The most effective ways to market an online store and increase sales
Marketing an online store has always been a matter of concern for many novice e-store owners, because despite the clarity of the ultimate goal of the owners of these stores, which is to make profits on a continuous basis…
However, this goal is directly related to marketing and is something that needs some planning, as they have to do more than just post content and an image or send an email here and there.
In fact, marketing an online store requires continuous and distinct planning to obtain permanent customers and gain their loyalty, and part of this planning is to try methods, some of which may be new, or different in their application from the normal e-marketing methods.
In this article, we will provide you with several methods that enable you to effectively market your online store through several channels and methods, and of course you will need to try these methods yourself to see which one is suitable for you and your store.
The most important ways to market an online store in 2021
Unlike online marketing with its well-known means, marketing an online store requires knowing some marketing and PR tricks, otherwise the store will have a hard time sustaining or gaining new customers.
In fact, the e-commerce market is a competitive market, as it is no longer limited to major electronic stores such as Souq.com or Amazon.
Rather, it expanded to include many stores whose owners were ordinary people who were able to create an online store easily, and they were good at marketing it, which helped them succeed in this field.
With all this number of electronic stores, excellence is required to continue in this field, acquire a number of customers, and keep them permanent customers.
But is there a secret to this distinction? In fact, the secret is to try several marketing methods to reach the best strategy that suits the nature of each store, and in the following points we will discuss these methods:
1. Offer offers to your customers on a regular basis
One of the most important factors that attract customers and push them to buy products is their price, which can be reduced in two ways:
- Reducing the prices of products in the store in general based on supply, demand, profit margin, etc.
- Providing purchase vouchers that provide reasonable discounts on some products.
Both methods are ideal for attracting customers, but the first method can sometimes backfire, especially if your online store is relatively new.
Reducing prices in general may make the customer doubt the quality of the offered products, or think that they are not original products, so we recommend following the second method, which is based on seasonal discounts and purchase vouchers.
You can link the discounts to specific days and public occasions, such as discounts on perfume products on Mother's Day, discounts on all products offered on the occasion of the summer vacation, or discounts on the occasion of Black Friday, or any other occasion that you think is appropriate to make discounts.
This will help you in offering great deals to customers, and keep visitors coming in to check out the latest discounts and offers available on your site which is important and necessary.
2. Connect with bloggers to promote your store
Do an online search for your industry (for example if you sell electrical appliances you might look for bloggers who blog about electrical appliances review)… Connect with the person with the most followers or the most popular blog owner in the field.
Make sure to check how many comments these bloggers get, how many followers they have on their social media accounts to see how popular they are, and whether they are a good fit to promote your store.
When you communicate with them, tell them why you like their blog and preferably be specific, detail why you like their site or blog, and then briefly explain why you feel your store would be a good fit for review on their blog.
Provide a sample of your store's products for free (preferably a unique product or available exclusively in your store), you can also give a free sample as a gift to one of the readers and followers of this blogger (if you can afford it).
In this way, you will get a review, the reader will get a free product, and the reader will often tell his friends about your store and its products, which will bring you direct promotion to a large number of potential customers.
3. Write a blog post promoting your store in a popular guest post.
As we explained in the previous point, marketing an online store by accessing a popular blogger is a convenient and easy way to promote your store.
You can also use it to promote your store in another way, by reaching an agreement with the blogger to write a blog post for your store (as a guest blogger) on his blog.
Most bloggers will allow you to add your store link in your personal account as a blog writer, which is generally visible to blog visitors, also with some negotiation with the blog owner you can add your store link in the post that you will write.
This method is recommended if you have experience in blogging, or you have your own blog, which leads us to the next point.
4. Create your own blog
Creating your own blog, whether it is for the purpose of promoting your store, or for any other purpose, is very easy and simple.
Within a few minutes, you can create your own blog or affiliate with your store and start blogging. In fact, having a private blog for your store is very important, because it provides you with several factors that attract customers, represented in the following:
- Through it, you can view full reviews of the products in your store in a way that you will not be able to present on the product page itself, due to the lack of large space for writing in the product pages, and the focus of these pages on displaying the basic features of the products only and facilitating the purchase process mainly
- Providing a new channel of communication with your customers other than through the store, which may be formal and limited.
- Increase the number of visitors to your store, by attracting visitors interested in product reviews, and then converting them to your store through the links within your blog posts.
