E-Commerce marketing can be super complicated. There are just so many different things that you can do to make your online presence a real hit and then get successful.
In this article, I’d discuss all the tips and tricks that have resulted in tremendous results – breaking them down into 12 points in short. Let’s dive into those right away.
- Use a great shopping cart system
There are many shopping carts used around. Some of them that we prefer are Shopify, Magento, Woo Commerce and Big Commerce.
These carts are good from a perspective of SEO design and paid search. So if you are running paid ads even on social these carts have everything you need to scale your business. They also have a support team to back you up when you need the help. So check out one of those carts.
If you don’t already have them next thing is to spend a tremendous amount of time optimizing your product pages with regards to SEO and design. So SEO here means a good product title. Don’t just call it something that only you would call it something. Title here means something that people are actually searching online.
Additional read: Why Your Ecommerce Site Needs Customer Reviews?
So do some keyword research figure out what people are searching for your products and make that part of your product title. Also include that in the description of the product and write a good description. Remember, this is your 24/7 salesperson. Your product page never falls sick. It works through the weekends and the holidays every time somebody visits your product page and you want to have that perfect sales pitch. So put some time into that also.
Next is product photography. Make sure that photography is really clean, smooth and a nice design and professional and also if you can do a product video this is massively valuable. Make sure you invest in doing some product videos to explain your products and more details final tips here.
- Display third-party trust badges
Make sure you have trust badges on the page. Make sure it says things like you have fast shipping, free shipping, if you have that. Also get reviews of your products you want to have reviews on your product pages. Studies show, if you have reviews on your product pages, it can increase your conversion rate significantly. So make sure that you get proper reviews on your page
- Leverage schema mark-ups
Next thing is making sure you have schema markup on your product pages. What this means is when somebody searches on Google right there in the Google search page before they even go to your website they are going to see what Google calls product rich cards which is going to show your product image and some information right there on the search page. This is going to give you an advantage over your competitors make you a little more visible organically to people as they are searching on things like Google.
So here’s a quick tip, if you just Google search schema markup testing tool it will take you to a testing tool. You can just put your product page URL in there and it will tell you if you have the proper schema markup or not. But if you use one of those carts Bigcommerce Shopify our Woocommerce, they typically have good schema markup out the gate and so you can just kind of build upon that.
- Capitalize on Google merchant center
Optimize your product feed via Google merchant center. Google merchant center is what you are going to use to run Google shopping ads, but the product feed is hugely important. Make sure you have good information in there with regards to your product title, description, keywords so that you are showing up when people are searching on Google shopping when you are running your ads. You don’t want to be not in the game when somebody is looking for your product because your product feed is not very well optimized.
- Consider Google Shopping Ads
Next tip is running Google shopping ads. Google shopping is very popular. People go to Google they search something like white shoes. They will click the shopping tab those are all ads. So if you want to be in that shopping tab, which we highly recommend you are going to want to make sure that you are running Google shopping ads. So invest in running product ads and then here’s a tip, optimize your product ads based on results.
So if you have e-commerce tracking set up you can see the revenue generated from each product. You can really see your ROI per product on your product. That’s what you want to do is as time goes by turn off the ads that aren’t doing as well the products that aren’t doing as well. Increase the budget on the products that are doing well. This is going to really increase your return on investment over time.
- Don’t under-estimate the power of re-marketing
Run Dynamic retargeting campaigns off of your Google shopping ads and your website visitors so that people that go to your website and they browse maybe two three products as they are surfing the internet. After that on the Google Display Network, which is thousands of websites online, they are going to see banner ads for your brand actually showing the specific products that they looked at. So it’s very relevant. This stays top of mind and it kind of just wears them down until they are ready to buy those products. They click it and they purchase on your website.
Also, you can run retargeting on Facebook and Instagram as well. So if somebody comes to your site, they look around and they don’t do anything that night when they are on Facebook kind of looking through their feed all the sudden they will see an ad for your brand. This is bringing you back to the top of their mind. They are like, hey, I didn’t have time earlier to put my credit card in there because I was getting interrupted but hey, I do right now on this commercial that’s on TV. So I’m going to buy right now. So by doing retargeting in a dynamic way, you are going to bring a lot more sales back to your business.
