10 Marketing Ideas To Boost Your Ecommerce Sales
eCommerce is huge, and so is the competition on it. To survive the heat of competition, you need to keep selling and keep converting on your eCommerce store. For this, you need to make sure you are reaching to your customers and approaching them the right way. In this article, I am going to enlist 10 eCommerce marketing ideas or ways that you can adopt to keep kicking and making the sales. You can effectively market your eCommerce store, products, and services by using these ideas. So here they are
1. Content marketing
The first item on my list and probably the most important one. Content marketing has been adopted by almost every successful eCommerce store and they are driving fortunes through it. It is one of the most prevalent items in any SEO or conversion optimization list. However, marketers often mistake the content marketing with focused product marketing. E-Commerce stores sell products and they are product focused. The hint of product focused marketing is completely understandable. However, content marketing is not just about the promotion. You need to expand your thinking and focus on the pain point of your customers. Tally the issues, needs, and requirements of your customers with your products and see if your product solves any of their issues or meet their requirements. If so, include your product in the content but not as a promotion but a persuasion that your product solves the issue they have been facing. This approach will not only help you create some awesome content but would also give a correct way to promote your products and services. One last thing- set up a blog if you have not done already. I can give several reasons to adopt the content marketing for your eCommerce store today.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is one of the most important forms of internet marketing that helps you
extend your reach to the maximum possible audience for your website and contents on it. Whether it is on-page SEO like URLs, meta tags, sitemap, robot.txt, etc or off-page SEO like content marketing, you must optimize them all. You don't want search engines to avoid your pages while searching for a suitable page in return to a search query relevant to your business. Using SEO best practices is one of the approaches, while off-page techniques like blogging can also help a lot. In fact, most of the marketers today, see SEO and content marketing as no different elements in website improvement. You will always need SEO and content marketing. But that doesn't mean that your eCommerce site cannot rank on its own aspects! If you are using the best SEO practices for your eCommerce store and following the webmasters guidelines, you can rank well on your core store keywords without content marketing too. However, Content marketing is still important as it gives a push to your SEO and helps you rank for not only your core keywords but also for the alternative, variants, and other competitive keywords as well. So, it’s important to keep both your On-page and Off-page SEO to the best level to keep making the sales and for several more reasons.
3. Press release publication
Press releases are one of the oldest marketing tactics and they work really smooth. They can hit the three targets at once- Authority, Traffic, and back-links. Whenever, you have something new to tell your customers, like the launch of a
new product or services, addition of a new feature to your service, make a press release. Create a press release for anything new about your business, it can also include your website moving from HTTP to HTTPS, or even when launching a new website design. The major benefit of creating press release is they are circulated across different high authority websites with your backlink on it. This is a great way to improve your own website's authority. Moreover, news and releases on these high authority sites are always seen as reliable by the readers. Make a list of all the high authority press release sites and send to them every time you create a new press release for something new about your business.
4. Up-selling
To up-sell is one of the most traditional marketing approaches that deals in convincing the customer to make more purchases once the customer is ready to make the first purchase. In simple terms, it’s really hard to convince a customer to make his first purchase on your store. However, once you have convinced the customer to make a purchase, you come up with up-selling to leverage that convinced status of the customer. So, if a customer is already making a purchase, you can offer more reasons to make some more purchases immediately or at a later stage.
For example, if the current cart value of the customer is $100, you can offer the customer a 10% discount if he makes it $150 by buying some more. The listings such as “related products”, “Customers also bought these products”, “Get No cost EMI on Cart value above $200”, “Get 20% off on your next Purchase” etc All are the different ways of up-selling where you convince the customers to buy more and more on your store. These PrestaShop modules are the perfect example of different up-selling techniques that PrestaShop store owners can implement of their store: Automatic Related Products- Up-selling by showing related products. Better Thank you page- Up-selling by offering discount coupons for next purchase on the order success page. Gift the product-Up-selling by giving a product free with a certain product purchase. Reward Points- Up-selling by giving discounts for the next purchase through reward points. Facebook share and win discount- Up-selling by offering a discount on sharing the product on Facebook.
5. Social Media Marketing
Today, no internet marketing is complete without registering your presence on the social media channels. In 2017, Social media marketing is one of the best ways to grow your eCommerce sales by becoming an influencer as well as the provider. As an influencer, you provide recommendations to your social media followers and as a provider, you become the sink of that recommendation. Although it not that easy to become an influencer on the social media, having an official social page would be a great start. I don't see a reason for why would you not want to connect with 1.23 billion daily active social media users? You can influence a great share of users towards your business by being active on the social media. Leverage the features and functionalities given by the respective social media channels and use them to connect more and more users to your business by engaging with them. For example, you can post photos, videos, Gifs of Facebook, Stories on Instagram, Tweets on Twitter, Pins on Pinterest and a lot more. Every social media platform today has optimized itself for the marketing needs of the brands and they even provided specialized advertisements as well. Facebook Ads, for example, can boost your sales to a great extent with proper targeting and Ad content creation.
6. Email marketing
For many businesses, email marketing remains the only reliable and affordable marketing tool today. Especially the small startups who have to think twice before spending on social media ads and other paid advertisements, the email is the best option to reach out to the customers.
