How to Market an Ecommerce Store on a Budget

If you’re short on money, you may feel frustrated by the fact that you only have a limited budget available to market your ecommerce store.

However, having a limited budget can often be a gift in disguise, when it comes to marketing an ecommerce store or for any kind of marketing, for that matter.

That’s because a limited budget forces you to think creatively, ensuring that you get the most out of any money or time that you spend on your marketing.

Nevertheless, you’ll be happy to know that there are methods that can bring you success, even if you don’t have a lot of money to spend.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at how you can market an ecommerce store on a budget and get great results in the process.

You’ll learn why you don’t need to have a lot of money in order to achieve success and how you can maximize your results, so that they last a long time. We’ll also take a look at high ROI strategies that you can use, if you only have a small amount to spend.

By the end of this post, you’ll feel confident that you can market your ecommerce store, even if you’re strapped for cash.

Let’s begin!

Traffic is the key

First we need to cover something that you might have forgotten about – traffic is key.

Yes, I know that sounds obvious.  But, it’s important to look at this from a 30,000 foot view.

Your ultimate goal is drive sales.

But, when it comes to marketing on a budget, you should first think of driving traffic.

To refine your research and thinking, you first need to separate traffic from sales.

Once you think about things in terms of driving traffic and not sales, it frees you up to develop dozens of creative ideas as to how you can market your ecommerce store.

This is different from having a large budget for PPC campaigns.

If you’re running a PPC campaign, you have to think about sales right away, as each visitor costs money. Sales is your foremost goal – as traffic is already taken care of.

With low-budget marketing strategies, you need to figure out how to get attention first and later worry about optimizing for sales.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that sales is something that you should just forget about.

You should definitely do the bare minimum to ensure your ecommerce store is set up to convert, because you want sales to rack up, once you drive traffic.

But, you need traffic, if you want to optimize your store and figure out how to improve conversions.

In any case, when you think about things from an attention-capturing and traffic driving perspective, it’s easier to think outside the box, in terms of how you’re going to get people visiting your store on the cheap.

Content marketing on a budget

Content marketing, even when done on a budget, is something that can be incredibly powerful, when it comes to driving traffic.

After all, as I’ve shown in my $100,000 challenge, a blog can be used to drive a lot of sales on Amazon, if you do things the right way.

Doing content marketing on a budget isn’t that hard.  And, for the most part, budgeting just means that you’re going to have to spend a lot more time on your content marketing campaigns.

I’ve covered how you can do content marketing on a budget here.

To begin with, it helps to pick one content type, understand how to get the best results from it and then create a lot of high quality content in that one format.

Because you’re doing all of your content creation efforts on a budget, you’re likely going to be the person creating the content.

To make the best use of your time, it helps to focus your efforts.

So, decide now – are you more comfortable creating blog posts or videos?

Or, is there another type of content that you find yourself leaning towards, such as podcasts?

Once you’re sure on what type of content you’re going to create, you then have to create content that is engaging for your target audience.

When looking to create engaging content, there are two approaches that you can take.

If you want long-term content marketing success, it helps to create a catalog of evergreen, highly useful content, that covers issues that your target market cares about.

My advanced guides are an example of how this can be done. Such content will be a steady source of traffic and will build awareness, slowly but surely.

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In-depth blog posts/videos/podcasts are also an example of this, provided that you provide a lot of value in a single piece of content.

Home Depot, is a great example of how this can be done, if you’re using YouTube and video as your main means of content marketing.

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Their ‘How-to’ collection has racked up over 48 million views. If you take a look at these videos, you can see that they’re all in-depth views that teach people how to achieve a specific result.

Consider what market your ecommerce store serves and then go about creating useful, actionable content for that niche.

On the other hand, if you want some short-term content marketing success, then it can be a good idea to create some content that is unique, engaging and somewhat unusual.

Such content is a great way to spike awareness.

Examples might include case studies related to wild experiments that you have conducted in your business. It may also include weird, wonderful and even extreme uses of your product.

You could argue that my $100,000 challenge, in a way, is an example of this. Though such content is valuable, it is a different kind of content, when compared to my ultimate guides.

The GoPro videos of people skiing through death-defying routes could count as another example of content that can quickly raise awareness of a product.

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These videos aren’t designed to educate you, they’re designed to impress you and make you aware of what the product is capable of.

Even though such pieces of content can drive traffic for years to come, they’ll often produce a large spike of traffic to begin with.

It’s hard to say how you can create this kind of ‘short term content’ for your ecommerce store, specifically.

You’ll need to take a step back, to think about how you can be unique and interesting enough to draw attention.

Another kind of content marketing that you might also want to take a look at is ‘User Generated’ content.

If you already have some fans of your product, reach out to them and see if they’d be willing to create a video that will show them using your product and highlighting the benefits.

Again, GoPro is a master of this strategy.

If you visit their YouTube channel, you’ll see hundreds of videos that show people using their GoPros.

In fact, it’s estimated that there are 6,000 GoPro tagged videos uploaded to YouTube every day.

When doing any form of content marketing, it is also important that you master promotion.

Because you’re on a budget, you can’t use PPC advertising to drive traffic.

The topic of content promotion is a massive blog post, in and of itself. If you want tips on how to promote content effectively, you can read this guide.

In any case, one of the best ways to promote content on a budget is by emailing people who’ve shared content similar to yours in the past.

This will take a lot of time, but it can be a good way to get your content shared by people who have audiences similar to yours.

Build a community first

Another way that you can market your store on a budget is by placing a focus on building a community around your brand.

If you take the time to build a community of people, perhaps using a Facebook Group, over time, you’ll have easy access to a group of people who represent your target audience.

It’s worth noting that building a community is often easier when you combine community building with content marketing.

For example, you can use content to promote a Facebook Group.

You can then also keep people engaged in the Facebook Group, with the help of content marketing.

You could host live webinars, or ‘Facebook Live’ videos, to provide some kind of value for your audience.

You’re free to provide these videos as recordings, later on down the line.

For example, if I were in the business of selling bicycles, I might host some Facebook Live videos or webinar sessions, where I go through how to repair a bike or how to train for a bike event. I might even bring on some guests.

You can also provide value to this community, by making it a place where people can get quick answers to any questions that they might have.

Building a community doesn’t have to cost a lot of money.

As I mentioned above, content marketing can be done sufficiently on a budget. You only have to be willing to put in the time. The same goes for community building.

When done properly, influencer marketing can create disproportionately positive results, when compared to other marketing methods.

Note: Yes, it is going to cost money, in order to approach influencers. However, if done correctly, you’ll be able to get amazing results, even from a small spend.

Plus, it’s worth spending money on influencer marketing, because this form of marketing can also facilitate most other forms of marketing.

These may include word of mouth and brand-related searches, which also help to generate sales. This widespread effect is somewhat harder to replicate, when using the same budget on PPC advertising.

In any case, what’s the general concept of influencer marketing?

Your goal is to find people who share similar audiences to you.  Then, get them talking about your product.

There are multiple ways that you can get influencers to promote your offering.

But, to begin with, you need to find some influencers.

There are three types of influencers that you’ll want to get the attention of:

  • Bloggers
  • YouTubers
  • Instagram Users.

Finding bloggers is relatively easy, as you can simply type in a keyword that relates to your niche and then type in ‘blog,’ next to it.

So, for my example of cycling, I just use ‘cycling blog.’

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In some cases, you can pull up a list of the top blogs in your niche, by typing in ‘top 50,’ next to your keyword.

Here’s an example of how that would work, when trying to find a cycling blog.

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The process for finding YouTube influencers is very similar.

Just head over to YouTube and find people who are covering a topic related to your ecommerce store.

For my cycling business example, I would just go to YouTube and search for videos related to cycling.

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Note:  When it comes to finding YouTube influencers, it helps to think in terms of audiences, rather than niches.

For example, if I’m in the business of selling bikes, I don’t just approach people who review bikes or create videos around repairing bikes.

I also approach people who create videos that revolve around fitness. Or, I could approach YouTube channels dedicated to traveling, using only a bike.

When searching YouTube for content related to a certain niche, it can be a good idea to combine the word ‘Vlog’ with the keyword that relates to your niche.

Vlogs is a word that’s used to describe ‘video blogs.’

When you look for such content, you’ll often come across channels where there is typically a good connection between the audience and the host of the show.

Here’s what comes up, when I type ‘cycling vlog.’

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Note: What you’re looking for here is a YouTube channel that has a lot of engagement.

The YouTube channel with the most engagement is almost always going to provide better results than the YouTube channel that just has a lot of views, but little engagement.

High engagement channels are likely to have viewers who trust the host of the show more and, therefore, will be more receptive to products mentioned in the video.

A lot of the time, you can approximate the engagement levels for a YouTube video, by taking a look at its ‘Video statistics.’

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You can find this information by clicking on ‘More’ and then ‘Statistics.’

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If you notice that the video is driving a lot of Subscriptions and Shares, it’s often a sign that engagement is high.

Comments and ratings are, of course, other signs that engagement is high – especially if the majority of them are positive.

If you want to find Instagram influencers, the process is a little more tricky.

If you’re happy to trawl through a large list of Instagram accounts, then you can search for them using Google.

Use the search string ‘“inurl:Instagram.com “Your Keyword”.’

Here’s what came up, when I used that search string to find cycling related Instagram accounts.

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If you want to make it easier to find accounts that are probably open to deals, add ‘enquiries’ to your search string.

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You then need to go through these accounts and see if they’re a suitable match.  Do they have the right kind of audience?  Are they large enough to produce results?

This is something that you’ll need to test, but try to find accounts with a follower count above 40,000, for now.

Note: When it comes to obtaining the contact information of an influencer, you can use a tool like Mechanical Turk to help you.

If you want to make the process of finding Instagram influencers more ‘foolproof,’ then you can use a platform, such as Whalar.

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Using this platform, the process of finding an influencer that can generate results will be easier – but it could also be more expensive.

So…What do you do, once you find influencers that look like a good match?

Well, you have a number of options.

Note: Different influencers are going to have different rules, in terms of what they will allow. You should respect these rules, as they often help you out more than you realize.

If it looks like the influencer is making too much of an effort to commercialize their platform, engagement levels can often drop, which means less traffic and sales for you.

In any case, one approach is to sponsor a show/blog/Instagram account.

If you’re sponsoring a YouTube show, you can have the influencer add a small segment about you at the start and end of their show.

For a blog post, the influencer may be willing to put a mention at the start and end of their content, for the sponsorship period.

For an Instagram account, you might just ask that they put a link in their bio and occasionally post pictures, announcing your sponsorship.

You can sweeten the deal for an influencer, by providing a coupon code that they can give to their audience.

You might want to arrange an affiliate deal with the host, so that they get money on the back end, in relation to how many coupon codes were used– making it a better deal for both parties.

You also could provide the influencer with a giveaway that their fan base can take advantage of.

To increase the odds of ‘virality,’ you could mention that the person who shares the most, gets the most entries into the giveaway.

You can do this, using a tool known as Gleam.

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And, you could just email the influencer and ask them to review your product, in a non-pushy way.

Here’s an example of how that can be done.

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When you do this, make sure that you highlight why your product is a good match for their audience.

The influencers that you’re targeting are probably getting bombarded by messages, a lot of the time. You can separate yourself from the pack, by being respectful and writing out individual emails for each influencer.

