The online platform seems never to make us bored. It started a century ago with so few people caring about and boom, more than 65% of the world’s population can’t live without it. Not going to lie; the more people go online, the more chances the e-Commerce industry has to develop. However, to be genuinely attracted and click the “buy” button, customers now need more than product images with only some simple description. Therefore, well-planned eCommerce strategies are essential for any company and sellers.
Let’s explore some helpful tips and the top 21 eCommerce strategies to eliminate confusion, build your plan, and stand out.
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Tips for Successful eCommerce Strategy
Before jumping into several eCommerce strategies to increase sales, you should know some tips for better implementation.
1. Establish Your eCommerce Goals
People can not do things without careful planning and wishing for desirable results. A similar principle also applies to all types of business, especially e-Commerce ones. Hence, the professional manager must take the first step before implementing any eCommerce strategy. Clearly defined goals bring numerous benefits to e-Commerce firms, such as setting priorities, informing actions about employees, tracking progress efficiently, and so much more.
Moreover, being aware of the importance of setting goals is not enough. You must know how to set SMART goals for an eCommerce strategy plan. In other words, you should avoid unclear and unreachable objectives by making it:
- Specific: Answer the 6 “Wh” questions, including Who, What, When, Where, Which, and Why. You can also discuss these questions with superiors and subordinates.
- Measurable: Define metrics used to track progress, set specific milestones, and communicate them with your subordinates.
- Achievable: The goal is meant to inspire motivation, not discouragement. Unattainable objectives create boundaries for accomplishing given tasks.
- Realistic: Being honest with your team and your abilities and establishing goals you are willing and able to work towards.
- Timely: In business, the shorter time you use for finishing work, the more incredible benefits you can attain. Therefore, establishing a goal deadline is compulsory because time constraints create a sense of urgency.
Lastly, a manager should establish an effective KPI to measure employees’ results. If you are not sure about your conducted KPI, consider the six steps below as advice:
- Write a clear KPI goal
- Ensure KPI is actionable
- Share KPI’s plan with subordinates
- Periodically review KPI
- Make KPI suitable to changing needs of the business
- Update KPI if necessary
2. Put the Focus on the User
Attention to your target customer’s experience is among the best eCommerce marketing strategy tips. Of course, specialists always say that, but why?
In today’s market environment, loaded with enormous products and services, customers are those with absolute power, not the sellers. Various goods allow customers to have a wide range of choices according to their interests, perceived price, quality, etc. If your company can provide customers with unforgettable experiences and offer reasonable prices, they will, in return, be loyal to your enterprise. As a result, you can save money invested in retaining customers and encourage brand advocacy.
Take the case of Apple for eCommerce strategy examples. CEOs of this multinational technology company always give priority to customers’ experience. So they equip retail stores with iPhones, Macbooks, iPad, AppleWatch, etc., to allow customers to experience Apple’s products themselves.
So, how can you create a buyer persona? Follow the four steps below for detailed instructions:
- Step 1: Gather data from the target audience
Use Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, etc., to collect demographic information, customer snapshots, interests, and other preferred information.
- Step 2: Get in touch with your customers
Listen directly to your target customers with in-person or phone customer interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, and more. Develop a list of questions before interviewing to ensure they are short but informative enough. Lengthy discussions create neglect and annoyance. Besides, good gifts in return are required to encourage involvement from volunteers.
- Step 3: Segment your market
Once the research is completed, narrow down your results and segment your market. Segmentation is important because you know your priorities to invest efforts, resources, and humans adequately.
- Step 4: Create and share your personas
Precisely organize collected information and distribute the personas to marketing or sales teams to gather feedback and give them a reference.
3. Look at Your Accomplishments
ECommerce strategy is not a simple one-off project. As a matter of fact, eCommerce business strategy requires regular checking and updating. Therefore, it is better to revisit the attainments of the previous projects before moving on. Moreover, carefully detecting what your team has and has not achieved is essential.
Effective and loyal employees are the core value of a successful business. As a considerate employer, you ought to bring blockages to the forefront, discuss weaknesses with subordinates and find solutions to enhance their knowledge and skills. Accomplishments with superior results can encourage employees, while uncompleted work can give lessons.
