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8 Top Tips for eCommerce Success

If you want to succeed in eCommerce business, you must listen to experts. Carefully follow what they do and how they do it. Many of these ex...

Monday, October 03, 2022

How Marketing Automation Strategies Help Your Online Business to Grow

E-commerce business owner working on a computer, using a credit card and with a smartphone on the table.
Most eCommerce business owners always seek to grow their businesses rapidly. What readily appeals to such people is marketing automation. Marketing automation is simply a way of outsourcing or delegating time-consuming, complex, or repetitive online business tasks to one or more software. Doing this helps to free up valuable time and resources for the business owner to spend on other business tasks. Marketing automation strategy simply means getting more marketing done with less time and resources. If you want to grow your online business fast enough, here is how marketing automation strategies can help you out.

 

Engage Artificial Intelligence (AI) in your Blogging

Blogging remains the most valuable content marketing strategy available to eCommerce business owners. To craft and post high quality and informative content consistently takes quite some time and resources. So, automation comes very handy to help out. As most bloggers very well know, there are many components to blog writing. Some of these components such as pre- and post- tasks do not really involve actual writing. Pre- tasks involve researching content, keyword research, and creating outlines while post- tasks include editing, proofreading and so on. If you want to automate blog post writing, you can decide which part you can do manually yourself and which parts to outsource to AI. Depending on your inclination, you can even use AI to write an entire blog, optimize your blog/social media posts, and improve the quality of your blog posts. With the help of blogging software like Grammarly, Jasper and Crayon, you can turn out more high quality blogs at a faster pace to help grow your business.

Auto-Scheduling of your Social Media Posts

One very important component of social media marketing is by posting content regularly. Doing so is not really that complicated but it is quite tedious due to its repetitiveness. That is where AI automation becomes quite relevant. You can use smart software to produce downloadable analytics reports that help you gauge how your posts are doing, plan your social media posts with a free marketing calendar and even set times for auto-publishing on any social media platform. Smart tools like Socialpilot, CoSchedule and Later come in very handy if you want to automate your social media posts. If you automate your social media posts, you get to post more high quality content at a faster pace to help grow your business.

Auto-Nurture your Leads

To nurture your leads effectively, you must first create a buyer persona. Next step is store highly valuable information about customer profiles in a CRM system and finally to repeatedly send out targeted content and follow-ups to these profiles. If you automate your lead scoring process, you can effectively nurture the leads that you have so far identified as ideal leads. This nurturing involves sending to interested people valuable and interesting content consistently with a view to converting the leads into loyal customers. This process may appear complicated but with the use of a smart software like EngageBay, things can become more easy going and with great results for your business.

Automate your Lead Scoring

A marketing strategy like lead scoring is helpful to businesses when they want to rate their leads or customers. Lead scoring helps eCommerce business owners to form various segments of customers depending on the level of interest they show in the business, their engagement, and other aspects of customer behavior. After this, they can then nurture these leads if they turn out to be worth spending more time and resources on. With the use of marketing tools like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot Marketing Hub which have in-built lead scoring features, you can automate your lead scoring process for faster and better results. These tools are capable of automating lead scoring by using software that automatically decides what content to send which customer based on their score or their position in the sales funnel. Now that can be really great for the rapid growth of your business.



Automate your Email Marketing List

For quite a while now, eCommerce marketers are relying heavily in email automation to boost their marketing campaigns. Instead of the tedious process of manually sending emails to individual customers, or even having a manually created mailing list, automation has become a great way to go. The best way to automate your email marketing process is to have email integration with dedicated software like MailChimp. This tool not only allows you to send  bulk emails, it also automatically helps out with other vital marketing information like reminding online shoppers about abandoned carts, engaging lost customers again and cross-selling products. The smart tool also automatically adds customers who demonstrate a deeper interest in your emails to a specific mailing list. This singular service is of vital importance to drastically reduce the chances of your emails ending up in spam folders. Even if you find MailChimp not too cool a smart tool to use, you can try PitchBox tool. This tool has an added advantage of helping to create email marketing campaigns and doing link-building
outreach to improve your website SEO. That means more organic traffic to your eCommerce website that can help grow your business.

Wrapping Up

Marketing automating strategy is a practical way of redoubling your efforts in your eCommerce business. If you effectively use AI tools to handle some of your marketing operations, things get progressively better. The foregoing strategies are practical ways to place some of your marketing operations literally in the hands of smart online tools. Doing so is one decision you can never regret taking if and when you see your eCommerce business growing fast mostly because of automation.

