Introduction to Internet Sales in SFI

If you become an SFI Affiliate, you’re partnered with one of the fastest growing and most popular e-commerce platforms on the Web today, the Zing Network. As discussed in more details at the LaunchPad Lessons, Zing sites such as TripleClicks.com, Rewardical.com, and Flexxity.com offer tens of thousands of products and services in a variety of categories from trusted sellers, merchants, and providers around the world. Astro Auctions, Pricebenders, and Eager Zebra Games offer members fun, excitement, and cool prizes. And ECommergy helps online entrepreneurs around the world become ecommerce pros and achieve success. At Zing, there's truly something for everyone—and that makes online selling both lucrative and fun!

But what if you're not a natural salesperson? What if you don’t have any experience in advertising on the Internet?

Welcome to SFI

Here, you’ll learn everything you need to know! In fact, you're already off to a good start just by reading these LaunchPad lessons. Perhaps the most surprising thing you'll learn is that it's really pretty easy to get started marketing your business right away...

A basic marketing method:

Simply point your potential customers to one of your Zing Network property Gateway links—embedded with your SFI Affiliate ID—as shown below:
    • TripleClicks Main Page
    https://www.tripleclicks.com/12177280
  • Rewardical
    https://www.sfi4.com/12177280/rwgw
    • ECommergy
    https://www.sfi4.com/12177280/ec
    • Astro Auctions
    https://www.sfi4.com/12177280/Astro
    • Eager Zebra
    https://www.tripleclicks.com/12177280/EagerZebra

These Gateways will introduce your prospective members to the given property you've chosen to promote. Any prospective customer who signs up (for free) is automatically registered as your own Personally Referred Member (PRM), and you will earn commissions whenever they make a qualified purchase at any Zing Network site...for life!

Another easy marketing method:

If you'd like a more targeted approach, try promoting a specific product to your audience.
For example:

    1. After logging into TripleClicks.com, click the SHOP option at the top of the page, and browse the store's product listings for one you think your potential customers would like.

    2. On that product's details page, click the SFI Toolbox button for a special "Promote this listing" link that includes your SFI ID number so you’re credited with commissions earned from any sales. Just copy and paste that link in your emails, social media posts, etc. You can also click the Create Banner link for a product banner you can use on your blog or third-party websites. NOTE: You can learn more about the SFI Toolbox in this lesson.

    3. Each time someone clicks your link (or banner) and signs up for free, they automatically become your Personally Referred Member (PRM). And when they purchase the product—and EVERY TIME thereafter that they purchase ANY qualified product at any Zing site—YOU earn a Commission!
What's more, your work is now done! SFI takes care of processing your PRM's payment, fulfills the order, sends the product directly to your customer—all at no cost to you! And, of course, they email you each time you make a sale so you always know how much you've earned.
 
NOTE: You can learn more about targeted marketing techniques at “19 Ways To Make Money In SFI.”

Best wishes and happy marketing!

Article Source: SFI LaunchPad Lessons

6 Tips to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing

Wanting to do business online? Affiliate marketing is one great idea worthy of your consideration. All you need to get started is just a little extra time to learn the rudiments. You don’t really need any considerable monetary capital outlay or experience. You can start by making it a side hustle at the beginning but it can as well turn to full time income if you gain hands-on experience in the business. With the rise of influencers and social media platforms, affiliate marketing can quickly become one of the largest online income sources for you. Quite simple to get started really! All you need to do as an affiliate marketer is to actively promote offers/products from product merchants and you get paid commissions for your efforts. To get started quick time, just get yourself an internet connection and a social media account and pronto you are in business. You can promote either through your own website/blog or through a full-service affiliate platform or a reputable eCommerce website.

The following tips can help you to get started with a bang and to make the most impact.

1. Market to the Right Audience

The right audience must be deliberately targeted for best results. You can grow a personal blog audience or a social media audience for better targeting. You can segment this this audience through demographics and thereafter promote what fits your demographics best. Because you already have considerable control over the audience you’ve built over time through your content, marketing to the audience becomes fairly easy to do.

2. Take Advantage of Social Media

These days, social media appears to be where everyone is at 24/7. That makes social media a huge market place. First is to have accounts on your preferred social media platforms particularly the very popular ones like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok or Pinterest. Next is to expand your following beyond family and friends with the help of your content which you depend on to help grow your following. You can thereafter engage with other people that have interests similar to yours and your market base grows from there. For better ads targeting, you can segment your audience by way of demographics and you direct your messages with pinpoint accuracy.

3. Promote Creatively

The Internet is such a huge market place that you must always seek creative ways to get things done if you want good results. Proven and provable authenticity is one of such creative ways. On the Internet, the more authentic you are when you promote products, the better your chances of getting conversions and making sales. Unlike influencers, affiliates have a lot of latitude to choose how they post content to promote their unique affiliate links. Affiliates can for instance do what most other affiliates do but they must do these things more creatively to get better results. 

4. Promote Your Products Multichannel

As an affiliate, you must resolve to explore as many channels as possible to get your messages out. It is fully within your powers to decide what channels to use. Experience and analytics results can help you make these decisions accurately with time. You can decide to promote through Google-My-Business, GMB, social media, emails, newsletters, podcasts, and webinars and so on. If you can spare a little expense for paid online ads, you can create native/display PPC ads to target people outside of your social media and email circles but who have an interest in your niche.

5. Hone in on a Specific Niche

Expert marketers do not advise affiliate marketers to promote any and all types of products. It is best to promote products that sell well and people want to buy. The reason it is better to hone in always on a specific niche of your choice. That helps you to quickly build authenticity. If you have previous certifications, do not fail to use them to help your authenticity. Such certifications come in really handy when partnering with brands/products. If you have a passion for a particular niche, you can look at the content you regularly post and determine what themes are present that will interest your audience. That helps your authenticity a great deal.

6. Target Fringe Products to Market

If you want to be an effective affiliate, always have an eye for fringe products to promote. This is because one of the best ways to easily distinguish yourself from other affiliates is to look for fringe products to market. These are products/brands that are not way too common with too many other affiliates. The reason is to avoid a heavily crowded market where every marketer is in a rat race to survive. Affiliate programs that are already crowded typically don’t usually offer high-paying commissions and you are in affiliate marketing to make money. Isn’t it?

5 Most Popular Types of Affiliate Marketing

Through affiliate marketing, you get to tap into new audiences. The job of your affiliates therefore is to act as your sales team.  These affiliates get rewarded based solely on their performance and by way of earned commissions. This relationship works smoothly if you are able to tap into the huge audiences built by bloggers, marketers, and influencers. When people who build these audiences over time help to promote your products or link to your content, it helps to increase your sales. So, one great way to boost your marketing through other people’s efforts is through the use of affiliates. But first, you must tap into the right ways to use affiliates correctly.