However, life is not like a dream; even frank discussion does not work sometimes. In this case, you can recruit a new executive or hire external agents for valuable professional advice for current problems. After figuring out the matters, you must immediately fix or change them according to the business environment. Be prepared because error problems could be anything, such as a timeline, allocated resources, the CEOs, KPIs, etc.
4. Update Your Goals and Priorities
To adequately adapt to the continuously changing environment, professional managers must be sensitive to changes. It can be achieved by modifying the objectives and priorities of the eCommerce strategy. It is simply because the enterprise’s resources are so limited that you can not satisfy all desires. Pay attention to your eCommerce content strategy, online marketing strategy, etc., to successfully update your goals and priorities.
Overall, there are five popular growth strategies that e-commerce businesses do, including:
- Market penetration strategy: lower prices to make your products attractive and increase the market share.
- Market expansion or development: sell existing products in the new market. To utilize the growth of advanced technology and transportation, consideration of being an international business is a common and helpful tendency.
- Product expansion strategy: This eCommerce strategy is suitable for SMEs when aiming at improving sales and profits. Businesses can conduct this strategy by expanding their product line or adding outstanding features to products.
- Growth through diversification: This strategy conducts thorough market research to determine customers’ needs before using it because it is precarious that you may lose all investments.
- Acquisition of other companies: If the company gains favorable results and the current output can not satisfy customers’ demands, the acquisition strategy involves purchasing other companies to expand operations. However, similar to the diversification strategy, acquisition consumes enormous investment to implement it. In addition, additional money for conducting market research is required.
Top 21 eCommerce Strategies in 2023
The information below includes the most exclusive eCommerce strategies businesses can apply to attract more customers and generate revenue in 2023.
1. Leverage Social Commerce
Have you ever considered integrating your business with Social Commerce as an eCommerce strategy? If you haven’t, you should think about it now. Facebook has over 2.8 billion active users, while Instagram has more than 1 billion. The above statistics demonstrate that these platforms are lucrative markets for businesses to reach customers.
Social Commerce can be recognized as a process of advertising, selling, and facilitating transactions on social media platforms. Generally, it represents all eCommerce functions and allows customers to complete their shopping without being redirected to other websites. Below are some of its significant benefits:
- Improve customer experience: Social Commerce allows customers to make payments quicker than ever. It reduces the friction and confusion that customers may have if they have to wait too long to pay.
- Makes the shopping experience more interactive: As social media platforms provide two-way communication, customers can interact and connect with brands to strengthen their relationships.
- Presents to a defined group
- Get shared and recommended
- Drives authentic engagement
Moreover, there are some social commerce trends that you need to know:
- Live streaming: This trend is rising significantly due to its advantages, such as providing authentic experiences.
- Messaging apps: The use of messaging apps allows brands to have real-time conversations with their customers.
- Run vertical video advertising campaigns: Vertical video ads are more significant than horizontal ads. Hence, smartphone users won’t have to rotate their phones to watch your ads. This gives your customers a powerful and fully immersive experience when watching the videos.
- Use Instagram stories polls: Instagram stories have a lifespan of 24 hours and can offer quick poll results. You can use polls and questions to collect data about what your audience would want you to improve about your brand or other relevant poll questions.
2. Create a Loyalty Program
Customer loyalty is what makes business exist. Simply speaking, customer loyalty is the willingness to repurchase products or services of a specific firm. In fact, enterprises usually invest considerable resources and efforts in establishing and retaining customer loyalty. It is because customer loyalty creates enormous advantages for the firm that gaining the customers’ trust and loyalty becomes a must-have mission:
- Increase revenue: Obviously, customers repeatedly visiting and spending money on your products contribute to the firm’s revenue.
- Save money: According to recently conducted research, retaining customers is much cheaper than acquiring new ones.
- Gather valuable data: In the technology era, data has become one of the most valuable assets of a company that many are willing to pay enormous amounts of money to acquire. Data can be used for various purposes by firms. In this case, loyal customers would be the most significant source of gathering information.
