Today we wanted to share our top 10 tips on eCommerce marketing strategies that helped us creating brand recognition for our customers.
Tip 1: Focus on Organic Social
The good part about this is it is free marketing, build all your brands around this concept. Start building your brand as a social brand first and built your community, the best place to start is to use Instagram. Don’t wait too long and start as soon as possible implementing this technique.
When we’re talking about social, we mostly talk about the three Cs:
- Content;
- Collaboration;
- Consistency.
The first important thing is content, and it is important to follow and analyze your top-performing posts and work around them. The best way to analyze your performance to use a business account, business account will give you the ability to look into analytics. It is easy to start a business profile if you do not have one.
Our number one tip would be to recreate your top-performing content, because that is the type of content your audience wants to see and to engage on the most.
The second part is Collaboration, so that might be collaborating with influencers or even other brands in your category. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to work with your competitors but work with other brands with similar category, this can be beneficial for both of your brands. You are not the only one that is doing eCommerce marketing on social media, find friends, and work together.
The third part is consistency, this is not only important for establishing brand recognition through repetition but it’s also really important for the social media platform. All platforms have an algorithm that favors consistency and the frequency in which you share. Also, think about it like this, you are posting twice a week that is getting a view of a hundred people each, that is 200 views a week. If you post 7 times a week you will get 700 views a week.
Tip 2: Build an email/waiting list
The second tip we want to give is to build a waiting list or an email list as soon as possible, this might be before the launch or even if you already have a brand. When you are not focusing on email you are losing a lot of business, email marketing can account for 30% to 40% of your revenue.
A really good way to start building a mailing list is to start showing pop-ups on your website, you want that pop-up to incentivize people to sign-up to your mailing list. A good strategy is to give something back when they sign-up like free shipping, discount code, or a complimentary product on first order. It depends on what you’re able to offer. If you do not know how to start, look at third-party services like Justuno, SumoMe, or Mailchimp. These are great tools to start with.
Do not wait and start capturing emails today because our third tip is going to be starting email blast ads, so you need this list to get started with tip number three.
Tip 3: Start using your mailing list!
The best practice is to start sending emails at least once a week to stay front in mind and be able to keep your list health up. The health of your list determines the deliverability of your emails that go into people’s inbox rather than landing in the spam box, we do not want that. Landing your mails straight into the inbox will get you as much exposure as possible.
This is a free marketing tactic and make sure you are using it. As mentioned, we want to send out emails at least once a week and you want to automate some emails you will be sending out, we divided these mails into three groups:
Welcome Sequence
Your welcome mail gets around 50% open rate which is around 20% to 30% above industry standard. Make this mail count to build up trust.
Abandoned cart mails
Some people build up their cart for later purchasing and forget about it, send a friendly reminder that they still have some products left in the cart. To make it more interesting you could even offer them a discount code if they fulfill their purchase.
Product Sequence
Educate people on your top products, top sellers, or even new products and try to make as interesting as possible.
Tip 4: Upsell your customers
This tip is all about increasing your average order value and your customer lifetime value, these are two of the metrics you want to focus on in your eCommerce store. We have broken this in three sections:
Upsells
What this means is that when somebody is looking to purchase one of your products you can advise them to look at your other products or even advise them to buy more to get a better deal. For example, you can say buy the friend pack or even the family pack to make the purchase more inviting.
Cross-sell
This is more about adding complementary products to the sale, or you can say people who bought this also have bought these. For example, you can say that when you buy this product it goes well with the following items when using the product. It’s all about solving problems for your customer.
Bundles
Creating bundles can make the deal more appealing to your customer, as mentioned in upsells. Creating bundles will make it easier for your customer to show the discount rate and this will let you sell more products at once.
Tip 5: Use micro Influencers
To broaden your audience, you can work together with micro-influencers. It is also easier to work with micro-influencers for example they can work with you for gifts and they will be able to provide you free exposure and content for your brand.
When looking for influencers we use the three Rs for finding the right influencer for your brand: Reach, Relevancy, and Relationship.
Reach
The reason we are focusing on micro-influencers is that they have a very powerful engaged niche community. These communities are often a lot more focused toward a niche than just a general broader community. The reach should range from 5k to 50k followers in size, these influencers are more likely to be willing to post your product in return for gifting.
Relevancy
We want to find influencers in your niche or category and relevant to your brand. Some good places where you can start looking for influencers are looking at other brands in your category to find out with whom they are working, it doesn’t always have to be a competitive brand. This is a really easy starting point.
