There are many different requirements for successful e-commerce marketing.
Personalization
When you visit a salon regularly, you expect from the hairdresser that he/she will shape your hair without any instruction. The online customers also have some expectations from your e-commerce store. They want their shopping experiences tailored to their unique tastes and needs.
Do you know that 80% of online customers are more likely to convert when they get a personalized shopping experience?
Personalizing the buying experience start from data collection. The platforms can collect information of everything from customers’ e-mail addresses to their buying behaviour and browsing history. They can identify the buying patterns from this data and then using other data you would be able to correlate what a customer is more likely to buy.
After the collection of relevant data, you can find ways to improve the buying experience of customers:
- Providing attractive discounts or coupon codes to who are buying first time from your store or on special occasions such as birthdays
- Identifying those customers who are likely to have the greatest lifetime value and prioritize them within your marketing efforts
- Display recommended products, upsell and cross-sell products
- Customize the customers’ experience on the basis of a device from which they are accessing the website or on the basis of location
- Sending follow-up e-mails to the customers who have left the cart abandoned or haven’t visited the store for a long time.
After implementing the mentioned strategies you have to think of how you can personalize the customer’s experience. It will improve the understanding of your customers and entice them to return to your store for shopping.na
An omnichannel experience:
In the omnichannel approach, you utilize all the channels that your customers can use to interact with your brand for providing the same buying experience from any device. Thus, regardless of the device or operating system your customers use, there will be a uniform customer experience. For e.g., you can avoid limiting what offerings or payment options are available as per the customer’s device.
It is critical to use the integrated experience as an omnichannel strategy whenever you want. For delivering the best omnichannel experience, you can use the latest trends like mobile commerce.
An e-commerce platform:
There are many e-commerce platforms available in the market but it is difficult to find the correct platform for your requirement. Here are some important features that you must look out for:
· Reporting Analytics:
You must be able to access and analyze important data through your e-commerce platform. It must generate reports of the data updated in real time, and integrate information from any data source.
· Personalization features:
The platform should be able to display content, promotions and pricing dynamically to the individual customers on the basis of their purchasing behavior, location, gender, search history, etc.
· Cloud hosting:
A reliable, scalable cloud-based environment lets you deliver an exceptional experience to your customers every time they visit your site.
· PWA Support:
PWAs are highly popular among the customers as they let you deliver a mobile like experience to your customers but using the web-based technology. This mobile-like experience also increases the conversion rates and customer’s retention rates.
· Instant Purchase Capabilities:
An online customer wants a fast checkout thus the e-commerce platform shouldn’t offer multiple steps for checkout but it should offer a simple and fast checkout method so that the customers will be converted more easily.
· Robust Admin Functionality:
The admin panel of the chosen platform should help you to monitor your business by accessing sales, ordering forms, search terms, product data, and customizing management screens for your custom requirements.
· Content management:
The platform should let you quickly create & edit pages, images, video, and across all pages of your site using a single UI.
9 best marketing strategies for your e-commerce store:
Content Marketing:
Content marketing means using blogs posts, articles, resources, eBooks, etc. to engage with the site visitors. It is a great way to demonstrate your offering to the visitors and increase traffic to your website. Content also informs or educate the customers’ about something new and gives them meaningful insights so that you can create a stronger personal connection to your brand. Content is not just limited to written media but also includes podcasts and infographics which are excellent ways to attract and engage customers.
Make sure not every blog or article should be a marketing device that just tells about your selling items. Instead, you must focus on creating informative content on any topic of your industry niche and include genuine links and CTAs that lead readers to purchase-oriented pages.
It is also possible to create shoppable content by which the customers can directly make purchases from the blogs, videos, articles, or any other content format they interact with. This special type of content requires some sophistication for production but it gives you the advantage of immediately converting customers.
However, one of the biggest challenges with content marketing is that it requires significant effort. But there are many SEO tools that can make it easier to craft content that will drive the largest volume of traffic from the web. An additional tip is that you can multiple blog posts for creating a single eBook to get a larger return on your content investment.
Consistency is another important key for effective content marketing. You can’t just put 10s of blogs on a single day but you should be updating the blog posts regularly either weekly, twice in a week, or daily. This will engage the customers over the long term. Make sure that you are not just adding blogs for the sake of numbers but the content should be of high quality and relevant. A poorly crafted content will turn customers off very fast. As an e-commerce store owner, you must think of content as a long-tail effort that takes and effort for significant results.
