There are hacks for everything — hacks for losing weight, hacks for getting rich, and even hacks for repurposing your favorite Swedish furniture in ways you never imagined. Turning your Bekväm stool into a cat corner is great, but sometimes there are no easy shortcuts to happiness. Sometimes you have to look at the practical work that goes into eating healthy, saving money, and giving Lady Hamilton a throne fit for a feline.
And no matter how well your eCommerce marketing efforts are going, there are always ways to improve them. Between your online and offline communication channels, there are seemingly endless hacks and best practices for increasing sales, engaging, or improving the customer experience.
Going beyond simply choosing the best product names or optimizing product descriptions, ecommerce marketing requires you to look at the entire digital shelf and explore the best ways to reach and influence your target audience.
Want to get better at eCommerce marketing? Here are 15 actionable tips.
1. Create characters
If you don’t know your customers, it’s hard to know what messages will resonate with them. The better you understand their values, needs, and lifestyles, the easier it is to communicate your products in a relevant way.
Creating personas—whether you call them buyer personas, customer personas, audience personas, or something else—is a valuable exercise in getting to know your customers. It forces you to collect, organize, and analyze data and insights about your customers.
A persona is essentially a fictional buy telemarketing data representation of your target customer. Ideally, you should have one persona for each target customer. If you create one persona to represent multiple types of customers, it won’t be effective for your business. And you don’t want to risk ignoring relevant customers.
All you really need to do is determine pillar pages and topic clusters: what do they mean for your content marketing strategy? hat type of person they are using any relevant data you have access to, such as age, gender, location, job, income, or marital status, and then consider what goals they have or what problems they need to solve.
These ideas can be obtained by combining the following tools:
- Customer surveys
- Customer Reviews
- Customer service
- Sales data
- Sales calls
- Previous Marketing Campaigns
- And much more
This is a creative exercise, but it taiwan data builds on what you know about your customers. Once you have a few personas, you’ll be better equipped to market your products to those demographics.
2. Make your content shoppable
In e-commerce marketing, engagement and sales are often viewed as two opposing goals. Focusing on engagement leads to fewer sales, and focusing on sales usually leads to lower engagement. But shoppable media is changing that. The most savvy e-commerce brands are using shoppable media to drive engagement and sales. Shoppable media closes the gaps between content and the shopping cart by displaying the information consumers need to decide where to buy right within a social media post, article, ad, video, or other piece of content.
As you explore the best options for creating landing pages for your products, shoppable media greatly expands your options.
3. Use packaging in e-commerce marketing
Sooner or later, the vast majority of people who buy your products will open it. What will they see when they do? Your packaging materials are one of the most valuable offline channels you have.
Most people at least look at every brochure, card, insert, and booklet in the package for instructions and other information they need to read before using the product. Consumers have also been trained to look for coupons and other rewards.
That’s why your packaging materials are such an effective way to market to your customers. You could increase sales with add-ons and tie-ins that help them get more out of their purchase. Or you could encourage them to check out your products or join a loyalty program.
Your customers only open the packaging once, so it’s worth taking this opportunity to try to expand your customer communications. Point them to your other marketing channels, such as an app, YouTube channel, or a link to a website that can tell them how to use their new purchase.
4. Assign a person responsible for marketing channels
The more people who can post to your marketing accounts or access your email lists, the more diffuse your marketing channels become. Brands of all sizes can run into the classic “too many cooks in the kitchen” problem. Instead of a single, cohesive view of your brand, you have as many themes, styles, opinions, and goals as there are people involved.
For each channel, you should aim to have one person – or at least one team – who takes responsibility for it and ensures it is used only as intended. Someone should be responsible for creating a strategy that aligns with your brand’s goals, and then implementing and following through on it.
5. Experiment with new marketing channels
Take any platform or marketing channel, and you’re bound to find e-commerce brands that have managed to make it a worthwhile investment. Whether it’s TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, a new advertising platform, or something else, it’s always worth exploring how your brand can use these channels to drive sales, generate engagement, or achieve another goal.
The challenge is to understand what’s unique about each channel, make educated predictions about what content might be effective there, and recognize when to abandon an experiment that’s not producing results.
6. Prepare to collect the necessary data
Imagine you took a multiple choice test and when you got your results back, you were told how you did on only 10 out of 100 questions. Let’s say you got a 7/10 or even a 10/10. Would you say you did well on the test? What if you only got a 3/10? Or less? Did you fail? You don’t know! You have to see the rest of the results.
When most e-commerce marketers evaluate and analyze their marketing campaigns, they are working with only a subset of the data: sales that came from their direct-to-consumer store. Because they can’t track transactions or collect cart data from retailers, they simply don’t know whether their content or ad campaigns led to sales on another site.
Consumers often look at ads, videos, and other content to learn more about a product on a brand’s website. But when they’re ready to buy, most people already have a preferred retailer. So they leave and buy your product elsewhere. Your e-commerce marketing still contributed to that sale and deserves credit.
How to Analyze Data: A Basic Guide
7. Use social proof
Consumers feel more confident in products when they know that most other people have had positive experiences with them. Ratings and reviews are effective in demonstrating consumers’ experiences with products. But there are a couple of problems with reviews that come from your D2C store:
- They are usually not enough to demonstrate social proof.
