Content Index
- Introduction
- What is eCommerce Promotion & Why do You Need it?
- 3 Types of Customers That Can Bring Actual Traffic & Sales to Your Store
- How to Promote My Online Store? You Just Need These 12 Low-cost Marketing Tactics
- 1. Harbor Great Email Marketing Efforts
- 2. Use Social Media Platforms to Promote Your Store
- 3. Register Yourself on “Leading Coupon Sites”
- 4. Perform Real Marketing Gimmicks Online
- 5. Don’t Lose the Essence of Offline Marketing
- 6. Optimize your Store for “Search Engines”
- 7. The Super Fast way to Rank - PPC
- 8. Level Up your Content Marketing Practices
- 9. Slide into Paid Social Media Campaigns
- 10. Invest in Influencer Marketing
- 11. Optimize Your eCommerce’s Product Pages
- 12. Leverage Marketing Automation
- Final Thoughts on How to Promote Your eCommerce Store!
Introduction
Each & every eCommerce store today is struggling hard to win the desired traction & revenue online. Even you are, isn't it? Having an eCommerce website isn’t enough, you need superlative ecommerce website promotion ideas to generate more repeat business, increase the order size of loyal customers & invite the real-potential buyers (who may/may not have heard about you).
If you are stuck at “how to promote ecommerce website”, below we are sharing a few best budgeted, self-doable, and professional marketers led tips on “how to market online store from scratch”.
What is eCommerce Promotion & Why do You Need it?
eCommerce promotion of marketing is a holistic practice that is done on & around your store website to increase its awareness & reach within your target buyers online.
The purpose of eCommerce promotion is to build brand awareness, drive curiosity of potential buyers, increase product sales with new or old customers.
Before we jump to some solid tips on how to promote my online store, know who your actual buyer is. Did you know you have 3 types of customers that could actually add to your brand awareness & revenue goals? Here are the types of customers you need to focus on while searching for answers to “how to promote ecommerce website” and implementing the best ecommerce promotion ideas.
3 Types of Customers That Can Bring Actual Traffic & Sales to Your Store
Customer Type 1 - Past customers who could be repeat customers --- Who have shopped before & know your store like no-one else.
Customer Type 2 - People who are looking for products that your store offers -- But they don’t know you yet!
Customer Type 3 - People who have known you, visited your store but drove away --- because your offerings weren’t convincing.
Let’s discuss the best practices on how to market online stores like a pro for these 3 customer bases that are likely to buy from you. Keep reading to find all your answers to “how to promote eCommerce website”.
How to Promote My Online Store? You Just Need These 12 Low-cost Marketing Tactics
Here are 12 budgeted, effective tips on how to advertise your online store without looking too salesy & boring. These points will help you create your effective eCommerce promotion strategy for sure, so do not skip but just read.
How to Promote your Online Store? (All By Yourself)
If you are starting off into the marketing funnel, terms like Search engine optimization, automation marketing, push marketing, etc can be overwhelming for you & as well require professional help (which we will discuss later). So we are first starting with the easy doable tips on “how to advertise your online store” that you can easily adopt, takes no investment as such & doesn’t fry your brain much.
1. Harbor Great Email Marketing Efforts
“Emails are still the most powerful marketing weapon for eCommerce. Yes Still!“
Emails are the most effective means to socialize with existing or new customers, sell them crazy offers, or announce to them about your fresh arrival in the stock or latest discounts.
Here are the few ways how you can take fullest advantage of email exchange & build a colossal email marketing funnel at your disposal.
- Keep on building that email list - Build a solid mailing list by collecting the potential emails from the past customers, new customers, targeted audience who visit your site or are interested in your products.
- Develop a cadence of email series with those customers - Start sending the regular, personalized, and valuable emails to the prospects or old customers to make them informed of; the new products, the fresh discounts, the season sales, order details, new blog, product benefits, shipping details or anything valuable that could tempt that audience to explore your site or even bring some referrals to your site.
- Send customized & automated emails - Don’t sit back & personally write each email, you can use popular free source or subscription-based automated email ecommerce promotion tools like Mailchimp, Drip, SendinBlue, Constant Contact, etc to draft personalized emails with custom messages. Add the prospects name in the subject, salutation line or anywhere throughout the email copy. This will make the copy sound personalized & relatable to each user you are targeting.
“Do you know emails that have a customer's name in the subject get 75% open rates?”
