If you think that e-commerce is just one hell of a sale, you may be just a bit wrong. Under the “e-commerce” umbrella you will find A LOT: and if you plan your e-commerce marketing efforts, you need to take a lot of factors into consideration.
Within our series of articles gathering insights of marketers all over the world, we already published posts about marketing, content marketing and social media marketing. There is only one question left…
How to boost sales and promote e-commerce?
And we got brilliant answers again.
Vlad Calus | Co-founder @Planable | www.planable.io
I’d say best would be to focus specifically on Instagram. It’s very visual, and exactly what an ecommerce needs, with a lot of tools for you to use – Stories, Live Videos, Multiple Photos and High Engagement, compared to Twitter and Facebook. You can easily talk directly to the customers, by using Instagram Stories, be part of the real-time marketing by using hashtags and geolocation tag and create custom audiences, reach out directly to customers in DM and make sure you create meaningful conversations. In this guest post, I’ve shared more than 10 examples of how you can engage with your users, and brands.
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Nick Stephens | Freelance Digital Marketing Expert | www.njstephens.com
If you have an online business are you aren’t offering live-chat you are missing out on conversions and customer satisfaction. It’s a great way to allow your customers to resolve any issues they have quickly and efficiently. Pay attention to your landing pages (you can take a look at a very informative page of Vision Detection Systems, for example), there are some great templates out there if you don’t want to create your own from scratch. Work on your cart abandonment game, check the wording of your triggered emails and employ live chat if you can.
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Ugi Djuric | CEO | Contenthorse
- Be able to get your target audience on your site
- Be able to make them buy
Georgios Chasiotis | Marketing Hustler & Co-Founder @Slide In | https://www.slidein.gr/
eCommerce businesses should find new and unexploited sales channels in order to generate more sales opportunities.
Sales channels like Messenger have a huge potential and should be used by eCommerce businesses along with great automation tools like Flashchat.ai. This is the new type of doing commerce: the Messenger Commerce
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Ben Culpin | Content Marketing Specialist | WakeUpData.com
Get your products reviewed, talk to your clients and ask them to give quotes or interviews saying how they were happy with your product/service – this is relatively easy but can have massive benefits in promoting your e-commerce business and boosting sales – especially when you are first starting out!
Run social media campaigns by posting links and publishing content that attracts and is relevant to your target audience, ensuring you refer them back to your website. My other tip here would be to take the time to create a well-designed user experience and conversion process on your website, so when visitors are sent there from paid advertising, you know they are going to convert.
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It’s all in the analytics, customer segmentation through understanding your eCommerce data. It’s vital to be able to visualise your Shopify store data quickly and simply, and not just rely on your Shopify Analytics data but also with your Shopify Google analytics data. For this, I recommend a tool like Conversific for the generation of KPI reports and a tool like OptiMonk for customer engagement.
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Hemant Jani | Co Founder & CMO of Abhisi | www.abhisi.com
Customers on you E-commerce are always confused. The average visitor needs guidance and helps to make decisions on their Purchase.
- Things an E-commerce Website can do to improve sales.
- Engage with your visitor at correct time Using Live chat or bot.
- Help them with suggestions by analyzing their recent behavior on your store, previous buy history and the average amount they spend on each buy.
- Push suggestions on their facebook messenger depending upon their abandon kart.
There are services available for each that help boost conversion from the website and abandoned the cart.
One example is a survey by digital marketing blog econsultancy. Live chat came out as the highest performing platform for customer satisfaction, with 73% of customers satisfied after using live chat.
Customer support helps win battles in E-commerce industry, It helps in better conversion, returning customer, lesser abandon carts and helps build trust with your clients.
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Eden Spodek | Founder & CEO @Spodek & Co. | http://spodekandco.com
“Build an email subscriber list with email pop-ups on your website and offer incentives such as discounts. Recently, a local brand offered visitors $50 discount codes ‘this weekend only’ if they subscribed to their email list and completed a brief survey. They asked a lot but they offered a big discount in return, which was enough incentive for people to share valuable information beyond email addresses. This tactic allowed them to build their email subscriber list, gather customer data, and generate sales quickly.“
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Martin Hennig | Senior Marketing Transformation Consultant | http://www.peregrine.se/
Unless you’re a well known brand with tons of direct traffic to your shop, you’ll have to invest in SEO and SEA. Investigate and understand what your customers and prospects are looking to solve with their purchase and deliver context for products. Your ecommerce website needs to be modern and functional, some organisations are trying too hard to have fancy websites. You may win design awards but not customers. No one wants to spend time searching for the products they want, so make navigation and ‘journeys’ intuitive and checkouts painless. The best built websites still need visitors to succeed – apply a mix of inbound marketing and targeted/personalized advertisement in the channels your prospects spend most of their time in.
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Justin Hartzman | Co-Founder & CEO @needls | http://www.needls.com/
One of the best things you can do to boost your sales for an online store is retargeting. About 92% of first-time visitors to a website aren’t there to buy… yet. Two things are at play when you’re developing a retargeting strategy: brand lift and attribution. It usually takes about 7 to 12 points of contact with a brand before someone makes a purchase, so with retargeting, you’ll be able to increase your brand recall and get more touch points with users. This also solves the abandoned cart issue when you show them ads for products they had in their cart.
