How Multichannel Marketing Can Help to Elevate Your E-Commerce ROI

In today’s marketing world, consumers have a better grip on the buying process than marketers do. Prospects are present everywhere, and they want more. In fact, according to the fourth Annual Consumer Insights survey, over 70 percent of consumers have reportedly preferred a multi-channel marketing approach from online stores.

It is indeed ‘the more, the merrier’ scenario. With competitors constantly breathing down the neck, fighting for the top spot of the search engine result pages (SERPs) is no longer the single-most effective option for e-commerce sites. Just search with a common phrase such as ‘buy Samsung Galaxy S6’, and you’ll know what we mean. With Pay Per Click or PPC text and image adverts from leading online stores ruling the top of the roster, what chance do you have at success other than multichannel marketing?

Relying on multichannel marketing for e-commerce

There is no denying the fact that multichannel marketing poses greater challenges, especially when it comes to managing such wide range of customers. However, it also opens up newer avenues to reach consumers. If done with proper planning, this marketing strategy holds the power to elevate your e-commerce return on investment (ROI) in no time at all.

Sticking to a single marketing channel, such as search engine optimization (SEO), is not a smart move anymore. As an e-commerce marketer, your aim should be to utilize both the direct and indirect channels of customer interaction – direct mails, email newsletters, website, retail stores, mail order catalogs, and social networks – and encourage prospective clients to buy your products.

This combination of some effective traditional ways (such as direct mail and telemarketing) of advertising along with the latest Web 2.0 media channels helps to create a strong media convergence model. According to the Multichannel Maturity Mandate published by Forrester, a US-based market research company, 86 percent of marketers have agreed that this integration of numerous marketing channels aids in long-term success by making it easier to target customer interactions, orchestrate highly choreographed touch points and monitor them using high-end Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools.

Also read: 10 M-Commerce Tips – How To Ace The Next Big Thing

How can multichannel marketing help?

Chances of things going wrong in multichannel marketing are quite slim. As it is ‘multi’ channel, there will be other platforms to rely on when one medium falters. Wondering whether this is the only benefit or not? Here are some other advantages of this marketing strategy:

1. Understanding the customer: Once you reach out to customers via different channels, you also start receiving a wide variety of feedback. These responses make it easier to figure out their exact demands from your products. You can not only figure out the best performing channel, but also determine the factors required to be improved upon.

2. Better revenue: If you are using a wide variety of channels, greater are your chances to gain more number of potential customers.  For example, if you are promoting your e-commerce store just on Facebook, you’re missing out on people who are more frequent in online classified websites. If you include these websites into your marketing mix, you’ll be able to grab more number of eyeballs. The net result — your store will generate better (read bigger) revenue.

The future of e-commerce is in multichannel marketing, and time is NOW. Therefore, buckle up and embrace the future in order to enjoy a successful online shopping campaign.

Want help in determining the best marketing strategy for e-commerce store? Contact us here.

The ‘App-Only’ Strategy – How Prudent Is It for Your Business

With the number of unique mobile users across the world currently being  a whopping 3.5 billion, introducing mobile applications into the present marketing machinery is no longer a choice; it’s a must to achieve entrepreneurship success. The catch, however, is whether to go app-first, app-later, or app-only. After all, jumping on to the app bandwagon is certainly not the only thing that you can hold on to in order to outwit your competitors in the ecommerce sector. Solidifying your brand via desktop and mobile websites is imperative. Saying so, wondering what’s with online retailers such as Myntra and Flipkart risking to go ‘only app’? We find out:

 The big switch

According to a survey by US-based financial services corporation, Morgan Stanley, India’s online shopping penetration is predicted to grow from 9 percent in 2013 to 36 percent in 2020. Myntra didn’t want to leave any stone unturned to grab a share of this big cookie or so it appears to be. Justifying their complete switch, Mukesh Bansal, Myntra co-founder, was quoted saying that desktops were not giving the same ROI as they used to. The business was drawing 70 percent of sales and 80 percent of traffic from its mobile app only.

This move, however, has been a hard pill to swallow for the generation of desktop lovers, who love to shop via their personal computers (PCs). In fact, Alok Kejriwal, the CEO and co-founder of Games2win, in his article went on to heavily criticize this ‘app-only’ approach, calling it nothing but a ‘cost-cutting measure’. “Starving people of access to large, popular Internet brands and making them available only via an app is a premeditated strategy to significantly reduce sales volume,” stated Kejriwal, who feels that a reputed website is equivalent to a well-known store on a busy market area. Shoppers can move from one store to another, haggling until they find their pick. It’s completely their choice whether they visit this well-known store or not. On the other hand, a dedicated app is like an exclusive private store, where the shoppers’ choice to compare is a lot more restricted. Not just Kejriwal, many other industry experts, too, feel that by going ‘app-only’, these online retailers have controlled consumer behavior, and this can make them “feel stifled (we are trained to google options and compare prices) and may never come back.”

