In the past year, retail has seen a significant upheaval. As conventional retailers were compelled to go online, customer purchasing patterns likewise saw a rapid transition. This led to an abrupt acceleration in eCommerce growth. The emphasis now is on increasing online consumer loyalty rather than just speeding up online sales. More and more hassle-free, convenient shopping experiences are what consumers are expecting. Offering this flawless customer experience online contributes to profitable transactions and steady development.
What steps can you take to ensure your online sales are optimized to satisfy these customers' needs? How can you increase your market share, gratify customers, and stop shopping cart abandonment?
In order to assist you in outperforming the competition, we've compiled our top eCommerce marketing advice in this piece.
What is eCommerce Marketing?
The practice of advertising your products and services to current and future clients is known as eCommerce marketing. Your online store's objectives will determine the overall direction of your eCommerce marketing plan, which can take many various shapes.
Your objective may be to increase website traffic, build brand recognition, or sell more of a certain product.
Once you are clear on your goals, you may select the most effective eCommerce marketing plan to achieve them. Your promotional efforts on platforms like social media, your website, search engines, or email campaigns to increase traffic to your website and boost sales are all part of your eCommerce strategy.
But how can you optimize your eCommerce approach to increase your online sales?
Top 7 eCommerce strategies for increasing online sales:
1. Review the prior year
Undoubtedly, individuals now regularly purchase online, particularly in the wake of the devastating effects of the Covid-19 outbreak. Global eCommerce sales will total $5.5 trillion in 2022. Additionally, it is predicted that by the end of 2025, the worldwide eCommerce market would be worth $7.3 trillion.
This demonstrates unequivocally that businesses have prospered in spite of severe challenges. So why not utilize what you've learned from previous years and use it as the basis for your peak-season eCommerce strategy in 2023?
Start by looking at the action plans you created to combat a worldwide epidemic. You may use this information as a guide to go forward and advance your approach.
Examine historical statistics on your top-performing products, peak sales periods, and successful campaigns. Utilize your data to segment your clientele depending on their behavior, and then send them offers that are both current and pertinent.
You may use the following key aspects to help you choose your successful approach for the future year:
2. Make your buying experience more customized
If there is one thing that internet sales sometimes lack, it is frequently the human experience.
Today, 80% of consumers are more inclined to make a purchase from a company that offers individualized experiences.
Brands could offer similarly tailored services online, much as in a physical store where the salesperson can tell what a consumer is looking at and how engaged they are.
By combining visitor behavior data with marketing automation, it is possible to create customized experiences for every visitor based on where they are in the buying process.
You may achieve this by providing your seasonal promotions, offers, and interactions in line with:
To help you with this we have mapped out steps on how to interact and personalize the shopping experience using different content during different stages of the customer journey:
The "Just browsing" stage
Your visitors often start out by looking for the things they need. They are also more likely to quit at this point without becoming converts.
Visitors are often investigating or browsing during the beginning of the customer journey and are more likely to depart without making a purchase. Sometimes a visitor to your website could arrive unsure of what they're looking for. Offering aid is the best course of action in this circumstance.
Active live chat is similar to the sort of interaction you would provide in a physical store: When a customer enters, a shop assistant welcomes them and assists them in finding what they're searching for. Why would you let a consumer roam aimlessly online if you would never do so in-store?
Proactively starting a dialogue with a visitor not only enhances their experience but also moves you one step closer to making a sale.
The "Check-out started" stage
The visitor is now transitioning from browsing to checking out. Cart abandonment is still possible since they have things in their basket but have not yet paid for them.
50% of customers will cancel an online order during the checkout process because of additional fees or delivery costs. It's crucial to be absolutely open and honest about your website's checkout procedure for this reason.
For those apprehensive customers, offering live chat with a customized autosuggest message at checkout might give them confidence. Additionally, you may utilize chat to assist consumers in completing their purchases, give specials and discounts, and remind them to do so.
Let's start a live conversation by saying "Hello! Anyone who has spent more than a specific length of time on the checkout page will see the message "Need help checking out? ". This can lead to a 30% rise in the average basket value.
The "Post-purchase" stage
Maintaining their happiness is crucial once they become a paying client in order to keep them coming back for more. Consider the following when trying to foster client loyalty and customize the post-purchase shopping experience:
giving a discount on their subsequent purchase as a way of rewarding clients that use your thank you page.
by giving them value-added information on the things they just bought. a manual or instructional video on how to use the new product they just bought. Give them product suggestions that complement their recent buy.
Upon their return to your website, send them a personalized chat welcome message or a product recommendation, such as "Welcome back! Have you seen our new product? will help you develop a link between your brand and your customers.
3. Be Proactive in your approach
Online sales should be proactive rather than reactive, much like in-person sales. This may be accomplished by tailoring your approach to website visitors depending on their behavior and activities while they are there and providing them with pertinent information.
You can automatically approach clients with pop-ups and advertisements that are tailored to their requirements by using Sarp mind fire’s targeting. AI targeting or rule-based processes are also options.
