The goal of every for-profit company is, of course, to make money. Whether your business is brick-and-mortar or online doesn’t matter; you still have to turn a profit to stay afloat.
In e-commerce, the best way to do this is to invest in a sound marketing strategy.
When you have an amazing site and an incredible product or service, you need traffic to get noticed. The rest is the easy part!
The right marketing strategy for your website depends on many factors. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. But these five tips are the must-have tactics for every business, big or small, that wants to dive into e-commerce successfully!
1. Get Your Site Right
It doesn’t matter how much organic traffic you’re generating to your site if it’s not ready for the load.
What happens then is that your potential customers get a bad taste in their mouths for your business. Not only will they head elsewhere, but they’ll relay their experience to others, too.
Before you activate your marketing strategy, make sure your site has the basics, like:
- Quick loading times for mobile and desktop devices
- A strong, attention-grabbing landing page
- Security for you and your customer
- A smooth and hassle-free checkout experience
If your platform doesn’t support all of these features, it may be time to upgrade to one that takes customer service, and your business, seriously.
2. Bring in the Social Media Sites
However you feel about social media, it’s an amazing business-booster if it’s utilized right. Each social media platform has unique benefits for small businesses.
You don’t have to create a site for your business on every site, but you do need to be somewhere.
Potential customers will look up stores they’ve never heard of and check for the reputation before ordering. The sooner you start a social media page for your shop, the more stable your reputation becomes.
If you’re not sure which sites are best for you, consider these advantages for each of the most popular ones:
- You can launch a Facebook store that integrates with any Shopify store to increase your exposure.
- Instagram is a natural platform to show off pictures of your products and engage with potential and existing customers.
- Twitter is a quick way to send out information about your business and interact with others to build a following.
- Video engagement to start contests and get people to market for you by sharing your snippets is easy with TikTok.
Choose one of these platforms to start with. Once you master it, you can move on to the next one. Remember, it’s better to go an inch-wide and a mile-deep and do each thing well than jump into everything halfway.
3. Use Email Campaigns
One of the first things you learn in e-commerce is that you must collect emails. But what do you do with them once you do?
Those email addresses are valuable tools that help you to build a relationship with current and potential customers. By personalizing email campaigns to give customers what they’re looking for, you’re creating an entire new approach to your ecommerce business. An email scraper can be very useful tool for you.
Welcome emails once a customer buys something makes them feel appreciated. From there, you can send promo codes, coupons, and free gifts.
Sending regular newsletters lets your customers know you’re not going to spam them with junk. The more consistent you are, the more your readers see you as reputable.
Over time, you can tweak your email campaigns to go to your regular customers to show them you appreciate their loyalty. Personalize each one with a note.
If your platform supports it, you can also design campaigns for upsells. These let users know when something they previously bought has been upgraded.
There are a plethora of advantages and disadvantages of Email Marketing; also, the potential uses for email campaigns are endless. This is a marketing strategy that you must learn as soon as possible!
4. Encourage Testimonials
Sure, you can say your product or service is the best. But everyone else says the same thing, so why should your potential customers believe you?
The trick is in the testimonials of others. Word-of-mouth from previous customers, even complete strangers, is enough to sway many skeptics in your favor.
By including user-generated content in your site, you’re giving out proof of your reputability to people who have no idea who you are. They see that others have bought your product or service, and they are more secure giving you their business. So start adding testimonial videos on your ecommerce websites to let people know that your product or services are the best.
5. Watch for Abandoned Carts
You are probably guilty of this yourself: You head to a website to buy something, add it to your cart, and then leave without making a purchase.
There are lots of reasons why this happens, and it’s not always because someone changes their mind. Sometimes, the “abandoned cart” issue is as simple as the buyer forgot their wallet.
But when a visitor abandons their cart, you’re losing money. Simply by reminding them via a quick email message about the items they left behind, you increase your chances of a sale.
Don’t take an abandoned cart personally. Statistics show that almost 70% of carts are abandoned at some point. But with numbers this huge, you can’t ignore the problem.
By setting up an automated reminder process as part of your marketing strategy, you maximize your business’s sales.
Conclusion
Marketing strategies must be tailored to each individual business. But some tactics are just plain smart tactics.These five tips will help you boost your sales, improve your business reputation, and bring you into the world of e-commerce with a boom!
