After setting up your online business, you need to promote your online store and the next big thing is to grow your online sales and revenue – getting in touch with potential consumers and convincing them to buy your stuff. Quite hard it is, but the fierce competition in the eCommerce industry and that’s also amidst pandemic make profitable business success more difficult. Leverage these tried-and-true eCommerce marketing tips to get an edge.

Integrate Instagram:
With billions of users, Instagram is undoubtedly one of the most influencing eCommerce marketing platforms that brings a phenomenal rate of engagement. There is no surprise that people use their Instagram feeds to discover new products and brands. Instagram Stories play a vital role in eCommerce marketing – giving your followers a direct path to buy that’s critical to accelerating your online sales.

Create entertaining and visually stimulating advertisements perfectly aligned with your organic content to convey your brand’s voice, expand your reach, establish credibility, target customers and eventually to boost conversion rates. Here’s a few tips to get the best out of Instagram.

  • Use excellent quality, consistent photos to show off your products.
  • Build a well-planned feed strategy and then publish the images accordingly.
  • Use videos mindfully and IGTV generously to tell a compelling story.

Facebook Audience Insights: 
With the cross-section of targeting (including demographics, language, location, interests, etc.), Facebook allows you to reach and engage with the highly segmented audience. Unlike other digital marketing solutions, Facebook audience insights closely match the targeting details, and therefore the personalized advertisements incredibly increase the CR (conversion rates) and decrease CPC (cost-per-click).

With more detailed targeting, your audience will be smaller and it’s not a downside in eCommerce marketing in any way. Well, with specific targeting you will get a more responsive list that will lower the ad spend – CPA (cost per action) will be decreased because you are driving qualified leads only.

Moreover, Audience insights help you expand the sphere of your ideal audience. Having successful audiences can be used to broaden your search for related topics and audience interests to reap the campaign benefits at best.

Google Shopping Campaigns:
One of the essential players in the growing e-commerce marketing realm and online sales is Google Adwords. You should direct your focus to Google shopping ads that’s far more effective than conventional text ads. The retail search ad spending is now aggressively shifted to google shopping ads. Active shoppers get all the required information (product image, short description and price) through these ads, which makes the purchase decision easy for them.

With the significant visual space in search engine result pages, people are more likely to buy because the intent to purchase instantly is already there. You can easily manage these ads from your Adwords account without requiring keywords management. Your shopping ads strategy must be aligned with your business goal – for instance, brand awareness, conversion maximization.

Last but not the least is launching the retargeting campaigns as your backup strategy to other online marketing methods such as social media marketing and paid search, etc. This cost-effective eCommerce marketing method helps you persuade the website visitors who have shown interest in your stuff, but left without purchasing anything.

Final Thoughts:
With the changing storefront platforms, quickly shifting social networks and constantly improving Google search algorithms has greatly evolved the eCommerce growth strategies. These powerful eCommerce marketing hacks will give you a great head start for accelerating growth in 2021 and beyond.

Building business success starts with customer acquisition. Not need to say that customer retention is equally vital. The key thing is to magnet more prospects and build a loyal consumer base. People tend to return for a second engagement with the brands they find reliable and affordable. Usually, businesses focus more on expansion and targeting new customers. However, it’s much easier to persuade the existing consumers to stick around with your brand compared to introducing your products to new customers and convince them to buy from you.

How long-term customer engagement could be done? Give your prospects fully-formed solutions – address their pain points your competition not considering. Also, to stay ahead of the curve, you need something more. What is that? Don’t settle in winning new leads only, customer retention is also mandatory to bring your business more profitable success.

Loyal Consumer Base – A Real Performance Indicator 

Customer retention equates brand loyalty and for this you need to ensure an unbeatable customer experience. Though the major concern for any business is getting more and more customers, retaining those customers is the actual win. Here’s some proven ways to earn brand loyalty and make more income through returning consumers.

Seamless User Experience:
Since a website is an absolute necessity in our digital world, today, businesses need to be more proactive in delivering exceptionally streamlined user experience. The brands not proficient enough customer engagement soon knocked out of the competition ring. Only those brands survive that successfully comprehend the consumer demand and expectations – they must have a pleasant shopping journey with you and that also with absolute ease.

People tend to keep buying from the brands, which delivers easy accessibility, affordability, and sustainability. So, make sure your business site provides personalized features, improved search, single sign-in, quick cart entries, and flawless checkouts – your eCommerce store must be mobile optimized to engage smart device users.

Above all, stay loyal to your words and deliver what you promise.

Value Consumer Interest:
Knowing the target audience and having a well-built buyer persona may bring you the customers, but to persuade them to keep coming back you must bring value to the fore. And, for this you should value their interest and give them what exactly they are looking for – both in terms of products and services. Customer satisfaction is that deep-dive you have to take as an indispensable part of your brand loyalty strategy. Bait and switch technique will surely help you acquire more customers, but it’s the personal gratitude, complementary services and promotional incentives to increase customer lifetime value.

Basically, you have to keep them engaged with what interests them the most. It could be a free membership, discount vouchers, themed gift boxes for festive seasons and holidays, etc. You can also add markdowns on bulk orders.

Keep modifying your business model to enhance consumer engagement.

Empathy is The Key:
People prefer brands that care for them. Empathy plays a vital role in coping with the rapidly changing market. Buyers seek for convenience and personalized solutions – it will help you fill the consumer retention gap. Emotional benefits help stimulate customer loyalty. So, the digital experience you are providing to your consumer-base must not only be aligned with their lifestyles but also supported by empathetically done customer relationship management.

It’s an open fact that customer acquisition is far expensive compared to customer retention – many studies suggested the same. Also, a mobile-friendly user interface can help businesses, especially eCommerce stores to have 200% increased retention rate. However, the much-needed thing here is how compassionately you deal with your customers – especially how you cater to their complaints. Deliver your message more creatively and empathetically, be it through conventional or digital marketing, and even PPC marketing ad campaigns.

Outsmart the competition instead of outspending in order to better nurture the buyers you already have and their valuable interests.

Swap Sell with Help:
Brands ultimate objective is to sell their products and/or services. But, keeping the selling approach at all times won’t take you anywhere. People want solutions and don’t really like listening to brands that keep on bragging about themselves at different verticals. People want everything better, different, and affordable. So, rather sticking to your sales pitch businesses who want to retain their existing customers should focus on ‘help approach’ to bring more comfort in consumers’ lives.

The persistent selling approach could backfire and may result in your brand’s reduced market share. Certainly, you don’t want a crashed brand value and therefore, put help first and tell your buyers what best you can do for them. While the selling approach can bring you more new customers, help approach magnets consumers for long.

Make ‘help’ the ultimate objective of your advertising and selling approach.

In a nutshell, businesses of all sizes and types across any industry should break down the barriers and make clever use of the above strategies to build trust and retain the existing customers.