Sunday, October 02, 2022

Tips to Build an Effective SEO Strategy on Low Budget

Google SEO on a magnifting glass.
If you own an online business, your online marketing strategy is not complete without search engine optimization (SEO). This is irrespective of the size of the business. Without utilizing SEO on your website, it will be difficult for your business to benefit from organic traffic. As more and more people are taking their businesses online, it is becoming customary for a vast majority of people who can use the internet to do business online. Most of these people now use the internet to search and find information and even connect with others easily, no matter where they are on the globe. Search engines make these connections possible on the internet. When you type in a search query on Google for instance, it throws up results related to the keywords in your search query. SEO on your website is responsible for arranging and presenting relevant keywords that guide Google to rank the content on your website for the benefit of searchers. The higher Google ranks your website on its SERPs, the more organic traffic it sends to the website. So, if you’re doing business online, having your website ranked highly by Google means a lot as it guarantees the website huge organic traffic. Working to improve SEO on your business website can be a huge drain on your time and finances but it is worth the while in the long term. If however your business in very low on marketing budget, these here tips can help you to improve your website SEO.



Website On-Page Optimization

The content on your website is a major marketing element for any online business. Therefore, if you want to get the best results from your own website content, be sure the content is properly optimized. SEO is the technique that lets search engines easily read and understand what’s on the content and what it is about. If search engines understand what’s on your content, it helps them to easily index and rank the content on their SERPs. As a business owner, if search engines rank your website over and above your competition, it puts your business in a clear advantage to receive more organic traffic from search engines. A good on-page optimization helps to give your business that vital advantage. On-page optimization involves adding key elements such as meta descriptions and alternative text and using the right keywords on your content. These help the content to be discovered easily and ranked higher in the SERPs of search engines. Granted SEO is a bit technical in nature, so if you don’t have the technical knowledge, you can consider hiring a professional SEO expert to help improve SEO on your business website. It is worth the while in the long term.

High Quality Content

Your website content is a very essential part of SEO. The higher the quality of the content the better for the website’s SEO. Without high quality content, you cannot effectively do content marketing on your website.  This is because high quality content is liked more and shared more by users in different online communities. Most people like value, the reason they relate more with content that has value to them directly or indirectly. So, if you want your site to gain more authority, you must invest in quality to consistently create unique and useful content for its users. You can package unique quality content in form of videos and photos/images to make your website really attractive to users. Such content if really attractive can make your website visitors to stay longer on your site and possibly do business with you.
 
Diligent Keywords Research

There’s really no need to be an SEO expert or hire one when it comes to small businesses. Instead, learn the basic and key points that you need to know. For instance, doing proper keyword research can help your website rank higher and boost traffic as you can target specific keywords with high search volume. You can use Google Trends to check which keywords are popular at any moment. The tool also gives you a prediction of whether the keyword may be relevant in the future. A diligent research on long and short-tail keywords and phrases will help you to know exactly which keywords can directly benefit your business and give it some measure of advantage over competitors.

Social Media Engagement/Following

One other great way to improve SEO on your website is to ensure the accounts you have are on the most popular social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes. These accounts should have a large audience/following. If you have a large audience/following on these platforms, many more people will visit your profile as a result. What they see there helps them to get better engaged with your profile more regularly. This engagement gives very positive online value to your business. If you deliberately build large audiences/following over your social media sites, you are likely to get natural backlinks to your business website. Google loves backlinks and relies on them as essential elements to rank your website.

Website Loading Speed

The user-friendliness of your website is helpful for its SEO. The loading speed of your website is one of the essential elements of the website that makes it user-friendly. Fast-loading sites gain more authenticity because they clearly show that the website owner really cares for visitors’ time and convenience. The average internet user is notoriously always in a hurry. You risk losing good business if your website is too slow to open. Impatient website users can quickly move to your competitors if they find your website too slow to open. When users wait too long before your site opens, they might get impatient with your site and quickly move on without even bothering to read the content on the website. If your website is slow to open, Google’s search algorithm takes note and it affects your ranking on Google SERPs.



Get On Social Media

Most brands now use social media not only to engage their customers better but also for marketing purposes. It costs you practically nothing to get your business on social media since most social media accounts are free. Therefore, having your business on some of the most popular social media sites is good for your SEO. This is because doing so helps to make your site visible to audiences who are already active on the internet and even to those who are not yet online or have no idea what SEO is about. Therefore, having your business on social media can help your business with a higher chance of reaching out to more potential customers. That gives the business more business opportunities and better ROI.

Carefully Build Backlinks

Google always takes backlinks into account when ranking websites. If such backlinks are coming from a reputable site, so much the better for your ranking. Numerically, the more quality backlinks you have, the higher your chances of ranking better on Google. A backlink coming from a reputable site is something that Google loves to see. Such backlinks automatically boost your ranking because Google really trusts other sites making their opinions about your website positive. Quality backlinks pointing to your website help to give the website some advantage when competing with other businesses in the same business as yours. Technically, you can deliberately build backlinks manually but if you are unable to, you can then think of hiring professionals to help you out.

Last Line

Even if you run a small business online and at very low marketing budget, it is still feasible for you to take advantage of SEO strategy. Because of the huge advantage your business will derive from SEO, low funding is not sufficient to dissuade you from having the right SEO on your website. From the foregoing tips, you’ll discover that you can build an effective SEO on your website even with very low marketing budget. Once you are able to consistently craft high quality content and optimize it on-page, get the business on social media, build a huge following for the business together with high-quality backlinks, you are good to go. You can get all these done at very low cost and still have a good SEO strategy on your website.