There are many marketing strategies you can apply to grow your e-commerce business and increase online sales, but of course, not all of them will be right for your specific business or its needs. Here are 12 effective marketing strategies that will definitely help you develop your e-commerce website and boost your online business.
How to Grow Your eCommerce Business and Increase Online Sales?
The eCommerce market has been growing rapidly in recent years. More and more people are expected to take advantage of this opportunity to start an online business. And if you are an aspiring online business owner, or already have an eCommerce store, the competition will be greater than before.
To stay in the game, you will have to do some work to increase your e-commerce sales. Although it is not an easy task, you can stay ahead of the competition, with the right knowledge and some good practices.
Without a doubt, the first sales are the most complicated and the most exasperating. Consumers won’t come to your platform by magic. Therefore, if you want to know how to grow your eCommerce business, you must aggressively market your business and take advantage of the weaknesses of your competition to attract customers and traffic.
In this article, we will show you 12 effective eCommerce strategies that can help you make a powerful eCommerce growth plan for your business. Read this article till the end and apply these strategies to develop your eCommerce website and increase eCommerce sales.
12 Effective Marketing Strategies to Develop Your eCommerce Website and Drive More Sales
If you want to grow your online business, you have to make extra efforts to differentiate yourself from other competitors. Hence, we have rounded up 12 smart tricks and effective marketing strategies that you can use to improve your eCommerce website and increase your eCommerce sales.
1. Create a Blog to Promote Your Business
If you are not yet building a blog associated with your e-commerce website, you are losing the unlimited potential of content marketing. Producing valuable and free content builds brand trust. It also offers you content to share on social networks and helps you rank in search engines.
To start, think about all those initial inquiries that the audience has about your products and your sector. Use the blog to answer those questions with individual articles. Plus, you can use it to provide lifestyle tips, tutorials, and resources around your products. If you can create regular content, you will soon start seeing results on social media and search engines.
Price aside, the big reason shoppers behave the way they do, for better and for worse, is because of the information they receive about the products. And this applies to all your catalog materials: the more you offer to the client, the more rigorous and complete, the better online sales conversion you will get.
2. Improve the Quality of Content
Price aside, the big reason shoppers behave the way they do, for better and for worse, is because of the information they receive about the products. And this applies to all your catalog materials: the more you offer to the client, the more rigorous and complete, the better online sales conversion you will get.
Include useful images of all kinds in your product sheets and create clear and prominent feature descriptions and bullet points. Make your testimonials credible and be accompanied by photographs.
The video is the future: it makes staying on a page online store grow up to 88%. Even a short video of a few seconds can make a big difference, explain your product more clearly and get more impact on other channels and social networks.
3. Improve Your Site’s Ranking (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is key to drive organic traffic to your website. Organic traffic is the type of traffic that is consistent and costs you nothing.
SEO works by optimizing your website for search engines, helping you rank higher, and increasing your chances of appearing on the first pages of search results.
There are two types of SEO:
1. On-page optimization: On-page SEO includes more technical tweaks made to a site to make it more search engine friendly, such as including relevant keywords, meta descriptions, and image alt text.
2. Off-page optimization: Off-page SEO focuses on increasing awareness of your website’s existence on the internet, including link building and outreach work.
4. Secure Your eCommerce Website
eCommerce website security is one of the most important features to protect against cyber threats. Without proper website security, you put yourself, your brand, and your customers at risk of suffering fraud or identity theft.
So, ensure the security of online business and choose a reputable hosting provider. Make sure the hosting plan you buy comes with effective security features to protect your website from potential cyber-attacks.
Your hosting plan must include an SSL Certificate and encrypts all confidential data that passes through your websites, such as payment details and other customer information.
If malicious traffic is ever sent to your website, the DNS Firewall must redirect that traffic, ensuring that your site’s functionality is not affected.
Improve the security of the shopping experience. Nobody reads the privacy policies, so the most effective thing is that your icons and purchase security and anti-fraud seals are well visible in your online store.