- Better communication: When collecting customer data, you can find out what they like and dislike about your products. What’s more, they can even suggest ways to improve the features of products.
- Attract new customers: A large amount of investment in advertising would be saved, and customers become the company’s most effective advertising method. Customers experience the product, are satisfied with it, and then introduce it to their relatives, colleagues, etc.
Although essential, loyalty programs are not difficult to conduct. First, think about three simple questions before starting it: What will you reward customers for? What will your rewards be? and How are rewards redeemed? After that, take your business into account and think about appealing offers:
- Discounts for long-term customers
- Giveaways and free samples
- Early experience with new products
3. Subscription Pricing
A subscription-based pricing model is a type of payment structure that companies usually apply for their eCommerce strategy that permits their customers to pay for a specific period using services. Examples of brands successfully gaining revenue through subscription-based pricing models would be iTunes, Spotify, Netflix, etc. Depending on their choices, customers receive a box of products monthly or weekly from a physical product company.
Overall, there are four types of subscription pricing suitable for various circumstances, including:
- Flat-rate pricing model: A single product or service and a set price every month is the principle of this eCommerce strategy. It is profitable for customers because the fee will be a shallow rate. On the contrary, firms do not desire this model.
- Tiered pricing model: This model is more common. Enterprises offer different products and services to meet various demands arising from customers.
- Per unit/user model: The more users you have, the more you can charge. Hence, this is the best way to value your company.
- Usage model: Telecommunications companies and IT services usually conduct usage models. The amount of services customers use determines their payment.
Firms do not choose a subscription-based pricing model as their eCommerce strategy randomly. Instead, they choose it due to the considerable benefits it can bring to the business:
- Make customers feel comfortable and easy when using
- Allow customers to discover the business’s products themselves
- Attract new and potential customer
- Minimize customer acquisition costs
- Establish strong customer relationships
- Most importantly, increase revenue due to frequent purchases
In case you are planning to build your pricing strategies, here are some tips you can consider to make it profitable:
- Check whether customers welcome your concept by using Kickstarter or Indiegogo
- Let customers try your products before purchasing
- Offer appealing discounts for long-term subscriptions
- Provide excellent customer service
4. Employ User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC), also known as user-created content (UCC), in any form, like pictures, text, audio, etc., created and posted by users on the Internet and social media. UGC has become firms’ favorite eCommerce business strategy in the technology era. Common reasons why firms prefer UGC may come from its remarkable influences:
- Authentic feature: According to research, 86% of interviewees stated authenticity contributes to and stimulates their decisions when choosing a specific brand and 60% think UGC is the most believable.
- Creation of brand loyalty: Allowing UGC benefits brands and makes customers feel influential. Brands pay much attention to users’ thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Thus, the relationship between the brand and customers is deepened.
- Cost-effective source of content: Instead of spending money recruiting teams to develop content, content-starved brands can utilize available resources from users.
User-generated Content
Knowing the importance of UGC and choosing it as your eCommerce strategy plan, you also wonder how to develop a UGC strategy effectively. Below illustrated some tips you can use:
- Establish anticipation: Select a specific period and anticipate notable events to save time.
- Refresh when needed: If you run a long-term event, change requirements and content to retain interest from customers.
- Provide helping tools: This makes your brand memorable to customers, enhancing the probability they will return to your brand.
- Reflect the brand lifestyle: Require users to take photos with your products, and you can create an impressive gallery.
5. Optimize eCommerce Sites for Mobile
According to the data, the current number of smartphone users in the world is 3.8 billion, which equals 48.33% of the world’s population. Therefore, optimizing eCommerce sites for mobile means online shopping will be convenient and accessible. Here are some things that you need to consider to make an efficient mobile online store:
- Design eye-catching websites: Use friendly platforms and quickly click on elements. If you are unsure about these factors, you should invest in a designer.
- Fast website load times: Your website will annoy customers greatly if it forces them to wait too long. Of course, they will exit and never turn back again. Reducing the amount of content, using a caching plugin, and implementing the AMP protocols are necessary.
