Ecommerce site owners have it hard, with the average cart abandonment rate hovering at around 69.2%. It takes expert marketing strategies and a strong brand presence to reach your audience.
Aggressive marketing, however, overwhelms and sometimes alienates them. Effective marketing involves reaching your audiences repeatedly over time, building familiarity, and encouraging purchases.
As a merchant, you can promote stores without an expensive agency and do it on your own
regardless of the size of your business.
Seekers who use these tactics build long-term customer relationships and offer new opportunities to engage and attract buyers. According to Systeme.io, creating a long-term business requires long-term thinking.
Have a sales strategy plan, and the rest will fall into place
Get Active on Social Media
Here's a video that helps you understand social media marketing basics.
Social media marketing only works if you're consistent. Post regularly at times that fit customers' schedules to reach and engage buyers. However, one word of warning. Don't create accounts on all social media channels and spread ourselves too thin. Ideally, create your eCommerce business on the best platform to build an ecommerce site.
Track channels your buyers are active on with the help of Google Analytics.
Do a demographic profiling of your target customers and then choose their favorite social media platforms. Share industry-related news and trends to keep your accounts helpful to buyers.
Ideally, start sharing links to your products on social media but don't overload customers with ads. Offer free trials or subscriptions. Too much self-promotion makes your social media account seem overwhelming to visitors and less valuable or helpful. The correct ratio shares 80% of industry news and just 20% of plugging in your products and services. This is the same strategy you can use for b2b growth marketing.
With Buffer, you can constantly post on post media without overloading your account. The software lets you schedule posts ahead of time and track their performance from a central point. Social listening tools, however, allow you to monitor the mentions of your name, brand, or other keywords.
Utilize PPC advertising
PPC is short for pay-per-click, a kind of marketing where companies pay for each click the ad gets.
PPC advertising lets you easily measure your advertising costs by comparing them to the costs of the traffic and sales the ad generates.
The most common type of PPC is search engine ads, with Google Adwords being the most popular software. Adwords lets you create ads that appear on Google's search engine. You buy ads through an auction. If you link the analytics and Adwords accounts, you can quickly see how customers behave on your site after they click on a Google ad.
Social media advertising uses PPC models. Ads appear on the user's feed or the timeline, and you either pay by PPC or CPM, which is short for Cost per thousand impressions.
Work with Other Strong Partners
You can generate much buzz around your eCommerce store if you network with major industry players. Contact blogs to see if they are willing to write a product review or talk about your website in a post. When you feature your site in a post on a popular place, you get thousands of targeted visitors quickly.
Reach out and connect with social media influencers in their industry and find anyone willing to share content about your store. You can use a scheduling system to book meetings.
Once you identify accounts with large follower numbers, begin engaging with them with these steps:
- Like their Facebook profiles as well as pages.
- Retweet, like, or reply to influencer's tweets
- Comment and thank influencers who retweet your posts
- Search people who use hashtags on Instagram to see if influencers use these keywords.
Interact with prominent industry leaders to build greater brand awareness around your products. People will spread the word about your store.
Buy podcast ads
Marketing can take any form—even an audio format.
For instance, online stores on MMA fighting have used podcasts and ads to reach and engage their audience.
Reach out to related relevant podcasts in your industry to discuss fees and explain product value. The messaging will benefit from an understanding of who your product serves. Midroll is an advertising network for brands with podcasts for advertising.
First, start with the content of your message when picking a time slot. A short pre-roll or post-roll spot at the beginning and end is an idea with shorter lines. Mid-rolls cost more and are suitable for more lines. You can also run your podcast and get listeners directly.
Go multichannel to attract more buyers.
Expand your brand's reach by selling on channels like Amazon and eBay or sites like Etsy. Research shows that merchants who sell on three tracks or more sell up to 144% more.
Marketplaces like Amazon or Etsy get higher amounts of traffic than one store, and selling on these avenues multiplies your store's and brand's visibility. Each channel has visitors who may not find your online store alone.
Get more buyers by spreading products across many distribution channels.
Once you expose customers to products through marketplaces, these buyers will develop brand loyalty.
Learn and use SEO
The significant disadvantage of selling through an online store is that it gets very little organic traffic. You need to optimize the store and build backlinks to get more traffic. You must add keywords, write painstakingly long product descriptions, and more. You can drive more traffic and sales to your store by adding the most searched-for keywords to your site. Here are a couple of ways to create value through content for your targeted audience. You can do a market research study and publish the results. New platforms like Poll the People even have an integrated Content Marketing report. You can copy-paste the information into your blog post. Proper SEO means you need charts, graphics, and comparison tables to make your point.
Ahrefs, Amazon, and the Google Adwords planner can help you identify these keywords. For example, if you want to rank for the keyword gaming, search for the same on the Adwords planner to get more relevant suggestions. You can see the channels report in the acquisition section on Google Analytics to see which keywords got you higher traffic.
Run an Active Blog
You don't need to be a wordsmith to do well with content marketing. Companies, irrespective of their niches, have blogs that provide buyers with eye-popping valuable content that helps them build trust in their brand. Promotion via blogging is ongoing as content gets reposted and shared on social media channels. There are excellent tools to record webinars and repurpose them as a course. You can also use Google Hangouts.
If you don't know what to write about, a good starting point is to comb through questions that people frequently ask your customer service team. Generate posts that provide answers to issues they face continually.
Also, consider the lifestyle of your target buyer. How do they use your product? Write tutorials that offer a glimpse into how they can integrate your product or different products from you into their daily life.
Add visualizations like charts, graphs, and videos to your blog to clarify and make the content more exciting.
Make Use of Email Marketing
Email marketing software is yet another easy-to-use tool that eCommerce store owners can use to target buyers with specific promotional content and cater to their needs. Customers are interested in how your products benefit them and will be receptive to discounts and offers. You need a marketing automation tool to do this successfully.
Let's consider Jack. He visits your site and views products but has never made a purchase. He will benefit if you offer him a coupon when he's exiting the store as a special first-time purchase promo.
Returning customers can't use a first-time buyer offer but will love an email reminder about the store's annual sales- something like Amazon Prime day- a week of discounts.
Next, segment these emails based on geolocation, purchasing activity, and other relevant details and send them messaging that informs them of promotions.
Conclusion
Lastly, encourage customer feedback and improve your store by reading reviews and resolving issues they face. Once you decide on the buyer's problems, ask the buyer to comment to indicate whether or not their problem was resolved. Removing or editing reviews will store will negatively impact user experience.