Conclusion

Marketing an ecommerce store while on a budget, is definitely a challenging task.

However, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

If you think creatively, your results, while on a budget, can often be better than if you have a lot of money to spend.

Because you’re on a budget, it helps to separate traffic from sales.

When you take a step back and realize that your goal is to capture attention, you’re free to think  about where and how your audience is spending their time and how you can creatively get them to discover your store.

Of course, when your spending limit is so small, you need to be prepared to put in a lot of legwork, so that whatever you do try works out for the best.

In any case, think about how you can use what you’ve learned to help your ecommerce store reach new heights.

Post Credit: https://neilpatel.com/blog/how-to-market-an-ecommerce-store-on-a-budget/

6 Ecommerce Digital Marketing Tips for More Online Sales

The percentage of total retail sales attributed to ecommerce has been growing with each passing quarter for years. That healthy market is good news, but on the down side it points to increasing competition. For each individual ecommerce business, it can be harder (and more expensive!) to attract the right customers.

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Via the US Department of Commerce.

But there are plenty of levers to pull so you can get more out of your ecommerce digital marketing campaigns. And now is the time to get started, with the busy holiday season just around the corner.

Here are six simple and effective ways to start driving more online sales across your ecommerce funnel.

1. Reach in-market shoppers with Google Shopping ads …

Google Shopping campaigns are a no-brainer for any ecommerce company. With a Shopping campaign, you can prominently advertise your products at the top of the Google search results at the exact moment people are looking to buy the kinds of products you sell. Your Shopping ads can include product images, price points, ratings, offers, and other key info that makes it easy for customers to “add to cart.”

Once you’ve uploaded a product data feed—a master spreadsheet that describes key attributes of your products—to Google Merchant Center and connected your Merchant Center account to your Google Ads account, Google will automatically generate ads for your products whenever a user searches a relevant query.

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To learn more, you can check out our guide to Google Shopping campaign structures as well as our guide to product data feeds. In the meantime, all you need to know is that launching a Google Shopping campaign is a fantastic way to drive a lot of relevant traffic to your site—fast.

2. … and remarket to them with display ads!

According to our Google Shopping benchmarks report, the average Google Shopping conversion rate is a little under 2%. In other words, about 2% of all clicks on Google Shopping ads convert into purchases. Does that mean Shopping campaigns are a waste of time? Nope. Even if it doesn’t immediately lead to a sale, a click represents a valuable interaction between your business and your prospect.

Here’s what the 2% conversion rate does mean: You might have to do some additional work if you want to bring those shoppers back to your ecommerce site. That’s where remarketing comes in.

Remarketing increases your ecommerce conversion rate because it reels on-the-fence shoppers back in. You can remind them about that pair of shoes they were eyeing last week. Maybe now they’re ready to buy!

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You can even use remarketing campaigns to target people who found you through Google the next time they’re on Facebook! For more help with ecommerce remarketing, check out these remarketing tips plus display ad design tips from our awesome in-house designer, Kate Lindsay.

3. Turn likes into sales with Shopping on Instagram

For years, the conventional wisdom has been that search marketing is for driving sales and social marketing is for building brand awareness. Though search (including Google Shopping) is certainly a good way to convert low-funnel prospects, and though social is most definitely a good way to reach new audiences, this absolute distinction between the two channels is becoming less and less valid every year.

Why? Three words: Shopping on Instagram.

Once you’ve set up a business profile on Instagram and uploaded a product catalog to Facebook (Instagram’s parent company), you’re eligible to tag your products in your organic feed and Stories posts. All of a sudden, the users who see your organic content no longer need to navigate to your website if they want to make a purchase; instead, they can simply click on the product they’re interested in and follow the link to the corresponding page on your website.

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Basically, what makes social shopping such a strong ecommerce marketing tactic is the elimination of friction. By enabling your followers to effortlessly make purchases, Instagram has effectively brought the power of search to social media.

For more ecommerce help in the social media realm, check out 4 Facebook Ecommerce Tips to Boost Sales.

4. Instill trust with customer reviews

So—you’ve started using Shopping on Instagram. Things are going well in the sense that it’s driving a substantial amount of traffic to your product pages, but things are also going poorly in the sense that those pageviews aren’t converting into sales at a terribly high rate. Is there an ecommerce marketing tactic you can use to boost your conversion rate?

Yup: customer reviews. Limited discretionary income makes consumers cautious about spending their money, and few things are more reassuring (read: persuasive) than a glowing review from someone who’s already bought one or more of your products. Throwing ratings and reviews on your product pages is a time-tested, straightforward way to turn more site visitors into customers.

ecommerce product page with reviews

 

5. Up your cross-selling game with pop-ups

Another way to boost your ecommerce digital marketing strategy is with pop-ups: the windows that temporarily take over site visitors’ screens to present them with additional offers. You can use pop-ups to entice a prospective shopper with a discount offer or to add another product to his or her shopping cart.

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I know, I know. Pop-ups have a bad reputation—but there’s a reason they’re so pervasive. They work! Especially when used to present people with legitimately relevant offers—a limited-time discount, a BOGO sale. Use them correctly and they can drive a ton of additional revenue for your business.

6. Win new customers with referral marketing

One last ecommerce marketing tip: Use the power of referral marketing to turn the enthusiasm of your most loyal customers into a steady stream of new business.

For those who may not know, referral marketing is the practice of incentivizing your customers to tell others about how much they love your business. The idea, of course, is that your prospects are far more likely to trust their friends and family than they are to trust your advertisements. Tactically, it’s pretty similar to curating customer testimonials; the key difference is that it’s more direct. Generally, your prospects trust their loved ones more than they trust random people on the internet.

Here’s a real-world example to get the wheels turning. Before their official launch, women’s athleisure wear company Girlfriend Collective decided to give away free pairs of their high-end, eco-friendly leggings. Because this offer was so irresistible—and because it only lasted for a short period of time—Girlfriend Collective generated a ton of buzz within their target market. All of a sudden, everyone and their mother wanted a pair of their leggings—and they hadn’t even officially launched the company yet! You better believe that plenty of these initial customers came back for more once Girlfriend Collective started charging for their products.

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Critical Pass—an exam preparation company that sells flashcards to help law school students get ready for the bar—provides another great example of the power of referral marketing. To incentivize their happy customers to spread the word to their friends, Critical Pass offered $10 to anyone who passed along a referral link that ended up generating a sale. Because the price of their flashcard set is well above $10, this tactic proved extremely profitable for the company!

Get your ecommerce marketing strategy off the ground!

No ecommerce business can succeed in an increasingly crowded landscape without a thoughtful, full-funnel marketing strategy. If you want to keep the sales coming, you’ve got to start brainstorming now. With a handful of tactics to try at each stage of the marketing funnel, you’ll be in great shape. Get to it!

Post Credit: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2019/09/05/ecommerce-digital-marketing

10 Ways To Market Your Ecommerce Site

There’s a well-known moral exemplified in the tortoise and the hare fable – “slow and steady wins the race.” The same is true in ecommerce marketing.

Customers aren’t always easy to engage — the average cart abandonment rate is 69.2%. It takes persistence and a variety of marketing strategies to reach your audience and increase sales. The alternative of slamming customers with aggressive marketing at once overwhelms buyers or, even worse, irritates them. Instead, effective marketing boils down to reaching audiences repeatedly over time to build familiarity and eventually encourage purchases.

Any merchant can promote their store without an expensive agency. The 10 marketing techniques in this article are easy to do yourself on any budget, regardless of whether you’re a small or large business.

Sellers who implement these tactics will have a diverse marketing strategy— one that enables long-term connections with returning customers and offers opportunities to engage and attract new buyers.

1) Spread the word on social media

Social media marketing is all about consistency — posting regularly at times that fit with your customers’ schedules allows you to frequently reach and engage buyers.

Don’t spread yourself thin by using all social media platforms. Instead, focus on the channels that their buyers are actually using. You can track which platforms their buyers are using the most with data-driven tools, like Google Analytics.

Pick your customers’ favorite social media platforms, and share industry-related news and trends to keep your accounts informative and useful to buyers.


The tea shop Harney & Sons used their Facebook account to share an upcoming industry event.

You should also share links to your website and products, but don’t overload customers with direct ads. Too much self-promotion makes your social media account less valuable and helpful to buyers. A recommended ratio is 80/20 – 80% topical industry news and 20% plugging your site and products.

You can post regularly on social media without needing to constantly monitor your accounts by using a social media management platform, like Buffer. This software allows you to schedule posts ahead of time and track your posts’ performance from one central hub.

2) Utilize PPC advertising

PPC stands for pay-per-click, a type of marketing where companies pay for every click that their ad receives. PPC advertising enables you to measure whether campaigns are cost-effective by comparing the ad costs to the amount of traffic and sales generated by the ad.

The most common type of PPC is search engine advertising, with Google AdWords being the most popular PPC software. AdWords enables you to create ads that appear on Google’s search engine and place your ads through an auction process. You bid on a keyword, and ads are chosen based on bid amounts and the ad’s quality score. Link your Analytics and AdWords accounts to measure customers’ activity after they click on a Google ad. This post by AdEspresso explains how to do just that.

Social media advertising also utilizes PPC models. Ads will appear on a user’s feed or timeline, depending on the platform, and you pay by CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per thousand impressions). Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and even Snapchat are all examples of social media channels that utilize this paid advertising model.

With PPC, you have to commit to testing and improving your campaigns on an on-going basis. When you regularly check these paid campaigns, you ensure that your click money is being spent wisely to generate greater traffic and sales.

3) Form strategic partnerships


Generate buzz around your store by networking with major players in your industry. Contact blogs to see if they’d be happy to review your products or website in a post. By having your website featured in a post on a popular site, you can drive thousands of targeted visitors to your ecommerce site.

You should also reach out to and connect with social media influencers in their industry who can post and share content about your store. Once you’ve identified social media accounts that have large amounts of followers and are affiliated with your industry, begin engaging with them on a regular basis:

  • Like their Facebook profiles and Pages.
  • Retweet, like, or reply to major influencers’ tweets, especially if they are about your store. Comment and thank influencers who retweet your posts.

  • Search the people who use your hashtags on Instagram to see if any major influencers have used these keywords, and follow any influencers you find.

Interacting and connecting with major players in your industry frequently builds awareness around your brand and products so they can help spread the word about your store. If you aren’t sure where to start your networking, try marketing software, like Group High. It connects users with bloggers and influencers and reports on the performance of your shared content.

4) Launch podcast ads

Marketing doesn’t always need to be visual. Podcast ads are a great way to reach your targeted audiences since shows are typically geared towards specific groups. Many online stores, such as Dollar Shave Club and Blue Apron, have used podcast ads to reach and engage buyers.

Reach out to podcasts related to your industry to discuss fees and explain your brand’s value. Their messaging about your online store will benefit from a solid understanding of why your products are useful and worth buying. If you’re unfamiliar with podcasts, check out Midroll, a network that pairs companies and brands with podcasts for advertising.

Consider the content of your message when picking your podcast time ad placement. A shorter pre-roll or post-roll spot at the beginning or end of a podcast is ideal if your ad only requires a few lines. For a more lengthy message, opt for a longer mid-roll ad in the middle of the podcasts when listeners are more engaged and settled in. Mid-roll ads usually cost slightly more than pre- or post-roll ads.

