10 simple e-commerce marketing tips to boost sales

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.



    • 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

    • Ticket Automatically Created from Closed Chat

      Is there a way to prevent a ticket being create for every chat.... or at the very least have it automatically closed.

    • IMPORT INVOICES CSV

      Hi, Impossible to import invoices in Zoho books with a csv file. I have also tried with the template. My topic keeps getting closed but I did not get any answer Is there an issue with this fonctionnality ?

    • Related Lists in Email Templates

      Hi Zoho team, I would love to see a feature where related list information can easily be added to an email template (instead of mail merge). I have a client who books flights for their customers. They do this through a Flights module so all booked flights

    • Outlook plugin funktioniert nicht.

      DAs Outlook Plugin funktioniert nicht mehr. Ich werde aufgefordert, mich mit der App "OneAuth" anzumelden Intelligente Anmeldung per OneAuth funktioniert nicht zufreidenstellend. Nach erfolgreicher Anmeldungung mittels QR Code lande ich wieder beim QR

    • iOS App Version 3.0 - Customer list gone?

      Not sure when this changed, but I seem to have been updated to 3.0 for the phone app (on iOS). I'm pretty sure that I used to have a Customers button that allowed me, for example, to see what appointments a customer has. Has this disappeared or am I just

    • Zoho Signature, "For Demo Purpose Only Powered by Zoho Sign"

      How to disable this text on the documents for signature. "For Demo Purpose Only Powered by Zoho Sign"

    • Add Resource variable to notification email customisation for Event Type

      The notification email customisation feature for Event Type does not include a variable for the Resource field. Without this field, Zoho Bookings cannot be used by any business for resource-based services or event types e.g. room bookings, equipment bookings.

    • Can't find add role button, is iet st because I have the free subscription

      Trying to add my accountant in Zoho Books if I press the add accountant button, I get stuck as it says no such role exists, and won't let me continue, I can't find the add roles button, so I am stuck. Is it because I have the free subscription? Also can't

    • Calendar view all appointments in workspace

      In the Calendar page, add the ability to view all appointments in the Workspace. The Manage Calendars filter requires me to select at least one user or resource, and it only lets me select up to five of them. There's no filter option to view the entire

    • Tip #13: Identify where your bookings come from with Source Tracking

      Source tracking is the practice of identifying where your bookings originated. This is important, because online bookings come from a wide variety of sources like social media platforms, your website, email and ad campaigns, partner websites, organic

    • Unable to Add Notes

      I've had a user report that they are unable to add notes to account records. I attempted and found the same issue. There is no option to save the note.

    • Workflow Rule Alert Not Working

      I have a workflow rule set (that I've been using for years) that suddenly stopped working. Module - Leads Execute on - Create Alerts - Email Active - Yes When I create my lead I no longer receive my email notification. 

    • Unify Overlapping Functionalities Across Zoho Products

      Hi Zoho One Team, We would like to raise a concern about the current overlap of core functionalities across various Zoho applications. While Zoho offers a rich suite of tools, many applications include similar or identical features—such as shift management,

    • Can zoho sign collect data feeding Zoho Sign?

      I m sending contracts to client who are not in my zoho CRM database yet. Can the data they enter in Zoho sign contract I send them, (that includes...) official company name address first name second name etc, ...Create or update a contact / account

    • IMAP ACCOUNT ACCESS PROBLEM

      Hi! I moved from Gmail some time ago to ZOHO. It works fine and it worked till yesterday. I found out that on my MAC OSX mail client I can not receive emails from ZOHO using IMAP. Gmail is set to IMAP and works OK. My company email account uses POP and works good as well. Is there anybody else who has such problem or this might be something with my email client...? I didi check for the settings but everything is as it was from the beginning. Honestly, I didn't change anything recently. It just stopped.

    • Modified approved time log

      I can’t seem to find a way to make change to approve time log entry. The case is the following. We pay the employees every 2 weeks, so employe A enter is time for the 2 weeks and then submit his timesheet. Now is superior approve the time he worked via

    • I want to Show the product list based on the drop Down

      in quotation app , amc form form i have Department drop down field and in subform i have loop up field item description taken from the anothe app PRO I want to show the product list look up based on the deparment selected example if they selected deparment

    • Inventory Barcode Creation - Add Picture of Item

      Hi I am trying to set up bar code labels and include a picture of the item on the label - any idea on how to add that field to the barcode generator?

    • Shared Snippets Everyone

      Hi, Now that the Shared Snippets have been released and I think will be the most used feature implemented in 2023 :) Creating and Using Snippets in Ticket Responses - Online Help | Zoho Desk Maintain consistency in ticket responses with shared snippets

    • Topics assigned to Contacts in Campaigns

      I have yet to find an efficient way to assign topics to contacts in campaigns with the new system in place.  We have daily contacts added to our system through various forms and we have to manually go in and add topics to contacts before each email campaign

    • Zoho CRM email formatting issues

      I have been having a hard time with formatting email templates. It feels like Zoho email is "fighting my edits." It refuses to change size, font, etc. Sometimes, the template looks great, then when the email gets sent, it looks completely different- some

    • Weekly Tips : Seamlessly collaborate with Share Drafts in Zoho Mail

      Ever found yourself stuck wondering how to get input on an important email draft without actually sending it? Maybe you want a teammate’s feedback or approval from your manager—without exposing sensitive info. Or perhaps you are working across different

    • How to Share a workdrive folder outside organization ?

