5 Creative Ways to Promote an e-Commerce Business if You Think You Tried Everything and Failed
7 mins 46 secs read
Every day billions of people around the world buy different things online: electronics, cosmetics, clothes, furniture, etc. In 2021, the number of online buyers reached 2.14 billion. Only imagine the field of work for those who have online shops! However, the first thing one should think of is a thorough plan that includes multiple e-Commerce marketing strategies for you to choose from. Why would you need that bureaucracy? The answer is quite simple: if you have no distinct plan and don’t know where to start, be ready that your competitors will definitely excel you multiple times.
To make your marketing campaign successful, you need to make sure you don’t stick to boring, outdated methods like writing cold, non-personalized emails, articles written for Google and not people, and running ads that only eat up your budget, etc. Instead, try being a little more creative, study your customers, their wishes and preferences, look for new interesting partnerships, use social media to its fullest, and let your customers know about all important news firsthand. So how do you do this? How to promote your online business and gain positive results? Keep on reading this article to find out!
Table of Contents
Gift guides
Getting a present for someone is often a challenging thing - you need to get into the person’s mind to imagine what they would like to get as a gift. But why is it so complicated? It’s obvious: there are tons of options, and it’s always just hard to choose from. Moreover, it takes too much time to choose something right.
That’s why if you have an e-commerce online shop, you MUST make it easier for your customers to select gifts from your product range. By integrating gift guides into your website, you will help your customers save more time and nerves, all while increasing their loyalty and improving your e-commerce business.
Gift guides increase brand awareness
One of the main reasons why gift guides are vital for online shop success is that they help your brand to become more popular. For instance, during holidays, gift guides are just a life savior and have become extremely popular among online shoppers. In addition, people share such online shops, boosting your brand awareness.
Gift guides help make more sales
It is important to always keep in mind that every activity that relates to your business growth should always have an impact. More desirable, a positive one! So, investing time, effort, and money in the gift guide for your online e-commerce shop will definitely pay off. The gift guide can be an effective marketing tool that increases sales; you only need to put your soul into it.
Gift guides can develop your social media and blog content
This is another important reason to start investing in gift guides. All the ideas you get from the statistics can be used to create engaging and useful content for the blog or social media promotion.
All in all, gift guides are an excellent option on your way to achieving new marketing and sales goals!
Affiliate programs
When working on marketing strategies for e-commerce or additional ways of boosting traffic and increasing sales, you always need to remember the affiliate programs and their impact on business. If you are short on a marketing budget, this is what you need now, as starting an affiliate program doesn’t require instant investing!
To make it clear how an affiliate program influences the business, let’s have a look at it in numbers:
- Affiliate marketing is loved and applied by over 80% of companies;
- About 15% of the world’s digital media industry’s income is related to affiliate marketing programs;
- A huge player on the market, Amazon, gets 40% of its revenue from affiliate marketing.
What exactly is the affiliate marketing program?
Affiliate marketing helps improve your business income by promoting the partner’s products from another website. So, that means that you, as an advertiser, promote your merch with the help of your affiliate partner, the publisher.
The advertiser provides the publisher with goods you want to get sold. The publisher places these products on their websites and then gets a fee for every sold product.
How do you benefit from affiliate marketing?
- All data can be tracked: clicks, leads, impressions, etc.
- ROI is extremely strong.
- Every affiliate program is scalable and can fit every need.
- It provides third-party validation and social proof.
- Having influencers as your affiliates helps gain a positive reputation and customers’ loyalty;
- An affiliate program lets you focus on promising products of high value and get more profit.
If you run the process accurately, affiliate marketing may be your most cost-effective approach to increase income and traffic and grow the customer base for your e-Commerce store.
The power of Pinterest
Perhaps that would impress you, but there exist 433 million Pinterest users in the world that use this service every month! That’s the number of people you could potentially reach and convert into your customers. Having an online e-commerce store and looking for ways to promote your online clothing business, Pinterest would be a very good option. The huge audience and their different interests will definitely help you grow your customer base. If you’re a newcomer and have little knowledge of how to use Pinterest for marketing purposes, then keep on reading.
Does Pinterest fit e-commerce businesses?