5) Go multichannel to attract more buyers

Expand the reach of your brand by selling on multiple channels, like Amazon, eBay, or even niche venues like Etsy. Our research indicates that merchants who sell on 3 or more channels sell 144% more.

Because marketplaces tend to gain higher amounts of traffic than a single online store, selling on multiple venues increases the visibility of your online store and brand. Each channel has a unique set of site visitors who may not have otherwise have encountered your online store. You can reach these potential buyers by spreading your products and brand across multiple channels.

After exposing these customers to your products through marketplaces, these buyers are set up to develop brand loyalty and explore your products more on your online store.

Going multichannel does present a logistical issue — how do you spread out your inventory efficiently to avoid overselling and delivery issues? You can easily solve inventory management issues with the assistance of a program, like Sellbrite. Our software serves as a central spot for controlling your listings and shipping across all channels so you can fulfill orders from a single interface.

6) Have an SEO strategy

The disadvantage of selling from an online store is having less traffic than major marketplaces, like Amazon and eBay. You have to optimize your online store to receive more visits by incorporating SEO keywords into your product listing titles and descriptions. You can drive more traffic and boost sales to your online store by including frequently-searched terms and phrases into your site.

Identify SEO keywords by using an outside tool, such as Ahrefs, Amazon, or Google. Check out this guide for using these tools to select keywords.

Once optimal keywords are identified and included in product descriptions and titles, you can measure the success of your SEO strategy with Google Analytics. With this tool, you can view the Channels report of the Acquisition section to see which organic search keywords are leading to increased traffic and greater sales.

7) Create a blog

You don’t need to be a crafter or foodie to engage in content marketing. Companies across all industries have launched blogs to provide their buyers with valuable content and build trust in their brand. Promotion via blogging is ongoing as content can be posted and shared on social media and drive traffic through search engines.

Not sure what to write about? Gather the questions buyers frequently ask your customer service team. Generate posts that provide answers to these issues so that buyers can continually return to them when they face future problems.

When brainstorming article ideas, also consider the lifestyle of your typical buyers. How do they engage with your product on a day-to-day basis? Write an article that offers tips or a tutorial about how they can integrate your items into their life in different, useful ways that they haven’t considered. For example, the plant-based protein powder company Vega posted a blog on 10 protein snacks for their health-conscious customers.

Adding visualizations, like charts and videos, to your blog is an easy way to make your content clearer and more exciting for your audiences. Consider using diagramming software, like Gliffy, to create flow charts, Venn diagrams, and other visualizations.

Posting blog articles regularly and promoting the content on social media enables you to generate buzz around your product, drive traffic to your online store, and boost sales.

8) Use email promotions

Email marketing is an easy way to target buyers with promotions that are catered to their specific needs. Customers are mainly interested in how your product can benefit them, so they are more likely to engage with discounts and offers that serve their wants.

For example, store visitors who viewed products but never made a purchase would benefit from an email discount for first-time buyers.

Loyal, returning customers can’t use a first-time buyer offer but might enjoy an email reminder about your store’s large semi-annual sale, since they’re already a fan of your brand.

Buyers’ emails are often collected on online stores through pop-up promotion windows (“send your email for a 20% discount”) or at checkout when buyers are asked if they’d like to receive email promotions. Segment collected emails by purchasing activity, location, and any other relevant messaging that informs email promotion content. You can also utilize tools like Campaign Monitor to track buyers’ interactions with emails and determine which campaigns led to increased store traffic.

9) Encourage product reviews

Reviews are a critical way of building trust around your online store and products. Online buyers can’t see merchants or their items in-person, so they make purchasing decisions through the phenomenon of social proof — determining what is correct behavior by looking to others. Store visitors read the product reviews of past customers and use the feedback to decide whether they should buy your product.

Product reviews sway customers when:

  • there are plenty of them
  • they are mainly positive (4 to 5 stars, on average)

Encourage customers to leave more reviews by encouraging feedback in an email. A few days after the buyer receives the item, send an email to politely request feedback on their shopping experience. You can even incentivize reviews by offering a discount or entry into a contest in exchange for feedback.


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You can also use tools like Yotpo that help businesses collect more reviews from buyers.

Encourage positive feedback by constantly reading your buyers’ reviews and resolving any issues that customers mention in their feedback. Once you resolve buyers’ problems, you can ask the buyer to comment underneath their review to indicate that the problem was resolved. If your store is enabled for feedback removal, you can also request to remove the review. Removing or editing negative reviews will show future store visitors that you care about your customers’ happiness with your products and build trust to encourage purchases.

10) Retarget your ads

How do you win back the store visitor who doesn’t make a purchase? Retargeting is the answer. This method places a cookie from your site on visitors’ computers. When they go to another site later, the cookie enables ads to show up for your products. The appearance of your ads on other sites keeps your products visible and accessible to buyers who need that extra push to make a purchase.

Ad retargeting is most effective when it is geared towards specific customer wants. For example, a retargeted ad might show the product that an individual customer was looking at, rather than show a general picture of the brand. Retargeted ads also perform well when they include a promotion and have a clear call-to-action.

Use a retargeting platform, like AdRoll, to place cookies in store visitors’ browsers, show ads on other sites that they go to, and track the performance of their campaigns. You can also use retargeting tools that are included in paid advertising services. For example, Google AdWords users can set up remarketing campaigns through the AdWords software.

Slow and steady wins the race

With ecommerce growing and competition amongst sellers peaking, putting effort into your online store marketing is more important than ever. With that said, implementing this guide’s strategies takes time. The tactics cover different channels that all need to be routinely checked, and results won’t come instantaneously.

However, spreading your effort over different strategies is the key to long-term marketing. Using a diverse set of tactics increases your chances of marketing success — if one fails, you have other strategies to rely on as you improve your efforts in other venues. Being willing to use multiple tactics and improve your methods as needed enables you as a seller to reach more buyers and drive more sales through your campaigns.

Everything You Need to Know About Ecommerce Marketing

With nearly every marketing operation now taking place online, it can be tough to distinguish between the various types of digital marketing people use today.

For example, take ecommerce marketing — what is it and how does it compare to practices like social media, content, search engine, and email marketing?

Ecommerce marketing and digital marketing are not mutually exclusive. Ecommerce websites can use all of the above digital channels to promote a product and grow their business.

This ecommerce marketing guide will explore all of the digital media available today.

Download Now: Ecommerce Marketing Plan Template

  1. What is Ecommerce Marketing?
  2. Ecommerce Advertising
  3. Types of Ecommerce Marketing
  4. Ecommerce Marketing Tips
  5. Ecommerce Marketing Strategy

Ecommerce marketers can use social media, digital content, search engines, and email campaigns to attract visitors and facilitate purchases online.

Before we dive into more detail about what ecommerce marketing is and how to implement a strategy of your own, let’s review the definition of ecommerce advertising and advertising’s parity with marketing for an ecommerce business.

Ecommerce Advertising

In similar fashion to the way advertising falls beneath the umbrella of marketing, ecommerce advertising falls beneath ecommerce marketing — and when used in tandem, you have the ability to more effectively reach your audience members to boost conversions and improve brand awareness.

As mentioned in our definition above, ecommerce marketing is about driving awareness and action towards your product or service.

Meanwhile, ecommerce advertising includes the methods through which you actually promote your product. In terms of online or ecommerce marketing and selling, these ads may come in the form of display ads, banner ads, or rich media ads.

The main takeaway here is that ecommerce advertising is a highly-effective method to implement while developing your ecommerce marketing strategy to focus your product or service promotion.

Now, let’s get back to our in-depth discussion about ecommerce marketing.

Types of Ecommerce Marketing

To give you a sense of what an ecommerce marketing strategy looks like, here are some common marketing channels and how you’d use them to build an online store.

Social Media Marketing

Brands, publishers, contractors, and growing businesses all launch pages on today’s most popular social networks to connect with their audience and post content that the audience is interested in.

As an ecommerce marketer, you can do the same thing, but the campaigns you run might look a bit different, and not every social network is a good fit for your needs.

Ecommerce websites are highly visual — you have to show off the product, after all — so your success on social media depends on your use of imagery to drive attention and traffic to your product pages.

Instagram is an appropriate platform for ecommerce businesses because it enables you to post sharp product photography and expand your product’s reach beyond its purchase page.

You can take your social media posts a step further by creating shoppable content, which is content that enables visitors to buy right away. That can include anything from strategically placed display ads within a social feed to additional tags that take users directly to a shopping cart. These methods help you eliminate friction from the buying process.

create shoppable content ecommerce

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An ecommerce business is no stranger to product reviews, either. Using a Facebook Business Page to share product praise is a perfect fit for businesses that already solicit customer reviews across their online store. We’ll dive deeper into product reviews below.

Content Marketing

When you hear “content marketing” you might think of blogging and video marketing — content that is meant to improve your website’s ranking in search engines and answer questions related to your industry. But if you’re selling a product online, do you really need articles and videos to generate transactions? You sure do.

Here are some ways to use content to market your ecommerce store.

Optimize your product page copy.

Optimize your product pages for short, product-driven keywords that include the name of the product. If you sell wedding dresses, for example, a Google search for “brown bridesmaid dress” is more likely to produce product pages like yours if you’ve included that term on the page.

Also, make sure that your page titles, headers, and image alt text focus on the right keywords so search engines know to return your ecommerce store for the right query.

optimize your ecommerce product page

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Write relevant blog posts.

If you manage an online wedding dress store, writing blog posts about “how to plan a wedding” can attract everyone involved in wedding preparations no matter where they are in the planning process.

As visitors become more engaged, you can create posts that will move them into consideration, like “how to select the right wedding dress”, and turn them into leads, like a downloadable “wedding planning checklist”.

Create guest posts for external websites.

Guest posts can get you and your products in front of relevant audiences (oftentimes for free). Submitting guests posts will also help you get more domain authority for your ecommerce site, thereby telling search engines that you have a reliable site.

You’ll need to search for sites that rank for keywords related to your product. Sometimes you won’t even need to create an entire post. If a site already has a relatable post, offer to expand on it by providing additional context, like a video or infographic with a link to your site.

Put product-related videos on YouTube.

YouTube has over a billion active users … chances are your target audience is somewhere in there. It’s also the second-largest search engine behind Google. If you’re looking for a massive, captive audience, YouTube is where you’ll find it. Use highly searched keyword terms to determine your topics, then share videos that are related to your product and helpful to your audience.

This is also a great option for tutorial videos that show current customers how to use your product — these videos can show people how best to use your product, increasing customer satisfaction and building long-term relationships with website visitors.

Include a keyword-driven FAQ section on your website.

If your audience is asking questions related to your product, then you need to be the one to answer them. Create an FAQ page on your website with responses to high volume, long-tail keyword searches to get users to your site. You’ll be building both authority and traffic — two crucial components of a successful ecommerce store.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and paid advertising. While SEO relies on your knowledge of Google’s ranking algorithm to optimize content, SEM can involve pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, display campaigns, or product-specific ad campaigns (think Google Shopping), which allow you to pay for top spots on search engine results pages.

On Google, PPC campaigns guarantee that potential buyers will see a link to your page when they enter search terms that match the terms of your campaign. But because you’re paying Google each time a person clicks on your result, the payoff to you should be high.

