8 Great eCommerce Marketing Tips to Boost Sales

Marketing your business successfully in the world of eCommerce can be tough. With ever-increasing competition, reaching potential customers and compelling them to convert can certainly be a challenge.

We’ve taken note from retailers, of all shapes and sizes, whose marketing strategies are proving powerful and effective, and compiled our top actionable eCommerce marketing tips. Solidify your eCommerce marketing strategy by using these 8 tactics to help boost your sales.

1. Get People Back to Your Website with Remarketing

The first of our eCommerce marketing tips often gets overlooked. Remarketing provides a huge potential to re-engage with customers who have browsed your products, abandoned their baskets or left without converting.

“Only 2% of shoppers convert on the first visit to an online store. The goal of remarketing is to bring back the other 98%.” – AdRoll

It’s a powerful digital marketing tactic that allows you to track website visitors wherever they go online after leaving your site. Implementing cookies and pixels can provide you with a huge amount of information on your potential customers. This information can be used to create highly targeted remarketing campaigns across Facebook and Google Networks.

Remarketing campaigns tend to be particularly effective in boosting sales. They are highly targeted, customer-specific ads which can display products viewed or items a user has left in their cart.

Customers coming back to your site from these adverts are more qualified leads, further down the purchase funnel and are therefore more likely to convert – and boost your sales!

2. Place Customer Reviews Strategically on Your Site

Collecting customer reviews is only half the problem solved. Often, its what you do with those reviews that will make the difference to your sales. Well-placed product reviews can be the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart.

Customer reviews have proven power to encourage people to buy. Reviews from real-life customers provide shoppers with a sense of trust that can help lower the barrier to buying.

The results of a study from the Spiegel Research Center make one thing very clear: customer reviews matter.

“Nearly 95% of shoppers read online reviews before making a purchase and Displaying reviews can increase conversion rates by 270%.” – Spiegel Research Center

Providing social proof through customer reviews placed at key points along the path to purchase, can more than double the likelihood of a consumer converting.

Make sure to display your customer reviews above the fold on product pages to ensure they are seen. It’s also a good idea to have your star rating icon displayed in the header so it can be seen on all pages.

Did you know? iWeb work in partnership with Yotpo, an ecommerce review collection platform, using the customer content collected to increase trust, social proof, and sales.

3. Share User-Generated Content

User-generated content helps people feel more confident in their decision to buy from you. The more that people see honest and positive feedback from satisfied customers the more likely they are to buy, therefore boosting your sales.

Happy customers will often post pictures of your product or them using it to Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. Some will even upload review or recommendation videos to YouTube. When you see customers posts, ask permission and repost them. You could share them on your social media channels, in emails, blogs or even product pages.

Here’s an example of how The Body Shop integrates UGC from customers on their site, and encourages future customers to create UGC.

4. Add an Exit-Intent Popup

Exit intent popups are one of the most effective ways of capturing site visitors who would have otherwise left, giving them a final chance to hear from your brand again. Capturing customer email addresses through popups enables you to deliver targeted messages to potential customer inboxes, encouraging them to come back and reconsider purchasing.

Popups are a great way to grow your email contact list and turn potential customers into happy customers.

Did you know? When used well, popups can drive up email list growth rates by an average of 50.8%.

Best practice: Make sure popups are easy to remove from the page. There should be a clear ‘No Thanks’ or exit button for customers who don’t want to opt-in to receive communications.

Intelligent site use signals can trigger your exit-intent popup to be served to a user if they move towards closing the tab or leaving the page. The popup is served before a user reaches the stage of leaving the page, giving you the chance to capture their information.

Of course, you should give them a reason to subscribe or to provide their email address, so offer a discount, free guide, or another freebie that is in line with your brand offering.

5. Send Cart Abandonment Emails

With an average of nearly 70% of people abandoning their basket before completing their checkout, sending cart abandonment emails is a necessary e-commerce marketing tactic to help boost your sales.

If a customer has logged in, you can send them highly targeted and customised emails with images of the items they were interested in. Studies suggest that more than 40% of cart abandonment emails are opened and 50% of these received clicks. The visual reminder of items a customer has shown interest in and an easy link back to them is especially effective and proven to increase conversions.