- Provide several payment options: Your site should have different payment gateways to provide customers a seamless checkout process and shopping experience.
eCommerce sites for mobile
- Include the share button: Sometimes, customers want to share things on social media for their friends to see, so you may add this.
- Integrate translation app: Billions of people are using smartphones now, meaning you need to take care of customers worldwide. Therefore, having a website in different languages will be a big plus for your brand.
6. Effectuate Up-Selling and Cross-Selling
Upselling and cross-selling are two great sales techniques that assist businesses in boosting profits by raising the amount of money a customer spends. Cross-selling is the practice of offering a client additional products or services that are connected to their first purchase. Meanwhile, upselling is when consumers are offered a more costly or upgraded version of the product they initially desired.
Upselling and cross-selling are essential for online marketing strategy, but how exactly? Here are some benefits of upselling and cross-selling.
- Increases customer retention: Upselling or cross-selling will not only result in a higher initial profit when the client is signed up. However, that will also increase the customer’s entire worth throughout the length of their lifetime.
- It boosts revenues: B2B businesses may provide freebies such as webinars or e-books to keep users interested and loyal to the brand.
- It gives customers a more personalized experience: Recommend products based on previous purchases and user preferences and successfully cross-sell and upsell.
Cross-sell and upsell
Here are some tips for learning how to upsell and cross-sell that you can integrate into your eCommerce strategy:
- Upsell smart by narrowing choices: Do not push on an upsell product if they have already said no.
- To simplify decision-making, provide packages: Purchasing them separately necessitates more decision-making and processes.
- Instead of being forceful or hostile, be helpful and provide value: The ability to assist clients by recommending goods that make sense to them and are relevant to their requirements is a fundamental element in cross-selling and upselling.
7. Utilize Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is an eCommerce strategy that leverages individuals’ voices to raise the firm’s overall profile and reputation. This approach is among the most effective ways to expand a company’s exposure. We may divide influencers into six groups in influence marketing: Mega, Macro, Micro, Advocates, Referrers, and Loyalists.
Influencer Marketing
For many eCommerce business strategies, collaborating with influencers is the most effective marketing technique. The following are some of the reasons why influencer marketing is effective:
- Increase the size of your audience
- Establish your brand’s credibility
- Increase your social media following
- Boost the number of people who visit your website
- Increase the number of leads
- Boost sales
Do you want to learn about influencer marketing or include it in your digital marketing plan? Then, continue reading for our standard tips on how to design and execute effective influencer marketing initiatives.
- Create authentic influencer content: Because artists have a real relationship with their audience, influencer marketing works. Anything that appears inauthentic to the audience will hurt the creator’s relationship with the audience and may harm your brand’s reputation.
- Choose the appropriate influences: Examine an influencer’s prior postings to see whether they fit your company’s purpose and vision.
- Consider your brand: Consider your brand before looking for influencers. You may want to answer questions: What are your target audiences? What do your target audiences look like (demographics, psychographics, etc.)? You can choose an influencer that is the same as your target audience.
- Define your objectives and target market: To create an effective campaign, you must clearly understand your goals and who you will target.
8. Recover Abandoned Carts
Cart abandonment is a significant issue in the eCommerce world. This is known as shopping cart abandonment when a potential customer starts the online checkout procedure order but does not complete the transaction.
Abandoned cart
Shopping cart recovery is an effective eCommerce strategy for dealing with cart desertion. Aside from that, the shopping cart experience may be enhanced and optimized.
- Cart abandonment results in a considerable loss of sales, and most eCommerce businesses fail to implement a successful marketing plan to reclaim abandoned customers.
- Because the consumer is already in the loop, recovering an abandoned cart is usually significantly lower than recruiting a new client in a concrete cart recovery plan.
Let’s have a look at some tips you can recover abandoned carts that will be useful for your eCommerce content strategy:
- Retargeting Ads: It can help you recover abandoned carts by showing customers the particular products they left behind.
- Email marketing: Email is one of the most effective strategies available to marketers for contacting cart abandoners.
- Target customers before they sign out from online stores: You may retarget your subscribers based on their email addresses and other information they’ve provided.
