Ecommerce Marketing: How to Connect with Your Customers
The online market is the place to be when it comes to doing business today because it’s the easiest way to reach as many potential customers as possible with no boundaries in terms of time and place. Due to its popularity, it’s saturated with various businesses and it’s of most importance to differentiate yourself from the ones doing the same thing as you. Naturally, this brings up the question of how to this? How do you attract new customers and keep the old ones? Well, you use marketing, more specifically ecommerce marketing.
Ecommerce marketing is using online channels to promote your e-store and products to customers. The end goal is to help you sell more. But, what does it exactly do? Well, it drives more traffic to your online store and helps you convert that traffic into leads and those leads into sales.
When you are planning your ecommerce marketing strategy you need to know who you want to target. Based on their characteristics you’ll choose some of many available marketing channels (the ones that are relevant for them). There is no need to use all of the channels at once. It’s not even a good idea because not all channels will have the effect you want them to. So, in the beginning, decide on up to three. And after you master those, you can add more. There is a huge number of marketing strategies that you can choose. Which one is the best? There is no answer because it depends on the company. What is best for one, won’t be for the other. But here, we’re going to exaplain couple of the most popular ones.
Let’s start with the oldest form of digital marketing – email marketing. Yes, it sounds oldfashioned, outdated. But believe it or not, it still works. If done right, email marketing will help you build long term relationship with your loyal customers. What is different in email marketing today is that email can automatically be sent to people on your email list. Automated email would be sent after a certain trigger such as joining your list (welcome email), shopping cart abandonment (remainder), buying a product (recommendation for a complementary product), etc. The only important thing is for the information to be relevant to them. And of course, don’t spam them.
If you are in the e-commerce business it’s inevitable to use social media marketing. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, this is just a small portion of the ones that are offered. Each has its own users with different preferences. Every popular social media has tools that allow you to target specific people. The point is to promote your brand and products (or services) on social media, raise awareness about all of them. It’s a great way to connect with customers because it allows two-way communication. They can talk to you, vice versa. You can see what they are talking about you, is it positive or negative. Also, social media is a great source of user-generated content. If any of you are unaware of that term it’s any form of content (images, videos, text, audio) that have been created and posted by users on an online platform. USG is created by people who use the product, love the brand, etc. They are promoting it for free. If you decide to share their work on your social media channels, it shows them that they’re appreciated.
Next, search engine marketing. When it comes to search engines there are two types of search results – organic and paid. To better your result you need SEO (search engine optimization). It’s the process of increasing the visibility of a website or its page to users of a search engine (e.g. Google). Paid results are pay-per-click campaigns, display campaigns and other types of ads where you paid for your position. Search engine marketing includes both. Its main purpose is to improve the overall position for the brand/product on the search engines. SME is important because everybody goes to look for information on the Internet. Making yourself visible is of most importance.
Ecommerce marketing isn’t only about selling, it’s about creating a long lasting relationship with your customers. You need to get to know them better and listen to them. With ecommerce marketing strategies, mentioned in this post, you can do that. They allow you to connect with them, give them relevant information and show them that you appreciate them.
Which social media channel do you prefer? We love twitter! Feel free to tweet us.
