Marketing your e-commerce business may seem easy on the surface. Since your brand is online, much of your marketing is digital as well. However, you may not get the numbers you want in conversions or site visitors. Tweaking your promotional strategies can help your company grow.
Statista reports over $4.28 trillion in global e-commerce sales annually. The pandemic forced a lot of people to stay home and order online, catapulting the numbers upward much faster than they would have on their own. Even though things are opening back up, many people plan to still order online for the foreseeable future.
Are you ready for the potential increase in business this coming year? Get everything in place to handle a growth spurt, including extra cash flow. Once you’re ready for the results, you can make some changes to improve your marketing efforts and secure your corner of the increase.
1. Build Brand Recognition
How customers see you is your brand image. Do people recognize your logo? It only takes 10 seconds for a customer to form a first impression of a brand’s logo, so it is important to do all you can to make your brand visually memorable, the reason for which using professional logo creator tools like Logo.com will lead to truly distinguishable designs. What kind of reputation does your company have? Before you ramp up marketing efforts, it’s important to analyze your branding and make any needed changes.
Figure out your unique value proposition (UVP) and share it in your marketing. What is the one thing you’re known for that makes you stand out from the competition? Consider your UVP from the viewpoint of your customer. What things might your audience care most about?
If you’ve made mistakes in the past and have a poor reputation or bad reviews, spend time cleaning up your reputation before moving forward. Respond to any negative feedback and try to make things right. Seek positive reviews from your current customers to show you’ve turned addressed the issues and things around.
2. Increase Visibility
Use your logo and messaging everywhere possible to reach new customers. Place it on your website, social media pages and even on the packaging you use to ship orders. Add it to the bottom of emails you send out, pass out business cards whenever possible and include it in advertising.
Did you know digital shopping is more popular than ever before? However, a business solely online limits your exposure in some ways. Your boxes go through a number of hands on their way to your customer, though. The mail carriers, the customer and even neighbors might see the box. Allow it to make a statement. Consider how the logo looks from a distance and up close. Is the purpose of your store clear and will people know how to find it if they encounter you while out and about?
3. Analyze Your Audience
Just throwing advertising out into the world isn’t a very effective use of your time or advertising dollars. You have some powerful data at your disposal, though. Pay attention to where your traffic comes from. If a certain social media site sends you 70% of your visitors, ramp up efforts there.
Spend time digging into the demographics and psychographics of your audience to better understand their pain points and solve them for your users. The more you get your customers, the more your message resonates.
4. Study Advertising
Take courses on how to formulate enticing copy. What language encourages people to click on a link and visit your site or make a purchase. There are numerous courses for Facebook ads, for example. Choose one that matches your business best and gather tips to improve what you’re already doing.
All of the social media platforms and Google offer dashboards with analytics. Study the results of ads and make tweaks until you get the cost per click you desire and those clicking convert into clients.
5. Expand Your Reach
While e-commerce saw a boost in the past year, some areas of the world grew more rapidly than others. According to eMarketer, Latin America had a 36.7% increase, putting it at the top. North America was right behind at 31.8% followed by Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Look at the markets you serve and if it makes any sense to tap into global markets. Are some areas growing faster and have untapped potential?
6. Invest in Technology
There are many new software options to help with customer relationship management (CRM). Investing in things that help you serve your clients better gives you an excellent reputation and allows you to retain the ones you have.
CRM software also sees patterns and helps you predict what products might be most popular, if a customer is due to order and so on.
Other types of technology to consider include inventory tracking options, anything helping with logistics and automating repetitive tasks. You can put social media posts on autopilot by investing in third-party options and scheduling ahead.
7. Build Email Lists
If you don’t already have a newsletter you send out regularly, you should develop one. Social media advertising might be successful for you at the moment, but you have zero control over your customer list.
Many businesses found all the followers they worked so hard to build on Facebook, for example, were no longer seeing their posts. They had to begin boosting and paying a fee to get their own followers to see their information.
When you collect emails, you have a direct line of communication with your customers. You can engage them anytime you’d like. You don’t have to pay anyone for your own list you’ve worked so hard to build. While you might have a fee for a mailing list service, such as MailChimp or Mailerlite, you also will have a backup copy and can take your list anywhere you’d like or use your own servers. There are also many cheap alternatives of MailChimp that wouldn’t burn a hole in your pocket and would provide you the same elite features.
Make One Change at a Time
Don’t try to do everything all at once and overwhelm yourself. Instead, make one marketing strategy change at a time. Perfect each new element, testing and tweaking until you get the results you’d like. Once you are happy, move on to the next change.
You’re in marketing for the long game and not a get rich quick scheme. Put in the time and ongoing effort and you’ll see success.
Author’s Bio
Eleanor Hecks is editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine. She was the creative director at a digital marketing agency before becoming a full-time freelance designer. Eleanor lives in Philly with her husband and pup, Bear.
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