Making people buy what you are selling or say creating interest in your product is not an easy job. When there’s plethora of options available in the market for shoppers, there’s need to be a reason behind they prefer your store. E-commerce store merchants should not think that every website visitor is beneficial. In fact, people with no interest in your product can dampen conversion rates.
An e-commerce store owner needs to constantly find out marketing strategies to win over customers. More the overlap between your product and interest of a visitor, higher the chances of making a sale. Below we have mentioned 10 marketing strategies that can help merchants pull customers to their e-commerce store.
1. Promotions And Sales
According to research quoted by Shopify, 37 percent of shoppers look for discount coupons while making an online purchase. Merchants can use this as an incentive to make people visit their store. Besides discount coupons, limited time sales, free shipping option and product combo offer (when two or more products come together at a lower price than individually) can effectively attract customers.
2. Collaborating With Influencers And Creators
Sixty one percent of customers trust recommendations suggested by influencers, as per research quoted by Shopify. Running an influencer marketing campaign can be a great way to drive website traffic. However, it is important to find the right creator or influencer whose target audience is similar to yours.
Store owners can collaborate with them through paid sponsored content, sending gifts and inviting
them to be affiliate. According to Shopify, this can result in conversion rate between 2.4 percent to 3.2 percent- better than the usual 1.4 percent.
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3. Press Coverage
Getting coverage by press on news sites is one of the ways to get free online advertising. Journalists are often in search of expert comments which they can include in their stories. Finding such requests and responding with relevant stories featuring your brand can help you gain traction. You can also shortlist publications read by your target audience and then pitch the journalist directly for the potential feature. If your comment or subject is relevant and interesting, there is a good chance of landing a coverage.
4. SMS Marketing Campaigns
SMS is an effective marketing tool to attract customers to your online store. People generally carry phones with them all the time and Shopify says that 86 percent have SMS notifications enabled. This gives merchants a big chance to directly interact with their prospective customers.
Adding contact number option to check out forms, requesting email subscribers to opt for SMS offers are some of the ways to stay in touch with your consumers. You can use SMS marketing campaign to inform target audience about new sales, promotions, latest product offer, restock alerts, loyalty program invites or discount coupons.
To know more about SMS Marketing Campaign, click here.
5. List Store On Free Advertising Sites
Advertising doesn’t always need to be expensive. You can start by opting for free advertising sites such as Locanto, Facebook Groups, Google Business, Oodle and Caraigslist. Free advertising is an effective advertising medium for a startup as it doesn’t drain a small business running on limited resources. All you need to do is to create an attractive profile, upload good quality images of your product listings and write elaborative product description that makes visitor buy via your online store instead of the advertising site.
6. Google Ads
It is important to know that 49 percent of shoppers begin their shopping journey from search engine. Google Ads help you reach them. Merchants can use different types of Google Ads such as display ads, video ads and search ads. While Search ads help you appear on Google search results either as Shopping advertisements or text-based, display ads appear on sites in Google Display Network. At the same time, video ads feature your brand on YouTube.
7. Referral Program
Make your happy customers the perfect salespeople for your store. Acquiring new customers is an expensive task, instead focus on making your old customers happy. Let the word-of-mouth publicity do the magic for your brand. Your loyal customers know what your store offers, who are most likely to buy the product and what do they need to know before hitting the Buy button. Referral marketing program is a reward for such customer base. Offer them gift cards, commission in exchange for new customer they refer and store credit. The best part is that instead of risking huge amount, you pay only for results.
8. Go Local
Providing in-person experience is a great way to engage with shoppers. This does not mean that you need to have a permanent brick-and-mortar store. Local events like trade shows, craft fairs, pop-up shows, local markets and Chamber of Commerce events can help merchants drive customers towards the website. Physical retail can be used as a medium to get customers into the top of marketing funnel and then process the entire sales through online store.
9. Host Giveaway
Sometimes organic social media cannot yield the desired result. It becomes important to attract the audience with something they want to be engaged with. You can compile your bestselling products and give them to one lucky winner. To become the winner of the giveaway, let the audience do some sort of marketing for your brand like following the social media account, sharing post to their stories, tagging friends or subscribing to SMS or email list.
As per Shopify, Instagram giveaways get 64 times more comments and 3.5 times more likes than usual posts. Also, if you make email subscription mandatory for anyone who participate in the competition, you will have details of potential customers whom you can retarget later.
10. Retargeting Campaigns
Do not sit idle after trying all the above marketing strategies. There is much more to this marketing world. However, above all it is important to make your previous visitors return to the site. This is possible with retargeting campaigns. Merchants can retarget visitors who have watched a social media video, viewed product pages or specific collection, added items to their cart but not purchased.
Assume that out of 100 visitors in past 2 weeks, only 10 have made a purchase. Upload customer list to Facebook and then Custom Audience can be created to retarget them. Dynamic ads feature can be used to promote the product the customer previously viewed on the website. Quoting a study, Shopify writes that three out of five online shoppers notice ads promoting products they have viewed earlier. There is also 43 percent more chance to convert. This means retargeting campaigns can lead to extra paying customers from the same visitor base.