This is why ecommerce marketers often register with Google AdWords and promote their product pages through PPC campaigns. The campaign puts searchers right in front of the business’s product when they click on a paid result, increasing the likelihood that the searcher will make a purchase before leaving the business’s website.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, and believe it or not, it holds specific value in the world of ecommerce marketing.

The best part about email marketing is it can be automated. Automation means that you can set up a successful drip campaign to subscribers that are segmented by interest or stage in the buyer’s journey and  let your email campaign do its magic. It’s one less marketing tactic that you need to worry about on your long list of tasks.

Even so, it’s imperative that you’re meticulous about your email list so you maintain trust among your leads. In a time when data privacy runs high on an internet user’s priority list, not every commercial email is welcome in that user’s inbox. Ecommerce marketers need to be careful when and how they add website visitors to their mailing list.

Here are two ways an ecommerce marketer might use email marketing.

1. Post-Purchase Follow Up

If a user has already purchased a product from your website — and agreed to receive emails from you during the checkout process — sending a follow-up email a few days after the product is delivered keeps the conversation going and gauges their future interest in your product line.

A post-purchase follow up also shows that you care about them beyond a sale and that your company has an interest in their success using your product. It gives you an opportunity to get feedback on their purchase experience, which, in turn, helps you reduce friction for future customers.

Some best practices for this type of email are to ask them to write a review of your product and/or read original content on how to use your product (those YouTube videos you created would be perfect here).

2. The Abandoned Shopping Cart

Users abandon their shopping carts for a number of reasons, and emails to diagnose the problem and retain their business can make the difference between a purchase and a lost customer. We’ll cover ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment below.

If a website visitor fails to complete a transaction while they’re in your shopping cart, consider sending a polite email to remind them to complete the checkout process, offer assistance, or recommend other related products to get their mind back on you and their browser back to your ecommerce store.

Learn more about why users are abandoning your shopping cart and how to fix it.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing focuses on people or brands that influence your target market. The term is commonly used to denote Instagram accounts with several thousand followers, but it could also mean a celebrity or community that your target audience follows or belongs to.

Influencers build communities of people that know, like, and trust them. It is, therefore, easy for them to garner attention around your online product through a recommendation, or “sponsored post.”

Affiliate Marketing

81% of brands employ affiliate marketing, and ecommerce sites are particularly good candidates. Affiliates are people or businesses that help sell your product online for a commission.

Unlike most social media influencers, affiliates generate interest in products via old fashioned (yet effective) marketing tactics. They often use paid advertising, content marketing, and other means to drive traffic to your their pages on your product — it’s like having a team market for you.

Local Marketing

This is an often-overlooked tactic for ecommerce businesses, but local marketing allows you to double down on the areas where most of your prospects are (if you have a large population of them in one area) and allows you to offer incentives to your potential customer base.

Here’s how: use tracking cookies to determine where your prospects are located. Then, offer discounted (or free) shipping to potential customers in the areas where you have warehouses or shipping facilities. The incentive might be just what you need to gain a new customer.

There are countless ecommerce marketing tactics that you can employ to drive visitors to your online store beyond the traditional methods that we reviewed above. Let’s get into some more creative ways you can market your ecommerce business.

1. Use personalization.

Companies that use personalization are seeing revenue increases ranging from 6-10%. What is this magic bullet?

Personalization is finding ways to cater to individuals within the marketing materials that you already have; it is tailoring your outputs to reflect the unique needs of your consumer.

This can come in the form of a prospect’s name in the subject line of an email, recommended content or products based on a visitor’s behavior, or even showing smart content on a webpage when a user visits for a second time or has moved along their buyer’s journey.

Personalization can move people along their buyer’s journey faster — instead of searching for what they need, you put it right in front of them, making it easy for them to take your desired action, that is, make a purchase.

2. Capitalize on user-generated content (UGC).

What if you could have your customers market for you for free? That’s exactly what user-generated content, or UGC, is. It’s about finding ways for your customers to promote and share your business.

This helps in a couple ways: 1) It drives traffic to your ecommerce store, and 2) it builds an authentic following of people who are interested in what you offer.

Coca-Cola® did an amazing job of this with their “Share a Coke” campaign by creating customized Coke® bottles with people’s names, which naturally was shared across social media platforms.

example of ecommerce marketing ugc campaign by coke

Here are some effective ways to drive UGC:

  • Competitions, where customers enter to win by displaying your product in some way
  • Review platforms, where customers share feedback about your product
  • Social media hashtags, where users submit content using a branded hashtag

3. Build a loyalty program.

A loyal customer is a long-term customer, and who doesn’t want repeat business? A loyalty program provides an incentive for a customer to continue doing business with you through relevant offers and discounts. While building a customer loyalty program takes some planning and work, it pays off in repeat business, UGC, referrals, and retention.

There are a couple of things to consider as an ecommerce business when building out a loyalty program. For one, consider diversifying the ways in which customers can show loyalty, whether it be through repeat purchases, mentions on social media, or sharing your content. Also, think about how you will pay off their loyalty, be it through points, discount codes, or exclusive perks.

Generate Word-of-Mouth Marketing (WOMM)

Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools out here. It’s based on the premise that people want advice from others like them. As buyers becoming more skeptical of marketing tactics from companies, the need for word-of-mouth marketing in your business becomes more apparent.

While you can make this to happen organically by providing a great customer experience, you can also encourage, and even create, forms of WOMM that are equally as effective.

Reviews

Remember how I just said that prospects trust companies less and less? Well, customer reviews help mitigate that mistrust because they come from people who are not invested in the success of your company — instead, they’re an authentic and oftentimes brutally honest review of your product and how it worked out for them.

Reviews serve as marketing tools for you because they include mentions of your product and oftentimes they do the selling for you … people think, “If it worked for them, it might work for me, too.” Encourage your customers to leave reviews however you can, and that post-purchase email we talked about above might be a good start.

Referral Marketing

When customers solicit their friends, family members, and co-workers to buy from you, that is a referral. Sure, this may happen naturally if they really enjoy your product, but you can ensure that it happens more frequently through a referral program.

Simply ask your customers to refer others in exchange for something of value (e.g. discount, money, free gift) that you can offer to either your new customer, your existing customer, or both. Dropbox does a good job of this — they offer additional cloud storage space when you refer a friend to sign up.

ecommerce marketing referral exampleSource

Testimonials

You can use customer testimonials to get the word out about how great your product is. Testimonials are essentially tailored reviews because you typically produce them from interviews where you can ask specific questions that get to the points you want to address and share with prospects.

Being that you have an ecommerce store, some topics you might want to focus on for your testimonial interviews would be ease of the buying process, the level of customer support, and frictionless delivery and setup methods.

Case Studies

Case studies allow you to promote customers’ successes in a way that pushes prospects over the edge. They are meant to relate to your buyer persona, so you should interview customers that most closely represent your target audience. Case study best practice is to show a customer’s life before your product and how it has drastically improved since.

4. Invest in live chat.

Chatbots — you’ve heard about them, right? Well, they’re one of two ways to employ a live chat strategy. Depending on your business size, you can have a live person available to chat with potential customers who visit your store.

Whether you decide to go the bot or human route, live chat will prove especially effective while people are browsing your store so they can get answers right away and when they’re in the checkout process to mitigate any objections just before buying.

5. Cater to the shopping cart.

We discussed the reasons why people abandon their shopping cart above, and a lot of it has to do with trust in your business, in the product, or in the delivery system. You want to give customers every reason to want to buy from you without hesitation by confronting their objections head on.

Some ways to mitigate shopping cart abandonment are:

  • Money-back guarantees
  • A clear and simple return policy
  • Superior delivery options
  • Immediate access to customer support

If you’re using WooCommerce to run your online shop, take a look at HubSpot for WooCommerce to add abandoned cart sequences into your marketing program.

6. Implement a responsive website design.

No matter which aspect of your ecommerce strategy you’re working on, it should include a responsive design. Your ecommerce marketing tactics will be viewable and easily maneuverable via any device (e.g. laptop, smartphone, iPad or tablet).

Meaning, in a world where people are always on-the-go and visiting websites and viewing ecommerce marketing materials via a variety of devices from an array of locations, your content will be easy to read and simple to navigate for all users. (Check out this post for some examples of successful responsive web design.)

Ecommerce Marketing Strategy

Now that you know the ins and outs of ecommerce marketing, let’s put it all together and review some tips for building a successful marketing plan for your online store.

Set goals based on industry benchmarks.

Depending on your industry, location, business size, and a multitude of other factors, there are some standards you can use to measure your goals against — those standards are industry benchmarks.

Consider goals like website visits, click-through rates, conversion rates, and customer acquisition cost and compare those to other ecommerce business in your field.

Break down your strategy into small tactics.

When building out a marketing plan for your online store, there are several paths you could follow — we listed many of them above. It can be tempting to chase after every single one, but that’s a sure way to not be effective at any of them.

We recommend that you focus on a couple key strategies first that you believe will have the most ROI — and are the most accessible to you — and create action items for each.

For example, say you decided that you wanted to focus on a paid strategy to drive users to your store. A few of your action items would be: set up a Google Ads account, determine your ad spend, create an ad group based on your target keywords, and monitor your account daily.

This may sound oversimplified — that’s because it should be. You don’t want to get lost in chasing the next “great ecommerce strategy” without executing on one thoroughly and allowing it to work for you.

Delight your new and long-term customers.

Marketing doesn’t stop after a sale is made. Once someone becomes your customer, you should continue to engage, nurture, and delight them.

This way, you’ll support your customers’ long-term success which, in turn, will boost loyalty. It’ll also make your customers want to share their positive experiences with your leads and target audience members through cause studies, reviews, testimonials, and word-of-mouth.

Ready, Set, Sell

Ecommerce businesses have several marketing tools at their disposal. Using digital and inbound marketing just the right way, you can create campaigns that are designed to help your online store attract customers and grow better.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in February, 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Post Credit:https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/ecommerce-marketing 

Ecommerce Marketing Essentials: 17 Actionable Tactics to Drive More Sales

Every online store wants to increase traffic and conversions. But even after you’ve put together a basic strategy it can still be challenging to decide on which marketing tactics you should try.

That’s why we put together an overview of effective marketing tactics and ecommerce tools along with ideas to help you implement each approach. The ideas themselves run the gamut from straightforward acquisition to generating more repeat purchases from the customer base you already have.

Try to implement one of these ideas every day for the next few weeks. On the last day of your sprint, take stock and figure out which tactics worked best to drive new sales.

What is ecommerce marketing?

Ecommerce marketing is the practice of using promotional tactics to drive traffic to your online store, converting that traffic into paying customers, and retaining those customers post-purchase.

A holistic ecommerce marketing strategy is made up of marketing tactics both on and off your website. A sound marketing strategy can help you build brand awareness, drive customer loyalty, and ultimately increase online sales.

You can use ecommerce marketing to promote your online store as a whole or to drive more sales for specific products. Below is an overview of a few practical ideas to try.

17 ecommerce marketing ideas to increase online sales

1. Upsell your products

Most of us have heard some variation of the famous, “Would you like to supersize your order?” It’s an example of upselling, or the approach of selling a slightly more premium product than the one the customer was originally considering.