For email marketing you need two basic implementations on your website: - Methods to collect the email address of your customers and visitors - Method to send the bulk emails and track their performance statistics. There are several ways to collect the email addresses of your prospects. Newsletter subscription, Exit pop up, Entry pop up, Auto subscribe, Discount vouchers, etc are some of the common ways to collect the email addresses on your own website. Now the part comes when you need to organize your collected email addresses and send your email marketing messages. Moreover, here you also need to track the performances of the emails to make sure if your campaign is working positively. You can use any of the email marketing software available in the market for this. Mailigen, MailChimp, Constant contact are some of the very popular email marketing services that you can use.
7. Abandoned cart Recovery emails
Truth to be told, Many shoppers will add the products to the cart but suddenly leave the process and exit the site without completing the purchase process and probably never return too. Such carts are called as abandoned carts or orphaned carts. An Abandoned cart recovery strategy can be made by tracking the email address, and cart information of such customers. Later this information can be used to send abandoned cart recovery emails reminding the customers about the cart they have left orphaned on the store.
Various strategies can be used to convince the customer for completing the purchase. You can simply send a reminder email or you can attach an offer in the email to encourage the customer. To have a proper abandoned cart recovery system on your store, you need the implementations for two very important events: - Capturing the details of abandoned cart customers and their carts. - Using the captured contact information to send reminders. There are tools which can perform both of these tasks. Furthermore, if you run a Magento, PrestaShop, or an OpenCart store, there are solutions that can not only track the abandoned carts but also automatically send the serial reminders to the customers without a need of your manual interference. Moreover, various email templates can be configured to send plain and well as offers email. Some of the soltuiosn are given below: Abandoned Cart - Magento Extension Abandoned Cart - OpenCart Extension Abandoned Cart - Prestashop Addon 8.
Affiliate marketing
Perhaps, one of the newest evolution of modern eCommerce is the online affiliate marketing. An old concept of “Bring customers and earn commission� has been shaped to adapt the online records and tracks keeping.
The developments in eCommerce and web development technology have allowed merchants to hire affiliate marketers who can refer customers to your site and give you a hiked website traffic. In return, the affiliates are rewarded by the merchant in kind or currency as a commission. You can crawl the internet and make a list of good affiliate marketers. Ask them to promote your products on their website, social media channels, or anything they have got to reach out to the mass audience. Most of the time, they will themselves come to you, if you make an affiliate program for your business. If you are wondering how would you set up an affiliate program on your website, it's not so tough. There are various modules and extensions in the market for almost every eCommerce platform. Just get any one from them and configure it on your site, that's it you will have an efficient affiliate program setup on your store.
9. Do A/B testing
A/B testing is one of the most effective online marketing and optimization tool at your disposal. By A/B testing your website you can not only discover the best way to present your Products but the whole website can be optimized to give you more and more conversions. Conducting an A/B testing experiment is very much accessible through the A/B testing tools. You need to just: Get an A/B testing tool - Try a free A/B testing tool for the first time. Choose what you want to test- Choose the pages or elements which can be modified to improve your conversions. You can refer to “6 A/B testing
ideas for your Product Pages”. Setup an experiment on the A/B testing tool- How to setup an A/B testing experiment on MockingFish? Note down the results and analyze them- Ultimate Guide to Quick A/B Testing for Beginners Apply the suggestions Indeed A/B testing is an ultimate conversion boosting tool. It improves the quality of your website implementations and lets you know if your implementations are according to the actual needs of the customers. Nothing can be more acceptable in marketing than a way to improve its quality, and A/B testing is a way to do this. Test your on-site marketing implementations and get to know if you are doing it right. If you are creating a landing page for your Google Adwords Ad, the best way to know it’s good or bad is to A/B testing it.
10. Do some Marketplace selling I understand that you have your own website for selling your products, but selling on a marketplace in parallel will give you ultimate opportunities to make more sales. In fact, today there are modules and extensions that allow an eCommerce store owner to sell the products from the store directly on the marketplace site. For example, the PrestaShop Etsy Marketplace integration module allows a PrestaShop store owner to sell his products (listed on his PrestaShop store) directly on the Etsy Marketplace without a need of any separate Esty product feed. You just need an Etsy Seller account that’s it. There are various eCommerce store owners who have successfully adopted such solutions to market their products and brand on various marketplace sites, and they drive some really good sales. Marketplace sites like Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Alibaba etc are quite popular in this segment of sellers as they provide APIS to be used by the modules to sell directly from the own store. If you are still confused, read “Why you should and shouldn’t sell on Amazon and eBay?”. This will give you an insight of pros and cons of selling on the marketplaces.
Over to you- Don’t Rush I have enlisted 10 different points in this post and each of them gives a separate idea to boost your sales. You might get over-tensed at the moment to check an idea and implement it as soon as possible to improve the sales. This is understandable, but you should not rush. Take a deep breath, wait for a while, and go for one item a time. Believe me, there are lot crazier ideas that marketers use, but think you should stick to the basic for the start. Take a point if you like it apply the suggestions and test it. A/B testing will give you a comprehensive idea if the implementation will work for you. However, I can bet that each of the ideas will help your website make an improved sale if you do it correctly. So, proceed steadily and apply your ideas after thinking at least twice.