Building brand awareness for your ecommerce business and reaching your audience effectively with your marketing communication requires effort, but the rewards can be significant. The truth is that well-structured ecommerce marketing strategies and tactics will swiftly expose your business to targeted customers and increase sales over time.
If you’re just getting started with ecommerce marketing tactics, or you are looking for new ways to increase your customer base, then keep reading because there are many useful tips for you here.
Below are some of our top tips you should use to expose your product to the right audience and increase your sales.
1. Start with Compelling Content
An essential source of high quality traffic for your ecommerce business is high-standard content channeled around products you want to market. It is therefore essential to invest time and resources into an effective content marketing strategy.
Ecommerce businesses need content to attract targeted traffic that will result in leads. With content, you can clearly expose everything you want your customers to know concerning any of your products. You can use well-structured content marketing strategies centered on your products to convince online readers to purchase them.
No marketer can deny the benefits of using content to build brand awareness, trust and attract new customers. It is also a great way you can build credibility and help your customers make the right decisions in purchasing whatever you are offering.
The mistake you must avoid is in making all of your content about your product. You need to mix it with some other topics that will impact positively readers. Make sure to offer them valuable content that they actually want to engage with rather than just showering them with sales-focused material that will end up irritating them.
2. Build Strong Email Lists
Email is an important marketing tool you can use drive revenue. It is one of the most direct means you can employ online to reach your readers. It is very useful because your subscribers have given you full permission to reach out to them with your offers. So you can use this medium to communicate in a more tailored manner to an audience that is likely to be interested in what you have to say.
There are many ways you can build email lists but the most popular one is to freely give out well-written eBook or piece of digital documentation in exchange for email address.
You can also integrate subscribe buttons or pop-ups on your website and encourage your readers to subscribe. You may also want to give users who sign up to your email list a discount on your store to give them an extra incentive to sign up.
Of course, you can use your email addresses database to send out emails directly, but also to retarget these users with ads on other platforms like Facebook or display advertising.
3. Leverage Social Media
Although not directly linked to sales, being active on social media is an excellent way of pushing your online content to an interested audience. You can also curate content from other sources and that are relevant to your audience’s interests to build an engaged audience base.
Scaling your social media follower base takes time, but it is a long-term project that will help you get your brand in front of people and create a great communication platform. It is also a great tool to remain ‘top-of-mind’ for your followers. First you will need to build a base of followers that could be interested in your product. Then keep posting useful content related to your industry or business but let it be posts that will interest them. No one is interested in a social media account that just blasts sales messages.
Examples of content you may wish to leverage are ‘how to’ guides, insight articles, industry news, company news, the occasional special offer, or simply entertainment-focused content. Use different types of content such as blog articles, photos, infographics, videos, quotes, news, etc.
4. Use Videos to Present Your Products
The use of video to present products is quite often neglected in ecommerce. Yet it’s an effective way to take your ecommerce business to greater heights. Online users watch videos more than they read articles. It takes little time and effort to watch a short video and your audience is likely to pay more attention to it than if the information were only written on a page.
You can shoot product videos providing customers with useful information such as how to use your product, the benefits they can get from your product, how to install or get the most out of your product and so many other things that can convince them to buy from you.
Besides, Google is friendly to videos. Having product videos gives you a chance to rank higher in search results than your competitors who are not using videos.
Note that although it is encouraged to use videos, you should also aim to provide the same information in text form.
5. Use Customer Reviews
The use of customer reviews of products is a proven ecommerce marketing strategy you should use to boost sales. A recent study found that 54% of online buyers read online reviews before placing their order.
Online shoppers want to know what other shoppers think about a product they are interested to ensure they are spending their hard earned money on a quality item. This is particularly important in the online world because unlike in a physical store, your consumers can’t actually directly see, touch or try out the product. Instead, they need to rely on the opinions and experiences of people who have bought it before them.
6. Offer Reward Programs
It is generally much cheaper and easier to maintain loyal customers who will buy repeatedly from you than to acquire new ones. Therefore, you should invest effort into nurturing your existing customers and maximising their Customer Lifetime Value.
Providing reward program is a good ecommerce marketing strategy that will encourage new and existing customers to buy again from you.
7. Upsell & Cross-Sell
You are missing out on lots of sales if you are not utilising up-sells & cross-sells marketing tactics. Up-sells & cross-sells encourage customers to buy more products that they didn’t initially intend to buy. You can use it to close additional sales with customers that are in a buying mood. You can take advantage of having customers buy a particular product to sell them additional products that are complementary. This is used effectively for example by ecommerce giant Amazon. In the example below, I am looking to buy a GoPro camera:
Now if I’m in the market for a GoPro, I’m very likely to also need a few more items such as a memory card, GoPro accessories or extra batteries. That’s why Amazon presents to me a series of such products I can add to my basket in just a click. And I’m very likely to think ‘Right, I actually need a memory card for my new GoPro. I’ll just buy it now at the same time.”
8. Diversify Your Sales Channels
Who said you can only sell on your website? Explore other marketplaces like Amazon and Ebay. These marketplaces are established and trusted with great numbers of new and returning global customers. You can sell your product on their platform in addition to your website and increase your revenue.