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8 Clever Ways to Market Your New E-commerce Website
Marketing an ecommerce website is not an easy task. You need to get your approach right if you want to reach more customers and generate a lot of revenue. Here are 8 clever ecommerce marketing strategies that you need to put into action today.
1- Take The Help of Inbound Marketing
Marketing can be of two types – “push marketing” and “pull marketing”.
Under push marketing, you push the customers towards your store even if they aren’t interested. For example, an ad in a newspaper is an example of push marketing.
Under pull marketing, you pull the customers towards your store when they are highly interested. For example, a visitor visiting your site using organic search is an example of pull marketing.
Inbound marketing consists of all such strategies that come under pull marketing. These strategies help to generate visits that are highly relevant and have greater chances of converting into a sale.
Here are some highly useful techniques of inbound marketing:
- Search Engine Optimization: SEO helps to generate quality inbound leads by getting your website ranked at the top of the organic search results.
- Content Marketing: Content is the lifeline of internet. Content marketing helps to increase the visibility of your brand and help to build lasting relationships with your audience.
- Social Media Marketing: Nowadays, you are marketing to millennials and social media is the perfect place to reach them. An effective social media marketing strategy improves brand awareness and lets you engage with a broad array of audience.
- Email Marketing: Emails remain one of the most cost effective inbound marketing strategies that’s easy to get started, delivers the right message at the right time and helps to generate a regular flow of leads.
- SMS Marketing: You can reach a large number of people at the same time with the help of SMS marketing. SMS lets you to reach customers instantly as and when you need it.
- Webinar Marketing: Webinar is a cost effective marketing strategy that helps to build lucrative relationship with your customers. Webinars adds to brand loyalty and helps to convert a new visitor to a lead.
2- Create and Promote Your Blog
Blogging is an inexpensive way for ecommerce business owners to drive traffic to their website. Here are the top benefits of blog promotion:
- It provides to boost your existing search engine optimization strategies.
- Blogging is an efficient way to connect with your existing and potential customers.
- People are able to easily recognize your brand and it educates them about your business vision and personality.
- Preparing blog posts on long tail keywords lets you get rank for new keywords which means you have greater chances of raising your leads and conversion. The below chart from Hubspot shows that businesses who blog generate 55% more visitors as compared to the ones who don’t.
- Blogging is an opportunity for social sharing. People can share blog posts that they like and this indirectly helps to raise publicity of your brand on social channels.
3- Advertise Your Store Offline
Offline promotion is equally important to give wings to your online business. Here are a few effective ways to market your ecommerce business offline:
- Take part in local business meetings to network with other businesses and to generate a lot of local brand publicity.
- Participate in trade shows to directly promote your products. Make use of tools like Shopify POS to accept payments from customers with their methods of choice. POS is a convenient medium to accept payments when you are in trade shows, meetings, kitty parties or workshops.
- Take the help of billboard advertisement to educate people about your brand and offers.
- Offer free products to people as this will encourage more prospects to start buying from your e-store.
4- Leverage The Power of Influencers
Influencer marketing is an highly effective strategy when it comes to reaching new prospects in a short span of time.
Nowadays, there are so many online stores so why would anyone buy from your store? People always prefer stores who offer quality products and a trustworthy service. Trust is the biggest factor that differentiates a business from a brand. Influencers help businesses gain trust and build goodwill.
5- Target Your Audience With Virtual Reality
VR is the next phase in the evolution of ecommerce marketing. Customers like to have a personalized experience and VR can create magical experiences for the customers.
Here is how ecommerce retailers can leverage the power of virtual reality to generate brand buzz and new leads:
- Retailers can create virtual showrooms or virtual stores to offer customers a virtual experience that lets the customers assume like they are viewing the products in a physical store. Customers can visualize how a product actually looks and feels as a “try before you buy” feature.
- You can use the Google Cardboard SDKs to start building an immersive experience of your own. As per a survey by Walker and Retail, people prefer shopping via physical stores as compared to online.
- With the help of Leap Motion’s advanced hand tracking technology, you can allow your customers to make selections and interact using their hand movements, all happening in the virtual world. This means, your customers can choose products, place them into their cart and order them easily all using a simple wave of the hand! Isn’t this magical?
- Moreover, VR combined with the power of AR (Augmented Reality) can do wonders. For example, a store selling furniture online can allow shoppers to visualize how a bed would actually look like when placed in the bedroom. All this happens with the help of an AR app where the customer would use the mobile camera and point it to the place in the bedroom where the bed needs to be placed. The moment this is done, the app places a 3D model of the bed as a live image on the bedroom. Hence, it becomes extremely easy for the shopper to visualize how the bed would actually look like in the bedroom.
6- Use Retargeting To Improve Your Visibility
Retargeting is a form of online advertisement that allows you to reach customers who have left your website for whatever reason. The figure below depicts how retargeting actually works: 
- Customers visits your website using a channel like a search engine.
- They browse your site but leave before completing the purchase.
- They start browsing other sites where your ad recaptures their interest by displaying products to them that they added in their cart.
- The customers return to your site and make the purchase. Congrats! You just made a sale.
You need to use the following types of retargeting to get the maximum benefit:
- Dynamic Product Retargeting where you can display the exact products that are seen by the customers when they visited your website. The below is an example of such as ad:
- Site visitor retargeting that allows you to target visitors who have visited your site in the past.
- Top customer ads that allows you to target people who recently made any purchase.
7- Reach More Customers With Native Advertising
Native ads present the audiences with content that they expect instead of delivering ads that don’t convert. They match the look and feel of the platform on which they appear. Some examples of native ads are ads that gets displayed in the social media feeds or as recommend content on a web page. 
Here are the top benefits of using native advertising to promote your brand:
- Native ads offer improved performance metrics and higher viewing rates.
- It helps to build a relationship with your customers as you engage with the audience in their own language.
- People are looking to find solutions to their problems and native advertising presents valuable content before the audience. When people find solutions, they become loyal to your brand.
- Native ads are innovative and they work well on mobile devices. With such an omnichannel viewing experience, people are more likely to remember the brand and convert.
- Native content offers more opportunities for brands to have their content shared across different social media platforms. People are more likely to share content that is valuable and looks like editorial content as opposed to an ad.
8- Use Affiliate Marketing To Drive Relevant Leads
Affiliate marketing is a key marketing strategy that gives you leads without spending any money on advertisement.
Here is how an affiliate marketing channel works: 
Follow the below suggestions to get started with affiliate marketing:
- Find an affiliate in your niche and register with affiliate marketing platforms like Affiliate Programs or ShareASale.
- Build your own tracking system so that you know which affiliates are generating the leads/sales.
- Determine the percentage of your affiliate program. Don’t offer too less commission or your affiliates won’t feel motivated to work on behalf of your brand.
- Make your customers your brand affiliates but keep the affiliate registration process dead simple.
Conclusion
Marketing a new ecommerce store is definitely a challenging task but it becomes easier if you follow the right strategies. Always remember that you might not start seeing the results immediately but there is no reason to get demotivated. Slowly and gradually, you will increase your chances of generating regular sales and reach more customers through your campaigns.
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