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

• Sam Connely

• 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

• Is this possible with Campaigns?

  My company is currently moving CRM's from Monday to Zoho One. Currently, our marketing lead process is send out 7 sms messages over 14 days if the lead is in a certain status. If we don't get a response the lead is put into a "Closed" status. Do we buy

• How to view two portals (Zoho CRM & Zoho Books) in single login

  Hello there, I need to create a portal access for the Customers. Customer data present in two applications namely Zoho CRM & Zoho Books. My requirement is to show the two different portals(Zoho CRM Portal & Zoho books Portal) in single login. I could

• Invoice status on write-off is "Paid" - how do I change this to "Written off"

  HI guys, I want to write off a couple of outstanding invoices, but when I do this, the status of the invoices shows as "Paid". Clearly this is not the case and I need to be able to see that they are written off in the customer's history. Is there a way

• Zoho Flow or Schedules

  I have a process where we text our leads 7 times over a 14 day with different content for each text. I created one flow in Zoho Flow to do this, but wondering if there is a more efficient way to accomplish this via Schedules. It goes on for 6 more times

• Updating Bounced Contacts in Campaigns to the CRM

  The article explains how to update Opt-outs from Campaigns to CRM, but not bounces. While Campaigns will automatically remove any bounced emails from future campaigns, is there a process by which a bounce will update or make a notification in the CRM

• Bandwidth, voice and poor video

  Dear Team, The webinar has made things quite easy and convenient for educators around the world. We are an art & culture-based organization where students and researchers are our major audience.  While using the Zoho webinar platform, we have observed that the audio lags and the video is of poor quality and often freezes. Some participants don't hear what is being spoken.  We also found that even a slightly slow internet connection disrupts the webinar while it should be working well even on lower

• No Hope for Zoho Meeting

  Zoho Meeting is just the poorest meeting app I've come across in a long time. The support sucks too. I called to see if there was anything that could be done on the backend and while I was on a test meeting with support the video was lagging and freezing

• Zoho books and venmo

  Hi, Is there a way to hook Venmo into zoho books? I have a Venmo business account and want to be able to sync that. I know you can do it with the paypal integration but I dont want to use paypal for the fees and that doesnt allow me use/integrate my current

• Associate Email API Internal Error

  I am trying to associate an already existing email within a function using the Related Emails API. To provide more context, I also have admin permissions and have ensured that the fields are correct and that I have admin permissions when associating the

• Global Sets for Multi-Select pick lists

  When is this feature coming to Zoho CRM? It would be very useful now we have got used to having it for the normal pick lists.

• Contacts Don't Always Populate

  I've noticed that some contacts can easily be added to an email when I type their name. Other times, a contact doesn't appear even though I KNOW it is in my contact list. It is possible the ones I loaded from a spreadsheet are not an issue and the ones

• 550 5.4.6 Unusual sending activity detected. Please try after sometime. <a href=https://www.zoho.com/mail/help/usage-policy.html target=_blank>Learn more.</a>

  Please help me with this. Sending of mails is blocked.

• External ID validation.

  I added an external ID field as below in one of my custom modules: When creating records via the API using some value (eg: 762115b2-097e-43b2-bdba-f3924a5371a6) for this field, it works without any problem. I can create and even see the records on the

• Segmenting Contacts Based on Product Purchased

  I am trying to organize our main Marketing Automation email list in a way that segments contacts based on products they have purchased (for example in this case it is 3 different products). To my knowledge, this would require the sync from Zoho CRM to

• Update a lookup field in CRM from Creator using deluge

  I have a Creator form that creates a new account. When it creates the new account in the Accounts Module, I need it to also populate the Parent Account, which is a lookup field coming from the Module Parent Accounts, field Parent Account Name. I have

• Urgent Assistance Needed with DKIM Verification

  Hi, I have been trying to verify the DKIM for the past month using your instructions as well as other resources. Unfortunately, I have not been able to resolve the issue, and it remains persistent. I need to address this problem as soon as possible so

• Someone made ActiveSync and Autodiscover work, with iOS and macOS

  Hi, I'm trying to set this up for the fifth day now and I"m not getting anywhere. Weird thing is that somewhen in the beginning, I had it working, when I still had VirtualServers and certificates mixed up. But now it's all fine, I have the XML file from

• How do I attach tasks from one task to other tasks in the same project

  How do I attach tasks from one task to other tasks in the same project

• Not able to change colors help center

  Hi. How can I change the orange color in the help center? You can change everything besides this font color And how can I remove the part on the bottom?

• Zoho Books Invoice Salesperson: requires ID but there is no "Fetch salesperson" action

  Hi, I am trying to attach a Salesperson to a Zoho Books invoice. In Zoho Flow, the salesperson field required an ID. However, I only have the salesperson name, I need to fetch salesperson by name and then provide the ID. There is no option to fetch salesperson...