- Consumers don’t trust them as much as third-party reviews
Enough e-commerce brands abuse the system that consumers tend to be more wary of the reviews they see on a brand’s site, where you have much more control over which ratings are accepted or rejected.
Many brands now use the Ratings & Reviews tool to showcase their product ratings on well-known retailers’ websites. Anyone skeptical of brand-controlled reviews will likely find a 4.5-star rating with over 500 reviews on Target.com much more persuasive.
8. Recommend related products
Product recommendations are a staple of e-commerce marketing. When someone is looking at a product, it’s the perfect time to show them products that go well with it, meet similar needs, or are loved by other people who have purchased it.
Most major retailers have this feature for recommending related products, but it’s hard to track whether users are looking at them. If you don’t already have a product recommendation section on your D2C product pages, you should definitely add one. You can also recommend related products through other channels, such as follow-up emails, retargeting ads, or packaging materials.
9. Educate your clients
Customers won’t get much out of your product if they don’t understand how it works. And they won’t fully appreciate it until you teach them what makes it special. Educational articles, videos, brochures, and other resources are a great way to get attention for your brand and ensure your customers get the most out of their relationship with you.
As you come across new product uses, share them with your customers. Ideally, find relevant topics that your customers might be interested in. For example, if you make aroma diffusers, your customers might be interested in educational content about cleaning certain types of rooms, getting rid of certain odors, or preparing your home for certain events.
This teaches customers to rely on your brand and your products when they encounter situations where you can support them.
10. Analyze your customers’ feedback
One person’s experience says little about your product. But if many people have the same experience (good or bad), pay attention. You may need to do something about it before public opinion about your product becomes too hard to change.
People may use your product incorrectly or in situations it wasn’t intended for and then say it doesn’t work. Or they may complain that your product doesn’t deliver on the promises made in your marketing.
Alternatively, reviews can lead to valuable discoveries. Perhaps there’s a new use case you should tell people about, or a value you should make more visible.
You can learn a lot from what people say about your products. Make sure you pay attention and track trends over time.
11. Launch a customer loyalty program
Once someone buys your product, the relationship between the seller and the buyer is not over, it is just beginning. You want them to use your products regularly, buy from you again, and recommend your brand to their friends, family, and colleagues.
To make this happen, create a customer loyalty program where they can:
- Receive exclusive discounts
- Be the first to know about new products
- Get rewarded for performing certain actions (such as reviews, surveys, and recommendations)
A loyalty program isn’t just another content distribution channel, make it feel like a membership program and make users feel valued in the program. If you do this, you’ll have more loyal customers who will become advocates for your brand.
12. Be responsive
People don’t expect instant responses to every social media comment or question on your product page. But when you leave someone unanswered for days or weeks, other people see it and learn from it. Your behavior teaches them that they shouldn’t expect you to help in a timely manner, and that your brand may not have the resources to provide high-quality customer support.
If you don’t respond, they start to imagine that your company is really just some guy in a basement. Don’t be that guy.
Every time a consumer publicly reaches out to your organization, it’s an opportunity to get someone on your side and demonstrate your willingness to help everyone else who is looking.
Your response is especially important for the questions and reviews sections of product pages. Others are likely to have the same questions or find the issues raised in the negative review compelling. Be responsive, answer these questions for everyone, and show other potential customers that you will help fix negative situations and experiences.
13. Take advantage of your competitors’ weaknesses
Just as you should pay attention to your own reviews, it’s worth keeping an eye on what people are saying (or asking) about your competitors. Is there a flaw their customers are constantly complaining about? A promise they haven’t kept?
Your competitors’ negative reviews are a gold mine of differentiating factors that you should pay attention to in your e-commerce marketing. You don’t even have to directly address your competitors. Just highlight areas where they are weak, especially if these are areas where your brand is strong.
The questions section on your competitors’ pages is also a great place to look for information you should feature more prominently. What do people wish your competitors included in their product descriptions? Can you answer these questions more directly on your page?
14. Map the customer journey
Customers don’t just appear out of nowhere. Buying your product is part of a larger journey that every customer is on, one that starts before they buy and continues long after.
A customer journey map takes your buyer personas to the next level by imagining how your target audience goes from not knowing your product to advocating for it. While the stages of this journey typically represent the evolving relationship between the customer and your brand, the journey itself begins with a desire, goal, or problem your customers had before they knew about your brand.
Mapping your customer journey will help you identify what your customers want at each stage so you can develop the best strategy to achieve your goals at every touchpoint available to you.
15. Give your customers a choice
Choice overload is a real problem. You never want your customers to feel overwhelmed by too many options. When it comes to actually purchasing your products, consumers already have a few retailers they prefer to buy from. If you try to make that choice for them, you’re likely to make the wrong choice.
When consumers can’t find their preferred way to buy, some give up. They don’t want to create a new account, and they don’t want to look elsewhere for your product. But some of them will look elsewhere, and the problem is that you can’t control what they find.
Your competitors will appear in search results. Depending on the search engine and what keywords the customer uses to find you, your competitors may even appear first. Plus, what happens if they search for you through a retailer that doesn’t sell your products.