7 Proven Marketing Strategies for Ecommerce
1.”” Optimize your product pages
Product pages are often overlooked, with a majority of eCommerce websites giving just technical specifications. Spend a considerable amount of time in optimizing your product pages. Optimizing your product pages also helps with SEO. Write a good product title and add the keywords in the title tag that people are searching for online.
Write good, unique, and relevant descriptions of your products and incorporate green brain / red brain messaging into your product descriptions. Most individuals go looking for a product or service in the Red Brain mindset. For example, a product must have X and Y and when it ticks off Z then it’s mine. If you sell a product that covers all of these needs then you have a round peg (product/service) in a round hole (customer problem/expectation) and they’re easy to convert because you have exactly what they are looking for.
But what if they also have A, B & C criteria and features that you don’t know about, they are just researching and not in a buying mindset. You’ve got a square peg with a round hole, so what do you do? Do you change the peg and focus on a different customer?
You don’t – you change the hole by how you connect with the prospect and the sequence of messages that you deliver to them to override the red side of the brain. You can do this by playing to the emotions of the user and using it as leverage to create a buying decision. Get creative with the page copy. Break your products down into hero lines and supporting products and spend time optimizing all, starting with your hero products first.
If you are not comfortable with SEO or conversion rate optimization, then you can contact a professional and reliable digital search media company (like us!) to get it done.
2.”” Optimize your product feeds and implement Google Shopping
If you’re a retail-based eCommerce business and not running a Google shopping campaign you are losing out on potential revenue. You can optimize your product feed using Google merchant center. If you’ve optimized your product pages as above, your product feed will be a breeze.
For your product feed, make sure that you have good information in there with regards to your product title, description and keywords so that you are showing up when people are searching. You don’t want to be not in the game when somebody is looking for your product because your product feed is not very well optimized.
3.”” Leave a calling card with your order
A simple yet effective way to elevate the customer experience is to leave a branded calling card with your order. A simple thank you for your order will suffice with an added discount code for a repeat purchase will entice clients back. Ensure the design is clean and noticeable and fits well with your branding. A simple yet effective marketing opportunity that is usually forgotten about. Not only does it build personalization into your brand, but if they love what you’re selling it will prompt them to make another purchase.
4.”” Automate emails & abandoned cart recovery
A wasted opportunity is not running abandoned cart recovery emails or email nurtures. With the level of marketing automation available, it’s no excuse to not have these set up. Segment these by new customers and returning customers to tailor the purchasing experience. We live in a day now where consumers expect personalization. If you’re offering is off, it will also put your customer off and give the feeling of ‘this business doesn’t understand me’ which is a dangerous position while building a brand. Each customer experience should be positive and reinforce the key values and feelings of your brand.
An abandoned cart journey can be as simple as a 3 step follow up. For example, 1 email after 1 hour of abandonment, 1 email 1 full day after abandonment and a final email 3 days after. Tailor each message, get creative and see what works. A/B test your emails and then experiment with the timings. There’s no right or wrong way of doing it, it’s just about finding out what works. Measure your stats of open rates, click through and conversions.
Don’t forget as well to build out an automated email journey to ask for reviews. Social proof is a real thing for Google Shopping and Facebook campaigns and can-do wonders for your average cost per click. Split mixed carts into business reviews and single item purchases requesting product reviews. Mixed cart purchases are more likely to review a business from a return customer. Single-item purchases can often be attributed to first-time purchases that are testing out a product. Market to those groups accordingly.
5.”” Use quantity breaks
Another way to increase average cart value is to offer bulk discounts on items. These work well on supporting products to your hero item lines that could benefit the end user from buying in bulk. Think of it as you would at an in-store liquor store. Most incentive’s multiple purchases to reduce each item in price, encouraging customers to purchase more. A single bottle individually is more expensive than a 6 pack, and a carton is a lot cheaper individually.
A great extension for Shopify that handles bulk pricing and discounts can be found here.
6.”” Up-sell during the checkout stage to increase average order quantity and value
Another wasted opportunity is not up-selling during the checkout phase of your eCommerce store. This reflects the same as you would if you lined up at checkout at your local supermarket. Along the registers are always impulse buy items and general temptations. That’s why they put them there. The methodology is very much the same online. Ensure that your product offering in up-sells is relevant to the products that the user is purchasing to lift conversions.
You can find this out in Google analytics with enhanced eCommerce enabled. You can drill down to find out what products and categories your visitors are purchasing to give you a steer. Depending on your eCommerce platform, there are several solutions and extensions that can assist you in setting this up.
7.”” Run dynamic re-targeting ads across display and social media
One of the great recent things to come out of Google is dynamic product re-targeting. Now apart of Google’s new Smart Shopping campaigns, by providing an additional product feed for dynamic re-targeting it allows your products to actively follow your customer around on the Google Display Network (GDN). It’s an economic and low-cost way of displaying advertising that yields amazing results. See an example of one of our clients below in the sports supplement space that generated over a 22 times return on ad spend by utilizing some of the strategies mentioned in this blog.
If you have optimized your product feeds as mentioned above, you won’t have to worry to much in way of setting up the dynamic re-targeting feed in Google merchant center. To activate it, make sure you are a user with administration rights, go to Growth, manage programs and enable dynamic re-marketing. To set up a smart shopping campaign, you need to have conversion value tracking set up from your orders as well as recent conversion data. If this sounds way to complicated to set up, reach out to us here and we would be more than happy to assist.