E-Commerce marketers should carefully craft strategies based on a combination of owned, paid and earned marketing tactics. They need to reach customers on their preferred communication channels, be mobile and responsive.
They need to have a very effective SEO strategy to be easily found online, a compelling website experience and offering to make visitors convert and engage them with visual applications and contextual messages to keep them loyal and cross-sell.
In terms of tactics used, the online marketing channels that drive most e-Commerce purchases today are Organic, CPC (SEM) and email. Furthermore, customer acquisition through quality email marketing quadrupled over the last four years. Other programs include affiliate programs, display, social media.
Start from understanding your digital buyer profile
Who is your customer? What are his shopping preferences? What are the trends? What social media channels he prefers?
For example B2C buyers will almost always hunt low prices whilst the same is not true for B2B where you are selling to someone who is spending someone else’s money. In this case, it’s about making their personal experience better and making them trust the quality of your product and service. A B2B buyer might be willing to pay an extra 10-15% for a safer experience, tools that turn their projects into success, services that enable them to save time or for improve delivery.
At the same time, 49% of the B2B buyers prefer to make work related purchases on the same websites they use for personal purchases. They expect useful services to support their shopping journey: self servicing accounts, easy access to customer service, store locators, personalized product recommendation, peer to peer reviews.
According to Forrester Research, online consumer are more likely to:
- Order outside core categories
- Add items to an order
- Order in bulk
- Buy standard repeat orders
- Order at higher frequency
- Switch from one brand to another due to promo offers
- Order values can be increased
- Easier to upsell and cross-sell
- The average order value can be higher
Some figures:
- 44% would prefer to buy on desktop/laptop
- 41% would prefer to buy in physical shops
- 11% would prefer to buy on a smartphone
- Smarter shoppers research more for price comparisons, reviews, product research
- 55% regular online shoppers would prefer to buy online
- How often do you shop online?
- 76% would spend more than 100 USD on a product without seeing it first
- 35% would shop more online if they were able to try on a product virtually (eg: Oculus Rift)
- 66% Expect to receive their first drone delivery in the next five years
- 68% once a month
- 28% once a week
- 50% of US smartphone users listen to personalized website recommendation
- 80% would pay for drone delivery
Online Consumer behaviour patterns
Points of influence in the buying journey
Invest in major traffic channels
Tactics that work:
- Focus on conversion: don’t let your website be a leaking bucket
- Upsell products without pushing too hard – hit visitors with relevant product links but stay away from constant upsell
- According to Econsultancy, upselling is 20 times more effective than cross-selling online. Sometimes your customers don’t know that a better product is available, or they may be convinced that a different product may be a better fit for their needs.
- Automate your email campaigns – send helpful information
- Test the social media channels that work best – create pages on major channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, other local pages and test which works best
- Use contextual marketing tactics: combine timeliness, humor, customer preferences
- Try to have user generate content
- Implement smart loyalty programs
- Have experts creating and writing a non boring content strategy
- Create “How to” videos to showcase products and services
- Use pay per click marketing wisely
- Launch stores on multiple platforms (Ebay, Amazon, Facebook, etc)
- Adwords, Facebook, Twitter, other social media retargeting
- Be original with your newsletters
- Remind people about their wish lists
- Reward people for making product reviews and recommendations
- According to the online magazine Internet Retailer, you can increase your e-Commerce conversion rate by 14-76% by adding product reviews to your online store. Furthermore, product reviews give you a social proof and support your SEO efforts
- Study after study has come to the same conclusion, that people trust and purchase products more from a friend recommendation than any other form of marketing. In fact, according to Neilsen, people are four times more likely to purchase a product when referred by a friend
- Allow ratings in discussion areas
- Find something awesome to give out to gather a database of contacts (either relevant content such as ebook, guide or a coupon)
- Reduce the abandonment card and send emails to people that abandon their cards – optimize thoroughly the checkout process
- An average of 68% of people abandon their shopping card, people that had enough interest to add a product into the shopping basket. You should focus on bringing them back
We cover the complete spectrum of e-Commerce services from software architecture and development to additional plug ins development, modules extensions, user experience design, testing, maintenance and support, integration with other business systems (eg CRM, ERP, inventory), SEO, marketing, store migration or mobile responsive versions of your e-Commerce platform.