Video Marketing:
There is an adage “ An image worth a thousand words but a video worth a million words.” You can demonstrate the products in many different ways through video marketing that text or images is not capable of. It is a great way for marketers who have complex stories to tell.
Nearly 87% of the marketing experts who use video for marketing it is able to increase more traffic to the site, 83% believe that it is an important tool for lead generation, and lastly 95% say that it can help users to understand their offerings.
There are many forms of video marketing, so choose the one which suits you best.
- Create a video showing your product in working
- Cover FAQs
- If the product is technical or complex then you can create tutorials or guide videos
- You can also create video testimonials from happy users
- Compare the products to the competitors’ offerings.
- Showcase how your brand is unique and different from your competitors
- Interview experts in your niche
- Ask the industry experts to promote your brands through videos
Whatever approach you adopt, the video marketing aim should be to help customers understand the product and feel confident.
It may initially seem that video marketing ideas should be difficult but you don’t need to be a professional director for effective video marketing. Here are some guidelines for creating effective, engaging videos:
- Keep the videos short and to the point
- Identify the audience and determine which videos your audience finds most engaging
- Check the KPIs constantly so you would be aware of whether the videos are making any difference or not
- Invest in HQ videos that can beat what your competitors offer
- Include a CTA in the video so the viewers will know what they can do next to continue the engagement
- Share the videos widely across as many platforms and marketing channels
Social Media Marketing:
We have seen a huge growth in social media platforms in the last two decades. You can find people of almost every age group on social media whether these are young children, adolescents, or old people, almost everyone is having a presence on social media. It is a very easy medium to know what is happening in the lives of our kith and kin and get updates of the outer world as well. The most popular social media platforms in the world are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Do you know that an average person spends 43,800 hours on social media which is equivalent to 5 years?
Well, social media is not only connecting people with the outer world but also opening up opportunities for online businesses as well. As shopping is also a social experience. People love to interact with the salesman, their friends, or their family while doing shopping. And do you know that every 9th person looks on social media for a better buying decision and almost 75% of the online buyers bought an item as they have seen it on social media?
Some of the popular ways of Social marketing are:
- You must have seen Google Shopping Ads on YouTube
- Product Pins on Pinterest with prices
- Buyable product pins on Pinterest
- Chat boxes to know more about products or services
- Groups and Forums to purchase or sell items
- Facebook Marketplace where thousands of products are sold and purchased locally
- Product Promotions by e-commerce sites on Instagram
Here are some important stats related to social media marketing:
- 87% of online customers agree to the fact that social platforms help them for making a good purchasing decision.
- One-fourth of the e-commerce store owners are selling their products through the giant social media platform Facebook alone.
- 40% of the e-commerce merchants are leveraging social media for improving their annual sales.
- One-third of the customers agree to the fact that they do online shopping directly from the social media platform.
- Customers who want to know about the product you sell expect a reply from your team within 4 hours while 42% of these customers expect a reply within an hour and 32% within half an hour
- 74% of online customer depends on social media platforms for their online shopping.
- 60% of SMBs say they’ve gained new customers through social media efforts.
You can also do organic social media marketing through unpaid posts but unpaid posts can boost engagement through ads if they have the budget and enough data to determine where to target advertising.
E-mail marketing:
E-mail marketing is a very old form of marketing and it is still effective. There are endless applications of e-mail marketing:
- You can generate leads by making prospects aware of your offerings
- Ask customers to subscribe to your newsletter or eBooks or any other e-mail-based resource which keeps the customers engaged with the brand even when they are not buying
- Nurture leads by encouraging them to make a purchase if they have expressed an initial interest
- Remind customers if they have left the cart abandoned on your online shop
One of the main advantages of e-mail marketing is that it is a low-cost marketing method that also requires less effort. You just need to collect the e-mail addresses and you can use existing templates created for every different special purpose. However, the challenging part of e-mail marketing is that the customers are receiving tons of e-mails from other vendors as well so it is difficult to convince the users to buy from only your store.
Make sure the e-mails are personalized. You can even use the name of the users in the subject line of the e-mail and in some cases, you can also add automatically generated customized recommendations on the earlier buying behavior. Also, don’t use generic content on the e-mail body. You can include educational content or keep the customers updated on new developments to accomplish this.