How ‘app-only’ benefits Flipkart and Myntra?

Kejriwal’s view received sharp censure from the Sachin Bansal, the CEO of Flipkart, the parent company of Myntra. He almost slammed Kejriwal, tagging his handle @rodinhood on microblogging site, Twitter, saying: when he tweeted, saying, “One of the most retarded pieces of writing I’ve read in a long time. @rodinhood: Bhai tu rehne de… (sic)”

Well, considering Myntra was getting more traffic and conversions from its app, the decision to adopt the ‘app-only’ strategy was nothing short of a masterstroke by the company. Aimed to cut losses from sales via delivery costs, returns etc and even from infrastructure, by going ‘app only’, businesses like these can in fact benefit from the present m-commerce scenario in India.

India hasjust started experiencing the full-fledged potential of mobile devices. The mobile phenomenon is penetrating the sub continent with increasing speed every day, making Tier II and Tier III cities get greater access to smartphones and Internet connection, so much that the country is slated to become the second largest smartphone market in 2016. Besides, the mobile app market in India doesn’t have an alpha yet so this is undoubtedly the right time to invest in a standalone app strategy. However, implementation is the key here. It will be nothing short of suicidal for a newly-opened business to think that it’ll find success with its app straightaway. An ‘app-only’ approach can be adopted by a business only when its website is popular, and it has already established its brand presence in the marketplace.

Want to go the app way with your business? Consult with us here.

E-Store Vs. Online Marketplace – What is Good for Your Small Business?

According to Remarkety, a US-based marketing platform for e-commerce, there are over 190 million online buyers in the United States alone. However, only 28 percent of US small businesses have made their products available for online shoppers. With competition in the e-commerce sphere not yet to turn aggressive among small businesses, it opens up a huge scope for you to go online and find retail success.

Before moving forward, it’s however important for you to decide which model of online selling you want to opt for? Should you revamp yourexisting website and start your own dedicated e-store or should you opt for an online marketplace and list your products on that website? The answer lies in the size of your business and your brand (recognition) value. If both fare high, an e-store is the obvious choice. If not, why not set shop in a thriving ‘marketplace’, and make the most of its popularity!

Why choose a marketplace?

You must have made umpteen purchases from eBay, Amazon or Etsy, haven’t you? Do these sites manufacture the products they sell? No. They are all online marketplaces. Here, shoppers have the option to try out a wide range of products listed by the respective brands on the site. A vendor has to pay the website (read market place), a certain percentage of sales on its products that are here, while the owner of this website handles the responsibility of managing the monetary transactions and attracting the customers.

The sole reason why you should sell your products on online marketplaces is to tap into a massive rate of daily traffic. The community programs manager at Etsy, Susannah Bradley feels, “With over 19.8 million active buyers worldwide, Etsy offers the potential to get in front of a huge global audience. With free listing codes for new sellers, there is 0% investment until an item has been sold”. Smorgasbords such as Etsy is a great option for small and growing businesses, where they can quickly reach a wealth of customers at an affordable rate.

WORLD’S LEADING MARKETPLACES AT A GLANCE

WEBSITE NAME	TRAFFIC
amazon.com	Reaches over 77 million Americans, monthly
eBay.com	Reaches over 77 million Americans, monthly
etsy.com	Reaches over 9 million Americans, monthly
flipkart.com	Reaches over 23 million Indians, monthly
snapdeal.com	Reaches over 17 million Indians, monthly

GOING WITH AN E-STORE

You can obviously take the big leap of turning your own website into an exclusive e-store when shoppers are well acquainted with your brand. However, for a small business that’s yet to find a strong footing in the competitive market, it’s probably a bit too early to take that risk.  With hordes of big names acting as competitors, products from small businesses often run the risk of being ignored. When shopping virtually, people tend to prefer trusted brands they are familiar with. However, there have been instances of small businesses creating their own e-commerce stores, too. With precisely targeted paid advertising now running amuck on social networking sites, these businesses are effectively using platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to make people more aware of their products. Once your brand is a popular one, online shoppers will visit you directly and buy your products from your own e-commerce store. This will also save you of the commission to be paid to the marketplace owner on sold items. All you need is a little upfront cost during the promotional phase. To begin with, you can first list yourself on a popular marketplace, and once your brand name and products gain popularity, you can kick start your own online shop!