For many businesses, upselling can be more effective than acquiring a net new customer. Sometimes your customers don’t know that a premium product is available, or they may simply need more evidence to understand how an upgrade (or package) is a better fit for their needs.

For example, is one of your product models made of slightly better leather? Or does one carry a special component that’s handmade? Make sure to emphasize the difference and ask, in the right places, if the customer might want to upgrade.

There are two main considerations when using upselling to increase sales:

  1. Make sure your upsells are related to the original product
  2. Be sensitive to the anticipated price range of your customers

Your product has to fit the customer’s original needs, and they may not be enthusiastic about a higher price point once they have an anchor price in mind. An anchor price is often the first number a customer sees, and it’s the number against which they compare other price points. The new product must be a discernibly better fit than the original for it to be worth the additional cost.

Anyone who’s ever purchased a computer is familiar with the screen below. Once you’ve selected a particular model, companies will usually highlight upgrades for performance (upselling) or additional accessories (cross-selling) for you to consider.

Upselling.

2. Integrate Instagram

With over 500 million daily active users, Instagram is one of the fastest growing social apps around, connecting consumers, influencers, and brands.

If you take compelling photos, use hashtags strategically, and post at the right times then you’re well on your way to building a large Instagram following of people who are interested in your products. The key to mastering your organic Instagram presence is engagement with your followers.

What are some ways to engage with your audience on Instagram? You may try running contests or going behind the scenes to showcase your product development process. You can also pay to play on Instagram. For ecommerce marketing, adding products to your Instagram posts and stories gives your followers a direct path to purchase, which is key for increasing your online sales.

Check out this example from GoPro to see shopping on Instagram in action:

Shoppable Posts

3. Reduce abandoned carts

Harsh truth: You’re losing money every time a visitor abandons their cart without purchasing.

This phenomenon is well-studied. Visitors add items to their carts, but abandon their carts during the checkout process. According to the Baymard Institute, 69.23% of shopping carts are abandoned.

Abandoned carts.

It’s worth directly addressing as many hesitations as you can because some shoppers who abandoned their carts could have been reminded to complete their purchase. Perhaps they could have been persuaded with a discount or free shipping, for example.

One simple and effective ecommerce marketing idea to reduce the frequency of abandoned carts is an email recovery campaign, which can convince your visitors to make a return visit and complete their original purchase.

The folks at LUSH use quirky subject lines and emails with additional product suggestions to try to get customers to return to their carts.

Email recovery.

Craft an email that entices your visitors to return to their carts by reminding them of what they considered purchasing in the first place, and why.

4. Launch a Facebook store

Although Facebook has undergone a number of changes, it remains a viable platform for social media and ecommerce marketing.

It’s fairly straightforward to start making sales through your Facebook store. Better yet, your Facebook store can integrate directly with your Shopify store so you don’t have to keep a separate inventory.

For inspiration, have a look at the Facebook store for Fiercely by Valery Brennan.

Facebook store.

5. Capture more email subscribers

Dollar for dollar, email marketing is one of the most effective channels at your disposal for making sales and generating repeat customers. Roughly 17% of digital marketing spend happens in email, but it contributes 24% of revenue, according to a 2015 study by Forrester Research.

There are too many tweets and Facebook posts for us to keep up with, and email can offer a more intimate interaction. People are still more protective of messages sent to their personal inboxes versus their social feeds. Plus, email gives you the space to say things that can’t fit into a social media post.

To get started with email marketing, actively promote your newsletter, blog and any other email capture efforts to get as many subscribers as you can. Take a look at Huckberry, which makes signing up for its email list the central focus when you first visit their site.

Email list.

6. Improve your email campaigns

It’s not enough to simply capture a bunch of email addresses. You then need to send regular, valuable emails for the channel to be an effective ecommerce marketing activity.

There are many occasions that are perfect for sending emails that your subscribers will actually appreciate:

  • Send a welcome email as soon as a customer makes a purchase.
  • Provide exclusive promo codes and free gifts.
  • Send regular newsletters to alert subscribers of new discount offers, product tips, and, when appropriate, company news.
  • Share relevant content to help customers get the most out of their recently purchased items.
  • Run a BOGO campaign in time for the holidays to promote self-gifting during the season, too.
  • Thank your highest-value customers. Send a personal note expressing your appreciation for their business.
  • Solicit feedback. If someone visits your site but doesn’t make a purchase, ask about their experience and how you can improve it.

Take a look at this simple email from Uncommon Goods. For Father’s Day, they sent a last-minute email to remind subscribers of the occasion, and to provide a service for the procrastinators on their list. The subject read, “The Gift that Will Save Father’s Day.”

Email campaign.

7. Send wishlist reminder emails

One final type of email to add to your list of ecommerce marketing ideas: the wishlist reminder email. The wishlist reminder email is closely related to the abandoned cart email. Both are designed to convince shoppers to take the final step in purchasing the products they have shown intent to buy.

Has it been a while since someone checked in on their wishlist? Have an item on sale that’s been put on a lot of wishlists? Is it selling out? Send out an email to let your customers know.

It may just be the trigger they need to finally purchase the item. ModCloth alerts shoppers when products are nearly out of stock. This motivates shoppers and helps minimize regret—no one wants to accidentally miss out on a product they’ve been eyeing.

8. Make it easy for your customers to get what they want

If your store is poorly designed, then you’re losing customers. But what exactly does a poorly designed store look like?

Besides appearing untrustworthy, the store could be suffering from some combination of the following: lacking a clear value proposition, hard-to-read font, or confusing navigation.

Even when you’ve improved the dimensions above, you could still be making a few design mistakes. Are you properly segmenting your products or are you putting too many products on a single page? Have you figured out the right balance between text and visuals? These are just a few of the many things that you should consider. If your theme isn’t converting well, consider some of the other great themes available on Shopify.

There are many examples of beautiful ecommerce websites, but consider DODOcase in particular. Take a look especially at how clearly products are segmented.

Value proposition.

9. Engage online store visitors with live chat

There are other high-impact ways to engage with site visitors and customers outside of email. For example, you could use live chat to engage with shoppers on your site.

Many live chat tools let you target browsers on certain pages, after they’ve been on your site for a certain length of time, or even after they’ve arrived on your site through an email newsletter. Live chat also enables you to have direct conversations with your customers so you can answer and address customer concerns right while they’re planning to buy.

Luxy Hair uses live chat to engage prospects and inform current customers of their order status, without having to contact their support team over email.

Live chat.

10. Anticipate future sales

If you have the ability to expand your product line, then you should evaluate market demand and see if it’s worth the cost. You can do that through a variety of approaches: keyword research, geographic validation, social media trends, etc. One more creative way to test out your market? Pre-sell items to see how many people place orders.

If you’re trying to decide which of three to-be-released products to sell, for example, create pages for all of them, making sure to use quality product photography and compelling copy for each one. Then list them as “out of stock” and see which product gets the most attention in terms of back-in-stock notification requests. That’s the one to sell.

In footwear and apparel especially, there are times when certain size or color variants are temporarily out of stock. KEEN, which sells hiking shoes, gives shoppers the option to receive an email when the product of their choice is available again.

Future sale.

Future sales.

11. Start a content marketing program

Every ecommerce store should consider blogging regularly to connect with customers and to rank better in search engines. If you’re already creating content, consider actively featuring your blog on your online store.

Don’t forget, there are more ways to take advantage of content marketing than simply blogging:

  • Start a podcast to feature your expertise or build a stronger community
  • Guest post on other websites and blogs to build awareness and generate backlinks, which also help with SEO
  • Create long-form content and guides to help customers use your products more effectively

One unlikely brand that has used content marketing to increase online sales is River Pools and Spas. Their company blog has earned them kudos from New York Times, but they don’t just stick to blogging. In time for the 2018 summer season, they have a downloadable guide featured on their homepage to help customers buy the right fiberglass pool as well.

12. Embrace personalization

Personalization is another effective marketing tactic to drive online sales. Using behavioral data, personalized experiences are served to the visitor, according to their past actions and preferences.

According to BCG, personalization can lift sales as much as 10%, but the opportunity is greater than that. Only 15% of companies are using the technology to its fullest extent.

You can also account for location in personalization to create an experience catered to where your customers are in the world. Someone in southern California may be looking for bathing suits in October, while your Maine customers probably need coats, for example.

Alloy Apparel shows a “what’s popular” carousel of products for online shoppers, but personalizes it with trending items local to the visitor.

Marketing personalization.

13. Leverage user-generated content

User-generated content (UGC) is a great way to generate social proof. When prospective customers see that people just like them are regularly purchasing your products, they’ll feel more confident in doing the same.

According to Salesforce, 54% of consumers trust information from online reviews and recommendations from their peers, compared to the 20% who trust the brand itself.

UGC can take many forms. Technically, even product reviews are UGC. One of the most effective types of UGC is pictures of customers actually using your products. Pepper, a store that sells bras, features lots of pictures of happy customers in their products.

UGC.

14. Think local

Brick-and-mortar businesses aren’t the only ones who can jump on the local movement. Online retailers can also take a local approach to their ecommerce marketing tactics to increase online sales.

To figure out what local means for you, here are a few ways you can look at it:

  • Identify where you have large concentrations of customers and run a promotion for that location. Look at which products those customers are buying and other spending behavior indicators, and consider local events or seasons to appropriately time a promotion.
  • If you have a warehouse or multiple warehouses, consider a promotion with free, discounted, or expedited shipping to customers in the vicinity. This’ll be easier for your operations team to execute and also help you promote sales in a cost-effective manner.

15. Optimize your product pages

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of optimizing your website for on-site conversions and increased sales. Practicing CRO helps you identify problem areas on your site.

Where are you losing sales? Who’s dropping off and why? What can you do to capture those missed opportunities? This process is done through both qualitative and quantitative research, so you get a holistic and unbiased view of how conversion-oriented your site is.

Once you’ve conducted your research to identify challenges and opportunities, you can develop hypotheses and tests to see which approaches generate the most sales.

16. Optimize for mobile

By 2021, more than half of all online shopping is expected to happen on mobile devices, according to Statista. Optimizing your store for mobile means more than having a responsive design. It means you’re designing your site with mobile visitors in mind from start to finish.

Perhaps you have a bigger add to cart button on all mobile product pages, making it easier for the visitor to add to cart without zooming in, for example. You might also present your images in a different format, making it faster for mobile visitors to load product photos and easier to zoom in.

Frank Body sells body scrubs and skincare products. When a mobile visitor lands on a product page and scrolls down, the “add to cart” button appears at the bottom. This saves the visitor from having to scroll all the way back up, likely losing their spot on the page.

Mobile marketing.

17. Reward your loyal customers

Focusing on customer retention is a cost-effective way to increase online sales. Return customers account for 22% of a retailer’s revenue, while making up just 11% of the total customer base, according to Stitch Labs. They also spend 15% more over the course of a year.

One way to reward loyal customers and big spenders is through a customer loyalty program. There are many ways both your customers and you can benefit from a loyalty program. They give customers extra incentive to make a purchase and they keep your brand top-of-mind through automated reminders.

You choose how to reward customers, how frequently and for what actions. For instance, you might have a point-based program, which has its own point-based currency that can be redeemed for discounts, free shipping or free gifts.

