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Top 10 eCommerce Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

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When it comes to eCommerce, driving business is achieved online by increasing traffic to your site. You can adopt one or many ecommerce marketing strategies across several channels available online to get more clicks to your site. Effective marketing tactics can help you with lead generation, customer acquisition, engagement and finally, retention.
Ecommerce marketing almost always takes a holistic approach and uses a combination of a variety of tools available online to drive traffic. Businesses, both large and small, make use of social media platforms, digital content, SEO and email marketing to help garner online sales.
Whether you have a brick & mortar store or not, in today’s digital world, it is imperative to divest some resources into online marketing. Online marketing can be used to promote the brand in its entirety or a particular product. This allows you to optimize the cost of figuring out a continuous marketing strategy that works best for your firm.
Although you may need to run online marketing through the year regularly, it still compares to be way more cost-effective than traditional methods like newspaper advertisements, digital signages or TV. The best part about social media is that if you know what you’re doing, you can effectively run campaigns year-round and generate new customers consistently, unlike traditional marketing methods that take on a more seasonal approach. However, if you don’t optimize your sales funnel, you may run into a soup in that the generated leads don’t convert to acquisitions.

1. Not knowing who is your target audience

Whether your advertising is paid or unpaid, you may be dispensing valuable resources to put out generic ads leading to high costs and no leads. With so much competition out there, the most crucial aspect of online sales, unlike traditional marketing, is to target only the audiences you want on your site. Defining your TG, looking up keyword searches, and producing content that works well specifically for your target audiences is critical in ensuring that you generate the right kind of leads. Otherwise, you may end up getting a lot of site visits, pay a lot for your marketing, and get little to no acquisitions – only because you are targeting the wrong audience with your campaigns.

2. Improper product description

A product description is an illustration of the value that the item could provide for your customer. With online marketing, you should remember that the product has to sell itself. It is required that product descriptions are both informative and engaging. Falling short on either count would allow your competitors an upper hand as you are not portraying your USP correctly. Use well-recognized content creators and stay consistent across channels to get the best results.

3. Not using Social Proof

Garnering audiences who are engaged, informed and socially active is the key to good marketing online. To nudge this process a little, you can collaborate with online influencers who connect well to your target group. Peer-to-peer marketing is vital in driving online sales as it is a form of trust-building exercise in the online world. Even if you don’t use influencers, stay present and active on social media and push loyal customers for reviews in exchange for discounts and loyalty points. This way, your customers themselves become your marketers – the proof of the pudding in essence.

4. Poor Customer Service

When you’re in the thick of the marketing game, sometimes you may tend to ignore the ones who’ve already found you. While it is essential to pat yourself on the back for doing good marketing, after-sales care is crucial in determining whether your acquired customers are coming back or churning. Customer engagement statistics speak volumes about your service, rather than your marketing strategies. However, the key thing to remember is that you DO NOT want to fall into the traps of bad reviews as the online world is extremely vocal. Having informed customer service representatives, using chat boxes and providing contact forms can help customers contact you first before they take you on in a public forum.

5. Poor User Experience

In a bid to increase website clicks to rank in the SERPs or reduce churns, you may wind up making your website a problematic experience for your customers. As convenient online marketing is, one cannot negate the pitfalls of an online experience over purchases in an actual brick & mortar store. The customer has to have enough trust in your brand, as the product he/she is purchasing is not tangible, and there is no “try-before-you-buy” model with online sales. Showing your product in use, making your site map simple, optimizing your page speeds and creating an easy-breezy shopping experience is key to having good deals online.

6. Poor experience in mobile devices

6.1 Everything is mobile now

Before we address how to be mobile-friendly, we should understand why this is important in the first place. Mobile-first is a commonly used phrase in the online marketing world – and rightly so. For starters, your ranking on Google is affected by whether you are mobile responsive! Secondly, most of your online ads are bound to be viewed on mobile devices. Those who see your ads and are tempted to click to find out more will land on a website from their mobile device. If you do not provide a comfortable experience on mobile, you will automatically be disqualified as a well-to-do company from the user’s perspective. Being mobile-friendly is vital in driving online sales.

6.2 A website not optimized for mobile devices

Given that landing pages for social media links or ads on your website, you must build a responsive website that scales well. If you use trusted sites like Shopify or WordPress for your store, you can be assured that you won’t fail in this aspect. Even so, while choosing themes, make sure that your idea itself scales well and try the site on all devices before purchasing your item. If you don’t use trusted sites, you can add in the auto-resize function to ensure mobile responsiveness. Having a comprehensive CSS is key. It may take more time, but it is well worth the effort.