 Need help listing your product in a marketplace or want to designyour personal e-store at an affordable price? We can help you with both. Contact us here.

Five Ways To Drive Traffic To Your e-Commerce Site Round The Year

Remember Christmas or Halloween, a time of the year when products almost jumped out from your store’s crammed shelves and reached your customers’ doorstep! You kept reassuring yourself whether your servers could manage the daily rush of enthusiastic shoppers during the holiday season. Come summer, are you tad disappointed that you do not have enough customers who are on a shopping spree? Worry not, there are some smart ways to shoot up your ecommerce sales even during the lean months. Here’s how:

 

1. Make the Most of Your Facebook Page

If you think that you can improve your site’s traffic simply by posting a few words now and then on your Facebook page, you are treading the wrong way. Derive maximum benefits from your Facebook page by doing a meticulous page audit. Ask yourself the following questions: :

• What kind of content  am I posting? Are there enough product images and information?
• How frequently am I  making these posts?
• Are my posts interesting and diverse? For example, you can post a video showing how your products can simplify a customer’s problems

After you’ve implemented the answers to the above questions, concentrate on the following tasks:

• Learn what your targeted audience is saying about your posts, and take their comments seriously.
• Conduct polls and surveys to know what your buyers actually want. Attract your customers’ attention by introducing a small quiz or caption contest related to your merchandise.

Focus on the above mentioned ecommerce marketing tips, and you can acquire at least double the likes, thus generating increased traffic to your primary website.

2. Get Inspired from the Past Festive Seasons

Last Christmas, your merchandise sold like hot cakes, thanks to some smart marketing tactics that you embraced to drive the sales. Great! Then, why not draw inspiration from the best practices that and come up with similar effective campaign by restructuring your strategies, content, and tweaking your marketing copy during the other part of the year, too.

3. Spoil Your Customers with Free Samples or Merchandise at Slashed Prices

Let’s not forget the age-old form of marketing. For instance, if you’re dealing with makeup and cosmetics for women, how about offering a free sample of your anti-aging cream or announcing a lucrative deal such as a flat 20% discount for the first 100 women who like your fan page?

4. Say ‘Yes’ to Instagram      

      

Pictures are worth a thousand words. How appropriate this adage is! Instagram, a social site primarily dedicated to visuals, has an engrossed audience of more than 100 million individuals. Photo contests with your brand’s hashtag could be a great way to get them interacting with your brand activities. For example, you can ask your followers to post photos of their kids wearing your products. You can even design a microsite and have Instagram photos feed right away into that site. 

5. Pay per Click (PPC)

Traffic generated via pay per click advertising has more chances of converting into actual customers, provided there is useful and engaging content on the page. PPC is more beneficial for large businesses. If you use it on platforms like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, it could be pretty effective for small businesses, too.

So, don’t wait for the holiday season to put your best foot forward. Employ these tips, and enjoy traffic throughout the year. Need help with traffic and marketing for your e-commerce site? Mail us at info@codeuridea.com or call us at +1 (813) 200-7229. 

Boost E-commerce Conversion Rate – Here are 10 ways

If you have invested a lot of money in e-commerce web development to create a great looking site that is user-friendly, easy to navigate and loads fast, but yet to see a decent turnover, there is perhaps one area that remains unaddressed – implementing right strategies to boost conversion. Well, you are not alone;  over 50 percent of businesses commit the same mistake, reveals  a recent research. It stated that 53 percent of businesses spend more than 95 percent of their marketing budget on boosting website traffic. Ironically, they spend only a meager five percent on activities that could actually boost conversion rates — the ratio of visitors coming to a site and visitors that are converted into paying customers. Poorly optimized pages can negatively impact a website’s search ranking in the long run. Here are 10 tips to increase the conversion rate of your e-commerce site:

1.       Implement Clutter-Free Design: Simple page design helps your prospects spot the deal right away. The page lay-out should be such that it gives maximum exposure to the products.

2.       Say It With Videos: When it comes to explaining the benefits of a product, there is nothing like moving images. Embed short and crisp product videos to convey your brand story in a more effective manner. Create a better experience for your prospects, and see the difference. Just look at how  fashion store ASOS makes clever use of interesting and fun videos on every product page to showcase their clothing line-up.

