When we talk about ecommerce, we need a planned marketing. Today, the ecommerece platforms make it easier to create and manage the ecommerce website but the battle is to rank well and get noticed, and staying ahead in the competition.
If the first step to a successful ecommerce business is to choose the perfect ecommerce platform and creating a website, the second step is marketing your business and making your mark. When you are going to sell online, you need to make people aware that you are in the business and can provide them with what they want. The sole purpose of an ecommerce marketing is to boost the sales and increase the traffic as well as revenue.
Here, we will discuss the factors that directly or indirectly affects the results of your ecommerce website. The steps you should take in order to market your website and products to ensure a consistent inflow of traffic and revenue.
Market research
The first step to any venture should be a proper research. Not just it helps you choose the appropriate path but also makes you aware of many other things such as competition, challenges, current trend, etc.
So before you start with your ecommerce website, you should try and get to know the market you’re stepping into. You can research your concerned industry on the internet, study how the competition works, study the various reports and the past performances. This will help you plan your course and make some vital decisions. A proper research and familiarity with the aspects of your relevant industry will help you plan your strategies well.
Promote on different platforms
You need to think beyond the conventional methods to promote your product. One of the ways to do this by promoting your product on different platforms. We will talk in the later sections of how promotions through facebook proves to be helpful for the growth of your business.
For the success of any business it is very important to reach more and more people. This can be done using This gives a guaranteed exposure to your products over a wide range of
User generated content
User generated content has many benefits to your marketing campaigns. The best and easiest form of user generated content is the comments and reviews. There’s a direct impact of the user reviews and ratings – we’re going to cover that in following section. Another form of User generated content can be guest posts,
Social media and other advertisements
Direct advertising plays an important role in promoting your products and services. The direct advertisement are now mostly replaced by the targeted advertisements.
Targeted advertisements
Advertising blindly may not always prove beneficial. However there are many companies that provide the service of targeted advertisements. So, the advertisements are based on the user’s search history. This data is unanimously collected by the browsers. The advertising engines use this data to determine the product range to be shown to a particular user based on his/her past browsing.
This is one of the smartest way of delivering relevant products to the people according to their requirements and search patterns. This may cost a little more than the basic advertising but guarantees to provides better results. One of the most popular targeted ad service provider is the Google Adsense.
Facebook store
Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites with over 1.79 billion active accounts. So, it is a gateway to expose your products to a large spectrum of audience. On facebook, your products will be viewed and shared and more and more people would know about it.
There are various provisions through which you can export a part of your shop to facebook. Most of the modern ecommerce platforms come with easy procedure through which you can display group of your products on facebook. If your platform does not directly support this feature, they may have an add-on or plugin to do it.
Easy to find the products
Keep it simple, always! It’s not bad to try and make things more interesting but while doing so make sure that you don’t complicate the things. Because when your website is easy to use and easy to navigate, it boosts user experience. A better user experience means inflated traffic and increased revenue.
A very simple logic applies here, if the visitors find it easy to find their products easily, they will stay longer and even come back. So keep the navigation easy and categorize well. Properly plan the navigation menus and where you place them. Also categorize your products well enough so that the products are easy to find.
Live chat and instant support – reply to the comments
You can boost your sales by being interactive. That can be done in many ways
- Reply to the comments, reviews on your blog or any webpage
- Allow pre-sales questions and answer them as soon as possible
SEO
Pretty convincing, isn’t it? SEO is undoubtedly one of the most important factor in a website’s success. Because it is all about being found. And when you are ecommerce business owner, all you want is to be found. So, take care of your website’s SEO.
You can stay ahead in the SEO race by preferring an SEO friendly platform, using SEO optimized theme or template and last but not the least, optimized content. Considering the importance of SEO, almost every platform now provides add-ons and plugins to enhance the SEO of your website.
The best SEO practice aims that when a customer searches for a product relevant to your business, your website is listed. However there are many other factors that contribute to this, but scoring the praise of search engine is unarguably the most important among them.
A satisfactory pre-sales services
Always make it easy for the customers to contact you incase they have a query. So, they can get their confusions cleared before they buy something. Most of the online selling websites have the option of “Contact the seller”. This means that interested customers can send an inquiry to the
Popups & newsletters
Popups are a form of call-to-action. Most of the popups are directed to inspire to subscribe to the newsletter. Through a monthly, quarterly or a weekly newsletter, you can make your audience aware of the new products and the current affairs of your business. It can be used to introduce offers and discounts too. A newsletter lets you directly communicate and pass message to the interested customers so it is really effective.
Shipping price
shipping price is one of the things that the users hesitate to pay. Because it is not the price for their product and people see it as an additional expense. The shoppers don’t have to pay for the shipping while they’re purchasing through the . So keep the shipping prices low. People prefer the products with lower or nil shipping prices.
So, keeping the shipping price low or offering free delivery for some of your products can greatly help you boost your sales.
Customer reviews and ratings
Reviews positive or negative have an effect on the users mind. It indicates that your website has some active customers who view the products and comment on them. The reviews on the products will help your customers to buy better and improve the user experience.
Discounts and offers
Discounts and offers every now and then are the key to your marketing. Tell me who doesn’t like paying less while shopping. For products that are new and not
Sales are also a good idea for clearance as well as attracting customers. Announce a sale on your website and advertise about it on other platforms.
Conclusion
These simple tips may help you make a big difference. Creating and managing ecommerce is not a piece of cake, but if done right it can lead you to the top. All you need to do is make some right choices (based on your business requirements) and adapt to the ever changing competitive environment. There are various tools and techniques designed to make this easy for you.