E-Commerce Marketing Strategies That Increase Online Sales

Sales can make or break a business, be it an e-commerce store or a brick and mortar store. Especially when it comes to online marketing, it can be pretty daunting to make your mark in the face of such stiff competition.

Did you know that around 2.05 billion global digital buyers are expected to shop via ecommerce websites in 2020? Given this staggering number, it’s no wonder that increasing online sales is the ultimate goal of innumerable businesses. Whether you are a small-scale start-up or a huge conglomerate, you want more and more potential customers to actually stick around on your website till the checkout process, and after that as well.

Here’s an overview of the number of estimated digital buyers from 2014 to 2021:

Fortunately, there are numerous e business marketing strategies that you can employ to boost sales on your e-commerce platforms. Some of these strategies are definitely more effective than others and easier to implement than the other long-term ones.

Interested in driving your online sales through the roof? Read on to find out 6 exceptional ecommerce marketing strategies that will help you do so!

Contents

1. E-Commerce Marketing Strategies to Boost Sales

Here are 20 incredible ecommerce marketing strategies, divided into six neat categories, to boost your sales.

2. Create Honest and Informative Ads and Sales Copy

2.1 Be Forthright and Authentic in Your Marketing Campaigns and Sales Copy
The first and foremost step to successful e-commerce marketing is to be honest and upfront about your company. You want your consumers to trust you from the get-go, and to establish this trust, you need to present yourself in an honest light. So, make sure that your sales copy perfectly encapsulates who you are and what your brand has to offer to its consumers. Your copy must perfectly represent the kind of products and services that your clients can expect to get from you.

Additionally, make sure that you don’t go overboard with your sales pitches to your consumers. After all, you don’t want to make grandiose claims that you will struggle to substantiate later on. For instance, if you are a start-up in the e-commerce sector, make sure to be upfront about your stature with your target audience. This is a solid first step toward having a successful marketing campaign for an ecommerce website.

In fact, if you honestly and authentically market yourself as a start-up, you can even gain some traction in the market. The strategy is to utilize your freshness and newness in the market as your USP. Establish yourself as a brand that will put its customers’ needs above everything else and will provide them with personalized and individualized services and care. It’s all about how you market yourself to your consumers. The correct way will help you establish your credibility in the eyes of the online consumer base. In fact, when it comes to online marketing, 43% of millennials rank authenticity over content.

If you establish a relationship that is rooted in honesty and forthrightness with your consumers, it will help build their trust in your brand. It will also ensure that they further recommend your website within their social circles. You need to maintain the same level of candour and approachability in all of your marketing campaigns, be it e-mail marketing or social media marketing.

2.2 Use Ad Extensions to Get More Clicks

If you are a part of the large e-commerce industry, then you must have ad extensions to promote your website. They are an integral part of the best ecommerce strategies for marketing your business. In the image presented above, you see a clear 8% difference between the click-through rate of an ad with a sitelink and one without it. They allow you to exponentially increase the visibility of your website, which leads to more potential clicks and an increased ROI. Moreover, it does not cost you any extra money. What more could you want from it?

As the name suggests, ad extensions are there to effectively increase the length of your ads. If you have ever written a Google Ad (AdWord), you know that it’s quite annoying to fit everything you have to say into the limited characters of Google Ads. However, with an ad extension, you can extend the length of your ad and highlight everything that you want to in your ads.  Check out this helpful guide on Google Ad mistakes to avoid and more on how to use ad extensions.

2.3 Answer Every Question and Address Every Objection in Your Copy
You simply cannot make the mistake of assuming that your prospective customers know anything about your business, products, services, or offerings. Many companies make the mistake of believing that their consumers know more about the market and the products that they are selling than they actually do. What this does is that it leads to a lot of confusion and unanswered questions, both of which can lead to a loss in sales.

So, first and foremost, consider every possible question that your customer can think of about your product. Once you have all those questions, make sure to answer them all in your sales copy or product description pages.

Moreover, think of every possible objection that a prospective client might have about your service and product, and then proactively overcome it in your sales copy. Don’t think of it as bombarding potential consumers with too much information; you are only providing them valuable information that will help them come up with an informed decision.

