If you are wondering how to make your online store visible on the screen of potential customers on a regular basis and impress them, our answer is to come up with eCommerce marketing ideas. Implementing creative strategies and ideas every day will help you choose which ones work best to attract customers and drive sales.
Your online store is ready to go. eCommerce platform. Products list. Payment gateways. Personnel. Page loading speed. Categories. And so on.
Wait! You seem to have forgotten something…
How can people find out about your website?
Don’t forget that potential customers don’t naturally come to your store to visit and buy products. And even if you have prepared an advertising plan, the content that is not prominent will be very difficult to attract.
If you’re confused, don’t skip today’s tutorial. It is dedicated to those who are running an online business but do not know how or fail to increase traffic and conversions for their website, sell more, and build a trustworthy image in the eyes of customers.
So what will you get from it?
More than 15 of the most creative eCommerce marketing ideas have been thoroughly analyzed, tested, and advised by us for thousands of our customers. The good news is, 99% of them succeeded.
Without further ado, let’s get started from the first one.
Table of Contents
- Upsell your products
- Encourage user-generated content on Instagram
- Reduce abandoned carts
- Launch a Facebook store
- Create a series of style or how-to videos
- Improve your email campaigns
- Convert customers with sold-out products
- Get people excited with challenges
- Engage online store visitors with live chat
- Reward your loyal customers
- Start a content marketing program
- Embrace personalization
- Aid product discovery with a Messenger bot
- Optimize your product pages
- Make your eCommerce website mobile-friendly
- Combine FOMO with free shipping
Upsell your products
When you shop online, some stores will ask if you want to replace the product with similar but more advanced items or those with some extra features. Usually, the quality of the replacement product will be a bit more premium so that the price difference is not too big. This arrangement is to fit the client’s original needs, thereby not causing him to immediately dismiss the offer but to keep his first decision.
With just a small amount of extra money, you can already add some cool features to the product that is similar to the one you originally intended to buy. These are all descriptions of the Upselling concept. You can check out our blog on eCommerce marketing tips: Trends, Content and Budget to learn more about how to persuade your customer to buy your product.
Encourage user-generated content on Instagram
Instagram’s coverage is undisputed. The brand’s average monthly users have now grown to 1 billion. If your customers are among these people, then you shouldn’t miss this – one of the best eCommerce marketing ideas for Instagram.
User-generated content (UGC) is a way in which you encourage users to create feedback content in an Instagram post or Instagram story, which you then ask for permission from them and repost it publicly on your Instagram account or in other channels. It has the same effect as customer feedback and reviews on your website, but the implementation is more proactive and the performance is clearer.
Reduce abandoned carts
The abandoned cart is a problem that is not unique to any one eCommerce store. On average, nearly 70% of shopping carts are abandoned. The reason may be that the payment operation on the website is challenging or the customer does not want to pay some additional costs.
Hence, there are two ways to fix this problem. One is to optimize the payment step for your customers on the website so that they feel most convenient and easiest. You should also diversify payment gateways. The second way to reduce the abandonment cart rate is to use eCommerce marketing ideas, including abandonment cart email campaigns combined with relevant offers like free shipping or limited-time discounts. In this way, you can find the root cause of customers abandoning their carts and encourage them to return to complete the transaction.
Launch a Facebook store
Presented nearly 7 years before Instagram, Facebook is the largest social networking community in the world with all kinds of users among over 1 billion people who log into their accounts every day! Therefore, it would be a regret to ignore this potential platform, right? The good news is that this app supports great marketing ideas for eCommerce business. You can create a store or fan page on this app to update information, advertise, and even sell products. It can also be integrated on your eCommerce website to increase your customers’ chances of shopping on interfaces they are comfortable with.
Is there even something more to add? You can also easily monitor and manage it without a big budget.
Create a series of style or how-to videos
If before, content about images and information was the most popular, everything is turning into videos now. The rise of apps like Youtube and Tiktok is the best testament to the success of these content ideas for eCommerce marketing. Not only that, but the top social networking platforms like Facebook and Instagram are also increasingly supporting video content on newsfeeds and stories.
Then you should not stay out of this game. Take advantage of its popularity to engage customers by creating fun or highly functional video content like how-to videos. Remember, they should relate to the highlights of your products and to the problems customers are looking to solve.
Improve your email campaigns
Email is not a new marketing tool, but it is surprisingly effective and economical. What you need to do is optimize it to maximize the benefits that this traditional method brings. eCommerce promotion ideas that you can implement include welcoming new users, taking care of loyal customers, suggesting products that your customers may be interested in, notifying them to sign up for a discount code, or suggesting feedback, etc.
