Six Marketing Tips to Boost eCommerce Sales

With the rapid growth of technology and the effects of the pandemic ongoing, customers are turning more and more towards online shopping to make their purchases. Whether you sell the latest fashion, soy candles, or cocktail mixers, having an online presence that people love is now essential. If you want to see profits increasing month-on-month and loyal customers who keep coming back, you need to continually market and optimise your site. It can seem daunting but it doesn’t have to be – we’re here to help you get started with 6 marketing tips:

Upsell to Engaged Customers

You know those “Customers also bought” or “You may like” pop ups and sections on product pages? Or even upgrades on a base product? This is a great way to upsell or cross-sell to users who are already interested in your products. However, it is important to make sure the upgrades or add-ons are actually of interest to the consumer. They should relate to the original product and match the kind of price range the customer is likely sitting at to ensure they consider (and hopefully purchase) the extras. If your store is on Shopify, there are some great apps that allow customisation of this, such as Cross Sell & Cart Upsell and LimeSpot Personalizer.

Offer Loyalty Programs and Rewards

Everyone likes to feel special and everyone likes to snag a bargain! Loyalty or VIP programs with rewards are a great way to encourage repeat purchases, as well as build a solid database for other forms of marketing. Some loyalty programs take it a step further with status tiers, which can incentivise customers more than traditional points systems. An example of this is customers getting a point per dollar spent, with a certain number of points, say 200, equaling a credit at the store, usually between $5 and $10.

We go into more detail about how to build effective loyalty and rewards programs for e-commerce in another article.

Encourage User Generated Content

User Generated Content (UGC) is not uncommon in marketing – you’re probably already using it! But there are even more ways to integrate it than you may be aware of. Instagram integration on product pages is becoming a popular way to show a product in use by real people and if you encourage this through hashtags and the chance to be featured, this will not only generate content for your product pages, but also your social media and content marketing activities. One brand that does this very well is BlackMilk Clothing, who highlight select customer photos that are tagged with the product name, like this dress.

Automate Email Marketing

Email marketing can be a dividing topic, with some experts claiming the field is dying, but it can also be an incredible tool and the statistics back it up, especially when it comes to shopping. Shopping online relies on good communication due to the lack of face-to-face customer service. Customers get emails confirming their order, updating them on the status, notifying them of sales and new releases – from an eCommerce perspective, email marketing is a huge beast and automating as much as possible to give the user all the information they need is essential. Klaviyo is one of our favourite tools for email marketing automation; particularly when paired with a successful abandoned cart strategy.

Optimise for Mobile

Crucial for any website, the experience someone has using a site (or store) on their mobile can quickly see the end of that customer’s interaction with your brand if it isn’t optimised appropriately. It can also affect your SEO performance as search engines like Google now have mobile-first indexing. At a minimum, your site should be responsive based on the size of the screen it is viewed on but if you can, creating a unique mobile experience for your audience is ideal. You can start by chatting to your developer about how optimised your site is for mobile (or talk to us about our partners about doing an audit for you!).

Make Purchasing Easy

You added some items to your cart, went to check out, and something stops you – the cart doesn’t give you all the information you want, the store doesn’t offer split payments, checking out takes too long, extra costs are too high. There are many reasons why someone might abandon their cart but creating a streamlined, simple checkout process can make a huge difference.

If you implement any of these ideas, make sure to track the results. Look at ROI, talk to your customers, review data before and after you implement. Tracking can be a complicated beast and a whole article in itself, so if you need help with improving your online store or analysing how it is performing, our team love working on eCommerce stores, so please reach out!