eCommerce Overdrive

Every ecommerce website needs the same thing to be successful: a direct traffic source that converts well for your vertical. It doesn’t matter what market you’re in, or the type of products/services you offer; without a steady stream of highly-targeted traffic, you’ll never get off the ground. Thankfully, creating successful traffic-generating campaigns doesn’t have to a long and complicated process, and it doesn’t have to cost you money, at least not when just launching. Here are a few quick and easy ways you can get started: Social Traffic This is usually the first place most people go when they want to launch their ecommerce website without investing in paid advertising. It makes sense: social media can be a highly-targeted source of quality traffic. It’s often easy to reach your ideal customer and target a large segment of your audience. The key is to share a balanced mix of promotional-based content with informative, useful content that’s relevant to your market. You should also consider providing incentives within your content that will drive people to your website, such as by offering coupon codes or limited-time discounts.

If you run a digital-product website, you could even create a free “light” version of your product in order to gain trust and acquire new customers. Start by studying the social media accounts of successful ecommerce website owners in your market. Pay attention to the type of content they’re sharing that’s receiving the most attention. Look for ways you can create similar content that will resonate with your audience. Take notes; everything matters. Being able to look back on ideas you’ve come up with while studying the leaders in your market will help you formulate a plan of action for your own website. Remember, the idea is to study what is working—not to copy them.

You want your brand to be unique and to not look like it’s simply a copycat of another successful business.

Referral Marketing With over 80% of consumers specifying that a recommendation from a family member or friend was responsible for their recent purchase, you’ll want to seriously consider setting up a referral program for your ecommerce website.

Setting up a referral program doesn’t have to be elaborate or time-consuming.

You could start by including a simple way for customers to view current reviews on your website, or allow them to share content from your site (such as discount codes and coupons) with people they want to recommend your products to. According to a survey from Nielsen, "92% of consumers around the world say they trust earned media, such as word-of-mouth and recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising."

And HuffPost says, “for businesses, word-of-mouth is the cheapest and most effective way to generate sales. Furthermore, customers referred to a brand tend to be more likely to purchase, less thrifty and more loyal than customers acquired through other marketing channels.”

For ecommerce marketers, referral marketing is a great way to raise awareness about your product or service without having to spend money on paid advertising.

Just keep in mind that referral marketing is different from affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is where people are getting paid to promote you. They typically earn a commission from every purchase made through their unique affiliate link or ID. Referral marketing involves people making genuine recommendations, and in almost every instance, it’s far more powerful than affiliate marketing, though there’s no denying that both strategies can be extremely effective. With referral marketing, there’s simply an element of trust that doesn’t always exist in affiliate marketing.

Here’s a detailed post that will help you set up a referral program:

https://www.referralcandy.com/blog/referral-program Run a Viral Giveaway

Giveaways provide an incentive for users to visit your ecommerce website and will ultimately boost engagement.

And you can offer additional reward points if they share your post on social media, invite more people to participate in your giveaway, or provide an email address.

Here’s how to get started:

1: Start with a Concise Goal Having a clear and concise goal will help you create a highly-targeted, effective giveaway. This could include building your email list, getting more social media followers, or simply boosting brand awareness. Defining your goal before you decide on a prize and create your giveaway will let you easily measure the results and determine how successful the campaign was.

2: Choose a giveaway plugin or platform. Of course, in order to launch a giveaway, you need a platform to run it on.

Here are a few links to help you get started:

RafflePress: https://rafflepress.com/

Woobox: https://woobox.com/

Promo Simple: https://promosimple.com/

3: Pick an Amazing Prize. One of the most important elements of a giveaway is, of course, the prize. The prize is what draws people to your contest initially, so you need to make sure the reward will grab the attention of a lot of people and not just a small segment of your audience.