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Oksana Chyketa | Marketer @Albacross | https://albacross.com/
I firmly believe that the best strategy to source new clients and boosting sales is through building your business credibility. A credible and reliable business is that which has a well build website that features high-quality blog posts. The business should also participate in various online communities such as LinkedIn, Slack, Quora, Reddit, etc., and last, but not least, the organization should have a well-laid strategy that enables them to collect testimonials from their site which will help them understand their visitors. Thus, gaining credibility means attracting more prospects clients. And I can’t help but insist on the excellent tool for gathering new leads, ALBACROSS, which is a FREE Lead Generation platform. It enables you to turn website visitors into leads and to get extra information on companies interested in your business, such as the pages they visit, their chief decision makers and the means of contacting them.
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Gloria Ziencina-Kawula | Global Community and Marketing Manager @BRAND24 | brand24.com
Online shop with good UX, good e-mail campaign and precisely targeted and well configurated remarketing ad campaign are the basic things you should take care of. When it comes to the marketing and more outstanding actions you can take I will go with community marketing. Being where your fans, customers, and potential customers are talking about your brand and products online, joining and engaging those conversations is a great way to build a strong community full of organic brand ambassadors. Monitor all those discussions by using media monitoring tool, like BRAND24 and use all the potential for your advantage. Encourage your fans to create and share content you will be able to use and appreciate them publicly – it will show natural, the human face of your brand and make people want to talk and publish posts about you!
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Bohumil Pokstefl | CEO @Kontentino | www.kontentino.com
I love what Facebook/Instagram has developed in the past 2 years. E-commerce formats in Facebook, Shopping tags on Instagram. Better tracking of conversions, dynamic ads with laser-focused personalized retargeting. There are so many options you can do now with Facebook and IG. For example, one of our clients generates 90% of sales from Facebook and IG ads.
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David Trott | Lead Digital Marketer @Impact Business Advisors
The most overlooked, and critical, part of e-commerce marketing is attribution; understanding where your traffic, and your sales, have come from – in other words, what marketing activity has driven the conversion.
The most common way of measuring this is through “last click” attribution, where the most recent click before the sale gets all the credit. However, you’ll most likely find that in actual fact, things are more complicated than this – that your sales are the result of multiple marketing channels: social media; Google Ads; organic search; and more and understanding how each of these channels has contributed to the end conversion will help you know where to prioritise your marketing budget.
It’s worth taking the time to make sure your Google Analytics is set up correctly, with meaningful goals and event tracking – and using the built-in attribution modelling to properly understand your customers’ purchasing behaviour.
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Pollyanna Ward | Digital Strategist & Digital Brand Manager @Vifit Sport
Create segments out of your target audience and create relevant assets that live on the channels they use that drive them to your shop. All ads need to be clickable, so that you can build up that audience of website visitors that you can retarget with offers based on what they viewed, what they purchased, as well as after care if they purchased. eCommerce really is about the data you have on your audience, but whilst in the offline world you can continue to blast a message out as your availability is higher (think: multiple supermarkets, local convenience stores etc), in the eCom world you need to keep adding people to your targeted ads all the time otherwise you’ll very quickly start to saturate your audience with the same content and offers. This also means you need to refresh your campaign content, your product offering, and keep your website updated a lot more frequently than if you were doing offline.
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Rahul Narayan | Owner @Golden Touch Digital | www.goldentouchdigital.com
We use contests with “share in social media” component to make it viral.
In case of most of our B2C clients – the above method works well. in the best cases – we have seen 10x growth with little marketing spends.
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Noman Rehman | Digital Marketing @Associate Concept Schools | http://nomanrehman.com/
To boost sales, it is important to find the right audience for the business you work for. To promote ecommerce, you need to find the right social media groups on Facebook, instagram and other platforms. LinkedIn also may be a right channel to promote and market the services or product. Finding bloggers with a specific niche and asking them to write for your business would also be very helpful for improving social awareness and converting leads.
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Isaac Bullen | New Zealand Director @3WhiteHats | https://www.3whitehats.co.nz/
Boost sales by ensuring you’ve optimised your product pages and categories for SEO. Do this by researching keywords people search for to find your category pages and products and implement these on the pages, in the headings, titles and meta descriptions.
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Klaudia Zylka | Marketing Specialist @Sotrender | www.sotrender.com
It seems that cooperating with influencers and having a brand advocates is nowadays a win-win situation. If who they are is relevant to what your brand does, and you are sure that they have loyal and engaged audience, you might be sure that this kind of cooperation will be a good choice to boost sales and increase your brand’s awareness.
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Ruchi Hupta | CEO @Shane Communications
One of the biggest mistakes e-commerce business owners do is that they focus on describing the features of their products. They should instead provide information about the benefits that the product has for it’s potential customers. People tend to search benefits and not product description. Fixing this can help boost traffic coming to your website.
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Neil Napier | CEO @Kyvio | www.kyvio.com
One key element that will highly impact your sales is the effectiveness of your sales funnel. Sales funnels are your highway to selling your product/service. You want to take your prospects by hand and walk them step by step to your offer. Make sure to have an attractive offer, some compelling copy, and an irresistible call to action. People are getting smarter, with that, it’s getting harder to convince them to buy something. And that is why you need to gradually nurture their curiosity and interest.
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Nina Kozlowska | Content Designer @Brainy Bees
Identify your target groups. This is crucial not only when you plan on getting some products onto your shop, but also when you plan communication. Appropriate targetting, curated creations and juggling with promoting forms can lead you to higher conversion.
We hope you enjoyed our series of articles! Let us know in comments, if we should make some more? 😉
