Selling your goods in the past required running a physical business and focusing mostly on serving local clients. These days, all you need to promote your goods is a website and access to the Internet. Customers from all around the world can easily shop at your online store thanks to an e-commerce website. But buyers won’t be able to find your e-commerce website if you don’t advertise it.
Every online retailer wants to boost traffic and sales. It can be difficult to choose which marketing strategies to use even after you’ve put together a basic strategy.
Without a costly agency, any retailer can advertise their shop. Whether you run a small or large business, the marketing strategies in this article are simple to use on any budget.
Sellers who use these strategies will have a varied marketing approach—one that allows for long-lasting relationships with loyal clients and presents chances to communicate with and entice potential new customers.
1. Use social media to your advantage
Consistency is key in social media marketing, as it enables you to contact and engage customers on a regular basis by publishing frequently at times that correspond to their schedules.
Don’t overextend yourself by using every social media site. Instead, concentrate on the channels that their actual customers use. Data-driven solutions, such as Google Analytics, can be used to monitor which platforms their customers are using most frequently.
To maintain your accounts informative and helpful to clients, use the social media channels that your customers like and publish news and trends from the sector.
Share links to your website and merchandise as well, but avoid bombarding visitors with sales pitches. Your social media account becomes less valuable and beneficial to customers when you overly promote yourself. 80% current industry news and 20% promotion of your website and items is a suggested ratio.
With the aid of a social media management tool like Buffer, you may post frequently on social media without having to keep an eye on your accounts all the time.
2. Make use of SEO
Search engine optimization for online stores is known as ecommerce SEO. Get your product pages to rank in the top 10 of search results on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. This increases the amount of organic (free and unpaid) visitors to your website. A page in position #1 is ten times more likely to be clicked than a page in slot #10.
Some strategies to spend money on SEO are
Researching keywords and incorporating them into the URLs of your pages, product descriptions, and blog articles
Enhancing the user experience and the structure of your website
Acquiring backlinks from trustworthy websites
If done correctly, you can appear for widely used search phrases associated with your items.
3. Utilize your email list and continue to expand it
Having a solid email marketing plan is crucial, even for brick and mortar businesses. Gather as many email addresses as you can from people interested in your events, customers, and potential customers. When you start selling, you’ll be able to notify everyone via an email that they can go to your store’s website.
It can be a good idea to consider a promotion for your email list subscribers or even a discount for referrals to entice users to tell their friends and family about your website.
Keep collecting email addresses on your website because email is still one of the best marketing tools available to e-commerce businesses. In exchange for a little discount, such as 15% off their first purchase or free shipping, several firms employ pop-up boxes to ask customers to submit their email addresses.
Additionally, you need to confirm that your email list is receiving regular communication from you. Establish a regular email schedule and include specials, fresh articles, product launches, and other information that can tempt customers to your website.
4. Influencer marketing
Because it enables you to reach a particular audience through a person with incredibly strong relationships of trust in the community, influencer marketing is an effective ecommerce marketing method. It’s particularly effective when launching new products.
The good news is that influencer marketing may be profitable even if you don’t sell lifestyle goods. Almost every sector has influencers, including the pet, DIY, beauty, and automotive industries. Others have smaller, more specialized followings while some have vast audiences.
5. Make use of PPC marketing
Pay-per-click advertising, or PPC, involves businesses paying for each click that an ad receives. With PPC advertising, you can assess if campaigns are cost-effective by evaluating the cost of the ads against the volume of visitors and sales they drive.
Search engine advertising is the most prevalent PPC model, and Google AdWords is the most widely used PPC platform. With AdWords, you may design ads that show up on Google’s search engine and place them through an auction system. Ads are chosen for a keyword depending on your bid and the quality score of the ad. When a customer clicks on a Google ad, you can track their activity by linking your Analytics and AdWords accounts.
6. Design your website so it’s easy for your visitors to navigate through
You’re losing customers if your store is badly designed. But how does a store with poor design actually look?
Along with coming across as unreliable, the store may also be plagued by a mix of unclear value proposition, difficult-to-read typography, and confusing navigation.
Even if you increase the specifications mentioned above, there may still be a few design flaws. Are your product categories being appropriately applied, or are there too many things on a single page? Have you established the ideal ratio of text to images? These are only a handful of the many factors you need to take into account.
7. Put user-generated material on display (UGC)
Using user-generated content as social proof can be quite effective. It displays individuals utilizing and savoring your goods in the open. People might not always believe what you say about your goods, but they will unquestionably believe what real customers have to say.
Users who interact with UGC are 161% more likely to convert, according to a study of 200,000 e-commerce stores!
Now, it goes without saying that you must be wise in how you present UGC. People won’t want to participate if it comes off as being very self-serving or boastful. Do it in a way that shows your appreciation for your customers rather than as a way to promote oneself.
8. Launch a blog
To use content marketing, you don’t have to be a craftsman or cuisine enthusiast. All types of businesses have started blogs to give their customers useful material and foster brand loyalty. Since material can be shared on social media and used to generate traffic from search engines, promotion through blogging is ongoing.
Unsure of the topic to write about? Identify the frequently asked questions by customers for your customer support personnel. Create articles that address these concerns so that readers can come back to them again and time again for assistance.
Bottom Line
It may seem difficult to start selling online or to develop your online presence into a crucial retail channel, but it’s more than possible if you take things one step at a time.
Maintain consistency, exercise patience, and refrain from taking on too much at once to avoid becoming overwhelmed. Pick a handful of these marketing strategies that you believe will be most profitable for your company. Once you start to see results, you can then refine and adapt.
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