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Retailers are all about ecommerce, so it’s only natural for them to realize the opportunities with internet marketing. Whether you’re just getting started or looking for a refresh, check out these 12 strategies that will jump-start your online presence and help you grow your customer base
“e-commerce marketing strategy pdf” is a document that provides 12 strategies for retailers. The strategies are broken down into four categories: branding, product, pricing and promotion.
Ecommerce marketing refers to when a company advertises to customers in order to persuade them to purchase things using online platforms (such as your own website or Amazon)—it involves both conventional and digital marketing methods and promotions. Creating an online shop for your retail company is a terrific method to increase brand recognition and sales. However, you’ll need to apply an ecommerce marketing approach to successfully increase your business and online sales.
Even if you operate a physical shop, you should develop an ecommerce marketing plan so that you can create an omnichannel retail experience that puts your brand in front of more potential consumers while also ensuring that current customers return.
Here are 12 pointers to assist you in developing an ecommerce marketing plan for your retail store:
1. Take use of email marketing
To produce and nurture leads, email marketing may be a cost-effective technique.
To automate your messages and deploy targeted campaigns to segmented audiences on your list, look for an email marketing solution.
Unlike social media, which employs algorithms to restrict how many people see your material, you have total control over your audience with an email list.
Because you’ll require permission to send an email to a subscriber, the individual is likely already acquainted with your company and interested in the items or services you offer or provide.
Here are some examples of how email marketing may help you with your ecommerce marketing strategy:
Create a mailing list
When it comes to growing your email list, quality takes precedence above quantity.
Instead of focusing on the amount of subscribers, consider how likely they are to connect with you, conduct business with you, and purchase from you.
Add opt-in forms to checkout pages, post-purchase messages, and popular sections of your website to establish a robust email list of quality subscribers. As a lead magnet, you can also develop an interactive quiz to encourage visitors to enter their email addresses.
Emails to Abandoned Carts
When an online consumer adds items to their basket and then leaves your site without completing the transaction, you have an abandoned shopping cart. These are a huge setback for businesses since these users are likely to have high-intent, implying a simple transaction. The data on shopping cart abandonment, on the other hand, do not lie:
- According to Baymard Institute, the average reported shopping cart abandonment rate is 69.8%.
- The yearly ecommerce loss from shopping cart abandonment is estimated to be $18 billion, according to a commonly circulated figure.
To curb these losses, you can Emails to Abandoned Carts. These kinds of emails remind your customers about their almost-purchase and encourage them to finish the transaction. In the emails, you could offer free shipping, a discount, or even suggest new products as extra encouragement.
Here’s an example of a cart abandonment email sent by Jack Wills to a consumer who didn’t complete their purchase after filling their basket.
Emails with great content are more likely to get opened.
When clients provide you with their email addresses, you gain a degree of confidence. Offer value in your emails to preserve that trust and develop a solid connection with your consumers.
Because “value” is a subjective term, it’s critical to know what your consumers care about and tailor your emails to match their needs. In general, though, you should build up a welcome email series to assist clients get to know your company and understand expectations. You might also send out unique discount offers to your email subscribers, give helpful product advice, and even solicit feedback.
Customers may get a 25% discount by sending an email to Made In Cookware.
Create a Lookalike Audience with Customer Emails
A fantastic way to utilize email marketing is to establish a lookalike audience based on your existing list. A doppelganger audience is a clone of your ideal target audience—in this example, your email subscribers list. Because your email subscribers are already engaged in your company, building an audience around them is more likely to result in conversions.
You’ll need to segment your current list and download it as a CSV file before you can construct this lookalike audience. Then, in your Facebook Ads Manager, upload the CSV file and pick identifiers to assist Facebook construct the lookalike audience for you.
Digital Marketing vs. Ecommerce Marketing Digital marketing is focused on online marketing platforms, although it may be used to promote both online and offline sales. Ecommerce marketing is essentially promoting your items on internet platforms in order to encourage customers to purchase them.
2. Sell your products to people who aren’t interested in what you’re selling.
Cross-selling has resulted in significant revenue increases for corporations like Amazon and McDonald’s, despite its simplicity. You may use the same strategy in your shop.
You can cross-sell a wallet to go with a beautiful pair of pants if you offer clothes. Alternatively, a pet store may offer vitamins as a supplement to dog food.
The product you’re giving must compliment the goods your consumers have previously purchased in order for cross-selling to function.
You may upsell consumers on a product that is somewhat more expensive than their planned buy, similar to cross-selling. Upselling is when you persuade a consumer to buy a $200 pair of pants instead of a $100 pair, or when you persuade a dog owner to buy the premium dog food instead of the generic brand.
3. Take use of social media
It’s impossible to talk about ecommerce marketing without including social media.
People are increasingly using sites such as TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter to amuse themselves and purchase for things.
As an ecommerce company, you can simply promote yourself as the one your customers look for on social media.
Use User-Generated Content to Your Advantage
Any piece of material developed by people—in this example, customers—rather than a brand is known as user-generated content (UGC). User-generated content (UGC) shared on social media is free promotion and exposure for your ecommerce company.
When consumers publish images of themselves using your product, it increases their faith in your company. UGC may take the shape of reviews and suggestions, in addition to photographs shared on social media. When done correctly, user-generated content (UGC) generates traffic to both your physical and online businesses.
Store on Instagram
Instagram allows ecommerce business owners to integrate their product catalog with their Instagram business profile. This means you can launch an Store on Instagram to build a shopping channel in your posts, stories, and Explore page.
Customers may buy things right from your Instagram stories and posts.
You also get a Shop tab on your profile, which serves as your Store on Instagramfront. In this Shop tab, users can see all the products you have for sale, the product’s price, and other details.
The Instagram Shop of @jfitzpatrickfootwear looks like this.
