Ecommerce

13 Powerful Ecommerce Marketing Strategies to Increase Your Revenue

Rahmi Ozcan, London, UK

Ecommerce is getting more profitable today. This year alone, there are over 1.9 billion digital buyers across the world. Therefore, estimates show that ecommerce sales would contribute over 14% of global retail sales for 2019

With this lucrativeness, you would expect that the competition in the ecommerce industry will get stronger. There are about 12-24 million ecommerce stores already, and this will even increase.

Therefore, amidst the enormous number of ecommerce stores, how do you beat the competition and raise your revenue? 

We will be exploring some powerful ecommerce marketing strategies to increase sales and boost the earnings from your online store.

1. Make Sure You Are Using Good Shopping Carts

 

For an ecommerce store, the importance of shopping carts can’t be overemphasised. Basically, these specialised carts are built to display your products to your prospective buyers. You will agree that the elegance and functionality of these shopping carts will significantly influence the buying decision of your website visitors. 

With the right shopping carts, your buyers can easily select the goods they want to buy and also have a precise idea of the dimensions and other specifications. 

The types of BigCommerce, Shopify, and WooCommerce place a considerable emphasis on their shopping carts because they directly affect sales.

You need efficient and attractive shopping carts as much as your customers do. The right shopping cart software will help you with the enhanced organisation of your transactions so that bookkeeping becomes concise and accurate. With excellent shopping cart solutions, you wouldn’t have much trouble managing the shop during peak hours. 

More importantly, a good shopping cart software solution improves your inventory tracking, coupon and wish list management as well as back-end tracking. This way, your portal is more flexible with an optimal functionality that attracts more online shoppers. 

Your customers love good shopping carts, too. It makes it easier for them to pay for the stock they buy while improving the overall navigation of your ecommerce store. This software solution makes your store more usable, ultimately enhancing the customer experience. Who doesn’t want happy customers? Don’t you?

 

2. Create Fresh Content for Your Brand 

Many ecommerce owners fall to the misconception that selling well is about selling at the lowest price prices or selling the best quality. They neglect the fundamental importance of content to the success of their ecommerce store. Yes, customers want great products at fantastic prices. However, it is original and compelling content that pulls them in most times. 

All the content you create for your ecommerce business should delight your customers (and potential customers). Ask yourself what sort of content they’d be most pleased to view when scrolling through their feeds. 

The time is gone when you use dull and lifeless content. Customers want entertaining user-oriented content that engages them – content that is informational and tells a great story which resonates with your audience. 

The right content on your product pages coordinated with your social media strengthens the connection you have with buyers. This strategy is the secret of customer retention, i.e. returning buyers. More interestingly, your visibility on search engines is directly connected to your content. This part brings us to SEO for your ecommerce store.

3. Invest in SEO of Your Store

Without good content, Google will most likely ignore your store, preferably displaying your rivals in the search results of your prospective buyers. Optimising your content with rich keywords that are relevant for your niche will improve the ranking of your ecommerce store. 

It is not all about SEO either. Having compelling and original content convinces your audience that you are an industry thought leader and well versed in your niche. This is the type of reputation that brings in referrals. You would be excited to learn that deploying the right content strategy for your store is far cheaper than the likes of pay-per-click ads, yet giving you impressive results long term.

 
Every successful SEO strategy has to entail linkbuilding. In the video below by SEO link builder Julian Goldie, you’ll find 5 top Ecommerce link building hacks, that generated sales worth thousands of US Dollars for his clients.

4. Optimise High-Impact Pages

Talking more about the visibility of your ecommerce store on search engines, you have to work on the optimisation of your store pages. One effective way to go about this is by focusing on the optimisation of high-impact pages. These pages are those your visitors are more likely to spend time on or see more frequently.

These pages are your typical selling point that largely influences how long your visitors will spend on your ecommerce shop or how well they will buy. Such pages include the likes of your product page, category pages, the home page, trending pages, and your blog posts. How can you achieve this?

“Mobile Ecommerce is growing with global sales tripling over the past four years from just under $1 trillion in 2016 to almost $3 trillion in 2020.”

5. Maximise The Right Keywords for Optimisation

Fundamentally, you will have to pick out the right target keywords. Which keywords are most particular to your niche and the goods you are selling? Bear in mind that these keywords must have high search volume. Think about the keywords your prospective buyer is most likely typing into the search bar when he or she wants to buy products online. 