- Social Media Ads are not dead (yet)
Make sure that you are running Facebook and Instagram ads. These are huge channels today. People are on Facebook all the time. So you are going to want to target people on Facebook.
So one example, like that is let’s say that you sell gymnastics equipment to kids particular maybe to girls in particular. You could actually target mothers that make over fifty thousand dollars a year that have daughters that are in gymnastics. How targeted is that? If these mothers see these ads they can afford it right there making enough money to afford it. They have daughters in gymnastics. It just only makes sense. They are going to like your product.
They are going to understand your brand and they are going to eventually buy from you. So make sure you take advantage of Facebook and Instagram ads those two channels are big Bread winners for e-commerce stores today.
Additional read: How To Choose Long-tail Keywords For Exponential Growth?
- Organic social media is the key
Invest in your social media organically whether you need to do yourself or hire somebody or hire another company. You need to make sure you have an organic presence on social media what that means is you are posting content you are engaging on social media. So not paid ads but just being involved being a part of social media today by doing this is going to be building your brand following organically. So eventually you have 10,000 followers a hundred thousand followers, the more followers you have as you are posting content you are building this awareness. You are only going to get more sales.
- eMail marketing may look cold, but converts really well
Automate your email marketing. Email marketing is hugely important. A lot of e-commerce stores fall short because they spend a lot of money to get that customer to make that first purchase, but they don’t remark it to those people via email marketing and other channels to get them to come back and make future purchases. If you could just get each of your customers to make one more purchase than they normally do think about what that does to your revenue. So with email marketing, it allows this in an automated way to make that happen.
So here’s an example you could set up an automated campaign for holidays. You just sent the up the beginning of the year for the whole year with promotions on all these different holidays that automatically gets sent to all of your past customers. So that’s one example, there’s tons of other examples like sending them automated emails to capture reviews for your products is another way to build product review content and automated way. If you are creative with your email marketing and you automate it, this is going to scale your business so that you can increase your sales overall and increase your return on investment on your marketing dollars.
- Do people read SMSs? Yes, they do!
Invest in SMS marketing. SMS marketing is text message marketing reason why that’s important is because only about 20% of people will typically open up your email sometimes even less and they also won’t open it up in real time. There’s a lag there right but with text messages, it’s almost a hundred percent of people open the text message and most of them are within a five-minute window so that can be really powerful on slow sales days on the end of the month times when you need to clear out old inventory stuff like that. So build a VIP text message marketing. And one way to do this is put a banner on your site that says hey for VIP VIP deals text something like hot deals 239 970 to opt in and get an immediate 20% coupon right now by doing that it gets people to opt-in to get that coupon. But now they are in that list for future VIP deals that you can tap into when you need to.
- CRM! Yes, isn’t that called ‘Customer Relationship Management’!
Use a CRM. After all, you have a relationship with your customers and you wish to cherish that. So many e-commerce stores don’t really have a CRM. They are actually using the back-end of their cart to look at customer data and kind of using that as a CRM, that’s not an active way you want to integrate your cart with an actual CRM so that you can populate all of your customer data and even add additional data in there as you get to know your customer.
And so if you hire a sales person or if you are the salesperson working through the CRM and actually making proactive calls to your customers can be life-changing for your business if you just reach out to hey, how was it? Did you get your package in time? Is everything going okay for you? What else are you interested in? Can I keep an eye out for other deals that come up and let you know you have for kids? Are their birthday is what are they interested in? If you get to know the customer you can save this information in your CRM your salesperson can just continually follow up these people and you will see four or five times more sales per customer than you would otherwise. So it’s a huge investment but a great return to look at a salesperson and a CRM and connecting those into your process within your e-commerce business.
- Care for the customer – they are real human beings
Create a customer care package that you send with all of your product purchases to the customer so don’t just send them a bag with a logo on it send them a nice package it has a handwritten note has a coupon in it for a future purchase that maybe has a referral card in there they can give to a friend.
This is going to be a nice experience for the customer and it’s really going to give them a good sense of feeling towards your brand and probably get them to come back and purchase with you again, but one really hot tip here is if you are selling on other channels such as Amazon or something like that when you send those products with the care package the coupon they come back to your branded website to make future purchases. This is going to increase your profitability right and get your brand going on your own website, which is what you want to do.
So take advantage of these care packages designed something real nice when they receive your product you stand out in the crowd from other businesses.
