The internet is an amazing platform. It's enabled businesses to grow exponentially, reaching customers across the globe and building a globally used and loved brand. With the help of eCommerce plugins like Shopify and Squarespace you can now build an online website in an hour! Setting up an online store with eCommerce platforms is affordable too and without the need for design knowledge pretty much anyone can set one up.
With many more businesses moving online to reach a broader expanse of customers comes an increased level of competition between businesses with similar branding or business aims. Getting your customer's attention is not easy and your online marketing strategy needs to be a priority when getting started.
Luckily, we've got a few tried and tested marketing strategies that successful online stores have been using for years!
Email Marketing
Email may seem like a dying form of communication but you may be surprised to hear that projected for 2022 4.3 billion people will be using email globally.
eCommerce plugins like BigCommerce collect email addresses from customers when they purchase so the more sales you get the bigger this list will become. This is a very helpful means of business marketing, as you will be able to send promotional offers to these email addresses.
You can offer them discount codes, or even free shipping. Interparcel can help you offer free postage by supplying you with reduced shipping rates with excellent couriers. This will allow you to offset these costs by increasing your product price slightly and then offering free shipping or even multi buy deals! This is a great digital marketing strategy to increase sales for eCommerce stores. Offering customers free delivery is a vital resource in today's saturated eCommerce market and is an excellent way to guarantee customer satisfaction and with Interparcel's discounted shipping prices it's easy to achieve this!
If you integrate with Interparcel too we can help you offer your customers multiple shipping options as well as the potential for free shipping, giving your customers a range of choice. Plus our shipping manager makes it easy to manage orders, addresses and send bulk orders in no time at all.
Sending marketing emails is a surefire way to get your previous customer's attention as they've given you their email willingly. But be sure to not overdo it - customers may unsubscribe or mute your email output if you email too often so strike a good balance!
Content Marketing
Although many people think content marketing should be about selling your product and building your brand and company impression, it's actually more about capturing your customer's attention and interest.
Take for example those long-running Haribo adverts. Everyone knows the ones. Where the policemen are sat in their car or the business partners conducting a conference, only to eat a Haribo and start talking like little kids. These ads are only indirectly connected to their product but work so well to make the customer remember it and the brand itself.
As long as your content marketing is able to capture the attention of the customer you've done the right thing. Try creating a video outlining how your product is made or integrate someone using it indirectly for a promotional video or picture series. Another great way of improving your content marketing is by keeping up to date with social media trends - Instagram is currently teeming with filters and quizzes that run through these filters, why not create your own quiz filter for your business for a fun, indirect means of marketing your products!
Using indirect marketing techniques to show off your brand's personality is a fantastic way to build relationships with your customers and keep your brand fresh in their memory.
Website Optimisation and SEO marketing
This may seem a lot more complicated than it really is, but the idea of website optimisation is to make sure when people google products like yours, that your website comes up!
In the same way, that packaging can improve business and increase sales, so too can a well optimised eCommerce website! You'll need to have a content marketing strategy for your webpages. A good place to start is by including content that answers questions your customers may enter into Google in order to find the products they're looking for. For example, if your business sells socks a customer of yours may google: 'brightly patterned socks'. You'll want to include these SEO keywords on your website so that it will come up for a customer seeking this product.
If you're using eCommerce plugins like WooCommerce you'll be able to see what pages customers are clicking on most, when they abandon their cart and what products are most popular.
This kind of information will help you to know what to improve with website optimisation platforms like Moz Pro. It's also worth having a look at Google analytics which is the be-all and end-all eCommerce ranking integration.
You should definitely try to gather good content for each page on your website. Using keywords that relate to your products will really help customers find your eCommerce store.
Social Media Marketing
In this day and age, there is no way you can run a successful eCommerce store without using some form of social media advertising. In the last two years, alone Facebook's click-through rate for their ads has risen from 1% to 3%, and considering 2.99 billion people use of people Facebook, that's huge.
You can run ads through Twitter and Instagram and each platform has its own advantages like Instagram is great for advertising through videos and pictures if your brand is very visual. Its a good idea to make a list of goals you would like to achieve through your social media marketing, be it 500 followers on Instagram or 10% more visits to your website, these small markers of your improving business will spur you to keep going!
Social media marketing is also a great way to get feedback from your customers. If your social media ads are doing what they're supposed to, the engagement from your customers should increase to improve your knowledge of what sells and what customers are interested in. This will massively help when you want to look into inventory management which allows you to put out stock strategically and schedule the release of certain products to match customer interest.
Influencer Marketing
Influencers are everywhere these days. Every other account on Instagram is one, garnering thousands of likes and followers that are hanging on their every word and recommendation.
Statistics show that consumers are 30% more likely to buy a product endorsed by a non-celebrity influencer online. Now is a fantastic time to consider making a social media plan, by linking up with influencers in your circle of connections for marketing campaigns you can build an online presence in no time. Using marketing strategies for Instagram or Twitter can work wonders as online shopping through these platforms has greatly increased in recent years.
Getting an influencer to post a picture with your product or mention your company on a YouTube video can be a massive boost for your sales and outreach. This also works both ways as influencers are often seeking to portray themselves as brand ambassadors which amplify their status as an influencer. This means of reciprocal marketing can boost your sales because everyone wins!
Online influencers are often known to have spent time cultivating a following in a specific area of expertise. Be it sport or makeup, it's worth finding an influencer that has built a niche similar to your brands in order to reach out to the most appropriate audience and build the best route for eCommerce marketing.
Every brand and business has its own approach to marketing so there's no single way to do it right. It's taking a mix-and-match type of approach to these strategies when you're getting started so that you can cover all bases.
Remember that no matter which eCommerce solution you choose to use, be it Shopify or WooCommerce, they all have features designed to take the weight off your shoulders. Setting up your eCommerce store needs to be the easy, fun and exciting part - building customer relations, marketing your products and watching your business thrive are all factors that will come later!
Even if you're going to stick with eCommerce giants like eBay or Etsy to sell rather than creating an entirely new website, the one plugin you will always need is Interparcel. We help an endless list of companies not only providing discounted shipping services but with our range of effective shipping tools for platforms such as:
- BigCommerce
- eBay
- Etsy
- Magento
- Magento 2
- Neto
- Prestashop
- Shopify
- WooCommerce
- Any many more to come!
The plugins are designed to do the hard work for you so that you can focus on taking orders and keeping your customers happy. Take a look today. Integration is quick and easy and our shipping tools will save you hours of manual data entry as well as a fortune on shipping.
Cultivating a thriving business won't happen overnight, but with a little dedication, it might happen much sooner than you think!
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