The purpose of marketing is to increase your sales & awareness. For marketing to work you’ll need a strategy that combines a variety of different marketing actions, that together will successfully bring you your desired results – growing your eCommerce sales.
When talking about eCommerce, there are some really easy to implement marketing actions. These actions, together, can help you boost your sales and increase the awareness of both, your products and your brand. These actions are really easy and fast to conduct, so keep reading and prepare yourself for a great success!
Generate Trust on Your Site
Even if most of the people now think that buying through the internet is great and safe, there are still a lot of shoppers who don’t feel completely comfortable with it. By displaying any security badges you are using on your site, you are helping increase their trust & hopefully the number of purchase orders!
Here you can find some of the security badges you can use. However, make sure you do comply with the requirements needed to display them, or you can find yourself in an unpleasant situation.
Grow Your Loyalty
It’s always much more expensive to attract new customers than to retain the ones you already have. Loyal customers buy more often and generate more revenue each time they purchase on your store. It’s always great to keep capturing new customers, but it also requires a more expensive marketing strategy.
But how can you grow your customer’s loyalty? There are a million ways to do it! Search for new ways to improve their experience. You can create your own loyalty program so your customers will have an incentive to buy more. On average consumers spend 46% more in businesses who have loyalty programs. For instance, you can give them points for every purchase they make so they can use these points later for getting promotions and discounts. They’ll love it, and your pocket too!
Generate Trust on Your Products and Services
How will people believe your products and services are as good as you describe them? If more people talk about them as well! Testimonials and clients reviews are a great way to show proof of concept, and its impact on trust and, therefore, sales is huge.
But now anybody can make up false reviews and publish them on their site, and shoppers know it. So why not show a picture and the person’s full name? This way people will see there is an actual person behind the review. To make it even more convincing, you can create a section on your store where your customers can write deeper about their experience with the product or service. Storytelling is always a good idea.
FOMO?
We only live once! And shoppers know it, so whenever they see things like “only one item left” or “limited offer for today”, they feel FOMO: fear of missing the opportunity. They’ll think that it’s now or never. By creating that sense of urgency, you’ll make shoppers act faster so they won’t forget to do it later, and so you’ll avoid losing purchases.
Be Mobile Friendly
People spend half of their life checking their phones, and a growing number of them are buying online through them (even more now that they can shop on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media channels). This means it’s essential for your webpage to be responsive because that people use their phones and tablets to shop online is a fact. Actually, 40% of mobile users have made a purchase online, and in the concrete case of millennials, that amount would rise to more than 60%. Not being mobile friendly could send potential sales away.
Another thing you could do is create your own mobile app. People love them! It would be like having your store on their phone always, and at the same time, the customer experience could be highly improved. This way you can achieve more eCommerce sales and customers.
Be Active with Promotions & Giveaways
There are never enough offers and discounts for the shoppers. We all go crazy about them, so you better increase them as well! You can even increase the base price of each product and then put it on sale with the original price, it’ll work! Everybody loves the feeling of getting a good deal, so this is a great way to drive eCommerce sales. When talking about promotions you should really take into account holidays and special days, these are the moments when people buy more and spend more money, so it’s super important for you to promote your holiday sales. A successful holiday campaign could bring tons of traffic & sales to your store.
Giveaways and competitions make us feel the same way. We’d give our emails, invite our friends and publish on our social media just to have the possibility to win something for free. This way you won’t only increase your sales but also your awareness and trust. More people will get to know you because of their friends and acquaintances.
Get your Ads on Google
Advertising on Google is great for driving additional traffic to your store. It will appear when to people right when they are searching for your products and you’ll also be advertised with banners on other web pages. Your ads can even follow the people that already bought products on your store to remind them to come back for more!
Using Google Adwords is a little more complicated and you’ll need some knowledge and experience to correctly create your ads and campaigns. However, you can find some apps like Google Clever Adwords that will create your campaigns for you in the blink of an eye and at zero cost. These tools are really useful and even lifesavers when you want to start something important like Adwords but have no time to learn how to use it. You should give it a try!
Showcase Your Main Products
If you have a lot of different kind of products people can be confused and overwhelmed. Especially if it’s their first time in the store, this could make you lose potential purchases. Let’s try to make it easier for customers! Showcase the products that people usually buy, or create a “best sellers” section.
Bet on Social Media
Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit are among the highest-performing sites. Discover which social media channel is performing better for your niche and attack! Don’t miss the opportunity, advertising on social media is really easy and not that expensive.
Upsell and Cross-sell Products
If you know your clients will probably need other products to combine with the one that they want to buy, you should cross-sell them! If they want a burger they’ll probably want fries and a drink as well. You should offer them, they’ll probably buy it all at once!
On the other hand, if they want fries, why not to offer them bigger fries? They’ll be happy, and you too. To do this is called upselling. Both tactics are really useful, you’d be helping the client acquire something you know they most probably want to buy, that’s why it works.
Make It Easier for Them to Pay
Paying is the hardest part of a purchase, the least pleasant and when doubts about if they really need the product can arise. This means you need to make this process as fast and easy as you can. Give them all the options you can, don’t only accept VISA or MasterCard, let them pay through Apple Pay, Paypal, and other payment gateways, accept both debit and credit cards, etc. If they cannot find their favorite and most trusted option for paying, you’re losing sales.
Eliminate Abandoned Carts
60-70% of the customers adding products to their shopping carts, abandon them. These are all lost opportunities! They were willing to buy that product, they wanted it, they loved it, they were crazy about it, but then… nah. What changed? One of the main reasons people leave their carts without actually purchasing anything is the shipping and other unexpected fees. Try not to increase the price of the products once in the cart, and explain them why do you include them if you have to.
You can also try to decrease the abandonment by sending them automated follow-up emails, this way they’ll remember you exist. If you can also include pictures of the products they had in their cart and send them a discount code you’ll have more chances that they come back.
This post is brought to you by Laura Sánchez – Marketing Product Manager at Clever ecommerce. Laura is a frequent blogger at Clever ecommerce blog, where she talks about eCommerce tips & advice, SEO & SEM strategies, and other related topics.
Cannot wait to launch my first shop here with my startup 🙂 All wonderful but only great if you already have a good flow of traffic to your website. have trouble getting people to my site!!
Hey @testinodelevingne:disqus, thanks for the feedback and glad to hear that you found our post interesting. Getting traffic and awareness to a new site is indeed a challenge for many. A good approach is to understand where your target customers are (be it social media, forums, community groups) and try to appear there as much as you can. Best of luck on your new shop! 🙂