Cart recovery email best practices:

• Send a series of cart recovery emails for best results. The first email should be sent within 1 hour of the basket being abandoned and a further 3-4 emails over the coming days.
• Test your emails to make sure they work. The last thing you want is for a customer to return to buy the items only to find an empty basket and have to add the products again.
• Use personalisation to make emails relevant. Make sure the email shows the products the customer was interested in as well as using personalisation tags like [customer name] to ensure the email is relevant and customised to the user.

You can find out more about the importance of cart recovery emails in this blog post, as well as some other great tactics to improve your email marketing.

Did you know? We are a DotDigital partner agency.

iWeb’s partnership with DotDigital means we’re able to create email marketing strategies that convert. Find out more about the marketing services our sister agency, Kanuka Digital, could offer to your business.

6. Upsell & Cross-Sell Your Products

Another great eCommerce marketing tip is to upsell and cross-sell your products. If a customer is already buying something, it should be your priority to maximise on their purchase using these tactics.

Upselling and cross-selling can boost your sales by encouraging customers to buy more items or a more expensive item. Using personalisation and customer product recommendations means eCommerce marketing can be taking place all across your site, even just before your customer is about to check out.

Upselling

If you stock a newer model or a high-end version of what your customer is considering buying, suggest it to them but make sure to let them know why you recommend it over the less-expensive version.

Example: buying a new phone and being suggested to buy the newest and most up to date model instead of the older model you’re considering.

Cross-Selling

When a customer has just added a product to their basket, it’s the perfect opportunity to cross-sell.

Show them a few accessories or related products to the item they’re considering purchasing. You could even suggest a ‘bundle deal’ giving a small discount if they purchase the add-on items alongside the main product. They’re more likely to purchase these add-on items at the same time as buying the main item for the convenience factor, so make sure to maximise on this.

Example: buying a new phone and being suggested to buy a screen protector, protective case and wireless charger to go with it.

Did you know? iWeb are a Nosto partner agency. We can implement ecommerce personalisation solutions for your business by integrating Nosto’s platform and technology.

7. Create Highly Relevant & Valuable Blog Posts

Most marketers will agree that content is key to engaging new customers. Creating helpful, entertaining and relevant content allows you to answer the questions or address the topics your target audience is interested in. New potential customers will be introduced to your brand in a low-pressure and non-salesy environment.

“79% of companies that have a blog report a positive ROI for inbound marketing.” – HubSpot

Blogging is a great way to drive traffic and engage with customers on a more personal level by covering subjects that interest them and answer their questions. High-quality and valuable content that engages customers is the aim of this tactic, as opposed to churning out lots of low-value blog posts.

‘How-to’ guides and tutorials are examples of highly useful blog content that you could create, based on your audiences interests and the products you sell, to drive traffic and enable new customers to discover your brand.

This How-To guide from HubSpot is a great example of creating highly valuable and relevant content for your target audience.

8. Create Downloadable Offers or Guides

Once you’ve started creating valuable blog content, you’ll be able to work out what works for your audience. Using those learnings, create more detailed and in-depth content that your audience will love and host it as a downloadable offer.

For example, a makeup and beauty brand could create an e-book on “Go-To Looks for Spring/Summer 2019” and include valuable information such as step-by-step tutorials, makeup artist tips, guides to the best products for different skin types and ‘how-to’s for mastering more tricky makeup techniques. By creating an e-book that your target audience would potentially pay for, giving it away for “free’ (in exchange for an email address) makes the offer even more appealing.

“A downloadable offer is valuable for two reasons: it builds your email list and it provides value to your website visitors.” – Uhuru Network

HubSpot’s ‘How to write a blog post’ guide includes downloadable blog post templates to help users starting out, in exchange for their email address.

Summary

Hopefully, our list of eCommerce marketing tips has given you some ideas of ways to boost your sales and conversion rates.

Remember, there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach when it comes to Commerce marketing, so make sure to trial a number of strategies to find what works for your customers.

Here at iWeb, we create bespoke eCommerce websites that convert and drive sales.

To find out more about our partnerships with Dotmailer, Yotpo & Nosto, contact our team of experts today to find out more about the solutions we can offer.

If you’d like eCommerce marketing advice or information, contact our sister agency, Kanuka Digital, who specialise in helping eCommerce websites grow their business online.