8 Proven eCommerce Marketing Strategies to Escalate Online Sales

8 Proven eCommerce Marketing Strategies to Escalate Online Sales Harness the power of these Eight Proven eCommerce Marketing Strategies and let your sales skyrocket like Captain Marvel in the eCommerce universe.

Okay, let’s get down to business‌ Advancements in technology make such things possible that were considered impossible a decade ago. Today, by tapping or clicking on certain points on your screen in sequential order can deliver products from anywhere globally to your doorstep. Moreover, with easy-to-use platforms such as Shopify, BigCommerce, and Volusion, online shopping and in turn the eCommerce industry has been greatly benefitted. In fact, eCommerce represented 14.3% of total retail sales in 2018.

Running an eCommerce store is having an online storefront and a connected warehouse. Running it successfully involves multiple tactics, preparations and creating a solid eCommerce Marketing strategy. This is especially important for small business owners who dream of gaining the best ROI for their efforts. So, by taking a leaf from the different marketing strategies used by online retailers, we shall highlight different eCommerce marketing practices based on the expertise you have.

Those who are starting out You have created an online store, connected it with your inventory management system and started pulling in relevant traffic to your store. At this stage, most of your visitors are not ready to make the purchase. Here, the proven eCommerce marketing strategies would be to identify the needs of the visitor and provide them with good user experience.

1. List out your customer journey Not everyone that visits your storefront is going to be turning into customers, at least not in the first few visits. They need to be gradually imparted knowledge about your brand, products, services, how they shall be benefited, etc at different stages before they can be capable to make a purchase. While the customer journey for every business starts with a prospect and completes at customers, the intermediate stage might vary.

So it is very important to chart out the customer journey and define milestones that indicate the promotion to a different stage.

A standard customer journey with different stages are: Prospects → Leads or Marketing Qualified Leads → Sales Qualified Leads → Low-Value

Customer → Loyal

Customer → High-Value

Customer

2. Create a content marketing plan After you have devised the different stages of the customer journey, next comes the points of contact where you can reach out to your prospects.

Even though no one is going to make a purchase based on what they read in a blog post, the blog post or any other form of content can at least influence the decision in your favor. Create a content marketing plan helps you identify which form of the content does your prospect consume more. It could be a blog post, infographic, flash card, case studies, eBook, style guide, or even a checklist.

Your content can revolve around the advantages of using your products, how to use your services or how people have been benefited with your services. Such content acts as the trust-building activity for pursuing prospects as well as bringing over those who are still on the fence.

3. Set up an email marketing automation

Assuming that you have created your content marketing plan, now it is time to ensure that your content reaches the target audience. Emails are a great way to achieve this as they are easy to use, has very high investment v/s ROI ratio, will remain in the inbox of your subscribers unless purged.

Additionally, in inbound methodology, emails are a vital part in 3 out of the 4 stages namely Convert, Close and Delight.

Moreover, thanks to USPs such as automation and personalized tags, emails are a great way to ensure that your customers receive personalized emails based on their online behavior without you having to manually monitor each email. Setting up an email marketing automation doesn’t involve you jumping through hoops; all you need is an email service provider (MailChimp, Hubspot, Aweber, etc) a client relationship management software (Zoho, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, etc) and the integration of both with your storefront.

4. Invest in a good recommendation engine It feels good when you have someone to suggest you similar products based on your choices. A recommendation engine is a bridge between your knowledge of your products and what your customers are looking for. The recommendation engine monitors the products your prospects browse and/or purchase and scours through your product list to find similar or relevant products to be recommended. This opens up opportunities to upsell better products or cross-sell relevant products.

Those who are comfortable with their business You have managed to bring in a steady flow of store visitors and successfully managed to bring sales but you are aiming for growth.

The following eCommerce marketing strategies are to increase the number of visitors, increasing engagement with existing customers and reduce the number of abandonment (both cart as well as the browser).

5. Conduct Sweepstakes or Giveaways to increase engagement Imagine getting a chance to grab the thing that you are planning to buy, for a discounted price or free. Would you let such an opportunity to go to waste? Similar is for your customers. When you offer exclusivity or discount in the form of sweepstakes or a giveaway, those on the fence to make the purchase would take the bait. Sweepstakes draws in new visitors to your website and most of such visitor would explore the rest of the website after taking part. By experimenting with different kinds of offers, sweepstakes and giveaway tools can help you identify what moves your customer base better.

6. Have a Loyalty reward program The success of a business depends on repeat orders and loyal customers. Just as sweepstakes are a great way to draw in the new audience, a loyalty reward program holds your customer base together. Your products/services may be greatly helpful to the end-customer but when you include additional rewards on every purchase, you encourage them to return to your store every time they plan to make a purchase. Even though what matters at the end of the day is a good user experience but a loyalty reward program provides an incentive for your customers to remain loyal to your brand even in the presence of competition.

7. Invest in a display ad program Ad monetization is a boon for marketing realm. It brings revenue for website owners and visibility for brands who enroll in the display ad program. Display ad marketing is a great way to bring your brand in front of those who satisfy particular traits. How the display advertisement works is using cookies. These cookies are a unique identifier for different devices helps track the owner’s

online behavior. Online advertising platform such as Google Adwords and Bing Ads! display your ads to those individuals whose online behavior matches your customer persona based on the stored cookie data in their devices. Display advertising has two major benefits: 1.

It can be used for acquiring new leads, contextual marketing, and re-targeting abandoners as well as dormant customers

2.

Most social media platforms support display advertisements so greater visibility compared to other marketing channels

8. SEO and SEM As per Retailing Today, 81% of shoppers report conducting online research prior to making a large purchase. If you fail to be present on the first page of their search, you might have lost a prospective customer. You may have the best products and your store may be the one your customers are looking for, but it is meaningless unless visible on a search engine result. By adding relevant keywords to specific pages and have a good SEO score, the search engine determines that your store might be the best suit for someone’s search query and you get a visitor.

Unfortunately, in this age of competition, relying on ranking on specific keywords is not going to bring in visitors. search engine marketing wherein you bid on certain keywords and based on the bid amount, your result is shown as an ad.