The biggest retail period of the year is almost upon us, starting with the build-up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday and lasting until Christmas. With ecommerce becoming a preferred way to shop, allowing consumers to skip the crowds and get great deals at the same time, the competition for online shoppers is fierce. Here are some tips to include in your digital marketing strategy that will bring new leads through the door and result in increased conversions and sales.
Engage in Upselling and Associated Sales
Upselling is when you offer a customer a better product than what they’re asking for, for only a slight increase in price. For example, if you’re selling beauty products and a customer puts a 50ml eye cream in their shopping cart, you can have a pop-up that offers them the same product in a 75ml option for a 10% savings. The offering of the same product at a better value is often very attractive.
Selling associated products means offering a customer a range of products that you think they’d like based on what they have put in their shopping cart or what they’ve previously purchased – a bit like getting recommendations on Netflix based on programmes you’ve watched. This is very effective as many people simply don’t have the time or inclination to browse through your entire catalogue, so a good recommendation can quickly trigger a sale.
There are a couple of rules you should always follow when using these two tactics – make sure your offers are related to the original products and stick closely to the price range of that consumer.
Know Why Abandoned Carts Occur
It’s normal to have a certain number of cart abandonments and for this number to increase during the retail season, especially if you are seeing more visitors to your website. However, it’s important to take steps to reduce cart abandonment as much as possible – after all, they’re lost sales. According to the Baymard Institute, almost 70% of carts are abandoned – and the reasons for abandonment during checkout include:
- Surprise extra costs like shipping costs (60%)
- A too-complex or confusing checkout process (28%)
- The website crashing or website errors (20%)
- Not trusting the site with credit card information (19%)
- Long delivery times (18%)
- Too few payment methods (8%)
All of these are issues that can be reduced significantly by working with your digital marketing agency to improve your website. You can display shipping costs and delivery times upfront, correct errors in your website, add new payment methods, partner with faster couriers, and streamline your checkout process. Your digital marketing partner can help build trust between consumers and your brand through savvy content marketing and social media engagement too.
Develop Powerful Email Marketing Campaigns
If you want your digital marketing strategy to deliver but have limited budget, email marketing is the way to go. Dollar for dollar, it’s the most effective form of inbound marketing for increasing sales. Emails have become very versatile too, so it’s easy to include all kinds of content – text, video, and images – in a single email to make it stand out.
Email personalisation is essential in these campaigns, and your digital marketing agency can collect and analyse data from your site’s visitors and their social media activity to allow you to send high-impact, customised offers. You can target your audience by gender, age, spending habits, interests and more, making it easy to create rewarding campaigns.
Emails are exceptionally versatile and useful in the ecommerce industry, and there are specific types of emails you can send out (many of which can be automated) in order to bring consumers to your website. This includes:
- Monthly newsletters
- Promotion and sales alerts
- Personalised offers
- Product tips and launches
- Gift suggestions for notable days of the year including reminders for last-minute shoppers
- “We haven’t seen you in a while” discounts
- Personal discounts to customers who have abandoned carts
- Order and shipping emails
- Thankyou emails for high-value customers
Of course, you should be trying to capture as many email subscribers as possible to maximise the impact of your campaigns. Include a pop-up for people to subscribe when they visit your site, and an email sign-up when they make an account or purchase an item. You can also offer a discount for new subscribers or for subscribers who get friends to sign up using their referral code.
Develop a Retargeting Strategy
Most visitors to an ecommerce site don’t immediately buy an item, but they do browse, add items to their wishlist or even put items in their cart that then become abandoned. Retargeting is simply a way of approaching them through other channels to remind them what you have and what they were looking for. There are several digital marketing channels for doing this, the most effective of which are:
- Sending an email with a reminder about what’s in their cart or on their wishlist
- Running retargeting ads on other websites they visit and social media
- This can be done via Google Ads and/or Facebook Ads
These serve as a gentle reminder of items that they’re missing out on – enough to tempt them back and make a sale.
Don’t Forget About Social Media
Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram offer great opportunities to engage with consumers and promote your specials and products, and a few – like Facebook – allow you to set up an ecommerce store right there on your page. For consumers who browse social media, this is an incredibly convenient way to shop! Facebook and Instagram both offer paid advertising, which is very competitive and can be targeted to very specific platform users. These sites also offer useful free tools like stories, video and more. Just remember to keep your voice and content consistent with your brand and campaign, launch your campaigns and promotions in sync, and target your content marketing to the most appropriate audience segments.
If you’d like to make this retail season your ecommerce store’s most successful one yet, contact us and speak to our digital marketing team. We offer customised services for email marketing, social media marketing, SEO, content marketing and more.
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