Category: Marketing

Best Ecommerce Marketing Tools: 10 Entrepreneur Favorites

Image Pexels

10 Ecommerce Marketing Tools You Need In Your Life

Setting up your online shop is only one part of actually owning an ecommerce business. Sure, you signed up to Shopify and you’ve got plenty of pretty pictures of your products, but you’re going to need to do a bit more than that.

Running an ecommerce shop takes time and effort: you need to establish your brand, get your company out there and visible, direct that traffic to your site, and convert those leads to actual buying customers.

Luckily, there are plenty of amazing ecommerce marketing tools that will make your life so much easier. There are many different types of ecommerce marketing tools; they can help with all sorts of things from email automation to analyzing data to social media strategy.

We’ve put together a list of the best 10 ecommerce marketing tools you need in your life. Read on to find out more.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a must-have for any ecommerce business owner. You should always have an analytics tool as part of your arsenal, and this is one of the best. It’s got a simple interface and tells you all sorts of things about your website traffic, visitor behaviour, how to optimize your site, and drive conversion rates.

Mailchimp

MailChimp is another great ecommerce marketing tool you need to know about. It’s basically an email service which helps you to create a email marketing campaign and send out attractive automated emails to your subscribers.

No former coding knowledge is necessary, as it’s packed with easy-to-customize templates. It reports and analyzes your campaign performances too.

Keyword Tool

If you’re an aspiring ecommerce business owner, then you should also get your hands on Keyword Tool. By now you should know all about keywords and SEO (but if you don’t, there are plenty of posts on the internet that can teach you).

Keyword Tool helps you direct your marketing appropriately, by finding out what your potential customers are typing into Google, analyze search trends, and help you to customize content on your ecommerce site to make you rise up the ranks in Google.

Buffer

Buffer is an awesome social media management tool. If you’re running an ecommerce business, then you need to stay on top of your social media game and have an active online presence!

Sharing and posting regularly on social media is a great way to make people aware of who you are and what your product is.

The issue with being vocal on social media is that it’s time-consuming, and as a business-owner, time is money. Social media marketing tools like Buffer help you to schedule posts, manage all of your social accounts from one place, and helps you to analyse your social performance.

OptinMonster

You’ve probably seen those popup messages that appear when you start moving your mouse to leave a website. These popups help to entice abandoning users back to a website by offering something like a few download or asking them to subscribe to a weekly email for free things, discounts and exciting news.

OptinMonster is a lead generation plugin that helps to convert those pesky visitors leaving your site into subscribers and customers. It integrates with ecommerce platforms like Magneto, Shopify and Bigcommerce, and it’s pretty cheap and easy to do.

Popups may seem annoying to you, but when done right, they actually work a treat— check out these stats on why popups are alive and kicking.

Buy Now and get important discounts

BUY NOW

READ REVIEW

Buy Now and get important discounts

BUY NOW

READ REVIEW

Buy Now and get important discounts

BUY NOW

READ REVIEW

Klaviyo

Klaviyo helps you market your products by using sales data from your store. This nifty marketing tool personalizes social media and email marketing by using this data.

One of its great features is that it can segment your customers based on things like engagement or behaviour, therefore making targeting more accurate and increasing ROI.

Canva

Canva is an awesome design tool for ecommerce business owners who can’t do web design themselves or afford to hire a web designer.

Canva helps you to choose attractive color schemes, edit photos and pick good font combinations — all things that you may be worried about doing on your own, but will make a huge difference to your site looking stylish and professional.

Bitly

This handy little tool is simple but life-saving when you’re following your social marketing strategy.

Bitly is a URL shortening service (although it does a lot more, and can help you with things like tracking clicks, geolocation and site referrals). We use it for any posting we do on social — platforms like Facebook and Instagram don’t react well to long links in posts and it looks pretty ugly, so Bitly is a godsend.

Grammarly

Not everyone who sets up their own ecommerce business is totally comfortable in the face of grammar. Grammar and spelling are really important in your content, whether it’s on a landing page, social media posts or a product description.

Spelling mistakes and bad grammar look messy and unprofessional, and that’s hardly like to inspire confidence in potential customers. Lucky for you, that’s where Grammarly steps in. It’s a grammar-checking tool which helps you to make your writing not just mistake-free, but effective and well-written too!

BuzzSumo

The buzz on BuzzSumo: it’s a must-have content marketing tool used by some massive brands (check out the list on their homepage), and it’s making waves at the moment.