      Hi, Earlier we were using Google Suite and were able to share the google drive folders with external organization ( Auditors , marketing collaterals ) as most of them had a personal gmail account they were able to access it without any issue. How can

    • Zoho CRM Account Duplication via Credit Application Form

      Hi, We send a credit application link to our customers via email, which is managed through Zoho Campaigns. When a customer submits the form, it automatically creates a new account in Zoho CRM. We would like to know how to stop this from creating duplicate

    • Flexible Milestone Invoicing

      If your Zoho Projects portal is integrated with Zoho Invoice/Books, you can now create an invoice for your milestones. You can enable it under Integration Preference and invoice milestones regardless of the project's billing type. For instance, consider

    • The get records i am getting produts that show in the show in the sub form item list field

      The get records i am getting produts that show in the show in the sub form item list field if(input.Department != null) { // Get filtered records once creator_ptid = zoho.creator.getRecords("harshadgroup","item-master","All_Products","Department == \""

    • Add Zoho Form Submission as Attachment to Zoho CRM Deal using Zoho Deal ID

      Hi Zoho team, I have a Zoho Form in which one of the fields will be hidden but will be defaulted with the Zoho Deal ID. Once the form is submitted, I want to reattach the submitted form (and another uploaded file field) into Zoho CRM Deals record. The crazy part is that Deal Name and Stage are the only two fields available for mapping. I have the actual Deal ID. Why can't I just use that. Can you please fix it so that I can properly attach the submission using Zoho Deal ID instead of name/stage (which

    • Payment link showing as malicious

      We've had a few customers who have been unable to pay invoices as the payment link (the domain is zohosecurepay.eu) is showing as a malicious website in their browser. Could anyone help with this please?

    • Side bar menu

      It would be great if you could stop the auto collapse of expanded menus when selecting a different module. It would save a lot of mouse clicks for a lot of users that frequently switch between sales & purchases as we do, it's easier to collapse them manually when not required !

    • Add Microsoft Entra ID to Zoho One

      Hi! Have anyone tried the Zoho connection to Microsoft Entra ID (https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/one/admin-guide/directory-stores/articles/add-microsoft-azure-to-zoho-one?action=kbArticleFollow&actionId=4014605732522 ) This is a big operation and you

    • Multiple Respondents for One Survey Submission?

      Does anyone know of a way to allow multiple respondents to complete only one  survey and then also see (while completing the survey) the responses for their fellow colleagues who already answered that question? The situation is that our new customers have within their own organization, multiple employees that will need to assist in the one survey response. Since we don't always know which new respondent is the "who" that will have the answer, we need multiple respondents to be able to view the response

    • Can you remove the title from the forms?

      I am placing the iframes for my forms on my website.  Is it possible to remove or hide the title of the form so that it doesn't show up on the website? Is it possible to place text in the form like "clicking submit will take you to paypal." thanks

    • Lost the ability to sort by ticket owner

      Hi all, in the last week or so, we have lost the ability to sort tickets by Ticket Owner. Unlike the other columns which we can hover over and click on to sort, Ticket Owner is no longer clickable. Is it just us, or are other customers seeing this too?

    • Mask Name Field in Report

      Is it possible to have the Name field as "Last Name, First Name" in a scheduled report.

    • Custom Project View by Project Group

      Hi Zoho Team, I used to have a custom project view which showed all my active projects (not cancelled or completed) and the list was separated into projects groups. Some time ago, possibly a couple of months ago, I began to see all projects even cancelled

    • Unable to attach the file via the API.

      We are trying to attach files to a Candidate in Zoho Recruit using the API. We reviewed the following API documentation: 🔗 Upload Attachment While this API does allow file attachment via a URL, that’s not what we want — we do not want to attach public-facing

    • Zoho Books (UK) needs to be able to submit a CT600 CTSA return

      As well as a VAT Return, most (if not all) small businesses have to submit a CT600 Corporation Tax Self-Assessment. There are many providers who do this (like Xero) bujt not Zoho. Can you add this to the request list please? Many thanks Steve

    • Stock Update After Approver 1 Approval in Multi-Level Approval Flow

      Hi Team, We have configured a multi-level approval process for POs/Bills. Our requirement is to update the item stock quantity based on the billed quantity immediately after Approver 1 approves the bill. Please find the script attached below. However,

    • Zoho Form Auto Fill

      I am setting up a Zoho form for my independent sales reps to request quotes. Their names are in the first field under a dropdown menu. The next field is their email address. I want the email address field to automatically be filled in when they select

    • Image Resolution Restriction Option in Zoho Forms File Upload

      Hi Zoho Forms Team, Greetings, We would like to request a feature enhancement for Zoho Forms regarding the file upload field. Currently, Zoho Forms allows us to restrict the file size of uploaded images, but not the image resolution (in megapixels). This

    • Next Page