To promote your business effectively, you can use different types of affiliate marketing. Find below some of the most common and interesting affiliate types that marketers like to use. Each one is unique and offers different types of benefits in its own right. What you choose depends on your own personal preferences and expertise.

1. Websites Reviews

Working with review websites is one of the best places to acquire consumers by affiliate marketers. You can consider working with review sites to partner up with. That is one great way to build trust and get your business in front of more people who rely on reviews to make their buy decisions. These days, even if you want a good restaurant to eat out, a good hotel to stay, a good travel destination, good airlines and good shopping malls, many consumers rely on reviews before making up their minds.

2. Video and Podcast Content Marketing

Marketers have since discovered that video and podcast content is widely consumed and popular. There are prolific content creators who get support for their work by taking on sponsors. You can consider working with these types of creators to bring your brand to the public eye, improve conversions and make more sales.

3. Email Marketing

Over time, bloggers, news publications, and niche verticals often build large email lists with audiences segmented into different niche groups. You can work with such email affiliates to send your content directly to their audience’s inboxes. It is easy, cost-effective and with very impressive returns.

4. Social Media Influencers

Social media Influencers make most of their social media followings by promoting products and services for paid commissions. Working with influencers can be a bit problematic for product merchants because of ethical and regulatory reasons. It is ethical that influencers fully disclose to consumers if the content they are promoting is sponsored. It is best to work with influencers who help conversions better instead of those who merely have very large followings. Some content may actually get a lot of visibility but doesn’t really lead to conversions. Conversion is where the money really is, so you must look to work with good influencers and develop performance-based parameters for your relationship.

5. Cash-Back Affiliates

This is one very unique niche of affiliate marketing. In this type of marketing, affiliate marketers are required to promote products and promise buyers a small amount of money that goes back to the buyer as an incentive. This small amount of money back is what actually acts as the incentive to get more people to buy the products. By doing so, the consumers really feel like they’re saving money and it makes them feel good. However, a major drawback about these types of affiliates is that they don’t always bring value addition right away. But, for marketers who want to promote their business and not make a profit right away, it is a good option.

7 Tips to Grow Your eCommerce Store

These days, as more and more people resort to shopping online, the world of eCommerce is growing in tandem. As more people get involved in establishing eCommerce stores, the competition grows too. Typical of any business characterized by free entry and free exit, everyone does everything to stay put there and to grow their eCommerce stores no matter the competition. If you run an eCommerce store and you want to enhance it particularly with growth in sales, don’t ignore these here tips.

 
1. Make Your Purchasing Process Simple

Yeah, no shopper ever wants to go through a complicated shopping process when they shop online. For this reason, you must put everything in place to make shopping out of your eCommerce store very simple. If you don’t, major stores like eBay and Amazon who have perfected quick check-out processes and even same-day shipping of products can quickly crowd you out of business. That is why it is hugely essential to make sure your customers go through a simple and seamless process when making any kind of purchase from your eCommerce store.

2. Make Your Customers Your Priority

Your eCommerce store cannot remain open and functional for much too long without customers. You can only keep it open and functional if you have customers that are actively purchasing from it. Your customers are therefore your most important assets in your bid to grow your eCommerce business. The reason, you must make them your number one priority. You can do this effectively by exploring any and every way to show them you care about them. Directly engage them and respond quickly and satisfactorily to their concerns and inquiries at all times. Always ask them for feedback through email surveys or in the review section of your store. Directly engage them on social media and pose such questions that will elicit responses from them on how best your business can better serve them. Specifically, you can find out how much your products suit their needs and how you can improve on their experience with your products and even on your eCommerce store.

3. Create an Online Sales Funnel

A great way to enhance your eCommerce store is to create and maintain a sales-funnel online. You can do this by paying special attention to the process a customer goes through from the time they first land on your website to the time they make a click to purchase a product. Making that process fluid and smooth can help to create an effective sales funnel for you. A fluid and effective sales funnel ensures that when your customers land on your website, they take the exact track you want them to take and they do what you expect them to do. Carefully examine and analyze your current sales funnel and find out if it effectively does what you expect it to do to enhance your store. Determine what has been working and what has not, then figure out what you can tinker with, remove or replace with something new and better. What matters is to get good results even if it means thinking strategically and stepping outside the box and trying new and better things to get the results you want.

4. Build Relationships with Influencers

If you can form impactful relationships with relevant Influencers in your niche, so much the better for your eCommerce store. By definition, Influencers are individuals who already have a large following on social media, or have high website traffic, or have a substantial email list. You can reach out to such influencers to help promote your affiliate links or to help post your sponsored content to their numerous followers. Of course that comes with some trade-offs in form of commissions but why not considering the huge traffic volume good influencers are capable of attracting to your eCommerce store. Through affiliate marketing, you can tap into Influencer’s networks to have your content or products reach their wide audience. Your eCommerce store benefits from increased traffic and enhanced sales figures.

5. Engage on Social Media

Yes indeed! Social media is where nearly everyone around the word is at right now doing their own things. There is no doubt your customers are having a conversation right now on social media. Your duty is to find out where they are talking and get yourself involved. Engage with them real time. One great way to continue building trust for your business is to engage your customers on social media. By doing so, you give them a real feeling of being heard and valued as if they are a part of something that is bigger than themselves. Better trust always means better business out of your eCommerce store.

6. Explore Remarketing Tactics

Vigorous marketing is hugely essential in any eCommerce business. You can deliberately deploy ads retargeting tactics and you’ll keep getting good results over a prolonged period of time. If you have proper pixels set up throughout your website, you can effectively monitor a buyer’s journey. With proper remarketing tactics, ads from your eCommerce store can be shown on various websites and social media platforms to remind shoppers who were earlier in your website exactly where they were in their buying process. Once your remarketing ads are set up and running, no matter which website the shoppers currently are, they can simply click and proceed with their purchase.

7. Offer a Loyalty Program

Yes, everyone loves rewards. You can always offer a loyalty program out of your eCommerce store that provides incentives to those customers who have been loyal to your brand and you’ve built a long-lasting relationship with them. Many of such customers are always returning customers. As returning customers, you can arrange to reward them with discounts or some other freebies. In return, such rewards will further help to induce more loyalty from the customers. The rewards will ultimately make the customers feel more valued thereby helping you to improve on your customer retention rates. That no doubt can greatly help to grow your eCommerce store.

8 Website Ideas to Earn Extra Income Online

Worldwide, internet users now top 4.5 billion. Meaning, more and more people are now using the internet for business and sundry activities and they access via websites. For people doing business online, they need websites that attract considerable traffic. Websites with good traffic inflow are well positioned for making money online with the right ideas. What that means is that a decent website can earn a significant income if the ideas are right. It is all a matter of ideas, good ideas and you can earn extra income from your website. In that quest, here are eight tested and proven website ideas that can help you earn extra income online.

