In a world, where everything has become instant – coffee, video, delivery, food, etc, eCommerce marketing is still one function where the story of the tortoise and the hare comes true: slow and steady wins the race. Putting out a few advertisements, doing a little Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and posting about your product on social media 4-6 times a day will not bring you any traction. Customers today are spoilt for choice and are very difficult to engage. Converting them is on another level of difficulty all together.

Look at this statistic for example: The cart abandonment rate is a staggering 69.2% which shows that customers today are a fickle bunch. But the one thing that can convert them is a persistent and consistent marketing strategy which works towards building familiarity over repeated non-intrusive messages and cajoles them to take the step towards their purchase.

Whether you are a large business or small, everyone is looking to building their marketing strategy with some simple yet effective techniques. Help is always available, but here are some proven yet simple and effective techniques to promote and market your online store.

1. To start, social media

Social media is a beast which needs to be tended to with consistency and care. Overexposing your brand across too many platforms, especially those where your customers are not very active, will be waste of your efforts, if not counterproductive. Pick one or two social media channels, pre-plan and schedule your posts and post during a time that your customers see your posts is important. You can always track consumer behaviour with data driven tools like Google Analytics for free. But always follow the 80-20% rule – 80% topical posts about everything but your product and 20% posts on your product. You don’t want to overload your customer with too many self-promotion advertisements that irritate them. Let them learn, discover and engage your band through your posts.

Customers today are spoilt for choice and are difficult to engage. But the one thing that can convert them is a persistent and consistent marketing strategy which builds familiarity and cajoles them to take the step towards their purchase.

2. Pay per click is your friend

Pay per click advertising is a great way to cost effectively conduct a campaign for your business as you would only pay for the number of clicks and sales your advertisement generates. Google, Facebook, Instagram all use this advertising model and GlobalLinker’s marketing services can help you navigate your way around these.

3. Form tactical collaborations

When you post on your social media page, the visibility of your posts is limited to your followers. But in order to expand your reach and audience, it is always a great idea to form strategic partnerships with industry players, mention them in your posts, reach out to influencers who can feature your product and give it the much-needed visibility.

Also read: Want to make your ecommerce store go from good to great? – Here is how!

4. Have an SEO Strategy

Search Engine Optimisation sounds complicated, but it is not. Firstly, lets demystify SEO. What is SEO? When you use a search engine to find out more about a product, brand or store, you are shown a list of web pages. Higher the position of the web page, the more relevant (and optimised) it is to your topic. Therefore, SEO is nothing but optimising your e-Commerce store such that it ranks higher in a search engine. Optimal words should be identified and used in the title, meta, product and image descriptions.

5. Write a blog and create content

Writing a blog on your e-Commerce store or website regularly can help organically grow your website traffic. Whatever your motivation might be to create content – to become a thought leader in your industry, to be differentiated from your competition or to simply share what happening in your business and around it. Furthermore, if your blog is optimised with link back to your e-Commerce store, keyword rich content and indexed pages can help improve your business websites search engine ranking.

6. E-mail isn’t dead

E-mail promotions are a great way to get a targeted message out to your consumers which caters to their specific needs. Need to reach out to those who abandoned their cart or give a discount code to returning customers or share offer to all your consumers? This is made easy with e-mail marketing. Offers, discounts, special codes, exclusive access to a sale collections, etc. are great ways to engage customers and bring them to your store.

7. Product reviews

Product reviews are very helpful especially when 1) they are many 2) they are mainly 4/5-star rating reviews. Getting your customers to write reviews on your e-Commerce store or to send it through e-mail or share pictures of them using your product or a video promoting it can influence many other customers to take the plunge. There is even a terminology for it – Social Proof. Since new customers unable to see, touch or feel the product, they rely on the proof submitted by others to decide whether or not they want to buy the product.

8. Provide free samples

Free samples can be shared with customers who buy your product or sometimes even to entice them to buy. You need not send them the exact product, but an ancillary one. For example, someone selling planners and stationery need not necessarily give our free planners (which are expensive) but can give out free stickers, smaller notepads, etc. which are economical. These when coupled with purchases not only delight the consumer but also when given to customers who haven’t shopped for a while, remind them on what they are missing out.

The most important part to remember is to have a multi-dimensional and long-term strategy. Spreading your efforts over a period of time consistently will help bring in the customers. As always, keep checking which one works better than the other, adapt and continue. Remember, you are the tortoise in this race, the one who will win, but for that you will have to take it slow and steady!

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