Driving organic traffic to your site maybe one of the biggest challenges facing E-entrepreneurs. Owning an e-commerce store can be very lucrative in today’s markets and in the last few years we have seen a rise in online shopping around the globe.
Your Consumer Base
Consumers search for products and brands that they believe in. So how can you promote your E-commerce store and drive organic traffic and loyal customers? Well it takes patience, persistence, and a steady marketing strategy to win the race to captivate your audience and convert them into loyal customers. You have to build your loyal consumer base brick by brick.
The Stats
E-commerce statistics from Baymard institute shows, shopping cart abandonment rate is 69.8%. Clearly customer engagement isn’t easy, as most consumers online have short attention spans. Bombarding customers with aggressive marketing schemes all at once overwhelms buyers, or even annoys them. Engagement is crucial as 85% of shoppers start a purchase on one device and switch to another. So how do we avoid this? By using multiple sound marketing strategies over a period of time, building the confidence of your consumers and engaging them in an organic way.
Overview
Any E-entrepreneur can effectively employ these marketing strategies explained below, to ensure successful promotion of their store. The 7 strategies to promote your E-Commerce store in this article are easy to follow and most importantly, are cost effective, regardless of your business size.
Merchants and sellers who implement these strategies will have a diverse marketing plan of action. It guarantees to drive real organic traffic to their e-commerce site, and have that traffic translate to real dedicated paying customers and a constant stream of new buyers.
1. Social Media Marketing
While there are a plethora of marketing and advertising strategies you can use, only one has been proven to bring consumers and sales on a consistent basis and that is social media.
Use social media to spread the word and drive traffic to your e-commerce site. Social Media is all about steady engagement with your clients and potential clients. Posting regularly is key to reaching your buyers and interact with them on a daily basis. Social Media users like authentic brands that engage them in a real way. The idea is to continually peek their interest and use various marketing strategies to grab their attention.
How do you do this?
Firstly, do not spread yourself too thin by using too many platforms on Social Media. Keep your focus to 3-4 channels that compliment your niche and targets your users. You also want to avoid in your face advertising. Instead, focus on community building and posts geared towards news. The top 4 Social Media outlets to begin with are:
Benefits of Advertising through Social Media:
- Organic growth of your sales and a loyal fan base
- Use customer generated content for ads to save more on advertising
- Reach a target amount of people daily
- Better target new and returning customers
With Social Media you need to be able to influence users with enticing offers via a compelling medium. Coupled with an engaging advertising campaign you are guaranteed to engage your users and translate that engagement to real sales.
In a recent study, Instagram ranked Number 1, ahead of Facebook and twitter in social media engagement. Let’s take a brief look at what the top 2 Social Media platforms have to offer.
Facebook Advertising
Facebook is the leading Social media platform for E-commerce. According to Techcrunch.com, Facebook host more than a quarter of the world’s population with 2 billion monthly users. This provides E-entrepreneurs and advertisers matchless opportunity to reach anyone, anywhere on the planet. Facebook allows more specialized and advanced targeting than any other platform. You can target by job description, location and distance, interests, hobbies, past activity and many other avenues of valuable criteria. Facebook Advertising is almost limitless in its reach and in 2017 made a lot of new e-commerce entrepreneurs, millionaires.
InstagramIn second place we have Facebook’s acquisition Instagram. While Facebook boast an out of this world user population, Instagram has made a name for itself as a free photo and video posting social media platform. It has a monthly active user database of 500 million users. Instagram commands the utmost in audience engagement rates in social media. Yes they rank 58% higher than Facebook and 2000% higher than Twitter.
The Appeal of Instagram
As a solely image and video based social media platform, Advertisers that have visually stunning products benefit highly from ad campaigns that rely heavily on visuals and that are aesthetically pleasing. Another excellent feature of Instagram is that it does not rely on organic post like perhaps Facebook; which works better on that platform for audience engagement. Instagram can links ads directly to a product page or a landing page. This allows your audience and would be consumers to directly engage with your product.
The great thing about generating buzz and driving real traffic to your E-Commerce store using social media is that you use various apps and websites like Buffer or Tailwind to schedule regular post for you. It enables you to schedule post ahead of time and track how your audience is engaging with your post.
2. SEO Strategy to Drive Organic Traffic
SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is used mostly for the largest search engine in the intrawebs, Google. One of the biggest disadvantages facing E-Commerce stores is having less traffic than huge market places like Amazon and eBay being driven to your store. To remedy this you have to optimize your product listings and descriptions on your website to use SEO keywords to drive users to your website easily through search engines like Google.
The best way to do this is to find the SEO keywords by searching on an outside tool like: Luxhosting SEO tool, Google, Amazon and Ahrefs. The fact remains that SEO is one of the number one ways to optimize your site. It helps to drive organic users to your site. It has the highest ROI, and the best part is that it is free.
Once you have done your research and found the best SEO Keywords for your product titles and descriptions you can optimize your site to help drive real traffic that translates to real sales. You can track and manage your success of your SEO Strategy by using Google Analytics. By using Google Analytics, you can the Channels report of the Acquisition section to check which keywords used during organic searches are leading to increase and drive traffic to your site and most importantly sales.
3. Email Marketing and Automation
Email Promotions and Automation is one of the quickest and fool proof ways you can really advertise and engage your customers on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Electronic mail Marketing is a great tool to target buyers. Be sure to use tailored promotions that specific to customers’ needs and wants. As we said earlier, customers want an authentic experience, so this is a perfect way to show your customers how your product can benefit them and they are more likely to engage with discounts and offers that suits their wants.