1. Start an Affiliate Blog Website

This idea is to simply create targeted content that will drive inbound traffic to your blog website. If you embed affiliate links carefully on the content, any click through these links and a purchase is made earns you some affiliate commission. The more affiliate products you link to and the more of these products that are sold through your links, the more money you earn from your efforts.

2. Create a Recipe Website

If you have culinary skills, you can create a recipe website and earn some income. Thousands of people search online daily for recipes and meal inspirations. If you’re creative enough to come up with some unique recipes, you can share them online through your recipe website. That helps to create awareness and curiosity. If your recipe website starts to get good traffic, you can take the next step to earn money by selling online cooking courses, advertising, or even affiliate marketing to your audience.

3. Establish a Travel Website

Yeah, the human race is always on the move. That means endless travels. If you enjoy traveling and you like to travel, you can capitalize on something you love doing to earn money. You can take beautiful scenic and destinations photographs; graphically tell stories about the trials and tribulations you’ve experienced in your journeys. Such content will attract an audience with interest in travels to your website. When your following begins to grow, you’ll be able to collaborate with different travel products for sponsored content to earn money. You can promote affiliate products related to travels and earn commissions. In addition, you can sell your photos online as prints; contact various destinations or hotels for discounted or free reservations, and lots more.

4. Create an eCommerce Store

You can significantly increase your potential to earn considerable income online by creating an eCommerce store since more and more shoppers are now going online to make purchases. That comes down to about 65% of all internet users. Now, that’s a very huge market out there. An eCommerce store will help you to get a foot into this huge market at very limited costs and you’ll be able to attract international shoppers as well. If you choose, you can sell your own products and ship them directly to buyers. Alternatively and as a good way to save up on costs, you can implement a dropshipping program. Through it, you can sell products without bothering about warehousing and shipping. The products manufacturers will be responsible for shipping these products directly from their warehouses to the buyers.

5. Start a Personal Blog

A personal blog is content marketing in which anyone who knows something useful that others will like to read can start writing about it. What that means is that you can blog on virtually any niche. The idea is to create readable, engaging, and exciting content that attracts people back to your platform.  As your blog following starts to grow, then you can consider monetizing it. This you can do in many creative ways such as sponsored content, affiliate marketing, advertising, or through Google AdSense. The higher your website traffic, the more advertisers are willing to pay for placements on your blog and the more money you earn from the blog.

6. Build a Job Website

Ever heard of Jobberman.com? Yeah, that’s a great job website. Millions of people worldwide are online daily searching for jobs, any jobs. Having a job website is one great way you can earn cool income online. The approach is simple and straight forward. You can decide to post available jobs to your website and you earn residual income every time someone visits the site.  Or, you can decide to connect job seekers to jobs as a recruiter and you earn on fees. If you have a well-designed job website, you can create a membership page that allows detailed profile creation. This can include resumes, job preferences, personal information, and more. To build website traffic fairly quickly, it is advisable to consider keeping profile registration free, along with a personalized platform for fees paying members. You can make the site more attractive by including early access to job postings, salary insights, and on-going career tips as part of the content.

7. Build a Humor Website

No doubt most people like humor, real humor that helps to brighten their days in a world full of endless struggles and stress. A humor website can become very popular very quickly for this reason. Humor is a very delicate subject matter though. Make sure that the content you post isn’t protected by copyright to avoid being barred from search engine results. Be careful not to engage in humor that denigrates race, ethnicity or religion. These are no go areas. When launching your humor-based content, you can carefully search online for various types of humor and determine which niche you’d like to cover. As your following grows, you can then consider monetization by way of paid ads and automated ads campaign such as Google Adsense.

8. Develop a Review Platform

Most online users particularly on social media like to share personal experiences with restaurants, hotels, resorts, golf courses, businesses, and local travels/destinations. A review website can help interested people connect local establishments with considerable website traffic. You can earn income on a review website by offering highlighted locations, top search placement, and preferred business packages. As your membership grows, your earnings grow in tandem.

Wrapping Up

These eight website ideas may not be the only income earning ideas from a website but they’re certainly some of the easiest to implement to earn income. They all have great long-term earning potentials. What is common to all of them is good content which must be shared regularly and consistently to attract traffic. Your website visitors are the traffic and no visitor returns to a website if there’s nothing interesting on the website either to read or view frequently. To earn money online with website ideas, you’ve got to be very patient. A website takes quality time to establish authority and recurring traffic because it must contend with great competition which the internet is notorious for.

How to Earn Money Online with Internet Technology

It is convenient, it is sleek, it is cute and it works leveraging internet technology to earn money online. If you’ve tried to earn money online, you may have been scammed a few times with over-hyped eBooks, webinars and get-rich-quick schemes. Well just take that as your learning process. You can actually earn good money online if you follow the rules and do what is legit. Any get-rich-quick scheme online is in most cases a scam. If it is too good to be true, it usually is. Never you forget that cliché.
 
If you’re interested in legitimate ways to leverage internet technology to earn extra cash, pay good attention to the following.

Market Yourself as a Brand

This is exactly how celebrities and sports personalities make good money with internet technology. But first, you must have an engaging personality and live for social media. If your personality becomes engaging enough based on what you do regularly on social media, you can monetize these activities and earn good income. By the time your social media accounts particularly on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook have very large following you become some kind of influencer. You earn money through products endorsements and recommendations to buyers. By fully establishing and building your online brand, you earn more income as your online following continues to grow.

Embark on Affiliate Marketing

If you provide content online, you can help promote affiliate links and earn commissions from sales made through these links. That is affiliate marketing. It simply means linking products merchants and buyers through affiliate links and you get paid commissions from sales made through the links you are promoting. A commission-paying affiliate is any product merchant that offers a commission for selling its products online. You can earn these commissions if you connect your followers/viewers to their products through blog posts, videos, email marketing, or social media accounts by way of affiliate links. When a click on these links takes a buyer to the product merchant’s platform to purchase a product, you earn a commission which is usually calculated as a percentage of the final sale.

Start a Blog for Money

If you know something or you have a skill that can benefit others, you can blog about it to grow a following. When your blog becomes hugely popular, you can use it to promote affiliate links and earn commissions on product sales. You can also use your blog as an influencer to endorse and recommend products and get paid handsome commissions for these efforts. If you are blogging for money, always make sure your blog posts are of high quality, educating and highly informative. Be sure that all your content is current and up-to-date when posting. That is what helps to build loyal and dedicated following for your blog. The more the following, the higher the income you earn from the blog.

Sell Photos Online

Photography is a great skill. If you have the skill, you can earn money online selling photos. Before deciding on which photos to sell, you must settle for a niche that you’re exceptionally good at then start creating images in this niche. Some good images to sell can include abstracts, city-life, scenery, buildings, and iconic structures and so on. The idea is to build up your portfolio until you have multiple images to post online to attract attention. Next is to decide on which platforms you’d like to sell the photos on. Many of these online platforms offer different incentives particularly on copyrights and payment methods. Depending on what you prefer, you can settle for pay-per-view or outright download payment offer and you earn money from your photos.