Outdoor brand REI has a robust customer loyalty program. Members pay a one-time fee ($20) to join the program, and they receive access to exclusive online (and in-store) sales and events. They also receive coupon codes and a portion of what they spend over the course of a year back in store dividends.

Loyal customers.

Your loyalty program doesn’t need to be as robust and you can implement it easily with a Shopify app.

 

Post Credit :https://www.shopify.in/blog/ecommerce-marketing

Top 10 Web Design Trends 2020

Over the past decade, technology has had a huge influence on web design.

From the way we create websites, to how we view them, being on-trend starts with understanding how new tech enables designers to push the limits of creative expression.

So far, 2020 has been the year of the Coronavirus and reliance on technology is at an all time high.

Businesses are adapting by increasing their online presence and depending on their websites to help them weather the storm.

In order for you to get the most out of your website, here are the top 10 design trends taking over the Web right now.

Creating trust with your users

Unfortunately, our online world is littered with misinformation. (#fakenews)

While sites like Google and Facebook continue to penalize or remove false information, an opportunity has been created for brands that inspire trust among potential customers.

When it comes to creating trust, it’s the little things that add up. The images, words, layout, and color choices you make may influence how people perceive your brand.

A good way to understand user behavior is to put yourself in their shoes.

Even better, you can use sites like Userbrain to ask real people that don’t know your brand how they feel when navigating your site.

The lessons you learn from these one-on-one sessions can go a long way towards improving your website and in-app performance.

Design tips:

  • Less is more – avoid complicated designs and big blocks of text;
  • Pay special attention to pricing, call-to-actions, and form design;
  • Avoid stock images when showcasing your product or customers;
  • Incorporate social proof in your design (reviews, photos, etc);
  • Only link out to reputable websites (this will also help for SEO);
  • Provide your customers with an easy way to get in touch with you.

Examples:

(Website designs: FitbitBeats, and Allbirds)

Oversized type and elements

This year, designers are leveraging oversized poster fonts with big, impactful visuals in order to create memorable first impressions.

Although this trend is one of the easiest to recreate, executing it properly requires harmony between your brand, the typeface, and visuals you choose.

Unfortunately, not all fonts can be scaled to 150px and still look good. Here’s a list of 60+ fonts that look great at scale and that are sure to get your creative juices flowing.

Since modern website builders make it easy to use just about any font on the Web, you should never limit your creativity because of the tool you’re using.

When it comes to your visuals, make sure to use professional grade images. The last thing you want to do is highlight imperfections on your customer’s new 4k monitor.

Design tips:

  • Your hero text needs to be short and to the point so people have a clear understanding of the message you’re trying to communicate. Should never be more than two lines;
  • Your entire website needs to fit the style you’re going for. Having a big, impactful hero section that doesn’t fit the rest of your design will create more harm than good;
  • Leverage CSS animations to bring your design to the next level.

Examples:

(Website designs: TitanBruno Arizio, and Kati  Forner)

Dark designs

As previously mentioned, technology has a huge impact on web design trends. Over the past year or so, operating systems, browsers, and pro-focused apps have been shifting towards dark UI.

This year, the trend of dark design has made its way to websites.

By combining dark backgrounds with vibrant accent colors, designers are able to maintain and influence users’ attention.

The great thing about designing on a dark canvas is that everything stands out.

However, the key is to not overwhelm the user with too much content at once. Dark designs need to be minimalistic and include lots of whitespace (or in this case, darkspace).

Also, while creating contrast is great, too much of it can create eye strain.

Here are some tips to make your dark design user-friendly:

  • Avoid pure black backgrounds as it creates too much contrast, Material Design recommends #121212 as your canvas color;
  • Avoid dark colors with heavy saturation. Focus on lighter tones which maximize readability;
  • Avoid white or grey call-to-actions as they can blend in with your text;
  • Avoid using dark backgrounds for blogs or websites that are text-heavy;
  • If you need to add a larger block of text, consider using light grey instead of white.

Examples:

(Website designs: ApplePlay, and Basili)

App inspired websites

In 2020, web designers are working closely with product teams in order to create a more consistent experience between what users see on the website and in their native apps.

Using the same styles, visuals elements, copy, animations, and interactions can go a long way towards creating a streamlined experience that helps with both product adoption and brand recognition.

On top of consistent branding, websites are incorporating more and more product shots in order to help set expectations. By previewing the user interface (UI), it becomes easier for users to quickly familiarize themselves with your product.

It’s also important to note that there are a large number of experts who believe that progressive web apps (PWA) will replace many of the mobile apps we use today. By converting your website into a PWA, you can eliminate the need for users to:

  • Go to the App Store/Play Store
  • Search for your app
  • Click to install
  • Accept permissions
  • Wait for it to download

Design tips:

  • Make sure your web and product designers work together;
  • Incorporate in-app style elements such as colors, buttons, fonts, icons, and visuals to your website;
  • Use curated visuals instead of direct product screenshots;
  • Develop style guides to help your team be consistent;
  • Always use high quality images, icons, and mockups in-app and on the Web.

Examples:

(Website designs: Payment for StripeAgendrixGrammarly)

Gradients 2.0

For a few years now, gradients have been making a huge impact on the world of web design.

From apps to websites, the use of gradients has increased dramatically, especially when it comes to websites in the tech sector.

This year, creators are taking gradients to a whole new level – incorporating them into fonts, shapes, interactive elements, and even videos. Also, while most websites used to limit gradients to a single section, more websites today are using gradients that take up entire pages.

With the help of CSSGradient.io, you can visually generate custom gradients and then copy the code into your website. You can create linear gradients, radial gradients, and even text gradients.

Other helpful resources:

  • Use ColorSpace to generate and preview color palettes and gradients;
  • Trendy Gradients in Web Design – Article by Awwwards.

Examples:

(Website designs: AdobeCapchoGogoroPlayup)

Systematic design systems and components

Although designing websites from scratch is a great way for designers to showcase their creative talents, it’s not the most efficient way to build a website.

Over the past few years, many designers have been moving towards website building platforms that enable them to create a component once (like a hero or contact us section) and then reuse it across multiple pages or projects.

In 2020, designers need to create flexible design systems that can be tweaked to fit the needs of their individual clients. Similar to how templates help do-it-yourselfers get started, design systems help designers wireframe websites and quickly move them towards a finished product.

Even for the 1% of your customers who are willing to pay top dollar for a truly custom website, working with a design system will help you build out their site faster once an initial direction is agreed upon. A win-win for both you and your client!

Examples:

Non-corporate designs

Since the emergence of social media in the early 2000’s, businesses have been slowly moving towards a more casual and friendly vibe both in the workplace and online.

Today, large corporations and CEOs that once seemed unapproachable are making jokes and interacting with customers online.

This year, we are highlighting this trend by sharing simple design tips that will help your brand feel less “corporate” and create better connections with your target audience.

Design tips:

  • Avoid large menus with complicated dropdowns;
  • Simplify your contact us page – make it easy for people to get in touch;
  • Write copy that everyone can understand – Apps like Hemingway can help;
  • Leverage graphics and curated visuals to explain complex information;
  • Modernize your web design with custom fonts, shapes, colors, and illustrations;
  • Use pictures of real people (testimonials, employees).

Examples:

(Website designs: AtozofaiTrip AdvisorHubspotShopify)

Memorable and legible fonts

Designers are always looking for new ways to display website copy.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen bold typography experiments including reversed, inverted, and even sliced text.

This year, designers are looking to make an impact, but are conscious of user-experience and legibility best practices. The key is finding a healthy balance between creativity and readability.

In order to follow this trend, we’d recommend you start by finding a great font pairing that matches your brand’s style.

Next, experiment by combining your font choices with some of the other trends mentioned on this list, including large type, dark UI, and gradients.

It’s incredible how a fairly simple font can be elevated to new levels with a few subtle design tweaks.

Examples:

(Website designs: CloudforcePrecision Run, and Queen Garnet)

Oversized images and galleries

Remember the old saying: “a picture is worth a thousand words”?

It has never been more true.

From online stores to portfolios, designers are leveraging big, beautiful images and galleries to make their websites stand out.

When it comes to the image selections, creators are favoring close-up product shots and pictures with solid background colors. In the absence of distractions, this ensures that all eyes are on the product.

As larger images work best with grid patterns, we’d recommend sticking to grid and justified galleries as opposed to the masonry style made popular by Pinterest.

Pro tips:

  • Use only your best images (less is more in 2020);
  • Ensure consistent colors and styles between images;
  • Take product shots with a white background;
  • Increase the size of the image thumbnails and place descriptions below or to the side.

Examples:

(Website designs: NikeDribbble – Kalli, and Cute and Broke)

Curated visuals

For the second year in a row, curated visuals have made the list of the top web design trends.

This year, we’re seeing even more concepts such as 3D shapes, motion graphics, and altered images make their mark on the world of design.

Although custom visuals can be time consuming and expensive to make if you don’t have the creators on staff, they are a great way to captivate your target audience.

For most businesses, with moderate budgets, we’d recommend keeping things simple:

  • Showcase your product in action using 3D mockups and templates;
  • Use websites like Fiverr to hire affordable illustrators;
  • Incorporate visuals with no background;
  • Consider videos and screen flows as a cost effective alternative to 3D animations and motions graphics.

Examples:

(Website designs: Exclusive PRSRappi pay, and eSwap Pro Controller)

Bonus: Augmented and Virtual Reality

Although there are many websites and apps that incorporate augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) into their user experiences, we can’t say that it’s a trend just yet.

As AR and VR technology continue to make strides, it’s important to be aware of how this new technology will impact design in years to come.

Examples of this technology are endless, from furniture stores and clothing companies allowing you to virtually try out products before buying them to fitness apps like Zwift allowing you to virtually ride your bike around the world.

From a designer’s standpoint, AR and VR should be considered as another form of content delivery. Similar to when videos made their way into web design, it took some time for best practices to be developed.

Similar to how autoplay videos don’t work well on mobile devices, augmented reality doesn’t work well on desktops as it’s harder to gain access to a camera that can point and shoot. When you add virtual reality goggles into the mix, you can see how interesting designs might become in the future.

While we wait for AR and VR technology to gain traction, here are a few cool examples of what’s to come:

Examples:

(Website designs: Little WorkshopWannabyCineVR, and Faraday Future

Final thoughts

Regardless of how technology and trends evolve over the coming years, it’s important to remember that great designs will always share timeless qualities such as:

  • A simple user-interface (UI);
  • An intuitive user experience (UX);
  • Beautiful yet legible typography;
  • Eye-catching visuals.

For most businesses looking to stay up to date with evolving trends, we recommend a progressive approach.

Making small design updates to your app or website every few months is much more efficient and cost effective than doing a major redesign every 3-5 years.

In order to make regular changes, you need a tool that fits your skill set. If you are familiar with code, WordPress might be a great option. However, if you’d prefer to visually design your website, platforms like PageCloud might be better suited for you.

 

Post Credit: https://www.pagecloud.com/blog/web-design-trends-2020

Strategic Design: 6 Steps For Building Successful Websites

QUICK SUMMERY : In order to combine all these elements of Web design together and achieve successful results you must have a clear direction, a direction that will guide each and every aspect of your design towards common goals. You must think strategically.


