Whether you have a start-up or an established online shop, all you need is higher sales figures. However, it is a herculean task to remain competitive among thousands of eCommerce stores. Your store should remain up to date with the current marketing trends, and this necessity leads you to implement effective eCommerce marketing strategies.

Here we give fifteen time-tested eCommerce marketing tips that can make your eCommerce store ready to deal with the growing competition:

1. Website Optimization

Let us put first things first. Your eCommerce website needs optimization for layout, language, conversion elements, and other performance parameters after launching. You need to make sure that when the visitors come to your site, they find it friendly and convenient.

Simple check-in and easy checkout processes are a must along with a pleasant look and feel to increase the web traffic.

Therefore, you must optimize your website for color, graphics, and content.

2. Content Creation

Both promotional and informative objectives are served well with creative and original content. Setting up relevant, unique, and yet simple content is really necessary to ensure the success of an eCommerce website.

You can compel the visitors to purchase with the help of crisp and high-quality content. If you want to opt for content marketing, your website content should be in line with the efforts put by professional content writers.

You can attract and retain customers to your website by promoting interactive content. All you need to brainstorm on the topics that can give your customers and site visitors a new perspective or new information.

You can promote the online shop with blog posts, videos, newsletters, etc., and show your domain expertise with ease. What’s more, you can get optimum results by following the Pareto’s principle for content, that indicates 80 percent informative and 20 percent promotional content.

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3. Social Media Presence

When it comes to online marketing methods, the social media network offers the most effective and yet highly affordable platform. It is easy to establish and maintain direct communication with your customers, visitors, and marketers on social media.

You can increase engagement and boost web traffic with the help of social media marketing.

Today, different social media channels bring people with various interests under one roof and you can build a large customer base across the world by utilizing social media.

In a way, social media can assist you to grow your business by building and strengthening your brand’s reputation. You can enhance brand recognition by showing a strong social media presence.

4. Run Email and PPC Campaigns

Email is one of the cheapest and yet the most effective methods to reach a huge audience online. But then, you need to be very careful about the email format and frequency, because email is a two-edged sword.

If you want to address the audience properly, email marketing is a better option because you can also monitor the outcome of email marketing efforts.

You can give useful content in an interactive way within your emails along with a special promotional offer. And yes, to build a substantial email list, it is a good option to offer special discounts and coupons in lieu of email sign-ups.

PPC is also a productive way to promote your eCommerce shop. If you want to address a specific audience, then PPC can work wonders.

You can track the result and direct your campaign accordingly with the PPC campaign. But then, you need to take care of three aspects to get the most optimum outcome: the ad (content and keyword), they offer, and the landing page (your website’s page which is linked to the PPC ad).

5. Optimize for Mobile

In today’s mobile-driven age, you must make your website responsive to any device. As most of the searches and purchases are done through mobile devices worldwide, you need to facilitate them with a mobile-friendly website.

Also, you should ensure that your customers can get what they expect from a mobile version of your website.

A mobile-friendly website also facilitates you to apply mobile marketing techniques to target a specific audience. These days, the geo-targeting concept gains ground to reach out to the existing and prospective customers within a specific distance. With a mobile-optimized eCommerce site, you can leverage the benefits of this concept.

6. Target Wearables and VR devices

Let’s face it! The virtual world has made substantial progress with the advent of AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality). Any business with a futuristic vision cannot stay away from these revolutionary technologies.

You should keep wearables, VR, and AR devices in mind while designing and customizing the eCommerce website. There is no exaggeration in mentioning that the online business would largely rely on these technologies in the future.

Image Source: ecommerce-nation.com

Useful Reading: 10 Real Reasons Why Customers Hesitate To Buy From Your ECommerce Store

7. Take Multiple Roots

How would you address a huge audience globally at once?

The answer is: You need to customize the UX of an eCommerce store in line with the needs of your audience.

If you want to expand the outreach, it is necessary to do proper homework about the customer’s behavior. You need to offer a personal touch while taking your business to multiple platforms.

You can share videos, pictures of your employees and show the transparency of processes to attract visitors. It is openness and individual treatment that can win the hearts of your customers.