If you need a tool to help you with content strategies and SEO campaigns, this is the one. BuzzSumo helps you find trending, popular content on search topics, which big influencers are sharing it, and how your competitors content is performing. So you can fill in the content gaps with your own awesome content (and reach out those popular influencers to get your brand noticed!).

OmniKick

OmniKick is a popup builder plugin for WordPress that’s effective for collecting leads.

With OmniKick, you’ll exceed customers’ expectations. OmniKick’s omni channel platform is easy to use. Interact with customers via email, SMS, Push Notifications, and Facebook Messenger without leaving the platform.

OmniKick’s omni-channel automation workflow builder is powerful and simple to use. With the visual automation workflow builder, you can create brilliant automation campaigns and send messages to all major channels within a few minutes.

The plugin automatically detects when a visitor is about to exit your web page. OmniKick tracks visitors’ movements across the web page. They’ve collected enough data to perfect their exit-intent technology.

The tool gives you the option to choose the sensitivity of the exit intention. That means how fast you want OmniKick to recognize when the visitor is about to leave. OmniKick’s abandoned intent technology is data driven and highly personalized.

As you can see, there so many amazing tools out there to help you with your ecommerce marketing! These are some of our favourites, so be sure to check them out to make your life as an ecommerce business owner much, much easier.

What did you think of our list? Let us know in the comments below.

October 23, 2018
7 Ways to Encourage Email Subscribers to Make A Purchase
Image Pexels

7 Ways to Encourage Email Subscribers To Make a Purchase

All business owners face the same basic customer problems: getting new customers, retaining them, and encouraging them to make repeat purchases. A healthy customer base making repeat purchases is critical to your business cash flow.

With sales funnels, email marketing, and other online tools, it’s easy for your potential customers to become an email subscriber but never make a purchase. You might have implemented an email marketing campaign or on social, but if you don’t convert subscribers into paying customers, your email list is useless.

Your email list may contain any number of curious potential buyers, qualified customer leads, and interested customers willing to make a purchase. But as any marketer will tell you, they’re not the same thing.

Here are seven methods to convert an email subscriber to a paying customer.

Create a sense of curiosity in your headlines
Eight of ten people will only read your headline, while the remaining twenty percent will go on to read your article. You need to create a sense of curiosity in your headline that entices that 80% to click through to your email. Creating curiosity involves:
1. Violating the correct expectations
2. Addressing the gap between the known and unknown
3. Knowing when to stop
Violating expectations involves creating disorder, which requires users to investigate to restore order (sense and meaning).

Readers are more likely to try to resolve the conflict in your email subject line by clicking on a link and reading the article, thus satisfying their curiosity. The title should appeal to the gap between the known and unknown without resolving the contradiction.

By appealing to a person’s innate desire to make sense of the information presented, they’ll be more likely to follow through with your desired course of action.
__CONFIG_leads_shortcode__{“id”:”371″}__CONFIG_leads_shortcode__

Transform curiosity into desire

When you present information to your email list subscribers, you whet their appetite for more. Telling your subscribers too much will leave them overwhelmed with information and less likely to take the next step.

Your copy should elicit a sense of desire in your audience. Appeal to their pain points and play on their needs as consumers, knowledge gleaned from your consumer research. You should then position your product or service as the solution to that desire. But don’t go in hard — you need to lead your customer to it, not simply show them.

Tell a story

Humans love stories, and an engaging story can draws the reader into your product, service, or brand through a compelling narrative. Don’t focus strictly on your product or service in your account, but instead approach it in a natural, organic way.

This is a particularly effective approach if you’ve just picked up a new business and you want to put your own personal stamp on it. You could take any one of the businesses for sale online, create a unique video that extols the virtue of your product or service with a story, and instantly revamp the brand so it appeals to a new audience.

But it’s not just your product — stories can help inform customers about where your new business is going too (a method that builds consumer loyalty by creating a relationship). As long as you tell it in a creative way that audiences can relate to, you can draw in customers in their droves.

Buy Now and get important discounts

BUY NOW

READ REVIEW

Buy Now and get important discounts

BUY NOW

READ REVIEW

Buy Now and get important discounts

BUY NOW

READ REVIEW

Less is more — be concise

While compelling stories and testimonials have their place, your copy itself should be concise and to the point. While it can be tempting to indulge in reams of florid prose, you have to write from a customer’s point-of-view. To hold their attention, it’s important you cut the waste.

Grammarly and the Hemingway Editor are useful tools to help your emails read better, especially for amateurs. But the best way to really get it right is by getting a second pair of eyes to take a look. Just remember: always write for your customers and their perspective.

