Author: Abhishek Yadav
April 21st, 2023
0%
Not sure about the effectiveness of your current digital marketing efforts? Concerned that you’re not taking full advantage of your available marketing budget? Some indicators that you’re not getting optimal results could include low Google rankings, clicks without conversions, lack of engagement on social media, not enough incoming leads, and lackluster sales numbers.
Even the best-laid marketing strategies can sometimes miss the mark. Or perhaps your marketing strategy itself could be the problem. Marketing experts suggest that as many as half of all business organizations don’t have a clearly-defined digital marketing strategy at all. That’s certainly not a good recipe for marketing success in the 21st century!
Thankfully, Cibirix is here to help. Here are 5 tips to help you overcome some of your digital marketing challenges as an ecommerce business. Taking action around these tips will help you to stay ahead of your competition and boost your business.
Perhaps you’re already taking advantage of a social selling platform like Facebook Marketplace. But even if social isn’t a direct sales avenue for you as an online seller, you absolutely need to establish a strong social media presence as an ecommerce company. Since your business is primarily online, then you also want to make a concerted effort to engage with your audience where they spend time online. And where they are is on social media! Social media can help you turn more visitors into brand followers and more brand followers into paying customers.
Here are some good social media platforms to include in your e-commerce branding & e-commerce marketing efforts:
There are over 2 billion people on Facebook every month, so to say that Facebook is a powerful marketing tool is really an understatement. Facebook ads offer highly segmented guidance using demographic categories and location specifics. You can really dial down to the exact audience you’re hoping to reach! In terms of ROI potential, it’s hard to beat Facebook in terms of social media marketing impact for business.
Did you know that you can use Instagram galleries to direct users to external links? Customers can click on an image they like in your gallery to go directly to your store site and start shopping.
Pinterest is a great place for an ecommerce retailer to showcase images of their product offerings. Pinterest users love to pin and save concepts and ideas when making purchasing decisions, so it can really play right into your hands as an online seller. At $50 per order, Pinterest has the highest average cart size for e-sellers, and is also the 2nd-highest social media traffic source for e-commerce sites.
This popular video platform has almost as many users as Facebook does, and it’s still growing too. In fact, YouTube is the third most-visited website in the world! If you’re looking to build your brand and increase the scope of your reach, YouTube can be a powerful ally. You don’t have to be a professional videographer or need a lot of fancy video editing capabilities, either. As long as you’re sharing content that your audience deems to be valuable, helpful, or entertaining (or all of the above!), you can gain a nice following on YouTube. How-to videos are popular, and you can also choose to share things like product reviews, customer testimonials, cross-promotions, new product reveals, and more.
You should also understand that effective social marketing does require a long-term approach. Just playing the short game really won’t build you much of a following or produce the kind of ROI you’d like to see. But if you will continue to post and stay at it, the return you receive from backlinks, organic SEO traffic, and lead generation will more than pay for your content marketing investment.
If you’ve ever worked in an in-person, customer-facing business, one of the most important lessons to learn is to ask for the sale. You can offer a great warm-up, make a fabulous presentation, and deliver a smooth closure. But unless you ask for the sale, the sale may still never happen!
Digital marketing is no different. Your product page may have all the information, some great 3D visualizations, and all the AI-powered gizmos. But if all you offer is information overload and no clear call to action (or CTA), you’re likely to lose that sale. Your would-be buyers may also leave your site in confusion because the “Shop Now” or “Buy Now” button is surrounded by ten other graphics or links that can distract them, or even lead them to click away from the point of sale! Not good!
Here are some good tips around asking for the sale:
Use a simple, highlighted design approach to call attention to your action buttons on the fold of EVERY PAGE of your website. Sprinkle some CTAs around in other appropriate areas in the middle and at the bottom of each page, too.
One recent study showed that by simply showing a higher-priced item together with the buyer’s initial choice, 3.9% of all buyers ended up purchasing the more expensive item. That may not sound like a lot, but those numbers really add up over time!
