You work hard and you do the fundamental things to succeed, like using RepricerExpress. But there are so many more aspects to selling online, like marketing yourself (and your products) efficiently and to the right target audience. If you’re feeling a little stuck on new strategies to employ, here are three high-level tactics you need to be taking a second look at.
1. Email Segmentation
Email segmentation is when you divide up your contacts list based on criteria you’ve determined to form separate categories. For example, you might have a segment of email subscribers that are more interested in clothing, with another segment that is younger and more into technology and electronics. Segmenting your email list is one of the most basic marketing strategies.
However — and especially if you’re selling in the double digits in terms of items — you can retarget your email segmentation. What we mean by this is targeting a demographic of buyers with another, but similar, product so you can capitalise on their underlying interests. Let’s take our above example of the younger demographic interested in technology. They might have bought one item from you in the past, say, an ethernet cable, but you should also be retargeting them with items like earbuds, portable chargers and other likeminded items.
2. Bringing Google and Bing Shopping onto Your Side
If you haven’t done so already, start using Google and Bing Shopping to help attract and retain even more buyers. What this involves is understanding how their search algorithms work, and how they’re different from Amazon.
Looking at Google for a second, you should be focusing on optimising these areas for better search returns:
- Title
- Description
- Category
- Reviews
- Price
And looking at Bing Shopping, the things you should be highlighting instead are:
- Pictures
- Videos
- Audio
- Flash
Google is more of a text-based search engine, while Bing is much more visual. If you can really internalise these differences and tweak your marketing for each, then you can make great use of both.
3. Create Spokespeople Out of Your Buyers
In the movie Pay It Forward, Trevor’s school project is the idea that when someone receives a favour, they should do a favour for three new people instead of paying back the original person. The idea is it creates a far-reaching tree of goodwill where people take the original favour and run with it.
You can use the same concept as an ecommerce marketing tactic by offering people who’ve bought an item a discount on a future item if they share their recent purchasing experience on social media. That can lead to more sales and more social media shares by having new buyers ‘pay it forward’ instead of simply saying thanks to you or leaving you a great review.
This marketing tactic works because people are far more likely to trust what their friends say about a product than trusting an ad they saw online or in person. They’ve invested time and energy in their friends; as a result, their friends have greater sway over their purchasing decisions than an ad usually does.
It’s important to remember that you’re recruiting the average person and not someone who’s a skilled professional. You will strikeout, and you will have buyers whose social media shares get no traction. But you will also find buyers who do get the word across broadly and effectively, and you will find that the pros almost always outweigh the cons. Also, you will find this is one of the easiest and simplest marketing tactics to employ — just be patient in waiting to see the returns!
Final Thoughts
Now that you’ve read this post, you have no good excuse for ignoring the marketing aspect of your ecommerce business anymore. Time to pour yourself a cup of coffee and get the juices flowing! While you do that, take time to sign up with RepricerExpress. We’ll take care of all the fiddley bits so you don’t have to, and can devote more time to the more sophisticated aspects of your business. As a bonus, when you sign up now, you start things off with a 15-day free trial.
