Among the great trends that have marked us in recent years, a phenomenon stands out above all: the presence of the internet in the daily routine. Millions of users’ access internet each day, and several times a day to get informed, interact, work or benefit from an offer. From the commercial point of view, this impressive expansion is reflected in the very high sums of consumers who use electronic commerce platforms to acquire products without leaving their home; from air tickets, clothes of all kinds or shoes for all ages, show tickets, appliances, and cultural products such as records or books.
If you have an eCommerce venture and want to stand out from the beginning, use this marketing guide for your online store and you will get visitors to know, value and choose your virtual business.
Having a presence on the Internet through a corporate website or a profile on social networks is not the same as promoting an online store. Before launching into an eCommerce project, your company must evaluate which business model best suits your needs, both present, and future, be clear about your niche and build your communication and sales strategy based on same.
And while having a digital business is the almost unanimous and predictable trend, it implies not only certain management and organization challenges but also new ways of applying Marketing for your online store and that it is well-positioned, promoted and provides security in the whole process of selling your products.
If you are still in an embryonic phase of this new bet, the first thing you have to know is that there are various online business models. More precisely, four:
Own online store
It consists of creating a web page for the direct sale of products or services. An online store never closes but operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and allows you to include the entire product catalog with detailed information, photographs, and contact information. Through it, you can easily manage and control the orders, stock, and billing of the company. And if you also invest in web analytics, you can get to know your customers better based on their shopping habits and preferences. Of course, this model must have the necessary technical and economic resources to create an attractive eCommerce, that allows you to reach as many clients as possible and that works in an agile and safe way to build trust.
Marketplaces
These trading platforms connect buyers and sellers around the world. They are the online version of the large shopping centers, where we can find stores dedicated to the sale of all kinds of items and enjoy a large influx of people. In exchange for a fee for its presence on the platform and/or a commission for each transaction, your brand can opt for this model and obtain easy access to customers with guaranteed traffic, reducing online advertising costs to achieve visibility.
Flash Sales
The quick sales model is made through platforms that channel offers and promotions online that are only available for a while and that apply great discounts on new products and services to attract customers. Some of the best known are Groupon or Letsbonus, but there are others focused on specific categories such as travel, fashion or training. The challenge that can be presented to you later is how to build customer loyalty once your offer has expired, needing a Marketing strategy for your online store that is comprehensive and with a long-term projection.
Dropshipping
This is one of the fastest-growing models in the eCommerce environment and that consists in opening an online store for the sale of products that are manufactured, stored and distributed by other suppliers. In this drop shipment model, it is the supplier who delivers the product to customers and takes care of possible returns, while your brand is responsible for customer service and billing.
Take Advantage of all the marketing channels for your online store
Businesses in the cloud need attention, maintenance, work and above all, scalability forecast. An eCommerce can be the best showcase for your company if it seeks to reach consumers from different parts. However, as in the physical environment, even the best project in the world needs to be known on all fronts where competition is present and stimulate the security of the transaction if you want to sell your products.
In the digital field, you can make use of various Marketing channels for your online store, all crucial both to attract customers and build loyalty and encourage them to buy again and again. And it is that at the beginning of the project you need a high share of persistence, patience and above all dedication.
Email Marketing
Sending content via email campaigns is a simple way to retain customers and increase sales. For example, with a newsletter, you can keep buyers informed about news or promotions, and give them exclusive access to discounts or contests. Try to segment your database to personalize all communications according to the previous behavior of your buyers or their demographic profile.
Organic Positioning
At the beginning of a business, it may happen that there is not too much budget to invest very high figures in advertising or that you even need to first develop a comprehensive visibility strategy and not just on a couple of pages with featured products. Therefore, a good idea is to invest time and resources in SEO as the axis of Marketing for your online store. Here we can help you develop a solid organic search engine positioning with a long tail keyword scheme so that your eCommerce appears as high as possible in the search results when someone queries something related to your business. When working the structure, the design and content from an approach that prioritizes the quality and originality of the store, search algorithms will take into account certain classification factors that will help attract traffic to your store.
Payment positioning
Unlike SEO, the SEM pursues the promotion of the store in the visible area of sponsored results within the search engine. Payment methods, being Google Adwords the emblem, as well as the insertion of advertising banners on other websites and blogs with traffic, allow you to buy search terms or phrases widely used in your industry to appear as high and prominent as possible in the area of the payment results. If you have a well-managed SEM, it will be possible to know exactly the effectiveness and conversion of marketing campaigns for your online store, as well as direct segmented traffic to your website.
