As Social Media grew leaps and bounds over the years, many businesses started adopting without proper strategy and ended up as failure. Like any other business, if properly strategized and executed, social media can provide myriad of benefits for ecommerce business too. Here we will give you some tips to improve your ecommerce marketing through social media.
Where is your customer?
Before you spend on a single dollar on a social media endeavor, understand your customer just like when you start off any marketing campaign. Where are your customers? Which are their preferred social media channels? How much time are they spending on social media? Your research shouldn’t be limited to this. Listen to conversations where your company, brand, partners, competitors and customers take the center stage. This would give you a fair amount of idea on what is happening inside your industry. Read more
It sounds obvious, but if you’re responsible for optimizing an ecommerce channel for a brand or client, you need to be focusing on the entire life cycle of your customer. This way you you can understand when they’re most likely to buy and focus your online marketing spend on the correct channels.
Because new and returning customers will be buying from you directly, online, you should focus your marketing efforts on websites they’re visiting throughout their paths to purchase. You can get a good idea of the kinds of sites your potential customers are visiting before they come to your site by looking at your local analytics (e.g. Google Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst, etc.), but you can’t get the full picture. You should also be looking at incoming traffic for your top competitors to better understand industry trends, and you should even be looking at outgoing traffic for yourself and your competitors to find a way to patch holes in your sales funnel. Explore the sites on your list and think about them in terms of your competition – look for advertisements, affiliate links, partnerships, etc.
If you can capture lost traffic and take better advantage of your prospective customers’ cross-shopping behavior, you can turn that into a noticeable effect on your ecommerce channel’s bottom line. Read more
No business can afford to ignore its web presence, especially its eCommerce portal.   Online is increasingly the way business is done:  nearly $1 of every $10 is now spent online, roughly 4.6% of $1.05 trillion in sales just in the 3rd quarter of 2011 alone. And the explosion of the mobile market just adds to this party buzz – purchases made on mobile devices are predicted to reach as much as $4.9 billion this year, and to grow to as much as $163 billion by 2015.
And the ground is rapidly shifting, given the number of new social media outlets appearing along with the seismic shift towards mobile browsing and buying. Over 63% of retailers are currently considering a redesign so that their site will look better to smart phone and tablet browsers, and according to Internet Retailer, over 80% said they were going to devote more resources to mobile in 2011, a number that has climbed in 2012 as mobile purchases rise. Read more
Retail-integrated eCommerce help brands to use online sales and grow in-store sales as well. This is a great benefit for branded manufacturers that are already selling on-line.
This annual survey of retailers conducted by Shopatron measures the effectiveness of retail-integrated eCommerce in helping both brands and their retail partners.
In March 2012, Shopatron again queried over 6,500 active retail partners and asked them to share their thoughts and findings for this retailer study. Over 1,300 retailers responded, offering their opinions and information on topics. Read more
A report from Campalyst found that the most successful ecommerce companies are boosting their success with social media marketing campaigns that favor a multi-platform approach. By maintaining presences on different social networks, businesses have found they can target segments of their audiences most active on these platforms.
According to the study, 97 percent of the top 250 vendors on the web maintain Facebook accounts, generating Likes from their fans. Twitter has attracted 96 percent of these top vendors that say they use the site to engage consumers. Read more
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you have probably already heard about the new sensation that’s been spreading across the internet like wildfire – Pinterest.
What is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a new social network whose main feature is its ability to act like a digital scrapbook, bulletin board, or wish list. While there are several other websites that offer extensive image sharing capabilities, Pinterest has developed this as its main competitive edge against other more popular social networks. In fact, it has been so successful in carving out a niche for itself that in two short years after launching its private beta, it has skyrocketed. It is now ranked among the top 10 social sites, and is estimated to be worth around 500 million USD.
The company was conceived a while back in 2009. It officially launched its invitation-only beta in 2010. Right from the start, Pinterest’s client base has always been mostly composed of women. Its first frequent visitors were mostly interested in the recipes and stylish home decors they found on the site. This core group of people then spread the word to their friends, who in turn told theirs, and so on. Pinterest owes its marketing success to the quality of its content and the power of referrals. On July 2011, only 13 months after its launch, the company had already its 1 millionth unique visitor. This rapid growth has often given it the reputation of being the fastest growing internet site in history. In truth however, it is only second to yet another internet sensation – formspring. Read more
Retail is inherently visual, so it comes as no surprise that two of the biggest online sellers – Amazon and eBay – have added Pinterest buttons to product pages.