• Change format of quantity format

  Hi,  I would like to change the qunatity format from 1,00 to 1.  Is this possible?   thanks!

• Ticket Views: filter criteria -> dynamic date values in relation to the current date

  Hello all, It would be very helpful if you could build custom views in such a way that you do not have to adjust the criteria daily or at whatever interval in order to change the fixed date value as needed. For example, I would like to create a view that,

• Captchas: No support for Google reCAPTCHA or similar

  Hi all, The current captcha integrated into Creator is very basic, and often near-impossible to read. I'm building an app for a charity which includes a couple of public-facing forms, and this is a real issue for people with dyslexia and related conditions - it's effectively excluding them if you want any form of spam protection at all on your published forms (and that being said, the current captcha doesn't even seem very effective - bots can often read it more easily than humans). I've raised this

• Maintain consistency in ticket responses with shared snippets

  Hello everyone! We are excited to announce that our highly anticipated snippet sharing feature is now available to all users. As you know, snippets are pre-defined message templates, or canned messages, that help agents respond to tickets with efficiency.

• Tickets - Zoho Desk

  Hi Team, My Clients need to see their tickets created and the status of the ticket in the Zoho Support Desk itself. How can I do this? My Client doesn't have a Zoho Account. They need to access the ticket by the provided link without signing in.

• Automatically assign Contacts to Account owners

  Hi, I have a finite number of accounts set up in the CRM, and each new contact that comes in is automatically assigned to an Account according to a rule I set up. I want the Contact owner in the Contacts module to be assigned to the relevant Account owner.

• Making Copies/Duplicates of Zoho Forms (Shared)

  Question to the community: is there a way to take a 'shared form' , make a duplicate copy and save under My Forms, so that i can use that which was already created as a template to make updates to and use as a test form and be able to have full access,

• Using IMAP configuration for shared email inboxes

  Our customer service team utilizes shared email boxes to allow multiple people to view and handle incoming customer requests. For example, the customer sends an email to info@xxxx.com and multiple people can view it and handle the request. How can I configure

• Can you help us creating a customised form with payment link?

  I would like to create a customised Transport form where the user will be asked to make payment basis the drop/ pick up they select.

• Deleting or disabeling predefined ticket list views

  Is it possible to delete or disable predefined views or is this still not possible? For instance, we are not using the chat function and therefore have no use for the "Missed Chats" view. Thanks!

• Unable to load your extension. Please check your plugin-manifest or Resources.json.

  Hi Team, I am using the config module with multiple fields of different types, such as checkboxes and picklists. However, I am encountering the following issues: Error Message: When loading the extension, I get the error: "Unable to load your extension.

• Remove or hide default views

  I'm looking to only have the views pertinent to my organization.  Is there a way to show only my custom views (or separate them to a different area or something)? If not, this should be a feature as switching from Zendesk we had this option...

• No Sales Returns on SO's with Dropped Shipped items + Inventory Items

  We have encountered an issue in Zoho related to sales orders that include both dropshipped items and inventory items. Specifically, it is currently not possible to create sales returns for the company’s own inventory items from these sales orders. This

• Layout Rules / Quick create

  Hello, is there a way to create a layout rule for quick create option? Regards, Katarzyna

• Issue with Create Note Button and Popup Form in Leads Module

  Hello Zoho Community, I am trying to implement a "Create Note" button in the Leads module with the following functionality: 1. When the button is clicked, a form should pop up with fields to add notes. 2. After filling out the form and clicking Send,

• Finding draft ticket replies

  Is there a way to see all tickets which have draft replies?

• Guidance on Making Zoho Desk Connections Available for All Data Centers

  Hi Team, I’m currently developing an application using Zoho Desk connections to manage OAuth for my third-party products. Could you please advise on the steps required to make it available across all data centers? Looking forward to your thoughts on

• Caso de Uso | Menos trámites, más salud: Clínicum optimiza sus recursos con Zoho One

  "La automatización del proceso de solicitud de bajas y su trazabilidad a través de Zoho nos ha supuesto una mejora en el ROI." - Carol Rodríguez, Responsable de Experiencia del Cliente interno y externo en Clínicum ¡Hola a todos! Estamos emocionados de

• Is it possible to disable Chat Waiting Time, or to make it indefinite?

  We have used many online chat services over the years. However, Zoho's SalesIQ appears to be the only one we've tried that has a mandatory time limit where we must respond to new customer queries. We are a small business so we have no dedicated staff to monitor incoming chats, which makes this requirement very undesirable. (There have been no complaints from our clients when we're slower to follow up.) Is there an option I'm missing to turn Chat Waiting Time off, or to allow an infinite wait time?

• Double opt-in notifications and customizable confirmation messages for your webforms

  Dear CRM Community, We are excited to announce a major upgrade to our Webforms feature. You can now customize the confirmation message shown to your users who double opt-in from your webform and also customize your confirmation emails when they submit

• Next Page