Smart Digital Marketing Moves to Boost Your E-Commerce Store

It is smart digital marketing to ensure your e-commerce store is always improving. Do not be complacent even if things appear to be going smoothly for the store. There are smart digital marketing steps you can always take to ensure the store continues to improve. Since the internet has fundamentally changed the way consumers shop, positioning your e-commerce store for better patronage is a great way to take advantage of this change in consumer behavior. Going forward, there are clear predictions that more and more people will be taking the e-commerce approach in doing business. That simply means more and stiffer competition. In this kind of scenario, there are practical steps you can take now to really position your e-commerce store to do better business online. Here are some of these steps:

Build a Memorable Brand: Yes a great brand can hardly escape the notice of consumers. You must make sure to have a brand that people really know and easily remember. Since the e-commerce space is inevitably crowded, your e-commerce store needs to stand out on more than just price or frictionless checkout. A great brand helps it to stand out. You must therefore consciously build a brand that is memorable enough to draw people to care about your store. That is the kind of brand that helps lower overall customer acquisition costs and increases lifetime value.
 
Use Content Marketing to Build Authority: In digital marketing, content is king. You must make sure to routinely craft highly valuable content that you can market multichannel to build authority for your store. It is smart digital marketing move to market such content through social media, expert and authoritative blogs, marketing and educational videos and vivid graphics. These help to position your e-commerce store as a trusted authority. Good content marketing ultimately helps the store to pull in organic traffic, build customer loyalty and engagement.

Research Your Audience to Personalize Content: Another smart digital marketing move that can benefit your e-commerce store is to deeply understand your target customers. Knowing your customers well enough helps you to tailor your marketing strategies better. You must endeavor to take diligent steps to research your market, analyze data and create clear buyer personas. Next is to carefully use the insights from your buyer personas to craft personalized content and offers that resonate with each segment’s needs. This helps you to effectively target the right audiences with relevant messaging that help to improve engagement, conversions and loyalty.

Leverage User-Generated Content, UGC: You can leverage user-generated content (UGC) across marketing channels. What really matters is UGC like customer reviews, photos and social media posts. Good UGC helps to build trust and authenticity with potential customers. When people see actual consumers using your products real time, it is more persuasive than traditional advertising. Good UGC helps your store to create a sense of community and social proof that drives sales and brand loyalty.

 
Use Email Marketing Effectively: Email marketing has been around for a while but it is still a cost-effective marketing strategy of choice for most digital marketers. It is the only tried-tested-and-true digital marketing method your brand can truly control. If you use email, it is you who decide exactly what messages your chosen audience gets to see and what CTA you want to prompt. Significantly, email is far more predictable than other algorithm-driven digital marketing methods out there online because email really works and works well to marketers’ expectations.
 
Re-Engage Your Existing Customers: It is by far cheaper to service your existing customers than to source new ones. You must therefore focus less on gaining new audiences and more on servicing your existing customers. You can take deliberate steps to re-engage your existing customers if you want to do more business. Take steps to showcase how much you value your loyal customers. This you can do by highlighting user-generated content UGC, feedback and engagement. This info can be re-shared both within and outside your immediate digital community to help you re-engage your existing customers.

Use a Familiar Tone in Texts to Customers: What helps your brand to quickly build authority is the unique way you communicate about the brand. This is what consumers easily remember. So, if you if you use SMS to connect with customers, you must avoid impersonal and common transactional texts in the SMS messages. For your SMS to be effective, it requires a familiar tone, a unique voice and value. This helps to build brand affinity and humanizes brands, making them unique enough to easily stand out among the competition.
 
Focus on Search Engine Visibility: For marketing purposes, it is hugely important for e-commerce businesses to enhance their user experience and search engine visibility. You can therefore leverage SEO for product listings in your e-commerce store. This you can do by improving navigation and using relevant keywords to make it easier for your customers to find products listed in your store. That way, you can directly increase organic traffic, engagement and conversion rates in your store. This ultimately helps to boost sales in the store. 

10 Practical Steps to Set Up a Viable E-commerce Store

As most digital marketing experts will readily agree, it’s important to have a comprehensive e-commerce solution if you want to sell everywhere with ease. You’ll need to be able to sell online, in person and across multiple channels, if you want your e-commerce business to succeed. What matters the most however is to ensure your customers always have a seamless experience with your e-commerce website. Here’s how you can set up a website to achieve this business goal.