You also have to consider the keyword difficulty. This concept signifies how easy – or difficult – it would be to rank for those keywords, especially if you are a smaller business. 

Your best shot as a small business would be optimising your keywords to your locality. This way, within a particular geography, your ecommerce store will be appearing more prevalently in searches. Great, now you have identified your keywords. 

These keywords will then be strategically inserted into the meta content of such high-impact pages. The keyword must blend in contextually with your descriptions. In this manner, it is relevant and easier for search engines to catch. Let us add here, that long-tail keywords are more effective in ranking your store compared to single-word keywords. The former is more specific and easily identifiable by the likes of Google and Bing.

6. Go for Depth When Optimising Your Product Pages

To increase sales for your products in your ecommerce store, you’ll have to optimise your product pages. It is helpful if you created specific and original product descriptions highly relevant to what you are selling. Strive for more detailed descriptions of your products, and make sure to give your visitors valuable specifics like the colour of the product, the size, the features and even frequently asked questions.

You can also add customer reviews to increase the trust in your online shop. Positive reviews affect the purchasing decisions of new buyers and eventually boost your sales. Big ecommerce players like Amazon build trust and credibility by displaying multiple reviews for each product.

 

The good thing about reviews aside from enhancing the depth of your content is that it increases the dwell time of your ecommerce store. Your website visitors spend more time on your ecommerce store, quickly reducing your bounce rates. The average time spent on your website tells search engines if your visitors like what they see on your store or not. The bounce rate and dwell time directly affects your store’s search engine ranking. Hence displaying reviews can be beneficial for the optimisation of your product pages. 

7. Adopt Mobile-Friendly Designs

It is anticipated that over 67% of digital purchases in 2019 will be made from a mobile device. How interesting is this? The reality is that your sales will suffer if your ecommerce store is not optimised for mobile users. It is only natural that your bounce rate will increase if it takes longer for your page to load on a mobile device.

The importance of fast loading pages and more interactive user-oriented designs for ecommerce stores is one of the critical factors for success. With a fast loading ecommerce website, it is easier for your store to rank higher on Google mobile searches. Ideally, your store shouldn’t take more than a second to load. Mobile usage and optimisation in 2019 are one of the most significant factors for SEO. Here you can find out if your website is mobile-friendly.

8. Use The Right Design for User Experience (UX)

Bear in mind that Flash is not ideal for your website as it will disrupt the readability of your content on mobile searches, especially breaking the results on mobile search ranking.

In all, the UX should be fast, simple, and fluid. The interaction of your UX shouldn’t disrupt the mobile experience of your buyers. On a mobile device, your visitors should easily navigate your shop with quick and easy clicks and swipes. It would be harmful if your visitors need to zoom in when using a mobile device repeatedly. Therefore, make sure your CTA (call to action) buttons are accurate just like your font size.

9. Run Google Shopping Ads

Many ecommerce businesses today are enjoying great success from Google Shopping ads. Since their beginning in 2010, these ads have steadily overhauled ecommerce marketing. Compared to the regular PPC Google search ads, Google shopping ads come top for their cost-effectiveness. Would you be surprised to learn that Google Shopping ads accounted for 76.4% of retail search ad spending in 2018? 

These ads can be very powerful and help you make your products more visible on Google. These ads tell Google what time your product listing ads should be displayed. The search pages you appear on are determined by your bids, ecommerce website content as well as your feeds. 

By the time you consistently appear at the top of search engine result pages, sales will increase significantly. It is more about the keywords here; you don’t need to have a massive reputation in your niche or even have familiarity with your prospective buyers. 

Statistically, Google shopping ads will give you 26% more conversions than traditional search ads. Also compared to these text ads, Google shopping ads boast a 23% lower cost-per-click. 

10. Run Dynamic Retargeting Campaigns on YouTube and Google Display

 

If you are not getting enough results from your search campaigns, it may be time to try dynamic search ads. Your ecommerce website’s content largely determines the display of these ads. Google will have to crawl your ecommerce site and identify the search terms from the content of your store. 

This way, there is the dynamic generation of the landing page and the headline to correspond with the search term. Therefore, you can enjoy more uniformity among the landing page, the search ad, and the search term. This tactic works pretty well to increase your website sales.

You will have to get your ecommerce website fitted with a customised remarketing tag. It will aid Google with product ID numbers extracted from your merchant feed. Now, Google takes on the responsibility of matching these IDs with your Google Merchant Center feed. They are now deployed in generating your dynamic ads. 