Affiliate Marketing
With these affiliate programs or systems, you can partner with other websites to sell your company’s products or services to your visitors in exchange for a commission. How does it work? These intermediaries insert advertising in the form of banners or links directed to your online store and charge based on the number of purchases that materialize, although a commission can also be set for the traffic generated to your site or if users complete actions such as filling out a form or subscribe to be informed of the news.
Social networks
Given the amount of time that users spend on spreading through networks, Social Media should be considered one of the main marketing strategies for your online store. The goal is not only to attract traffic to the eCommerce but also to improve the visibility of the offer and build brand image. In our creative agency, we are advocates that managing these platforms should not only be thought of as sharing a URL of the product on the wall or the timeline but also cooperating with the instances of customer service, resolution of doubts and conflicts, promotion of competitive advantages and encouragement of the community.
Content Marketing
While we develop a specific article on the importance of content and marketing for your online store, it never hurts to remember that digital communication is the axis of all commercial prosperity. Creating valuable content for your corporate blog can give you unbeatable advantages, but above all, it will make your target audience feel identified and interested in what your brand publishes periodically. You will see how a blog post or a well-written article can explain what the proposal is, show how the product works and detail all its features.
Off-on integration via flyers
If you identify that your target or target audience frequents certain physical places, the best advice we can give you is not to despise those public spaces at all but to creatively integrate the offline channel with the online one and thus achieve that the relevant information in the Conventional terrain stimulates the action in your online store. When integrating them, do not forget to highlight the address of your eCommerce, as well as add the QR code to give a small gift to all those who keep your omnichannel strategy alive.
Promotional or discount coupons
The coupon is the most classic way to attract new customers and retain existing ones. If you have allied and complementary brands to your industry, you can use your physical business to promote your online store through discount coupons that are delivered to your store but that apply to your eCommerce.
Point programs
This model, what it does is to reward the customer every time he buys in the online store, being able to exchange his accumulated points for new products or services. The desire to collect points can encourage new consumers to continue shopping or function as a strategy to “recover” old customers.
Google Suite
Through Google Shopping, users can find the product they are looking for directly in the Google search engine and buy it right there. To enable this option, you first need to open an account in Google Merchant Center and use Adwords to appear in the search engine, telling Google the data of the products in your store that you are interested in displaying. By choosing the categories you want to export, you can send product information to be included in the Google Product Search engine where there is advertising space available to be purchased and displayed as if it were an AdWords ad.
In a simpler way, and perhaps not so advanced, you can open a Google Places account so that when your business appears as a result of an internet search, it will be done along with additional data such as a physical address, phone, photos, opinions of customers and of course your online store. By offering more information to your potential customers, you will help them clear up doubts and increase the chances of them becoming real. Also, if you have physical stores, a good idea is to add the address in Google Maps to offer the consumer more than one possible shopping channel.
Chatbots
In other articles of our blog, we have mentioned the usefulness of these automatic conversation windows and that undoubtedly help the audience to resolve doubts about a purchase or steps before the transaction process directly and immediately, avoiding that the motivation to acquire the product is cooled. Incorporating a chatbot or Live Chat can, in addition to providing you with a new customer service channel, help you close a high number of undecided customers.
If just in your case, statistics show you that your store has many carts full but abandoned, it may be time to leverage that final purchase decision by providing instant answers to customer questions. And that’s not all! The smartest chatbots detect what your client is looking for from the use of keywords and even suggest complementary products; making them excellent tools to deal with problems of easy solution.
Mobile Application
In the last two years, we have seen the proliferation of eCommerce integrated to the native development of our application to facilitate the navigation of its customers and make the shopping process more intuitive, at your fingertips. By having an app as a sales tool, you can insert payment information and dispense with the need for the buyer to fill out a form with their data each time they complete a new transaction; a dynamic that allows you to accelerate the purchase process. Besides, this channel serves to deliver periodic content to buyers through push notifications and thus remind them of the competitive advantages of your commercial proposals.
So here we present some of the many marketing strategies for your online store. Of course, there are other dozens of techniques, channels, and integrations and that you can use well in your digital business.
The important thing is that you keep in mind that together with the absolute prominence of mobile devices, the future of eCommerce will be linked to two trends: hyper-personalization that will require knowing very well what your buyers are like and what they expect, as well as the gamification of purchasing processes, which will involve applying the rules of the games in relation to customers to encourage sales and strengthen brand loyalty.
In this current moment of profound change in our way of buying and living in the middle of two worlds (online and offline) merged, companies will be obliged to understand the entire purchase process and assess the changing needs of the new generation of consumers to satisfy them with a proposal as instantaneous as segmented.