Having a blog for your store will help you build an audience of followers, not all blog audiences need to enter your store or buy from it, but their presence and follow-up to the content you provide will help you in advertising your brand.
We also recommend adding reviews about products you don't have or about topics in the same field as your store, for example if your store sells sports products you can make reviews about sports matches and events.
This will bring you a large number of visitors interested in the sports field, who will get to know your blog first and then your store, making it easier for you to motivate them to buy and convert them from visitors to customers.
There are many ways that you can create a blog for your store easily, including:
In the event that you use the Shopify platform, it provides the ability to create a blog for the store easily, if you use one of the other store creation services, go to support and ask how to create a blog for your store.
Create a free blog on blogger platform.
Create a free blog on WordPress.
In the event that you are using an e-commerce platform that is configured with your hosting, here you can simply create a sub-domain and use it as an official blog for your store.
5. Add your products to Google Retail
Google Retail is a platform provided by Google to help owners of products in the following categories:
Merchants who sell their products through a website or online store.
Local merchants.
Merchants who sell their products through private markets.
Manufacturers who make products themselves or through their own factories.
This platform offers a series of steps to help traders set their goals through several tools such as:
- Google My Business
- Google Analytics
Being on this platform as a merchant will help you promote your store, analyze your visitors, and work to increase them naturally for free or paid like using Google Ads.
6. Rely on Affiliate Program or Referral Program
One of the profitable marketing methods that you can rely on in marketing an online store online is to rely on someone else to do it, this is not lazy at all, but it is a globally successful strategy, and you can apply it in two ways.
Referral Program: You pay current customers for inviting their friends to your store, and then their friends create an account or buy a product.
Affiliate Program: In it, you rely on an intermediary (commission marketed) to make sales for you, in return for paying him a commission on every successful sale he makes to your store.
In both systems, you are a beneficiary, whether by registration or sales, as long as you can balance your profits with what you will pay to the marketer or the owner of the referral link.
Sales make profits directly, and registration will help you create an email list for your customers, which you will need in email marketing, which we will discuss in a later point.
7. Exploiting public relations
How many times have you come across negative reviews about some online stores? I bet this has happened to you at least a few times, because it happens to everyone.
It starts with a customer who has had a bad buying experience or a bad after-sales service, who explains it on his account on a social networking site, and within a few days the news spreads (this store is bad, do not buy from it).
Of course, the impact of this news varies according to the size of the online store, because the large online stores have a large number of customers, and in contrast to some negative opinions, there are more positive opinions and experiences.
As for electronic stores that are still in their infancy, any bad evaluation may kill any opportunity for growth in its infancy, and it will also take a long time to address it or to reflect its negative impact on existing or new customers.
One of the most important solutions that can be used for the previous problem is the public relations department, which works to publicize your site’s brand, and searches for solutions to problems and bad customer experiences, if any, and works to increase loyalty to existing customers.
The role of public relations can be divided into three main tasks:
1- Providing media coverage.
Whether it is through social media or through any visual or audio media… The presence of media coverage is very useful to advertise your store, especially when it is used to publish articles about you, whether in electronic newspapers or blogs (and the latter is a great way to advertise your online store).
2- Work to increase the loyalty of existing customers and attract new customers.
In one of the previous years, Souq.com launched an initiative in one of the theaters, through which it presented gifts to all those present in the theaters at that time, in one of the best marketing and public relations initiatives in the Arab world.
Such new ideas (or less expensive versions of them) help you strengthen your relationships with customers, which are the responsibility of your store's PR team, and in coordination with the marketing department, you can easily make a discount for some of your permanent customers for one day or a big discount for a limited time to entice customers shopping.
Or you can give a small free gift with every purchase whether you are offering a discount or a free gift, this can help to motivate purchases, and delight your customers.
3- Control what is said about your store in various platforms and sites
While customer reviews can paint a picture of what people think of your products, they don't tell the full story. You can track what people are saying about your store in a number of ways, including:
You can set up a Google Alerts that will notify you when an article contains the keyword you requested, where the keyword you want to receive an alert for can be your store name or your brand name.
Monitor websites that provide online store reviews.
Follow social media platforms and micro blogging to make sure there aren't any angry reviews about your store.
8. Collaborate with stores or brands
Collaboration agreements or partnerships with brands can help drive significant growth for your store, as they allow you to implement powerful marketing strategies, such as co-marketing, that advance your business by leveraging the audience of another brand or online store.