Include social sharing links

Econsultancy has done extensive research on email marketing, and their #1 recommendation to convert email list subscribers to click-throughs is to include social sharing options. Rates for click-throughs jump significantly by including multiple social sharing options.

Obviously Facebook and Twitter should be included, but B2B businesses might also want to include LinkedIn buttons too. And if you’re a particularly visual brand such as a fashion or cooking company, a suitably visual platform such as Instagram or Pinterest are a must.

Optimize for mobile devices

Americans check their phones 80 times per day, so it’s vital that you make your emails mobile-ready. When you create your email, test it to make sure it’s readable and user-friendly. Break paragraphs up so they’re no longer than two sentences long — any longer won’t translate well to mobile devices, repelling customers.

And be sure to eliminate distractions such as ads and superfluous information that can cause slow loading times. This can result in decreased click-through rates so, just as your copy should be concise, so should your design.

Buy Now and get important discounts

BUY NOW

READ REVIEW

Buy Now and get important discounts

BUY NOW

READ REVIEW

Buy Now and get important discounts

BUY NOW

READ REVIEW

Use video to engage in new ways

Video now accounts for over 80% of all web traffic, a considerable figure. A video has a higher probability of converting casual users into paying customers, and marketers are using video to great effect. Including video in your email can net you sizeable returns.

When creating a video, make it short but entertaining, and include a call-to-action in the first 10 seconds to boost conversions. Cloud-based rendering services such as Viddyoze offer affordable solutions for intros, outros, and logo animations without the need to hire a professional animator.

These seven steps can help you drastically improve the conversion rate of your email subscribers by engaging them through effective, targeted marketing campaigns.
October 11, 2018
How To Harness The Power Of Email Marketing And Boost Your SEO Footprint

Email marketing and SEO: what’s the link? Find out how the two channels can work together to help make your business more profitable.

(more…)

October 11, 2018
Ecommerce Digital Marketing: Why Your Business Needs A Digital Marketing Strategy (With Examples)
Most successful online store brands embrace a range of tactics as part of their ecommerce digital marketing strategy, with their approach including everything from email to social media.

Done right, ecommerce marketing can be used to build your brand, increase sales, and provide a personal level of customer service.

If you’re new to ecommerce and struggling to find ways to grow your audience, don’t fear — in this article, we explore the fundamentals of ecommerce marketing and hope to inspire you with six awesome real-life examples.

What is ecommerce marketing?

Ecommerce marketing is an umbrella term encompassing several different components:
- Social media
- Content
- Email campaigns
- Search engines
Together, these components are used to attract potential customers and improve the bottom line in your ecommerce business.

Driving awareness and actions towards your product and service is the aim of marketing, so let’s take a deeper look at the strategies you can adopt to help boost online sales.

Types of ecommerce marketing strategy

There are many digital marketing strategies ecommerce businesses can adopt. In this section, we explore the types of tactics available to your operation.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing is all about leveraging the web’s most popular social networking platforms to connect with your audience and post content people love to share.

Not every platform is appropriate for your brand, so it’s important to match the tone and type of content you produce with the audience you want to reach. For example, Instagram lends itself to highly visual users, allowing you to capture a sharp image of your brand. For more information, check out our guide on Instagram ecommerce marketing.

Nowadays, many social platforms also allow you to create shoppable content, meaning you can sell directly to your audience from your account.

Content marketing

Content is king, especially when trying to promote products online and appear more frequently in your target markets’ Google search results.

Create a portfolio of relevant blog posts and shareable images to position yourself as an industry authority in your given niche. Here are some quick tips:
- Upload consistent, keyword-driven blog posts
- Outreach to other relevant sites and provide a guest post
- Put product-related ‘how to’ videos on YouTube
- Source user-generated content to drive engagement
- Include an informative FAQ section on your website
From creating unique articles to upgrading existing ones, content marketing is all about guiding leads and potential customers down the sales funnel.

Search engine marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing (or SEM) is a combination of organic SEO and paid advertising.

On one side, SEO relies on your knowledge of search engine algorithms; on the other, SEM can also involve clever use of paid Google ads (and display ads) to take up an optimum amount of space in the SERPs.

Email marketing

Email marketing isn’t dead — and as one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, it holds a special place in the world of ecommerce.