8. Care for Abandoned Carts

One of the biggest problems in the eCommerce domain is cart abandonment.

When it becomes more frequent that the shoppers abandon their carts during purchase on your website, you need to think about it more seriously.

If you can reduce the number of abandoned carts year after year, you can increase the revenue significantly.

If you really care for abandoned carts, which you should be, you should shoot a follow-up email immediately along with other relevant emails. All you need is to get the customer’s email address before the checkout process.

You can also opt for ads to retarget them. For example, a Facebook pixel can help you retarget the customers who abandon their carts. Whenever they go on social media, they will immediately see your ads and may consider a purchase from your store.

9. Opt for Upsell

Well, it is about targeting the ‘buying mood’ of the customers. When people by something online from any specific eCommerce platform, chances are bright that they have a euphoric feeling that comes with shopping, and they are ready to buy something related to their selected item.

You can show the list of related items to the purchasing customers in a way that they feel like they are getting a better deal. It is called upselling, and Amazon utilizes it in the best possible way.

The upselling option can enable you to increase sales. Your customer can get a pleasant surprise while seeing the related items with better combo options.

Also, you can suggest them an upgrade with a reasonable price that facilitates them to make a purchasing decision. If you can utilize the upsell option well, it can translate into a big profit.

10. Take Help from Instagram

You may find this strategy the weirdest of all eCommerce marketing strategies. Instagram is highly popular, and you can take an advantage of its growing penetration.

You can put product images with a catchy description to give your customers and visitors a pleasant visual experience. You can also utilize the video features of this amazing platform to attract people to your online shop.

To get the most from Instagram, you can use the tips given below:

• Ask your customers to post their pictures with your product
• Develop a unique hashtag to give your products a new identity
• Run contests in which you can give your products as a prize
• Give away your products to influencers in lieu of posting their photos
• Remain active in the comments section of photos and stay in touch with customers

Remember, a strong Instagram presence can lead you toward the optimum outcome.

11. Give More Power to Customers

‘Wishlist’ is a small function in the eCommerce website with big benefits. It gives the facility to mark any item for the future if your customers do not want to buy it at the moment. You can periodically remind them about their wishlists through an email or social media. You can also send a coupon if any of the items in the wishlist have a promotional offer.

What’s more, you can target your customers with items related to their wishlist. In a way, you can give more power to customers and get to know their desires and purchase behavior. Wishlist plays a vital role in reducing the number of abandoned carts.

12. Get Product Reviews

As a customer, how would you judge any product online? Obviously, you will look at the customer reviews first.

If there are more positive reviews than negative ones, you will more likely to buy a product, and vice versa. Similarly, you must care for reviews of your products on the website. Google also counts these reviews to show the products in searches. But then, these reviews should be from genuine users of your products.

You can send a follow-up email after several weeks of purchase and ask your customer to review the product. You can also give them the guarantee to resolve their queries or negative feedback. In a way, you can get valuable reviews for your eCommerce store.

13. Focus on Spending

You know it very well that any online paid marketing campaign can be monitored for spending and RoI. You should keep the focus on ad spending when it comes to promoting your eCommerce store. Though ads are very powerful and are capable of targeting and attracting people, you need to keep a check on spending to avoid your efforts go in vain.

14. Make Your Store More User-friendly

A slow and sluggish website with difficult navigation can keep customers away from your eCommerce shop. In the growing competition, if people do not find your website simple, sophisticated, and professional, they will go to other websites quickly.

You should, therefore, take care of the following aspects to make your online shop more customer-friendly:

• Give clear and crisp product description along with high-quality, professional photos of products
• Make navigation simple and classify products properly in categories and subcategories
• Include videos and graphics if necessary, but make sure that they do not increase the PLT (Page Load Time)
• Keep checkout and sign-in process simple and straightforward

These aspects can enable you to attract and engage visitors on your website.

