Tips & Guides — 25 Apr 2022
6 Tactics To Ramp Up eCommerce Conversions
While the ecommerce industry was growing steadily long before the pandemic, many previously offline businesses have been driven towards online shopping.This is great for consumers, but can leave ecommerce business owners in a tough spot because of the increase in competition.
With ecommerce sales set to continue increasing for the foreseeable future, this competition is only going to get worse.
But there’s some good news! Many ecommerce companies are using growth marketing to beat the competition. The strategy is proving quite effective at scaling ecommerce businesses and increasing sales.
So, in this post, I will take you through the top six growth marketing tactics that will ramp up your online conversions. But before all that, let’s discuss what growth marketing is and how it’s beneficial.
Growth marketing is the continuous testing and experimentation of different marketing strategies to identify tactics that generate compounding returns.
True growth marketers understand that market dynamics change all the time. As such, the tried and tested tactics that worked a decade ago are not guaranteed to produce results today. That’s why growth marketers focus on innovating and A/B testing a multitude of marketing techniques.
In contrast, traditional marketing is focused on implementing proven customer acquisition strategies. It uses the same paid marketing, remarketing or retargeting campaigns, email blasts, and similar methods to attract new customers. These techniques will certainly produce results if executed correctly. However, a slight change in customer preferences can easily make a strategy obsolete.
Moreover, after using the same marketing technique for a long time, results are likely to plateau. Worse still, you may hit a point of diminishing returns. Case in point, if you run the same pay-per-click (PPC) campaign covering the same area for an extended period, the cost-per-acquisition will likely go up while your conversion rate will stagnate and drop.
You should know that growth marketing focuses on more than just customer acquisition. It also aims to boost customer engagement, retention, and the conversion of customers into brand ambassadors.
Here’s how the growth marketing framework usually looks:
With the AARRR framework, growth marketing goes beyond the top of the funnel tactics. It enhances the entire customer journey and boosts the long-term success of your business.
Here are a few of the top benefits of growth marketing for ecommerce businesses:
As stated earlier, testing plays a critical role in growth marketing. These tests generate valuable data showing what’s working and what isn’t. That effectively eliminates guesswork and assumptions, which are pretty common in traditional marketing.
Growth marketing focuses on the entire customer journey. It’s not just about acquiring the customer. You also interact with them and enhance their experience to the point where they’re comfortable enough to become your advocates. Enhancing the customer experience ultimately boosts your brand reputation.
Growth marketing seeks to increase repeat customers and referrals. Both lead to increased revenue.
Growth marketing tests produce insightful data, which shows you what strategies generate the best results. That should help you focus your investments where there is good ROI for your business.
Without wasting any more time, here are the six growth marketing tactics that can boost your ecommerce store conversions:
With more than 3.7 billion users, social media is an integral part of digital marketing. And the best part about social media marketing is it doesn’t just give you a platform to promote your products. You can also interact and cultivate personal relationships with prospective and existing customers. That’s precisely what growth marketing is all about.
The first step towards successful social media marketing is knowing where your customers hang out. Therefore, before you start creating pages on all platforms, do your research and shortlist the most popular social networks in your industry.
You can ask your audience directly through a survey. You can also access social media audience metrics on data websites like Statista. Platforms such as Pinterest share audience data with businesses, too.
Once you identify the relevant social networks, create a strategy that will help you target your audience effectively.
Platforms like Facebook provide innovative paid ad marketing tools that make targeting your audience feel effortless. The Facebook Insight tool, for instance, helps you create a targeted campaign for a specific audience. Beyond the basic demographic data points, you can also target an audience based on their interests.
The whole point of growth marketing is to test different elements and find the best performing strategies. Avoid limiting yourself to what you think is common knowledge. If you have multiple targeting ideas, create a single ad and test out those ideas separately.
After a few weeks of running those ads, you will have enough data to know which of your targeting tactics gets you the best results – and double down on them.
The next thing you need to scale social media campaigns is to find the right content. For ecommerce businesses, images and videos perform the best. But, make sure you are using high-quality images and linking back to specific product pages – so, if a customer clicks on a backpack ad, make sure the link directs them to that backpack and not your homepage.
You can also scale your social media marketing campaigns with user-generated content. Pick some testimonials from existing customers and share them on your social pages. Run giveaways, encourage hashtag use, or ask for user-submitted images of new products.
Guest posting is a common content marketing strategy. Software as a Service (SaaS) and many other businesses use it for search engine optimization. It improves backlink profiles resulting in higher rankings on search engines.
Guest posting can also be an effective ecommerce marketing strategy as it can boost referral traffic.
How guest posting works is very simple. First, identify blogs closely related to your business. For example, if you have an ecommerce website selling hiking gear, look for top hiking blogs.
Next, reach out to the editor with a compelling guest posting pitch. Tell them you have a topic not currently covered on their blog, and you’d love to write the content for them. In exchange, ask that you include one or two links going back to your ecommerce site. Most editors will accept the pitch.
Then, write an excellent blog for them and include your links. Don’t be overly promotional on the guest post, though!
Once the blog post goes live and starts to rank, you should see increased referral traffic. The increase may not be significant (depending on the blog’s monthly traffic), but the results will compound over time if you repeat the same process with multiple blogs.
In addition to getting referral traffic, the backlinks included in the guest post will also boost your SEO marketing efforts. It will increase your ecommerce website’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). Higher rankings increase your visibility which should result in more organic traffic and sales.