Automation is the key for streamline e-mail marketing. You can trigger an e-mail whenever a customer leaves the cart abandoned in your store or send a welcome invitation whenever someone signs up for the first time.
Influencer Marketing:
Influencer marketing is a new term that has been popularized in recent years. It involves some popular persons of a given industry to promote your offerings. It is highly effective in many different circumstances and works well for marketers who have a defined industry in which just a few individuals can sway a large portion of your target audience.
It may ostensibly seem that in “influencer marketing” only high-profile film stars will be involved. But that is not the case. The influencers can be low profile people who are popular and followed by your target audience. For e.g., if you are selling herbal products then you can find a person who is having a good reputation in the fitness industry or beauty industry.
Influencer marketing doesn’t need to be a “quid pro quo” opportunity. In simple words, it is a way in which you pay influencers to give positive reviews about your offerings. Another way is to find happy customers and ask them to give detailed reviews on social media platforms either through videos, images, or written text reviews and give them financial compensation. Many will be happy to do if they are truly pleased with your offer.
Local Marketing:
Although your store is available for a huge demographic audience sometimes it is a good idea to market specifically for your local target audience. It is more true when your offerings are having local appeal such as food sourced from regional producers. It is mainly good for those online stores that also have physical store owners.
The only disadvantage of local marketing is that it can attract a very narrow range of audiences. But if the conversion rates or sales value is higher among this demographic, then the efforts are worth it. If you want to start with local marketing, start by brainstorming ways for localizing your brand. In simple words, find ways to connect local values, features, or trends of what you sell? For instance, if you are selling sports shoes or boots in a location where the outdoor culture is more popular.
SEO:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is like the respiration system of your e-commerce store. It gives you the incoming traffic on your site. All the content of the site such as blog posts, videos, product descriptions, or content on the website landing page, are included in the SEO.
SEO marketing efforts initially start with keyword research and then use those keywords in your content for marketing goals. There are many popular tools such as Moz, Ahrefs, and SEMrush. It is also important to update keywords because search trends can change after a period of time.
To help stay ahead of competitors target keywords that your target audience mostly use and have the greatest opportunity to bring traffic to your content.
Chatbots:
The e-commerce industry has witnessed an enormous rise in chatbots. As per the report of Business Insider, in 2020, 80% of e-commerce businesses wanted to integrate chatbots. There was a time when the chatbots were only limited to collecting the e-mail address and
The contact number of the customers, but now things have changed significantly. They
can now automate business processes, help customers with shopping, and enable
retailers to foster better customer experiences and streamline a vast matrix of complex interactions.
The chatbots have been programmed to understand all the potential queries of the customers. Earlier, the chatbots were developed pre-programmed coding scripts, that’s why they used to give similar answers. But now they are built using advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. Thus, they can learn from their experiences and resolve the queries on the spot.
It would be erroneous to say that human beings have been completely replaced by chatbots in customer service, but the truth is that they may get replaced in future. With artificial intelligence technology, it is hard to recognize whether you are interacting with a human being or a bot.
The e-commerce industry has been most impacted by chatbots. They are completely changing the way e-commerce stores used to interact with their visitors to answer their questions. The customers get a highly personalized experience with faster and accurate responses. In the current scenario, it is possible to deploy chatbots on other platforms as well, like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and others. There are several types of Chatbots, some of the types are:
- Support Chatbots
- Skills Chatbots
- Assistance Chatbots
- Transactional Chatbots
- Social Messaging Chatbots
User-generated Content:
You can also use the content generated by the customers on your site for promoting your e-commerce store. One of the best examples is getting feedback or reviews from your customers. Whether you have posted reviews on your own site or on others they offer potential customers a perspective on your products that typically feels more genuine compared to content that your brand produces itself.
Wrapping Up:
In this article, we have gone through every different type of marketing. All these different types of marketing methods rely on the e-commerce platform you are using. Adobe Commerce comes with pre-built tools that let you create an omnichannel experience, personalize online content, and gain critical insights through cutting-edge business intelligence. At Ceymox Technologies, the best Adobe Commerce development company in India, we are having expertise in developing next-level e-commerce stores with advanced marketing features. Let us know your requirements.
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