Top Digital Marketing Strategies to Promote your eCommerce Store

Top digital marketing strategies to promote your eCommerce store

How to create a digital marketing strategy that will work for your business.

What makes a brand flourish and thrive over others that disappear within just a year of starting up? The key to any successful enterprise is strategic planning. In the online shopping world, consumers are wooed through ads and marketing messages from different brands. Why should they choose yours over the rest? Having a high quality product won’t help you be profitable in the long-term if you aren’t able to sell your product. Just like the leaders of successful ecommerce businesses, you need to be able to have a good overall strategy that employs various social media, email and web tactics. This easy guide will describe how you can plan your eCommerce marketing strategy to make your virtual store a success.

Work some intelligent strategy onto your website

A great landing page just isn’t enough to keep your shoppers engaged with your website. You need to put in some more strategic work if you want to thrive in the competitive world of ecommerce. Intelligent web design elements can go a long way to help retain customer attention and increase conversions. Here are some pointers on the strategies you can employ.

Offer them a discount just for being there

Some users may have stumbled across your site through a referral. Others may have found their way to your site after clicking on a well-placed social media ad. If these visitors don’t see something they like immediately, their first instinct would be to exit your webpage and move on to something else. How do you grab their attention in the first 20 seconds? Besides good web design, get this user to stay on your site through an exit intent pop-up. These pop ups are usually created for the express purpose of collecting customer information for marketing. Garnish this pop-up with an irresistible call to action message like:

Before you go, wouldn’t you enjoy a discount coupon for 40% off your first purchase?.

This would entice a user to click ‘Yes!’ and proceed to make their first purchase. In the process they would have to register to claim the coupon, so you would be able to target them with an email marketing campaign.

Grab the attention of shoppers who abandon cart

Online shoppers love browsing through different sites to find the products they really like at attractive prices. What this means for ecommerce owners is that people don’t complete a checkout, leading to a low conversion rate. Up to 75.6% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts; that’s a meaty market right there! An exit intent pop-up can help you win back these users. Simply have a pop-up displayed when a cart abandoner is trying to exit your site. Use it to highlight a discount that will last only for the next couple of hours. You’d be surprised to see just how well people respond to a thoughtful offer like that.

Market and then remarket

What if a user meant to purchase a product but then got busy and forgot all about it? You can remind such users about the product in an inconspicuous way. Facebook Pixel has proved to be a highly effective way of showing similar ads to users across a wide range of websites. This method of marketing is called remarketing and is made possible through a powerful bit of code that remembers what a user has been looking at on a target site and then promotes it throughout ads on partner sites. You can use a pixel-like code from any provider to make use of its powerful insights to remind users to complete a purchase.

Plan out a thoughtful email marketing strategy

Complement your intelligent web design with a well laid out email marketing strategy. Email marketing may seem outdated, but to this date remains the third most influential marketing tactic for businesses.

An attractive email strategy is one where you don’t spam a user with information they will not require. Users will just block your emails or unsubscribe from your newsletter forever. Instead, employ some meaningful email marketing tactics to hold a user’s attention. Here are some examples.

Send a customised email for shoppers with abandoned carts

There’s certainly more than one way to get the attention of a shopper who hasn’t completed the checkout process. In addition to an exit intent popup, you can try a follow up email message. There are several great CRM tools out there that will trigger a customised email to a shopper who has not completed a purchase.

The emails that elicit a good response are those that are first sent within 24 hours of the shopper having abandoned their cart. You can target to send out reminders every couple of days after. These emails should have specifics about the user’s city, the item they were looking at, and reviews of the item that have been left by other customers. The trick is to have each reminder highlight a different reason why they should go back and check out the item, making each email seem personally written for the shopper’s notice.

Have a great-looking newsletter that is customised for each shopper

A great customer database is not enough – you need to make the best use of it. Most ecommerce marketers tend to use customer databases to send out email-based newsletters about existing products, new products or information related to an upcoming sales. What if you had more specifics that your shopper has already shared with you regarding their anniversary, shopping preferences, or even insights you have gleaned from their past purchases? A good CRM tool will help you configure emails to your users that will target their specific interests. You can have the newsletter focus on the products they love, remind them to get a great gift for their family or even give them a discount coupon on their birthday. By using these specifics, a user is much more likely to look forward to emails sent by your brand.

Make your emails interactive

Resist the urge to fill your email newsletters to your subscribers with plain old images and text. The marketing emails of today contain interactive features that allow users to make purchases right from within the body of an email. Include interactive buttons that will allow a user to buy something or express interest in a product they would prefer. Use your email newsletter to become a fun shopping experience all on its own.

Craft a fun yet useful social media strategy

There are hardly any ecommerce providers who don’t have an online presence. Based on their target audience, different brands have chosen various methods to grab the attention of their user base who are on major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. A good example are the cheeky Twitter messages that Flipkart sends out to users either in response to what they have tweeted to them, or to highlight an ongoing promotion. Here are some ways you can use social media to your advantage to target shoppers who would be interested in your product.

Borrow the ear of an influencer with a wide reach

Social media influencers are a powerful ally for you to partner with to get your products before a wider audience. A good influencer usually is prominent on social media, has thousands or tens of thousands of active followers, and posts interesting posts several times a day. Talk to an influencer who posts related to your niche so that you can then have them endorse your product. This may involve contacting them, offering to send them your product, and then agreeing on how they will review or post it to their followers. While there are influencers who would promote your product for a fee, others may be happy to partner with you in return for a freebie. Whatever route you choose, make sure you opt in for an influencer who is positively viewed by your target user based.

Invest in a great blog strategy

Blogs have been around for a while now, but they certainly haven’t lost any of their charm. When users are looking for information related to a niche that your ecommerce site caters to, they are more likely to shop from a site that has plenty of information on the topic. Create a series of articles with curated product content based on information shoppers most look for. Have a blog section added to your website with articles from a good content writing firm, or popularly known guest bloggers. A well-written, engaging article peppered with appealing images is exactly what would drive positive ROI on your marketing strategy.

Interact with your shoppers online

Another great way for brands to show their human side is for them to positively interact with their shoppers online. For this, you need to have a team that is energetic and passionate about the brand. Use a social media CRM tool to detect when users have mentioned your brand or tagged your brand in an image, so you can repost or retweet them. You can even thank them for having shopped with you and request them to post a review on your Facebook page. Other ways to interact with online consumers include giving them a challenge on social media, offering them random giveaways, etc.. The more you interact with your shoppers in a positive way, the more likely they are to want to do business with you again in the future.

Target would-be shoppers through your mobile app

Smartphones have revolutionised the online marketing space. 54% of shoppers are more likely to pick up their phone to order their next purchase than pull up a shopping site on their computer. If you haven’t already, invest in a good mobile app. There are several tools out there today that will allow you to quickly create a great looking mobile app for your ecommerce site at minimal expense. Offer users who download the app a discount on their first purchase. You can use the mobile app to send out push notifications to shoppers at regular intervals. These notifications can be a pretty effective way of reminding shoppers about an item they had recently shown interest in, or to intimate them about big discounts.

To sum up

Thanks to the improved business climate, the Indian ecommerce market is set to surpass that of the US to become the second largest in the world by 2034. There is sure to be an upward trend in Internet availability, sales of powerful smartphones and improved consumer spending over the next couple of years. All this means more competition for ecommerce owners! You can ill-afford to remain complacent in such an environment. Work on a strategic set of marketing tactics to make your brand one of the most sought after by consumers.