You can share any information with your prospects or customers that can build a connection with them & make your store appear to be as credible & transparent. But be cautious, don’t bombard them with cryptic, tonnes of email, have a steady flow of communication on decided days only, otherwise you will lose their interest by poor click throughs & unsubscriptions.
Here are the few occasions on which if you will send the messages, your potential or actual buyers would highly-appreciate:
- Welcome email when a new customer signs up or purchases a product for the first time.
- Timely newsletters to keep subscribers posted about the latest offers, product discounts, latest arrivals, products tips, benefits, any company’s latest news or happenings.
- Appreciation email on high order or to regular customers to make their presence count & feel appreciated.
- Feedback emails, when someone arrives & leaves without buying, ask them what went wrong.
- Cart or wishlist reminder mails to customers who have abandoned the cart without buying.
- Holiday season mails to wish the customers & convince them to buy your products for gifting or self use.
- End minute occasion mail to remind users about any special day & how they make it more special by buying your products.
You can easily pull through simple email efforts, but to build a sureshot flow of referrals, traffic & revenue from your buyers, you need workable email marketing templates & efforts, with which only a professional email marketing team like us can help.
2. Use Social Media Platforms to Promote Your Store
Every next person is active on social media platforms, and finds it an effective means to gather any brand’s information & credibility. Social media platforms have a great role in influencing user’s buying decisions. Be it Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or any other media platform, all of them are a huge asset for your online retail because you can do a lot to attract people’s attention, bring awareness towards your brand.
How do you promote your online store through social media? Promoting your products or services over social media platforms is possible in various ways by curating & posting relevant informative, engaging, promotional content in the form of videos, images, blogs, GIFs, etc.
Start posting relevant & fresh updates, offers, or news about your brand, its products, your industry on popular social media channels. Use 80-20% rule. Share 80% general industry related news (any ecommerce industry you are in, be it beauty, retail, electronics, food, etc) to make more informed buyers & 20% your promotional content to let users know of your specific products & quality services.
For an eCommerce, Facebook, Instagram & Pinterest are the 3 best platforms to bring traffic, conversions & sales to your business. So better focus on each one of them and don’t just rely only on a single platform as you may lose heavy leads.
You can easily pull social media for free on your own to maintain that brand visibility. But for more broad & constant reach, you need to deploy some investments in Social Media Campaigns under your budget. Paid social media marketing can give you dramatic conversions & sales within a short period of time.
But acing paid marketing is not that easy, you need professionals around who are familiar with social media trends, metrics, ecommerce promotion tools, click through rates, and best ads to run --- that can help monetize your efforts. When you want a faster brand outreach & revenues, better consult them!
3. Register Yourself on “Leading Coupon Sites”
“Why pay for more, when you can get the same product at discounted rates, through coupons?” --- That’s what your rationale buyers thought process is.
The internet shopaholics always look for fresh brand deals & coupons to make their transaction less on pocket. You can register your eCommerce business on several coupon websites online & get the desired action from the buyers. Here are some of the popular coupon websites that could be suitable for your eCommerce business:
- Groupon - 82% people are likely to buy from the brands listed on Groupon.
- Slickdeals - The site has 10 million monthly visitors, 80% retention rate & 4.3 ratings.
- Coupons.com - Popular site for coupons & cash backs.
- Rakuten - Almost more than 12 million Americans interact with it for its exclusive deals, shopping rewards, and cash back.
You will easily find more such coupon sites online for registering your eCommerce store and getting best traction from them.
4. Perform Real Marketing Gimmicks Online
Make sure you are following the real marketing gimmicks along with fixing your social media & search engine reach. As a brand or eCommerce, give something that the audience can relate with & drives that trust & anticipation towards your brand. We are talking about real marketing gimmicks, which could be anything that temps your current or future buyers to stick with your offers & products like:
- Flash sales
- Discounts, rebates
- Redeemable coupons
- Giveaways
- Free Samples
- Loyalty programs to nurture your existing customers
You can have as many ecommerce promotion ideas as possible that could help you attract customers. That could help your store position well, differentiate from the crowd and bring that fast attention towards your offered products & services.
5. Don’t Lose the Essence of Offline Marketing
There are still some conventional people who love buying the products based on offline marketing practices. You can follow these best way to advertise online store through offline marketing methods:
- Billboard printing
- Promotional leaflets or flyers
- Telemarketing
- Guerilla Marketing
- Free product sampling & distribution
- Print ads
- Newspaper advertising
- Word of mouth
- Driving trade shows or events
- Radio ads
- Sponsorships to drive that curiosity about your eCommerce store & its products.
