Lately, there has been an upsurge of B2B businesses that have embraced e-commerce. It has resulted in many but similar companies competing for an audience and sales in the online space. The biggest hurdle is how to obtain a competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace.
Some of the common challenges in e-commerce include cart abandonment, nurturing loyal customers, product returns, and growing revenues. Even so, a B2B player can overcome these challenges by embracing creative marketing strategies.
Here are a few e-commerce marketing secrets.
- Integrate With Facebook
Facebook commands approximately 2 billion daily users, making it the most popular social site. It, therefore, makes economic sense to focus on its users to drive potential buyers to your eCommerce store.
Facebook has a rich database with vital information like gender, interest, location, shopping behavior, and so on. E-commerce players can leverage the rich data to explore targeted marketing, which is an excellent advertising model. For instance, as a business, you can build a custom audience to target website visitors or general users who may be interested in your e-commerce products.
Moreover, you can use data to understand your audience better and, as a result, nurture authentic connections. Specific data points like gender, nationality, interest, or shopping behavior can reveal their preferred content type. If your audience prefers short videos or stories, you can apply them to keep them glued to your page. The increased engagement implies more opportunities to sell or command a loyal audience.
- Embrace Upselling/Cross-selling
According to Amazon, upselling and cross-selling accounts for 35% of its total sales. The considerable percentage indicates the impact of product recommendations. Whenever you visit popular e-commerce stores like Amazon, you get additional options like ‘add accessories’ — cross-selling or ‘upgrade features’ — upselling. Customers are not necessarily aware of premium services or products. Sometimes you just need to provide additional information like why an upgrade fits their needs better.
Here are a few tips to increase upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
- Create space to highlight reviews from past customers
- Highlight the most popular or reviewed items
- Upsell products that are not 25% more expensive than original products
- Utilize shopping behavior while extending upselling or cross-selling offers
- Cross-sell products that are at least 60% cheaper than selected items
- Cross-sell products that bear a complementary purpose
Ultimately, upselling means you increase the value per order by recommending better products that are more expensive. Cross-selling, on the other hand, increases the number of products, which boosts the total revenue.
- Minimize Instances of Cart Abandonment
The average rate of cart abandonment is 69.57% which is a real pain for e-commerce players. It’s a common occurrence when customers add items to their shopping list but abandon them midway before making the purchase.
It mainly occurs due to unclear return policies, shipping costs, and a poor checkout process. A high abandonment rate is directly correlated with a dismal conversion rate and revenue.
Here are a few ways to minimize the cart abandonment rate:
- Incorporate More Compelling Visuals: For instance, you can insert a thumbnail to represent the product visually. The intention is to create a similar experience to a brick-and-mortar store. Equally, you can incorporate a progress indicator to track the purchase, keeping buyers motivated to complete the purchase.
- Improve Navigation From Cart to Store and Back: Customers love to add items to the cart quickly and effortlessly resume browsing. You can incorporate checkout on the product page to reduce the required clicks to complete a purchase.
- Enhance Page Load Speed: Work on specific aspects like compressing files or browser caching to increase page speed. A higher page speed improves user experience or checkout. Consumers, as a result, become more satisfied and inclined to buy additional products.
- Make Your Site Mobile Friendly
According to the Sales Cycle, mobile devices account for 63% of traffic and 53% of total sales in e-commerce stores. So, an optimized and responsive site is an excellent addition to your business. Although the vast majority of internet traffic originates from mobile devices, only a fraction converts; therefore, optimizing your site for mobile to maximize conversion rate is highly essential.
Here are a few ideas to make your site mobile friendly:
- Create a responsive design that reacts perfectly with screen width, device type, or content type.
- Create an impressive site speed.
- Insert big buttons that are legible on small devices.
- Design a quick checkout process.
- Create professional and mobile-optimized content.
- Promote User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) has the potential to take your e-commerce business to a new level. It’s one of the authentic ways that build trust by showcasing your brand. The modern customer doesn’t easily trust what a brand says; they instead listen to fellow customers who are more likely to give an unbiased opinion.
Dedicate a space where you can share customer reviews in the form of photos or videos. Positive reviews will increase your trust, whereas negative reviews highlight your customer care abilities.
Equally, you can partner with micro-influencers or trusted customers to create user-generated content. For instance, you can encourage them to take pictures while using your product. Alternatively, a testimonial video from a past customer can form UGC that you can use to enhance your sales.
A point to note: Influencers with a small but more engaged following bring better results at a fraction of the cost.
- Add Live Chat
The live chat feature provides a quick way for customers to reach customer representatives whenever they encounter a hurdle while transacting. Instead of waiting for a reply via email, they get instant support, contributing to a low cart abandonment rate.
Live chat can also facilitate you to counter reservations that arise in a typical sales process. For example, you can provide real-time answers to common issues like ‘Do you have a special deal for a large group of tourists?’ ‘Is my credit card information secure?’ ‘What is the return policy for a wrong product?’
Let Us Transform Your E-commerce Site
Most businesses are looking to exploit the e-commerce field, which necessitates unique marketing hacks to gain a competitive advantage. Achieving desirable revenue levels involves embracing features like live chat, social selling, and adopting user-generated content.
Faster Solutions is here to transform your e-commerce site through unique offerings like marketing automation, website plans, website building and design, and social media
