How to run marketing campaigns that boost your online store

To keep growing sales for your online store, you naturally need to offer products that match demand, but you also need to increase your site’s traffic. After all, you could have the most beautiful shop in the world — if nobody visits it, you won’t get a single order. Here are some of the most effective marketing strategies to grow your traffic and your sales volume.

Work on your store’s design and navigation

Before launching marketing campaigns, your store needs to feel both welcoming and reassuring, while its navigation should be intuitive and simple. From the homepage, your visitor should be able to access a clear offer. They should be able to browse easily, with a minimum number of clicks.

Your products must be well presented, with explicit descriptions. At a glance, your prospect should understand what the product is for, what’s included in the order, and what options are available. Spend time on your storefront and ask for outside opinions, since you lack perspective on your own shop.

Track abandoned shopping carts

The abandoned cart rate before checkout completion reaches nearly 70%. That represents a considerable loss that needs to be reduced. You can send an email to your prospect to follow up. To help them get past their hesitations, you can offer an incentive, such as a discount (on this purchase or the next one), reduced shipping fees, and so on.

Include all the necessary details in your email, along with a direct link, to make it as simple as possible to return to the cart.

Run this type of campaign regularly to stay top of mind with visitors who showed interest in your offer.

Promote upselling

You have tools available — Bold Upsell, One Click Upsell, Frequently Bought Together, and more — that encourage your customer to buy products complementary to their choice and/or higher-end products. The idea is to add the suggestion “Would you be interested in this product?” into the sales funnel.

This marketing technique proves effective, especially since it doesn’t come across as aggressive to the visitor. You’re making a suggestion, and they’re free to respond or not. For the process to work, make sure that:

• the products suggested are related in some way to the initial product;
• the price difference doesn’t seem excessive;
• if it’s an upgrade rather than a complementary product, the suggested product must offer real added value.

You can launch marketing campaigns encouraging your prospects to add products to their cart or upgrade by offering them a special deal, such as reduced shipping fees, for example.

Collect emails and communicate with your visitors

Collecting emails lets you build email marketing campaigns afterward. You communicate with your visitors and keep them informed about your store’s evolution, new product arrivals, upcoming promotions, and so on.

Write fairly short emails, with a single piece of information, so as not to blur the message you’re sending. Always keep in mind that internet users are heavily solicited, which should motivate you to write concise copy. Never send messages if you don’t have interesting information to share, and don’t send excessively often, as your readers might unsubscribe or, worse, send you straight to their spam folder.

Run regular email campaigns and review the statistics for each one. You can see the percentage of emails opened, as well as the percentage of recipients who took action after receiving the email. Refine your message each time to improve your statistics.

Complement your e-commerce store with a Facebook shop

Facebook remains the go-to, long-established social network. Running your professional Facebook page increases your traffic while also serving as a channel for additional sales. In fact, 76% of adults who have already made a purchase through a social network chose Facebook.

Apps such as Payvment, Facebook Channel, or Storefront Social let you easily set up a shop directly on your Facebook page.

Rely on Instagram for your marketing strategy

Instagram is still going strong and enjoys a very high engagement rate: 2.26% in 2020, while Facebook plateaus at 1% for the same period. The hugely popular social network claims that 44% of its users make a purchase every week, thanks to features that let you tag products from your catalog.

These figures should encourage you to grow your Instagram presence and interact with your followers. An app like Instafeed, for example, automatically integrates and updates your Instagram feed in connection with your store.

Go fishing for reviews

Buyer reviews and comments are valuable, as they act as social proof for your visitors. These short texts inspire confidence and overcome many of your prospects’ objections or hesitations. They can also influence your organic search ranking, since they generate content containing keywords, and often long-tail keywords too.

That’s why you should systematically ask your customers to leave a review and run campaigns targeting past buyers to help build your store’s reputation. You can use an app like Trustpilot, Custplace, or Product Reviews to help you collect and display customer reviews of your products.

Launch advertising campaigns

Google Ads remains, to this day, the advertising platform most favored by online sellers. You might also want to look into Facebook advertising, whose return on investment can prove particularly attractive.

Whichever channel you choose, you need to thoroughly track your campaigns. These platforms provide you with analytics tools that let you understand precisely how the people reached by your ads behave. This is how you verify that you’re targeting the right audience and assess how effective your ad messages are.

Analyze your online store’s financial investment

Your marketing campaigns require a financial investment that must be measured and controlled. You need to think carefully about every euro you invest and make sure it isn’t wasted, which is why you should pay particular attention to tracking your statistics.

On top of that, using e-commerce accounting software like Bizyness proves essential for integrating your marketing and advertising expenses into your bookkeeping. It should also help you extract and sort your data using custom exports, which help you assess the quality of your return on investment.