The Ecommerce industry has grown leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. Every online store wants to increase its traffic and conversions in an organic manner. Even though every store has its very own ecommerce marketing strategy, it is important to look deep and research for some actionable marketing practices that will help you run your online store in a successful manner.
With the wide number of e-commerce marketing tools and tips available in the market, you might be wondering what works best for your online store. If you’re confused, don’t worry. We’re here to your rescue! In this article, we have outlined for you 17 actionable tactics related to e-commerce marketing that you must try to implement today.
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What is Ecommerce Marketing?
Ecommerce marketing refers to the type of marketing that makes use of promotional techniques and tactics to drive organic traffic to your online store and convert customers and retain them as loyal customers to your ecommerce store.
It is a well-known fact that your marketing strategy must involve marketing tactics that aim at targeting your audience online and offline. Similarly, your ecommerce marketing strategy must also include strategies to attract audiences both on and off your website. Therefore, a good marketing strategy helps you to build brand awareness, drive customer loyalty, increase customer retention rate and thereby contribute towards increasing sales. We’ve brought to you the top 17 e-commerce marketing strategies that are highly practical and effective for your online store.
Consider Upselling
Upselling is an approach that refers to selling a more premium version of the product to the customer than the original product the customer was initially considering purchasing. In simple terms, upselling refers to supersizing your order. In most cases, businesses find it to be more effective to upsell than to acquire a new customer. In most cases, customers are not even aware that there exists a premium version of the product they want to purchase. Hence, when you adopt upselling as an approach, your customers become aware there exists a higher version of the product of their choice and can help fulfil their needs better.
Integrate Instagram
We all can agree that social media platforms can be a great tool to help ramp up your sales. Instagram, being one of the most popular social media platforms, has over 500 million active users every day. It has become the go-to platform for consumers, brands, businesses and influencers and made it easy for them to connect via a single medium. Hence, integrating your brand’s official Instagram account into your online store can help increase organic traffic and engagement with your target audience. One can easily engage with their audience through Instagram by posting eye-catching photos of their products, using the right hashtags in a strategic manner and posting it at the right time. When you frequently follow these strategies, you can easily grab the attention of your target audience and thereby increase your engagement. With Instagram’s Shop feature, you can add products directly to your Instagram account through your posts and stories. This will give your customers a direct path to purchase your products thereby increasing your online sales.
Use Facebook Shop
Facebook, which has now rebranded itself as Meta is one of the most popular social media platforms. It is also a great platform for e-commerce marketing. In just a few simple steps, you can set up your Facebook Store with ease. It’s fairly simple to set up your own Facebook Shop. This will help to increase your customer base and potentially drive in new customers. If you are looking to start your e-commerce business, speak to our experts at Bikayi and integrate Facebook Shop to your ecommerce store today!
Reduction of Abandoned Carts
A recent study conducted by the Baymard Institute found that every time your visitor abandons their cart without making any purchases, you lose money. This phenomenon has been well-proven and experts suggest that the shoppers could have been reminded to complete their purchase frequently before they abandon their carts. They could have been induced to make purchases by offering discounts, promo codes or even free shipping. Another effective way to reduce the abandonment of carts is to start an email recovery campaign and also push notifications if they have their app – mention this please. The need for crafting can be aimed to convince your visitors so that they return to your store and complete their purchases. Hence, it’s important for you to craft your emails in such a way that it persuades the reader to return back to their carts and make a purchase. With Bikayi, you can reduce the rate of abandoned carts with our distinctive and unique features.
Capturing Email Subscribers
The most important element that must be a part of your e-commerce marketing strategy is email marketing. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to increase your sales and keep your customers engaged with your brand. It is one of the easiest ways to generate repeat customers. When compared to social media posts, tweets and other platforms, emails offer a more personalised and intimate experience for your customers. An individual’s inbox is considered to be a more personal space and offers you ample opportunities to express yourself in a more convenient manner. You can easily get started with email marketing to promote your newsletter, blogs or any other content and get as many subscribers as you can.
Improve your Email Campaigns
Once you have started to collect email addresses, you mustn’t simply stop there. You must always engage with your email subscribers by sending them valuable emails on a regular basis. Here are a few examples of how you can make your email marketing campaign much more effective and welcoming for your subscribers;
- Sending your subscribers a welcome email as soon as they make a purchase or when they first visit your website, depending on whichever action is first taken.
- Sending your subscribers exclusive promo codes, e-vouchers or free gifts.
- Sending your subscribers emails on occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries or any other festivities.
- Sending newsletters on a periodic basis and alerting subscribers of new products, discounts or any other new company announcements.
- Sending personalised emails to your high-value customers by appreciating them for supporting your online store.
These are some of the very simple ways by which you can start improving your email campaigns and thereby drive sales to your online store.
Sending Reminder Emails
Another important type of email that you must add to your e-commerce email marketing strategy is to frequently send wishlist reminder emails. The wishlist reminder email is an email that usually reminds your customers to check their wishlist and induces them to make purchases. In most cases, sending wishlist reminder emails can also help in reducing your cart abandonment rate. These reminder emails can act as triggers and push them to purchase the products on their wishlist.
