You’ve worked hard and created your e-commerce website. It looks great, your products are awesome and are just waiting to be sold – now what? Now comes the time when you have to make people aware that your website exists. Your potential customers need to know how professional your business is, how exciting your products are, and how good their experience will be if they shop on your website.
Promoting a business can be hard enough in the real world, promoting an e-commerce business with no physical premises can be even more challenging. You might think that getting a lot of people to see something that you’ve put on the internet would be easy, after all, more than half of the entire population of the planet have access to the internet. Things aren’t quite that simple though.
With close to 2 billion websites to choose from, getting yours in front of a large audience is no easy task. Promoting your e-commerce website isn’t just about as many people as possible seeing it, it’s about getting it in front of as many people as possible who would actually buy from your business. That’s why promoting your e-commerce website properly can make a massive difference to your business.
Use Social Media To Its Full Extent
Social media gets a lot of bad press nowadays. While there are definitely some aspects of it that aren’t particularly pleasant, when it comes to promoting your e-commerce website, social media can be an invaluable tool. Your social media channels are a window into what your business is all about. You can showcase your products, you can show some behind-the-scenes images that show how much care and attention goes into each customer’s order.
One of the best things about social media is that you can build a big audience for your business without having to pay for ads or get loads of content on your website. This is particularly useful if you’ve recently launched your business and your website is still having content added to it. It can take a while for SEO strategies to take effect, but your social media channels can gain a substantial following in a very short period of time (if used correctly).
While there are different social media strategies you could use to promote your website, as a general rule, regular posting, quality posting, interaction, and sharing interesting content are great ways of building a following. Once you have a decent audience on social media, your posts will draw some of them to your website – the bigger your audience, the more visitors to your website.
Using appropriate hashtags on your posts and tagging customers, influencers, and celebrities can be a great way of encouraging people to not only see your posts, but also to share them and interact with them. The more shares your posts get, the more people will see them, and the more likely you are to get visitors to your e-commerce website.
Even if you already have a good-sized following on social media, to grow your customer base and sales figures, you might want to think about increasing your post frequency, your post content, and the engagement levels your posts generate. Social media can be a fantastic promotional tool that is free marketing for your company. As long as you use it correctly, you can heavily promote your e-commerce website across all social media channels.
Create Quality Content That People Want To See
The content of your website will be a huge factor in whether search engines rank your site highly, and whether potential customers choose to visit it or not. E-commerce websites are predominantly used to sell products – this is their main purpose, but that doesn’t mean you should only have product pages on your site.
While your product pages should be designed to a high standard so your business looks professional when selling things, a high-quality blog post can be incredibly effective at getting people to visit your website in the first place. If you think about how often people research things on the internet, particularly about products they are considering buying, you can see why having useful content on your website can benefit your business.
Let’s say your e-commerce website sells tents. There are a huge number of websites which someone can buy a tent from. Before someone buys a tent though, they may want to find out which type of tent will suit them best. Maybe they want a tent for family camping trips, or maybe they are more of a solo camper who only ever needs a one-person tent for their trips into the woods. If the person looking to buy a tent is searching for tips, advice, or guidance on which is the best tent for them – if your website has an informative, interesting, useful, and high-quality article on the subject, the potential customer might end up on your website reading it.
Once on your website, the reader could very well deem your business an expert on tents due to the quality of the article they just read. As they are already on your website, there’s a very real chance they will have a look around and could end up buying a tent from you despite not necessarily knowing about your business until they accidentally stumbled across your article.
Every e-commerce business owner knows the importance of SEO, and they also know how difficult it is to get it right. Creating quality content that people want to see, whether that be blog posts, product videos, review articles, or any other form of content, can be a very effective way of improving your website traffic without spending money. While creating quality content does take time and effort, if done well, you’ll likely be rewarded with increased traffic and sales on your e-commerce website.
Think About Influencers
Like social media, influencers can sometimes get a bad rep. While some may not have the morals and ethics you do, there are actually some influencers out there who could have a hugely positive impact on your e-commerce website.
In very basic terms, an influencer is someone who has a large following on social media. Not only do they have a lot of people follow them, but their followers listen to them, take their advice and guidance, and even buy products that they probably would never have been interested in unless the influencer told them to be. If you can find an influencer who fits your business niche, it could be worth reaching out to see if you can collaborate as part of a promotional strategy.
