E-Commerce marketing best practices 2022
- superstoresolution
- Apr 16, 2022
- 7 min read
As we have stated above, email marketing is one of the most powerful eCommerce marketing channels to not only make new sales but to generate repeat customers as well. There’s no wonder why leveraging email marketing will be the first practice that we want to introduce you to.
However, capturing customers’ email is not enough to win your email marketing campaign. In fact, what you send them and what they can gain from your email is much more important. Along with sending out weekly or monthly newsletters, there are some occasions that your emails might be welcomed more, such as exclusive codes and free gifts, campaign reminders, thank-you emails, or asking for feedback.
More than that, email marketing can be an effective weapon to follow up on customers who abandon shopping carts at your online store. Customers might abandon their cart without making a purchase for various reasons, but it’s worth noticing that they could be persuaded to change their minds and return to your online store to complete orders. Sending an email to remind customers of their carts and how they want to purchase them in the first place can do you and your store wonder.
A lot of companies settle for this situation because they’re not ready to invest in a tool to simplify the process. However, email marketing tools don’t necessarily have to be expensive. You can find plenty of free email marketing tools that can help you save time and money. There are many email marketing tools. Email marketing strategy has once again proved its power, and leveraging this traditional and oftentimes overlooked method at your eCommerce store might bring more benefits than you thought of. Read on for our list of the top free email marketing tools:
HubSpot Email Marketing
Active Campaign
Sender
Sendinblue
Omnisend
SendPulse
Benchmark Email
Mailchimp
MailerLite
User-generated content (UGC) is a marketing method that lets your customers promote and market your business and product for you. UGC can take many forms, as long as the content is authentically produced by your customers. This method helps you to drive traffic to your store without spending a huge cost, and it builds an authentic source of customer feedback to help users believe in what you offer.
Building user-generated content can cost your brand some time and effort, such as arranging a competition, or it might be as simple as utilizing social media hashtags under your brand name or using the ready content from review platforms. No matter which method you decide to choose, it’s highlighted that UGC should be updated frequently and arranged beautifully on your store website to make sure first-time visitors can acknowledge and hopefully remember your brands.
ASOS used to have a selection called #AsSeenOnMe, in which customers can upload images of their outfits from this fashion brand, and the ASOS team will select the top one to appear on the main page.
Another best practice in eCommerce marketing you can utilize to drive more sales is to embrace personalization. Using behavioral data and customers’ past purchases and actions, it’s entirely possible to deliver personalized experiences to them. For eCommerce, this marketing technique means tailoring your available marketing material and proposing the most relevant content to each customer group, even for first-time visitors, by analyzing and making use of all information you can observe about their behaviors.
Personalization can happen in many forms, from simply including prospect customer names in the subject line of an email, to providing them with smart content along their eCommerce journey. Rather than welcoming users with a generic landing page or a bulk product recommendation that is not appealing to them, personalized marketing can help you take customers to exactly where they want and show them the most related items based on their previous actions, or by identifying the source where they come from.
Upselling is a common marketing technique in retail, in which you persuade customers to buy a more expensive or upgraded version of their purchased items or to upsize these items. The arguably biggest benefit of introducing upsell is that it helps increase the average order value, and for many businesses, the cost of upselling is normally much lower compared to acquiring a new customer.
When implementing this marketing technique at your online store, remember to take into consideration your customers’ essential needs and the budget they are willing to spend. If your upselling products are exactly what customers are in need of, a surprisingly high total price might let them down. Also, be sure that the new recommended product is a discernibly better fit that is worth the additional cost they have to pay.
If you want to expand the product line at your eCommerce store, it’s essential that you test the market demand before actually launching these products. Evaluating market demand means analyzing the viability of your product and determining if there is a market demand for it so that you can anticipate future sales as well as prepare your inventory for these items at your store.
There are a variety of approaches that you can rely on, such as keyword research, social media trends, or local and global preference. One straightforward approach you can try to test the market demand within your own customer base is to pre-sell items on your Commerce channels and gauge the attention of users on these products. Desired items will receive more back-in-stock notification requests, and you can decide if this product is worth selling or not.
A loyalty program aims at turning your visitors into long-term customers by proposing incentives for those who continue to make purchases at your store. The ultimate goal behind this program is to motivate repeat purchases and gain customers’ trust. Building a loyalty program might take you a lot of time and effort, but the fact that this marketing practice can help you increase repeat purchases, boost retention rates, and more customer referrals really pay off. There are many rewards programs you can adapt for your eCommerce store:
Point-based loyalty: This is the most common type of loyalty program. Customers accumulate points from purchasing products and they can redeem for free gifts, discount codes, and more.
Tiered loyalty: In this membership type, customers get different discounts depending on their ranks.
Paid loyalty: This loyalty program is getting more popular recently. In paid loyalty, customers pay a membership fee upfront for great benefits they can use all the time.
When building a loyalty program for your eCommerce store, remember to diversify the ways customers can receive rewards for their “loyalty”, be it through promotional offers, limited codes, special gifts, or discounts. Also, you can expand your reward program to engage social media activity or referral programs, instead of the traditional method of prompting customers to purchase more from your store.
One of the best ways to close the gap between online and in-store shopping is to utilize live chat as a virtual assistant to support and engage customers on your site. There are many automated live chats that can answer FAQs on certain product pages or target customers after they have been browsing your site for a certain length of time, which help you to assist visitors without worrying about high employee cost.
Better than that, live chat also enables you to communicate directly with customers and play the role of a store assistant to give advice and address any concern customers might have when they are about to make a purchase at your store. Live chat is crucial to resolve any issues on time, without letting prospects wait for a reply or support through emails, and an excellent customer service team working through live chat can apparently drive more sales and greatly boost up the cross-sale rate at your store. This marketing tactic is a high-impact method to engage with site visitors and assist potential customers coming to your store.
We all agree that it takes more than one engagement before customers decide to make a purchase at your eCommerce store.
So how to make them come back and become loyal customers? That’s where retargeting, or remarketing comes to play. This marketing strategy is so powerful because it allows you to follow your leads around the internet and display ads to them with the intent of driving them back to your site until they make a purchase. However, this retargeting strategy can only succeed if your ads are as specific and relatable as possible. Make sure the ads you display around your customers contain enough information that they are looking for and are engaging enough to allure them back to your site.
Ecommerce funnel represents the process or the overall path customers take from being aware of your business to returning after making a purchase at your online store. brand.
There are five stages involved, namely awareness, interest, decision, action, and retention, and each stage in the eCommerce funnel is concerned with a customer’s stages of interest in your The marketing funnel helps you to understand how prospective customers are interacting with your website and your brands, and therefore, optimizing the eCommerce funnel can make it easier in converting leads and achieving sales goals.
10. Ensure a seamless shopping experience
It’s expected that by 2021, 72% of online shopping will be happening on mobile devices, meaning that optimizing your store for mobile is no longer a choice, it’s a must. Therefore, ensuring an excellent shopping experience across devices has become the top priority of many retail businesses for the past few years.
To ensure a seamless shopping experience, you will need more than having a responsive design. You have to make sure visitors accessing your online store from all devices can experience an excellent experience that’s been optimized for that specific device. You can achieve that by optimizing all elements on your site, such as bigger navigation buttons, reformatted content and image. Investing in PWAs might be a smart decision to help you achieve all of that in an effortless way.
We all know that the eCommerce industry is thriving, and at the same time, becoming more competitive than ever. We hope that these most-updated best practices can help you win your sales goals with the best eCommerce marketing strategy.
Comments