- Using a push notification: You can include a cart abandonment notice. That will result in a better reaction and a reduction in abandoned carts in the future.
- Sitewide improvements: Product descriptions should be updated, add trust badges to the entire site, make an exciting homepage; return visitors should have a more personalized online experience and assist customers in locating answers.
- Checkout changes: The stores make it easy to check out by simplifying the procedure.
9. Improve Customer Experience
Customer experience is defined as the interaction between a company and its customers. It covers every encounter, no matter how brief, regardless of whether it leads to a purchase. A positive customer experience is critical for your company’s success because of the following reasons:
- Increase customer loyalty: Providing an outstanding experience for your consumers excites them and guarantees that they will continue to do business with you.
- Client retention is higher: Quick service increases client satisfaction and encourages them to stay with your company.
- Boost sales conversions: Customers with a positive brand experience have a more excellent lifetime value.
Every business must take precautions to provide an excellent customer service experience. Here is a list of eCommerce strategies firms may use to achieve the best outcomes.
- Establish feedback loops: It can also inform where consumers get stuck and what’s performing well.
- Make a content management plan: Customers prefer to handle problems independently rather than contact a live person. With data-driven information, you can assist people in assisting themselves.
Customer experience
- Personalize the experience: This might be through involvement with their chosen contact method, account type or status, product suggestions based on purchase or search history, or a tailored online experience.
- Make use of analytics and data: The effectiveness of the support organization, customer satisfaction with interactions, behavioral tendencies of the customers, and much more may be found in the data on your customers.
10. Implement an Affiliate Marketing Campaign
Affiliate marketing has been widely applied recently as a time-saving, effective way for businesses. Firms will cooperate with third parties to boost revenue and profit using this method. This third party, often called affiliate marketers, uses their available network and online marketing strategy for advertising and selling the hiring firm’s products. The more transactions occur, the more commission affiliates receive as a percentage of sales.
The eCommerce strategy of hiring affiliates with market-specific knowledge has shown various advantages for the firms:
- Acquire a profitable channel for selling products: Outsourcing for affiliates will result in better revenue than hiring a sales team. That is because your firm only pays affiliates when they bring customers to you.
- Learn from affiliates: Obviously, affiliates specialize in marketing with considerable experience working with firms of all sizes, from giant to tiny ones. Thus, they can suggest and apply the most effective method for your firm circumstance to gain profit. During the cooperating process, you can learn from their skill sets.
- Access to influencers and their network: Relationships are a must-have thing in doing business. You should try to maintain a good relationship with influencers for future collaborations.
Affiliate Program
Although you have hired experts to advertise your products, there are remarkable concerns you must know to utilize your investment in affiliates best. Here are some tips for you when conducting this eCommerce strategy:
- Keep track of progress to ensure it follows the correct route.
- To understand their relationship, combine given data from affiliate marketing and your customer behavior.
- ImFinally, improve our funnels for future development.
11. Leverage Chatbots
Chatbots have become widespread with the development of online selling platforms and eCommerce strategies. It is a program developed to automatically and immediately interact with customers. Based on keywords from received messages, this intelligent program can raise the most suitable within a few seconds. According to Outgrow, a believable website, 80% of enterprises integrated some chatbot before 2021.
Collected opinions from chatbot vendors, specialized agencies, etc., show that chatbots have unlimited benefits:
For customers:
- Instant answer: No matter where customers live or when it is, chatbots will simultaneously provide immediate and timely responses to thousands of customers.
- Recorded answer: Customers can take screenshots to remember the conversation and essential information.
For businesses:
- Connect with new and potential customers: Giving instant answers allows businesses to reach new customers who do not want to call or email firms for further product information.
- Cost-savings: Using chatbots helps firms better manage and lower the number of employees answering customers’ questions.
Chatbots are an intuitive and easy-to-use tool for businesses due to additional advancements created by engineers. However, knowing some hacks when applying chatbot eCommerce strategy would be necessary:
- Use the professional platform to create a chatbot: Utilizing the availability of chatbot-making websites or software will reduce the efforts and money invested in chatbots. You may refer to some popular platforms here.
