E-commerce has given businesses of all sizes the potential to expand to a global audience.
Via a well-crafted online marketing campaign, you can scream from the virtual rooftops about your brand to a potential audience of millions.
The difficulty is that all your competitors are doing the same thing. With so many other sources vying for your customers attention, it’s difficult to get your voice heard.
Here are some professional tips to help you make your e-commerce store stand out from the masses.
1. Make use of collaborations
Success is much easier when its a team effort. Instead of trying to be a lone wolf trying to claw its way to the top, why not team up with other businesses of similar size and lift each other up by leveraging each other’s audiences.
Ryan O’Connor, owner of fashion brand One Tribe Apparel, has built his audience by engaging in co-giveaways with similarly-sized brands. His most successful giveaways have resulted in the brand’s Instagram following growing by 1,000 people per day.
“It’s more cost effective than working with paid social media influencers and can help you grow your long term network,” he said.
You don’t need to sign up to an official partnership to team up with influencers. Often, if you put the effort in to engage with and promote other influencers, they will return the favour.
Creating listicles about the best brands, tools or products in your niche is a clever way to engage with several industry influencers at a time.
If you get in touch with the people you recommended in the list, they may share your post with their networks and this could help you develop deeper relationships or content-based partnerships in the future.
2. Work to convert your nearly-customers
The customers who visited your website, but didn’t buy a product are your low-hanging fruit.
It’s now commonplace to put a retargeting pixel on your website that allows you to advertise to these individuals in the days and weeks after they visited your website.
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The conversion rates of retargeting ads are so high across the board that most businesses see them as a no-brainer.
E-commerce websites without a lot of traffic could still make the most of this strategy using ‘link retargeting’.
This allows you to retarget ads at people who have clicked on a link that you’ve shared, but which leads to a third party website.
There are plenty of analytical tools that can help you understand what prevented your website’s visitors from converting into customers. The Google Analytics conversion funnel tool called ‘Goals’ will show you what stage of the purchasing process that most people are dropping off, so you know what part of your website needs to make amendments.
FullStory is tracking software that goes one step further and let you witness your customers’ exact behaviour on your website.
Bethanie Nomani uses the software to understand more about the customers of her e-commerce website, Marley Nomani.
She explained: “You can see recorded visits of your customers and prospects as they start on your home page and navigate around your e-commerce site until the moment they leave your site. It is amazing to see the behavior and you may discover many opportunities to make it easier for them to buy.”
3. Make use of reviews and user-generated content
Customers tend to trust referrals from other people more than do they do recommendations from brands, so it makes sense to make it easy for customers to be able to review your products.
Star ratings and review content is widely believed to be favored by Google and other search engines, meaning they can help brands rise to the top of both paid and search results.
Indeed, by displaying star ratings in Google Ads, eCommerce brands have seen a 17% increase in CTRs for AdWords campaigns and a 24% increase in CTRs in Product Listing Ads.
User-generated content drives impressive results in social media marketing. Facebook recently found that including customer reviews in adverts drew 4x higher click-through rates.
By making use of these tips, you can help spread the word of your online business far easier.
