The e-commerce market is absolutely huge. It’s predicted to generate $4.5 trillion by 2021, and the US represents 10% of all retail.
Such a huge and growing market presents incredible opportunities for your e-commerce business, but it also means you’re competing with a bewildering range of rival stores.
In this e-commerce marketing guide, we’ll take a look at 8 tips you can implement to supercharge your e-commerce sales.
Social sharing
The more people talk about and share your products with their friends and family, the more likely they are to buy them and encourage their friends to buy them too.
That’s why you should make it as easy as possible for your customers to share products directly from your product pages.
An easy way to do this is to include a social share button on your online store and website.
This will allow you to leverage social platforms like Facebook and Pinterest to create buzz about your products, and encourage those all-important word of mouth recommendations which are more effective than traditional advertising.
Website retargeting
It’s shocking to think that only 2% of customers convert on their first visit to your e-commerce store.
That’s because people need to have repeated exposure to your products to motivate them to buy.
That’s why website retargeting is so powerful.
This process involves storing anonymous cookies with your website visitors that track their journey around the web, which allows you to re-target them with your ads on other sites.
Add an exit-intent popup
Exit-intent popups detect when a user is about to navigate away from your page and displays a pop-up designed to win back their attention and engagement.
This could be a discount offer, a cart abandonment reminder, or a newsletter signup form.
Exit popups are a last resort because popups are disruptive and they are targeting users who already want to leave your site, but exit-intent popups can boost conversions from around 3-10% according to a study by Sumo.
Build customer loyalty with a retail app
Most browsing is done by smartphones these days, but many brands are behind the curve when it comes to reaching their users on their preferred devices.
If you want to generate a loyal customer base you need to give them what they want in the way that they want it, and reward their increased attention.
Building a retail app is a powerful way to do this. Loyalty needs to be encouraged and rewarded, and an app lets you offer loyalty programs that are exclusive to app users. The trick is to make your app an absolute pleasure to use and a real timesaver for people. Throw in loyalty rewards on top of that and you’re golden.
Upsell and cross-sell your products
Not all marketing is about getting people to buy the products they are initially considering. You can also suggest additional related products (cross selling) or more advanced versions of the products they are looking at (upselling).
Often people haven’t considered getting a more advanced product. But if you point out the value of “supersizing” a product, you often get results.
This will help you get more value from each customer. This is important because it’s much more expensive to acquire a new customer than to sell to an existing one, and the higher the average spend of each customer, the higher their lifetime value will be. This means more sales with less work.
Send cart abandonment emails
It’s wild to think that nearly 70% of people will abandon their shopping cart before completing checkout. But this is not necessarily because they aren’t interested in your product.
It might be that they want to compare prices with other sites. Or perhaps they are using your ecommerce store to create a wishlist. Maybe they’re distracted by something, maybe their boss has come back into the office, they’re browsing your site during ad breaks… it could be anything.
The point is not to give up on the people who have abandoned their carts. It’s often for reasons that you are able to solve by providing them with the right information or an incentive.
Setting up automated cart abandonment emails is a perfect way to close the deal the second time around.
Feature product videos
Including product videos on your ecommerce website can increase the likelihood that people will make a purchase by up to 85%, according to research. Including videos on your pages increases the time people spend on each page and it will encourage people to browse other pages of your site too. This will lead to more conversions.
Product videos make your products and services come alive for your customers and provide helpful context for their purchase decisions. They show your products in a positive light and make the shopping experience more vivid. People get a really solid sense of what they are buying and your production values will make your products more appealing. One major games retailer saw an 86% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS) after using product videos which included integrated calls to action (CTAs).
Include user testimonials
Data from TrustPilot shows that 84% of people trust user generated reviews as much as personal recommendations, and nearly 70% of people check user reviews before buying a product.
Reviews give a high level of social proof that your products are everything that you claim they are, and featuring useful reviews on your site will help you boost sales.
Good reviews include pros and cons of the product, have images of the product, and contain at least two paragraphs.
Including photos and a title for reviewers where relevant can help with products that require higher levels of social proof or benefit from some form of expert testimonials.
Conclusion
In this short guide, we have shown you how you can increase the virality of your products by including social share options, and explained how website retargeting nurtures site visitors on their buying journey with your brand.
We’ve also seen how exit-intent popups can nudge people back into your sales funnel and how you can build customer loyalty with a well designed retail app for mobile devices.
We’ve also discussed the importance of upselling and cross selling to increase the average purchase value of your e-store and talked about using cart abandonment emails to seal the deal on neglected purchases.
If you combine these tips with well made product videos to show off your products and integrated user reviews, you will be well on your way to seeing big increases in your e-commerce sales.