An excellent way to grow your customer email list is to have an automated pop-up when your users arrive to your site. Create one that suits your brand and engages customers to sign up. When customers browse products, but never made a purchase they could benefit from an email giving them more information or offering them a discount for first time buyers. Who can ever resist a discount?
For your loyal customers you can offer other discounts and promotions throughout the month to show your appreciation for their loyalty. Emails can be schedule to remind these customers of monthly sales promotions etc. Use a Campaign Monitor tool that monitors the performance of your email campaigns in real time, on any device. There are many amazing features to this tool that can help you have a successfully automated Email Marketing Campaign for your E-commerce store.
4. Create A Blog
So, you do not need to be a creative to use content marketing as a tool to drive sales to your E-Commerce site. Companies large and small have launched blogs provide their buyers with content. That is, informative and helps to drive their product sales and engage their audience. A blog is a substantial way to build trust in your brand. It is also an excellent vehicle to give pertinent information to your customers. Promotion via blogging drives success as articles can be shared infinitely across social media. Enabling comments on post can also help spread the word from loyal customers to new customers and give your products excellent reviews. Your blog post can be written with SEO keywords to ensure that it is seen across search engines as well.
What to write about?
Well a part from product spotlights and giving users engaging pieces on your company’s journey and vision. You can gather the questions that are frequently asked and use it to curate blog topics. Answering frequently troubleshooting questions are excellent fodder for post to help inform buyers and creates a space where they can return for any future issues.
Blog post centered on the lifestyle of your buyers and how your products help to make their lives easy are excellent post to write. How do they and how can they engage with your product on a daily basis? Other ideas for articles can be in the ‘how to’ realm of blogging, and tutorials on how to use your products more effectively. For example, if your E-commerce business is in the fashion industry, writing blog post like “How to effectively use a Capsule Wardrobe” would be really interesting to your customers, and it is a create way to link products as examples.
5. Influencer Marketing
Thanks again to Social Media Platforms like YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, 'Influencers' have become a driving force in advertising for small and major companies. An 'Influencer' is a normal person that has a massive social media following, on any of the platforms aforementioned. Many luxury brands to newer brands have utilized 'Influencers' to market their products to would be consumers.
There are many avenues to attracting 'Influencers' to market your products to their users. You can send them free products to try and then give a solid review via their audience and on their blog if they have one. You can also pay them to advertise for you. Many well-known 'Influencers' with huge Social Media followings have packages available for their advertising.
The great thing about using 'Influencers' is that they have a solid fan base that is highly influenced by their opinions and their lifestyle. This can range from a small budget to a larger budget in your Marketing Strategy. It all depends on the type and level of 'Influencer' you approach.
6. Omi-Channel Management
So, we’ve mostly talked about ways you can employ marketing and advertising strategies online to drive organic traffic to your E-commerce store. However, another great way to do this is to go multichannel to attract more buyers. Omni-Channel Management is simply a method of expanding your reach to ensnare more buyers by selling on multiple channels like Amazon, eBay, or even smaller niche venues like Etsy. You can also utilize Facebook Marketplace along with your other Facebook Promotion strategies.
As we mentioned earlier, large marketplaces tend to gain lots of traffic daily than a single online store. Tapping into that by selling on multiple venues increases the visibility of your products, brand and online store.
This exposure from multiple marketplaces can increase the amount of loyal customers you gain monthly. However, there are problems that can occur with going the Omni-channel route, where you can spread yourself too thin and run into product supply issues. How do you avoid this? Well, you can easily solve inventory issues with a tool that are available online to help you. These tools will help you to manage your listings and shipping across channels (marketplaces) enabling you to fulfil orders from a single interface. Potential delivery issues and overselling is easily avoided.
7. Paid Ads & Retargeting Ads
The oldest form of promotion is through Paid Ads. As a new business owner, having a budget set aside for paid ads is crucial. For an E-Commerce store there are many channels online that you can use. There are paid ad options on Social Media Platforms that can be ran and are very effective. You can pay for ads on Podcasts that match your product and store niche. Advertise on radio, and use traditional avenues like billboard and flyers. All methods here work to help spread the word about your E-commerce site and drive organic traffic to your store.
Appeal to users
With Retargeting Ads you win the user over that came to your store and only browsed a few products but didn’t purchase. How is this accomplished? By retargeting your ads. To do this, your website places a cookie on the visitor’s computer. When they go to another site later, an ad for your site and a specific product pops up. This makes your products visible to that customer to entice them and give them that extra push to come back to your site.
Target users needs
Ad Retargeting works best when it is specific to a customers’ wants and needs. Retargeted a should include the specific product that the user was searching on your site with a call to action button or a promotion for first-time buyers. These retargeted ads work best to drive the customer back to your site and ensure a purchase.
Many great retargeting platforms exit online. In general, they can place cookies in visitors’ browsers, show your ads on other sites that they go to, and track the performance of your campaigns so you can see how effective they are. There are also paid advertising services, like Google AdWords, that can set up Ad Retargeting campaigns for you.
Building Brick by Brick
Building your E-commerce store with a dedicated customer base takes time, as you build brick by brick to ensure optimum success. To recap, the best thing you can do is have an iron clad marketing strategy. If you follow our 7 strategies to promote your E-commerce site you are well on your way to building a million-dollar business. Don't forget, this takes time, effort and patience. Consistency is key to promotion success. Remember your customers want real engagement and they want products that suit their lifestyle and brands they believe in. Be creative with your campaigns and use all the tools to drive your loyal customer base.
Spreading your marketing strategy across multiple advertising channels is the best way to ensure maximum results that are consistent on a daily basis. Be diverse in your tactics and remain authentic and true to your brand. Follow these tips and you will traffic the masses and reach more buyers through your efforts.
