For any business to operate smoothly and reach the correct audience, it is important to have the right eCommerce marketing strategy. The strategy should be robust enough to help you find the right audience, draw them in, engage them, and finally convert them. Since there is tough competition in eCommerce, the marketing strategies you employ should help you stand out.
In this article, we shall focus on suggesting eCommerce Marketing strategies that will help you get organic leads, nurturing them, tips to engage them, providing a good user experience during the purchase and post-purchase stage, and ways to boost customer loyalty.
For easy explanation, we shall break the strategies into 3 categories based on the marketing funnel.
Expand Email List
A visitor first visiting your online store is less likely to buy than the visitors who have visited your online store multiple times. This gives an idea that you need to consistently stay in touch with the first-time visitors to get them back to your store and encourage them to buy.
How can this be done?
Your first-time visitors should be converted to your email subscribers. Put your maximum efforts to collect the email ids of your first-time visitors through –
Review Forms – Ask your visitors about the design or any other aspect of your store through a review form and collect their email id.
Exit-intent Popup – As soon as your visitor tries to close the window or tab of your online store, there should be a popup asking for their intent and email id.
Live Chat – Get a live chat integrated into your online store and offer your visitors help as soon as they enter. While offering the help, you can ask for their email id.
Discount – Offer your visitors a discount on their purchases instead of basic information like their name, email id, etc.
Minimize Shopping Cart Abandonment
People leave the shopping carts without purchasing might be because of the below-mentioned reasons-
- Unexpected charges levied at the time of checkout.
- The tedious and time-consuming checkout process
- Found a better price elsewhere
- Worried about payment security
- Payment gets declined
- And many more, as given below –
We need to eliminate these reasons by making the checkout process as user-friendly as possible. Also, check on your website loading speed, which may annoy your customer and instigate them to abandon the shopping cart.
What about the visitors who have already abandoned the cart? We need to create opportunities to bring back the visitors who have abandoned the cart. But how?
Please send an email to visitors who have abandoned the cart, offering them free shipping and an extra discount on the products in their cart.
Call them if you have the contact details, asking about the problem they have faced during checkout, and assure them to solve that issue if they come back to the store and complete their purchase.
Upsell and Cross-Sell
Upselling means offering the higher version or better quality product than the product that your customer has already selected or purchased.
Cross-Selling means offering a similar or relevant product to the one your customers have purchased or intend to purchase.
In both ways, you can boost the sales of your online store. So, if you have not thought about this before, you can implement this strategy for your eCommerce store.
Encourage Product Reviews
You would agree that product reviews play a major role in the purchase decisions of your customers. The reason? People trust product reviews more than product descriptions.
So, how to ensure that you get maximum positive reviews for your products?
Please send an email to your customers asking for the reviews for the products they have purchased in place of a discount code on their next purchase.
Just ensure that –
- You send an email asking for review within 24 hours of the product purchase
- You provide an attractive incentive to your customer
- The email content should be convincing and persuasive
- Leaving product review should be an easy process
eCommerce Personalization
You might have heard about eCommerce personalization. There can be different ways of personalizing the shopping experience for your customers –
Recommend products to your customers based on –
- Previous purchases
- Information gathered through surveys like their age, gender, etc.
- Special days like – Birthdays, anniversaries, etc.
- Real-time information like location, time, etc.
Moreover, personalized emails can also encourage purchases. For example, an email sent to a customer saying “$49 discount only for you” can motivate them to purchase products from your store.
Many customers also prefer to view personalized shipping and tracking information. They would definitely prefer to purchase from your store in the future if they get personalized shipping and tracking information.
Mobile Optimization
Having a responsive website can not be enough to get high conversions. You need to ensure that your online store website provides an excellent mobile experience as most of the purchases done these days are through mobile.
Few factors to be considered for the best mobile user experience would be –
- Quick loading time
- Simple navigation and menus
- Optimized site search
- Concise product filtering
- Easy checkout process
To better understand this, you can check out our infographic – How to optimize your store for mobile visitors?
Excellent Customer Support
If you provide excellent customer support, you can be sure that your customer would return to you only for their future purchases. Otherwise, you know that there is a lot of competition and your customers can get better options.
Retaining a customer is really challenging, and customer support can highly contribute to overcoming this challenge.
Be available for your customers 24/7 through –
- Live Chat
- Phone
- Social media
Assure your customers to provide quick solutions to the problems they are facing, as that would be a sure-fire way to delight and drive them back to your online store.
Customer Loyalty Rewards
Loyalty rewards are an excellent way to encourage your past customers to buy from your store again. You can treat your customers with –
- Points that they can redeem in their future purchases
- Discount coupons to be used in their next orders.
- Free shipping
- Early access to newly introduced products
If implemented correctly, loyalty rewards can motivate the buyers who have purchased only once or twice from your store and thus improve the conversion rate.
Send Emails Based on Customer Behavior
Have you ever analyzed your customer behavior? If not, it is really significant to do that to give relevant offers to your customers.
Different emails can be sent based on –
- Pages visited during your customers’ previous visits to your online store.
- Products added by customers in their cart.
- Your previous emails read by the customers in past
- Your customers’ previous purchases
- The subscribers maximumly clicked Which links in your email campaigns.
- Wishlist of your customers
Based on all the above facts, you can draft a personalized email and send it to your customers for better results.
Use Social Networking Platforms
Showing off your products on Instagram and Facebook is in trend these days. Although people don’t visit social networking platforms for shopping, they would definitely visit your store and purchase those products if they find products that can lure them.
Using the right hashtags, appropriate filters, and posting at the right time would be some tactics to sell successfully through social networking platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
Moreover, you can also sell directly from Facebook by launching a Facebook store that can be integrated with your online store, making it highly convenient to manage it.
eCommerce Marketing Tips: What to do Next?
These were some of the best eCommerce tips that can help you in encouraging high conversions on your online store.
Still, if you are in any dilemma or confused about implementing these eCommerce marketing tips practically, just get in touch with QeRetail – a specialized eCommerce marketing agency.