- Evaluate the audience and demand for a product.
- Research the competition.
- Research business models and sales strategies.
- Name and register your business.
- Establish your branding and design a logo.
- Create your product.
- Determine manufacturing costs and processes.
- Research and set up shipping and fulfillment processes.
- Buy a URL and create your website.
- Develop a marketing plan to attract and convert customers.
- Ensure social image and start to build followers.
- Start your online store.
- When completing the above steps and setting up an online store, keep in mind the following best practices regarding e-commerce marketing and websites.
Ecommerce Marketing Best Practices
What do you need to know about marketing for an ecommerce business? Here are some best practices that can help you get started quickly.
1. Test social media ads.
Facebook has 1.18 billion daily active users and can attract a large audience. Consider targeting your audience with social media posts and videos and experiment to see what works best and drives sales and revenue.
2. Collect email addresses and stay in touch.
Recent data shows that three-quarters of companies agree that email marketing offers “excellent” to “good” ROI. By collecting email addresses on the spot and asking customers to choose your future communication method, you can provide visitors with a reason to keep returning to your e-commerce site again through quotations, sales, VIP discounts, etc.
3. Use personalization to tailor offers/messaging.
For online shoppers, personalization is more important than ever. In fact, research shows 74% of online consumers get frustrated with websites when offers, ads, and promotions appear that have nothing to do with their interests.
Make sure that you use personalized product recommendations to personalize your email marketing efforts, and generally work hard to make each customer feel that you are talking to him or her.
4. Gather feedback via surveys.
The best way to keep a finger on the pulse of what your audience wants is to ask them.Use online surveys to collect feedback on everything from products to your marketing efforts to customer service interactions.
5. Choose ecommerce software that helps you meet your needs and goals.
You may be wondering how to ensure that the right e-commerce software is selected for a particular business. Here are some tips.
How to Choose the Best Ecommerce Software
When looking for the best e-commerce platform and software (e.g. eCommerce website builder) to meet your needs, there are many factors to consider. Look for:
- Themes and customization features: You should be able to customize ready-made themes to personalize you and add company branding.
- Domain name customization: Make sure you can get a custom domain name and URL (so you don’t have to include the platform name in the website URL).
- Expert 24/7 support: Take a moment to study the platform’s services in detail. If you encounter an emergency, you want fast and reliable support immediately.
- Flexible payment methods: Customers now want to pay in multiple ways-from credit cards to digital wallets and more. Looking for an e-commerce software solution that is flexible enough to support many different secure payment methods.
- Multilingual ability: Your customers may come from all over the world, so you need to be able to speak their language. It is a good idea to use tools that support many different languages.
6. Keep in mind website best practices.
When you’re ready to build an inbound ecommerce website, there are a few best practices to keep in mind that will help you get results out of your time and effort.
Select and customize a mobile-friendly theme.
BrightEdge data shows that more than half (57%) of web traffic now comes from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets — which means it’s essential to use a mobile-friendly theme when building your ecommerce website.
On the e-commerce platform, you can browse a series of free and premium themes (all themes are optimized for mobile devices) and find the one that best suits your needs. Plus: From there, you can customize templated website themes. By adding your color scheme and branding elements (like your logo), you can make your ecommerce website look 100% custom-made.
Take a look at this Shopify template example:
Optimize for the web.
Network optimization includes a variety of strategies and strategies that can help convert more website visitors into customers, but we focus on the following two aspects:
- Use persuasive copywriting triggers to make your product descriptions sell. This means adopting psychological strategies such as fear of missing out, reciprocity, exclusivity, etc., all of which encourage website visitors to buy (and buy immediately).
- Add beautiful product images. When it comes to marketing, visuals are extremely important — especially for online buyers who can’t see or touch products before making a purchase. Together with the static product image, it provides customers with a 360-degree view by combining model images and videos of the product, thereby adding context.
Create a stellar customer experience.
Research shows that by 2020, customer experience will surpass prices and products and become the main brand differentiated sales. This means that it is essential to focus on creating an impressive customer experience at all touch points across all brands.
A few ideas to get you started:
- Add a FAQ page. Answering common questions on your e-commerce website can help potential customers quickly and easily find the information they need to complete a purchase.
- Reduce image sizes for quick load times. Survey data shows more than half of website visitors expect a page to load in less than two seconds.In more than three seconds, they left the page (and are unlikely to return.) Reduce the size of the live image in order to load quickly.
- Leverage user-generated content. Including user-generated content on your e-commerce website (for example, customer reviews, images in social media, and testimonials) means adding a social proof element-can improve overall purchases experience for customers.
In the next article we will cover the ways in which you can work to increase your ecommerce sales.