Welcome to Part 2 of Marketing Your eCommerce Business : 20 Ways to Increase Revenue
11. Reduce Cart Abandonments
Shopping cart abandonment is a common practice among online shoppers. It’s so common that studies have been done to pinpoint the reason that 69.99% of shopping carts are left abandoned.
But just because it’s common doesn’t mean you can’t change it on your website. Every time someone leaves something in their cart and bounces from your website, you should see it as a lost sale and create a marketing process to encourage those who abandoned a cart to come back and complete the process.
The most common way of doing this is by sending an email saying “you left something in your cart”. Showing a customer what was left in their cart also encourages them to come back because they feel as if they are missing out.
There are numerous ways that shopping cart abandonment can be reduced by offering free shipping, or the ability to check out without logging in. Visit this blog post for more information on how to reduce shopping cart abandonment.
12. Integrate With Instagram
Instagram continues to be one of the biggest and best social media platforms for showcasing products. And it has become even more shoppable in recent years!
The key to a great Instagram marketing strategy is taking great photos, implementing a hashtag strategy, and posting at the right times, but those are just the basics. If you want to grow your following, you’ll need to engage directly with your audience.
The best ways to do this are by running contests, creating partnered content with other brands or influencers, and creating content around your product development process. You need to let the customers in and show them a little behind the scenes so they feel connected to your brand. Authenticity and honesty are growing in importance, and it’s simply a requirement if you want your customers to trust you.
Instagram provides even more options for eCommerce marketing, with its very own eCommerce marketplace where you can set up shop.
Once your shop is live, you can share products to your stories, reels, and posts, and even tag influencers (very handy when doing a collab). Instagram also allows users to check out in the Instagram app, so there is no need for them to even visit your eCommerce store. Taking this extra step out of the process creates a shorter sales funnel which aids in increased sales.
13. Create A Text Message Campaign
SMS marketing is the act of sending out promotional messages via SMS. While many businesses think of this as old school, it is actually a very successful tactic in the world of eCommerce. This is because 82% of text messages sent are opened, which is far more than that of email.
And guess what? People don’t actually mind receiving marketing SMS messages. 70% of customers say that SMS marketing is a good way to find out about promotions, deals, and new offers. There are many different ways you can use SMS marketing, including:
- Cross-selling and upselling
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Exclusive offers
- Sales promotions
- Reviews
- Customer support
14. Increase Your Email Sign-ups
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to build long-term customer relationships and drive sales as well as acquire repeat customers. While social media marketing has you trying to compete for attention, email marketing allows you to speak to an already captive audience.
You can also fit far more information into an email than you can in a social media post, so it’s a great way to let your customers know about upcoming sales, new products, or updated terms. The most difficult parts of email marketing are capturing emails, and writing a captivating subject line that encourages your audience to open the email.
Capturing Email Addresses
The best way to capture email addresses is to offer a ‘newsletter sign up’ pop-up on your website. Let your audience know that you will pop them an email when there are sales or new items available. This way, they actually want to receive emails from your brand.
Another way to capture email addresses is to offer your audience something for free. This could be a free tutorial, free discount code, or some kind of free resource. In order to get the free item you have on offer, they need to enter their email address and be added to your email list.
If you really want to collect a lot of emails at once, you can run a competition and promote it on social media. In order to enter, contestants will need to provide you with their email addresses. This one tends to bring in a lot of emails at once so is great for brands looking to build their email list from scratch.
Writing Captivating Subject Lines
The only problem with email, is that only 21% of marketing emails are actually opened. The best way to increase open rates is to improve the subject line. These are a handful of things you can do to improve your subject lines and increase your opening rates:
- Write short subject lines
- Avoid words that are associated with spam
- Ask open-ended questions
- Include a deadline in the subject line
- Try a teaser subject line
- Give a clear command in your subject line
There are a lot of different directions you can go in for your subject line, so you will need to test them out and see which ones receive the best open rates. You can then further perfect your formula from there.
15. Optimize Your Email Marketing
Acquiring emails for your email list is just the first step in your journey to creating a great email marketing campaign. While you should always be trying to capture more emails for your email list, you need to have an email marketing strategy in place in order to convert your audience into buying customers.