Useful Reading: Essential Things Your E-Commerce Website Should Have

15. Emphasize on SEO

Last but not least; SEO is still a big factor to drive huge traffic to your eCommerce website. SEO efforts can improve the ranking of your websites on the leading search engines like Google and Bing. However, you need to update the website with relevant and reliable content as well as necessary graphics to meet the latest SEO standards.

Good user experience and an error-free performance together with an SEO campaign can enforce visitors to take a purchasing decision and your store can earn good revenue along with increasing sales figures.

16. Start an affiliate marketing program

Like influencer marketing, affiliate marketing is a burgeoning method of generating more leads for eCommerce businesses. The method allows you to put people on the work to promote products and receive a commission in exchange for the sales. This helps you drive more sales and brings in more traffic to your site.

Solwin Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an attractive marketing method as it is easily measurable and offers you maximum capabilities to drive traffic from high-traffic and popular sites. Most of all, you can know how many clicks and purchases are driving towards your site. This process allows you to find out the affiliate partners are profitable for your business. It also gives you an opportunity to learn about successful marketing strategies.

The process includes marketing products over social media channels, sharing unique promo codes. The process may also include blog posting and reviewing your products. This gives more perspective to potential buyers about the products and makes decision-making easy.

The process requires minimum effort from you; the recommendation comes across as more trustworthy as it comes from people that are in a position to recommend it to other people. This can be your way to earn more trust for a new business.

17. Advertise on Podcast

If you have already identified buyers for your brand, then you can try out advertising on the podcast. Besides purchasing your products, learn what people are interested in knowing. Such as hobbies or the usability of your product and what education they need to help make purchases better.

By carefully crafting your podcast content around these topics, you can gain more loyalty from the people. This would allow you to reach out to more people that are looking for your products. Most of all, it gives you an opportunity to market your products to people that are already interested in buying products that you sell. You can manage your podcasting easily by working with companies that can help you bring more consistency to your podcasting.

18. Implement Google Shopping Ads

One of the most amazing ways to market your products is through Google Shopping Advertisements. The platform offers you the right tools and puts you in front of the right customers. This gives you an opportunity to get on the top of the Google search results. With this, your products are the right thing people see when they are searching for the relevant keywords. Most importantly, when a user clicks on an ad, they come directly to the product page.

If you are thinking about the ROI, you can rest assured as it is one of the most low-cost and high ROI methods of marketing. According to Nikki Bisel of Seafoam Media, it gives you a 200% increase in conversion rate and click-through rate.

To make the utmost use of the product, the product gives you an opportunity to market products to consumers that are looking for generic items. This way, you can attract more customers at the top of the funnel and at a very low cost. This gives you extreme benefit as it allows you to gain more eyeballs in the market and get recognized for a large range of products.

19. Sell Your Product on Amazon, eBay, Flipkart, and Others

One of the best pieces of advice that we can give you for marketing your products is to not stay limited to selling products on your own ecommerce site. It is great that you are marketing your products and have your very own channel where you can easily manage lead generation and sales. But look how drastically the world of eCommerce has changed.

To diversify your portfolio and expand your product to new platforms, you need to think about reaching out to companies that have people coming and searching for products that are similar to your products and services. So, look out for the companies such as Amazon, eBay, Flipkart, etc., where you can easily obtain a license to sell your products easily.

20. Grow eCommerce through Text Messages

The power of mobile phones is not unknown to anyone. If we go by the statistics, 79% of smartphone users make online purchases, and the number is increasing at a Godspeed.

Image Source: Localapppower.com

That being said, businesses can easily target and connect with valuable customers through text messaging. SMS may look old, but it works. You can personalize each message and try to create a more intimate bond with your buyers. This makes them feel more valued, and you get well-deserved recognition in the market.

Finally, you can also send order updates, coupons, discounts, information, etc., on upcoming sales, new products and encourage more sales for your platform.

21. Make Internal Linking a Habit

It is beneficial to internally link your article and pages of your websites. It allows you an opportunity to increase exploration of your related services and blog pages. Internal linking would help you increase browsing time on your website and reduce the bounce rate significantly.

