E-commerce Marketing Checklist for Success in Online Business
The dynamics of e-commerce marketing is constantly changing. Each year, the industry gains new insights into how digital media and online platforms are transforming consumer response and public policy. With the constant evolution of search engine algorithms and changes in operating system guidelines, it has become essential to update a company’s marketing strategy and know the ins and outs of e-commerce marketing, but it is difficult for most SMEs to take advantage of the latest marketing trends. Startups can also struggle to navigate and market digital marketing. That’s why we’ve put together this handy checklist to help you with your marketing strategy for 2021. This step-by-step guide will help your business develop an effective and efficient marketing approach that turns research into sales, drives research, promotes your brand, and launches.
Website Optimization
Your website is an important factor influencing the end customer’s choice, so you need to make sure your website is free from errors and bugs. Even if the product, price or other factors are perfectly good, the user interface on the website is impeccable because a poor user experience won’t allow users to visit your website and convert them to sales. A/B testing can help increase conversion rates. The payment modes, cart flexibility and checkout options should be simplified, secured and error-free to offer the best user experience. Content on the website should be SEO optimized to be searched easily on Google and rank at the top. Also, apply a full-proof SEO strategy to make it as easy as possible for search engines to find your website (by using proper HTML code, writing relevant copy, designing for ease of use, optimizing page load speed) and then to give search engines a reason to rank your website higher than all the other relevant websites by publishing better and more robust information, getting more links and more online PR.
Site Mapping
A site map is an XML file that holds a complete list of page URLs for your website. Its primary purpose is to inform search engines about pages on your sites that are available for crawling. It is perhaps the most under-rated and under-appreciated part of a website. Customers often forget that a site map lays the foundation of a website. Site mapping if correctly done be very helpful in successful link building and smooth flow of traffic. A well organized and systematically laid site map is accepted effortlessly by search engines.
Social Media Marketing
Small businesses or Startups use the power of social media to reach their target audiences. Social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram help businesses influence new audiences and foster relationships with customers. The content of your social media posts plays an important role in customer engagement. Social media platforms allow you to connect your brand personality with your audience. It also creates trust among the audience and provides word-of-mouth access. It serves as a growth channel to continually remind customers of your presence and when used wisely, customers can continue to rate your valuable brand through these platforms. However, expecting direct sales from these platforms or viewing them as a marketing platform for immediate conversions is somewhat difficult initially. Think of it as a long-term investment and not as an advertising channel.
Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
Pay Per Click (PPC) management is the ongoing process of building, maintaining and analyzing advertising campaigns at Google Ads, Bing Ads and Social Media Ads to achieve the best possible results. These platforms are extremely complicated and constantly changing to fulfill the needs of an individual. They offer unique ways to advertise products or services. PPC management determines the outcome of money invested, helps you in calculating customer acquisition costs and the percentage of advertising spend required.
Omni-channel Marketing
New online businesses must be open to using other marketplaces for networking, connecting and reselling. Omni-channel marketing is usually at the heart of most online businesses. If you are using another online store or working with another sales channel, you must provide a percentage of your sales. However, these methods are useful in the long run as they increase your online awareness and visibility with customers who had never heard about your brand. Offer coupons or deals through these marketplaces for attracting customers and minting money.
Content Marketing
Rich content enhances customer experience. When customers are happy and satisfied with your product or service, they’ll consider buying your product or opting for your service. When it’s about content marketing, using the right keywords at the right time on the right platform is very important. Generating rich content can help in improving the traffic numbers, SEO rate, organic search results, search engine ranking, link building opportunities, brand visibility and sales. You should generate different content for different platforms. We increase traffic with the following high performing types of content:
- Blogs: Blogs are one of the best ways to improve SEO and drive more organic traffic to your site from the search engines. Blogs fit in your limited marketing budget easily and can be a replacement for any kind of big-budget marketing with inbound content.
- Infographics: Infographics help businesses educate their audiences about the existing product/service of your company that can add value for leads and customers. This visual content marketing format helps viewers better visualization of information such as statistics so that they can have a better idea of why your product/service is valuable or how it works.
- Customer stories/reviews/feedback: This type of content illustrates how your business has helped a specific customer gain success after using your product/service. Businesses can use these stories to highlight special applications or uses for their services and products. This type of content helps customers better understand your brand and believe more in the product/service you have to offer.
Email Marketing
Emailers can be effective as a lead magnet. Information on existing products, new products and new offers are mentioned in emailers. They are a bit more data-driven and detail-focused. It is the best form of B2C marketing. Conversion rates are high through email marketing.