The most popular giveaway prizes are:

·      Gift Certificates

·      Free Products/Services

·      Cash

While these all make fantastic prizes, consider choosing one that’s not only relevant to your business, but most beneficial. For many, this would be offering free products or services instead of cash. Not only is it a beneficial reward for both the winner and your business, but you could end up with a loyal, lifelong customer who provides glowing reviews just from giving away some of your products. Create Video Content

Create short, engaging video content that’s relevant to your market and your business. Then, post it on your business’ YouTube channel, social media and on your own ecommerce website.

Videos are one of the easiest ways to boost engagement, capture attention and further brand exposure.

You can even use videos to answer frequently asked questions about your business, or create a series of explainer videos that demonstrate how your products work.

Content Marketing

Content marketing refers to any content that you create that offers valuable, relevant and engaging information that will help you connect to your target audience. The immediate goal isn’t always to secure the sale, but to introduce your brand and to stimulate interest in your products. Tip: Create a series of infographics and share them via social media channels, or create a blog that includes a series of high-quality 1500-word articles that will appeal to your target audience.

You can then link this content to product pages on your ecommerce website.

This will help you rank in the search engines, but will also give you a place where you can run giveaways, create landing pages for different mailing lists, and simply offer additional information that will help build your brand and promote your products.

Note: Make sure you brand your infographic with your business’ logo and a URL to your site so that when people share it, you’ll gain brand recognition.

Optimize Your Website

Above all else, you’ll want to optimize your website for both visitors and the search engines before you even begin to create traffic-generating campaigns. For visitors, you’ll want to ensure that your website is organized with an uncomplicated structure, product categories, clear CTA’s, detailed product descriptions, and the ability to filter search. For the search engines, you’ll want to pay close attention to your site’s metadata (SEO titles, descriptions, slugs and headers throughout your website’s pages).

4 Easy Ways to Maximize Sales

There are many different ways to maximize sales and help your brand stand out, even in a crowded market, but it all begins with having the right ecommerce strategy in place.

Here are a few of our top ecommerce strategies that will help you quickly increase sales:

1: Include Advanced Filtering The easier you can make it for customers to find what they’re looking for, the better. 

This involves including advanced product filtering so that visitors can perform an advanced product search and find every product associated with their query. Ecommerce platforms like Shopify allow you to add up to 250 tags that help filter your products so that customers can find them easily, so take advantage of these options in order to showcase your products and improve user experience.

2: Offer Additional Payment Options Try not to limit your payment options to just PayPal. Instead, providing several payment options enables you to cater to a wide variety of customers.

In fact, the more payment options available on your ecommerce website, the easier it becomes for your customers to purchase from you because they’re able to find an option that works for them.

Depending on the ecommerce platform you decide to use, it should be very easy to integrate additional payment options into your website.

Just make sure to run a test purchase for every payment gateway you decide to integrate.

3: Offer Discount Codes & Coupons There’s no easier way to boost sales and motivate people to purchase products then with a discount code or coupon. This is also a fantastic way to acquire new customers as well.

Not only will discounts save them money, but it will make your audience feel good about buying which goes the distance in establishing a strong connection and building brand loyalty.

4: Run a Loyalty Program

An ecommerce loyalty-based program, rewards customers for making repeat purchases. These rewards may include discount codes for future purchases, free items, trial products, or even cash-back.

It's likely that you're a member of a few different loyalty programs from some of the brands you love.

These programs have been a common way for businesses to focus on customer loyalty while giving customers something in return.

A loyalty program can drastically boost customer retention, encouraging customers to remain loyal to your business.

And in many cases, a customer will choose a brand that offers a loyalty program over a competitor simply because they're getting something in return for their business.

To start, you'll want to choose loyalty rewards. Try rewarding customers with a discount when you're just launching your program. Or, you could offer free shipping or an exclusive product in order to launch your shop and maximize traffic.

You should also consider a point-based rewards system. That way, you can offset the costs and remain profitable, ensuring you'll always break even.

And finally, you'll want to ensure that your loyalty program is connected to an email marketing workflow system so that customers receive emails promoting the program.

These emails can also include upsells and remind customers that they'll earn additional points with their next purchase.

This keeps the momentum going.