E-commerce is a big market, with Amazon dominating about 50% of all e-commerce trade toward the end of 2019, it can seem overwhelming trying to break the market when opening a new store. However, don’t let this statistic put you off. If your product is good and you have faith in your customer service then use these tactics to get traction to your online store and overcome new e-commerce sales challenges.
There are over 12 million online stores already in existence and that number is set to grow even higher! The simplicity of setting up a new store is great for newcomers, but it also means increased competition for everyone else. Discovering how to get more traffic is something that every eCommerce business should be focused on. Here’s how to gained traction to your new e-commerce store in 2021.
Marketing tactics to get traction to your e-commerce store
Micro-Influencer Marketing
Micro stores warrant micro influence. The best thing is? These are often trusted better than macro-influencers. A study by aspireIQ found that, on average, micro-influencers with 10-50K followers have just over 40% higher engagement rates than macro-influencers with 500K-1M followers.
It’s essential that you involve micro-Influencer marketing in your own marketing plan. Micro-influencers not only promise a high engagement rate and often better quality content but they’re perceived as more trustworthy, are more likely to change their link in bio for your campaign link and will be more responsive with their community management.
If you’re looking to gain traction for a new e-commerce store then micro-influencers who genuinely connect with your product can be a perfect fit.
Youtube Marketing
With over 2 Billion monthly active users, Youtube is currently the second-largest social media platform out there. It can be navigated in over 80 different languages and covers 95% of the world’s mother tongue.
Where does your e-commerce business fit in? 90% of people say they have found a new brand or product via Youtube.
Use Youtube as your video content distribution channel, it’s a fantastic way for you to not only reach new audiences but help to convince potential customers as well. A study from Wyzowl found that nearly 70% of all consumers prefer watching product videos than reading about them.
Take this into account. Create review videos that answer FAQs, use interactive walkthroughs using Youtube’s video cards, comments, and 360 features. Lastly, gift the product to potential Youtubers that would be interested in reviewing it.
How to use YouTube to to gain traction and boost sales to your new e-commerce
As we explained in this post about video marketing, the options that this format opens up are endless, but just merely being on YouTube is even bigger. Let’s check it out.
1. Positioning like an expert and reciprocity
When creating useful and valuable content you’ll be seen as a point of reference within your field. Imagine that someone wants to buy running shoes. Who do you think they are going to buy from? A shop they just learnt about or a shop from which they have learnt about running techniques or that taught them what the best accessories for mountain races are?That is called the reciprocity principle.We feel in debt when a shop helps us in a selfless way, so whenever we can, we return the favor.
2. Uses for your products
Here we find the typical example of an e-commerce that sells food and that uploads recipes using their products.But there is much more. With a video, it is easier to show your products combined with others, and therefore you get to sell more than one product at the same time. For example, if you have a clothing or accessories shoponline, you can show how to combine outfits with other pieces of clothes.
3. Fight negative publicity
We hope that you never have to do this, but if your brand gets affected by a case of negative publicity, YouTube offers the best scenario to explain yourself or to create a video clearing up the situation. That’s what the Domino´s Pizza presidente did (a client had found an insect inside a pizza), or even McDonald’s with this video when they explained how their chicken nuggets are made.
4. Streaming on YouTube
Another way of connecting with your audience that is becoming very popular nowadays is streaming (live videos). During these sessions, you can carry out tutorials of how to use your products or response to any questions that people in your community may have.
2. A Beautiful Site
User experience is crucial when it comes to success on your eCommerce site, which is all down to a simple layout, clear content and of course, great design. The world of design is moving quickly, so check out the latest design trends when creating your site to ensure you can catch the eye of potential customers.
Clarity is key. Make it easy for your users to navigate to different areas of the website, with a clear menu and simple language. Statistics tell us that 25% abandon shopping cartsbecause the website was too difficult to navigate, so don’t allow this to put off potential customers.
As well as ensuring a clear journey through your site, product information is just as important to hook in your customers. Item descriptions should be well thought out, accompanied by high quality photos or examples of the product.
If you want people to stay on your site, and keep coming back, remember that a good experience = customer retention.