Most brand and store owners view each other competitively, but they can be allies or partners.
If two brands serve the same audience but focus on different products, they can help each other grow, by creating joint content (visual or audio), hosting a contest or launching a joint product together.
Your marketing campaign can reach a larger audience, by leveraging the audience of another brand or store.
As for choosing brands, of course, you will choose the brands that you work with and already sell their products in your store, or even seek to collaborate with brands that you want to add their products to your store in the future.
As for cooperation or partnership with other electronic stores, I advise you to search for different stores from your store, whether in the field of products or in size, because partnering with supermarkets will benefit you more than the company with stores that are still in Its beginning or even at the same level as your store.
9. Spreading on social media
Being on social media platforms is essential if you want to promote your online store effectively, but you have to know that getting followers on these platforms takes effort and time.
Depending on how much time you have (or if you can delegate this task to someone else to help you, either from your team or through a professional digital marketing company), you will need to be present on the following social media platforms to help you market your store:
- YouTube
It's important to constantly try out new sites and platforms to see which ones work best for your business and store.
10. Use email to market your store
When your online store starts working, start sending weekly newsletters (if possible) to your customers, with the goal of these messages being to highlight your products through great images and compelling content, but short and directly linked to each product on your store through the special link tags, to facilitate the purchase process.
When you have a sale be sure to advertise and promote it via email, so customers can take advantage of your discounted rates right away.
You can create your email list by linking it to the email used to register the account, where the email used to create an account on the store is automatically added to the mailing list.
You can also add a subscription form for your store blog, your store homepage, and other popular pages in your store.
There are free tools that help you manage the email addresses you got from your customers like Mailchimp, which is an easy-to-use option for small business owners.
Some online stores promote the products of their sellers by sending emails to their customers on a regular basis, alerting them to the presence of these products.
Email marketing helps e-store owners achieve near-instant results in increased store page traffic and increased sales.
But the real strength of email marketing lies in the ability to continue to rejuvenate its marketing effectiveness, given that your clients' mailing list is a 100% asset.
Think that your followers on social media platforms can only be transferred or accessed through these platforms only, unlike your email list, which you can completely transfer to another service provider at any time, meaning that you own your list completely and can control it as you want.
This control enables you to increase the efficiency of this method in marketing your online store, as it gives you several options, the most important of which are:
Create different lists according to your customers' buying behavior.
Delete certain customers for not interacting with your messages.
Send discount vouchers to special customers.
Send newsletters about new products you have added to your store.
Alert users who have added products to the cart but did not complete the purchase.
Suggesting new products to a specific customer segment Show interest in these or similar products.
As your email list continues to grow, personalization and segmentation becomes essential, as it will help you plan your relationship with your customers, and figure out what aspects of your store you need to develop.
11. Create an app for your store on Android and Apple platforms
Having an app for your store on Android and Apple is absolutely essential, and its importance extends beyond mere marketing to increasing sales at a significant rate.
This is due to the fact that the largest percentage of Internet users use the mobile for browsing and performing other recreational and life tasks, including of course shopping, meaning that your absence on mobile operating systems makes you miss a great opportunity for growth and spread.
Having an application for your store on mobile systems allows you to market your store in a way that you will not find in other marketing methods.
For example, the application sends notifications as soon as there are discounts, general offers, or special offers on products that the mobile owner has previously shown interest in, such as placing them in the wish-list or in the shopping cart or even viewing them more than once.
Marketing by creating an electronic application that has unlimited possibilities, because it is related to how the application is programmed and according to what you want as the store owner, that is, you may be able to invent new ways of text or voice alerts related to your store in particular, and designed specifically to advertise your brand.
12. Optimize your store for SEO
We talked about SEO before in detail as a free way to increase the number of visitors to any website.
But when we talk about this method in terms of its importance in marketing a product on an online store, the situation is very different. Imagine that you search for a specific product online. The first page that appears in front of you in the search results is the product link on an online store.
Of course, this page will be the first thing you will go to to check the product, its price and description, and if you find an accurate description of the product and clear pictures of it (in addition to an appropriate price, of course), this may prompt you to buy it.
Well, let's now divide the process of configuring the store for search engines into its traditional stages, which are external configuration, internal configuration, and technical configuration and we apply it to the previous example:
External configuration: It consists in trying to publish links to your store on the sites and blogs associated with it, but of course in legitimate ways… such as publishing an article in one of the blogs as mentioned above.
