10 simple e-commerce marketing tips to boost sales

Congratulations! You've finally set up that e-commerce store you've been thinking about for a long time. Hopefully it wasn't too difficult. Even if it was, the effort will be totally worth it when you start seeing some orders come through.

Now that the store is live, let's take a look at some marketing tips you can apply for sales growth.

1. Avoid cart abandonment

If you've ever shopped online, you might have added a product to the cart but then decided not to purchase it. This is known as cart abandonment.

How to fight cart abandonment:

• Build trust — Web users aren’t always comfortable providing credit card info online. Improve conversions by building more trust. For example, show some security compliance badges to assure users that transactions are safe.
  
• Offer discounted or free shipping — Customers get sticker shock after seeing how much the shipping cost adds to their order. Avoid this by offering discounted or free shipping promos.
  
• Make checkout simple — Online shoppers have a short attention span and will abandon the checkout flow if it is too complex or time-consuming. Avoid this by making the checkout process as easy and painless as possible—cart to shipping address to the payment page. Don't give-in to the temptation to include anything that disrupts that flow.
  
• Turn browsers into buyers — Many users who add items to the cart but don’t complete the purchase are just browsing with low buying intent. Incentivize these users to buy immediately by offering limited-time promos.
  
• Offer popular payment options — Customers often have strong payment preferences and only complete a purchase if their preferred method is presented. Reduce this problem by offering the most popular payment methods for your target audience.
  

2. Attract visitors with content marketing

Smart, catchy phrases on store pages can influence site visitors to buy. So, how do you get visitors to your site in the first place? While paid ads, social media posts, event sponsorship, and brochures might work, nothing generates traffic like an awesome SEO.

Optimizing your content for SEO increases the probability that search engines will show your website as the first result when somebody searches for the type of product you're selling. It's FREE, rewarding, and easy to do.

First, choose the right keywords and phrases (long-tail keywords) for your business. Think, "If I were looking for this product, what search phrases would I use in Google?" Then start writing relevant content using these, maybe in the form of informative blogs like this one;). The goal isn't to talk up your product. No one wants to feel like they're being sold to. Building trust with quality insight will improve the likelihood of a customer purchasing from you.

When you have a good 40-50 blogs, you should start seeing some organic traffic on your site. But don't stop there. Share your blog on social media. Post it everywhere. Tag people if you want, but don't spam them. That's the last thing you should do in marketing.

3. Optimize for mobile

Almost 40% of all eCommerce purchases during the 2018 holiday season were made on a smartphone, so make sure your website is optimized for mobile screens. There's no reason that the desktop version of your site should be popping up on mobile devices.

You don't want to lose out on people who do not like the way your store looks and operates on a mobile screen. Ask your website developer about mobile optimization. Alternatively, if you've built it yourself, make sure to choose a theme that is optimized for mobile devices.

4. Cultivate leads with exit-intent pop-ups

There are marketing tools to help you create pop-ups that appear when visitors try to leave your website. These can be pretty effective if used wisely—such as, giving them offers and discounts in exchange for subscribing to your email list. They track your visitor's mouse point movement, and, as soon they hover over the address bar, prompt a pop-up form on the screen.

This exit-intent pop-up offers a discount in exchange for an email address.

5. Leverage social media

As I mentioned earlier, don't shy away from social media. In fact, post as much as you can. That said, you'll get the most out of social media if you're strategic with your posting.

Make a plan. For instance, this plan could be to post four tweets, a Facebook post, four Instagram posts, two Pinterest posts, and a LinkedIn post, all this in a day. Keep in mind that you don't want to spam feeds with content that feels repetitive. It's a tricky balance to achieve—one that'll likely take some trial and error.

Using hashtags effectively will also help, especially if they're popular tags relevant to your posts. Check the trending hashtags and see if you can ride one. For instance, if you're a fashion store and you see #ThrowbackThursday is trending, share some retro fashion design and use the hashtag. This is sure to get you more impressions. You can also use GIFs or try creating some funny memes (be careful with copyright issues though).

6. Invest in Google AdWords re-marketing

If you can put some budget towards your online marketing, try Google AdWords with re-marketing. The re-marketing feature shows your online ads to your website visitors even when they leave your website.

When someone visits your site and then leaves, Google tracks their IP address. They then strategically place your ads on their partner websites that are visited from the same IP address. When your prospect sees your ad multiple times, it gives you more chances to convert.

