/B testing on your processes can make a huge difference to your conversion ratios. Make sure to run your tests throughout the whole checkout procedure to figure out when and why people abandon their carts or don’t finalize purchases. Through testing you will figure out which words or buttons aid your sales and which don’t. Then you can make informed changes to better serve your customers.
Don’t Ignore Mobile Users
More than half of your customers could be coming to you through a mobile device. This means that your business must use a mobile responsive website and e-commerce interface so that purchases can be made smoothly and without fuss. Either your website is designed so that it runs on mobile devices and desktops alike or it transforms for mobile but the address stays the same.
Use Mobile Advertising
Create engaging ads that use geolocation to connect viable customers to your store while they are on the go.
Expand Your Available Delivery Options
Try to make your business stand out when it comes to delivery. The faster the process is the better, so try and find ways to speed it up. Ways you can do this is to ship orders as soon as they are placed, or you can offer expedited shipping.
Employ Local Marketing and Branding
If your business uses a brick and mortar location then looking locally for customers is advantageous. You can target local audiences through search engine targeting or geolocation tools.
Add Power with Pay Per Click Campaigns
While difficult to make run efficiently, a PPC campaign can really help boost your visibility and sales by keeping your business visible to customers. There is always a fair amount of trial and error associated with a PPC campaign but once you’ve ironed it out it can really be worth the costs.
Don’t Push Too Hard To Up Sell
You can show your visitors links or ads for relevant products but don’t overdo it. Keep everything relative to purchases being made and don’t force customers to get sidetracked from completing purchases.
Reduce Abandoned Shopping Carts
E-commerce is fraught with cases where customers abandon their shopping carts without making purchases. Minimizing is the best you can do and testing your process to see if there are any hang-ups along the path to checkout does this.
Add a Wish List, Save Cart or Favorites Option To Get Return Customers
Sometimes visitors to your site will make a purchase, but just not right now. Give them the option to keep tabs on items they want with a favorites list, wish list or by being able to save their carts for later. This not only makes future purchases much easier but it also gives your business valuable data on product interest. In order to save products in a cart the user must also sign up to become a member of your site, thus providing you with even more information.
Ask For Reviews
Positive reviews can be a major sales driver for your business and cause customers to gain trust or choose your business over another. Nothing promotes your business like reviews so ask your customers to give them.
Generate Reports
Take the time to generate reports on everything. Having information about visitors, sales ratios and anything you can measure will greatly affect your ability to make changes and plan for the future.
E-commerce marketing can be a real game changer for retail and service business as it allows customers to browse and make purchases through a mobile or desktop browser. Grow your business or brand with a professional e-commerce solution from Delta Decisions Inc.