If we think about the e-commerce website that sells tents again, an influencer who is in the outdoor niche could be a great person to partner with. Let’s say your business has a range of tents available on your website. If you were to send one of these tents to the well-known outdoor influencer for them to write a blog post about, to share some photos on social media, and link to your website – you could quite easily see a big increase in traffic and sales.
You do need to be a bit careful with this method of promotion though. Partnering with the wrong influencer can have detrimental effects on your business so you’ll need to do plenty of research to make sure their beliefs coincide with yours. You’ll also need to be very clear about what you’re hoping to gain from your partnership. Most influencers will have promotional packages of blog posts, social media mentions, and alike so you’ll need to make sure they understand what you want from them.
Working with influencers is another way of promoting your business with minimal costs involved. Some influencers will promote your website in exchange for a free product or a discount code for their followers where they get a small percentage of the sales. While this may not be suitable for all e-commerce websites, influencers can certainly work for a lot of online businesses.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Probably the most talked-about aspect of promoting your e-commerce website is SEO. While most people have heard of SEO, there are much fewer people who actually understand it in enough detail to use it to the best of their ability.
SEO is all about making your website as easy to find as possible. Ideally, you want your website to show up on the first page of search engine results to give it the best chance of being seen by as many people as possible. The higher up the search results your website is, the more people will visit.
A lot of e-commerce business owners get confused by SEO but there are actually some simple things you can do to quickly improve your website’s ability to be found. The first is to ensure all content on your website is unique to you, is of high quality, and features specific keywords related to your business. Let’s go back to the tent selling business again – this website will want to show up in search results for terms related to tents. For example, if someone searches for topics with camping, outdoor equipment, tents, or other similar keywords in the search query, it would be very useful for the e-commerce tent business to show up. Having blog posts about these topics can go a long way in helping search engines recommend your website to more people.
Another relatively simple thing to do to help improve SEO is to use language that is natural and doesn’t seem fake. Google uses some very sophisticated algorithms to choose which websites show up in which position in its search results. While Google doesn’t openly say what its algorithm actually looks at, it does appear that natural-sounding language and flow of content play a part. This makes sense when you think that Google wants to recommend websites that will be most likely to be useful to the reader. If your website is full of sales terms, scripted content, and plagiarized content, it will likely be seen as a poor-quality website and won’t appear like a good choice to visit.
SEO is something many businesses seek help with. There are a large number of professionals who specialize in SEO tactics to get the most out of your website. It’s always worth trying to make some basic improvements yourself, but if you’re struggling to have the impact you want, then seeking help may be a good choice for you and your business.
Email Potential Customers
Email marketing still seems to play a big role in the marketing strategies of businesses all over the world. If you can get information about your e-commerce website directly into people’s inboxes, you will likely see an increase in the traffic on your site.
This is only the case if the emails you are sending are going to the right people though. Having thousands of contacts on your mailing list might seem like an impressive thing, but if none of them are actually interested in your business, then it’s no different from not having a mailing list at all.
Collecting the email addresses of potential customers means you can send them relevant emails that can help turn them from an interested party into a paying customer. There are two important aspects of email marketing – getting the right email addresses and then sending them the right content.
To get email addresses in the first place, you’ll need to be creative. You could put on some kind of competition where your business is giving away a product for free (or at a discounted price) to one person who enters the competition. To enter, people just need to provide their email address and name. This is a great way of collecting relevant email addresses as anyone entering the competition will likely want to win the product you’re giving away. This means that they have a strong interest in the products your website is selling. Even if they don’t win the competition, they could very well be interested in hearing from you about promotions, discounts, new products, and other exciting developments that they can find out more about by visiting your website.
The type of content you send to your mailing list needs to be carefully planned too. Even the frequency of your emails should be considered. Sending too many emails will likely cause people to unsubscribe from your mailing list, whereas not sending enough will make not make your business stick in the minds of your potential customers. You’ll also probably benefit from sending your list useful information that doesn’t directly try to convince them to buy something. Telling them about a new blog post or a new competition can go a long way in building your relationship with customers.
The whole point of email marketing is to get people to visit your website and, ultimately, make a purchase. It’s worth thinking about the importance of interaction, reputation, and relationships your business has with potential customers though. It could be more beneficial to use your mailing list as a way of showing how much your website can help people find the information they need, rather than offering to sell them lots of products. Once people are on your site, they will likely look around and could end up buying from you. Of course, this is the ultimate goal but sometimes an indirect email marketing strategy could be more effective at promoting your e-commerce website.