Internal configuration: It consists in having a clear description of the products using appropriate keywords that visitors are searching for.
Technical configuration: It is represented in having a smooth user experience, loading product images quickly, with no slowdown in the speed of loading the store site, and moving between product pages quickly and easily.
Configuring your online store website for search engines leads to effective marketing and sure sales, because it is a process that always strives for your store to occupy the first result in search engines, which gives the visitor confidence that this store is reliable and increases his likelihood of purchasing the product.
13. Use Paid Ads
Like it or not, you will have to rely on paid advertisements from time to time to market your store, whether it is for the store in general or for a group of products in particular for a specific occasion, such as running an advertising campaign to promote the discount on kitchen utensils on the occasion of Mother's Day, for example.
Do not misunderstand me, the use of paid advertising is not wrong or a marketing practice that does not work, but rather it is one of the most powerful means that you can effectively market your online store, and rely on it to increase your sales effectively.
But the use of the word “compelled” stems from the fact that it is an expensive method, and it cannot be permanently relied upon, especially for novice e-store owners.
There are many platforms through which you can advertise between social media, search engines, ad networks, and others. But the previous three categories are the most important and influential in this field.
Thus these platforms can be divided into:
A- Social media platforms such as:
Facebook Ads
Linked In Business Solutions
Instagram Ads
b- Search engines such as:
Google Ads
Bing Ads
C- Advertising networks such as:
Propellerads
Adcash
14. Sponsor a party or event
This method of marketing is very widespread and common, to the extent that you will not find an event or party, regardless of its content, unless it has more than one official sponsor from various fields.
Even football matches you can easily notice the big companies sponsoring some of these matches individually, or offering a full sponsorship program for one of the big club teams, such as the famous Chevrolet sponsorship of Manchester United in 2019.
You may be wondering what drives huge companies like Chevrolet and Vodafone to sponsor matches, events or parties even though they already have a huge audience and a huge number of customers?
The reason is simply the desire to appear in front of a huge number of potential customers in order to market and attract, and in order to show loyalty and support for existing customers.
As an online store owner, you do not need to sponsor a huge party or a global event like football matches, you can create your own local event or participate in an event suitable for your store as an audience and in line with your marketing budget, this will help you appear in front of a good number of potential customers.
15. Make contests
Contests are a good way to publicize your store and increase the number of your followers on social media. We see them sometimes used in a vulgar way such as (the owner of the last comment has a gift or a discount), but this is not the only method available.
You can post questions about products or even other topics like general information, and you can even post a math puzzle and ask your followers about the solution.
With this method, you may not need to stimulate interaction by offering gifts and discounts, because it may bring you interaction as the follower's desire to win and solve the puzzle.
Do you remember the previous point about sponsoring parties or events? It is possible to make simple competitions for the audience of the event before its start or at the time of the break. Of course, this is a better method of promoting than having a special board for your store or distributing publications, or any other means of advertising that you may use to promote your store in this event.
16- Use video to market your online store
Video is the most important and popular form of content nowadays, people love to watch videos on YouTube and Facebook, they enjoy them without any effort.
You should take advantage of the power of video in marketing your online store in all possible ways, for example, the first important point here is to create an official YouTube channel for your store, and work to put a lot of videos in it.
There are many types of videos that you can post to your YouTube channel, such as:
- Videos that talk about your store directly, and explain its competitive advantages.
- Videos dealing with the most important and popular products that you sell in your store.
- Videos explaining how to use some products.
- Funny and light videos whose function is only to draw attention to your brand.
Of course, you don't just have to publish on YouTube, but you should also use Facebook to publish videos… such as posting videos of positive customer testimonials, and you can also make live videos to publish specific news about your store, or to explain something.
Conclusion
The success and continuity of any online store owner depends on his innovative ability to use the marketing methods that we mentioned in this article in a way that suits his store, and creates his own brand identity.
Therefore, be sure to use these means in a different and new way from your competitors and major online stores, determine your identity and how you want to show it to your audience before using these means, and then start publishing this identity on various means and platforms.
Also, do not try to spread at a rate that exceeds your financial capabilities and time, this may cause you and your store with negative results, so I advise you to start by relying on two basic means at the beginning and then add another means after preparing and preparing for it.
Share your opinion in the comments about which of these methods you think is most effective in marketing an online store.