Tip 1: Keep it simple
While it’s tempting to add lots of interactive features or graphics to a site, these can overwhelm your customers and drive them away.
For e-commerce website design, simple is always better. No one wants to click through 5 pages, deal with a million popups, or search for a nonexistent navigation menu. Design errors like these result in lost customers—and that equates to lost sales.
Approach your design as though you were the end user. Would you get frustrated navigating your site? Can you find everything you need in a click or 2? Are menus and buttons clearly and legibly marked? These are all ideas you should consider in your store’s design.
Other elements of simple design include:
- Easily scannable content
- Simple and legible fonts
- Unified color schemes
- Clearly identifiable navigation elements
- Easily navigable product categories
Show the customer your product, clearly describe it, and let them know how they can make a purchase.
Tip 2: Use images and color to your advantage
Large, high-quality images are a great way to showcase your products on a website that features a simple design—let the pictures speak for themselves. They draw the customers’ attention and make them want to know more.
Images increase conversion—sometimes as much as 40%—so it’s critical to feature them front and center. Customers want to know what they’re getting and want to see it from as many angles as possible before they buy. Clean, professional shots of your product build trust.
Using color psychology in your e-commerce website design may also give customers a nudge. Everything from the color of your background to what shade you make a button can drive conversions.
Certain colors evoke certain emotions in people, whether they’re aware of it or not. In some cultures blue can increase feelings of trust. Red can signal energy, passion, and danger. Colors can also suggest something about traits of your brand.
- Tone: Consider what you imagine as your brand’s tone—it could be anything from whimsical to serious to quirky.
- Value: Colors like sleek blacks and shiny golds can be used to convey luxury.
- Time period: Some colors convey a vintage or futuristic feel.
Using color and images in conjunction as part of your e-commerce website design can both inspire an emotion and motivate a person to take action. Just making a certain button red, for example, can increase click-through rates up to 34%.
Tip 3: Optimize your site for mobile, and make it fast
We all know more users are browsing the web on their smartphones than ever. Some people don’t even own computers or laptops anymore—their phones are their sole source of internet access. Younger customers, in the Gen Z age group especially, do more of their browsing on mobile.
If your site operates clunkily or doesn’t load at all on mobile, you’re going to lose sales. People will get fed up and click away to another site.
Your site should adjust to the size of the smartphone screen on loading, and the images should all load properly. Navigation links and buttons should work just as well and just as intuitively on mobile as they would on a laptop or desktop. You want to be sure you’re maintaining the same functionality and clean look as your desktop site—especially on your checkout page.
Your site should also be fast. A lagging page makes people pass judgment on your site, and possibly your brand, before they’ve even seen a single product. By the time your page hits 4 seconds of load time, you’ve already lost 25% of viewers.
To avoid slow loading times, lean on minimalist e-commerce website design and be mindful of the elements you’re using. Avoid overcrowding your e-commerce store page with a bunch of interactive graphics or random blocks of text. They will slow your load times. Use good images, but make sure they aren’t in the most data-intensive file formats. High-quality JPG images display just fine on the web, while massive PNG files will take longer to load.
Tip 4: Make checkout simple and seamless
It should be common sense, but it bears repeating: Do not make your customer struggle when they get to your checkout page. You spend lots of time and effort investing in a site that gets customers to the finish line. Make sure they cross it.
Give customers the option to check out as a guest. Make them fill out as few data fields as possible with only necessary information. Clearly label those data fields. Let them see a product preview in their cart with a description so they can review what they’re buying.
Also, don’t wait until the very end of the line to tell someone what shipping or other fees go along with their purchase. If they get all the way to “confirm purchase” and see a total that’s much higher than they anticipated, it comes across as dishonest and leads to cart abandonment.
Be up front about what shipping options are available and what they’ll cost. Outline your return and refund policies on your checkout page so that the customer knows exactly what to expect if they have to return a product. Knowing a policy is in place gives the user a little extra peace of mind and lends your site more credibility.
To get their product, the customer should know what information to give you, why they need to give it to you, and how you’re protecting it. Then, make the process easy for them.