When you are leveraging offline marketing, don’t forget involving the online ecommerce website promotion tips. Create a balance between the online & offline methods & soon you will have a thriving brand.
How to Promote your Online Store? (With Some Professional Help)
We just talked about self employable ecommerce promotion ideas. If you are looking for some more paid yet budgeted and professional digital marketing agency led marketing ideas, here are some to follow.
6. Optimize your Store for “Search Engines”
Ever wondered how giants like eBay & Amazon manage to pull so much traffic from the web? Well, they play a very cautious SEO strategy. If you have the right keywords in your site that include the “frequently-searched terms” and “phrases” used by your target customers, you can drastically improve your eCommerce website’s ranking, traffic & sales opportunities.
The potential & most searched keywords can be placed within your products titles, description, meta titles, meta descriptions or the blog you run (if any). This will help you score the leading position in search results & get you the desired traffic, organically.
You can take help of popular keywords finders like Google keyword planner, Amazon, Ashrefs, or Google Analytics to keep track of what your competitors are cooking.
SEO requires special planning, efforts, ecommerce promotion tools, years of experience in targeting the eCommerce centric short & long-terms keywords, which is why it is best if you don’t do it all alone & hire the help of a professional SEO agency near you.
The key is -- Use the unique, smart & compelling content with the most searched keywords & present them in a very distinctive way than your competition, and your prospects will be all yours.
Don’t Forget the Technical SEO
Make sure you are topping the game of technical SEO too...
- Ensure your eCommerce store is mobile friendly (because Google gives ranking preference to only mobile-first eCommerce stores.
- Speed up your slow tortoise store - You have 3 seconds to load the content or you may lose big.
- Optimize your internal or external links - Make sure each product link or external is not broken.
- Let your primary keywords sit in the alt text of the “Product image” you post.
- Have latest SSL certificates -- No they are not just for safety, they help with SEO too.
Check crawl errors in Google Console - Make sure the pages are blocked from crawling that shouldn’t be.
7. The Super Fast way to Rank - PPC
The next solution to your question “how to promote my online store” is PPC. PPC aka pay-per-click advertising is a most absolute & aggressive marketing way to position your eCommerce business out in front of the would-be buyers & make them see your worthy products (like a kid forces you to see his new toys).
There are 3 components of PPC - “The Ad”, “The offer”, “The promising landing page”.
All these 3 needs to be in great sync to tempt the customer towards the ultimate buying step. Your landing page should have everything that you promised in that ad & the offer. Make sure your eCommerce landing pages are distraction free, have all the information & products the prospects wanted to see & that too on the keyword he/she was looking for.
Google AdWords can help you find the most relevant keywords for your PPC ads. The tool will help you distill your potential customers & their key terms searched over the internet. With professional marketers around, you can easily leverage Google AdWords & best practices to ace the ad writing process & promoting it for your store.
“The PPC ads are effective & fastest ways to get traffic & customers as they are placed on the top position of search results, before the organic ones, which gives you an edge before the competition.”
8. Level Up your Content Marketing Practices
“Content is the foundation of every eCommerce marketing process. If it is weak, there is no way you can stay afloat in the competition.”
Your customers need informational, fresh, appealing product-based or promotional content on a regular basis, to get convinced for actual buying. And there lies the biggest role of content marketing, within which you need to identify the flavors of content that can hook your potential customers in one shot.
Here are a few tips that you & your content marketers can choose to make your content game for eCommerce promotion strong.
- Decide on type of content - You need to brainstorm & analyze the type of content that your audience would read & react to --- which could be crisp web copies other than just product descriptions, weekly blogs, social media posts, videos, newsletters or so.
- Create very useful, informative & engaging content - Produce & promote informative & compelling content that can help readers stay & make informed decisions or purchase. Suppose if you are selling “Camping supplies”, you can talk about the benefits or careful consideration about important camping supplies in your blog section or social media channels. Or you can mention every aspect of the product, its use, features, benefits or so in its description.
- Invite & promote user generated content - User generated content is content that your would be buyers create & share over their social media or any search engine platform. It could be in the form of text, image, video, audio. Be an inviting brand, ask users to create more of such content & share that over your social media or website to form some engagement, influence & awareness of your e-store & products.
- Follow 80/20 rule - Whatever content you plan & deliver, it has to be relevant & interesting, but it also has to be 20% promotional & rest 80% informational. Otherwise, you will sound too salesy & aggressive.