By capturing a user’s email you can:
- Perform a post-purchase follow up: keep interest going and secure a future purchase
- Understand an abandoned shopping cart: diagnose a problem and retain business
Email is important for maintaining a connection with leads, but not everyone is happy to be contacted. Nowadays concerns around user privacy run high, so be careful when selecting people for your mailing list and make sure you follow current GDPR protocol.

Best ecommerce digital marketing examples

Need some inspiration to kick your ecommerce marketing strategy into gear? In this section, we highlight some of the best marketing examples from popular brands around the web.

1. Newegg

Image: Newegg Studios

Newegg Studios comprises a team of experts obsessed with all things tech, gaming, and DIY.

Its hugely successful YouTube channel is packed with original videos detailing the latest product releases and industry news. Why is this strategy effective? Newegg understands its customer base and what they want to see – their mixture of reviews and interviews spark lively debate among viewers and put value before commercial intent.

2. IKEA

Image: IKEA

We’re all aware of IKEA’s modular, DIY homeware range, but did you know that they’re also pretty savvy on the social front? IKEA makes the most of user-generated content to drive sales by asking customers to take photos of their favourite IKEA products and post them on Instagram, using specific UGC hashtags that distinguish them from regular posts.

The incentive for this approach is that a few lucky customers receive their favourite items for free – a small price for IKEA to pay in return for users voluntarily posting their products across Instagram and Pinterest.

Another of Ikea’s strengths is its willingness to run with playful promotions, like the time the Exeter UK branch hosted a sleepover in its warehouse. This came about as a response to a growing Facebook fan group with hundreds of thousands of members: ‘I wanna have a sleepover in IKEA’. 100 participants were chosen and the whole thing was captured on video:

Embedded video temporarily unavailable. View the original video

These unusual prizes help IKEA to maintain its active online community through unique experiences. IKEA Australia later offered one couple the chance to get married at an IKEA store on Valentine’s Day.

3. FabFitFun

Image: FabFitFun

Health and beauty brand FabFitFun makes the most of Pinterest by using shoppable pins that drive users directly to their website – in many cases, to a set promotional landing page.

Moreover, they’re killing it with influencer marketing, sending subscription boxes out to bloggers who review their products in return for referral commissions — it’s word of mouth marketing gone digital.

4. Enso Rings

Image: @EnsoRings

Enso rings are a modern brand selling top-rated wedding rings and composite silicone rings designed for people with active lifestyles.

The brand uses Facebook retargeting to capture lost leads and raise brand awareness, using the carousel advertisement functionality to drawback customers who have already been on their website. Remarketing works by following leads around the web with tempting offers – if you shop online, you’ve probably noticed this happening yourself!

5. Beardbrand

Image: @beardbrand

Beardbrand is a modest but incredibly popular Shopify store that sells beard oil for the modern bearded man. They’re masters of tone, particularly on Twitter. In the tweet above, they manage to brag about their products in a way that’s light and cheeky – so the brag is easily forgiven. Being able to get your brand’s personality across on social media is important; there are far too many businesses making noise on there already. A little humor can go a long way.

Beardbrand also does an amazing job maintaining its cohesive Instagram aesthetic – dark, strong, muted colours, sharp lines, and high contrast. Plus, of course, lots of handsome, bearded men. It’s masculine, but not aggressively so, and brings in a lot of natural materials as well as the occasional ‘arty’ photo to mix things up.

Image: @bearbrand

Beardbrand’s posts regularly get likes and comments in the hundreds of thousands, all the while maintaining its authentic, quirky tone. Overall, it’s refreshing to look at and does a great job of staying true to its brand identity.

6. Sephora

Image: Sephora

Beauty brand Sephora has its social media strategy nailed, regularly taking to Instagram and Vine with beautiful product photos and smart videos that show what their products can do.

But what also sets them apart is their Beauty Board – an exclusive social site for its members that brings all of its online communities together, including Beauty Talk and Sephora TV. Talk about doing things your own way!

Summary: creating your ecommerce marketing strategy

Creating an ecommerce marketing strategy is about adopting a range of successful practices and making them your own. From social media to email marketing, make the most of all the channels this digital world has to offer when advertising online.

Now it’s over to you — which of these marketing strategies can you apply to your own business? Remember, you don’t need to do everything; simply choose what makes sense for your ecommerce brand, and carefully track the results.
October 3, 2018
Short Form Content & Video: How To Create Better ‘Snackable’ Content

Content is the backbone of any digital marketing strategy. Whether your company is B2B or B2C, or whether you are selling products or services, content plays a significant role in driving traffic into your marketing funnel, and moving those prospects towards the sale.

(more…)

November 7, 2017