Are you making these e-commerce marketing mistakes?
Are you stranded, stuck, not moving.
No sales, no leads it’s like your marketing efforts are falling on deaf ears.
But still, smart e-commerce marketers, are making a killing.
Ecommerce boom
Let the number speak
- U.S e-comm estimate to top $1T by 2022 an increase of $183B year-over-year.
- Pet Startup Chewy reported gaining 5M new customers in 2020.
- Consumers spent $121 online in the first month of 2021
- Shoppers spent $188.2B online during the 2020 holiday
- Nearly 150M people across the globe shopped online for the first time during the pandemic
- Nearly 1/3 of all US e-commerce sales in 2020 were on Amazon
Wham!
Despite the looming pandemic e-commerce is booming.
But where is your piece of cake in this?
It’s disturbing, isn’t it? You are trying hard to make your first sale while others are sipping yummy vanilla ice cream on the beach.
Celebrating their success.
So what’s the solution?
I’ve researched 7 e-commerce mistakes that are costing you and how to fix them.
Ready
let’s dive right in.
Shooting in the dark
Imagine shooting a target with blindfolds on.
It’s crazy hard right?
That’s what is happening to your content marketing if you don’t have a strategy.
You know that content marketing will save your business, but doing it the wrong way is more like shooting in the dark. You can either hit or miss the target nobody knows.
You are producing tons of content, distributing it all over, there is no consistency, no objective in short you don’t have a content strategy.
Fix it:
Invest in powerful persuasive copy that
- Describe customer pain points
- Avoids technical jargon
- Tells stories and connects with customers emotions
- Explains how product help customers
- Creates a sense of urgency
- Puts SEO best practices
Not using email marketing
Email marketing is a gem to e-commerce.
Email marketing accounts for approximately 23% of sales making it the most effective marketing channel.
Then if you are not collecting emails then you are missing out. And if you are already collecting emails how are you using email marketing to engage customers.
Fix it:
- Join an email service provider
- Launch a landing page to collect emails
- Use pop up to collect emails
- Write automated welcome emails to connect with your prospects
- Send regular informative emails
- Send sales emails with deals on both new and existing products
- Leverage abandoned cart email series
Ignoring current customers
A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.
The same we can say an existing customer is worth more than a prospect.
Do you know that it costs five times as much to attract new customers than keep an existing one?
Fix it:
- Thank loyal customers with special deals and discounts
- Create a VIP customer list and keep them engaged
- Keep customers informed on existing brand news
- Implement a loyalty program to entice them to have a buying habit
- Ask for feedback and do follow-ups
- Introduce affiliate programs to reward referrals from existing customers
Overlook mobile
Mobile devices are now an integral part of e-commerce.
79% of smartphone users have made purchases on their phones in the last 6 months
Customers are looking for convenience, they want to do their shopping while still attending to their busy work.
Many prefer to space sometime while going to work, on a train and do their shopping and all of this is done on mobile.
In short, if you overlook mobile devices in your messaging then you’re killing your business.
Fix it:
- Have a mobile responsive website
- Make links and button top priority
- Include a clear CTA
- Utilize visual content
- Simplify forms
Overlooking SEO
A word of caution:
No matter how good your words are
No matter how powerful your copy is
If you don’t satisfy the search intent readers will click the back button and never return.
They will see that your information missing what they are looking for. So keywords with search intent play a key role in attracting readers.
Fix it:
- Strong keyword research to find keywords customers are searching for.
- Improve site architecture based on keyword research
- Work on On-Page SEO
- Fix technical SEO to help the search engine crawl your site with ease
- Leverage on local SEO to drive organic traffic to your physical store
- Embrace content marketing to drive additional organic visitors
- Improve on Link building to improve website authority
- Measure SEO success with tools like Google Analytics and Ahrefs
Lukewarm customer support
Customers expect real-time responses from customer support.
Imagine customers filling a contact form on your website then get their response after 72 hours.
They will be frustrated and never buy from you again. right?
Fix it:
Implement an omnichannel customer support strategy on
- live chat
- Phone support
- Social media
Being ice-cold to customers
Many people forget to engage customers.
They care about sales and nothing more.
Mass marketing is the surefire way to lose customers. E-commerce marketing should be laser-focused on a specific target audience ensuring the message is relevant.
Customers are looking for engagement, they want someone who understands their language, addresses their pain points, and presents specific products as solutions.
Customers will buy from you if you keep the engagement live that is before and after-sale.
Fix it
- Examine on-site behavior, click-through- rate on ads, and social media engagement.
- Collect customer data and use it to create specific profiles
- Audit customer lifestyle behavior understand their, value, interests, problems, goals, and objectives
- Get to know where your customers hangout- Facebook groups and social channels
- Identify customer common questions and problems and work to solve them
- Talk to customers through surveys asking them their experience with your website
Wrapping Up
In a nutshell
7 mistakes e-commerce marketers make are:
- Shooting in the dark
- Not using email marketing
- Ignoring current customers
- Overlook mobile
- Overlook SEO
- Lukewarm customer support
- Being ice-cold to customers
What more? subscribe to our newsletter for e-commerce marketing tips.
Further Reading
- E-commerce Email Marketing For Beginners All You Need to Know
- 21 Tips to Get Your E-commerce Emails Opened, Read, and Clicked
- How to Write Ecommerce Emails That Converts