Let’s say you’re making a computer sale. By all means, don’t stop with just the computer itself. Take a lesson from the Amazon playbook, and offer a combination package which includes the computer your shopper has chosen, along with a wireless mouse, external hard drive, and an included protection plan. Plus, retailers who cross sell in this manner see conversion rate increases of up to 18%. And cross selling doesn’t just work for B2C customers; it can give your B2B business a boost, too.
Contrary to what you may have heard, a solid email campaign is still a very effective digital marketing strategy. Here are some fundamentals that are often overlooked or ignored, to the detriment of lead generation and sales conversions.
Welcome email from Bloomingdale’s-
A tasteful welcome email helps to strengthen the relationship between a brand and its new customers. It’s also a good idea to include a specific discount offer, along with detailing some of the advantages of being an email subscriber.
This is truly part of the power of email marketing. Keep your prospects interested by offering helpful info and tips, without constantly hammering them with sales offers. If you’ll be conscientious about that, it will go a long way towards establishing brand trust and customer loyalty.
Let’s be honest – everyone loves it when they get a good deal. And offering discounts and coupons is a great way to give your ecommerce business a serious boost. For example, one online seller sent coupons to everyone on his email list, and ended up increasing sales conversions by a whopping 265%!
Email surveys are an effective way to learn about your customers, and also to learn what your customers think about your business. Asking for feedback in this manner isn’t for the faint of heart, but it’s one of the best ways to make your customers and clients feel valued and important. And as Lee Cockerell puts it, your customer knows more about your business than you do. Ask them for their opinion, and then be willing to act on that feedback!
Offering your customers the ability to keep a “wishlist” of things they like on your ecommerce site can pay real dividends to you and your business. Use regular emails to keep them in the loop with reminders, price reductions, birthday wishes, and any business announcements that are worth sharing. Knowing what’s on their wishlist helps you to understand what they really like and are interested in, and this is something you can help to monetize with careful, conscientious email marketing.
One well-known sphere of brand differentiation is that of personalizing for the customer. Ecommerce has really become “Me-Commerce” for many shoppers, and online sellers need to be paying attention. Buyers have come to expect personal treatment and a personalized shopping experience, and they’ll gravitate towards those stores which work to provide it.
For example, ecommerce shops can address customers by name (once you’ve gotten them to fill out a response form through a CTA) whenever they’re shopping your site. After they make a purchase, you can also offer other personal touches like sending annual birthday greetings, asking for comments & feedback, and offering exclusive promotions and discounts to your “inner circle.” The writing is now on the wall for stores who don’t strive to provide this kind of personalized experience; they’ll soon become as obsolete as ecommerce shops which don’t provide mobile-friendly websites.
Adding some customer reviews to your online product listings is a great way to boost sales, too. One California-based retailer alone boasted an 80% increase in sales simply by adding reviews alongside their product listings. Being willing to publish reviews will gain more credibility in the eyes of your visitors and shoppers. And beyond that, 85% of consumers trust word-of-mouth more than any other form of advertising. For that reason alone, it’s certainly worth the effort to build more word-of-mouth into your ecommerce site!
If you’ll leverage the tips shared in this blog, you’ll be well on the way to attracting more followers for your brand, as well as more shoppers to your ecommerce site. But maybe you need more help in getting your ecommerce business where you want it to be. We can help you get there! Connect with one of our experts at Cibirix today at , and let’s talk about the best ways to leverage the power of digital marketing for your ecommerce business!
Since founding Cibirix, Ashish has leveraged his marketing degree to lead the agency in crafting meaningful digital marketing experiences for clients. His results-driven approach is a unique mix of analytical thinking, crisp visual aesthetics and a desire to simplify frontends while developing robust architecture. With a passion for design, technology, & marketing, He leads each aspect of the agency’s business and oversees its talented team of digital professionals.