Web design isn’t art. It involves a whole collection of different skills — from copywriting and typography to layout and art — all fused together to create an interface that not only features a pleasant aesthetic but that communicates function and facilitates easy access to its content.

But in order to combine all these elements of Web design together and achieve successful results you must have a clear direction, a direction that will guide each and every aspect of your design towards common goals. You must think strategically.

WHAT IS STRATEGIC DESIGN?

Strategic design is the fusion of your organizational goals with every aspect of your design process. You aren’t simply designing a user interface that looks good and is usable and accessible. You’re designing an interface that will help you accomplish your organization’s objectives.

There are many websites out there that look fantastic and sport the latest trends in design yet often fail miserably in their intended function. Design trends are, of course, important because they give you fresh inspiration and new techniques, but the implementation of those techniques and styles needs to be intelligent and focused. For example, a blog isn’t a marketing brochure; you should focus on usability and readability rather than style. Similarly, a promotional website for a computer game should feature graphics and styles that portray a specific feel and style; the aesthetic is very important here.

When the designer simply implements a look and feel that is fashionable at the moment (think Web 2.0 trends) without any thought of how they fit the function of the website or the business behind it, the end result is unlikely to be very effective.

Web design is all about crafting an interface that communicates function, is usable and accessible and exudes the right emotion and feeling. Effective Web design needs all of these elements to be in tune with the goals of your website and in sync with the organizational objectives behind the website. Strategic design is all about identifying those goals and using them to guide your design.

Implementing Strategic Design

Let’s take a look at how we can use six steps to think strategically about a Web design project:

1. ESTABLISH YOUR GOALS

One of the first things you need to do before starting work on a Web design project is to be clear about your client or organization’s goals. What are you trying to achieve with the new website or redesign? What is the website’s main purpose? Ask your client, your manager or yourself what those are. If they or you don’t know yet, then they should be discussed and agreed upon. A clear direction is essential if you want your design to have a purpose.

Remember that a website isn’t a piece of art; it’s an interface that serves a function. That function may be to sell products, to deliver informational content, to entertain, to inform or to provide access to a service. Whatever that function is, your design must focus on fulfilling it. Goals are also important, especially if you’re doing a redesign. Ask why you are doing the redesign: are you looking to grow the number of sign-ups, decrease the bounce rate or maybe increase user participation?

Take a look at the design of the New York Times website above. Its function is to deliver informational content. The minimalist interface serves this function beautifully by fading into the background.

In contrast to the New York Times, AdaptD is a Web design studio, so the goal is not to deliver a lot of content but to impress visitors with its design, showcase a gallery and advertise the company’s services. The visuals are very important here, and AdaptD delivers a browsing experience with beautiful imagery and strong colors.

2. IDENTIFY YOUR AUDIENCE

Who your audience is will play a big role in how your website should look and function. There are many demographics here that can influence your design, ones like age, gender, profession and technical competency. A computer game website for a younger audience needs a different style than that of a serious business journal. Usability should play a bigger role for older and less technically savvy audiences.

Who your audience is will not only influence the general aesthetic of the website but will also determine a lot of smaller details, like font sizes, so make sure you’re clear about who will be using your website.

This is the unsuccessful jQuery rock-star redesign. The designer went too far in trying to create excitement and so failed to cater to the more serious, techy audience. Since then, the rock-star graphic has been replaced with a more conservative look.

Disney’s target audience is kids. The intent is to entertain and involve this young audience, and the design does it by wrapping the content in a fun, colorful interface with a lot of visual and interactive elements.

3. DETERMINE YOUR BRAND IMAGE

A lot of designers tend to get a little too inspired by the latest trends and then implement them without thinking first about what sort of image they really should be conveying. Glossy buttons, gradients and reflective floors may work for some websites, but they may not be right for your brand.

Think about color. Think about the feel you want to achieve and emotions you wish to elicit. Your design should embody the personality and character of your brand. Everything has a brand; even if you don’t sell a product or service – for example, if you run a blog – your website still has a certain feel that makes an impression on your visitors. Decide what that impression should be.

Carbonica is a website aimed at helping people reduce their carbon emissions. The environmentally friendly image of the website is crafted using a lot of recycled paper images and textures, as well as earthy green and brown tones.

Restaurantica was a restaurant reviews website. Its design illustrates this by taking on the look and feel of an actual menu you would see in a restaurant.

4. GOAL-DRIVEN DESIGN DIRECTION

You’ve established the purpose of your website, set some goals you want to achieve, identified your audience and determined your brand image. You can now proceed to implement it. So how do you make design decisions sync with your strategy? Let me illustrate this with a likely example.

Suppose your main objective is to increase the number of subscribers to your Web service. How can your design help accomplish this goal? I can see at least three things here that will make a difference:

  • Make the “About” snippet on your landing page as clear and concise as possible. Your visitors must not have any confusion about the function of your website.
  • Use color and contrast to make the registration button or link stand out. If people can’t find it, then you won’t get many sign-ups.
  • Streamline the registration process by removing unnecessary and optional elements; people can fill those out later. If the form looks long, people may be put off of filling it in.

These are just three ways you can lead your design towards accomplishing the goal of increasing the number of sign-ups to your service. Your goals may vary, but the strategy is the same: shape and focus all the design elements towards meeting those goals.

The same strategy applies to your brand and audience: design the aesthetic that best suits it. If your website’s focus is entertainment, then create an “experience.” You are free to use a lot of color and imagery to shape that experience. On the other hand, if you’re designing a website that is focused on information consumption, for example, a blog or a magazine, then focus on usability and readability. Create an interface that fades away and doesn’t distract the user from accessing the content.

Stubmatic was an online box-office application. Their external website has two purposes: explain what the service does and get people to sign up. New visitors may only remain on your website for a few seconds, so if you don’t want to lose them you must be concise. You can do this by:

  • Using large imagery and diagrams to illustrate the function of your product or service.
  • Showing screenshots of your application. People will want to see what it looks like before they commit to a download or sign up.
  • Providing a tour, using descriptive examples of how your service can help them solve a problem. Show a video if you can; the less effort people need to make to understand how your app works the better.
  • Having the sign-up link accessible from all pages.

To succeed, the website must make the best use of the very limited amount of attention visitors will be giving it by not only informing but educating them about what your product does, and selling the benefits it provides. Stubmatic uses design elements effectively to pursue those goals.

TechCrunch is one of the more popular tech blogs. Its new design removes every single unnecessary graphical element from the page. What’s left is just the content, advertising and navigation. Subtle lines and grey shades give the page structure, yet the interface is almost invisible and places content straight into the front row. For a blog that posts several new articles a day, this format is ideal because it facilitates fast and easy access to the content.

5. MEASURE RESULTS

Once you’ve designed and deployed your website, it’s time to measure your success. This is just as important as the first two steps because until you test how well your design performs, you won’t know whether or not it is effective in fulfilling your goals.

If your goal is to increase the number of sign-ups to your service, measure it and see if your changes are making a positive impact. If you want to increase the number of subscribers to your blog, check your RSS stats. If you want to increase user involvement, see if you get more comments or more forum posts or whatever else is relevant in your context.

You can, of course, also ask people for their feedback, and this is a very good way to check if you’re on the right track. Be careful though not to implement every suggestion people make. Everyone has different tastes and wants, so everyone is going to have a different opinion about what your website should look like. If you do collect feedback, look for patterns; see if there are common issues that crop up and deal with those.

Measuring various website metrics is a whole science unto itself and is beyond the scope of this article. But however in-depth your analytics are at this stage doesn’t really matter; the important thing is that at the very least you have some way of measuring your key objectives. You can use this information to see if you’re moving in the right direction with your design and with any future changes you or your client make.

Even if you’re on a tight budget, you can use free tools like Google Analytics to get a lot of data on how your website is being used, including overlays of your pages to see what links people click on most as well as the ability to track conversion funnels.

6. KAIZEN

There is a Japanese philosophy called “Kaizen,” which focuses on continuous improvement using small steps. When you work on your website, you should be thinking of Kaizen because the version you’ve just published is not the final version. There doesn’t even have to be a final version.

You can always make improvements, and the very nature of a website will allow you to introduce these at any time. This is because a website isn’t a magazine that you print and sell: once a magazine copy is out of your hands, you cannot make any changes or fix any spelling mistakes or errors. A website, however, sits on your server: if you find a mistake, you can fix it right away. In the same vein, you can introduce gradual improvements and updates to make your website more effective in serving its function.

Using the results of your measurements, you can identify problem areas. Perhaps your visitors cannot find the RSS feed link, or your bounce rate is too high or an important page on your website isn’t getting enough visits. Whatever the problem is, there will always be a way to improve things.

Conclusion

The main gist of strategic design is simply common sense: you’re making something for a specific purpose, so of course it should fulfill that purpose through its design. But it is actually very easy to lose track of your goals and end up with something that is beautiful but ultimately doesn’t work in its context. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of implementing the latest design trends just because they look attractive or shaping a section of your website to resemble another website that you really like without first thinking about why you are doing it or how it fits in with the purpose of your project.

Avoid falling into these traps by thinking through every design decision you make. Why is this button this color? Why are we using tabs? Why should we use icons here? Once you get into the habit of questioning your every design decision, the whole process will become much more focused. Think about the product or organization you’re representing. Think about the target audience and your brand. What will work in this context? What is expected? How can you use design to best fulfill the website’s purpose? Don’t just build a beautiful website: make a website that really works.

Post Credit by https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/11/strategic-design-6-steps-for-building-successful-websites/

Can You Design A Website For The Five Senses?

QUICK SUMMERY : While you don’t want to design a website for all five senses — because that would most certainly lead to sensory overload — you can use individual senses to strengthen the experience visitors have. Let’s take a look at five ways you can use the senses to put your visitors in a better headspace when they enter your site and interact with your brand.


Maybe it’s the whiff of someone’s perfume. Or a bite of pizza from a new restaurant. Or a song playing over the loudspeakers at the store. But the second it hits, you’re immediately transported to another place, time, or mood.

Imagine if your website could evoke this kind of response. Visitors who respond to the sensory stimulation would instantly be in a more positive headspace, which they’d then associate with the site and your brand.

Just be careful if you’re going to attempt this. Not every sense-triggered memory or emotion is going to be a positive one, so you want to focus on more generalized and shared experiences that come with little risk of backfiring.

Here are some ideas to help you do this:

Designing For The Sense Of Sight

A website is a medium to be seen, so you’d assume that the sense of sight is the most powerful one to play with. But there’s a difference between a visitor taking in the photos and words on a web page and feeling something because of what they’ve seen.

The truth is, sight is the most pragmatic of the senses. Typically, what you see is what you get.

Nevertheless, it is possible to design a website so that it alters the mood of anyone who visits it.

Color theory is one tool you can use to inspire visitors to feel a certain way based on what they see. However, that can be problematic as colors often have multiple meanings not just across cultures but within them as well. So, while you might think you’re making visitors feel happier with bright yellow hues, it could instead be making them feel overwhelmed and anxious.

What I’d suggest you focus on is how to use visuals to create an immersive experience that transports your visitors to another place or time. They shouldn’t need to look past the homepage for it either (though it’s a good idea if you can make it extend across the site).

Travel and hospitality sites have a tendency to do this well. Let’s look at an example.