- Name your chatbot: This trick will simply impress your customers.
- Provide an option to communicate with humans: To avoid wasting your employees’ and customers’ time, doing this would work.
12. Issue Vouchers and Coupons
Issuing vouchers and coupons is consistently among the top eCommerce strategies that businesses can conduct. A remarkable brand that successfully applied this strategy is Domino’s Pizza. Domino’s Pizza is a multi-billion dollar company specializing in making various pizzas. By providing several voucher offerings to customers, Domino efficiently enhanced the likelihood of customers’ return and gained enormous value. Therefore, make customers satisfied, and you can receive multiple pros:
- Attract potential customers: Remember that buyers are always attracted by discounts. Therefore, people are willing to spend more on items without previous intentions just to use vouchers and become new customers.
- Meet sale objective: More purchasers means more revenue you can create. Hence, the weekly or monthly goal will soonly be met.
- Create blank space for the warehouse: Some items sit in your warehouse longer than others. Thus, discounts and selling them will make room for new ones.
The most competent stores always know how to use eCommerce strategy plans and distribute their coupons efficiently. Therefore, you can become one of them with careful attention:
- Offer instant discounts: This allows your company to receive timely cash for other investments. Remember that in business, time is money.
- Send email for subscription offer: Offering appealing coupons to new users encourages them to visit your website and purchase products would be a great idea.
Vouchers and coupons
- Add other requirements: Utilize your customers by requiring them to like, comment, or share events to advertise your brand better.
13. Collaborative Marketing (Partnerships and Collaborations)
The sentence “two heads are better than one” applies to many aspects of life, and so does business. The academic term for this would be brand collaboration. Simply put, it combines your and other brands’ strengths to compete better in the marketplace.
Co-branding, obviously, provides remarkable advantages for joined parties, including:
- Combined expertise: Best knowledge, skills, and experience from both sides will be contributed to the coming campaign.
- Reach new audiences: Due to the collaboration, customers of your collaborated company will choose your brand as the next destination.
- Create a pool of recommended and trusted businesses: when your company collaborates with another, you can acquire their relationship, such as suppliers, wholesalers, etc.
Partnership marketing
Some tricks for you:
- Set clear objectives before collaborating: Doing this not only makes you clear about your expectations but also defines an appropriate eCommerce strategy to follow. Besides, your firm can develop contracts that best suit you and your collaborators.
- Collab with firms from different but related industries to improve customers’ experiences:
Take the case of Uber and Spotify as an example. The campaign allows passengers to freely connect Spotify’s app to the car’s radio and play their favorite songs during the journey. As a result, customers feel comfortable and appreciated.
Other remarkable corporations would be McDonald’s and Hasbro. The annual “McDonald’s Monopoly” event attracts many participants. While having meals, customers will collect tokens and match up colors to win promising prizes. These events have acquired a reputation and increased profits for both brands.
14. Invest in a Data Feed Management Platform
In the eCommerce world, customer data is one of the most critical factors for becoming prosperous. However, how do businesses reap the advantages of this thing?
A data feed management platform can be considered a tool that has the following attributes:
- Calculate distribution channels and traffic audit
- Get access to different sales networks
- Create customized product catalogs
- Provide performance reports
Data management feed platform
Thanks to this tool, businesses can publish and have better control over their product listings online, which visualizes profitability and enhance return on investment.
15. Email Marketing: Grow Your Email List
People are moving towards a more integrated and interdependent world with more and more activities performed online. Email, accompanied by this trend, becomes increasingly popular as businesses utilize it to send information to customers. The academic world for this eCommerce strategy would be email marketing. Simply put, it involves using email to send advertisements, business requests, or solicit sales and donations. Conducting this eCommerce strategy can bring enormous pros to your firm:
- Send timely events: Prepare short but informative content for your events and send them to your target customers. Doing this saves your and your customers’ time and ensures it reaches them timely.
Email marketing
- Enhance sales and revenue: Contact customers timely and suggest items related to their interest, buying history, etc., increasing the likelihood they will spend more on your products.