9. Slide into Paid Social Media Campaigns
Take along your marketers & ask them to show you how paid marketing works for social media. There are 2 popular social media channels that could induce best paid marketing efforts & results for your eCommerce store, which are Facebook & Instagram. Sharing a few tips on how you can advertise your online store with these top 2 social channels to turn traffic, referrals & revenue under a budgeted investment.
How to Promote your Online Store on Facebook?
You along with your marketers can easily promote your products on Facebook by:
- Opening a Facebook Page - You can create a business page on Facebook to tell people about your products & services, what you sell, the latest offers, and every update that you want your customers to get from you. There people can even review you, follow you, like the page, share it and read everything that you share.
- Opening Facebook Store - Open free of cost Facebook stores where you can directly hatch the attention of buyers, without having to redirect them over your store. Setting up a Facebook store is easy & free, you can easily integrate the inventory from your site & process payments through FB store only. However, you get charged a small fee when you start selling the products.
- Running not so costly Facebook ads - Place bets on Facebook ads if you are failing at hunting down the organic traffic & engagements. You can run 9 types of Facebook ads - Facebook conversion ads, Facebook like ads, Facebook carousel ads, Facebook ad with single & multiple image display, and more at any small or big budget and you will experience some remarkable reach & response.
These were the quick tips on How to Promote your Online Store on Facebook, now let’s find out for Instagram.
How to Promote your Online Store on Instagram?
With almost 500 million daily active users, Instagram is the most popular social media platform today that easily connects brands, influencers, customers with each other. Once you create an Instagram business account & store, you can easily promote your products on Instagram by:
- Writing compelling instagram bio and adding a link or CTR to your bio.
- Posting eyeconic HD images of your products, offers, events, behind the scenes, and more content that your audience would want to see.
- Leveraging instagram live - when you connect with your audience in real-time live chat, you create trust & are better able to share your offerings.
- Getting high on Instagram ads - “Do you know Fizzy Goblet, a footwear brand saw a 40% increase in web traffic & 50% increase in sales by placing bets on Instagram ads?” You can decide a type of ad & budget for it in advance. There are 4 types of ad you can run on Instagram - photo ads, carousel ads, video ads, stories ads. These ads will help in targeting your potential buyer, inspire them & ultimately buy from you.
- Posting relevant yet unique content on #trending hashtags - Design & display the most stand out content on your feed that motivates the buyer to take the next best step, that too on #hashtags that are trending & your buyer is searching for you at. Or you can simply create your brand’s personal hashtag to create a distinction.
- Offering great discounts, giveaways, deals - Your potential buyers would love to explore your latest offers, discounts, or anything that adds value to their purchasing power.
So these were the quick tips on How to Promote your Online Store on Instagram, which can bring quick results in a sizable time span.
10. Invest in Influencer Marketing
“Infleuncer marketing is one of the biggest marketing tactics you can leverage for better outreach, traffic & popularity of your store & its products.”
Influencers are the famous social media personalities who have quite huge followership & fandom. Their ardent followers or allies trust them for their advice, recommendation & every opinion they put out like fire on the internet. Contacting such influencers can really help make your brand & store highlight & invite more customers. You & your trend seeking marketers can jot down the popular names & ask them to review & write about your products/brand/store over their:
- Blogging platform (if any)
- Youtube Channel
- Facebook Page
- Public or Business Instagram Account
- Pinterest or Snapchat
- Or any other platform or event where their presence is highly acknowledged by your potential audience base
11. Optimize Your eCommerce’s Product Pages
“Any ecommerce store’s success lies in more than its quality products”.
Sure you may quality products but if you don’t have an outlet that displays their quality that well, how do you think customers would get to know that? If you are having hard time in keeping customers, bringing in new ones or increasing the average order value of existing ones, it’s time you need to lay focus on the product page optimization of your eCommerce store with an eCommerce web redesign company.
At any point, you can choose to optimize your product pages designs, content, structure of non-performing pages or ones that carry tremendous potential to convert. If you are looking for tips on “how to promote eCommerce products page”, here are some elements that you can optimize over your product pages for better reach.
- Add useful, informative, and distinct product descriptions in a crisp & consumable way.
- Have a guide or giant size image that lets the user understand & view the overall aspect of the product. Like you will see some eCommerce pages having “lens view” or having a small description of how you use that particular product.