Visit Philly is a tourism site I like to use to find things to do around the city. And that’s because this is how most of the pages on the site are designed:

Each page feels like a physically immersive experience without forcing visitors to watch a background video or scroll through a carousel of photos. Instead, each full-sized image perfectly encapsulates the setting that awaits each visitor.

Unlike staged, overly manipulated or stock photos that portray an unrealistic reality, visitors aren’t likely to ignore this kind of content. Because it’s real and it’s also easy to put themselves in the shoes of the people they’re looking at. The man and his dog. The family going for a walk. Or the people enjoying the spectacle that is Spruce Street Harbor Park:

For people who’ve been to Philadelphia, the visuals on this site are likely to lure them back to the good times they had. And for people who are new to the city, the oversized visuals that show off the city’s hotspots enable them to picture what it’s like to go, which is a very effective way to sell someone on an experience.

Designing For The Sense Of Smell

Back in elementary school, our teachers would reward us with good scores on homework and tests with a handwritten note like “Great work!” and a scratch-n-sniff sticker. Like these ones available on Etsy:

If you don’t know what these are, the name says it all. You scratch your nail against the sticker and it smells just like the picture on it.

Looking at this photo, I can still smell the “Berry Good” strawberry. This is going to sound crazy, but it reminds me of success. I don’t know if my teachers had an entire pack of the strawberry stickers, but it’s the one I got most frequently. And so I guess that’s why I associate it with good grades just by looking at it.

This is what you want to aim for with your website. You want to depict some recognizable scent in a way that the majority (if not all) of your visitors instantly feel good.

For example:

A used bookstore or library website with imagery that depicts rows upon rows of old books like the Providence Athenaeum:

Voracious readers will definitely be able to smell the athenaeum and its old collection of books through this photo.Or how about a company that’s known for making cleaning products like Tide?

Even if you don’t use Tide to do your laundry, you know exactly what the first image in this carousel is going to smell like.

Fresh laundry is the scent of cleanliness and comfort. I’d also argue that it’s the scent of satisfaction because nothing feels better than getting laundry done and over with.

I also really like what Coffee Culture Cafe & Eatery has done with its homepage video:

It’s not abnormal for a restaurant or cafe to show photos of its food or drinks. However, this is the raw product: the coffee beans. And as any coffee drinker can attest, this photo smells delicious and is something that’s sure to awaken their anticipation in ordering their first cup.

Designing For The Sense Of Sound

I was driving to the beach over the weekend when a song came on that made me smile. It was “What I Got” by Sublime, a song I listened to many times when making the long drive to the beach with friends in college.

Although I was alone on this particular trip and headed to a different beach, there was something about that song that instantly transformed my mood. The stress I was feeling about work melted away and all I could focus on was how good it was going to feel to spend the day in the sunshine by the water.

That’s something that the right sound can do. It can pull us out of the present and take us back to a memory of the past. Or it can overwhelm us with emotion that has no real grounding in the moment and, yet, there it is.

It doesn’t have to be music. And, honestly, on a website, it shouldn’t be. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still appeal to visitors’ ears through design.

There are two ways to approach this.

The first is to include imagery that depicts a predictable sound and one that brings joy (or whatever positive emotion you’re shooting for). Take the website for Kindermusik:

For many of us, the xylophone was one of the first instruments we were introduced to as kids. So, it’s hard to imagine anyone seeing the top photo and not immediately hear the sounds of a kid banging away on the bars.

And while this school is all about providing kids with music-based education, not every image sounds like music. For instance, the Benefits page has this photo at the top:

There might not be any sound coming through this site, but we all know the distinctive sound of a baby’s laugh. For parents trying to decide where to have their kids educated, they’ll be pleased to hear the sound of a child laughing as they visit this web page.

The other way to approach sound in design is to remove it entirely from the experience.

This works well for places like Scandinave Spa where customers come to enjoy the solitude and silence as they retreat from pressures of society, work, life and so on:

If a lack of noise is what makes the real life experience so valuable, then choosing images that represent this is really important. So, obviously, sites like these won’t have images of people standing around talking nor will it incorporate bright or flashy lights.

A calm experience is best depicted by an absence of noise, movement and distraction.

Designing For The Sense Of Taste

Dr. Bence Nanay wrote about the cooking show paradox on Psychology Today, debating why it is that so many people enjoy watching someone else cook. It can’t possibly be to learn how to cook as recipes are everywhere online. And while they might enjoy the competitive aspect of some of these shows, he suggests the main reason is this:

Watching cooking shows is eating vicariously in the most literal sense possible — we get mental imagery of tasting and smelling the food without actually tasting or smelling it.

I think we can expand a bit further on Nanay’s argument.

I also believe that people become more invested in an outcome when they get to see the process of it being made. This isn’t something we’re usually allowed to see as consumers. We go out to eat and the food is sitting there on a plate for us. So, there’s something about the build-up of watching food or drinks being made that adds something extra to the experience.

That’s why I don’t think it’s enough to just use static photos of a restaurant’s dishes or food company’s products on a website. Not if you want to deeply connect to the visitors’ sense of taste, that is.

For instance, this is the video that’s embedded into the top of Sweet Charlie’s website:

If you’ve ever been to a shop that makes rolled ice cream, you know just how enjoyable it is to watch this process in person. So, for a website to recreate that process — especially for first-time customers wondering what the heck rolled ice cream is — it’s a brilliant move.

Designing For The Sense Of Touch

The sense of touch is a relatively easy one to depict on the web. We see it all the time on ecommerce sites that allow shoppers to zoom in on fabrics and get a sense for what they feel like to touch or wear.

Like the zoom-in capabilities Anthropologie gives its shoppers:

But this is nothing more than window-shopping done virtually. Anyone could walk through a store and brush their hands through racks of clothes. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a necessary functionality. However, this isn’t how we use the sense of touch to create a deeper connection with visitors.

We need to play around with more drastic tactile sensations.

One element you might want to fixate on is temperature. If there’s a heating or cooling element, work with that.

Another element you can play with is the feeling or pressure of human touch. There are many applications for this, though it’s particularly useful for websites that advertise therapeutic services.

For instance, this is how Massage Envy invites people to its spa services:

This is a good start. Some spa and massage websites just show images of empty massage rooms and tables. At least here prospective customers can kind of see the massage process.

I don’t think there’s much to feel here though as the positioning of the masseuse and pressure being applied seem unrealistic. I’m guessing it’s a stock photo chosen for its symmetry, color and attractiveness.

But there are ways to capture the tangible experience while still making it look good for a website. For instance, the Bodhi Spa uses a video to take visitors through various services they can experience — alone or with others — at the space.

At one point, they’re shown someone getting a massage:

Notice the symmetry of this screengrab and how it doesn’t have to come at the expense of authenticity. Plus, the video shows customers how the massage feels as the masseuse applies pressure and moves her hands around the woman’s neck and head.

Visitors then get to see a couple enjoying the benefits of hydrotherapy, with the woman picking up a handful of salt and placing it in the pool they’re in:

There’s a lot to touch in this video. The fine salt crystals. The warm water in the hydrotherapy tub. And, shortly after this screengrab, the couple holds hands as they enter the cool-down room.

A copywriter can certainly convey a lot of the feel-good benefits of something like this, but it’s also effective to let visitors see it with their own two eyes and experience it vicariously through others.

Wrapping Up

While I think that trying to design for all five senses at once would lead to sensory overload, choosing one particularly potent sense to design for is a great idea.

If you can find a way to recreate that sense through your site, your visitors may experience:

  • Heightened awareness,
  • Positive and happier thoughts than before they entered the site,
  • A greater connection to the bigger picture and a willingness to take next steps on the site.

We often focus on how to connect to our audience through their pain, but why don’t we focus on connecting through happiness for a change? I think we could all use a little more of that these days.

Post Credit by https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/08/design-website-five-senses/

 

Mumbai: Web professionals thrive as brick & mortar biz go for digital reboot

Everything about this men’s wear manufacturing hub in Prabhadevi was designed to be experienced in person when Rajnikanth Morbia set up shop 27 years ago. Last April — a time when their 11,000 sq ft warehouse would be teeming with retailers — swooping down from Chennai to Jaipur just to touch, feel and investigate the warp and weft for wedding and festival shoppers in their town — it all went eerily silent. It was a similar story for freelance photographer Samir Todnkar, used to carrying around his portfolio in a folder or a pen-drive until the pandemic shuttered his studio

While it’s easy to blame the pandemic for these closures, the Covid-19 crisis has possibly been a catalyst for mom and pop enterprises like Todnkar and Morbia’s—with zero to comatose digital presence—to up their contactless game. As a new wave of Covid cases winds down and an increasing number of traditional retailers and independent professionals— dance instructors to legal advisors; art galleries to learning libraries; vegan pet food to window net sellers—untether themselves from a physical space and migrate to the cloud, one sector that has emerged as growth-friendly and pandemic-proof, has been web development. Given the pressing need for a digital reboot, local web professionals are navigating their way to success in a pandemic world.

Staffing firm TeamLease says they’ve seen about “18,000 new web development jobs exist today which is an increase of 25% in the last year itself and almost a 70% jump since 2018.” Google data reveals that searches for “website builder” and “website hosting” increased by “1.5X times” during this period.

“It’s like a genie that is out of the bottle and you can’t get it back in,” says Ritu Mehrishi, cofounder of an
Andheri-based digital media agency. “The biggest shifts are around grocery, education, cosmetics, clothing, security and legal. It’s given us an opportunity to bridge the gap for companies that never had any online presence,” she says.

While social media pages have been an easier, faster piece of the marketing puzzle to help smaller enterprises establish their digital presence, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as the only strategy is no longer enough. “Using social media is like displaying only the best you have on offer. Websites require an investment that could range from Rs 35,000 for basic browsing and go upto Rs 4 lakh depending on capacity, product pairing algorithms and user analytics. But having your own domain helps create a credible brand identity, have greater control and makes for easy referrals which many smaller businesses are understanding only now,” says Kandivli-based Priya Singhi,a web and graphic designer who has witnessed “a 30 percent surge in requests to revive old domains.”

Ashish Thakkar, a Dadar-based web developer has witnessed demands, “from owners of dead websites in dire need to bounce back.” Although the basic structure of a website as an information hub hasn’t changed — mobile responsiveness, exciting multimedia and features to fit the add-to-cart age — make web design a cocktail of creative skills and technical prowess today. “People’s needs range from 3D images, blogs and explainer videos to clones of Amazon with secure payment gateways, chatbots and intuitive analytics of buyers’ personas,” says Thakkar.

Much like a brick and mortar business, websites need upkeep and occasional upgrades. “It’s not just about changing the look and feel but updating content and search engine optimisation. When websites are templatised, take too long to load, not mobile friendly or lack modern functions, they look cliched, outdated, and spammy. Some owners don’t upgrade for years and therefore face poor traffic and frequent security breach,” explained Nayan Khandor, founder of a web solutions company that had to hire interns to meet mounting content writing and graphic design needs.

Priya singhi started successful web design agency

I’m Priya Singhi Jain, a UX/UI, website, and brand design consultant, and CEO at Emerge Digital, a creative digital agency in Mumbai, India.

I enjoy creativity and solving problems and have grown up with a deep passion for design and technology. I guess that is why today I work with amazing clients and help them to solve business problems with design.

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