Write a clear and concise copy with only the most relevant and useful information about your products and services. Just make sure that your copy is all about the consumer and how your product can benefit them rather than rave about your company and its services.

2.4 Keep Your Message Consistent Across the Board
Have you ever come across an interesting ad while browsing online, only to be redirected to a highly irrelevant landing page or the website’s home page? How did it make you feel? Annoyed, right? Did you end up buying something from that website? Most probably not! This is the most widely used yet ineffective and often detrimental e business marketing technique.

If a user clicks on an ad, they obviously do so because they want to learn more about the specific product that is advertised in the ad. So, they should be taken to a webpage that has more details about said product or service, not to some other page that is highlighting the merits of some other product category or a special offer for another product. This will only annoy a potential buyer and dissuade them from browsing your website. They will think that they were baited into looking at products that they were not even interested in buying.

So, make sure to keep your messaging constant and relevant across the board. You need to ensure that your PPC ads take the user to the pages that are associated with the advertised products. This will help you turn the clicks into actual sales. It will also help you keep your buyers happy and satisfied.

3. Utilize Your Buyers’ Testimonials

3.1 Display Trust Signals and Consumer Reviews and Testimonials

Customer feedback holds a key role in the sales of an online business and is a key ecommerce strategy. It has gained even more significance due to the vast influence of social media. This allows you to capitalize on the satisfaction of your customers in a unique and effective way. You can simply ask your loyal customers to provide you with some needed credibility and boosted reliability in the form of their valued testimonials. Moreover, actively encourage your buyers to leave reviews of your products on your website. According to a report by Spiegel Research center, nearly 95% of shoppers read online reviews before making a purchase!

In fact, a vast number of satisfied customers raving about you, your services, and products is vastly better than even the most amazingly-written sales copy. So, make sure to spruce up your website pages with raving reviews and customer testimonials that highlight the glorious benefits of your products. You can include these testimonials on your landing page, product description pages, pricing pages, and even your home page.

Likewise, you should think about adding different trust signals to your website. As the name suggests, trust signals are different ways in which you can help the potential customers look at your brand in a favourable light. Trust signals are the perfect ecommerce marketing strategy. They allow prospective customers to overcome any hesitation they might have about your image in a pre-emptive manner. These usually include certifications from legitimate institutions and sources. Make sure to display these trust signals on your website in a way that they are impossible to miss.

4. Think of What You Are Offering Your Buyers

4.1 Create a Sense of Urgency in Your Buyer’s Mind
It is as important to establish a sense of urgency in your clients as it is to be truthful and transparent about your services and offers in a sales copy. You need to persuade potential customers to buy from you right now, right away.

How can you do this?

Well, there are a lot of ways to persuade customers that the best possible thing for them is to buy your products right away. These include incentives, such as time-sensitive offers and limited-edition products.

Although there are numerous effective ways to create this sense of urgency, which almost always leads to an increase in sales, some strategies are much more effective than others. For instance, if your brand is not established enough to successfully entice consumers with a limited-edition product, you can choose to offer an irresistible financial incentive to those customers who commit to purchasing an item right away. These incentives include solid discounts and free shipping. You can also come up with limited-time sales and seasonal deals and display a countdown on your website pages.

4.2 Offer an Ironclad Money-Back Guarantee

Most often, when a consumer hesitates to buy something online, it’s rooted in risk aversion. They simply want to avoid a potential financial loss. They fear that they might not like a certain product, which means that they would have spent their hard-earned money for nothing. After all, buyer’s remorse is very much a real thing and it often leads people to never return to an e-commerce website.

So, why would a potential consumer be inclined to buy your product? What motivation or guarantee can you provide them that they will be motivated to buy from you? You can effectively counter a buyer’s hesitation from the outset by clearly offering a bulletproof money-back guarantee on your products.

This way, you are taking away any and everything that might dissuade a prospective buyer from spending their money on your website. It’s one of the highly effective internet marketing strategies for ecommerce. It will effectively remove the fear of potential loss from the buyer’s mind. Additionally, it will also project your brand’s image as one that’s trustworthy. Once the risk is removed and trust is built, people are more likely to spend their money on your products.