7. Choose the right price

Pricing is probably the trickiest part of your e-commerce strategy. According to a classic study, a 1% improvement in pricing results in an average increase in profits of 11.1%. It is that huge.

Cost-based pricing is the most popular strategy. Take your cost of goods sold and add a margin that you believe the market will bear. During the initial phase of your business, you may need to work on thin margins since you'll need to provide attractive discounts and offers. Treat the discount as your marketing cost and continue with this strategy until you hit your target numbers for a month.

In fact, for the first few months, you should measure success by your number of orders rather than your total revenue.

8. Assist the customer with a live chat

An interactive live chat support widget on your site can help in many ways.

Guide a customer to the right product or ask a departing customer for their contact details so you can send them an email with the best solution and an attractive price quote.

You can also talk to a customer (who remains anonymous) ready to make a purchase and guide them through the buying experience—product navigation, adding to the cart, and the payment process.

9. Reward your loyal customers

Surprise your loyal customers with a gift on special occasions like birthdays or anniversaries. You can also set aside a fraction of your marketing budget to send surprise gifts. People love when they are treated special. Your gift might make someone's day and win you a customer for life.

10. Solicit and share customer reviews and testimonials

Find your best customers and ask for their experience shopping on your website or a review of the product they bought. Post it on your website. The more testimonials you publish, the more trust you generate for your store, which also means more sales. Feel free to post the testimonials on social media as well.

These are just a handful of ways to get your e-commerce site to flourish. If you want to dive further, there are many other marketing secrets you might want to check out.

We hope you found these tips helpful. Let us know if you applied any and if you saw any positive results.

• Topic Participants

• Vinit Tibrewal

  

• Windzoon Technologies

  

• Terry

• Sticky Posts

• 10 simple e-commerce marketing tips to boost sales

  Congratulations! You've finally set up that e-commerce store you've been thinking about for a long time. Hopefully it wasn't too difficult. Even if it was, the effort will be totally worth it when you start seeing some orders come through. Now that the store is live, let's take a look at some marketing tips you can apply for sales growth. 1. Avoid cart abandonment If you've ever shopped online, you might have added a product to the cart but then decided not to purchase it. This is known as cart abandonment.

• Marketing in a post COVID-19 world!

  Consumers across countries are increasingly spending more time on a wide variety of digital activities, right from online grocery shopping, to video conferencing, to tele-medicine. There is a good chance that you performed one or more of the following activities during this lockdown, thanks to COVID 19: Cooked a meal Made a TikTok Video Signed up for a remote learning session Consulted a doctor online (or ordered medicines online) Shopped for groceries online A study by Hunter, a food and beverage

• Inbound Marketing 101: The Foundational Blocks of Inbound Marketing Strategy

  According to a behaviour survey, 68% of the buyers use sources such as blogs to evaluate the product even before considering it. Before buying a product, we do a lot of research to learn more about the product through communities, blogs, social media,

• How Zylker doubled their webinar registrations!

  Webinars are good educational resources to gather qualified leads for your product. But what if your visitors are dropping off from your webinar landing page without signing up? What more could you do to convert visitors into registrants? This is the

• The ideology behind why features tell, but benefits sell

  Do you think there's any truth to this? Do features only tell, and benefits sell?  Well, let's see why we should focus on benefits rather than features as the great marketing wizards, David Ogilvy and Steve Jobs proved to be the best examples leveraging

• Recent Topics

• Custom "create meeting" button with more functionality than Zoho currently has?

  I'm looking for a little help/direction in how to do this. Even just some general high level pointers on how this might be able to be done. The current Zoho Meeting Activity functionality is not ideal for my org's workflow. I'd like to try and create

• Error Code 4: Invalid value passed for JSONString

  Okay, I want to start by saying I know I'm a terrible scripter, so sorry if this is a dumb mistake. I just can't figure it out, even with LLM help. Here's my code: // --- Input Variables --- customer_id = salesorder.get("customer_id"); so_id = salesorder.get("salesorder_id");

• Organizing contacts/members by company

  I work for a membership organization (representing businesses) and am trying to use Zoho CRM more effectively for managing the points of contact for our members. Currently, our members are listed in our CRM by the primary point of contact's name, but

• Allow Stripe Credit Card and Stripe ACH payment methods to be enabled separately on an invoice.

