Product marketing is more competitive than ever with an increased focus on e-commerce and online purchases. Let’s take a quick look at some important tips to grow your e-commerce sales!
Who is your target audience?
You absolutely need to know the type of customer that buys from you as that gives you great insight into how to reach more people like them, ranging from the type of content you make to how you buy paid media.
Repeat Customers are often over 50% of total sales!
The majority of businesses generate a significant portion of their revenue from repeat customers. As you grow and try new marketing strategies, it’s important to not forget your prior customers. Every effort should be made to keep them buying from you.
Create email marketing campaigns sending prior customers special offers, reminding them of sales events, etc. You want them to remember you!
Customer service is also so important for this reason, a bad experience will quickly erase any notion that a customer turns into a repeat customer.
Entice customers to leave reviews
Having a large number of positive reviews is a great way to build your brand and drive more customers to try what you offer.
There are a bunch of ways that you can prompt customers to leave a review depending on how your sales process works and the type of communication you’ve had with the customer. For eCommerce companies, follow-up emails are a common approach. If you’ve had in-person communication or phone calls, a follow-up or mention of review at the time of purchase is a good strategy as well.
Plan out Sales Offers
Build out a tentative year-long calendar of the different offers and special sales events you will have at different points throughout the year. While you need to be flexible, and not hesitate to alter the plan as you get data on what’s working and what’s not, having a tentative sales plan is a good way to keep up with holidays and allows you to base marketing content off the offers.
It’s important to note that cross-shopping and brand loyalty have dropped as shoppers become savvier and savvier. This means that your offers need to be good. We’ve all gotten those “sales event” emails, then you look through the dealers and they are all mediocre. This is a major turnoff and makes you much less likely to pay attention to future sales events. When you have sales specials, you need to provide your audience with offers that are actually compelling! This way in the future, they’ll know your emails mean business!
Diversify Marketing Channels
Make a list of the marketing channels and social media platforms you are actively using, then make another list of the marketing channels that might potentially reach customers similar to your current customers or that might let you test the waters of diversifying your customer profile.
While most businesses get the majority of their business from 2-3 marketing channels, and those that are working well shouldn’t be diminished, but it is important to be constantly trying new marketing channels. When you try new channels or types of content etc, don’t put pressure on the campaign to be successful, just treat it as an experiment. If it works great, but if not, well now you know. What generally happens is that a marketing channel you wouldn’t think would work, ends up being successful. Different marketing channels will also reach different types of audiences and new groups of people which can be a powerful tool to increasing your sales by simply increasing the audience you have.
Ad Creative
What type of posts are you making on social media and paid marketing channels like Adwords, Facebook ads, etc? They need to look good! If a potential customer sees your post or ads and they look substantially less professional than a competitor, you can bet the customer will become skeptical of your offering.
We’ve worked with a lot of clients to integrate video ads into their paid and social campaigns, as a replacement or complement to static ads. Video ads always have a CTR rate of 50-250% more than static ads as they are just more visually interesting and capture viewers’ attention better.
Product Photography
Improving your product page listing is a major priority for small and large sellers regardless of if you are selling on Amazon or your own website. The better the photos, text, and layout, the more likely you’ll convert viewers to the page.
We always recommend working with professional photographers to get very high-quality listing images for your products. These product photos can also be used on other social media posts and website pages, thus the cost of the product photography is spread out over multiple use cases.
Product explainer videos and product overview videos are powerful tools to keep visitors more engaged with your on-page content and show off your products in a visually interesting way.
Linking reviews or unboxing videos from customers on your product listing page is a powerful tool as well as it alleviates buying concerns ASDASDASDASDASD
Easy Returns
As eCommerce has risen significantly in popularity over the last several years, particularly following the pandemic, returns have become a major topic for online retailers.
While returns are frustrating, expensive, and time-consuming to deal with from the seller’s side, it’s extremely important you make returns as hassle-free as possible for customers. Figures range from 10-25% of all items ordered online are returned, and while handling all these returns is costly, it also will increase your sales and make new customers less skeptical about buying from you. If a customer does have a return, they are more likely to buy from you again if the return process experience was a good one.
It’s important to note that you need to think through how you will handle the physical act of shipping returns back then what to do with them. You without question need a written and detailed return process both internally and posted on your storefront for customers to understand.
From an internal perspective, having a solid planned-out return policy is important as it can help to reduce the costs of returns.
How to drive email signups
Look at any website from Nike, to Ralph Lauren, to JC Penny’s, they all, without question, have a method for capturing email addresses and encouraging you to create an account or customer profile. Often they will entice you to signup for an email by offering a signup coupon code that could be free shipping or 5-10% off your first order.
There’s a reason nearly every retailer does this, and it’s simple – it works. You should implement something similar, building a large email list is great for sending out special offers and other marketing materials.
Even for small web stores with a limited budget, building a way to capture emails is quick with a number of great WordPress plugins and most eCommerce-focused storefronts like Shopify have this functionality built-in.
Efficiently using those emails is quick and easy with email automation software like Mailchimp or their competitors. This takes all the time-consuming legwork out of sending offers, special deals, etc. Not only does it provide easy to build templates for different types of emails, but you can also track which types of emails are opened and read, how often your links are clicked, and provides for audience segmentation.
Audience Segmentation
Not all your customers are the same, whether in their preference of the products they buy related to age, gender, location, etc. Differentiating between repeat customers, newly signed up website visitors, or prior customers that have stopped opening your emails or haven’t bought from you in over 12 months.
Segmenting your audience into multiple ad groups allows you to send targeted emails and marketing offers to specific portions of your audience thus providing more relevant messaging to them which will increase the effectiveness and ROI of your campaigns.
Marketing automation software is an important tool for keeping this process manageable and efficient. While it seems daunting at first planning different emails or content for different portions of your audience, once you get used to whichever email/marketing automation software you pick, it’ll pretty quickly become a nonissue.
Want more effective ads? Want to sell more?
Volan Media is a top Knoxville video production agency specializing in broadcast production as well as digital video and social media ads. For top Knoxville trade show video, social media video ads, digital video ads get in touch!