7. Poor Content Marketing Efforts

7.1 Content is king – use it wisely

Online content is everything that your customer sees about you before they have your product in their hands. Crucial to good online marketing, making your content foolproof is vital in understanding what marketing channels work for you and what doesn’t. Using well-reputed ad-copy writers, researching SEO well and using graphics, infographics, and imagery available online to your advantage drives business value and can show your customer how well-equipped with the latest tools, trends, and techniques. Do thorough research on what works for your audience and what doesn’t – the worst thing you can do to your brand persona is to be boring. Use stories and other mediums to engage with your audience, rather than simply have words on a background stock image.

7.2 Video Content

It is important to note that 2020 has brought a new era of digital marketing. Short videos like Instagram and YouTube stories were such a big hit that other channels are now trying to bring in more video and less static words and imagery. The next trend in video marketing is going to be shoppable videos! Be prepared for bringing in the latest trends into your marketing kitty this year. 51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI – so much so, that the next best-seller email is also integrating video into its channel. Get going with the times and explore what you can do with video – whether it be product demonstrations, reviews or something new and different.

8. Poor Email marketing automation set up

Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of communicating with your audience regularly. But the effectiveness is entirely dependent on how well you handle it. If you keep dropping the same old with new subject lines, you are likely to hit spam. Get inventive and innovative. Email marketing aims to push consumers to categorize you rather than spam you. And the way to achieve this is to personalize. Use tools that can help you address your customer by the name – this way, you ensure that you aren’t ignored. Secondly, make sure that you segment your data well while running drip campaigns. Generics don’t work in the online world. Get as specific as possible to improve leads.

8.1 Email marketing automation tools

Email marketing is big, and you can use many tools available online to optimize your strategies. Here are a few that are especially helpful:
  • OptinMonster
OptinMonster is the ultimate solution to effective drip campaigns. OptinMonster allows you to build landing pages and contact forms in minutes. Moreover, it also uses analytics to segment leads and customers based on behavior.
  • RafflePress
One of the best ways to generate leads online is to run contests. RafflePress allows you to host games on blogs and social media platforms.
  • HubSpot
A pioneer in the digital marketing world, HubSpot can handle a spectrum of tasks, including and not limited to, streamlining email marketing services with automated workflows.
  • Hatchbuck
If you are new to segmenting, you can create a similar model manually using HatchBuck. Create tags and assign them to specific contacts using HatchBuck.

9. Poor Social Media Engagement

Social media allows you to bring your brand persona alive. It helps you create the ethos you want in the online world and determines your success and failures in marketing. You must stay engaged with your loyal customers so that you keep serving constant reminders in a fun and informative way. Your social media engagement determines the loyal customer base.

9.1 Not consistent

It’s easy to pat yourself on the back when you’ve built your online media to have XX number of followers. But the journey doesn’t end there. If you don’t stay engaged, the competition will take over and quickly your customers will shift goalposts to newer brands who seem to be more “alive”. Ensure that you regularly put up new content that evokes spontaneous reactions from your loyal customer base. Provide your audience with fun experiences regularly.

9.2 Not knowing your target customers

Again to drive home the first point, your entire online content is built around what your customers like. The millennials connect well with temporary online formats more than the usual generic posts. Build your base well and expand organically as you go.

10. Not analyzing the result of your efforts

A no-brainer, the most valuable aspect of online marketing that traditional marketing fails at, the analytics of the online world is clear cut. Take email, for example, you know exactly how many customers open your emails, and how many sites visits you get through the mail. Keeping an eye on analytics determines how you can do better the next time over. The great thing about social media is that it allows you to experiment and learn from your failures, as much as your successes.

10.1 Setup analytics

Using tools like Google Web Analytics gives you an overall picture of how well your ad campaigns and your website content is working out for you. You can also use tools like Hotjar to help you understand what customers do when they reach your site. However, it is most crucial that you use email marketing services that provide you with analytics tools so that you have a clear picture of your online strategies.

Conclusion

Online marketing is an endless venture in many ways and requires continuous efforts. AdNabu helps improve sales in Google Ads for eCommerce companies. If you are running search, shopping or display campaigns in Google Ads, Their software will be able to increase your sales. Keep the sales coming and ensure that you don’t make any of the above mistakes so that you get the most bang for your buck. The critical thing to remember is that online, you know that what you’re doing is working if your cost to acquire customers reduces over time.

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