Teach Online Courses

Online teaching skills help to earn money. You can teach cooking skills, yoga and sporting skills, teach languages, offer language translations, teach music or playing a musical instrument and so many other skills that can benefit others. Many people have specific skills/talents they can teach. We all have specific talents we can teach others to earn some extra income online. What really matters is to ensure you market your skills in the right online platforms to help you earn money from teaching these skills. How you teach these skills can vary depending on your preferences. You may choose to teach these skills by way of online courses, Webinars, eBooks, or even a profitable blog dedicated to your specific talent/niche.

Start an eCommerce Store

You can run your own small business and make money online by opening your own store in an eCommerce platform. You can consider eCommerce dropshipping as a convenient business model. It is hugely popular with eCommerce stores owners. Dropshipping allows an eCommerce store owner to sell various products to its customers while the manufacturer/supplier handles the shipping part of the sales chain. It saves the eCommerce store the huge costs of warehousing, safety/security of the products and the cost of shipping. Thus, when a sale is made from the eCommerce store, the product remains in the supplier’s warehouse until they ship directly to the customer. To get started, you must first create a website, find a reputable supplier, and start posting.

Organize Periodic Garage Sales

This is one great way to sell off your extra junk online. Solid items you no longer need such as used furniture, clothes, tools, appliances, books, bedding, sports equipment and children’s toys etc. etc. are eligible for periodic garage sales. Periodically selling off such items online can be a hassle-free way to earn some extra money. If you search well online, you can locate many websites that allow users to post items free of charge, complete with photos and a description. If you’re looking for a local seller, find an online platform that caters to your area. To sell unique or specific collectors’ items like antiques, paintings and rare photographs you need to find specialized and reputable websites for such rare items. You can make quick money from such sales.

Tips to Get More Mileage Out of Your Small Business Website

For most small business owners their websites serve as their biggest online assets. That is where they get to make their very first contacts with prospective customers and it is the place customers return to for repeat business. Making a website attractive to serve the full purpose of its creation is always a very smart digital marketing move. Many elements usually go into creating a successful website. Some of such elements are, the website content, SEO, marketing, and special features like blogs and eCommerce sections. These are the elements a small business owner can always tinker with if and whenever he wants to get more out of his business website. 

If you want to make the most out of your own small business website, here is what experts recommend you can do.

Improve Your Web Positioning

The aim is to have a very strong online presence and to attract traffic to the website. The more traffic your website gets, the more business you can do with it. Web positioning involves creating a digital strategy that includes valuable content on your website and other online content shared multichannel and very widely. That is what helps to attract the much needed traffic to the website.

Get More Opt-Ins

This you can get from your website content if it is of very high quality, informative and educational in context. Content marketing on your website is a very effective way to get opt-ins from potential customers. That helps your business with leads generation, more customers and better sales.
 
Use Your Website Data Creatively

If creatively used, you can use your website data to discover missed sales opportunities because your website isn’t just a marketing tool. It is much more than that. Through it, you can learn about customer behavior, shopping habits, their preferences and even spending habits. This information enables you to market better to them through your website.
 
Focus on SEO, Search Engine Optimization

If no one finds your business website online, it is akin to marketing in the dark. It can therefore make no major impact on your business if searchers are unable to find it online. To make it visible to search engines, you must optimize it. That is why SEO becomes relevant to help the site get more and better organic traffic from search engines.

Adhere to Blogging Rules

If you have the skills to blog, a blog can be a major part of your small business website. It is a great revenue earner too if monetized. Even if you don’t have blogging skills, you can hire professional bloggers to blog on your website. What matters most is to be sure the blog relates to your business niche, it is educational and informative and must be of high quality. That is what helps to attract good traffic to your website. The more and better the blog content on your website becomes the more traffic it attracts.

Use Backlinks Effectively

Backlinks help to give your website online credibility. The site can grow exponentially in credibility if other credible and reputable sites link to it. This strategy can be especially effective if you can manage to get backlinks from sites with known authority and reputation online. The more these backlinks grow, the more the reputation of your website grows.

Use Homepage How-to Videos

The homepage of your website is the perfect spot to give potential new customers a great intro to your brand. What they see first when they hit your website is thus of utmost importance to your marketing efforts. Many marketers prefer to use very captivating product photos/graphics on the homepage of their websites while others prefer to use how-to videos to arrest visitors’ attention.

Niche Your Business on Your Website

If you do this effectively, you can easily fix your marketing activities. Every business must have a business niche it identifies with. The website content must clearly show this. Your website and other marketing materials on it are more effective if they relate with a clearly defined niche. Failing to identify with a business niche can at times be the major cause of the ineffectiveness of some websites.

Reap the Benefits of Owning an Online Store

You can reap real benefits of owning an online store depending on your eCommerce proclivity and what products/services you are selling. These days, a lot of small businesses operate online stores and they make good sales particularly if the stores are optimized for local searches. Even if you don’t have the proclivity for eCommerce, you can consider it because an online store is hugely beneficial to your website. 

Effective eCommerce Email Marketing Tools

Digital marketers rely immensely on email marketing tools to enhance their businesses. When in search of email automation and Artificial Intelligence, AI, to boost your marketing business, you’ve got to think email enhancement tools. Many of these tools have special adaptations to eCommerce businesses making them more effective thereon. In reality, different email marketing tools have different capabilities. It is best to use the right combination of tools that help to enhance your email marketing strategy.

Here are some of such tools you can take a look at.

SparkToro Tool

What this tool does is to provide you with a platform that can help you find and identify all sources of influences your audience might be interested in. Meaning, the tool has audience intelligence capabilities. With SparkToro’s Audience Intelligence capabilities, you can have access to difficult-to-get data about your audience’s preferences. This is in terms of what they read, listen to, watch, and are generally interested in. Having access to such a database is an invaluable source of knowledge that helps you come closer to your store’s audience. Such information helps you to understand what your audience wants or might need from you. If through such research intelligence you get to know what your audience likes, it helps to increase your chances of creating engaging and compelling email content. If you do so consistently, you can manage to save valuable time, money and efforts in your marketing activities and still be able to get good results.

Mailtrap Tool

Marketers find Mailtrap tool very useful for email testing. It is a very powerful tool for email testing since you can basically use it to run your email tests and improve on the emails before they are actually sent out. By using this tool, marketers ensure their approved/final emails are near perfect. What that means is that after the testing, the emails have all the necessary elements, like a great subject line, the right text in terms of photos and graphics volume/ratio and so on are in the right proportions. That helps to make a huge difference in terms of email deliverability and marketing conversions. With billions of emails sent out daily, most marketers know very well that low-quality and spammy emails are most likely going to end up in spam folders. Mailtrap tool helps to prevent that.