To increase the effectiveness of this tool, do not forget to personalize the content and promotion programs for each one so that they can feel your efforts.
Convert customers with sold-out products
Be a smart marketer and know how to redirect customers who are disappointed that some of your products they are interested in are out of stock. If you do nothing, those customers will get discouraged and look for them on other websites. On the other hand, if you recommend similar or best-selling items, you will increase their likelihood to convert. It is one of the cool and effective eCommerce marketing ideas in reducing user frustration, capturing leads, and increasing sales.
Get people excited with challenges
eCommerce marketing ideas like these are not new but can bring an interesting and different experience to your customers. Everyone wants to be the lucky one to get rewards from challenge programs organized by eCommerce stores. What you need to do is encourage people to sign up with an email account or phone number. Thanks to eCommerce campaign ideas like these, you can grow a list of emails and phone numbers of potential customers for your business.
Engage online store visitors with live chat
If your customer has a problem, you will do everything you can to satisfy their request. But what if they need you to deal with it right away?
If you are late, you may lose trust and they can even cancel their orders. At times like these, you realize how important tools like live chat are to customer support. Some eCommerce platforms offer automated live chat, which helps you build trust with your customers by being available whenever they need it. Or, try some eCommerce marketing ideas with it like notifying customer order status without the need of email.
Reward your loyal customers
Taking care of old customers is not only easier than starting to re-engage new customers, but it is also more effective in cost and average revenue. People who are engaged with your business will tend to spend more money on each one of their orders on your website.
Not only that, but if you feel satisfied with your experience at a brand for a long time, would you be willing to recommend it to the people around you? More than 80% of users say Yes.
So, what eCommerce sales promotion ideas will you use to satisfy your loyal customers?
Offer them a reward plan with frequency and specific actions like discount codes, loyalty cards, free shipping, or holiday gifts, etc. Remember, each customer will have their own criteria and preferences. You can’t give a teenager 50% off baby items, can you?
Start a content marketing program
We have lots of eCommerce marketing ideas for you to leverage content to connect with customers and increase rankings on search engines like Google. The most popular of them is to develop a blog page with SEO-standard posts both in terms of form and useful content.
In addition, you can also build a strong online user community with a podcast, attract guest posts to generate backlinks or optimize content for product manuals and how to solve some common problems as we mentioned in the previous part, etc.
Embrace personalization
Personalization is something we always say over and over in our blog posts. That’s because it’s especially important, deciding up to 90% of customers’ decisions during their online shopping experience in your store. People create personalized eCommerce offer ideas using user behavioral data, including information collected about users’ past actions and preferences, to analyze and devise strategies that are tailored to each individual.
Besides, you can also use data about your customer’s location to personalize their experience. For example, offer swimwear deals to those in southern California in October.
Aid product discovery with a Messenger bot
Messenger is an application for messaging on Facebook. Therefore, it is not surprising that it has more than 1.3 billion users as of today. So what can Messenger do for your eCommerce marketing ideas?
Establish a Messenger bot for your eCommerce business.
This way, you can create a new experience for your customers, motivate them to interact with you, explore product features while making operations super easy and neat. The most important thing is that customers do not have to leave this app to be able to discover your company’s products.
Optimize your product pages
The way you take care of your product pages greatly influences your customers’ purchasing decisions. Therefore, optimize it with eCommerce marketing ideas about product descriptions, actual images, and videos. Investigate why the conversion rates on these pages are dropping to solve the problems which are preventing you from increasing sales.
A good tip is to use the section below the product pages to display suggestions of similar products, so customers can have more options that they might like. Related products are also very potential as they will likely want to purchase additional items that can be combined with the item of their choice.
Make your eCommerce website mobile-friendly
Who doesn’t use a smartphone these days? Computers and laptops are ubiquitous, but their size and convenience on the go, at bus stops, in cars, etc. are challenging to compare with mobiles. Thus, your website interface must be able to display well on all popular devices’ screens, including mobile. Operations, such as product searching, cart adding, or payment, also need to be optimized. That way, your customers will easily view the product without zooming in. Besides, they can also access, view, and buy products anytime, anywhere without worrying about the payment process being interrupted.
Combine FOMO with free shipping
FOMO is one of the eCommerce marketing ideas that we appreciate because of its application of customer understanding psychology. It serves as a small boost to those who are still considering whether to buy a favorite product or not. Free shipping is similar to it. It not only makes the payment process of customers more convenient but also encourages them to add more value to their orders.
Creativity in marketing is endless. When it comes to eCommerce marketing ideas, it’s even harder for online stores to decide which tactics they should try to increase traffic and conversions most effectively. From our eCommerce website promotion ideas, start implementing some of the ones that work for you today to see the earliest results.
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