3.       Dedicate a Page To Announce Special Deals: Consumers love to shop cheap, and therefore they always crave for discounts.  Make the most of their craving by posting about the deals right on your home page. Highlight your offers through bold fonts, bright colors etc. It is also important to guide your visitors through a clear navigation path to help them find the stuff  that falls under the purview of the special deal. For example, fashion brand 6pm has a dedicated, easy-to-spot banner-location to display the products on sale.

4.       Make Them Act: Call-to-action features should be placed prominently on your product page. Use large, colorful ‘buy now’ or ‘add to cart’ buttons and place them below the product price to easily grab your prospects’ attention, and to lure them into completing a purchase.

5.       Keep Loyal Customers Happy: Keep a track of purchases and surfing behavior of those visitors, who return to your website.  Now going by their shopping or surfing pattern, add a ‘recommended products’ section to showcase the products they are most likely to appreciate.

6.       Pricing and Shipping: Clearly state the pricing and shipping details. Hidden costs put off customers. If you have any shipping charge, mention it alongside each product and let customers take an informed decision.  

7.       Design a Smart Cart: Save the shopping cart contents to allow user to retrieve it later. Alternatively, offer to send cart contents through emails. All these will help you linger in your visitors’ memory for a longer span of time.

8.       Build An Easy Checkout Page: Keep your checkout process simple. Keep the shipping details form brief. Offer multiple payment options to make shopping enjoyable for your prospects.

9.       Facilitate hassle-free returns: It goes without saying that offering a generous and easy return policy is a must. What’s more important is to make this process smooth and hassle-free. Avoid inclusion of too many steps, and don’t forget to add a contact number on the ‘Returns’ page, so that the buyer can talk to the authority concerned and resolve the issue as quick as possible. Leave room for an exchange offer to turn returns into resale.

10.   Offer Live Chat: This small box at the bottom right corner of a site can go a long way to add credibility to start-up ventures. In addition, provide detailed contact information to boost the customer’s confidence in your products and service.

Use these tricks and notice a surge in your sales. Need help to boost the conversion rate of your e-commerce portal? Contact us here.

Five E-Commerce Platforms For Online Stores – Which One Must You Go For?

With global e-commerce evolving at an extremely  fast pace, the demand for the right platform has become the need of the hour. Ascertaining which platform is apt for your online store is a challenging task,  more so if you are a new player in the marketplace.

This piece, about the five most-preferred e-commerce platforms, will make your task simpler and help you opt for the one that is most suitable for your business needs.

1.     Magento

With almost 21% of the world’s most popular e-commerce sites developed using Magento, it’s the obvious choice of store owners. It has a huge number of extensions and plugins that help  incorporate new functionalities. The main benefits include:

• A powerful platform with outstanding functionality and customization options
• Less development and maintenance costs
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) friendly
• An extremely active community thus leaving room for any help with troubleshooting options and tutorials
• Highly scalable

2.     WooCommerce

A WordPress (WP) plugin is most apt for e-commerce website development on the WP platform. It comes with just about all the essential features that are found in other open source content management systems. The key benefits of WooCommerce are:

• Easy to setup
• User-friendly and affordable for small businesses
• Huge support community
• Runs on WP; so there is no requirement for powerful servers
• Several inexpensive themes and add-ons

3.     BigCommerce

BigCommerce is another sought-after platform with approximately 17% of the best 100,000 websites across the world using its hosted solutions. Two of its biggest  benefits are:

• Simple  interface
• Huge knowledge base with ample help resources

4.     Drupal

Drupal is another popular open source website content management system (CMS) whose flawless integration gives online store owners a competitive edge, especially when it comes to incorporation of blogs. As far as content marketing is concerned, Drupal helps in the easy accomplishment of SEO strategies, too.

5.     Prestashop

With Prestashop, setting up your online store or adding products is super easy. It also has a host of SEO features. This e-commerce platform also scores well when it comes to maintenance. Prestashop development comes with more than 300 features, making it a robust platform for startups or small businesses who can’t afford to spend extravagantly on ecommerce solutions. Some of its outstanding features are:

• Customizable templates and layered navigation
• Unlimited currencies, infinite product and inventory management, analytics and reporting
• Multi-store management

As you can gather, every ecommerce platform has some edge over the other. Do not be confused. Just hire webdevelopment company, who can help you choose the right e-commerce platform that best suits your online business model and needs.

Need help setting up your e-commerce portal? Contact us here