4.3 Offer Fewer Product Picks
Many businesses out there think that the more products they offer, the higher their sales will be. They believe that more choices increase the likelihood of buyers finding what they are looking for on their website. However, in many instances, the more choices a buyer has, the likelier they are to get confused and then leave the website without buying anything. Indecision on the prospective buyer’s part is a great factor in terms of lost sales.

So, even if you have a large variety of products, make sure to structure your website in a way that presents buyers with a limited number of choices on each webpage. This is one of the key online product marketing strategies. It will significantly reduce the possibility of your prospective consumers getting overwhelmed by the sheer number of different products.

4.4 Offer as Many Payment Choices as Possible

Make sure to provide your customers with as many varied payment options as possible. You simply cannot stick to just one or two payment methods, such as Google Wallet or direct transfer, and then expect to generate massive sales. You need to take into account that different people have different preferences when it comes to paying for things online. Some people have a preference for American Express, while some others prefer to pay via ApplePay and so on.

By offering a large variety of payment options to your consumers, you are making sure that you generate maximum sales. This is one of the most widely effective e commerce selling strategies. Make sure to add payment methods that are especially popular on mobile phones since many consumers shop online. We recognize that it can be a complete hassle to optimize your website; however, this is definitely a great way to prevent shopping cart abandonment and drive sales.

4.5 Give Away as Much as You Possibly Can for Free
It’s no secret that people simply love free stuff. However, giveaways also have the potential of becoming one of the most impactful ecommerce sales strategies. The more offerings and products you give for free, the more likely it is for prospective buyers to perceive you in a favourable and positive light, which will eventually lead to more online sales.

So, take a look at your current offerings and find out if you can give anything for free without harming your business. If you are in the cosmetic industry, you can choose to give a customized cosmetic bag to a few lucky customers. If you are a part of the software industry, you can offer free tutorials for new software.

Use social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook to promote your giveaways. You can put some conditions on them as well such as reaching a certain number of shares on Facebook or sharing your giveaway post on their Instagram story before you can choose the lucky consumers.

5. Use the Power of Social Media to Your Advantage

5.1 Target Lookalike Audiences on Facebook
Look at the data you already have about your existing customer base to find more potential customers just like them. Social media platforms such as Facebook allow you to do this. Lookalike audiences are Facebook users who share behaviours and characteristics displayed by the customers in your database.

Once you upload your data on Facebook, it runs a cross-reference check with its own data and the data from third-party data brokers to come up with matches based on your specified criteria. What’s more is that you can use tracking pixels and data from app installations to assist you in creating different lookalike audiences.

This is an incredible way to utilize the data you have already gathered from your existing customers. This way, you can effectively maximize your reach with minimal effort. It’s one of the most common e commerce strategies for business markets to promote their brands. Moreover, once you have a target audience that you know you can influence, you can then use highly targeted ads to entice them on social media.

5.2 Dive into the World of Social Media Advertising
Social media is arguably the most effective and profitable form of online advertising today. Another plus is that most of the advertising on social media is free of charge, so it won’t add to your average cost of internet advertising. If you have accounts on different social media platforms, then you are already on the right path.

However, simply posting regularly on your account about new offers and products and linking your website in all the posts is not going to be enough to increase your sales as every other brand is doing just that. To truly stand out from the crowd and make your mark, you need to make use of different online marketing and sales strategies on social media. We have already discussed targeting specific segments of the audience on Facebook.

Additionally, you can create relevant landing pages for your advertising campaigns. However, these will only work if you already have a giant following in terms of loyal customers who would be willing to browse your website for specific products. If you are one of the lucky ones, make sure that your landing page information is in line with your ad copy, so that your customers don’t feel like they were duped.

Another strategy that you can employ is to incorporate video advertising in your social media marketing campaigns. If you show a short clip to your potential customers about how your products can turn their lives around, it will definitely create a significant impact. It will send your point across in a quick and effective manner.