Read here: How to Build an eCommerce Website Step by Step
5. Build a Better Social Media Presence
If you want to grow your eCommerce business, you must be present on social networking sites. To start making yourself known, you must open an account. It is not about being in all of them, but about selecting the ones that will be useful to connect with your target audience. The most popular social media platforms are Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and others.
A good way to find potential clients is to proactively find people who post questions about your field and reach out to them so they keep you in mind. The idea is not to present or mention your products but to help them answer their questions. If you do it right, users will investigate your existence and discover your business.
Take advantage of your professional profile and create a business page to interact with friends, family and acquaintances and make people talk about your brand.
There are dozens of public and private groups created for specific niches, allowing you to post questions and talk to other members. Engage in the groups relevant to your niche.
6. Develop a Unique and Memorable Brand Identity
The main purpose of brand identity is to help people recognize your brand more easily and make them associate it with your products. A strong brand identity should equate to a personality, create some kind of feeling, and be associated with the brand products in no time. The brand identity consists of:
- A distinctive logo
- An interesting company name
- A unique tone and voice for your brand
- Great website design
- Content that evokes emotion
- Presence on social media channels
To create a great logo, you can either hire a professional or use free logo maker tools. Also, pay attention to the icons you use, and especially the color scheme, as it has more meaning than you think.
When it comes to website design, make sure it suits your brand’s tone and voice. If your brand image is youthful and light, your website design should reflect that as well. In fact, that should be a constant on all platforms, including social media.
7. Improve Your Public Relations Skills
If you want to grow your eCommerce business and increase your sales, make a good public relations strategy.
Public relations is about communicating with your market to raise awareness of your business, sharing the right information to the right places and people, building and manage your business’s reputation, and cultivating relationships with consumers.
Public relations have the same effect as when a video goes viral and can drive your brand to success. A surefire PR trick is to do something unusual, outrageous, funny, or important enough to merit media attention. If successful, your eCommerce will benefit from many high-profile news source links, which is great for both short-term traffic and long-term SEO.
Create an easy contact process and report on the performance percentages you offer to your partners, and generate synergies and good relationships at public events, such as fairs and congresses.
A team of partners is a very effective action to grow online sales and is a win-win for everyone involved.
Here are some core public relations skills to master today to improve your public relations strategy:
- Have strong and excellent skills both in communication and listening.
- Identify the topics you wish to speak on.
- Know precisely to whom you want to communicate.
- Learn how to use social media platforms to their fullest potential.
- Try different writing styles for different clients across different industries.
- Have excellent time management skills to deal with all of your clients equally and complete your projects on time.
- Set goals for personal and professional development.
- Be aware of industry trends and learn more about your client’s focus.
- Think creatively because creative thinking will provide you with many opportunities for promoting your business and approaching new clients.
8. Build Loyalty with Your Customers
When online sales stagnate, you may think that the customer base is no longer working. However, it is much easier to retain and convince customers who already know your brand and products than to get new buyers from scratch.
A former customer spends more in an online store, adds more products to their shopping cart, and offers a higher sales conversion for each visit to your online store.
Develop marketing strategies that refresh the memory of these loyal customers and make them feel cared for.
Also, identify your customers’ favorite products and highlight them as best sellers on your platforms. If you are able to attract your former customers, you can convince more users of the same profile.
Create a cross-selling and upselling strategy and apply this to your own online store and think about offering more information about your catalog to buyers in each product card and purchase process.
Offer the customer the possibility of opting for a higher category product or for a more complete service.
It is also useful to apply this strategy to increase online sales in the marketplaces, looking at which listings and star products you can make your own products appear as related suggestions.
Upselling is up to 20 times more effective than cross-selling so that it always includes visual and textual strategies that offer the user the option of improving their purchase.
9. Prioritize Your Customer Service
Even if a company offers good products at competitive prices, buyers probably won’t stick around if customer service is bad. In fact, a study shows that 90% of people will verify a brand’s customer service before doing business with them.
Good customer service can make the difference between a successful eCommerce business and an online store with no conversions. If people have a positive experience with your business, they are likely to leave a positive review and recommend your services and products to others, which is one of the most effective ways to grow.
