eCommerce Marketing Strategies To Increase Sales & Traffic

By Maulik D Shah

With so many online stores selling more or less the same products, competition is at an all time high in the online retail industry. Any eCommerce business wanting to succeed in this competitive environment needs to have the right marketing strategies in place. It's simply not enough to have a great webstore. Without proper marketing all your website development efforts will go down the drain.

Here are some eCommerce marketing strategies you can use to get the best out of your eCommerce venture.

1. Upsell Your Products

A majority of merchants go for up selling their products, because up selling works better than cross selling online. There are two main factors to up selling - 1) Make your upsells related to the original products 2) Have the right product pricing strategy to make the upsell look like a deal. Also make sure that products you are up selling fulfill your customers' needs. New products must be really better than the original ones.

2. Integrate Instagram

An average order value from Instagram marketing is around $60.00. Instagram gives brands 25% more engagement than any other social media platform. If you use right filters, appropriate hashtags and post at the right time, then you are on the right path on Instagram.

You can run campaigns, contests and share user generated pictures on Instagram. It is an excellent way to attract users towards your offerings. Instagram is one of the fastest growing apps and can be integrated with your store to have a better user engagement.

3. Launch A Facebook Store

Nobody in their right mind should ignore Facebook, the biggest platform for social media marketing. What many people are not aware of is that it is also a great source to generate traffic for shopify users since it is well integrated with Shopify store; you don't have to have a separate track of your inventory changes. Facebook Store, an app built by Shopify lets you display and sell your products directly on your Facebook page. Buyers can share their favorite items with their friends.

4. Capture More Email Subscribers

Email is one of the most essential means at your disposal in eCommerce marketing. It drives online traffic to your store. Email marketing is one of the oldest and still the best channel for digital marketing because it is more direct and accessible. If you are not convinced, consider these stats:

• Emails have an ROI of around 4,300%.
• 80% of people claim that they receive marketing messages with their personal emails regularly.
• 70% of people make use of discount offers.

So don't ignore the power of good old email. Getting your target customers subscribe to your emails is one of the most surefire ways of increasing sales.

5. Improve Email Campaigns

Of course, it is not sufficient to gather a bunch of email addresses. Sending emails regularly with targeted content and offers is critical. There could be many occasions for sending emails that your subscribers appreciate.

For instance, send a welcome email once the customers sign up. This helps have the highest open rates of any marketing e-mails. Or you can let your customers know that their order is being processed and on its way. They would love to know their order status.

Another example is to send regular newsletters and let your buyers know about new discount offers, tips and company news. Out of curiosity, they might check your emails.

6. Generate More Product Reviews

As per the online magazine Internet Retailer, one can boost eCommerce conversion rate by 14-76% by adding product reviews to eStores.

There are two key reasons why this is so. First is social proof. Product reviews are similar to testimonials, wherein people share their experiences after using particular products. Second key reason is, SEO. Product reviews help increase the amount of content on web pages and also increases the probability of ranking for long tail keywords.

Maulik Shah is the founder and CEO of Biztech Consultancy, an IT services provider based in India, specializing in providing ecommerce development solutions, CRM and ERP solutions for SMBS and enterprises.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Maulik_D_Shah/1532722