A strong online presence for your brand is extremely important whether you’re in the process of launching a new business or already have one and it can be done by selling a product online. Do you know how to sell your product online? Do you know the four main marketing principles that you need to follow? While planning for a marketing strategy, if you break the fundamentals, no matter how much effort you put in, you will not succeed.
Effective Marketing Strategies For Ecommerce Websites
Use a Good Shopping Cart
There are three shopping carts that we work with clients all the time that we really love. And so check these out if you’re not already on these carts– Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce. These three carts are really good from a perspective of SEO, design, and also paid search– so running paid ads, even on social. It has everything you need to scale your business. It also has a support team to back you up when you need help. So check out one of those carts if you don’t already have them.
Optimizing Your product pages with regards to SEO and Design
So what I mean by that is SEO would be a good product title, OK? Don’t just call it something that only you would know. Call it something within the title that people are actually searching online. So do some keyword research, figure out what people are searching for– your products– and make that part of your product title. Also, include that in the description of the product. Write a good description. Remember, this is your 24/7 salesperson. Your product page never calls in sick. It works through the weekends and the holidays.
Every time somebody visits your product page, they want your perfect sales pitch, so put some time into that. Also, product photography, hugely important. Make sure that photography is really, really clean, smooth, and a nice design, and professional. And also, if you can do a product video, this is massively valuable. Make sure you invest in doing some product videos to explain your products in more detail.
Make Sure You have Trust Badges on the Page
Make sure you have fast shipping, free shipping, all of that if you have that. And also, get reviews of your products. You want to have reviews on your product pages. Studies show if you have reviews on your product pages that can increase your conversion rate in your eCommerce business significantly, up to 400% by having product reviews. So make sure that you get product reviews on your page.
Make Sure You have Schema Markup on Your Product Pages
What this means is when somebody searches on Google, right there on the Google search page– before they even go to your website– they’re going to see what Google calls product rich cards, which is going to show your product image and some information right there on the search page. This is going to give you an advantage over your competitors and make you a little more visible organically to people as they’re searching on things like Google. So here’s a quick tip. If you just Google search “schema markup testing tool,” it’ll take you to a testing tool. You can just put your product page URL in there, and it’ll tell you if you have the proper schema markup or not. If not, there are some warnings and some tips there on how to make sure you add that. But if you use one of those carts, BigCommerce, Shopify, or WooCommerce, they typically have good schema markup out the gate, and so you can just kind of build upon that.
Optimize Your Product Feed via Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Center is what you’re going to use to run Google Shopping ads, which we’ll get to later, but the product feed is hugely important. You’re going to want to make sure you have good information in there with regards to your product title, the description, the keywords, those sorts of things so that you’re showing up when people are searching on Google Shopping when you’re running your ads. 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.
Run Google Shopping Ads
Google Shopping is very, very popular in business. People go to Google, they’ll search for something like pink shoes, they’ll click the shopping tab, those are all ads. So if you want to be in that shopping tab, which we highly recommend, you’re going to want to make sure that you are running Google Shopping ads. So invest in running product ads. And then here’s a tip, optimize your product ads based on results. So if you have an eCommerce tracking set up, you can see the revenue generated from each product. You can really see your ROI, per product, on your product ads. What you want to do is as time goes by, turn off the ads that aren’t doing as well, the products that aren’t doing as well, and increase the budget on the products that are doing well. This is going to really increase your return on investment over time.
Invest in Your Social Media Marketing Organically
Whether you need to do this yourself or hire somebody or hire another company, you need to make sure you have an organic presence on social media. What that means is you’re posting content, you’re engaging on social media. So not paid ads, but just being involved, being a part of social media today. By doing this, this is going to be building your brand following organically. So eventually you have 10,000 followers, 100,000 followers. The more followers you have as you’re posting content, building this awareness, you’re only going to get more sales.
Automate your Email Marketing
Email marketing is hugely important. A lot of eCommerce stores fall short because they spend a lot of money to get that customer to make that first purchase, but they don’t re-market to those people via email marketing and other channels to get them to come back and make future purchases. If you could just get each of your customers to make one more purchase than they normally do, think about what that does to your revenue. So with email marketing, it allows us an automated way to make that happen.
Invest in SMS marketing
SMS marketing is text message marketing. The reason why that’s important is that only about 20% of people will typically open up your emails, sometimes even less. And they also won’t open it up in real-time. There’s a lag there, right? But with text messages, it’s almost 100% of people open the text message. And most of them are within a five-minute window. So that can be really powerful on slow sales days, at the end of the month, times when you need to clear out old inventory, stuff like that. To build a VIP text message marketing campaign.
Use CRM
Many eCommerce stores don’t really have their CRM. They’re actually using the backend of their cart to look at customer data and kind of using that as a CRM. That’s not effective. You want to integrate your cart with an actual CRM so that you can populate all of your customer data and even add additional data in there, as you get to know your customer. And so if you hire a salesperson or if you’re the salesperson, working through the CRM and actually making proactive calls to your customers can be life-changing for your business. If you just reach out and say, hey, how was it? Did you get your package on time? Is everything going OK for you? What else are you interested in? Can I keep an eye out for other deals that come up and let you know? Do you have any kids? When are their birthdays? What are they interested in? If you get to know the customer, you can save this information in your CRM. Your salesperson can just continually follow up with these people.
By using this technique, you’ll see four or five times more sales. So it’s a huge investment, but a great return to look at a salesperson in CRM and connecting those into your process within your eCommerce business.
If you want to book a free consultation about your Digital Marketing Strategies, SEO or Website design Plans, please drop us an email and we will get back to you within 24 hours.