Do you own a B2C e-commerce business? Is selling products getting difficult due to existing market competition? If yes, you are at the right place. Opening an online store may seem convenient and fun, as it is a customer driven business structure that sells products for customer’s personal use, but it has it own challenges.
However easy it may sound, owning a business like this is not a child’s play. The online e-commerce market today offers countless alternatives to the customers. Gone are the days when customers used to wait for the products to be bought from a fixed store. The supply is at par with the demand nowadays, or I must say, even more.
Well it obviously requires a fair amount of e-commerce marketing strategies to increase traffic on your online store.The focus is mostly on customer centric, emotionally motivated sales. To be honest, the end result is always “the sales”. It is important, no doubt!
But apart from that, you must also focus on raising the brand awareness, inducing customer loyalty and increasing customer engagement. All these points may seem unnecessary, but are very crucial.
Now that you have an idea about the market, you must also be aware that the wind is supporting the sails of your business. Over 33% of B2B ecommerce websites are also conducting B2C transactions. (Source)
In 2018, global business-to-customer e-commerce sales reached approximately 2.35 trillion USD. Most of the crowd today prefers to do online shopping through their mobile and laptops. It is also worth noting that 51% of Americans prefer to shop online and by 2020, 36% of Indians would be doing the same . (Source)
This gives us a lot of advantages and sets a stage where you can easily make your B2C business flourish if combined with the right marketing strategies.
Table of Contents
Game up your Marketing Skills
Which is the last advertisement you remember? Whatever it might be, I’m pretty sure it must have been impactful in terms of emotional quotient. The main B2C marketing strategy that most of the community follows is by creating catchy punchlines and emotionally driven content that stirs up strong connect.
The online e-commerce industry today is exploding with good content. Business to consumer model is now becoming synonymous with the e-commerce industry in general. That has given birth to the surplus competition. The consumer today has way more options than he needs. So, what will make your store stand out?
Give your online store a competitive edge in the market, if you want it to be one of the best e-commerce websites. There are a few essential features you need to adapt in your e-commerce marketing strategy today.
1. Dazzle out with Discounts
Trust me this strategy can never get old. There will always be discounts and coupons and there will always be people hovering over stores, like flies on honey.
It is a must to include discounts and coupons in your marketing strategy. Although word of mouth is the best marketing even today, with a little discount and a few coupons, people get more convinced to visit your store. It gives that extra push to explore new prospects, besides good reviews,.
You can always attract traffic at your store by offering quick discounts. Sounds like a lot of work? Well, it isn't. look for a platform that has a powerful discount engine for your B2C store. You can set up flat or percentage based discounts for products, collections, category, user groups, and device specific audiences with ease.
Also look for a solution that generates coupon effortlessly from your dashboard and helps you set up your own rules for start and end date, products, time, maximum usage etc. You can also go for referrals if you want. This way your customers will be expanding your clientele, and you will just have to worry about maintaining the great user experience of your store.
Storehippo provides such functionalities to make you comfortable in handling discounts and tracking coupons. With its unique discount engine, you can handle a variety of discounts and coupons for your promotions. This gives you the flexibility to plan your marketing in advance and play around with various mixes of promotions to maximise your marketing ROI. Flexible enough, right?
2. Leverage The Power Of Social Media and Organic Search
The world today is shrinking. The online e-commerce industry is a big virtual marketplace and you need to make your brand stand out in this competition. Search engine optimization is a must for you.
Make sure you get a solution that provides a host of inbuilt features for e-commerce marketing, to make your SEO process fast and easy, like - unique product page URLs, Alt tags, Meta fields, SEO optimized themes, blog feature, and automatic sitemap that can help in increasing the rank of your store on Google. Make sure you have a strategy before you start.
Storehippo SEO friendly ecommerce platform along with its inbuilt B2C marketing solutions will not only simplify things for you, but also help you multitask and save time. By using these features and tools you can boost your organic traffic.
3. Gear Up Your Site For Promotions
The marketing page is the front-face of your brand. Please don’t confuse it with the B2C website home page. Dynamic page is very important for marketing, for that’s the place where all your online leads and traffic will be redirected to. So, if that’s what the trend is, why stay back?
You can promote your online store using dynamic marketing pages. search for a platform that provides you with the functionality of making the custom pages easily to promote different, marketing strategies and products specific to geography, user segment, time and device.
What if you are given the freedom of uploading new banners, changing the design and colors, editing or updating new content of your online store. No, you need not know coding for that. Fascinated? Pick a platform that helps you create and maintain attractive, dynamic and user friendly pages.
Apart from that, custom and dynamic forms also play a crucial role in generating leads. There are many online stores that use these forms to conduct surveys as well. Find a solution that will help you customize forms accordingly and easily capture the information you want and store it effortlessly in the platform.
