Online Store Promotion: Effective Marketing Strategies To
Build A Reliable E-commerce Channel
As Bill Gates noted, If your business is not on the Internet, then you are not in business. Companies global investments in digital marketing amounted to $333 billion in 2020… Analytical services, internal website monitoring systems allow you to track consumer behavior, including their interests, location, online activity. Such statistics allow you to divide the audience into segments and determine the most effective channels for attracting traffic and increasing sales. In conclusion, this makes e-commerce websites to be uniques and effective.
To promote your e-Commerce store on the Internet, you need to build a comprehensive strategy. All promotion tools – paid advertising, social media management, email marketing, SEO, and other traffic channels – need to work together. Of the many advertising tools, we will single out the most effective ones and share practical advice on how to promote an e-commerce store.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing – Sending out emails by email is a great way to keep in touch with customers on a daily basis, notifying them of new offers from the company. According to research, every dollar spent on developing this digital channel brings in $ 44 in return.
To improve your email marketing performance, follow these tips:
1. Segment your audience
The correct distribution of customers will help to convey to them the most relevant messages and offers. This will reduce the number of unsubscriptions, bring more conversions, and increase consumer loyalty to the business. Here are some possible criteria for
segmenting a mailing list:
- Demography: age, gender, occupation;
- Consumer life cycle: new subscriber or buyer, potential or regular customer;
- Consumer behavior: purchase history, clicks, link openings.
2. Address subscribers by name
Adding the customer’s name to the subject line of an email is a basic personalization technique. This is a simple step to gain attention that can increase conversions, sales, and decrease unsubscriptions.
3. Find the optimal mailing frequency
The average web subscriber receives a lot of emails, so he is unlikely to be happy with the daily updates from the online store. Submitting too often results in low conversion rates, unsubscribes, and even spam complaints. Because everyday emails can be annoying to a
person, even if the brand is offering a discount. The best solution is to give subscribers the ability to customize what types of emails they want to receive and how often.
4. Optimize email for different devices
79% of clients make orders on the Internet using mobile phones. Similarly to do this, you need to optimize your website, including your email, and for different devices. This will help simplify your shopping journey and improve your customer experience.
5. Offer discounts, remind subscribers of expiring promotions
The sale message in the subject line of an email is a sales boost that can be enhanced by specifying a specific expiration date or reminding you to expire. Another effective way to entice a customer to make a purchase is to add a countdown timer.
6. Send e-mails with customer reviews
Consumers are more likely to trust other people’s product responses than brands, so it’s worth adding proof of product quality to your email. They use real reviews: posts from social networks, photos, and screenshots. Companies usually post quotes from their regular customers’ comments, written in a relaxed, positive way.
7. Remember the special dates of the subscriber
Companies congratulate customers on special occasions – first of all, happy birthday and by giving them gifts and discounts. Many online stores also congratulate consumers, so you need to come up with original gifts to stand out.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a tool for getting traffic and increasing position in Google, Yandex, etc. In advance Optimization is also carried out at the very beginning of creating a website. its architecture should be based on keyword analysis, then proceed to detailed elaboration of pages.
To measure the effectiveness of SEO, they use Google Analytics and Yandex. Metrica – services for tracking traffic sources and calculating keywords that bring more visitors. They are guided by the following rules when SEO promotes an online store.
1. Create the correct title and description tags
Headings and descriptions should be readable, short, and not overflowing with keywords. Each page uses unique tags.
2. Use keywords that the user enters into the search engine
The selection of keywords is carried out based on the frequency of occurrences of words at the request of users, in which it is performed by such online services as Yandex Wordstat.
3. Create content based on key occurrences
Adding keywords to text content increases the ranking of the site, in which its position in the search will also attract more visitors. They must be present in page titles (title), meta descriptions (description), alternative tags (image descriptions), article titles.
4. Optimize images on web pages
The first rule is to add an alt tag to the image code to make it understandable for the search engine spider and raise it in the search results. Another parameter is the speed at which the image is loaded. Photos must be compressed into a smaller format to download faster. For example, JPEG images usually have a smaller file size than PNG. To speed up the loading of the site, you should reduce the number of hypertext transfer protocol requests, redirects on the page, and use browser caching.
5. Embed links
To increase traffic, backlinks are used – external links leading to the site from other sources, and internal, linking pages of one website. Similarly, backlinks can help a resource rank higher in the search engine results, as search engine crawlers identify it as a reliable source. Authoritative websites
are used to embed external hyperlinks. You can determine a resource’s authority using tools like Ahrefs.