Since 85% of Pinterest members use the platform to plan their next projects, this is a huge opportunity for those who are looking for a new e-commerce promotion strategy. For instance, a user is looking for a new printed T-shirt and therefore is running through Pinterest ideas to find the most suitable one. They scroll, and scroll and scroll, and then pin some of the best results. After that, the user most probably will check the retailer’s account to find more information on the product, if there is the desired size and color, print, etc. Then, most users compare some of the options they have found and choose what they like the most. This whole process, the customer journey, can be extremely easy and enjoyable with Pinterest.
So, how to promote an e-commerce business? If you are ready to start your Pinterest journey, then we suggest you create a business account. Unfortunately, without it, you won’t be able to run ad campaigns and gather analytics data. Just remember, the more content you post, the more data for analytics you get!
Digital Marketing Trends That Will Bring Your Print On Demand Business Into a New Level in 2022
Facebook Shop
Facebook aims to ease the in-app online shopping process for both businesses and consumers. And it’s quite reasonable as the audience of Facebook Marketplace is 1 billion active users every month!
With Facebook Shop, you allow customers to reach your store from both Facebook and Instagram, which again increases the audience. In addition, opening an online store on Facebook doesn’t require additional investment. No matter your business size or budget, every seller has an opportunity to turn their store online and get connected with their customers anytime and with no effort.
With Facebook Shops, you can:
- design your shops whatever you like;
- make your shop famous among consumers;
- grow your business globally;
- talk to your customers and close their needs.
How to promote your online store on Facebook?
- Live Shopping
This awesome feature allows you to tag certain merch before you start live-streaming. The products you tag are then visible at the bottom of the page, allowing customers to tap the item and learn more about it or proceed to checkout.
Live Shopping helps to:
- promote and sell items right from the video;
- boost traffic to your online store by redirecting new customers;
- encourage customers to buy more by arranging live streams with influencers;
- communicate with the customers in real-time while increasing their loyalty.
- Loyalty campaigns
- the sellers are able to integrate loyalty programs to their FB accounts all while linking them to the clients’ Facebook accounts;
- the customers can easily check bonus points and rewards they have gathered when shopping in the FB Shop.
- Instant contact with your customer
FB gives multiple opportunities to get closer to your client:
- Facebook Messenger;
- Instagram Direct messages;
- WhatsApp.
Now, it’s so easy to provide exceptional support to your clients and show them how important they are! Share the additional items’ images with them, feel the power of testimonials, answer questions, etc.
Good old press releases
Some may think a press release is an old thing and relates to journalism only. However, it is a big mistake that may cost you a fortune. Therefore, promoting your e-commerce business with a press release should be definitely considered, and here is why.
What is a press release, actually?
A press release is a good way to improve the online store promotion. Whenever you have big news about your business, be sure you let all your customers know about that: a soon launch of new merch, a big sale, or something that relates to C-level news.
Press releases are usually applied to strengthen your online store's SEO and help customers find you faster and easier. Additionally, press releases can be utilized for direct communication with your customers. Just post the news on your website or social media accounts - share it everywhere you can to engage more audience.
How to launch a working press release?
- Focus more on the storytelling and not the company itself. Let your readers dive into the news.
- Do not go too far with the number of press releases. Better make them unique than tell about every micro event in your business.
- Develop a strategy first, and then create your press release. You don’t want to waste so much time and effort and get no result.
- Work on the press release idea. Make sure the message and the story are clear and valuable.
- Check the text thoroughly; no typos or errors are allowed!
When creating press releases, remember that your every effort will definitely pay off. Keep calm if no one called right away or you didn’t sell a thousand products in one day. There is still an option to launch that e-commerce press release on your store website and social networks - increase awareness of your merchandise and improve your digital footprint!
Conclusion
Selling online is a tough process now with such competition in this sphere. When doing it for the first time, it’s better to remember that it only seems to be challenging. Everything is more than doable, just take one step at a time and do your best.
Marketing strategies in e-commerce should be extremely creative to bring desirable results. But, be patient, and do what you are doing - when staying consistent and sticking to your plan, you will get there. In this article, we described how to promote online business on social media; choose the most appropriate for your business tactics, adjust them, apply our print on demand business promotion ideas and get ready to see the results!