Taking your store or business online has many perks, from expanding opportunities to reach the global market to targeting a specific audience for maximum conversion. The e-commerce industry is now in its prime phase of flourishing with technology evolving and the increasing number of internet users. As many business owners are becoming more inclined towards e-commerce, you will need to invest in the right marketing tools to stand out from the crowd. Using the proper tools with a smart marketing strategy is bound to give you an edge over your competitors, in addition to your online business running smoothly.
While choosing an e-commerce marketing tool, you need to keep two major things in mind: your budget and your technical skills. You also need to have basic knowledge on search engine optimization (SEO), on-site search, responsive web design, and scalability to properly select the right tools to grow your business and attract an audience to your site. Apart from investing in marketing tools, you may also want to consider setting up an e-commerce blog for your store. This will help you increase the domain authority of your site. Having a blog will also keep your audience informed on the latest events and keep them engaged as well.
Here are some of the most popular and useful kinds of e-commerce tools that you should be investing in for your business.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is still one of the best ways to build trust between a brand and customer. It also offers the highest conversion rate compared to other marketing tools to boot. Through email marketing, it is easy to track conversions and sort out potential customers from your target audience. While it may be overwhelming to have a huge following on social media platforms, your followers are not really your contacts, and they can always become out of reach when the platform decreases in popularity or, in the worst case, if your account becomes blocked.
A dedicated email list will allow you to have your own audience that you can engage with through valuable content. This way, you can narrow down your audience to smaller yet highly convertible contacts. To build a successful e-commerce business, you need to invest in an email marketing tool to promote your business, introduce new items and offers, and gradually shortlist potential contacts in hopes of converting them into paying customers in the future. Some email marketing tools even provide email templates and automation tools for you to easily manage your email list and track the responses of your contacts.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an essential part of the digital marketing and e-commerce industry as they heavily rely on data. Focusing on Google analytics will help you track customer behaviour, including what they want, how are they interacting with your site, why they came to your site in the first place, and most importantly, how you can attract more traffic to your business. This free tool is all you need to track all kinds of data and statistics which can help you with improving pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, tracking the behaviour of visitors on your site, and optimizing product descriptions.
Social Media Advertising
While setting up and managing an online store requires effort and constant monitoring, it is also necessary to market your store across different social media platforms to target a highly convertible audience. With all the advanced paid advertising campaigns on social media channels, you can acquire highly convertible prospects and get their contact information. For example, Facebook Lead Ads is one of the most popular ways to target a defined audience who has shown some interest in your business or niche. It works in turning an audience into leads by acquiring their contact information then adding them to your email list.
Building a dedicated contact list is important to expand your business and obtain higher conversions. Another way to engage with your audience, apart from email marketing, is using text marketing. With this method, you can promote new deals and offers, handle billing alerts, and provide proper customer care. Text marketing is a quick way to connect with a particular contact to let them know about the latest events, or even just to communicate regarding their orders or any concerns they may have. The good thing about text marketing is that it is very cost-effective because it is cheap, fast, and reaches a wide demographic. Besides, it is more likely to be opened and read compared to emails.
SEO Tools
As much as it is important to give paid and social advertisements close attention, SEO tools are also just as important for reaching out to your audience and increasing your brand visibility. Generating traffic to your site organically should be given more time and effort, rather than relying solely on paid ads. To achieve this, you need to focus on what type of SEO tool you will need and what strategies you can implement to optimize your online presence. Even if you aren’t tech-savvy or even if you aren’t too familiar with marketing techniques, there are plenty of SEO tools these days that can do all of the work for you.
Conclusion
While setting up an e-commerce store can sound a bit daunting at first, strategizing and investing in the right tools can make your e-commerce journey seamless and without hassle. Even if you don’t use all of the tools mentioned above, using even one of them can make a drastic difference to your business. With so many marketing tools and solutions right at our fingertips, success is only inevitable.