Here are some easy-to-implement tips on how you can provide the kind of customer service people are looking for:
- Offer a contact page on your website, live chat functionality, provide an email address, and possibly even a phone number. Make sure to use social media chats as well, whenever possible.
- Always respond to your customers’ concerns as soon as they contact you. Even if you mean to analyze the problem, any answer is always better than no answer.
- Always remain calm and kind and alleviate the situation by providing the necessary guidance.
- Always try to answer the question or fix the problem effectively and quickly, if visiters contact you with a simple question or a complicated technical dilemma. Never leave any problem unsolved.
10. Create a Return and Refund Policy
One of the things that makes people hesitate to buy is their fear that the product will not live up to their expectations. This feeling increases in the field of e-commerce, as unlike normal stores that allow the buyer to see and touch the product and possibly use it before buying, the buyer cannot try the product in e-commerce stores.
The only information the buyer has is a picture or a few pictures of the product and a description of several lines.
Therefore, online store owners must provide the possibility of returning money to buyers in the event that they do not like the product or do not respond to the agreed specifications within a certain period.
Create a return and refund policy that builds trust with your customers. Be clear and concise when writing your return policy for your eCommerce store business. Make it easy to find and access the return policy page on your website.
This strategy removes the psychological barriers in buyers and reduces the risk of wasting money, and this leads to increased sales.
11. Create a Competitive Price Monitoring Strategy
Most consumers like to shop around before making a purchase, this includes browsing Google and sites like Amazon for the best options.
To achieve notoriety, you have to follow the rules of each platform, stay competitive on pricing, and wait while you experiment to find out which platform is the best fit for you and offers the best ROI.
According to the survey report, up to 67.45% of online shopping carts end up abandoned. The main reasons are prices and shipping costs and times, but also the design of your website or app.
To create a competitor’s price monitoring strategy, just follow these simple steps:
- Determine the goals and objectives of your online business.
- Analyze your target audience and gather important information about your audience.
- Define your competitors, identify your competitive assortment and profile your competitive landscape.
- Conduct a comprehensive market pricing analysis and create a pricing strategy and execution plan.
12. Launch Marketing Campaigns for Your Online Business
Marketing campaigns are an effective tool to drive traffic to your website. It’s about knowing who your target audience is, where to find them, and then approaching them in the most effective way.
There are different types of marketing campaigns that e-commerce companies use, some of which include:
Social Media Marketing Campaigns: Find out which social media platforms are popular with your target audience and build your brand awareness on those platforms. With active engagement and paid advertising on social media, you can build a strong presence and following that will easily turn into loyal customers.
Email marketing campaigns: Email marketing is the act of sending commercial messages to the contacts who have signed up to your email list and given express permission to receive messages from you via email.
Email marketing is the most profitable marketing channel. It is used to inform, drive sales, and build a community around a brand.
Email marketing campaigns work exceptionally well for various commercial ads and cart abandonment recovery.
Content marketing campaigns: Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience by creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience.
Effective content marketing campaigns include a wide variety of different content, such as videos, infographics, and even e-books. This content can also be shared on social media platforms and through email marketing campaigns.
Affiliate marketing campaigns: Affiliate marketing is an advertising model in which you earn money (commissions) every time you promote a company’s products or services and generate sales. You can collaborate with other brands and influencers similar to your industry.
An affiliate marketing campaign is a set of processes and activities that you can take to promote the affiliate products. You can arrange for marketing campaigns to promote your products on their channels for a commission, which can increase your brand awareness and attract new customers.
Read here: 5 Keys to Boost Online Sales for SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises)
Final Thoughts:
Remember that these strategies should be applied to all your online sales channels, and especially to the mCommerce business, since up to 67% of buyers prefer to buy from a smartphone because it is more convenient and faster.
The more strategic actions you add, the better online sales growth results you will achieve. But the fundamental thing is that you study what your weaknesses are and what strategies are best for you at all times.
What do you think of this article on how to grow your eCommerce business? Leave your comments and share your love!
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