Internal linking also gives you some major SEO benefits. And unlike any other SEO practice, you can do it on your end; without having to invest anything in the external plugins or tools. Also, make sure that you are linking to the relevant articles and pages on the website. Make it contextual, and don’t do internal linking just for the sake of it. Make the browsing experience of your visitors rewarding and go forward with an intent to engage.

22. Add a Table of Contents

Table of content is another popular blogging practice. This helps you increase engagement on the blog as it allows easy navigation. Especially if you are working on long-type blogs that have a lot of subsections, it is always better to use a table of content. It helps align the thoughts of the reader, and they would be able to browse to the most relevant sections without having to scroll up and down and lose the engagement.

As a proof of concept, Julien Raby of Combustible shares his experience in an interview. According to their internal report, the table of content was able to increase the engagement on their blog page by 22% in a few weeks.

Max Robinson on StreamingMoviesRight.com also promotes the idea of adding a table of content. In his experience, after having a report from a head mapping software, they realized readers were not spending time reading complete articles; they would only go directly to the sections that were relevant to them.

Added table of content in your blog page can help you in increasing the average time on the page.

23. Set Links to Open in a New Window

To increase the time on the page, you have to think of ways that can prevent the loss of interest of a reader every time they click on a link.

According to Angela Ash of Flow SEO, one of the easiest tricks to prevent that from happening is by opening internal and external links in a new tab. This trick helps draw the attention of the readers and ultimately return back to where they were a few minutes back. This easy browsing makes things much easier for the users.

24. Start With a “Post Summary”

In a case study by SuperOffice, it was found out that the average time on the page increased by 39%, i.e., users started spending time on the blog pages from 3 minutes 55 seconds to 5 minutes. The case study takes us through the factors that affect the mindset of readers while they are browsing the content of a particular website. Post summary being widely popular amongst blogging sites such as Insider, Buffer, and Drift.

Why does the “post summary” work? It is because it gives your readers a quick look into the entire article. It allows you to display all the things your readers might be interested in by giving them a straight look inside. It’s an ultimate selling point where you can give away all the good things about the blog in just a 15-second read.

25. Boost Sales by Showing Related Products

Another good way to keep the engagement going is by optimizing navigation on your product pages. Imagine your potential customer clicked on one of the ads and landed on the product page. For some reason, it didn’t work out. So, would you want them to go away without browsing other relative products? Definitely not.

Adding related products of the same category on the product page can help you from losing potential customers. Giving them quick access to other products can increase your chances of conversion.

Create user-friendly eCommerce experiences. Some of the good additions to your eCommerce site are related items, sponsored products, recently viewed products, etc. Ecommerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart use the same strategy. By using it, you can increase the engagement on your page and reduce exit rates on the pages.

26. Increase Website Credibility

Some of the small mistakes that businesses make and that can reflect badly on their brand image is that of not providing information about the author. It is not about how fake it looks, but about how people can trust the opinion of people they don’t know.

Make it a habit to add the author’s description; this would help people trust the opinion and know that you have subject matter experts in-house. Include important information such as name, picture, short bio. This should help you increase the trust and credibility of the website.

Another good way to increase the trust of your brand is by providing links to social media profiles. This would give people an opportunity to follow their favorite writers on social media and know when the new posts are coming.

Adding certifications, ratings, and awards helps you in the course of increasing credibility for your website content.

Concluding Lines:

In a nutshell, eCommerce marketing is smart and aggressive work. You need to put dedicated efforts and time, but once you apply the right blend of eCommerce marketing ideas, success will not be far away!

That’s all for now! Remember, your eCommerce store is an online representative of your business. We do hope that these eCommerce marketing tips will remain handy for you in expanding your business through strengthening your online presence. But then, we cannot expect overnight success. Just stick to these strategies, and gradually you will see a visible uptrend in traffic as well as the conversion rate for your eCommerce shop.

Solwin Infotech has gained fame for offering the best-in-class web design and development services in the eCommerce domain. Our expert web developers have served the global clientele with customized and feature-rich eCommerce web solutions.

Just drop us a line to build your flawlessly working online shop or learn effective eCommerce marketing strategies to stay ahead of your peers!