- Create customer loyalty: Actively offering vouchers and coupons through email sometimes make your customers surprised and satisfied. Hence, they may utilize these vouchers and coupons for their next shopping on your website.
Besides, there are some hacks you can use to utilize email marketing best:
- Personalized content: Utilize email marketing to divide customers into segments based on their interests and concerns and add personal elements to attract customers.
- Be brief: your customers may receive hundreds of emails every single day. Therefore, creating concise but attractive mail will make your brand outstanding.
- Create a killer subject line: The subject line must be effectively created to enhance customers’ likelihood of opening your mail. Refer to this link to discover how to write an excellent email subject line.
16. Implement Google shopping ads
Google shopping ads, also known as Product Listing Ads (PLAs), are among the most popular eCommerce strategies among many online retailers. The principle of its work is simple, Google Shopping places items at the top of Google search results to ensure they are the first things customers come across. Then, when customers click on these items, Google will immediately move them to a firm website to encourage spending. Thanks to Google Shopping, retailers can:
- Reduce cost: The investment in Google shopping ads shows superior results that many traditional marketing tools can not do. Therefore, considering your budget and spending on an appropriate plan would decrease costs.
- Increase sales: Immediately transferring customers to a firm website improves its traffic and increases the likelihood of purchasing a firm’s products.
- Reduce future maintenance efforts: Setting up Google Shopping ads may take time. However, once implemented, it can continuously create profit without effort afterward.
To conduct Shopping ads effectively, you should:
- Avoid negative words: Using negative keywords prevent your ads from adequately functioning and, even worse, hurts the performance of your campaigns.
- Optimize products’ titles: Provide only relevant information to attract customers. Lengthy titles would create a wrong impression on customers.
Google Shopping Ads
- Offer suitable price: Remember that Google Shopping Ads will recommend your products and other firms’ products. Hence, customers can easily make comparisons about price. Too high a price will repel your products, while too low a price will make customers suspicious of your products’ quality.
17. Optimize the Website With SEO Tactics
SEO tactics create more organic traffic, involving planning, outlining, and implementing steps. Among SEO tactics, Blog SEO is one of the most important things. Hence, getting an overall understanding of Blog SEO is essential. Blog SEO can be considered a technique to optimize a blog’s content, site architecture, and HTML code for search engines. It is done through four everyday tasks: on-page optimization, plugin installation, page loading speed improvement, and internal linking.
Optimize the website with SEO tactics has various benefits:
- Enhance customer experience: Allowing customers to find information with a few clicks makes them more comfortable experiencing a website.
- Reduce cost: You do not need to pay for ads in SEO. If your business is small with a minimal budget, consider optimizing your website with SEO tactics.
To best benefit from your website with SEO tactics, you should:
- Remove things that slow down your site: Slow sites annoy customers, and if you do not improve them, your customers will soon abandon you.
- Link to other websites: Recommend trustworthy websites with relevant content is a good SEO practice. Provide customers more value, and you will gain a remarkable return.
- Have Web Analytics: Keep track of what works and does not help you improve your website and products. A deep understanding of websites allows you to optimize your budget.
18. Utilize Social Media Marketing
Thanks to the development of the internet and social websites, marketers have invented another powerful eCommerce strategy – social media marketing. Generally, social media marketing functions based on creating unique content on social networks to promote business, specifically its products and services. Common social media platforms would be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on, which are famous to various generations.
Social media marketing
The business’s use of social media marketing has shown considerable advantages:
- Increase brand awareness: According to research, the number of global netizens was 32 billion in 2018 and continuously increased. Hence, marketing on social media can reach enormous audiences without much effort.
- Create customer relationship: Relationship is significant because CR (Customer Relationship) decides the business’s existence. Thus, following where customers appear and communicating with them make a difference.
General audiences require careful strategies. Following these when doing social media marketing would bring you promising results:
- Research purchaser personas: Better understanding of customers would benefit your current business and even bring impressive ideas for future development.
- Choose specific social platforms to market: Various existing social media mean you can not market on all of them (except when you have unlimited resources). Hence, determining 1 to 2 platforms to invest all efforts in will create promising results.