Grammarly Tool

No matter what you do in terms of the visual aspect of your emails, they must be easily readable to be effective. That is where Grammarly tool comes very handy. This tool helps marketers to send clean email content with no typos and grammatical errors. Grammarly tool provides users with AI-powered writing assistance. That helps to make sure that your email content is of high quality and will thus resonate with your audience as expected. This is because when email content is well structured and mistake-free, it helps people to better focus on the content and the meaning behind it. If it does that, it makes it more likely that readers will understand what the marketing message is all about and what the marketer is actually saying. Even if you have limited vocabulary, Grammarly tool as an effective digital writing assistance tool easily provides you with vocabulary recommendations for your content. That helps you in no small measure to find the right words to express your brand’s identity and to capture the attention of your readers better.

WebFX Tool

WebFX tool is a very effective Readability Test Tool. As a great choice digital writing assistance tool, WebFX tool helps in enhancing the content of emails. It allows you to input content and test its readability at the same time. With that, you can easily create content that’s easy for your readers to read and comprehend. By creating readable and easy-to-get email content, you can significantly increase your chances of having your email subscribers engage more with your emails. If they do, chances are higher that they can get to take such desirable actions like visiting your web store more often and taking advantage of the offers you might be sharing at any point in time.

Designmodo Tool

Designmodo tool is an extremely versatile tool that offers a wide range of website and email design solutions that business owners can use to create their eCommerce websites. It is a particularly very good tool for designing beautiful and efficient newsletters that attract the attention of readers compelling them to read the newsletters. Such newsletters are very useful to marketers for audience engagement. What this means is that if you use Designmodo tool to build your email newsletters, it allows you to create responsive email content that somehow helps to boost awareness and engagement for your business.

Visme Tool

Visme tool parades very unique credentials. It is a design-software that can be used for creating all sorts of graphics, including infographics and videos. If you want to make your emails as visually compelling as possible, Visme tool is what you need. Given the fact that most people are generally better able to process visual information than text information, emails that appeal more on visuals are generally more engaging. If you want your emails to keep your audience more engaged, be sure you provide them with more interesting visual content. Visme tool is the right tool to help you out in that quest.

Finally, based on experience and recommendations from expert marketers, if you deploy these tools well enough as part of your email marketing strategy, they can help you to get the most out of email marketing as a very powerful and effective channel of communication.

Best of luck with your email marketing activities!

Effective Ecommerce Website Marketing Tactics

If you have an Ecommerce website, you must promote it to get good business. First is to decide on credible and effective ways to promote the website. This requires the use of the right digital techniques/tactics to drive sales. The effectiveness of these techniques/tactics depends on how well you are able to use them and for what purpose. For these techniques/tactics to be of help to your business, below is what they must be able to do and do affectively well to drive more sales to your Ecommerce shop. They must be able to:

• Nurture your website visitors into subscribers and the subscribers into Customers
• Get prospects back to your website through remarketing
• Grow your Email list
• Create a series of style or how-to Videos
• Capture abandoned shopping carts with an exit-intent pop-up
• Send shopping cart abandonment Emails
• Work with Influencers in your Niche
• Create highly valuable and informative blog Posts
• Create downloadable Offers
• Host giveaway Events
• Create Pinterest-specific Images
• Upsell and Downsell with every opportunity
• Send Wishlist reminders
• Ask customers for Reviews  
• Place such reviews strategically
• Generously share user-generated Content
• Create great power posts for the benefit of onsite SEO

Doing these things well and consistently will not only make your Ecommerce store highly visible, the site will as a direct consequence also benefit from good traffic, leads and sales. Why not get your hands on the plough now and give them a try?

Effective eCommerce Business Tips

If you market online, particularly eCommerce, be prepared for stiff competitions because of the millions of others online doing similar things you do. You can succeed though if you listen to experts who are always willing to give some business tips to eCommerce stores owners. Many eCommerce stores are usually individualized. They require no costs to set up their stores and start selling from popular and reputable eCommerce platforms. Others can set up their own online store and sell out of it if they have the knowledge, skills and wherewithal to do so successfully. If either or both of the situations arise, business tips from experienced marketers are always very helpful.

Here are some four tested and effective tips to help you succeed in your eCommerce business.

Diligently Build Your Online Reputation

In online marketing particularly in the running of eCommerce store, online reputation matters a great deal. You can take quality time to build your online reputation diligently when you start marketing online. By posting quality content regularly and spreading it widely on many channels particularly social media channels, your posts will stimulate robust reviews online. Many customers first read reviews of businesses before purchasing from them to ensure that the businesses are legitimate and trustworthy. That becomes a plus for your online reputation. Your online reputation is a very essential part of the process of converting ordinary online surfers to leads and even customers of your eCommerce store. Satisfied customers never fail to tell others and the reputation grows exponentially from there.

Create High-Quality Product Photos

In eCommerce business, high quality photos of the products you are selling are very important. By having them on your website or store, they help to attract traffic to the store. The better the photos, the more the attention they get and the more traffic they attract. Some eCommerce stores now use 3D photos showing all sides of the products they are selling in rotation. Such rotations can even be 360 degrees thereby allowing the potential buyer to see every aspect of the product on display. Such views play a significant role in their buy decisions. 

 

Get a Good Brand Logo
 
Every business needs a good reputation to do well. Branding helps that reputation a great deal. A good logo is a very essential piece of your brand. If it is attractive and memorable, it helps you to build brand awareness fairly quickly. Online, when people see your logo, they easily remember you what your business is and what you do. If you do not have the skills to design a good logo for your eCommerce store, there are online services like fiverr.com or upwork.com you can use to get a good logo.

Highlight What Makes Your Store Unique

This is part of your eCommerce store identity and online reputation. You can skillfully identify what sets your store apart from others and put it into words. If well drafted, this statement can conveniently serve as an essential value proposition for your business. It helps to tell customers at a glance what you do and why it matters. If it is quick and compelling, it will be good to get quality traffic to your eCommerce store.

5 Digital Marketing Strategies for Profitable eCommerce

It is vital to have a concrete eCommerce digital marketing strategy for your business if you want it to succeed quickly. With it, your eCommerce business will not only have increased sales, it will also ensure you remain relevant to the rapidly changing trends in the business. Staying ahead your competition becomes easier to attain even within very fierce competition with millions of shopping options. A good eCommerce digital marketing strategy helps you to target new traffic to your eCommerce website and to entice existing customers to keep coming back to the store. To ensure that you remain relevant, close more leads, make more sales and even to turn a profit, you need effective strategies to help you to stay ahead of the trends.

 

These five tested and effective digital marketing strategies are good to help your eCommerce business become profitable.
 
