5 Ways to Promote Your E-commerce Site for a Steady Business

Going by the latest sales figures, e-commerce is on the rise and is growing at a good pace. This growth has forced business planners – particularly marketers – to use all available resources to take benefit of the opportunities available. However, there are still challenges ahead as competition and customers’ growing awareness are forcing brands to adopt more people-centric and rational approaches towards marketing and promotions.

Have a look at the points below.

• Global e-commerce sales are expected to increase to $ 1.88 trillion by the year end and reach $ 2.1 trillion by 2017 (source)
  
• As of February 2016, the share of mobile orders (phone and tablets) out of all e-commerce has increased to 30%, up from 26% in 2015. (source)
  
• One second delay in your website loading may result in a 7% loss in conversion. Similarly, 40% of internet users tend to leave a website it loads in longer than 3 seconds. (source)
  
• 8 out of 10 people will opt for ecommerce deal, if offered free shipment (source)

The given stats endorse two things: growth of ecommerce and multifaceted challenges it faces. In this regards, the prime concern for e-commerce managers (particularly the new ventures) is to maintain steady (traffic and business) flow and ensure good conversion rate.

In order to help you meet both challenges, we are sharing 5 simple tactics to ensure your website gets good traffic and business observes steady growth.

1۔ Design Your Unique Experience:

“If you build a great experience, customers tell each other. That, he believes, is better than any TV advertising”; says Amazon.com CEO; Jeff Bezos. Taking advice from the world’s leading e-commerce manager, design your unique service experience. It deals with three things:

• Your website’s user interface
  
• User experience
  
• SOP or steps for transaction to complete

A study has found that 89% people leave an ecommerce site only because of poor experience it offers. Therefore, make sure that your website is mobile-friendly (since most traffic comes from mobile) and users can easily navigate between the pages to find their required content.

Another element to ponder is to design the shortest possible transaction journey. Developing trust takes time and you can do it by enabling newcomers to easily search, find and complete their transaction.

2۔ Employ Retargeting Tracker:

This might sound a little un-doable to many who are new to e-commerce since they don’t have that traffic. However, please note that it works even when you have low traffic or your website is new. All you need is to install Facebook’s tracker on your website and it’ll do as an intelligent market researcher for you. You’ll be able to track your visitors on social media and serve them your ads. Just like cookies enable you to serve a visitor his/her most liked item.

To learn more about Facebook’s retargeting program, you should visit its learning and resource center for marketers. It offers a decent collection of tutorials and how-to videos and texts.

3۔ Introduce Social Customer Service:

This concept is relatively new but is gaining popularity on a rapid pace. Hiring some professional resource to respond to customer queries and feedback is critical to good e-reputation management.

Have a look at the following 3 stats.

1. 71 percent of consumers change their perception of brand after seeing a positive response to a review or post on social media.
   
2. Social traffic has increased by at least 357 percent as compared to last year, demonstrating unprecedented growth.
   
3. 74% consumers choose social media to find the right product or service whereas 65% choose it to get gifts for their loved ones.

You may check out this infographic to read some interesting stats about ecommerce, online trends and best practices to succeed in e-commerce.

These give you a fair idea into the importance of investing in social media management, social customer service, and social advertisements. Moreover, social media no more offers free exposure; instead, brands have to invest in more to get more visibility.

Therefore, setting up social channels, investing in social advertising, and introducing a professional social customer service is vital for growth. Answer queries, praise good feedback and professionally respond to negative comments. You’ll see the magic working within just a quarter.

4۔ Focus on Education – Not Selling:

Online selling has quite longer buyer’s journey. Customers tend to get all essential information about the brand, product, price, and perceived value from different sources. They tend to strike better deal in terms of price and value. Therefore, you need to work on it in a different style.

Here’s my recommendation. Design an educational content strategy that contains guides, reviews, customer testimonials, features set, and videos. I’ve observed leading e-commerce companies Etsy, Amazon, IKEA, Target and BestBuy employing this education-centric marketing strategy.

This content can be pushed through various channels; email, blogs, website, social media, reviews sites, YouTube, and others. Feed people the type of content they are looking for and highlight the value you offer. Here comes the art of content of content promotion and it is a sensitive part. Study endorses that only 20% of businesses are able to promote their content well enough to breed good ROI. A documented content (production & promotion) strategy with defined KPI’s is the right way to proceed.

5۔ Offer Value-Added Services:

As we noted in the first point, people look forward to a joyful buying experience. If you are able to design your customer journey with good number of touch-points, success is guaranteed. One of the best ways to make your buyers’ journey pleasant is to introduce free or value-added services. This may include:

• Discount offers
  
• Bundles
  
• Free shipment
  
• Coupons
  
• Loyalty membership
  
• 24/7 customer service
  
• Multiple payment options
  
• Free downloads

Also note, no matter how educated and experienced your customer is – he still needs customer support. It’s the part of work that can single-handedly win you a good number of customers.

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