Ecommerce marketing is an effective way to drive sales, boost engagement and build a loyal customer base. As a small business, driving sales can be challenging, however, with the right ecommerce marketing plan one can grow a customer base through consistent interactions.
Many factors come into play to make ecommerce marketing effective and most of these are free!
It’s easy to spend dollars and push ads across platforms but that’s not going to build a loyal customer base or boost communication. Paid ads are helpful, however, to be able to truly build a brand identity and position yourself as a credible small business you must put in a little more effort.
In a nutshell, a strong ecommerce marketing plan drives sales, creates brand awareness and helps you get noticed and stay top of mind.
Let’s look at 5 ecommerce marketing hacks to get the ball rolling.
5 Ecommerce Marketing Tips to Drive Sales (and Much More!)
With more and more businesses getting online it takes consistent effort to stand out and get noticed. The good news is customers appreciate and notice businesses that put in the effort! If you are a small business owner, here are 5 ecommerce marketing tips to boost sales, improve customer retention, enhance communication and build an ‘unmissable’ brand identity.
1. Create Valuable Content
Valuable content that helps a customer get relevant information consistently is one of the key elements to building customer loyalty. When done right, and consistently, content marketing drives desired action from the customer, and at the same time builds credibility. Use content as a medium to communicate and encourage interaction rather than a medium to push sales. When you create valuable content that is relevant to your target audience, sales will automatically follow. Valuable content also has a direct impact on SEO and includes website, blogs, social media campaigns, newsletters, and all other forms of marketing content.
2. Email Marketing
Email marketing is the best way to build a direct relationship with your customers. Create personalized messaging for your subscribers to drive desirable action. You can create email lists and segments based on location, preferences and other categories to be more relevant. Use emails to share updates about products, exclusive benefits like discount coupons, feedback and reviews, promos and news, and all other relevant information that will encourage the recipient to go ahead and take the action you want them to.
3. Address Abandoned Shopping Carts
A customer may add products to a shopping cart and abandon them without completing the checkout process. Abandoned carts are a huge loss of revenue for businesses and thus, addressing this is of high importance. A customer may abandon a cart for many reasons – the checkout process is too lengthy, they have not found all the products they need, there is no information regarding shipping, or they simply got distracted. Try and understand why a cart was abandoned and how you can urge the customer to come back and complete the purchase. You can increase your revenue with abandoned cart emails. Automating this process with triggered emails is the easiest and most effective way to try and win back the customer.
4. Upsell and Cross-Sell Products
When a customer makes a purchase it’s important to keep the communication going. Thank you emails for shopping, tracking and order details are all transactional that do not encourage further action. However, create emails to upsell and cross-sell your products. Once you have basic data about a customer like recent browsing and purchase history, you can leverage that to your advantage to showcase similar products or other products that may be relevant to them. For example, if a customer buys trekking boots from your adventure gear online store, you can tell them about trekking bags or let them know about temperature-controlled water sippers or first-aid kits. Try and think about how you can get them back to shop more and keep the interaction active.
5. Personalized Communication
As a small business, the biggest advantage you have is that you can create a direct and personalized line of communication with every existing and potential customer. Be it a chat box on your website, social media platforms or phone calls – communicate directly and extend complete support to help customers with queries or any other information they need to shop with you. Follow up on your chats to ensure your messaging has been clear and let your customers know that you take customer support and feedback very seriously.
Bring in the Big Wins for Your Small Business!
Leverage the power of multiple ecommerce marketing strategies to bring in the big wins and bigger profits for your small business. Focus on creating value and driving customer loyalty and you’ll automatically drive sales and revenue.
Customer support and service, informative content, personalized messaging and automated emails are all great ways to build loyalty and brand awareness and drive desired actions.
Build your website, get the right hosting, design it yourself or get experts to design it for you and get ready to market your small business to a large audience. For more tips on how to grow, manage and market your small business, read more on our WordPress Tutorials page.