It is not easy in the course of your remarketing exercise to get image ads for every product that you are selling. Google’s innovative dynamic remarketing feature will be of immense help in integrating your desired text, image, and price to the behavioural persona of your visitors. Via this medium, your marketing is more specific and resonant with your customers without you having to toil through creatives.

11. Try Out Instagram and Facebook Retargeting Ads 

Many ecommerce business owners are struggling with the problem of abandoned carts or visitors leaving their website without buying. You can avoid such behaviour with efficient retargeting campaigns. Here is where dynamic product ads come in handy. 

These ads aim at website visitors who browsed through your ecommerce store, but didn’t buy before leaving. The chances of them coming back to your site are very small. Hence retargeting ads work very well and can increase conversion because those visitors have already shown interest in your products.  

The beauty of such dynamic product ads is that you can specially customise these ads for every individual buyer who has viewed certain products on your site. The Instagram and Facebook feed of these individuals are very strategic places to position such ads. So when they go on these social media platforms, they see these ads reminding them of your products they left behind.

This way, you can recover lost leads improving your conversion rate where it matters most: in the purchase decision making phase. In these ads, you can even attract these prospects more by showing them discounts, shipping arrangements, and positive reviews of previous buyers.

12. Utilise The Facebook Pixel

To achieve such dynamic product ads, you will need a Facebook pixel installed on your website. For those who don’t exactly know what a Facebook Pixel let me briefly explain this. 

The Facebook pixel is an analytics tool that consists of a code that you can place on your website. The Facebook pixel tracks your website visitors behaviour while browsing on your store. 

This data provides you with data, that helps you to retarget those users with your Instagram and Facebook ads. The pixel helps to keep up with your store visitors, tracking what they are viewing when returning to your website. 

It helps to display the accuracy of the ads to a specific audience – ensuring the right prospects see your ads for the right products. 

It is easy to check if your Facebook pixel in your ecommerce shop is working well or not. You can check via the Facebook Pixel Helper. It is a free plugin for Google’s Chrome browser. Upon installation of the Facebook pixel helper, you will notice a small pixel logo icon display in Chrome’s toolbar. Now, go to your web page and check if the pixel is correctly installed and tracking your store’s visitors. 

Clicking on the plugin, you can view the events firing there on that specific page. For the Facebook Pixel Helper to work correctly, you will have to disable your Chrome’s adblocker if you have any. 

It will also be helpful if you create a product feed. This is a page hosted on your ecommerce website, housing the required information Facebook needs about what you are selling. The data to be included in this product page include the price and sizes of your wares, the descriptions, shipping arrangements, image link as well as the condition of your stock.

13. Automate Your Email Marketing

My recommendation for you, as an ecommerce business, is to leverage email marketing. However, this can be difficult when you are dealing with a large number of buyers and prospects. How about automating your email marketing?

Email marketing automation makes brand-customer communication uncomplicated. Here you have an array of automated tools that can help you send customised content to designated recipients and even track these messages. 

When you automate your email marketing, your customers can easily subscribe to get compelling content from you, which keeps you in constant interaction with them. This way, they do not forget your shop that easily.

It is beneficial that you can integrate your email marketing automation with your analytics software, for instance, Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free and allows you to extract valuable data on customer activity so long you configure in the right goals.

With such customer data, you can further streamline your newsletters, promotion offers, and other content you send to your audience through your email campaigns. When automated, cookies can also receive useful data from your email recipients, and you can see how they are interacting with your content. This way, your campaigns are tailored to your customers’ preferences.

With such tailored messaging, it is much easier to nurture prospects into buyers. It is easier to monitor the history of your buyers and show them what they want at the right time. This drastically improves the effectiveness of your up-selling and cross-selling activities. Doesn’t this sound exciting? 

 

Conclusion 

There we are! You have read a thorough presentation of strategies that can help you boost your ecommerce earnings from sales to customer acquisition and retention. These strategies cutting through using the best shopping carts to automate your email marketing are worth every single penny, and time you spend on them. More importantly, the results you reap from these tactics are far more sustainable. 

So, do you want to make more money from your ecommerce shop? Think Digital Now has helped many struggling ecommerce stores to increase their revenues significantly by leveraging these ecommerce marketing strategies. 

Get in touch today and find out how we can help you to boost your sales for the last quarter of 2019.