1. Provide Clear and Concise Product Descriptions

Online, product description is vital to making sales. A clear and concise product description helps a prospect throughout the sales cycle. Prospects make their buy decisions when they fully understand exactly what the product is all about and how it will be helpful to them. When products are correctly, and clearly labeled, it helps to establish the authority of the seller. That helps sellers gain customer confidence and trust. Good labeling can even help to boost the SEO of your eCommerce store. By optimizing your products descriptions with the right keywords, it helps search engines to rank your webpage higher in their SERPs. That is instrumental to sending good organic traffic to your website. With good traffic, you get more leads, more conversions and better sales.

2. Understand Your Sales Cycle

If you want to succeed in eCommerce business, you must have well-defined user personas. That allows you to fully understand who you are selling to. Who exactly is your audience and how do they behave. From there, you can define your sales cycle before launching any marketing strategies. If you know how long it takes a customer to make a purchase on your website, what they buy and how they move through your sales process, you will be able to introduce relevant eCommerce marketing strategies that will actually get results. If you understand your sales cycle well enough, it will help you to know how to target and qualify leads better, how to move them onto the next stage of the sales funnel faster, and what you need to do to keep them coming back as repeat customers.

3. Boost Product Visualization

Ever heard of the cliché, what you see is what you get? Yes, most people always love what they see with their own eyes. If you have an eCommerce business site, and you market content or even blog on the site, be sure good visuals of the products you are marketing go along. Good content or blog posts may be boosting factors on your site but good visuals are the key selling points. Never you forget that! For this reason, it is advisable to invest more in having quality images of the products you are marketing. As much as practicable, you can use advanced methods such as 3D technology for the visuals of your products. That allows your customers and potential customers to view your products from many angles, including a 360° rotation. Now, that can be quite captivating for your marketing efforts if you ask me.

 

4. Simplify Your Checkout Process

The easier the checkout process on your eCommerce website, the less the abandoned carts it will experience. It helps your business therefore to ensure your checkout process is seamless. If not, it will experience very high bounce rates and abandoned carts. It takes a lot of convincing to get your prospects to the checkout page of your website. It is very costly therefore to lose a business at that point. To avoid that, make sure all actions and buttons are clearly visible on your eCommerce website and that all your site visitors know exactly what to do after they have added their preferred and chosen products to the cart. The payment options available to customers are very vital too. No customer wants to go through any unnecessary hassles to make a purchase. Once things are easy and smooth through the checkout process of your eCommerce website, you make more sales.

5. Use Re-targeting Messages/Ads

Nurturing leads and luring buyers is usually a very delicate process in eCommerce business. This is because as astonishingly low as about 2% of website visitors actually make a purchase on their first visit to an eCommerce site. Many visitors are at times aimless surfers who merely stumbled on your site. Others may simply be window-shopping on your site. Those more enterprising may come to your site with the aim of comparing your products and prices with those of your competitors. Some others may even want to make a purchase, change their minds along the checkout process for one reason or another and leave things half way. Getting this huge percentage of potential buyers to actually buy, requires some re-targeting marketing strategies. These strategies will enable you track and market more to persons who visit your website and fail to make a purchase. From your dashboard, you can discover the particular products such visitors were interested in, and then reach out to them with re-targeting messages/ads through their email addresses or any other forms of contacts. You can make specialized/personalized offers to them by giving them better deals and even discounts, guarantees and warranties to get them to change their minds. By doing this, chances are, they may feel better appreciated, a consequence of which they may change their minds, return and end up making a purchase from you.

Exciting New Program, Flexxity, is Here in SFI Tripleclicks

Here is what is new in SFI/Tripleclicks. We are extremely excited today to open the curtains on a big, shiny new addition to the Zing Network! We call it Flexxity and it's all about SERVICES--services that will be provided, by and large, by YOU, our affiliates!

Here's how we arrived at this new development...

Selling physical products will always be a part of what we do. But, of course, selling physical products requires shipping...and when you're an organization like SFI with a presence in over 200 countries, well, let's just say that, for many products, the combination of shipping, delivery times, Customs, etc. are very complex and very challenging to do in a way that fully satisfies buyers.

 

So several months ago we began building a new platform that would focus on SERVICES. We realized that, with services, "our affiliates could become the product." And with tens of thousands of new affiliates joining SFI every week, we are sitting on an opportunity to build one of the largest and most diverse service networks in the world!

Imagine being able to earn all the SVP you need each month by simply hiring your fellow SFI affiliates to inexpensively mow your lawn, groom your dog, do house cleaning, design your business cards, help you run an advertising campaign, and literally thousands of other services.

But that's only one side of it. The other side is, by becoming a service provider (SP) yourself in the Flexxity network, you'll be able to potentially add a whole new income stream! That is, you can be earning some great extra income by simply listing one or more skills that you (or someone in your family) already have! And, yes, we're going to do everything we can to make sure as many of your peers in SFI as possible become your customers (and visa versa)! More on this in a moment.

We also think Flexxity is very timely because of how the world changed in 2020. That is, we are in a new era now due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Millions of people worldwide now stress about the stability of their jobs (assuming they still have one). So having a "side hustle," as it's called, becomes very prudent to "stay afloat." Through Flexxity, we will be providing millions with a platform to monetize skills they have (or can develop), while committing as little or as much time to it as desired.

How It Works

Here's a basic overview of how Flexxity works...

Interested service providers register by filling out an online application form at Flexxity.com. If we approve their application, we process their subscription payment and we notify them that they now have a live listing and can start accepting orders and making money. We also give them immediate access to all Flexxity SP resources, and they can begin benefiting from the included corporate co-op advertising as well (more on this in a moment).

Persons interested in purchasing services browse the online database. They can make inquiries with individual providers for any project they want done. We make this super-easy by using an online quote system. The customer can submit free bid requests with any provider he/she chooses, which we then forward to the providers. Providers can now choose to reject or accept the project requests received. If the provider chooses to accept, the provider will confirm the price, date, time, etc. for the project (with messaging handled by us to protect each party's privacy) and the project can commence.

A key element of Flexxity is how we are handling payments. As a broadly global company, we wanted our new services platform to have great flexibility when it came to payments. Thus, providers can choose to accept payments DIRECTLY from customers! This means you can accept your local currency, work for barter, or use whatever terms that are acceptable to your customer. It also means that customers can feel protected because he/she typically won't submit payment until a project is completed to their satisfaction.

Once a project has been recorded as completed, we will invoice you the provider, and you will remit our share, 20% of the sale, to Carson Services, Inc. (you keep 80%). You can pay us using your SFI affiliate funds, Bitcoin, and/or multiple other forms (exact list of payment methods will be announced later). Once we've been paid, we will award the customer his/her due Rewardicals and notify him/her of same via an email alert.

More Reasons to be excited about Flexxity

Virtually everyone has a skill they could monetize (make money from). Flexxity provides the platform to do it! Becoming a Flexxity "flexpert" is quick, simple, and easy. Just sign up and you can be off and running within hours. Don't think you have a skill you could monetize? You might be quite surprised by how much value you have in skills and tools that you possess.

