When you are developing an e-commerce marketing plan, you should consider some important factors before you start. Thinking of your advertising strategy and email marketing campaign are just two things you should focus on. When it comes down to creating the best marketing plan, you should think about who you are marketing to as well as what the best techniques are to reach your target audience.
In this post, we will look at some of the best e-commerce marketing tips to help you focus on the most important things so that you can increase your return on investment and boost sales. After all, that’s what it’s all about!
5 E-commerce Marketing Tips to Boost Your Sales
When you are creating a marketing plan, it’s important to remember both the “big picture” and the details. A marketing plan does not stand in isolation. Instead, it is a series of smaller and succinct details that all work together to create your targeted marketing plan.
Taking specific actions that focus on results is the key to success in e-commerce. Below are seven of our favorite tips that focus on increasing your return while limiting the amount of time that you have to spend to achieve the results.
Create your own original content
People crave fresh content. If you can provide original, fresh content to your site and blogs on a regular basis, you increase the chances of gaining interest from new visitors to your site.
Also, if visitors like the content you present, they are more likely to share it with others on social media. This increases your reach even further. Consider including all sorts of original content including videos, podcasts, and articles, to name a few to generate the most interest and appeal to a wider audience.
Make it personal
Research shows that when people are shopping, they make decisions from the limbic center of the brain. This is the part of the brain that is responsible for emotion, not logic. (Business Boutique: A Woman’s Guide for Making Money Doing What She Loves, Christy Wright). This means that, to be successful with e-commerce, you need to learn how to appeal to the emotions as well as the intellectual, rational side of people.
Think about what they want that your product or service is providing them with, not the product itself. Also, include information on your blog. Blogs are inherently more personal in nature and allow you a platform that speaks to the customer in a more personal way than your website or online store.
Encourage engagement and interaction with social media
By encouraging interactions and engagement on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you will create a stronger connection between your e-commerce store and your target market. Include videos on YouTube with great descriptions that use keywords that appeal to the emotions of your audience as well as to encourage interaction. Let customers ask questions and get them to share with others on social media. This is where many of your customers are, so it is to your advantage to speak to them on these platforms.
Automate your leads generation
Tools such as Aweber.com and Sales Genie offer a way to help you generate leads automatically so that it takes much of the guesswork out of it. Use your resources but also remember that you will need to go in and adjust this to meet your specific business needs. By creating an automated solution for leads generation that you can filter through, you take much of the work out of the front end so that you can focus on more important tasks. Also, don’t forget to include an autoresponder for emails so that customers can contact you anytime.
Don’t forget the follow-up!
Nothing is more important than follow-up when it comes to online sales. Sending a quick email to a customer who filled out a form on your website about a particular product can make the difference between a customer for life and a lost sale. Following up on abandoned shopping carts is important also. You need to know why someone thought about purchasing then changed their mind. You never know the power of one customer or how many they will share your business with if they are happy so make sure to follow up on your leads and sales.
In a Nutshell
In summary, you have to know what works for you to have success in e-commerce. The market is always changing as your customers’ needs change also. To keep up with these changes, you need to tap into what makes your customers tick. This takes analysis, constant vigilance, and taking those small actions that help you to have a greater understanding of your customers and why they behave in the way that they do.
Using your resources and automated tools are a great way to increase your return to boost your sales and revenue, as well as creating original, engaging content that gets people to come back time and time again.
There is no cookie-cutter solution for e-commerce success. It is only by taking each situation and looking at it up close that you will understand what is needed to increase your sales and win customers.
Try these E-commerce marketing tips and see if they produce the results you need, then experiment with even other ways that you can reach your target audience and speak to their needs. Remember it is not the products or services you are offering that draws them. It is what your products and services can do for them.
In Steve Jobs now legendary speech in Silicon Valley in 2003 when he released the iPod for the first time, he captured the spirit of this in this one sentence: “This is not a music player. This is a tool for the heart.”
Wow! If you can capture this idea in your eCommerce marketing, you’ll know you are where you need to be. Capture your audience with heart, not intellect. It works. What are your best marketing tips to boost your sales? Tell us below or tweet us!