By recognizing customers, giving them priority, and launching customized activities to suit their individual needs, AI may assist in converting website visitors.
By using audio and video chat, you may also bring your personal selling experience online. These are outstanding tools for customer care that are sales-focused.
Be proactive when contacting clients online
Use real-time client behavioral data to your best advantage for profitable online sales. Similar to in-store situations where you may provide the consumer advice or point them in a particular route depending on what they are purchasing. Online customer support must have these skills as well.
The sales staff can effectively upsell and cross-sell by having knowledge about your customers' purchasing habits.
Interaction with shopping carts makes it possible for you to provide related online services: While they are conversing with visitors, your sales representatives may see what is in their shopping cart.
4. Strategically upsell and cross-sell
Customers who have things in their baskets have a great chance for upselling and cross-selling related products that are of higher value. The ability to see a shopping cart in real-time and keep track of a customer's past purchases opens up a variety of sales and marketing options. Make use of these examples:
Cross-Sell: When a customer adds an item to their basket, you may send them a chat message suggesting a value bundle of related products that they frequently buy together.
Up-Sell: When an item is added to the cart, a pop-up window promoting a more recent, improved, and expensive version of the item displays.
Offers: For instance, when a customer has a basket with a value of £60, point up discounts and deals that are only valid if they raise the amount to £75 or £100.
Automate as much of this process as you can to successfully and timely concentrate on high-value leads.
5. Gamify eCommerce holiday sales
Consumers nowadays, believe it or not, have an attention span shorter than a goldfish, giving marketers only 8 seconds to capture their interest. Due to the little amount of time available, it is up to you to plan your peak season eCommerce strategy and develop campaigns that are effective in driving direct online sales.
You may get the type of interaction you want by gamifying your online business and creating engaging campaigns that are sales-focused at peak times. It makes your marketing more interactive, adding that extra push to shorten the sales cycle.
How to make e-commerce marketing more funConversion rates might rise thanks to interactive marketing, which also has the potential to quadruple weekly newsletter subscriptions.
It works really well for gathering additional information about your consumers, enabling you to segment and personalize your product even more. An excellent resource for enhancing and expanding your database.
6. Use A/B testing to optimize your eCommerce deals
You can't expect to strike the mark even after considering all the information and lessons from the previous year. The market may alter sometimes (as we have all discovered in 2020...), your business objectives may change, and what worked in the past may not be the greatest option this year.
A/B testing is a powerful technique that may help you understand what appeals to your audience and improve outcomes because of this. Additionally, it's a terrific approach to maximize the discussion rate of your encounters, not only for your email marketing.
You may play around with features like pop-up windows, live chat, chatbots, or even tests or games.
Iterating modifications that produce outcomes and increase marketing ROI is the main goal of A/B testing.
Begin with A/B testing interactions on your eCommerce website:
1. Establish a goal.
Start by considering the objective of your campaign: Are you trying to boost order size, promote a certain seasonal product, or expand your email list? Use this as a reference for what you want to optimize and to decide what the objective of your A/B test should be.
2. Select the tests to run
Second, you must a strategy for achieving the intended outcome. Your A/B testing hypothesis is as follows. A/B testing includes experimenting with a single element, such as your heading copy, banner graphics, or CTA location. Why not give one of the following a try?
A free delivery pop-up vs none
Show a coupon in a pop-up rather than a prompt live chat message.
Instead of not having live chat, include it on your checkout page.
3. timing and traffic
Last but not least, you'll need enough visitors to your site to evenly distribute them across the two options if you want trustworthy findings. Due to the high volume of traffic you're currently directing to your eCommerce website, peak seasons are perfect periods for A/B testing.
Consider the duration of your test as well; it should truly last as long as it takes to collect sufficient data to allow you to make comparisons between variations. Once you have the information, make the necessary adjustments and then continue on to testing additional components.
7. Make an impression with interactive advertisements
Peak sales periods are one of the most competitive times of the year for advertising for retail enterprises. By using rich media interactive advertisements to promote your campaigns across paid channels, you can avoid banner blindness and cut through the clutter. Brands may offer distinctive ad experiences that boost conversion rates by using interactive advertisements.
Because they encourage customer interaction and frequently feature media types like video, photos, music, or animation, they differ from static display advertising.
When compared to static, non-interactive video commercials, interactive video ads may increase customer engagement with your brand's advertisements by 47%.
When a user scrolls down the page, interactive advertising often spreads, plays videos when clicked, or expands when the user hovers over them. It's an effective strategy for marketers to increase the amount of time customers interact with their brand.
The advantages of interactive advertisements in eCommerce
your buying experience will be better: They don't push visitors to a publisher's website as static advertising does, so they don't obstruct a visitor's surfing.
Boost lead generation: Interactive advertisements with lead form extensions inside the ad allow lead generation to happen outside of your eCommerce site.
Boost CTR: Rich media advertising have a higher click-through rate than banner ads, exceeding them by 267%.