If your ad is loaded with too much text, chances are that it will go unread. With small snippets and video advertising, you can effectively grab the attention of social media scrollers. Additionally, demonstrating how easy it is to use your product in a short clip will increase the likelihood of people buying it. This can also act as a wonderful ecommerce launch strategy. After all, a picture is definitely worth a thousand words.

Moreover, you need to use social media to form connections with your consumer market. The best way to do that is to respond to their queries in an honest and fun way. You can even deal with the trolls and capitalize on their hatred to generate traffic for your business. Reply to tweets on Twitter in an honest and creative manner. Engaging with your customers will allow you to present yourself in a favourable and fun light.

Handling various aspects of social media marketing can be pretty time-consuming and require prompt responsiveness and research skills to stay in touch with recent and ever-changing trends. If you want social media experts to handle your social media marketing campaign, then do get in touch with SEO Resellers Canada.

5.3 Invest in Influencer Marketing

Another one of the best ecommerce marketing strategies is to collaborate with social media influencers to promote your brand and drive your sales. Influencers are people who have a massive following on social media and people look up to them for daily product recommendations. If you are a skincare brand, then a great way to increase the sales of your products is to get in touch with an established beauty blogger.

When such an influential presence on social media actively promotes your brands and products and practically vouches for them to be amazing, their followers tend to buy the product for themselves. In fact, about 40% of consumers tend to purchase something that they saw their favourite influencers recommending online. Try to collaborate with both established and up-and-coming influencers in your field so that you can cover as much ground and reach out to as many demographics as possible.

6. Optimize your Website and Product Pages

6.1 Optimize Your Checkout Process

According to the worldwide survey conducted Statisa, a whopping 69.57% of consumers abandoned their online shopping carts before completing their purchase in 2019. This is a truly astonishing statistic and one that highlights just how essential it is to have a smooth checkout process as that’s the only way to deal with shopping cart abandonment on your website. Here are the global shopping cart abandonment rates:

If you are able to reduce friction in your checkout process, it will have an amazing impact on your conversion rates. Just as it is essential for your website to have a user-friendly interface, it’s important for your checkout process to be smooth, quick, and easy. This way, users will be encouraged to actually go through the buying process.

So, make sure to eliminate all unnecessary steps from your checkout process. Anything that could potentially dissuade a lead from converting needs to go. This definitely includes all the unnecessary fields that e-commerce websites tend to add in their forms. Additionally, don’t time out a consumer and make them start anew, this will only discourage them from shopping with you.

6.2 Display High-Quality Product Images
Appearance has a key role to play in how people perceive different things. This is why it is critical that you invest in high-quality product photography, such as the one shown below, for your e-commerce website. It will definitely help you sell your products to your prospective buyers. Regardless of the kind of products that you sell, make sure to display top-quality graphic images of them instead of opting for poorly lit shots or tiny thumbnails that reveal nothing. This is one of the most impactful and necessary e marketing techniques in ecommerce.

Furthermore, always make sure to include a large variety of images that highlight different aspects and angles of your product. This is because when online shopping, the image of the product is one of the most important things a buyer has to go on before they choose to buy that product. So, you need to ensure that your prospective customers have many images of your products that they can look at to appease their minds.

6.3 Add Helpful Product Descriptions

Another solid step on your way to increasing your online sales is to add helpful product descriptions. Think of these descriptions as your online sales rep – they need to contain all the information that a sales rep would provide to prospective customers at a store. So, make sure to add product descriptions that have answers to all the questions that your customer will likely have about your product. The descriptions should be full of keywords that customers repeatedly type in for their searches in search engines.

Additionally, set up a detailed FAQs section on your website and have categories dedicated to your most loved products. This will greatly enhance your prospective consumer’s shopping experience and also cut back on the refunds for your e-commerce business. Adding keyword-rich product descriptions will also help you make your content SEO-worthy. Simply put, as a highly impactful marketing strategy of e commerce sites, it will help you rank higher on search engines.

6.4 Get Rid of Unnecessary Landing Pages
Yes, you read that right. Now, before you raise your eyebrows at us, thinking that we might be crazy to suggest that you get rid of the one page where you can market your offer, do hear us out. We are definitely not suggesting that you get rid of all of your landing pages. This strategy involves optimizing your online ads to align with the number of people that are going to browse the web and shop online.

