Think of ecommerce like cooking: the final taste rests entirely in the ingredients you’ve mixed together and the magic they make from being combined. In keeping with the food theme, RepricerExpress will take a look at what kind of ecommerce marketing mix you can cobble together to be your whiz of a chef.
Settle on a User Experience
Anytime you make a food dish, there’s always some end goal in place. If you go with Kraft Dinner, it’s because you want a meal that’s hot, fast, easy to make and still tastes good. Likewise, if you’re making canapés and Cornish hens, your end goal is to create exquisite and high-level flavour.
The same goes for your ecommerce marketing mix. To know how to begin, you have to be able to picture how you want the product to taste. Once you understand that part, then you can easily infuse it with the rest of the process — and your buyers will also instantly understand what you’re about, too. When she was writing the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling had first written the last chapter so that everything else would lead to that logically and intuitively.
Is Your Pricing Consistent with Your Brand?
Brands like Tiffany’s, Bentley, Starbucks and Bvlgari can price themselves however they want because everyone knows their products are elite. At the other end of the spectrum, those kinds of prices would get seriously laughed at if they were found on tags in Walmart, McDonalds or that faceless coffee shop down the block.
Even when the product is roughly the same — like getting coffee at Starbucks or McDonald’s — there can be a discrepancy in price based on the aura around it. Starbucks has built their brand on freetrade and other fancy doodads that seem to warrant a higher price, while McDonald’s hasn’t. Once you figure out what your brand is, then you can appropriately price your inventory (as well as reprice it appropriately).
Get the Word Out
You may have the most fabulous selection of items ever, but if nobody knows about it, then you’ll be going nowhere fast. One of the biggest downsides about selling online is you don’t have the chance to charm people in person, call them in from another store or be able to offer a deal on the spot.
But the advantage you do have is convenience. From your bedroom and in your pyjamas, you can ‘travel’ around the world and spread the word on your brand, whether it’s chatting up Redditors, hashtagging on Twitter or selling on different platforms.
This also includes literally promoting your products by offering them at reduced rates, bundling them or removing shipping prices. Whatever you have to do to make your name commonplace, work it into your business plan.
Anticipate and Answer All Questions
On just about every website there’ll be a section for FAQs, or frequently asked questions. It’s a place where buyers can explore the ins and outs of a particular product or service, which is something they’d normally ask a sales associate if they were shopping in person.
But what we’ve seen some online stores do — and what we’re huge fans of — is taking FAQs to the next level by making videos. Not every buyer has the ability to turn the theoretical into the practical in their own minds, and seeing someone else do it can cause a lot of lightbulbs to go on. And as a bonus, you can twist this around to be video advertising, posting them on the biggest platform: YouTube.
Top Things Off With SEO
We’ve purposely left SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to the end because, in our minds, it’s the easiest thing in your ecommerce marketing mix to take care of.
By leaving SEO to the end, you can focus on making it fit into good copy instead of the other way around. All you have to do is edit a header here or manipulate a paragraph there, and you can bring your SEO up to a higher level.