  I need to be able to pick at the invoice level whether Stripe Credit Card and/or Stripe ACH payment methods are available. Currently, I'm not able to select from the two Stripe payment methods individually on an invoice. However, there are some larger

• Unable to search in Zoho Email

  I've started using Zoho Email (free version) recently and realized that it doesn't have email search functionality. Am I missing anything here? I've gone through the Zoho tutorial which does show the search bar on the right top of the Zoho UI. But in

• Response Time Report

  From data to decisions: A deep dive into ticketing system reports Every organization that interacts with its customers should have an established timeframe for how soon an agent is expected to send the first response and any reply to any follow-up messages.

• Problem : Auto redirect from zoho flow to zoho creator

  Hi there, I've been waiting for zoho team to get back on this for last couple of days. Anyone else have the problem to access zoho flow? everytime I click on zoho flow it redirects me to zoho creator. I tried incognito mode but it still direct me to zoho

• Zoho - Outlook plugin

  Does anyone know if there is a way to modify the autofill in the Zoho plugin in outlook? When we create a contact, it enters the correct email address and name, but then pulls information from our own signature line to add phone number, address, etc.

• Threaded conversations for emails sent via automation

  Hi Guys, I hope you are doing well. Don't you guys think we should have an option in a workflow to notify users either as a new email or the previous email thread. For example, if you have one deal in the process and there are 10 different stages during

• Zoho Books - Sales Person Information

  Hi Team, On Invoices, Quotes, etc... I can include the Sales Person, but it only shows their name and not their email or phone number. It would be great to have place on invoice templates where we can manage what sales person information should be shows

• Offline working in Zoho Creator portal

  Zoho's help says that offline working is only available in the Creator mobile app and not in the portal app. But I can see offline options in the portal app too and it seems to work when I test it. My portal users are often in areas where there is poor

• Fetch Records using Dynamic Criteria

  Hi,  I have a form that builds a filter based on user input.  I need to fetch the records based on dynamic criteria.  How would I accomplish this as there is no eval function? For example: desiredRecord = Form1[dynamicCriteria];

• Url filter Report date (pivot chart)

  Hello. Is it possible to filter the data in pivot char using parameters in the url? I'm trying but I should not doing very well. Something like: https://creator.zoho.com/.../....../#Report:MyPivotChartReport?MyDate=01-Jan-2012;31-Jun-2012;MyDate_op=58 Saludos

• Sending gmail to a particular person fails because the address gets changed to "gmaill", with a second "l" typo somewhere

  I send to bob@gmail.com (example) and get an error sending to bob@gmaill.com, only for this one person. Note the extra "l" in the email the system tried to send to, which was not in the address I entered. Can't find a typo in the contact or anywhere else

• Emoji Support in Bigin CRM

  We request the implementation of emoji support across Bigin CRM. This feature should allow users to seamlessly use emojis in text fields, headlines, and deals. It would enhance communication, improve the visual appeal of records, and bring more personalization

• Bigin Booking Pages enhancements

  I would like to ask for several enhancements for the brand new (and promising) Booking feature. 1. Add "Contact/Mobile" Field to Booking form We use Mobile as key (id), but unfortunately it is missing from the Booking form, only Home Phone is available.

• Amount in words in Indian format

  Hi, I had coded the following code to convert amount in words. But in the code in the format of US like million. But i need in Lakh and Crore. So pls suggest ideas r post corrected code string Num2Words(int val) {     val_s = input.val.toString();     th = {"", "thousand", "million", "billion", "trillion"};     // uncomment this line for English Number System     // th = {"","thousand","million", "milliard","billion"};     dg = {"zero", "one", "two", "three", "four", "five", "six", "seven", "eight",

• What are people using to send Service based emails?

  Zoho Campaigns is for marketing. Users can unsubscribe from these emails. Service based emails need to be delivered and can without the worry of Can-spam act. What are people using to send service based emails? My mailing list is derived from a database

• Standalone LMS tool

  Will Zoho release a standalone LMS (Learning management System) than can be used by external parties (guest)?

• Announcing Kiosk 1.1 - Customize screen titles, configure new fields & actions, use values from your Kiosk to update fields, and more.

  Hello all We are back again with more enhancements to Kiosk. So what's new? Enhancements made to the Components Add titles for your Kiosk screens and adjust its width to suit your viewing preferences. Three new fields can be added to your screen: Percentage,

• An Overview of Dario Schiraldi Deutsche Bank Executive

  Hello Community, Dario Schiraldi is an executive at Deutsche Bank, focused on advancing the firm’s financial services and crafting its global strategic vision. With 20 years of expertise in leadership roles, he has spearheaded successful market acquisitions

• Emailing a document to WorkDrive

  Does WorkDrive include the ability to upload a document by sending an attachment to an email address? (Books and Expenses include this functionality) If it doesn't is it under consideration? on the Road Map?