- Keep larger than life size images from all possible angles in high definition, telling & displaying product’s actual visuals.
- Put user generated content as testimonials & reviews, FAQs for products social proofing.
- Create a clear pathway to checkout process, have a clear description on pricing, delivery & shipping description.
- Have streamlined products recommendation, wishlist & add to cart options with swift CTA buttons.
Test, test, test! Always test, change, recreate, optimize, & implement these elements of your product pages as per the timely performance of your web pages. If approaching better conversion rates is getting overwhelming & difficult, get the help of a professional conversion rate optimization service for eCommerce.
12. Leverage Marketing Automation
Everything has been automated. Even so called Marketing. Today you can multiply or duplicate redundant efforts without infusing much time & effort. You can leverage Marketing Automation cum ecommerce promotion tools for your eCommerce with the best digital marketers around.
The professionals can help you get introduced to not-so-costly, automated ecommerce promotion tools that will actually help you plan, coordinate, measure your all marketing efforts in a single hood, both offline & online. With such automated ecommerce promotion tools you can create, nurture & turn leads into actual & loyal product buyers.
With marketing automation cum ecommerce promotion tools, you can align, manage your core marketing efforts by:
- Having effective automated lead campaigns
- Tracking social media efforts & responses
- Managing leads
- Setting real-time alerts
- Organizing the workflow
- Customizing templates for emails & newsletter
- Personalizing messages for customers
So these were the 12 tips on how to market online store with or without professional help. Apply it, share it, and be ready to reap the rewards.
Final Thoughts on How to Promote Your eCommerce Store!
On digging deep, you will find a variety of tips & methods on “how to promote your online store”, whereas these are just 12 sizeable yet powerful tactics on “how to promote my online store”, which you can try yourself and with some experienced marketing team.
Your eCommerce marketing should have a combination of self-initiated as well as professionals led paid marketing marketing ways. Because that’s when you get both organic & paid results at a faster turnaround. You can’t solely rely on either organic methods or paid methods, you need both of them in equal proportion to drive interesting traffic, revenue & brand outreach for longer haul.
Do you need some assistance along your way to drive those effective PPC campaigns or leverage automated marketing tools? Contact us & know how our positive results driven Digital Marketing Company can drastically help!
Also, is there some special eCommerce marketing strategy that you used for your online store that worked heavily? Share your thoughts on which of the above marketing tactics you are least to most likely interested in exploring & implementing.
Z
It was a really informative blog. You covered the major marketing efforts I feel are enough to position & promote an eCommerce business. But one other thing I feel can positively impact as well is affiliate marketing, it can really help pull big results.
E
It was a nice read. You gave an in-depth knowledge on eCommerce marketing. All the methods you explained are easy to do by self or by taking some professional help. But I feel professional help is a must in today’s time, as no business has time to, you know, really look into its marketing efforts.
D
I and my team are looking forward to some professional social media marketing help. By reading your blog, it really inspired us to expand our products’ digital footprints. Let us know if you are really into social media marketing, especially.
C
The eCommerce industry has come a long way today. In fact, every business with a group of more than one product is a kinda eCommerce business. Marketing such businesses are very crucial, otherwise surviving digitally is very tough & hard for any business. Nice explanation though 🙂
V
You just can’t rely on old traditional marketing methods, especially when you are online. You mentioned every point so well, you covered each aspect of marketing. Thanks for sharing.
B
So for my small-scale eCommerce store, I worked a lot on my SEO keywords, and ran some amazing paid ads on Facebook & Instagram, I saw some tremendous footfall of traffic & leads. But I didn’t do it all alone, of course, I rendered some professionals help.
S
I am quite influenced by automation marketing, and am looking for basic tools that can help me write some amazing email copies & send automated emails, so could you help me with some?
R
Why do they say paid ads are not only enough? I mean I have heard marketers say, you can’t just rely on paid marketing, and you do need organic methods too, why? Just to tell you, I have no knowledge of digital marketing, so asking just out of curiosity.
K
Isn’t it enough to have my store’s presence only on Instagram? We make & sell gluten-free edibles for fitness-conscious people. I think Instagram is the best media for millennials. Should I focus on Facebook as well?
l
Each point is very informative explained in detail that how we can improve online sales through e commerce marketing, as today everybody prefers to buy things online rather than visiting shop, as it saves the time and money as well. so it is very important that we must update abandoned products from website and we can update our business on Instagram and social media as well. thanks for sharing such amazing information. It will definitely help me for my project.