While many mentions of Amazon from early Pinterest adopters refer to the rainforest, users have mentioned the site in their picture captions, even before the e-commerce giant included the Pinterest share button on pages.
Statements like one from Pinterest user Mary Kobayashi: “I bought this dress on a whim, as I had never bought clothes from Amazon before…. Either way, I’m so glad I did it,” are easily found. Read more
The past 15 years have provided an evolution of technology that has allowed us to share more and more digitally. First we had email, then came blogs, reviews, Myspace, Facebook and finally Twitter…but wait do we have another contender? Yes we do, welcome Pinterest.
Not much has been said of Pinterest in the eCommerce sphere, everyone seems to still be trying to figure out how to leverage Facebook. However, I think Pinterest could be incredibly disruptive for eCommerce. Read more
- Preferences, Please
In an age of phishing (define) and heightened information security sensitivity, marketers should rethink their existing preference centers, including content, layout, and design. Some of today’s best-in-class preference centers provide full transparency and include information icons and links to privacy policies. Threaded messaging runs throughout the subscription process, summarizing the use, value, and benefits of the specific data requested and captured. Several leading financial services and mortgage firms as well as retailers have made significant strides enhancing the registration process with these best practices in mind.
- Welcome
Few marketers ever say “hello.” If email is about building a long-term relationship throughout the customer lifecycle, first impressions mean a lot. Once you’ve acquired a customer’s email address, trigger a welcome message that exposes her to the benefits and value of the subscription and relationship.
Many of our travel clients have been enormously successful implementing triggered lifecycle email communications. They often start with a welcome message at the first booking. They send subsequent messaging throughout the customer lifecycle, which may include the latest news about the recipient’s destination as well as money-saving travel tips, assistance, and relevant up-sell opportunities (car rentals, etc.). These communications continue to generate high click-through and conversion rates due to their timeliness and relevance.
- Personalization and Control
Smart marketers deliver the control over and relevance to continue relationships consumers demand. E-mail is about building a relationship over time.
A well-designed preference center is an instrument for communicating control and maintaining profiles and preferences up front. But it must be married with an existing email strategy that allows consumers to customize their email experience further with every interaction.
A leading newspaper client’s efforts include a contextual relevant-personalization option within its newsletter. Subscribers are encouraged to select additional topics and columnists of interest to their subscriptions. A link within the newsletter allows them to “Personalize this email further now.”
- Interest-Based Triggers
Amazon.com does it. You can, too. Retailers are already scrambling to grab their share of the multibillion-dollar online marketplace this holiday season. Critical to success will be the careful development, timing, and deployment of interest-based products mapped to each customer’s purchase history, actions, and profiles. For example, “Customers who have purchased X product also purchased Y product. For a limited time, you can preorder Y at a savings of 20%.
- Customer Service
Great customer service is pivotal in building customer loyalty and satisfaction. As marketers prepare for another record e-commerce season, they must consider strengthening their interactive customer service initiatives. Incorporated into those initiatives should be relevant email responses that follow online chat sessions and inbound customer requests.
What you need from RIA and what you can get from RIA are two different requirements. As a retailer you need to be clear whether your online activities require the intervention of RIA today or in the near future. Rich brand experience is attained through the use of RIA applications. To consider whether your retail site requires the implementation of RIA technologies, you need to consider whether the deployment of such a technology would lead to greater flexibility for upgrades in future and lower overall costs of ownership. It is true that RIAs take users beyond the capabilities of familiar page-after-page navigation and presents users with everything on the same page. Read more
As Social Media grew leaps and bounds over the years, many businesses started adopting without proper strategy and ended up as failure. Like any other business, if properly strategized and executed, social media can provide myriad of benefits for ecommerce business too. Here we will give you some tips to improve your ecommerce marketing through social media.