Relationship
You want to make sure that the influencer you want to choose as a strong relationship with their followers as much as possible. On Instagram this means that they do quite a bit of video content as well or even have a YouTube presence as well. YouTube influencers have a very strong relationship with their community and if that community has now gone across and followed them on Instagram is much better, it means that they’re kind of super fans. Those are the followers that we want to target.
A good indicator of a strong relationship would be a lot of comments and even a two-way dialogue between the influencer and their audiences, they will reply to comments often and people might ask them questions/advice on things. These are all really good signs that there’s trust within that community. The main thing you are leveraging in influencer marketing is the trust that the influencer has with his/her audience, otherwise you may as well just be marketing cold traffic.
Tip 6: Content Marketing
A good strategy in content marketing is to start blogging, not only blogging but also user-generated content. Blogging is a good way to start your content marketing, what you need to do is to find out what people are looking for. Start with keyword research and write around these keywords, this will also help you with your SEO. When people are searching for those certain terms or ranking those keywords (read more about SEO here). Blogging is something that you really shouldn’t ignore it’s another easy way to get free traffic to your site.
Tip 7: Utilize customer reviews
User-generated content is a good powerful tool to build up trust with your customers. Give your site the ability to leave captioned reviews and even upload a photo of them using your product, this will help you with social proof.
Photo reviews are far more useful than having just a text-based review system, your customers will be able to see your product in action and is more realistic. You are not only selling products you are also selling an experience and this way your customers can kind of experience your product through other people. This is an amazing social proof.
Social proof helps you to build trust in sort of the same way influencers do, influencers are more word-of-mouth or at a larger scale because they got a larger audience. A lot of the time the trust is even stronger when it comes to utilizing your customers.
In short make sure to collect as many reviews as possible, you might want to have an email sequence that is a post-purchase sequence. In this mail sequence you can ask your customers after-sale questions like how they liked your product and even if they have the time to leave a review, much better if they also can upload a photo using your product.
Tip 8: Create a “Viral” giveaway
Giveaways are a great way to grow without needing to put too much budget in, for these giveaways you can use third-party platforms like Gleam or Vyper. One of the most important parts of a giveaway is to bake in virality or shareability into your competition.
You don’t just want to be like “Ok, enter to sign up. With your email” these kinds of giveaways are to private and there is no shareability aspect, you want to encourage people that are entering your competition to share this giveaway so you will get more followers. Sharing can be done through Social media or sharing through email, the main reason behind a giveaway is that you not only want more people to enter but also that people will talk about your brand. The people that will enter your competition will get more and more people for you; this is often referred to as the viral coefficient.
This is a really fast way to generate new emails in a short period. You will be able to leverage that to grow your brand exponentially
Tip 9: Text message abandoned cart
What is better than email marketing? Text message marketing, is a marketing strategy that is often overlooked but a great way to reach your customers. The benefit of text messages is that they have a far higher and faster open rate, it’s is more like 80% to 90% of people open their text message within the first 15 minutes of receiving them.
As opposed to email the open rate over the lifespan of an email a lot of the time is 20% to 30%, imagine getting 80% to 90% visitors in the first 15 minutes. That is something you want to take advantage of.
A text message abandoned cart works in the same way as email abandon cart works. Customers will fill their cart but leave it without placing any purchase, you can remind them about the abandoned cart and maybe even offer them a discount code.
Tip: 10 Facebook/Instagram video Ads
The tenth and final tip are Facebook and Instagram video ads. If you’re not utilizing video in your advertising yet you are leaving money on the table.
The main tips here that we’d like to give is to make sure that they’re captioned, 85% to 90% of people watching Facebook and Instagram with their sound off, if you are not using captions in your video, you’re losing that audience.
After grabbing the attention of the viewer, we need to highlight your brand. This can be done by creating a kind of narrative and want to talk about the benefits of your product. A really good formula to tackle this is to be having a compelling hook and move directly to social proof or stats that highlight a problem. Once you highlighted the problem you want to present your viewers with a solution, and the solution is your product. We will show the benefits of your product, it’s not like physically describing the product itself but more about what it can do for your customer or user.
Before we can finish everything up, we want to show a bit more social proof. This can be done by showing influencers using your product or even customer reviews, at some point everyone can find some social proof.
For the finisher we want to get into your offer, this is important because people that are still watching your video is still interested in your product. You took them on a small journey from start to end presenting your product and they are ready to buy your product at this point. That’s why it is now a good idea to hit them with your offer and this can be a discount code or free shipping, it all depends on what you can offer them. Make your offer as compelling as possible.
eCommerce marketing strategies Conclusion
We hope we could help you creating a strong marketing strategy that will help you in your marketing, if we did please leave a comment or if you have your own suggestions.