2. We really want to build a vibrant and robust "members buying from each other" culture here at SFI. Coming together as a community is very powerful! When you decide to work with your community members and peers, you move from being an individual to being part of a community where everyone helps each other. Thousands of our affiliates will get new "jobs" and be able to earn more money by providing services to their fellow affiliates, while at the same time rewarding buyers with valuable SVP and Rewardicals! Everybody wins. To this end, we will be making some very cool modifications to the SFI Affiliate Center that will allow everyone to easily connect with fellow providers. For example, look for an addition to the profile panel on all forum posts; if the person is a Flexxity provider, you'll see it denoted here and you'll have a link to view their services with a click. We'll also be introducing a new Flexxity daily tab shortly!

3. Unlike many kinds of products, services are often consumed over and over and over again (e.g. cutting hair, scooping snow, mowing lawns)...which can generate ample amounts of the best kind of income there is: residual income!

4. Because services are typically rendered locally, there will typically be no shipping or Customs issues to deal with.

5. Not everyone is capable of creating and managing a physical product business with all the challenges of securing quality products, shipping, etc....but almost everyone has some skill or ability (i.e. a service) that they could trade for money!

6. Joining SFI to make money is a great proposition (which is why MILLIONS have become SFI affiliates over the last 20+ years), but the fact is, the "how's" are confusing to many. 90%+ of our sign-ups eventually walk away or never really get started because they can't "connect the dots" and/or motivate themselves to "learn a whole new language" (how to sell our products online). Flexxity changes all that because it can be quickly understood, and the Flexxity platform provides virtually everything that's needed to operate your own service business. Also, many people are intimidated by the concept of leading/training a downline, especially if they're new to network marketing/e-commerce/internet marketing. With Flexxity, those "scary" things are eliminated; it's just "make some side money doing something you already know how to do (or can learn to do)." How many more new affiliates will become engaged in SFI when the Flexxity option is available to them? Is Flexxity a game-changer? We certainly think it will be!

7. CV is earned on every service job completed, creating more opportunities for Direct Commissions and Executive Pool override earnings. Soon, there can be hundreds, and then thousands, of new places to buy services and earn Rewardicals and SVP. That means potentially millions of dollars in new CV added to the SFI compensation pool!

8. Flexxity will become a great way to add workers and go-getters to your SFI affiliate team. That is, anyone who gets listed as a Flexxity SP will later be informed about SFI. And it makes total sense since they've already demonstrated they want to have their own money-making business. And by becoming a Team Leader in SFI, they can even make their participation in Flexxity FREE! All access fees for SPs are waived if you are an SFI Team Leader! YES, we just added another big incentive for all the affiliates in your group to become Team Leaders (and maintain that status every month)!

9. Rewardicals will play an important role with Flexxity. A standard allotment of Rewardicals will be earned by the customer on each sale (if you're an Flexxity SP, your customers will automatically receive a set amount of Rewardicals that we will oversee and deliver, with the cost coming out of our margin). However, so that Flexperts can draw additional attention to themselves if they want, we will also allow them to increase the amount of Rewardicals offered with their services--with the cost for this coming out of the SP's pocket. Note: Offering bonus Rewardicals so you can stand out from the competition is actually very inexpensive (just a few cents more). And with potentially thousands of service providers coming to Flexxity, Rewardical's stock will be substantially boosted because it means there will be thousands of additional places worldwide to earn Rewardicals!

10. Once an affiliate signs on as a service provider, they've got "skin in the game," something that is very important for keeping people engaged and active in SFI.

11 Flexxity will be synergistically integrated into SFI, and also with Rewardicals, Astro Auctions, Pricebenders, and Localvantia in multiple different ways--making each of these divisions more robust. And each of them will provide additional exposure of Flexxity to create growing numbers of sales for our Flexperts!

12. Recruiting for SFI, especially within your social circle, is often intimidating...but with Flexxity, you can simply be on the lookout for friends, family, and co-workers who have "salable" skills. And all you have to do is provide them with your affiliate link. No pressure, just engaging in "win/wins." Note: We'll provide your Flexxity referral link a little later after we've got a number of SPs signed up (you don't want to have your prospective referrals visit Flexxity.com right now and see an empty site).

13. We will be introducing a way for SPs to inexpensively promote themselves within the Flexxity.com search engine (e.g. "sponsored ads"). Targeted ads promoting one's services may also be made available for placement at the SFI Affiliate Center, within Eager Zebra games, Astro Auctions, and Pricebenders.

A GREAT NEW WAY TO EARN REWARDICALS!

For Flexxity to become a massive success, we'll need to attract thousands of quality service providers. And as an SFI affiliate, we're of course going to reward you for helping us populate Flexxity. So long as you maintain the minimum rank of Executive Affiliate (EA), for each Flexxity SP you personally refer, you're going to earn one Rewardical for every 10 your referred SPs distribute to their customers!

That's not all. Maintain the minimum rank of EA and you'll also earn the 1-to-10 Rewardical matches on any of your PSAs who become SPs, too! Likewise, for all your CSAs, you'll earn 1-to-25 matches! So be sure you're working with your team members to get them signed up as SPs, and then also help them establish and build their new service businesses.

PRICING

We will be offering four different payment plans for service providers:

1. The monthly rate (paid monthly) is just $5.97 ($.20/day)
2. The quarterly rate is $14.97 ($4.99 per month). Save 16% off the monthly rate!
3. The bi-annual rate (six months) is $24.97 ($4.16 per month). Save 30% off the monthly rate!
4. The annual rate is $39.97 (just $3.33/month, just $.11/day). Save 44% off the monthly rate!

All four plans provide full access to all Flexxity resources and includes the international co-op advertising perk.

OR BECOME A FLEXPERT FOR FREE...by simply maintaining the minimum rank of Team Leader in SFI! Yes, if you're a Team Leader, you can plug in to our amazing new program immediately and for zero monthly cost!

We're also adding Flexxity SP subscriptions to the Rewardical exchange. That is, later today (approximately noon CST), you can purchase quarterly subscriptions with Rewardicals you've earned and get started as an SP!

SERVICES FOR THE SERVICESTERS!

One of the areas we'd especially like our affiliates to cover is in providing services for those who've become SPs at Flexxity.

What do we mean by that? Yes, Flexxity will make it very easy for almost anyone to start their own profitable service business. But there can be a big difference between just doing something and doing something in the most optimized way possible. Here are some ways that a person can optimize and maximize their Flexxity business:

- By choosing the right category
- By incorporating a professionally-designed logo for their company
- By featuring a concise, well-written, benefit-laden, and error-free description of their services (i.e. great ad copy)
- By using great photos and/or images and/or illustrations
- By advertising their service business in various media
- By employing effective "guerrilla marketing" techniques

But most people may not have the experience or skills to do all these things, right? We know there are many, many of our affiliates that ARE quite skilled in these areas. If you're one of these affiliates, why not put yourself in the business of helping the hundreds and thousands of coming SPs at Flexxity?!

