Top 4 Tips For E-Commerce Marketing To Increase Your Sales

While there are many similarities between e-commerce and traditional brick-and-mortar retail marketing, there are also some unique challenges that will demand your attention if you want to succeed. It’s a competitive marketplace out there, with millions of other retailers vying for the same eyeballs as you. For four tips on how you can stand out from the crowd and make your online store profitable, read on.

1. Use Social Media to Boost Your Sales

Social media is a great place to share your products and services with your followers. But don’t only use social media to promote your products and services. Use social media to help build your brand and interact with your audience. Social media is a great way to build trust and to keep people interested in your brand. As a business owner, you have access to a variety of online measurement tools aimed at helping you gauge consumer engagement with your website and to measure the success of marketing campaigns. It isn’t hard to find online tools that will help you stay on top of your marketing efforts.

Instead of using social media to share your latest offers and promotions, use it to engage with your audience. After all, what good is advertising on social media if no one knows about it or cares about it? You might not be able to convince anyone to immediately buy your products and services, but you can at least create a curiosity gap and hope that one of your clients did. From there, you can get lots of feedback on your marketing efforts so you can tweak your existing marketing strategy, determine how best to conduct business with your clients, and prepare that next email to introduce yourself and your products.

If you present your value in your customer’s eyes, your mind, and your wallet, they will align your products with their wants and desires. We all need a little help along the way to realize our dreams, now all we need is a little motivation. That motivation could be money, fame, or power. Entrepreneurs don’t have to sell their soul and give all their possessions to the devil in order to get other people’s attention. They don’t need to believe in a higher power or leap from breaking water to bring other people to their shores. All they need to do is tell a compelling story, practice the art of storytelling, and make every customer feel seen and appreciated. That, my friends, is creativity.

2. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Reviews and Testimonials

Testimonials are important for gaining the trust of potential customers. By asking for testimonials or reviews, you can show potential customers how happy your current customers are with your product or service and how much they love it. Reviews and testimonials are also good for SEO because they allow you to get links back to your website. If you aren’t collecting reviews and testimonials on your website yet, now is the time to start. You can use testimonials pages on your website, which will display trust metrics like star ratings, to see what prospective customers are saying about your product or service. And whenever possible, ask for positive reviews instead of negative reviews. This can help you build a better shopping experience for your customers. There are also many free resources available online for e-commerce store owners to ask for positive reviews.

Blog comments are a great way to build relationships with current customers. Blog comments are a great way to direct customers to a particular product if you consistently offer it or to see if a product is available in specific stores. Even if your store doesn’t have historical blog comments on its website or on its blog, guest blogging is a legitimate way to build relationships. Shopping carts work well because they provide you with the chance to chat with customers, which makes establishing trust directly with them easier.

Start developing a friendly conversation with an interested buyer by offering a discount. Offer a steep discount and ask the inquisitive buyer to “See you at the store!” Make sure to restate what discounts are valid for that product. Even if someone’s shopping cart doesn’t automatically offer a coupon, you can ask the customer what they want and prompt them to select your product for free when they checkout. On average, people want to save between 25% and 80% on their purchases. The closer you can make them feel that saving money will help their budget tremendously, the more likely you are to get them considering your product to buy it for cheaper.

3. Provide a Great Return Policy

Your return policy is an opportunity for you to show your customers that you care about them and value their business. A generous return policy makes customers feel confident about shopping with you and ensures that they’ll come back for another purchase in the future. Start by writing down a few return policies for your own business so you’ll remember them. In order to create a shopping experience that’s compelling and personalized for every customer, each return policy must clearly convey what the buyer can expect if something goes wrong. Make sure these points are clearly stated and communicated throughout your store and online if you want customers to know that they won’t be left holding the bag if something goes wrong with the order.

Another way to ensure your customers understand your return policy and will come back for more is to have customer service agents or assistants on hand to answer questions about return policies and assist with determining if there are any exceptions or limitations. This way, you’ll be communicating clear messaging to your customers and be able to collect data to use in the future. Amazon has a fascinating methodology for hardware purchases. Some sellers will place their items on a wish-list portion of their store for free, while others will offer the ability to pay a small fee to have their items delivered directly to the seller. This allows the Amazon Marketplace team to track the orders and inventory in real-time, enabling them to offer replacement or refund services to sellers with high volume.

If you too have a marketplace, consider what Amazon is doing with their technology and tools and adapt their approach to your e-store. You could all set up master accounts for each platform (iOS, Android, or e-commerce), add a “one stop shop” approach using Amazon’s Customer Service, or consider integrating third-party services such as Price Match to generate additional revenue.

4. Get Your Site Noticed With Search Engine Optimization

If you want your site to be found when someone searches for it, you need to make sure that it’s properly optimized for search engines. There are a few different elements to SEO. The first is keyword research. You want to make sure that you’re using the right keywords on your site. With keywords, you can advertise to searchers based on their interests. This serves the dual purpose of driving traffic to your site and improving the algorithm (the algorithm is a ranking system that displays a page in line with its size, difficulty, and authority.)

A good place to start is by testing the strength of your site’s keywords using Google Keyword Planner (watch our Keyword demo video here). On the homepage of your site, you can explore the search volume level of your keywords. This tells you how many searches there are per month for your keyword(s). On the right side of the bar, you can also see how these searches are ranked in organic search engine results. This will give you an idea of how your site is doing compared to the competition.
It is also important to study how your competitors are ranking.

Google is social-driven, and there are no “keywords,” “channels,” or “landing pages.” You need to find the right keywords that complement the content of your website and drive traffic to your site. You also need organization and consistency around your keywords. Local small businesses often struggle with finding the keyword they want to use to maximize their advertising results. To help them, you can use Keyword Everywhere, which allows you to run searches and monitor your ads’ results on Google, Bing and other search engines.

Check out our E-Commerce page for more awesome tips and information about making e-commerce work for your brand.