Ecommerce is one of the most competitive industries online. Whether you plan to sell electronics, t-shirts, or collector’s edition chopsticks, you’ll find others doing the same.
So, how do you get shoppers to click on your site and buy something from you instead of your competitors? The answer is through an effective ecommerce digital marketing strategy.
Here are eight ecommerce marketing tactics that get results and will help your online store improve its bottom line.
1. Fix Your Site!
All of your marketing efforts, which we’ll outline in a minute, will be for naught if visitors arrive at your site, and it’s a hot mess. It takes about 50 milliseconds, or 0.05 seconds, for visitors to form an initial opinion about your website.
The fact is that shoppers will judge your book by its cover, so how your site looks and functions matters a great deal. The best way to get visitors to stay, and hopefully buy something is to have an attractive, responsive, secure, optimized, and functional website.
Cookie-cutter ecommerce sites are one option, but another choice that can help boost your digital marketing efforts is a headless ecommerce model, which gives you more customization and design options.
2. Prioritize Content Marketing
Few consumers are impulse buyers anymore, even online. Most put at least a little bit of research and thought into their options before hitting the “Buy” button. According to Google, more than half (53%) of shoppers always do research before they buy something. And many of those shoppers are reading content.
Content like articles, infographics, videos, and images can educate potential customers about your product and your company. Customers need reassurance that the product they are about to buy will suit their needs and that you are a reputable company.
3. Enable Customer Reviews
One of the best ways you can increase your ecommerce conversions is to enable product reviews on your website. If you need proof that this is effective, head over to Amazon.com and take a look at some of the top-selling items in each category. They have tons of reviews!
Roughly 68% of consumers form an opinion by reading 1-6 online reviews. How do you get these for your site? Simple. An estimated 7 out of 10 consumers will leave a review if you just ask. Once you begin populating your site with legitimate reviews, you’ll see your sales figures soar.
4. Use Social Media
If you’re not promoting your ecommerce site on social media, you’re missing a golden opportunity to boost your results. According to Smart Insights, there are now more than 3.8 billion active social media users who spend an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes each day browsing across up to eight channels and apps.
Leverage networks like Facebook and Instagram, where about two-thirds of users use their feed to find online shopping inspiration. Instead of just posting product listings, engage with your audience, and even offer limited-time discounts on social media pages.
5. Implement Paid Ads
You might think that paid ads aren’t in your budget. But if they produce a positive ROI, there’s no reason not to include them in your overall digital marketing strategy. The truth is that paid social media ads have become incredibly affordable of late, so they are worth exploring.
Another popular strategy that ecommerce businesses use is the Google Shopping ad platform. When a consumer searches for a product, such as a “red velvet cat bed,” you can your item shows up at the top of the search results. This allows you to get highly targeted traffic to your site and only pay for ads most likely to generate sales.
6. Personalize Your Message
If you’ve ever been on a website (think Amazon) that seems to know what you want when you want it, you know that this type of personalization has become incredibly attractive. Sure, it’s invasive to a point, but you are using available data about the customer’s behaviors and characteristics to serve up recommendations and complementary products.
Gartner predicts that ecommerce companies who successfully handle personalization will boost profits by 15%. You can personalize search results, offer a style finder, use geo-location targeting, and adjust your navigation to a visitor’s interests to increase results.
7. Try Referral Marketing
A powerful, yet underrated, method of ecommerce marketing is called referral marketing. There are several ways your company can get others to recommend its brand through virtual word-of-mouth.
The most common way is to offer some sort of financial incentive. Allow shoppers or other website owners to create a referral link that sends traffic to your website. If they refer sales, you can reward them through discounts or cold hard cash. Once you’ve decided on a referral program, be sure to add a link in the footer of your site and promote it on social media to gain some traction.
8. Leverage Retargeting Campaigns
One of the biggest challenges that ecommerce companies face is keeping customers engaged throughout the buying process. Shopping cart abandonment is an outrageous 75.6% globally, costing billions in lost revenue. You can recoup some of these potential losses through effective retargeting campaigns.
When a visitor leaves your site prematurely, you can follow up with them, or retarget, in several ways. If they were signed in, send them a follow-up email and offer an incentive to complete the purchase. Otherwise, you can use a remarketing ad campaign that will show them ads for your products on sites that participate in the Google ad network.
Need Help With Your E-Commerce Marketing Strategy?
Whether you’d like to make changes to your current ecommerce website, if you want to start from scratch to build a new solution, or if you would like to explore ways to increase conversions, Connection Model can help. We’ve been successful in implementing a variety of ecommerce digital marketing solutions for clients and welcome a conversation about your goals.
Contact us today to learn more about our results-based solutions.
Written By: David Carpenter