Instagram presents the goods that prospective consumers may be interested in when they click “View Shop.”
Facebook Marketplace is a platform that allows you to sell
It’s no surprise that Facebook, as Instagram’s parent company, encourages ecommerce promotion on its site.
Over 33% of Facebook users in the US use the Facebook Marketplace is a platform that allows you to sell to buy and sell products every month.
Aside from the Facebook Marketplace is a platform that allows you to sell, you can also create a Facebook store that easily integrates your product catalog from platforms like Shopify with Facebook.
4. Make Existing Product Pages Better
Your product pages have two primary goals: to attract visitors and to convert them into customers.
You must optimize the page for keywords that your target audience uses while searching online in order to attract them. Proper meta tags, alt text, headers, and keywords are all best practices for optimizing your product pages for traffic.
Once you’ve established a constant stream of visitors, the next step is to optimize your product pages for conversion. To accomplish so, develop product descriptions that appeal to your audience’s emotions or pain areas while positioning your product as the answer. Over time, track performance to see what works and what doesn’t.
5. Encourage customers to provide feedback
Customers like to do business with companies they know, like, and trust. However, building trust isn’t always simple, mostly because prospects don’t think a corporation would provide an honest assessment of its items.
On the other hand, 79 percent of shoppers believe internet reviews from people who have tried a product.
You might send your customers a post-purchase email asking them to evaluate their shopping experience to encourage them to give reviews. Alternatively, you could send them an email after a fair period of time (ideally after they’ve had a chance to use your product) asking them to rate how well it’s working for them.
If your audience is hesitant to provide reviews and comments, you might offer a discount on their next purchase to entice them to do so.
6. Make Useful Website Content Available
Creating a blog might be an effective ecommerce marketing strategy for attracting new and current consumers. You may rank better in search engines and create more options for your audience to connect with you if you post good blog material on a regular basis.
By developing content for informative, navigational, transactional, and commercial search intent on your blog, you can serve the demands of an audience at the top, middle, and bottom of your sales funnel.
Let’s pretend you’re the owner of a shoe business named RunZ. Writing a blog article on “how to prepare for a marathon” is completely informative and would certainly appeal to anybody interested in running a marathon. This sort of material is great for prospects at the very beginning of your sales funnel.
When your target audience puts “RunZ website” into a search engine, it shows they are already acquainted with your brand and want to visit your website.
You’ll need to include terms like “best,” “discount,” and “shipping” in your product description to attract a transactional audience. As a result, when someone searches for “best air force 1 sneakers,” your product pages will appear in search results.
7. Hold giveaways and contests
Everyone enjoys receiving free gifts. You may use human nature to your advantage by holding competitions and freebies for your company. However, since a giveaway may attract a wide range of individuals, it’s critical to include a mechanism to gather and categorize your giveaway audience data in order to discover those who may become customers in the future.
Analyze the data after your giveaway is ended to see which channel delivered you the most qualified visitors. Then, using various advertising strategies, seek for ways to double down on those possibilities.
8. Create a Loyalty Program for Customers
Customers like being acknowledged. Creating a customer loyalty program in which you provide unique discounts and incentives to your most loyal clients is one of the finest ways to show your appreciation for them.
Customers might get points for buying anything from you, giving you a nice shoutout on social media, leaving an online review, or referring a new consumer to your company, for example.
You may spend less on client acquisition—which is often more costly than customer retention—if you have a customer loyalty program.
Barnes & Noble, for example, offers a membership loyalty program that includes benefits like as free delivery, discounts on in-store purchases, and early access to new items.
9. Collaborate with a different brand
Another great ecommerce marketing approach for exposing your goods to a new audience is collaborating with a business that provides a complimentary product to a similar demographic. If you operate a body soap shop, for example, you may join with a company that offers body creams and lotions.
Then, using your websites, email marketing, social media, and other current channels, you may advertise the cooperation online. This may also help you grow your audience, resulting in long-term and indirect effects long after the partnership has ended.
10. Create a mobile-friendly version of your online store
Every year, more people purchase online using their mobile devices, and this trend does not seem to be slowing down anytime soon, if ever. As a result, while building an online shop, it’s critical to consider the mobile experience.
Customers shouldn’t have to zoom in on their phones or tablets since your store’s design is responsive and has huge buttons. To prevent losing customers who dislike slow-loading websites, you should also optimize your online business for website performance. Fortunately, all ecommerce platforms and website builders come pre-loaded with mobile-responsive functionality.
Collaboration with Influencers (No. 11)
Influencer marketing is a viable alternative to pay-per-click (PPC) and social media advertising. Choosing the proper influencer for a campaign may help you raise brand recognition and get your goods in front of an already interested audience.
The most typical kind of influencer marketing is an influencer creating a social media post on a platform where their engaged following may be found. You may also request a product review from the influencer you’re working with.
Remember to favor quality over quantity when dealing with influencers. A large number of followers does not automatically imply a high level of engagement or sales. Look for influencers that seem genuine and have a lot of good two-way conversation on their posts, but a lot of this is subjective.
12. Take use of SMS marketing
You may also acquire consumers’ phone numbers and send them marketing text messages in addition to emails. Given that your clients get a large number of emails each day, many of which go unread, sending SMS messages might be a great option.
You may use SMS marketing to provide push alerts to your consumers or promote time-sensitive deals. Location-based messages may also prompt people to buy something while they’re in the shop, give more product information, and push unique in-store discounts.
Conclusion
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to ecommerce marketing. It’s critical to think about the things you offer and the kind of people you serve—as well as how much time and money you’re willing to put into it.
You don’t have to do everything at once. Pick a few suggestions and try them out. Get rid of the ones that don’t work and try out new ones as you go. The finest aspect of running a small company is having control over how it is conducted.
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