If you’ve spent a long time designing the perfect online store, it can feel confusing when you don’t have customers piling up on the day it opens.
Here’s a question to ask yourself in this scenario: how much marketing did you do?
If the answer is none, then you have your answer. If the answer is a lot, then your strategy may not have been effective enough. Luckily, we’re here to help.
Read on to learn the 7 best tips to build an effective e-commerce marketing strategy for your business.
1. Establish Your E-Commerce Goals
Like with any business plan, you have to decide what your goals are. Here, you’re going to focus on e-commerce, but these goals can then travel into other realms of your business.
Customer experience, both online and in-store, should feel seamless for your clientele. Nowadays, people expect quickness and convenience, and they expect it no matter how they’re shopping.
That experience goes for social media as well. If your business interacts with someone one way online, and then a different way in-person or even over the phone, they’re going to be confused. In some cases, they may even be unhappy about it.
Because e-commerce businesses have many moving parts, there are a few questions you should ask yourself when building a marketing strategy:
- What do you want people to say about your business?
- Who or what is your competition?
- What is wrong with your current strategy?
- What is good about your current strategy?
- What do you want to keep the same?
- Who is responsible for the day-to-day oversight of this strategy?
There’s a lot to consider here, but the rest of these tips can help you answer, or tweak your answers, to those questions.
2. Develop Your Buyer Persona
The target audience is important. Your buyer persona is going to be the demographic — or ideal person — that your marketing strategy is geared toward.
Your marketing strategy’s buyer persona is going to determine what social media you use the most, the way your brand is built, and even what content you create for both those things.
These statistics can help you make a decision.
3. Identify What Sets You Apart
This step is crucial for your business. What does your product or service target that others don’t?
Identifying your customer’s pain points and then targeting them tells people what you can do that others can’t. This answer is going to vary for everyone, but it can be simple and doesn’t always have to solve a bigger problem.
Take Apple for example. They offer a free engraving on pretty much all their products, but definitely the new electronics. That’s something that a lot of other companies don’t offer, which sets Apple apart from the crowd.
Other things, like an eco-friendly product, or something long-lasting and energy sustaining, set products apart from the crowd.
We live in an age where the market is willing to spend more money if they know the product is high quality and long-lasting. Put the extra effort into making your product something memorable and personable.
4. Create Effective Descriptions
Product descriptions are important for your website because they help things feel more professional.
If you sell clothes, a size chart can go a long way. If you sell furniture, placing the dimensions in your product descriptions can help people recognize where it would fit into their home.
Some companies have even implemented an augmented reality feature within their app that customers can use to see the item in their space. The possibilities are endless here, and there is no such thing as too much detail.
5. Engage Your Audience
You can use social media to engage your audience in a way that aligns with your goals.
You can use Instagram stories to take polls or encourage people to post products they receive from your business. A custom hashtag can even go a long way.
If you notice that customers take the time to post your product and tag your business, take the time to interact with them! Thank them for their business and invite them to revisit whenever they’d like.
6. Streamline Your Website
In a recent study, 74 percent of people have said that if a business has a well-designed mobile website they’re likely to revisit it. In that same study, 50 percent of people said that even if they liked a business, they wouldn’t use them as often if their website wasn’t well-designed.
Consumers have high expectations for their shopping experiences, whether it’s in-person or online. The most important thing you can do here is have a well-designed website that also loads fast.
Anything longer than a 3-second load speed is going to have people leaving your website, and that’s not going to look good for your bounce rate on search engines.
7. Identify Upselling and Cross-selling Opportunities
Upselling is selling a better, or bigger, version of your product or service. If you offer a free version of your product, then upselling would be inviting them to join and get the premium version.
Cross-selling is attempting to sell more of your product. If you run a bakery and someone comes in for cake, cross-selling would be offering them cookies, brownies, or any other kind of pastry.
Other examples of upselling and cross-selling you can include on your website are placing deals in the checkout process, or letting the person they’re only x amount of dollars away from free shipping.
You can place relevant items underneath other items, or a section called “others also bought” on your product pages.
Sending out emails when a customer reaches a milestone, or their free trial is about to expire, is another great way to encourage them to buy your product.
The thing to remember, however, is to not be pushy. Though you want customers to be aware of your products, you don’t want to annoy them with too many emails and pop-ups.
Remember These Tips When Designing Your E-commerce Marketing Strategy
If you want a successful e-commerce store, you’ll have to design an effective e-commerce marketing strategy. It’s important to remember that you’re not going to generate leads simply because you have an online store. You have to get out there and attract customers, which is exactly what these 7 tips will help you do.
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