These days, with almost all businesses maintaining online stores, e-commerce marketing has become a crucial business strategy to drive sales and revenues. However, the competition is fierce, and without a proper strategy, your business may get trumped by others.
Fortunately, there are several tips and tricks to help you stand out from your competitors. This article will show you some of these proven and tested e-commerce marketing methods after discussing the basics of e-commerce marketing.
What Is eCommerce Marketing?
If you’re completely clueless about e-commerce marketing, don’t worry. Simply put, the term refers to the use of paid and organic promotional strategies to increase site traffic and facilitate conversions in your online shop. It also includes methods that help keep loyal customers coming back for more.
There are few stages included in the process, but the main aspects include building awareness, generating leads, increasing conversions, enhancing customer retention, and boosting online revenues. In addition, E-commerce marketing strategies can be outsourced to digital marketing experts, such as Caffeinemarketing or an in-house team.
7 Strategies To Drive eCommerce Sales
Opening a business means taking some risks. But, with the digital tool available these days, launching an online store is less costly than opening a brick-and-mortar shop. In addition, your marketing strategies can cover your entire business or specific products that you want to be boosted. Either way, you can try these practical steps to get you started:
- Understand Your Customers
Before you can plan on creating any e-commerce marketing method, develop your buyer personas first and understand them, including their behavior. Communicate with them, ask them questions, know their pain points, and identify how you can convey clear messages about your products. By doing customer research, your business will use the correct words and tap the right channels to drive conversions and, later, boost revenues.
- Build Your Brand
One of the keys to increasing your sales is to build brand awareness and, eventually, trust. After becoming aware of your brand, the next crucial step is to establish customers’ trust in your brand, as influenced by several factors. Best practices include providing high-quality, value-for-money, and reliable products and services, impeccable customer service, and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. Partnerships with other industry giants and social media influencers can also help build up your company’s reputation.
- Upsell Your Products
Notice how fast-food chains use this strategy extensively and making big money out of it, too? You can cull inspiration from ‘upsizing your drinks’ by offering premium products or upgrades. Often, customers don’t know such ‘better’ products are available and would rather consider the first product that they come across within your site.
When a customer clicks on your product, show the upgraded items that may be what they’re willing to buy, regardless of the price difference. Upgrade your e-commerce website if you don’t have this shopping option yet.
- Use A Strategic Email Marketing Campaign
You can tap emails to increase your customer base, generate leads, drive conversions, and retain loyal customers. Emails are useful digital marketing tools, and almost a quarter of average company revenues are attributed to them, based on a 2015 study by Forrester Research. The same study found that approximately 17% of digital marketing spending is targeted toward email marketing campaigns.
Integrate a compelling call-to-action (CTA) button in your site to encourage more email subscribers to whom you can start offering your products and services.
- Tap Social Media Platforms
Almost all social media channels offer some paid advertising to help you increase brand awareness. If you don’t want to pay for advertisements, you can always use your account to post updates, announcements, and any form of information. You can also post high-quality photos and use hashtags to expand your reach.
By knowing where, what, and when to post, you’ll be able to effectively pique users’ interest to visit and browse your e-commerce site and turn them into paying customers with higher rates of success.
- Content Marketing Is Key
Creating high-quality and evergreen content will help your business rank highly on search engines, which, in turn, means better exposure. So, integrate blog content into your e-commerce site and update it regularly. But, don’t stop there.
Content marketing covers written articles and other forms of online content, including videos, webinars, podcasts, white papers, and infographics. This type of writing also includes website content, CTA writing, and email marketing, so it’s practically the bloodline for any marketing strategy.
- Optimize Your Site For Mobile Viewing
There are approximately 3.8 billion smartphone users all over the world, according to Statista. Mobile phones play a crucial role in a buyer’s journey, with most of the users tapping their phones to find a product they want to purchase. Therefore, your mobile site should be responsive and easily clickable, so users won’t have a hard time buying your products.
An e-commerce store that’s not mobile-friendly translates to missed opportunities.
Final Thoughts
Increasing traffic and revenues in your e-commerce site require careful review of your current performance and implementing a few strategies outlined in this article. Don’t forget that your strategy should be periodically evaluated and improved to ensure business growth and success.
