Do you run an ecommerce website or have aspirations to do so? Then you absolutely have to read this post! Since I have been in online marketing for 15 years, and have worked with over 100 ecommerce websites, I’m able to put together a fabulous list like this together! If you have any questions, just contact me through this website and you will responded to asap. If you are looking for an effective, affordable online marketing agency, let me know and we can have a call to discuss what we can do for your company! Enjoy the tips and let me know if you have any questions! 🙂
1. Organic Search – Don’t forget about Search! It’s still the #1 way customers buy online. Types of original content to be adding to your site would be: articles, blog posts, product descriptions, testimonials, and product reviews. Repurpose positive customer comments as testimonials and add to the site. Competitive research tools help find keywords to target in your content, look in your Google Analytics for real-world search queries. Have a good, monthly SEO strategy to build out your content and get free traffic. Frequent, original posts/pages are always the best strategy to get more free traffic. Daily posting is best for the search engines. Share your content socially to spread it out.
2. Off-site SEO – you can get traffic and rankings from other websites besides your own. Some great ways to do this are: online press releases (using Vocus.com or eReleases.com), guest blog posts, blog reviews, sponsoring blogger’s sweepstakes, Yellowpages.com, eBay classified, Superpages.com, Backpage.com, and getting listed on any well ranking website in your niche with original content and titles. Outsource your writing tasks to maximize writing volume, but make sure the quality is intact. I recommend 1 online press release per week, it builds SEO rankings and saturates the search engines. I have a great contact at Vocus/PrWeb, you can save significantly if you buy their annual packages.
3. Paid Search Strategy – the new enhanced Google Adwords is great, conversion tracking of sales is a must on the keyword level, BingAds has low hanging fruit, site specific content network ads can also work well. BingAds can be 1/10th the cost of Google Adwords. Make sure you are running on all your branded keywords on Google and Bing Ads, the general keywords can be made to convert on BingAds. I would be happy to review your pay per click search campaigns for you or manage them for you.
4. Social Media – You of course need a great social media strategy in place! Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Foursquare are the top social networks. Run frequent sweepstakes and contests to pump up the fans and gather emails of your fans (Woobox.com is a great Facebook app for sweepstakes and contests). Some social media management tips would be: Daily posting to the wall, 24/7 social management responsiveness, anything less is inadequate! 🙂 Total Facebook website integration is a must, i.e. Sharethis.com, Facebook comment box, Facebook site registration. LinkedIn groups are great for niche/industry community building. LinkedIn is also great for B to B, B to B advertising, and business development. In my opinion, fan advertising is the best expenditure of advertising on Facebook, then running Facebook Offers, Promoted Posts, and Sweepstakes to make it go viral and measure the ROI. Regular, direct to site Facebook advertising now has conversion tracking pixels that can be placed on your site, so that needs to be tested to see if it works for your company or site.
5. Mobile site for eCommerce – If you don’t have a mobile site you are losing customers! Mshopper.com is a good solution to go mobile asap on a rev share. Responsive design is a must for sites that look great across devices. If you don’t have a mobile site you are leaving money on the table and it’s hurting your conversion rate. Dudamobile.com is great for turning any website into a mobile website.
6. Social Referrals – every customer should be referring their friends through Facebook, Twitter, and email to your company or website. Check out CureBit.com, it’s great and inexpensive and effective. I know the owner Allan Grant, you can tell them I sent you.
7. Text messaging – Textmark.com is great for for mobile (SMS/text) marketing to customers that you have gained their mobile number through permission. Seek to acquire their mobile phone numbers in the website check-out and set up a follow-up system for mobile offers to monetize. You can acquire mobile numbers via your Fan Page too by running sweepstakes and asking for it in the entry form.
8. Retargeting Options – Retargeting is the best thing to happen to ecommerce in the last 10 years. EVERY major company is using retargeting to remarket to their website visitors that leave their website without purchasing, on the web and on Facebook. It’s the hottest thing in ecommerce and can also be used by bigger affiliates.
Retargeting Options:
– Google Adwords
– Adroll.com for retargeting on Facebook, works well
– Retargeter.com for eBay searchers retartgeting
– Steelhouse Media – for on-site targeted promotions in real-time.