6. Include keywords in URLs
Search engines are readable for web users since URLs are designed to be simple. Do not add numbers, stop words, random letters to them. Correctly composed titles will increase your site’s ranking in search results. Seo promotion of an online store includes technical optimization, selection of keywords, their introduction into the architecture of the site, continuous improvement of content to increase the position of the site in search engines and attract customers.
E-commerce store promotion on Google
There are two ways to promote your e-Commerce store on Google: paid advertising and search engine optimization, which helps your site rank better in search results and get organic traffic. Since SEO has already been described above, below are tips on how to advertise an online store through Google Ads.
1. Use Google search campaigns.
On the search results page, advertisements are placed that are relevant to the user’s queries. When you enter the query “leather bags”, ads for brands that sell bags and other leather goods are displayed To launch an ad campaign, the system selects keywords that match people’s queries and negative keywords to avoid irrelevant traffic. For example, if a site sells leather bags, its negative keywords would be “bag making,” “bag making,” used by people without intent to buy a product. Search ads are effective because they appear on high-demand pages for a product, which is especially useful for low-cost, everyday-use stores.
2. Run campaigns on the Google Display Network
. These campaigns are launched from Google Ads and Google Search campaigns with some differences. Google Display Network audiences are less engaged than customers who can be reached with search ads. But the first has many advantages: it allows you to run not only text ads, but also add multimedia, interactive elements, and also carry out remarketing. The Google Display Network allows you to interact with the user through multiple channels, which increases brand or product awareness. It also delivers a wide audience reach, typically with lower CPCs and conversions compared to search campaigns, which is especially useful for new brands entering the market. Another advantage is remarketing.
3. Add items to Google Merchant Center.
The merchant center also permits you to put a web-based store and data about its items on google, Therefore this will be shown to potential clients while looking for a comparative item.
4. Launch Shopping campaigns
This is one of the sorts of publicizing planned explicitly for online business. You don’t need keywords to launch it, you just need to add product data to the Google Merchant Center and create a campaign in Google Ads. It uses automatic targeting based on product characteristics added by a web resource and displayed for relevant search queries. Shopping ads can appear on search results, on partner sites, on the Google Display Network, including YouTube, Gmail, and Google Discover.However google notes that this type of ad provides broader brand visibility and drive traffic from potential customers
Price aggregators
A price aggregator as an advertising platform is used to advertise products from different websites. This is an electronic catalog that contains information about products (price, photo, main characteristics, availability on specific sites, and reviews), used by the buyer for comparison. In addition pricing platforms are user-friendly and easy to use. It is much easier for a buyer to go to a website on the Internet and in one place to see offers from different online stores, rather than navigate through different resources and spend a lot of time on it.
Price aggregators do not sell products directly, but only collect and systematize information about them. After that their earnings consist of monetization received from affiliate programs. Websites pay them for placement or traffic. High click-through rates on popular sites increase the number of potential customers. Therefore, companies sell products not only on their own resources but also on similar trading platforms to gain a highly competitive position.
Benefits of using price aggregators:
A freeway to monitor websites and compare prices for their products; Simplicity, ease of use; For e-Commerce stores, this is the ability to track the main competitors in one place; and also Users can view the current offers of a particular resource.
Flaws:
- Processing takes a long time;
- Not all websites list their products on pricing platforms;
- Prices are often not up-to-date;
- Lack of benchmarking for purchases;
- The difficulties in tracking the availability and quantity of goods in the warehouse, and the information is lagging behind in time;
The large amount of manual work during the placement. In order to continue price aggregators are a convenient platform for consumers to compare prices. But this is not the best option for suppliers and distributors because these sites do not cover the entire number of online stores. The information such as prices is rarely updated after 7-10 days, so they are often not irrelevant. Therefore, for a reliable and regular analysis of prices on the Internet, it is necessary to track information from official sources. The projects like Z-Price are likewise utilized.
Marketplace
The marketplace is an e-commerce website where retailers and wholesalers post information about their products and services. Similarly, it is the main type of omnichannel e-commerce business that can improve business performance. In conclusion there are different types of place markets on the web just like e-Commerce, the most common of which are:
Comparison platforms.
These comparison platforms are web indexes used by customers to choose items dependent on various qualities, costs, surveys, and so on. After that most of them combine products from different retailers do not sell products themselves.
Open platforms.
They started it as simple online stores and expanded as soon as possible. After that, they include third-party sellers in their range of products and services. In conclusion, an example of an open platform is Amazon.
Search engines.
Search engines are Google, chrome, e.t.c. Above all they Bing provides an opportunity to post products on Local sites. These are online trading platforms that bring together several companies with a wide range of products.
Internet sites.
These are online marketplaces that conduct auctions and other commercial transactions, which are e-Commerce, eBay, Shopify e.t.c.
