Product marketing is one of the biggest challenges an e-commerce business has to tackle. Marketers around the world prefer email – the most powerful channel for e-commerce product marketing. Businesses use social media too to market their products.
Sending emails or posting updates does not give you traffic, leads, and sales. Additionally, these are not the only channels to promote your e-commerce business.
You will need to brainstorm the right channel(s) and approach for your specific e-commerce products. This will involve trying a set of strategic implementations to make sure your product marketing efforts yield.
This blog talks about some of the tried and true product marketing tactics you can implement for your e-commerce business –
Upsell
In its simplest definition, upselling is when you sell an expensive product to a customer with an aim to make him/her happier (and not to mention, to increase your sales and revenue). You up the experience of a customer by offering a better product – that’s why the term “upsell”.
It takes a lot of efforts to bring visitors on your website or product page and then, to convince them to purchase. And if the user buyer has decided to buy your brand, then your efforts have fruited. Congrats!
How about persuading them to buy a product that meets their needs better?
In ecommerce environment, where you can have different versions or deals for the same product, upselling is comparatively easier.
Let consider an example: Company A organizes an annual event in July every year. For that, they need customized disposable cups and glasses with their brand logo, message, and event info. They have already bought these supplies from a local distributor, and are looking for personalized stickers and labels to be applied on cups and glasses.
Company B custom designs stickers and labels for businesses. A deal to deliver 1000 customized stickers by the last week of June has been finalized between Company A and Company B.
In the meantime, Company B figures out that it is an annual event, where Company A serves snacks as well. So, the marketing department at Company B sends another proposal to Company A to offer 5000 stickers which can be used on disposable cups, glasses, and plates as well.
Company B also proposed a design change for the sticker, so that the leftover stickers can be used for the next year’s event. The deal was upgraded, and both the companies were happy because of that.
That’s called upselling!
Notification for Abandoned Cart
This is a common scenario for e-commerce. A customer opens their shopping app, adds a few products in the cart, and leaves and never returns to buy.
Stats indicate that average cart abandonment rate in e-commerce is 67.91%. Meaning, about 68 out of 100 customers abandon their cart. It costs the e-commerce industry about #4.6 trillion every year.
An abandoned cart is distressing even for large e-commerce players like Amazon. But there is a way to deal with it.
The top reasons why customers abandon their cart include unreasonable shipping cost; longer delivery date; so many steps to complete or too much information required; and payment security related concerns.
Some users add items in their cart while researching for products they need. If they find a better deal somewhere else, they will never return to buy that product from you.
In addition to that, 34% of users are not ready to buy at the very moment they add an item in their cart. You can create a strategy to gain the attention of cart abandoners, and sell them.
You know that they already trust you; that’s why they added an item in the cart. All you have to do is to send them an attention-grabbing deal for their purchase.
What else you can do is, perform a third-party audit on your website to find the issues with your e-commerce cart. You will need to fix the issues with your cart before you start promoting and selling your products. Apparently, such audits should be systemized quite often to ensure that your website offers a seamless experience to the user in the long run.
Social Network
Everyone socializes nowadays. You too can connect with your audience on different social networks. This will bring you closer to your customers.
Social media and e-commerce are a match made in heaven. 44.8% of global internet users use social media to search for brand-related information.
This is where you can build awareness about your brand in a more effective manner. You can engage with your audience and establish your store on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. For example, you can review iCustomlabel Instagram profile to know how you can use social network for product marketing.
You can promote your products to your specific audience via updates and paid targeted ads. Campaigns like these are result oriented and provide higher click and conversion rate.
Paid ads can be used on almost all social networks; they boost your engagement, clicks, and sale like no other channel does. You can choose a variety of ad formats such as text based ads, timeline ads, sidebar ads, in-video ads, video ads, and slideshow like ads. You can experiment with creating your own ads using online video editing platforms which even have a slideshow maker with music features.
Check out how Meesho is doing paid ads on Instagram.
Customer service can also be delivered through social media. And the way you resolve customer issues easily becomes your forte and the biggest factor contributing to your ecommerce sales.
The best part? You can track everything with the help of inbuilt analytics feature on all leading social networks, or by integrating a third-party analytics tool in your backend.
All you need is an effective social media marketing strategy based on your business and industry type.
Let’s now talk about email – the best performing marketing channel for ecommerce businesses. If you believe that email is a thing of last decade, you are probably wrong. Nearly 50% of people in the world use email.
Did you know that the welcome email that you send after a user signs up on your store can skyrocket your engagement rate by 500%? You can reach directly into the inbox of your user with your customized email recommendations through your marketing emails. But make sure, you do not spam the inbox and eventually get abuse reported against you.
About the Author
Birbahadur Singh Kathayat is an entrepreneur, internet
marketer and co-founder of Lbswebsoft, a digital marketing company. He has 12 years in digital marketing experience and helps some of the biggest companies build their brands and keep their reputation while increasing sales in the process.