1. Design and Create your Online Storefront

For a good website design, you can rely on reputable website builders like Shopify, WordPress or Wix. Since your website design is expected to play a crucial role in attracting and retaining customers, you’ll need to work with a website builder that’ll make it easy for you to design, publish, manage your shop and handle all the in-between tasks on one platform without the need to integrate other services. Luckily, many website builders always offer a variety of e-commerce templates to choose from if you want to build your own website. If however you do not have the expertise to build a website all by yourself, you can always hire the services of professional webmasters to help you out. These professionals will build for you a perfect e-commerce website that meets your business needs.

2. Create Products and Product Options

Once your website design is in place, you can then launch your storefront. Next is to start adding the products you are selling to the store. At this point, the choice is yours whether to sell physical products (assorted goods) or digital products (e-books, software or image files). Make sure your website is flexible enough to allow customers navigate and search for whatever products they want without undue hindrances.

3. Use Categories to Organize

If you decide to sell multiple products, do not ignore grouping them by categories as a way of organizing them. Always group similar products into categories to make things easy for your customers. Doing so allows your customers to browse related items together. It allows them to easily search and filter through what they are looking for before making their choices. It is advisable however to always display categories on separate pages making sure to link to other related categories elsewhere on your website.

4. Optimize Product Pages

After deciding which products to sell and categorizing the products, the next thing you need to do is to take technical steps to make it easy for your audience to find, read about and see your products online. That’s optimization. You get it done by using high-quality images and or videos that vividly showcase your products. Make very clear and compelling descriptions that highlight the benefits of the products. Suggest related products that buyers can add to their cart to increase sales before they check out. For social proof, try to display customer reviews and testimonials that attest to the quality of your products. Do not fail to provide general and contact information on the page. Such vital info as your email address, location, language and your acceptable currency is very important. It's also a good idea to have a contact page and/or phone number, social media handles any other relevant contact information on your website for additional questions or customer concerns.

5. Enable Site Settings

You must enable site settings on your website to ensure the site functions smoothly to expectations. Set up clear roles and permissions, privacy setting, disclaimer notices and security SSL certificate to encrypt data transmitted between your site and its visitors. All these are necessary to protect and safeguard your business and secure your customers transactions. SSL certification ensures sensitive information such as credit card details are protected. This helps to boost customer confidence and significantly improves your site's SEO ranking.

6. Products Shipping and Delivery Options

You cannot run a successful e-commerce shop without having in place reliable ways to get your products to customers in a timely and cost-effective manner. You must therefore decide on your shipping and delivery methods very quickly. If you cannot safely deliver products to customers, it means you are not selling. You can decide to deliver your products by hand, through local and international shipping, courier services or even have the customers pick up the products themselves from your shop.

7. Determine Online Payment Option

To make money, your products must be paid for by shoppers. You must therefore clearly determine how they’ll pay for your products in the payment methods and preferred currency of your choice. It is advisable to set up secure payment gateways so that customers can pay seamlessly and with multiple payment options. Many platforms support various payment methods, including credit cards, PayPal and more. You can even set up info for acceptable bank wire transfers on your website.

8. Optimize for Search Engines

For your products to be easily found online by way of searches, you must take quality time to optimize your product pages and even other pages on your online shop. This is for Search Engine Optimization, SEO purposes. With a good SEO on your pages, when someone searches for a specific product or type of store on a search engine, your site/product pages will be the ones that search engines come up with. This means your website ranks high in the SERPs of search engines and it thus benefits from good organic traffic. You can always take advantage of the in-house SEO tools in your website hosting platform or social media platforms to have a good SEO in place in your shop. If you are unable to do it yourself, you can hire the services of an SEO specialist directly through your site to get it done.

9. Vigorously Promote Your Store

Even though SEO may organically lead customers to your store, you must still explore all other avenues to vigorously promote the store online. Explore every available means to raise awareness online for your shop. These include email marketing, social media marketing, and car stickers, branded apparels, token gift items and so on.  What really matters however is to have an idea where your audience is and to get your marketing messages to them where they are. If you choose to use social media marketing, try to leverage the platforms to widely share product updates, promotions and behind-the-scenes content. It is a great idea as well if you insert social icons onto your site to help visitors share your products with their own networks. If you have the resources, you can consider paid advertising by way Google Ads or social media paid ads to give your products and website a very wide boost.

10. Monitor and Improve

The only way to gauge how well your online shop is doing is by way of regular analytics data and monitoring. You can take advantage of many online tools to gauge the performance of your online store. If you use analytics tools, you can easily track visitor behavior, conversion rates and popular products. Insights from such data can help you to determine whether you need to add, improve or remove any products from your website that aren’t selling well. In addition, if you listen to customer feedback, you can also rely on the info to make necessary improvements on your website. It is a great marketing idea therefore to encourage visitors to your website to write reviews on your products at will. You may even choose to induce such reviews by offering a discount if customers submit a testimonial on a product they purchased, used and liked.