It’s important to make sure that your customers are receiving messages from you on a regular basis. This way they get to know your brand a little better, and you start to build trust. Automating your email marketing messages means that you don’t even have to think about a weekly mailer, it happens automatically in the background.
Consider the following emails to be added to your automation process:
- Set up a welcome email for visitors when they first sign up
- Give customers promo codes and gifts
- Updates when discount offers go live
- Provide customers with product tips (where and if applicable)
- Share relevant content that will help customers get the most out of their purchases
- Promote gifting your items during the holiday season
- Thank your highest paying customers for their continuous support
- Ask for feedback when a customer has visited your site without making a purchase
- Let customers know about products left in their cart
- Make the most of special days like Fathers Day, Mothers Day, Halloween, etc to promote your products.
If you ensure you are using every opportunity possible to provide more value for your customers, they will reward you with additional sales. Once your automated emails start running themselves, your business will really start seeing the value in email marketing.
16. Engage Store Visitors With Live Chats
If you want to keep visitors engaged while they are still on your website, then live chat is a great way to do it. Most live chats are triggered once a customer has spent a certain amount of time on your website, or has visited a certain page.
Live chat gives you the opportunity to have a conversation with a customer while they are still in the consideration process. This means you can address any concerns they have, or answer questions while they are in the process of making a purchase.
Having a live chat option could increase conversions for your business while simultaneously building trust. Connecting with customers using multiple channels is a must, but having the ability to chat to customers while they are still on your website could be the final touch point your business needs to increase sales.
In fact, live chat is so powerful that marketers believe it could increase conversions by 20% on eCommerce stores. If you do not make use of a live chat at this point, you could be missing out on a large portion of sales from possible buyers.
17. Start A Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is a powerful tool that allows you to provide long-form and relevant content to potential buyers, as well as help your eCommerce store rank in Google results pages. If you don’t already have a blog on your eCommerce store, then this should be a serious consideration. These are some suggestions for your content marketing strategy:
- Create SEO content for your blog
- Write user guides with useful product information
- Write guest posts for other relevant blogs so you can link back to your website (this is great for SEO and creates relevancy in your niche)
18. Make Use Of Personalization
Creating a tailored and personalized experience for each and every customer is a great way to make your audience feel valued. It’s proven that personalization can increase revenue by 10 – 15%. This is quite a significant portion and one that could make a huge difference to your company’s overall well-being.
Personalization means you are taking into account the user’s previous actions, products visited, and preferences in order to make sure they are seeing only content that interests them. The best part is that personalization is somewhat new, and only 15% of companies are using it to its full potential.
By using personalization, you are setting your eCommerce store up to be an industry leader and meeting your customer’s needs without them even realizing it. Personalization can also make use of more general data such as customer location. This means that you can suggest products more relevant to them, at the time of year they would need it most.
19. Encourage User-generated Content
UGC or user-generated content is becoming increasingly important to build trust with prospective buyers. One of the biggest factors people take into consideration when buying a product is social proof.
The best social proof is product reviews left by other customers who have bought the product.
While user-generated content is rather popular on social media platforms, there are far fewer companies making use of it on their website. If you provide customers with the right incentives, they will be happy to leave reviews and image reviews for prospective customers to see.
20. Optimize Your Product Pages
Conversion rate optimization is the practice of optimizing your website for on-page sales. By looking at potential problem areas on your website, you can make changes to ensure that your site is pushing users toward making a purchase every step of the way.
CRO works to identify where you are losing customers and what can be done to captivate your audience to stay with you right until the end of checkout. Many eCommerce stores find they need to further optimize their cart and checkout in order to increase conversions.
The best way to do this is by using heat mapping to see how users are interacting with a page and when the majority of users are choosing to bounce off a page. If a lot of users are bouncing at the same point, you know there is an opportunity for optimization.
Marketing Your eCommerce Website For Increased Revenue
Marketing your eCommerce website requires collaboration between a variety of strategies and various different platforms. It will also be a trial-and error-process that allows you to refine which strategies and platforms work best for your eCommerce store.
If your team is not clued up on the marketing process, it’s best to leave it to the professionals and hand over your marketing to a team of experienced individuals who can drive sales to your website.
Once you’ve figured out your eCommerce business plan, it’s time to put it into practice. Make your online marketplace into a success with these marketing tactics to increase revenue and profits.
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