It's a great win/win/win; you'll make sales, you'll help your fellow SPs make sales, and you'll be helping make Flexxity a roaring international success! We're counting on you! And, pssst, if you're doing really good work and garnering great reviews, we might even include you in a special directory we'll be creating that every new Flexxity SP will be referred to!

Tip: Maybe YOU don't have these skills, but maybe you know a great copywriter, or someone who is skilled in advertising or designing logos or proofreading, for example. You can let them know that a great, new opportunity has just opened up at Flexxity and they should get listed. Not only might you be doing them a big favor, but you can also automatically earn 1 Rewardical for every 10 they distribute for referring them to Flexxity (i.e. you earn rewards every time they make a sale)! Note: Must maintain minimum Executive Affiliate (EA) rank to receive matched Rewardicals.

By the way, many of these same services are also needed by tens of thousands of affiliates who could grow their SFI business with better welcome letters, team newsletters, ads, logos, photos, illustrations, and more. And, of course, virtually all of these services can be provided digitally, worldwide. So there's a huge, new opportunity here for lending your assistance to "SFI Nation."

DID YOU KNOW?
The "gig economy" is growing rapidly around the world. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies are looking for freelance service providers (examples: graphic design, writing, translation, video editing, animation, music production, and much more) instead of permanent hires. One of the ways to get found by companies looking for freelancers? You guessed it--by getting listed on Flexxity! We even plan to add a special section to Flexxity so said companies can quickly and easily find those interested in such gigs.

READY TO GET STARTED?

To apply to become a Flexxity service provider, go to:

www.Flexxity.com/12177280/signup

Remember, it's FREE if you're an SFI Team Leader!

To hire a Flexpert for a project you need done, head over to:

www.Flexxity.com/12177280

Article Source: SFI Blog Forum

10 Vital Lessons on Ecommerce Marketing

If you run an ecommerce site, just pay attention to these lessons. They are mostly customer based and the persistent search for ways to improve on how to serve them better. For very huge ecommerce marketing platforms like Amazon, what drives their marketing efforts is their deep understanding of the customer and their relentless search for self-improvement. If you run an ecommerce site and you want to compete with giants like Amazon, study these lessons very carefully.

These here 10 lessons if faithfully applied can help any ecommerce site better serve its customers.

1. Seamless and Pain-free Transactions
 
Because of habitual constraints in online transactions, ecommerce by nature may engender a lot of customer constraints and pains. Shipping costs, damaged or missing products and return of unsatisfactory products are usually areas of concerns. You can mitigate some of these constraints by way of free shipping, free return-shipping of damaged and unsatisfactory products, money-back guarantees and convenience to drop-off returns at designated/convenient collection centres.


 
2. Know Your Customers Closely
 
To be able to deliver personalized service which many customers really like, you can get to know them deep enough by way of their behavioral data from your ecommerce site. This data is not too complicated to collect. With it, you can help to ease a customer’s shopping experience by way of suggestions and tips to help them make a buying decision seamlessly. That way, it is easy for you to position yourself to the customer as a sympathetic partner in his otherwise complicated shopping forays.

3. Leverage Your Customers to Get More Customers
 
“Word-of-mouth” remains a very powerful customer referral effort in aid of marketers. It usually comes from satisfied customers who are easily believed by other people. On your ecommerce platform, if you manage to make customer experiences unique and positive, such customers willingly and happily tell others. Before too long, the word gets around that you are the best there is in the business and many other people will be looking out to do business with you. The force multiplier from the “word-of-mouth” of your satisfied customers can do amazing things for your ecommerce business.

4. Allow Buyers a Wish-List Store

Habitually, many online shoppers do spend a lot of time researching products before making the decision to buy. By allowing them an onsite wish-list store, buyers can store in a list items they like, but are not yet ready to buy. That list simply means they have a deep interest in such items which maybe for lack of sufficient money or time not yet due to buy them, they are earmarked for purchase at a later date. Such list usually gives them the impetus to return to your site to do business at some later dates of their choosing instead of going elsewhere to shop.

5. Have a Membership Rewards Program in Place

Membership rewards have many variants such as paid subscription for prime membership, free and priority shipping or access to special discounted products. It is a good way to retain loyal customers. Rewards programs may cost the ecommerce site some money which is recoverable from the increased patronage from Prime members. It has been established that Prime members on average usually spend much more shopping than non-Prime members. That is a win-win situation for all parties.


 
6. Make Testing and Innovation a Priority

Out there on the internet, the competition is always very fierce for ecommerce marketers. The reason you must be really proactive if you want to remain relevant in ecommerce business. You must always think ahead, innovate and stay at least one step ahead your competitors. That is proactive competition which is a credible survival strategy in ecommerce business.

7. Use Mixed Personalized Recommendations

Every customer likes to feel important. Nothing boosts that feeling more than the ecommerce platform taking personalized interest in serving its customers. With customer behavioral and purchases data at the disposal of the ecommerce site, it is easy to make targeted recommendations to customers to help their buying decisions. You can make personalized recommendations not only based on recent purchases, but also for your next buy including a variety. This variety usually derives from your wish list, past browsing sessions, or recent buys encapsulated in your behavioral data. The ecommerce site can also entice you by showing you other products that could go with your past purchases or some new pieces in the same range you like to buy. That way, a customer may end up at times buying more than she earlier intended.

8. Simplify Regular Repeat Buys for Customers

If you want to retain customer delight and loyalty you must find ways to simplify repeat buys. Because of the many easily exhaustible household items needed month after month, you can encourage customers to have “standing orders” for some purchases. This gives these customers the advantage of buying these products at discounted prices and having them automatically delivered up at given times of the month without them having to make any fresh orders. That way, such customers don’t necessarily have to remember to stock up on such regular items. That is one great value-added service to customers and guaranteed purchases from the ecommerce marketer. 


 
9. Give Customers Wider Products’ Insights

Characteristically, one of the major drawbacks of buying online is that we cannot touch, feel, turn, or hold products. We can only see virtual images of such products. This limitation tends to slow down buying decisions. Many ecommerce sites are now providing for better and more detailed examination of products by using near 3-D images, image guidelines to sellers on close-ups and image insets by way of more robust literature and brochures which are very vivid in virtual space. All these tend to make online buying more distrust-free.

10. Deploy User Reviews Very Generously

There is research evidence that about 85% of online customers trust online reviews of peers. This is the reason why many people usually rely on the opinions of their peers and even social media influencers before making their buying decisions. Many marketers now regard customer testimonials as hugely important for any online marketing business. For effects, these testimonials are usually genuine and truthful and are neither coerced nor induced. The reason they’re easily believable. When these testimonials are made available right below each product on display for sale, they help to make customer buying decisions faster.