It was a time when a vendor had to walk several miles to grab all the items and made his stock. Then the customers would come to visit him to buy what they wanted. There was no proper schedule as to when the vendor would come to sell things and no proper buy station.
Later in the years, we evolved and learned to make things easier for us. Vendors now started to set up specific shops and stores. In there, they would keep bigger stock of all the items and keep restocking them. Moving further, the technology around us drastically changed our lives to make the process of shopping less sophisticated with eCommerce.
eCommerce is the process of buying or selling different products online from the comfort of your home. You can pay via the web and you just get your desired items delivered to you at your doorstep. Due to COVID-19, eCommerce has emerged into one of the most booming segments in the entire IT niche, as more and more businesses are forced to move to digital mode, due to lockdown and other restrictions.
This business has been very successful and the impact of eCommerce is huge but it still has a lot more potential that needs to be utilized and that can be done by implementing some digital marketing strategies for eCommerce. These are a few ways the sellers can use to take the business further and generate the profit. Collaborating with a growth marketing agency can bring these strategies to fruition, harnessing untapped potential and driving your eCommerce business towards unprecedented profitability.
Self-check
The first and most important part of this list is to see where you stand as an eCommerce businessman. You need to devise a proper plan and figure out all the weak points of your business to access your level. In this way, you can use the right strategies and methods to boost up your business and set it on the right track to success.
If possible, hire an expert whose purpose should be just to figure out ways in which you can make the most out of your business, make it even more successful and advance it with the best eCommerce marketing strategies. Investing some time and money in learning about the latest marketing strategies and advertising mediums would be really helpful. You can take some online courses on digital marketing from the likes of Udemy, Uteach or Lynda in the long run.
Referrals and Advertisements
There will be no point in having a full warehouse if the electronic store does not have enough traffic. This is why you need to pay close attention to the advertisement to increase its reputation in the industry.
If used creatively, you can capitalize from outdoor ads to bring in direct traffic to your eCommerce store easily. But you have to be creative with your ads as it has to be catchy and intuitive for customers to make a visit. So your primary incentive should be to promote your store as much as possible. By either setting up billboards, putting them on different social media platforms. By paying commercials companies that can make some attractive digital advertisements for you.
Moreover, you should also give your customers an option to refer your store to their friends and family. In addition, if they use the referral link they get a bonus on their next purchase. Offering referral income and incentives can really help in bringing customers at very cheap customer acquisition rates.
You can also consider running an affiliate program also. This can make others (affiliates) work for you. You only pay them once customers made purchases through their reference. There are many smart affiliate marketers out there who can bring in revenues from day one. All you have to do is to offer a good commission rate for them. By deciding to create an affiliate link, businesses can streamline the process for affiliates.
Influencers
Another great eCommerce digital marketing strategy is that you should get in touch with influencers or micro-influencers and pay them to advertise your products for you as this will help direct most of their fan following towards your shop and the on-hand user review from the influencer can really inspire their fans to shop from your store.
Micro influencer marketing is one of the trending digital marketing services right now across the world. There are thousands of top-notch micro-influencers who can really impact your sales if they endorse you. And the important thing is that these are cost-effective too in comparison with the other digital advertising costs.
There are many platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube, etc. where you can find micro-influencers with millions of followers. This is a great opportunity to seize as most of them have a major influence on their followers. At the same time, you can rely on a digital marketing agency to help you access the micro-influencer network faster.
Frequent sales and giveaways
You should not shy away from doing different seasonal sales all year round. Because there is a big community of people just waiting for stores to put sales so that they can immediately hop on and grab their desired products.
This does not generate a higher profit per item but the overall sale profit can easily surpass what you had planned. Moreover, after trying the products once, if the customers feel satisfied they will prefer to shop. Holding some kind of giveaway is also a great way to grab the attention of thousands of customers. Who would say no to a free item?
You can creatively use this by running some contests related to various festivals or events. For example, if you’re selling products for young women, you could run contests like ‘ ‘selfie with Mother’ on Mothers’ Day. Then give a prize for the most beautiful photo. By doing that, people would start promoting their photographs and eventually give reach your products and website.
Once you start working with the best digital marketing agencies, you will realize that there are multiple contests and offers that you will be able to run for your target audiences. This includes content on search engines as well as social media platforms. A good digital marketing agency might also suggest that you create a new Landing Page for better targeting and conversions.
Email marketing
Marketing through email is still one of the cheapest mediums to reach your customers. You should definitely include email marketing in your digital marketing strategy. It is one of the best digital marketing strategies for eCommerce stores if used in the correct way.
Build an email list by leveraging email search to capture all the customers that have visited your online store and use it to your advantage. Start sending an email whenever you have new products available, restocked an all-time favorite product, added new discounts. Add personalization in your email by mentioning the names or showing similar products as the customer had viewed earlier to grab their attention; additionally, use high-quality pictures and catchy phrases to further get the attention of people.
This email marketing strategy is extremely important for any business and increases customer inflow. Running some creatively designed campaigns could definitely bring in some sales at a very low Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) rate. You can use email marketing software that could give you a better inbox delivery rate. Thereby you can enhance your chances of reaching your customers.
Customer feedback
Apart from making sure that your online store looks beautiful, eye-catching, and vibrant, it is recommendable to add customer feedback for all the products. It is more difficult to buy any product in the eCommerce stores if you have never seen it in person and have no idea about it. However, if you add honest and positive customer feedback for your products, then customers are more likely to trust that review and will end up buying that product. This is because it is easier to get the trust of the customer once they see previous customers’ feedbacks for the same product they intend to buy.
Social proof has a bigger impact than push advertising promotions as it creates some sort of confidence in the users in trying out your product. So collecting testimonials and feedback from your initial customers is really important in creating good credibility for your website. Collect some good video testimonials and social media reviews from your happy customers even if you have to offer some discounts and perks for it.
According to the current situations around the world, this is probably the best time to invest in an online store as people prefer to order things from the comfort of their home right to their footstep and avoid all the hassle that comes in the process of physically going and buying from the store. Though the quality of your products and the quality of your service are really the ones that will help you in making a loyal customer base, following these digital marketing strategies for eCommerce along with it can really help you in having fast-paced growth. Then you are most likely to have a very successful eCommerce store that will just keep on increasing its reputation and will pay you well for all the hard work you put into it.
This post is contributed by Rithesh Raghavan from Acowebs.
Author’s Bio:
Rithesh Raghavan is the co-founder of Acowebs, an online store for eCommerce plugins with 15000+ satisfied customers across the globe. Having a rich experience of 15+ years in Digital Marketing, Rithesh loves to write up his thoughts on the latest trends and developments in the world of IT and software development.