• Allow Changing Appointment Status from "Completed" to "No Show" or Other Valid States

  Hi Zoho Bookings Team, We hope you're doing well. We would like to submit a feature request regarding appointment status management in Zoho Bookings. 🎯 Use Case Sometimes, an appointment is mistakenly marked as Completed, but later we realize that the

• Ability to modify what displays in calendar invite?

  I am a long time calendly user and want to make the switch to bookings.  I understand that there is not currently a meets/hangouts integration, is one on the roadmap? Is there anyway I can modify the calendar invite to include the meet link?  I can add it to the emails no problem, but I would also like it to display on their calendar.  Is there some work around I can do to get it on the calendar?  Also am I able to modify the calendar event title?

• Zoho One and Tally Integration

  Has Anyone in this forum done any implementation with Zoho CRM and Tally accounting software. If so who have you used and how easy was it?

• Microsoft PowerPoint files Extremely slow to save

  I and others on my team have noticed that Microsoft PowerPoint documents are extremely slow to save when using WorkDrive. It always takes over 30 seconds to save a file. Word and Excel files seem to save in a typical length of time, but PowerPoint is

• How can users unblock their blocked Zoho Mail accounts?

  After the reason for the account block (storage exceeded, spam detection etc.) has been rectified, the user can unblock the account from the UnBlock Me page. Account support@edu2review.com  Edu2Review is an education review platform, we rate the quality

• Adding additional fields for batch information

  Hello, I am looking at adding additional information into our inventory module. we would like to be able to see up to 8 attributes that will be individual & different for each batch (i.e. batch specific information) but currently I seem to only be able

• Dynamic Pickup List Values using Deluge and Client Script

  I would like to dynamically show Pickup List Values For example we need to fetch some data from an on premise application and display it so they can choose and pick This can be done in Creator but I didn't find anything for CRM

• Validation Rule for Controlled Stage Movement in Deals Module (Deluge Script)

  For keeping a control over module stage or status, you can use the below deluge script. The below deluge script defines validation control over deals module stages: // Function to validate allowed stage transitions in the Deals module map validation_rule.LeadStatustValidation1(String

• Pick List Issues

  I have created a pick list that looks at a table in a sheet, it selects the column I want fine. Various issues have come along. The option to sort the pick list is simplistic, only allows an ascending alphabetical sort. Bad luck if you want it descending.

• Four types of task dependencies

  "Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs."                                                                                                                  - Henry Ford Projects, small or large, are driven by simple work units called tasks. Monitoring standalone tasks might look simple but as the workflow becomes elaborate, tasks may start relying on one another. In project management, this relationship between tasks is termed as "Task Dependencies". Dependency between tasks arise

• 1099 tracking

  Do zoho books offer feature of tracking for 1099's for contractors, etc? Quick books offers this feature and wondered when/if Zoho books will do same

• VAT-type Taxes in US Edition?

  I'm located in the US, and I use the Zoho One US edition of Books. We are in the process of registering with Canadian authorities for their GST / HST, which is a VAT-type of scheme. It is not immediately obvious to me how one would deal with input tax

• 2 users editing the same record - loose changes

  Hello, I'm very new to Zoho so apology if this has been addressed somewhere i can't find. I have noticed the following: If we have 2 users put an inventory item in edit mode at the same time: say user1 click on edit and user2 while user1 is still in edit,

• Schedule sms to be sent later

  When will you make available an option to send sms's at a later time??? You finaly have this option available on emails, so it will be very useful to have it also with sms. Our sms provider, has already this available but we cannot use it because you

• Ecommerce integration with prestashop

  Development of campaigns integration with prestahop. When???

• How to create an article containing images and rich text via the api?

  Hi, I'm trying to migrate our kb articles from our previous helpdesk service, and import them to ZohoDesk. Is there any way to create an article that contains images?  Is it possible to add formatting to articles created via the API? Thanks, Adam.

• Number of statement execution limit exceeded on deluge scheduled function

  I'm working on a send email functionality in creator that sends out crew work orders at the end of the day each day for the next day. I'm running into the issue that zoho is unable to handle the number of statements that I am doing to be able to successfully

• Color of Text Box Changes

  Sometimes I find the color of text boxes changed to a different color. This seems to happen when I reopen the same slide deck later. In the image that I am attaching, you see that the colors of the whole "virus," the "irology" part of "virology," and

• Next Page