9. Targeted Display Advertising – Quantcast.com is “intelligent display advertising” based on your website demographics and can work well. Remnant inventory can be good too if you get it targeted and cheaply enough. They place a pixel on your site to gain demographics and then run your banners on their display network. Works well for some advertisers. Whatrunswhere.com tells you where companies are advertising.
10. Partnership Marketing – rev share based – reach out to other companies and offer to reciprocate. Examples: Thank you page placements, newsletters, members area, solo emails, display on site. Partnership marketing is a great way to build customers and traffic, and works even better if you can reciprocate.
11. Personalization – works best for converting traffic and repeat customers. You can personalize and segment targeted offers via: email, on-site, and segmenting. Listrak.com is a great email platform for websites to segment, personalize and measure the revenue. Mybuys.com does on-site personalization and through email.
12. On-site targeting and negotiating – Steelhouse.com does on-site promotions. Netotiate.com does on-site negotiating with visitors and increases sales. NEW!
13. Live Chat – Olark.com or Liveperson are both great for website Livechat – most underused conversion increasing tool in the industry in my opinion. Great for merchants because it’s so cheap and easy to use. Have someone good on it! Proactive live chat allows your customer service and sales people to interact with site visitors and direct them around, offer specials, and answer questions. Increases conversion rates by interacting with more site visitors. Can also be a great loyalty building tool.
14. Sweepstakes and Contests – I recommend monthly contests and sweepstakes to pump up fans, emails, and go viral. Better prizes produce better results, photo contests are great too, Pinterest contests are HOT, but only work well with a lot of customers on Pinterest.
15. Product feeds and organic listings – goDatafeed.com to syndicate it all product shopping engines. Seasonality plays into the conversion rates on the paid shopping engines. Keep it fresh and managed like PPC search campaigns.
16. Inbound Phone Calls – Driving phone calls from the website and ads is a great way to boost sales. Also, effectively upselling is a great way to maximize traffic and increase conversion rate. Have good people selling on the phones or don’t bother.
17. Facebook Advertising – Facebook fan advertising is great and highly recommend even at a minimum budget because the targeting is so good. Look to convert the fans into emails with sweepstakes so they can be remarketed to and increase website conversion rates. Facebook promoted posts work great to get the message out to everyone. Use sweepstakes to create hype and go viral. Use Facebook offers to run special offers to fans that keep reminding them about it.
18. Conversion Rate Optimization Tools – Optimizely.com is #1 conversion A/B tool. Pluralis.com is a crowd sourced conversion contest tool.. very cool new tool. Have a monthly strategy for increasing your click to sale ratio or you are missing the boat. If you aren’t testing your page elements (such as add to cart button, logo, main graphics, bullet points) you are leaving money on the table. “Testing is always better than not testing.”
19. 14 Website Conversion Rate Boosters:
– BuySafe.com – purchase insurance – increases site trust.
– Norton’s trust seal – #1 trusted ecommerce logo. Places in the cart pages and site wide.
– BBB logo – builds trust
– Truste.com – builds trust
– Testimonials – feature them all over – ask for them from customers. Incentive them with gift cards for giving them. Video testimonials are great for Youtube traffic and site.
– Sweepstakes – gains fans and emails of site visitors to follow-up with. Should be run monthly.
– Drip emails that measure revenue – great after email capture with Listrak.com.
– Netotiate.com – real-time on-site price negotiating – NEW!
– Price comparisons on product pages – shows how you are less expensive
– International shipping – increases conversion to int. traffic. There are companies you can partner with to handle this.
– On-site promotions. Free shipping is #1 promotion
– Pop-up email capture – great for drip email campaigns, use Listrak.com capture email and send drip follow-ups
– Shopping Cart abandonment follow-up emails. Great for ecommerce and lead gen
– Customer Reviews – check out PowerReviews.com
20. Marketing Calendar – have one. Keep the marketing message consistent across channels. Plan ahead, leverage seasonality whenever possible.
These are my ecommerce tips, strategies, and amazing companies to work with. I know most of these companies personally and have worked with them. A lot of times if you mention Evan Weber and Experience Advertising, you can get a better deal that everyone else, so make sure to drop my name. Let me know if you have any questions or would like to discuss working with my agency to implement an effective, comprehensive online marketing strategy for your company. Thanks and have a great day!
