During the 2016 holiday season, Amazon captured 36.9 percent of the e-commerce market.
While this statistic demonstrates that having an Amazon storefront is certainly valuable for many SMBs, equally important for smaller e-retailers is running a proprietary e-commerce site. Raising awareness for new e-commerce sites is very often more challenging than capturing traffic through Amazon searches. Still, SMBs can establish stronger brand identities with proprietary sites, and also keep a larger percentage of the revenue.
Terri Mock, chief revenue officer, Ve Interactive
The most successful SMB e-commerce marketing campaigns are the ones that focus on a comprehensive approach across the full purchase funnel, combining a series of activities to attract more prospective shoppers, increase conversions, and incentivize existing customers to make additional purchases.
With this in mind, here are 5 tips for more effective SMB e-commerce marketing:
Get your digital advertising in front of the right people
Generating traffic is typically the biggest pain point for SMB e-retailers, and a key area to focus your marketing efforts.
Make your advertising dollars count by ensuring that your branding and awareness campaign is reaching the customers you want to drive to your site. My biggest piece of advice in getting started is to have a clear understanding of your buyer profile, and buy advertising that reaches your target customer.
Place ads alongside relevant content based on contextual keywords, or target audiences with specific behaviors and demographics. If you want to generate awareness for a chic fashion e-retailer, you may want to target high-end fashion publications, or geo-target Facebook users in high-income regions.
Small business owners passionate about their brands need to invest to drive quality traffic to their sites. I’ve seen many SMBs hesitate to invest in digital advertising, but it’s critical to spend on advertising efforts that will have a top of funnel impact. Start with a targeted ad budget to draw in the right buyers on key media, social and search channels, document which channels are most effective, and continuously look for ways to improve.
Meet your customers face to face
Just because you’re an e-commerce company doesn’t mean that all of your marketing spend should go towards digital advertising. SMB marketers must also look for ways to engage with prospective customers in person.
Identifying events that your target customers attend is one place to start. If you’re focused on a local audience, you can check out your regional business journal for community events. If you’re selling consumer electronics, you might consider low-cost options for attending national events like the Consumer Electronics Show or South by Southwest (SXSW), and use the shows as networking opportunities.
When you attend an event, try out some guerilla marketing tactics. Hand out flyers with a special event discount, and track how many times the promo code is used. Run a contest with an enticing giveaway to get email signups, and track which of these new shoppers purchase a product over the next several months. Hang attention-getting posters with a promotion, humor, or shock to create curiosity and drive customers to your website.
Make your onsite engagement meaningful
After doing what you can to get people to your site, it’s time to focus on making them convert.
Particularly for shoppers who are about to leave your site, you can consider putting in place onsite overlays that encourage them to complete their purchase. While traditional popups have received bad press, SMBs can take advantage of next-generation on-site overlays that present just the right offers to enhance the user experience. With personalized promotional messages, you are likely to recover sales from visitors who are leaving your site.
For instance, you can tailor your messaging to present different offers based on the amount in the cart. You may want to offer a bigger discount for customers with a higher basket total in order to pull in a higher order sale. Alternatively, you can present different shipping offers based on the cart value. For example, if the cart value is more than $150, you can offer free express shipping. For shopping carts with less than $75, you can offer free ground shipping.
Focus on targeted re-marketing efforts
Despite your best efforts to keep customers engaged on your site, a certain percentage will always leave without making a purchase. After all, the dozens of cart abandonment rate studies that have been done in recent years agree that average cart abandonment rates are well over 60-70 percent.
Emailing customers who have abandoned their shopping carts is an effective way of re-engaging them. For shoppers who abandon their shopping cart, you can send a re-marketing email to remind them of what’s left in their cart, and prompt them with a discount to complete their purchase. Software is available to automate your email re-marketing campaigns to deliver a series of cascaded emails after a shopper abandons.
On average, the first email sent after 30-45 minutes generates up to a 20 percent increase in the onsite conversion rate. A subsequent second email 24-48 hours later can drive up to an extra 13 percent increase in conversions.
In addition to email re-marketing, you can also build out a display ad retargeting campaign to target visitors to your site who didn’t purchase. Ensure you are getting the most out of your retargeting budget by targeting visitors based on their level of engagement, using personalized ad creatives tailored to your visitors’ interactions, and adjusting the number of ads served after a shopper has visited your site.
Keep your existing customers coming back for more
Loyal customers are a SMB’s best friend, and you want to do whatever you can to ensure that the customers who purchase from you once are incentivized to buy again.
It’s certainly important to reward your loyal customers with sales and promotions, but discounts alone won’t keep them engaged. Make sure that you’re also providing them with updates when your company offers new products, and consider running exclusive pre-orders for your existing customers.
The SMBs who implement a balanced marketing approach will be the most successful in building their e-commerce businesses. Remember, attracting, engaging and converting both new and existing customers will be critical to growth in 2017 and beyond.
Based in the United Kingdom, Ve Interactive is a provider of online marketing and advertising services.