- Develop unique content: Remember that you and other businesses pay attention to the social media market. Therefore, you will fail in this competition if you can not distinguish your firm from others with an eCommerce content strategy.
19. Optimize for Voice Search
Technology engineers are working harder than ever to invent comfortable and easy-to-use techniques and devices. Voice search became widely accepted among these inventions due to its outstanding and marvelous features. Moreover, this hands-free technology eliminates the difficulties of inputting your search questions by hand, which is exceptionally suitable for busy people and the elderly. Therefore, applying it to doing business would help you gain promising results:
- Answer your customer quickly: Your customers are busy cooking and driving but want to search for information; voice search will move them to your website. This convenient feature may bring enormous traffic to you.
- Attract more customers: According to research, 40% of adults use voice search daily. Therefore, you should catch up with this trend to satisfy your customers and enhance your competitive ability.
Understanding the importance of voice search is not enough; pay attention to these tips before actually applying them to your business:
- Use long-tail keywords: Voice searches are longer and more specific. Hence, your content must be detailed to ensure your customers reach your website.
- Make your content involve “Wh” questions: This is easy to understand because people often start their concerns with “ What,” “ Why,” etc.
- Constantly update your website: Trends will rapidly change, and so does customer behavior. What you know about them today will be obsolete soon. Therefore, you should periodically check your website and content to become relevant to customers.
20. Create Offline Customer Experiences
Effective websites are not enough for further development in the future. Customers need more than just graphic pictures, attractive discounts, and free delivery. Even when you have posted genuine product pictures and precise information, customers are still suspicious about the products’ quality.
Accordingly, periodically organizing offline events with brick-and-mortgage places to demonstrate your products is necessary. Why? Because through physical locations, your enterprises allow customers to touch, experience and comment on your products. That creates meaningful interactions, gains trust, and builds strong customer relationships. As a result, the traffic to your website and revenues will increase.
Offline customer experience
However, organizing these events is costly. Therefore, pay attention to these things to make sure they go well:
- Determine the purposes of your events: obviously, the first and foremost thing you must think about is the goal and objectives. What do you want to achieve from offline events? What do customers gain from it? Answering these questions does not ensure you succeed but keeps you on the right path.
- Build hype wisely: Without audiences, you do not want costly events to occur. However, the likelihood that customers randomly go to your offline events is low. To solve the problem, use an eCommerce strategy to efficiently attract participants before the events. Show customers what unique value or products you have.
- Harvest customers’ data: Customers’ data is the most valuable source for better performance. Be alert and gain as much information when conducting events as possible.
21. Use Urgency to Encourage Action
“Only 100 products left”, “Available until midnight,” etc., are common sentences you once saw on a selling website. You may wonder why retailers prefer to use them and how they work. Let’s discover it from a psychological perspective.
Overall, these sentences are made based on feelings of urgency and scarcity feelings. As you may know, urgency feeling is a psychological trigger relating to FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). This type of fear creates social anxiety and encourages people to act quickly. Limited time is often used to create urgency. On the other hand, scarcity triggers the use of quantity to urge customers to buy products.
Use urgency to encourage action
Some eCommerce strategy examples that apply urgency and scarcity would be:
- Booking.com: This website uses CTA messages like “Don’t miss it” and “In high demand” before illustrating the number of times a hotel was booked.
- OnePlus: You can only purchase a smartphone from OnePlus only if you are invited. Although using a weird strategy, OnePlus has successfully created FOMO for customers and sold its products effectively.
Learning from these successful cases, to improve your website, you can:
- Add countdown timers: You can offer flash deals within a limited time and show how much time is left for customers to stimulate their FOMO. Utilize Thrive Ultimatum to create countdown timers for your website.
- Add “New”: People like the lowest price for new things. Hence, adding “New” features accompanied with products makes customers pay more attention to your items and encourage them.
Wrapping Up
In a nutshell, your business has several eCommerce strategies to adapt and leverage. However, business situations and overall goals should be considered carefully before implementing any strategy. So, let’s get started and take your business to the next level!