StoreHippo allows you to create new marketing pages that fetches information from your database as and when required. You can also create pages and forms within minutes to promote products and get product requirements, feedback and much more to grow your business.
4. Support That Is Always There
I have witnessed many unhappy customers that could not complete the entire purchase cycle because they were stuck with queries without any support team? I have also been on the other side of the bargain to experience how frustrating it can be.
Therefore, it is better to have a chat support in your e-commerce marketing strategy list, than losing customers like this. You can help your customers using multiple channels including live chat.
The more interactive and helpful your support would be, the more customers will trust your brand. It is the satisfaction of the end user that counts. Make sure you help the customers with optimum solutions and fulfill their basic expectations.
With StoreHippo you can easily integrate third-party chat solutions to your store. This will not only help you to offer services that answer customer queries but also resolve their issues in real time.
5. Reward Loyal Customers
It has been rightly said – “Loyalty can’t be bought, it is earned.” So if a customer associates with your e-commerce store, appreciate their gesture. Go for a system where customers get points on every purchase, or look for wallet system based solutions that help you credit reward points to the customers on sign up or referrals.
But how are you going to track so many customers every day? Find a platform that knows the value of your time and offers B2C solutions that will easily support your schemes. A platform that studies customer behaviour and provides analytics that can help you improve your business.
Such analytics help you understand the pattern of your product sale along with the regular customers you have. This way you can effortlessly enable the loyalty wallet and can then specify what kind of rewards you want to provide to your customers.
StoreHippo can help you manage all your loyalty schemes effortlessly and manage your clientele with ease.
6. Reduce Abandoned Cart
There won’t be a single online store owner, who is not concerned about cart abandonment. Looking at the customer’s side of the story, the issues mostly revolve around extra delivery charges, complicated checkout, unclear final costs, site responsiveness issues and so on.
But the real question is, “Are you going to give up on those leads?” Well the correct answer should be “no”. Giving up on leads means giving up on probable sales. Go for a solution that has exclusive features that supports your e-commerce marketing by storing the contact information of the customers as an abandoned checkout. You can always bring back the potential customers by sending them the abandoned cart mailers.
Have you experienced a new trend lately. The items that you abandoned in your cart are visible on facebook ads until you buy them. Well, we all know that there is only a 2% conversion rate on the first visits. To make the second time conversion, you can add Facebook Pixel to the admin section of your store and track the users to remarket your abandoned products through Facebook advertising. Along with this if you have an automated email follow up of these incomplete checkouts, the probability of converting them increases.
Since StoreHippo knows how important good leads are, for your online business, we make sure to track each one of them until those visitors become your customers. With StoreHippo’s advanced shopping cart abandonment solutions you can easily check order details, send auto follow-up messages and persuade your potential customers. No threat of lost customers
7. Use Content To Sell
Content is the king of marketing. Nothing can influence someone more than words. Therefore it is important that your brand has a good reputation online. Well, if it is too late now, don’t worry. You can always improve your B2C reputation by good blogs and positive product reviews that showcase your USP and quality of product.
The customers today generally check the articles and reviews of the products they are buying. And why not? They have the right to inspect before investing their money. To make sure you win the trust of your prospective customers, it's your duty to show them how worthy your product is. Maintaining positive reviews and blogs is a must in such cases.
Apart from that, blogs help in SEO link building when merged with good keywords that eventually increase your rankings on Google. Go for a platform that gives you the feature that helps in posting blogs on page and also showcases product reviews.
With StoreHippo you can easily edit and update your content, and also manage the product reviews. You have the flexibility of creating unlimited number for blog to engage customers and sort out their queries. With StoreHippo you can get the flexibility to write articles, edit or save for later using inbuilt functionality. along with setting the date of the blog post and observe the view count for all articles. You can also have multiple images between your content to make your posts appealing. And once your posts are published, why not share it on social media. Well, StoreHippo has that sorted for you. You can easily carry on the social share to reach wider audiences.
Now that you know the basics of good and quality strategies of e-commerce marketing, go ahead and explore new waters. Just keep in mind that it takes years to earn the trust of customers and seconds to lose it.
StoreHippo is there to cater all your e-commerce needs. You can now easily promote your online store and establish your brand globally. Do remember, when things have an emotional connect, they make sense to customers, and that is how the customer's trust is earned. We know what it takes to reach out. Therefore, we provide support for different e-commerce businesses that help you grow by all means.
StoreHippo is a B2B+B2C, e-commerce platform that offers diverse solutions e-commerce marketing solutions for diverse businesses. It offers amazing features that make online store management, easy, simple and efficient. For free demo and consultation, drop us an email at [email protected] .
Leave a Reply