4. Draw people back with email
As well as social media, email is a great way to connect with potential customers. 61% of consumers prefer to be contacted by brands via email and 60% of consumers say they’ve made a purchase as the result of an email marketing message they received.
One of the ways you can encourage people to hand over their email address is by adding website popups within pages of your website to sign up to your mailing list. To make this even more compelling, this could come with a special offer, such as a discount code for future purchases.
Marketing emails can be used to highlight new products, make your mailing lists aware of upcoming sales, or to send a monthly or weekly newsletter with a round-up of products that might be of interest. You can also highlight events, or content such as your blog.
An impressive 82% of marketers have reported an increase in open rates through email personalization, so pay close attention to the behavior of your customers and use this to segment and tailor emails to drive sales. A good example of this is ‘abandoned cart’ emails, or recommendations based on previous purchases.
2. The thank you email + post sales updates
One of the best thank you emails I ever received was from Ann Handley—the veteran author, speaker, and chief content officer of MarketingProfs—after I signed up for her email list. The subject line read “Thank you! And a question for you…” I found a warmly-written note, doused in humor, that made me feel close to her.
Send helpful resources
Once someone has joined your email list or bought a product, automate their email to be added to an onboarding series, and move them into a nurture campaign. Start to send a flow of intriguing, educational content that directly speaks to their pain points and offers helpful solutions. Content marketing will allow your brand to stay top-of-mind for customers—in a non-annoying, long-term way. It can also help you expand your reach significantly.
One auto parts store created an infographic, “How Much Do We Spend on Cars?” which went viral. By aggregating information that is genuinely interesting to all car owners, it reached far more potential customers than advertising. By including an “embed this graphic on your site” it boosted its own backlinks, thus improving its SEO rankings.
Abandoned cart reminders
According to the Baymard Institute, there is an average abandoned cart rate of 69.23 percent. That’s a whoppingly large number of potential sales that you could be losing to distraction, pausing or forgetfulness.
Digitally savvy companies need to loop back to re-engage with these customers through a series of automated reminders:
- Set the first one to go out within 24 hours, while the buying impulse is fresh.
- Don’t let it end there! Automate another email or two to follow up at gradual intervals if the purchase still isn’t made.
- Personalize! Include photos of the item they nearly purchase, use their first name if you can, and draw from your CRM to add-in suggestions of other things they may like.
- Use humor to your advantage—Shopify has some good examples here.
5. Write Guest Posts For Sites Within Your Niche
Another very important aspect of your SEO e-commerce marketing strategy that many shop owners forget about is that search engines favor websites that have a healthy backlink profile.
This means that the websites on the top of the search engine results pages likely have a lot of other websites linking to them.
The more links pointing to your website, the better.
As you gain more links to your website, your domain authority will increase. Your domain authority is basically a virtual scoring card that tells search engines like Google that other users on the internet recommend your website.
As you can imagine, the more ‘recommendations’ that you have through links, the higher your website will rank on the search engines. A robust link profile tells the search engines that your site is a trusted source of valuable information.
The higher that you rank, the more easily you can increase website traffic.
So how do you get a beloved link from other websites?
Rather than wait for other websites to direct traffic to you through a link, it is easiest to offer to write a guest post for other blogs within your niche.
You can begin by visiting yourfavorite blogs within your niche to see if they accept guest contributors. If they do, reach out and ask if you can write a guest blog post.
If you’d like a wider reach, then you can search for any blog within your niche that accepts guest writers. You can do this by using the site: operator for Google.
Using the site: operator helps you identify guest blog post opportunities. To use this function, simply type ‘intitle: write for us + your niche’.
For example, if your Shopify store sells products within the wellness industry, then you will want to write guests posts for websites within that niche market.
To use the function in this example, type ‘intitle: write for us + wellness’ to generate a list of guest post opportunitieswithin the wellness niche.
Reach out to as many blogs as you can manage and aim to publish a few guest blog posts each month. In your author bio, usually at the bottom of the blog post, include a link back to your Shopify store.
By doing this, you will slowly build your link profile and your organic traffic along with it.
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