The affiliate marketing industry is worth over $12 billion. It’s widely known as one of the most effective marketing strategies for ecommerce businesses. In fact, about 40% of Amazon sales are attributed to affiliate marketers.
Your store is obviously not the size of Amazon, but that should give you an idea of just how effective affiliate marketing is for ecommerce brands, whether they’re an enterprise or a startup.
If you need another reason to set up an affiliate program, consider this: affiliate marketing is performance-based. In most cases, you will only pay the marketers when they refer a prospect and complete the purchase.
Moreover, you will not be responsible for how the affiliates promote your products. Your work revolves around creating unique affiliate links, providing resources for the affiliates. They do everything else.
Influencer marketing is another option. It’s similar to affiliate marketing, but you need to be very careful picking the influencers. Ideally, you want influencers who understand your brand goals. And, of course, they should have a commanding voice with your target audience.
For example, Transparent Lab is an online store selling performance enhancers. They went out there and got Europe’s Strongest Man, World’s Strongest Man, and the Arnold Strongman Classic Winner Thor Julius Bjornsson to promote their store:
Your business can benefit from various types of influencers. If you have a high budget, go for the top influencers in your industry. Most of them demand a flat fee upfront, but you’ll benefit hugely from their massive audiences.
If budget is an issue, look for micro-influencers. They’re more open to a commission-based arrangement. Some may even take free products. For example, a micro-influencer in the beauty niche could accept your makeup products, test them for a while, then recommend the items.
Email is one of the marketing channels with the highest ROI. A 2019 report by DMA showed that UK marketers get as much as £42 for every £1 spent in email marketing.
Various marketing emails could scale your ecommerce business. Even basic transactional emails can increase your sales. For example, you could use the transactional or thank you email to upsell. You can also use them to request product reviews, which should increase the social proof on your website.
Moreover, you can use abandoned cart emails to reduce cart abandonment and increase your sales.
Beyond that, you can utilize email marketing to nurture leads and build customer relations. You could, for instance, create an email drip that guides subscribers through the customer journey until they become loyal customers. This is made even easier with modern email software that automate the entire process.
But here are some email marketing best practices that you’ll need to follow:
A/B testing is critical in email marketing. Test email formats, subject lines, call-to-actions, time of day when the emails are sent, and other elements regularly.
Cross-selling and upselling are great ways to increase your online sales while giving your customers more value.
These strategies also help with customer retention. If there’s a higher value product in the market and your customer finds out from your competitors, they’re likely to leave your store. You don’t want that. Cross-selling and upselling ensures your customers are always aware of the available options.
To get the best results with these campaigns, suggest reasonable cross-sells and upsells. For example, if someone is placing an order for a 128GB iPhone 13, it makes little sense to upsell them to the 1TB iPhone 13. The specs and price differences are too big. In such a case, the customer is more likely to upgrade to the next best thing, the 256GB iPhone 13.
You can use offers to make your cross-selling and upselling campaigns more successful. You could provide discounts or free shipping, for example. Don’t only use these tactics on landing pages, etiehr – they can be just as effective during the checkout process.
These incentives encourage clients to consider your cross-sell more seriously.
Lastly, optimize your product pages to maximize your conversion rate. There are various ways to do this.
First, you need high-quality product images. The images must show product features as accurately as possible. It may also be worth it to invest in a tool that provides a 360-degree view.
Social proof can help skeptical prospects convert into buyers. Therefore, place customer reviews strategically on your product pages.
Another common trick is using urgency to accelerate conversions. You can implement this in various ways. For example, you could show the number of items remaining in stock or use a live-timer to create the fear of missing out (FOMO).
Some retailers, like Currys, have created a notification that slides through the product showing how many people are viewing the items. The sliding notification grabs the buyer’s attention and creates the impression that you’re looking at a hot product.
Test out different ecommerce FOMO tactics and find the most effective one for your unique audience.
Call-to-action buttons are also known to affect conversions. Although “Add To Cart” is the most common option, experiment with other buttons as well. You can also play around with different CTA colors and placement.
Exit-intent pop-ups can also boost the performance of your product pages.
And, you don’t have to use these pop-ups to recommend other products or push your discounts. Sometimes a prospect is simply not ready to convert. In such a case, you’re better off capturing their email address. You can then put them through your lead nurturing email campaigns before pitching a sale later on.
No matter what your marketing budget, these tips can help you drive traffic and develop your audience. First, you need to come up with a dynamic social media marketing strategy. Next, seek guest posting opportunities and use them to boost your referral traffic and SEO.
Affiliate marketing is the other option. You can use the traditional affiliate networks, partner with influencers, or use a combination of both.
Then, optimize your email marketing campaigns. Consider using email autoresponders to make these campaigns more efficient.
Cross-selling and upselling campaigns are also critical. Be careful not to come off as “salesy” or pushy. Therefore, ensure your cross-sells and upsells make sense to the customer.
Finally, optimize your product pages for conversions.
Growth marketing is perhaps the best way of ensuring your ecommerce business succeeds over the long haul. So, why don’t you get started with the six tactics discussed above?
Written by
Sam is part of the marketing team at Mailshake. Sam’s goal is to inspire people to not just “hang in there” but to thrive. When Sam's not publishing or promoting new content you can find him playing sports and cooking up a storm in the kitchen.
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