Never stop experimenting no matter how successful and thriving your e-commerce company is! The start of a new year is a great time to start practicing some new trends to boost sales and increase the power of your marketing strategy.
As we have enter 2017, here are 10 resolutions that every e-commerce business should implement to make this year the best ever yet!
1. Improve Email Personalization
Personalizing your email marketing can be an incredibly effective strategy and is a simple one. You can make use of all the data provided or segmented in specific contact lists i.e. location in order to increase the power of your email.
You can also set up automated behavioral trigger emails – these are the type of emails that remind your customers, for example, that they haven’t been active in five days, and they are incredibly effective at getting a response.
Triggered emails have a 152 percent higher open rate when compared to traditional ones.
2. Segment your Email List
Email list segmentation is a great way to ensure that you are sending emails that align with each individual customer as best as possible. All it means is putting your email subscribers into different groups so you can send them emails that are more relevant to them.
The groups can be as simple as “Buyers” and “Non-buyers,” and then you can continue to separate into more subdivisions such as groups that bought a specific product, groups with specific interests based on your analytics, etc.
ContactPigeon’s segmentation tool is a great way to ensure that you are sending the right message to the right person. This tool classifies your email subscribers into different groups to provide you with more accurate re-targeting options.
3. Dig More in Ecommerce Analytics
Speaking of analytics, that is going to be another huge trend in 2017. Big data is more prevalent than ever and it would be a big mistake not to take advantage of it because it can provide a wealth of insights about your site, your visitors’ behavior and the sources of customer acquisition.
According to Forbes,
“Big data and business analytics worldwide revenues will grow from nearly $122B in 2015 to more than $187B in 2019, an increase of more than 50% over the five-year forecast period.”
All this info can be used to seek out new customers and boost sales.
4. Improve the Mobile Experience
According to the Baymard Institute, check out rates on mobile are 70-percent lower in comparison to the already poor checkout rates on desktop e-commerce sites. Mobile checkout is going to be a huge focus for e-commerce businesses in 2017.
If you haven’t already polished up your mobile site and shopping cart to make for a perfectly seamless user experience, now is the time to do so. Using mobile wallets and accepting different forms of payment can help customers take the final plunge.
5. Start Using Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is simply the software that exists to help make marketing tasks, like emails, social media and other online actions, automatic to save you time and money and increase conversions.
E-commerce marketing automation platforms like ContactPigeon helps you focus your resources on marketing tasks that help you convert more visitors and takes the legwork out of the initial contact points with early potential customers.
6. Offer Better Shipping Options
Shipping is the last frontier to sealing the deal on your customer’s satisfaction. Make it a goal this year to examine and revamp your fulfillment methods if there is any room for improvement.
If you’re not certain, it might be helpful to survey your existing customers to find out what is important to them in terms of shipping. Some customers expect free shipping, others want to be able to count on priority and express shipping options and specified time slots for delivery, while others still are looking ahead to companies that will eventually offer drone delivery as an option.
7. Create Awesome Content
Content is more important than ever. It’s what compels people to visit your site, engage with your brand and is what helps you stay ahead of your industry. Now that so much content exists, it is becoming more and more difficult to have your stuff rise above the fold and get noticed.
In order to do so, you need to constantly come up with fresh and engaging content in order to lure in more visitors and gain a loyal audience. The Reebok: Be More Human campaign is an awesome example of an e-tailer putting great content to work – they focused on material that would encourage their customers to see their full fitness potential by calculating “Human scores” and sharing workout selfies.
This year, we’ll see a lot more video, interactive content and good storytelling become core parts of e-commerce content strategy.
8. Refresh Product Photography
Product photos are extremely important for e-commerce because they are the only visual interaction your customers have with your product. A recent study showed that larger product images can boost online sales by up to nine percent.
Make it a resolution this year to make your product photos prettier and glossier. Optimize your images to make them more appealing and more shareable.
9. Watch the Rise of Chat Bots and AI
AI and chat bots are going to cause a huge shift in the e-commerce world in 2017.
They will come close to replacing human interaction and e-commerce businesses need to confront this aspect of the tech industry and start to embrace the new, conversational lingo that chat bots are using.
10. Engage with Customers in Social Media
This is probably already on your radar, but social media is a super important way to engage with your customers and build your brand – not just to push sales directly. This means offering helpful, smart, insightful content that will help persuade your prospective customers to take a chance on you – or at least share your content with others.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat and Vine are the big leaders these days, but it’s worth doing your own research to find out which networks your particular audience use most often. Check out these examples of companies like Birchbox and Of a Kind that are rocking their social media campaigns.
Make your 2017 slogan “out with the old and in with the new” and stick to these 10 e-commerce New Year’s Resolutions and you will be sure to see the difference we have discussed with you.
Get in touch with us if you have any questions about e-commerce marketing automation solutions and we can help you get the new year off to a great start.
