When you’re an online business, there are few things more important than marketing. While physical locations have the benefit of convenience depending on their location, your eCommerce website doesn’t have a storefront that someone can stop at when driving by – you simply have your website that needs to compete with millions of similar businesses all just a few seconds away. Talk about competitive!
Without marketing, you won’t have any customers to buy from you and you’ll be out of business before you know it. Fortunately, with the vast space that is online retail and the immense reach of the internet, you have a variety of ways to bring customers to your website.
Below are 6 different approaches you can take with your digital marketing to increase your sales and product awareness. Keep in mind that they are not exclusive – the best marketing campaign will have multiple (or even all) of these recommendations.
1. Maximize Your SEO & Web Presence
The best way to maximize your sales and product awareness is to be easily findable online. This begins with an established website with SEO (search engine optimization) implemented so that you show up on Google for your niche as well as showing up as a trusted, legitimate website if anyone were to look you up before buying. One way to do this by utilizing all major social media platforms.
SEO isn’t as much of a marketing idea as it is necessary to ensure that the rest of your advertising efforts don’t go to waste. After all, if your website & web presence stink, people may not want to buy even if your advertisements draw them in.
2. Take Advantage of Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the greatest tools that eCommerce businesses have when it comes to boosting sales & brand awareness. Like direct mail, email allows you to reach out to specific people who are either previous customers or fall within your ideal demographic for a customer. Whether collected through your own mailing lists or bought from a list curator, you can all but guarantee you’ll get your website or product in front of some faces.
Make the most of email marketing by using clickbait titles and offering special deals for people who respond to instill FOMO (fear of missing out) and spur them into visiting your site.
3. Partner with Influencers
Word of mouth and testimonials are an incredibly important part of sharing your brand to more potential customers. However, it’s hard to guarantee that happy customers will share their positive experiences with others. The answer? Find someone with a lot of “friends” or a large potential audience who is willing to share their experience to thousands or even millions of people.
There’s a reason the Kardashians make millions for a single Instagram post – people like to emulate their idols and they often trust their recommendations. It means that when an influencer says that they recommend something, they’re endorsing your product to their audience who may not have ever known you existed before. If your product applies to them (which it should if you’re targeting an influencer!), then you’re looking at tons of potential sales.
By working with an influencer in your niche on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media platform, you’ll be generating high-quality leads from a trusted source in the industry your customers are most likely to come from. Not only that, but you can use referral links to track the effectiveness of the campaign based on the advertising cost.
4. Engage on Social Media
Effective marketing is all about making the most out of your marketing budget. The less you spend on a specific marketing avenue, the more you can put towards other methods to help increase your reach. The right combination of direct and indirect marketing is the secret to a well-balanced & cost-effective campaign.
With social media, advertising is basically free (aside from paying a social media marketer), making it one of the best cost-effective ways to market your products. However, accumulating enough of a following to make your platform an effective advertising method takes a bit of creativity.
Giveaways and contests are some of the best ways to get your business on people’s feeds. By offering a free product, discount codes, or other prizes for sharing a post you can circulate it through a wide range of markets just by individuals sharing it. As it spreads, each new person who sees it becomes a potential share, exponentially increasing the exposure you receive at little cost to you.
Once you attract enough followers, your tweets can then become effective advertisements themselves for absolutely free.
5. Use Targeted Ads
Do you know your target demographic? Are you a unique business with products that are for a specific kind of person? Through the use of targeted advertisements, you can get your brand & product in front of the people who are most likely to buy from you. For example, if you sell hunting equipment, the vegan market isn’t going to be the ideal market for you.
General advertising is great for increasing your web presence and brand awareness, but it usually doesn’t covert well because out of all the people who see it, only a select few will be interested and even fewer will actually be willing to buy.
With targeted advertisements on places like Facebook or banner ads through Google Ads, you can improve your conversion rate by cutting down the dead leads your ads may attract. You can do this by configuring advertisements to only appear when a user searches for something related to your business, is part of groups or posts on social media about your industry, or anything else that establishes them as a potential customer.
These ads are great because even if you’re a smaller business, people who are looking for something from a competitor may still fit your criteria for a targeted ad. That gives you the chance to steal a customer with an exceptional offer.
6. Create a Viral Ad Campaign
Old Spice, Dollar Shave Club, and many other brands were once very small businesses that were looking to find a way to maximize their advertising. They both came up with advertisements that not only sold their product well, but they were naturally memorable & shareable. This led to them being posted online, talked about, and loved by people who hadn’t known they existed before that.
In a time where social media is larger than ever, shareability is the new word of mouth – and it can reach further than ever with the internet’s expansive reach. Videos and other media are inherently more shareable, and if you manage to ride a trend (or create your own), you’ll reap immense rewards for very little investment. It’s not easy to make something go viral yourself, but it is by far the single most effective form of advertising possible because people advertise for you.
Finish The Sale with Effective Checkout Plugins
Once you setup your new marketing campaigns, customers are going to start pouring in. However, no matter how many customers you attract to your website or how much interest you drum up for a product, you can’t make sales if your checkout doesn’t convert.
Cart abandonment is a huge problem for eCommerce websites, and a major part of it is the checkout process. With an estimated 27% of carts being abandoned due to checkout complexity, simplifying & solidifying your checkout process is the best way to maximize sales from your marketing.
Handsome Checkout is an all-inclusive WordPress plugin that integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce to take the convenience of your site’s checkout to the next level. It simplifies the process by allowing you to add checkout to ANY page on your site, eliminating steps that could result in cart abandonment. You’ll also be able to create a cart/checkout combination page that shows their products, allows changes, accepts discount codes, and more all at once. Once they reach checkout, you can trigger an upselling campaign to increase your average sale with special offers or discounts for additional purchases. Finally, if for some reason they do abandon their cart, Handsome Checkout will track where the cart was left so that you can gain insight into your checkout process’s conversion and retarget that customer at another time.
Don’t lose precious sales at checkout – optimize your checkout with Handsome Checkout.
Wrap Up
Now that you’ve got some ideas to implement in your next marketing campaign, be sure to give everything a try to see what sticks. It is also a good idea to include as many different advertising approaches as possible. A lot of digital marketing for eCommerce sites is trial-and-error, but as you expand you can analyze the results of your campaigns and make changes based on what works and what doesn’t.
Now go out there and become the next marketing success story!
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