In this regard, what works best are Call-Only campaigns on Facebook and AdWords. They are an ideal example of when it makes sense to remove unnecessary landing pages. Many people simply don’t want to spend their time browsing through different web pages on their mobile phones simply to find out more about your offers. They are looking for easier and simpler ways to get in touch with you and your business.

If you utilize call-only ads, you will make it easier for prospective clients to reach out to you as you will effectively eliminate one of the weakest links of the online sales funnel. This will also increase the volume of calls that your business gets – which is one of the most priceless lead sources for many businesses. This is because people who actively choose to reach out to you are so much easier to convert than those who randomly visit your website while browsing online.

6.5 Create a Mobile-Friendly Website and App
If you want to ensure that more and more leads convert and buy from your website, optimize your website to make it mobile-friendly. It’s a major marketing strategy for an online shopping portal. To optimize it, ensure that your website has a responsive design.

This means that every element and content on your website should be perfectly balanced according to the user’s screen size. So, whenever a user zooms in or zooms out their phone’s screen, the content of your website remains aligned with the size of their screen. It should also have simple menus and helpful search functions.

What’s more is that you can invest in an ecommerce app for your online business. With an app, you won’t have to worry about losing prospective clients due to loading speed as apps tend to load much quicker than websites. Additionally, apps are just super convenient to use for mobile phone users.

They simply have to tap away to view your products. Moreover, you can even send helpful, push notifications to your users announcing special offers and seasonal sales. Overall, building an app to go with your established website is an ideal way to generate more sales.

7. Use E-Mail Marketing

7.1 Influence New Customers with a Personalized Follow-Up Email

Some businesses make the mistake of ending their relationship with their consumers as soon as they checkout. However, this is not favourable when it comes to retaining customers. What really works like a charm in terms of increasing sales and making life-long customers is sending a follow-up e-mail to all your new customers.

Make sure to send out a thoughtful, genuinely useful follow-up e-mail that includes the details of their purchase, links to more relevant and helpful products, and some customer service information. Add sentences that reflect that you actually care about the satisfaction of your customers. Urge them to contact your customer service representatives if they find anything amiss with their order or if they want to find out anything about your services and products in general.

The more attention you give to your consumers, the likelier they are to form a fierce brand loyalty with you and your products. This strategy will allow you to increase your sales and retain your customers for a long period of time.  Think of your customers in terms of forming relationships with them and not just as channels from where you can gain more money. The more humanistic your approach is, the more likely you are to form long-lasting bonds with your new customers.

7.2 Use Retargeting to Drive More Sales
A large number of users simply don’t convert on their first visit to an e-commerce website. In fact, a lot of times customers revisit a certain website via two or more devices on different occasions. So, what exactly drives these revisits? Retargeting campaigns!

If you want to increase your sales, you will need to retarget customers by running an ad of your products on other websites that a customer heads to after leaving your site.

Another way to retarget customers is via e-mail campaigns. You can choose to remarket your content to your customers via e-mail on a time-sensitive sale offer or in a newsletter. This way, potential customers will remember your brands and products.

8. The Bottom Line

Ecommerce marketing is easier said than done. After all, it can be overwhelming to fight for customers and increase your sales while competing with thousands of other e-commerce sites. However, you can follow the above-mentioned comprehensive e commerce planning methods and strategies to exponentially increase your online sales.

If you want to drive the sales of your e-commerce website through the roof, you can get in touch with us. At SEO Resellers Canada, we optimize your website so that it ranks high on search engine searches, which will increase your website traffic and sales. Our team of experts offers effective digital marketing services, such as SEO, blogging, e-mail marketing, social media marketing, and so much more. To find out more, contact us today!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jamie Barton

CEO of NASN Licensing Inc. & Shopincities.com

Jamie has more than two decades of experience in accelerating brand visibility for online businesses. His company operates SEOResellersCanada.ca, a white label SEO and digital marketing agency. With his unique and actionable business processes, agencies and small businesses can successfully expand online operations without the traditional associated cost overhead.