Offer Social Login
Several e-commerce experts suggest that offering social login can help in reducing bounce rates and cart abandonment rates. When you start to offer social login features it helps to reduce any kind of difficulties that can occur in the checkout process. Whenever a new customer visits your website, you can offer them an option for new customer registration and optimise it for both desktop and mobile. With this new customer registration, you can easily capture all the basic details and thereby ensure that the registered user has a seamless shopping experience with your online store. Hence, offering social login can be a highly advantageous option for increasing the sales rate of your business.
Using Popups
What’s more attractive than offering a double-digit discount to your customer? Well, that’s exactly a marketing strategy that can help you drive sales. Several e-commerce business owners resort to offering a huge discount rate upfront through the form of eye-catching popups. This has turned out to be a proven way to increase the sales rate without reducing your profits.
Chatbots
Live chat and chatbots are considered to be tools that are in the high impact range. They help you to easily engage with the website visitors and all those outside your email list. These live chat tools can help you to target visitors on specific pages or after a specific time they have been active on your website. With the live chat option, you can also directly converse with your customers and address their queries and concerns right at the time of purchase. You can also use the data gathered through your live chat tools and optimise your website accordingly.
Anticipate Your Demand
The next important tactic you can follow to boost up your sales is to anticipate your demand. This simply refers to predicting or foreseeing the sales of your online store. There are various methods through which you can evaluate market demand for your online store. You can start off by offering a ‘pre-sale’ and then figuring out the demand for your product based on the number of people who place orders. You can also use other popular methods such as keyword research, social media trends or any other creative methods. You can simply create pages for all the products you want to check the demand for and list them as ‘out of stock’ to see which of them gets the most attention. The product with the highest notifications is the one you must sell.
Focus on Optimisation
Today, most of us do our online shopping on multiple devices. It can either be through our laptops, tablets or even our mobile phones. Therefore, it is important for you to invest ample time in optimising the user experience for different devices accordingly. One must remember that even if your design is optimised, you must ensure that the images, content, checkout process and other descriptions are also optimised according to the different devices. At this stage, you must also ensure that your site loads fast and it’s organised well and there are no distractions so that a visitor stays on the website for a longer time period and makes a quicker purchase.
Focus on Content Marketing
If you already have an online store or want to start an ecommerce store, you must create a good content marketing strategy for it. You must write blogs as it helps to rank better in the google search engines and thereby increase your relevance among your customers. Here are some other ways you can adapt by taking advantage of content marketing;
- Creating long-form content such as blogs or how-to guides to help customers to use your products in an effective manner.
- Starting a newsletter and giving your subscribers some valuable and informative content.
- Write blogs that are aligned with SEO guidelines. You can also guest post on other websites and thereby build brand awareness and generate backlinks.
- You can also start a podcast and feature some industry experts and speak about the trending topics in your industry.
Hence, having a good content marketing strategy helps your users to engage with your brand in a recurrent manner and stay connected with the brand always.
Personalisation is Key
Personalisation is one of the most effective ecommerce marketing tactics that can be used to drive sales. According to a study conducted by Boston Consulting Group, personalisation helps to increase the sales rate upto 10%. Using behavioural data, you can personalize a visitor’s shopping experience based on their past actions, preferences and previous history. With the help of technology, you can also personalise a shopper’s experience based on their location too.
Invest in SEO
We’ve all heard the saying ‘Content is King’, but your content does not really pay off until it’s infused with some elements of SEO. SEO, which is abbreviated as Search Engine Optimisation plays a major role in bringing your content alive amongst a large number of people. You must take time out and invest time in learning about SEO and creating a good SEO strategy for your online store. You can start by optimising your content, URLs, titles and every other element. If your online store is optimised both for on-site and off-site it’s a great win for you!
Use Influencer Marketing
Influencer Marketing is another great ecommerce marketing strategy that gives you a higher return on your investment. You can start off by identifying potential influencers in a particular niche (industry) and inviting them to promote your product. Since influencers have their own set of followers they can help in pushing your product to potential customers, in some cases it can even help you garner new customers. Once you have picked a set of influencers you can create a strategy and create viral, quirky and shareable content that diverts the attention of customers to your brand and thereby make a purchase.
Rewards and Loyalty
The last yet most interesting e-commerce tactic that you can follow to push sales is to set up a rewards program or a customer loyalty program. It is one of the easiest ways to retain customers and increase online sales. When you offer a rewards program for your customers, you can achieve two purposes; it can act as an incentive for your customers to make a purchase and also increase their loyalty towards your brand.
Takeaway
Now that you have a fair idea of the best ecommerce marketing tactics, it’s time for you to implement these strategies and drive sales for your online store, with our expert ecommerce marketing strategies. If you want to read more about hosting your e-commerce business and looking for the right platform, read our article “What’s the Best E-Commerce Platform for Your Business? “. If you are looking for the right place to get some guidance on how to start your e-commerce store in less than 90 seconds, visit www.bikayi.com and speak to our experts today!
