Ecommerce Marketing Mistakes

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Gone are the days when you could stick a hoarding across the street and get customers to your store. It is the new era of business, and the opportunities are endless for you to explore.

What is Ecommerce Marketing?

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Ecommerce Marketing includes everything from brand awareness to sales and retaining customers post-sales. It is an online practice adopted by most companies to drive traffic to their online or offline stores.
The process involves certain tactics to generate traffic for your store and enhance certain sections' sales, especially to gain momentum in the average footfall you receive. It is a set of promotional activities to target your potential customers as per their gender, age group, tax slabs, and other similar parameters.
There is no limit to online platforms when it comes to Ecommerce marketing.
You can decide the number of platforms or services on a budget that you have set to get a certain audience group on your store to either shop from you or avail of a service you provide.

Importance of Ecommerce Marketing

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1. Ecommerce Gets You 24/7 Online Presence

By being present online 24/7, your store is no longer a brick and cement structure; it is rather a home for your product and services.
Broaden the spectrum of your business by making your products available to your customers all day long, such that they can shop what they want and when they want. If you look at the broader picture, when you are sleeping, your business is still flourishing.
While in a store, the moment you shut the door, you have yourself brought in a barrier between your clients and the products or services they need.
On the other hand, you have a free hand at expanding your business by operating it online, independent of your store's or customer's location. Moreover, you can use blogs, social media, guest posts, and more to your benefit.

2. Selling Through Ecommerce Is Convenient and Comfortable

More often, people prefer shopping from the comfort of their homes.
Consider a push and pull mechanism. When customers step out of their homes to purchase a product from a store, it takes effort and time. Therefore, it is a 'Pull' mechanism. Instead, you can make the product they want reach their doorstep. It is a 'Push' mechanism.
Your customer would not have to take the pain to step out, get on a vehicle, reach the store, shop, and return home to use it. Instead, he can just place the order in a few clicks and track it while it is shipped to him.
People are busy juggling their work shifts and tight schedules, they require a flexible way to shop everything from grocery to a house online, and it is conveniently doable.

3. Ecommerce Increases the Reach of Your Business

Ecommerce marketing helps you connect with people across the globe.
If you witness it from a distance, it might feel like a maze, but once you zoom in and see it from the lens of a strategist, you will understand that there are specific sets of protocols and strategies you can adopt, and you'll notice the change in numbers.
This will help not just the people in and around your area to buy from you but millions who can access your store through rectangle screens.
All they need is a stable internet connection. This way, your business can address the pain points of your customers and make them yours forever.
If you draw a comparison between the people you can reach offline versus online, your immediate reflex should be to move online and target millions of users.

4. Ecommerce Marketing Affects the Scalability of Your Business

Once your business starts booming and you start getting loyal customers, it will boost your business, and you would want to enhance your range of products to multiply the list of your potential customers.
This will upscale your business and develop it to address your customers' needs and cover all the supply and demand gaps.
Ecommerce marketing opens a whole new gateway to upscale your business and caters to all kinds of fluctuations that might affect your business cycle.
If you are having trouble finding a solution to a problem offline, why don't you try finding the answers online?

Important Ecommerce Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

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1. Not Aware of Basics of Business

You should be aware of what you are selling or providing. What is your goal?
Remember, the goal is meaningless if it does not have a timeline attached to it. Is your business idea something that solves the user's pain points?
You should align your Ecommerce website with the mission and vision of your business.
The purpose should be clear, and each strategy you adopt in Ecommerce marketing should be a step towards it. You should be clear about what kind of business model your company follows.
Is it always dependent on others to invest, or can it sustain itself for a good period without external funding?
Keep in mind; insufficient funding methodologies will take your business on the road to insolvency, which is not a good sign.

2. Not Knowing About Your Target Audience

The day you start your business, you should know that not everyone is your customer. There is only a section of people interested in your product and would ultimately be your buyers.
To know this, you need to understand the nitty-gritty of your business and who you should target.
For instance, if your product buyers are women between the age group of 23 to 45, there is no need to spend time and money on applications such an audience does not use.
First, you can look at the competitors and find your look-alike customers searching for similar products but on a different platform. This will drop some insinuations on approaching them and what you have to offer your competitors don't.

3. Not Having a Mobile-Friendly Website

If your Ecommerce website or any activity your company does online for promotional objectives is not mobile-friendly, it is pointless.
There is a bigger chunk of people who would open any website or page on their mobile phones rather than desktops. However, that does not mean that your website can take the liberty of being well versed with a mobile view and not compatible with other screens. It has to be robust.
In Ecommerce marketing, be mindful of your website's appearance, load time, icons, legibility, dark mode; everything matters.
For instance, if your website is extremely appealing and takes forever to open, then it is certain that your potential customer will bounce off and land on a competitors' website. They are once gone, consider them gone forever.

4. Not Having an Effective Design and Layout

If you wish to have an Ecommerce platform, then the design and layout should be clear from the beginning. Users tend to stay on a website with an impressive design for a longer duration.
Your website has a lot to do with the look and feel, how it looks, and how the users feel after using it. Your website should help them locate the right things at the right place without any hassle.
The users should navigate easily from one page to another, just like a flowchart showing them the directions. All the menu options, buttons should be functional.
Do not try and test your user's patience. Moreover, a website that does not make them land on an error page is considered a good one. The website should be safe as well compatible across screens.

5. Having an Inconsistent Ecommerce Platform

Consistency helps the user to relate to things. It acts like a key for him to operate through different sections of your website. You can test and try different color gradients across the web pages but try to maintain a consistent set of colors for similar portions of the website.
Fix it to three of four and stick to that. The same approach you can adopt with fonts. Do not meddle too much with them. Do not try to surprise your user with functionality. He should be able to access what he wants to through certain defined areas.
For instance, the 'About us' section of the website should talk about the company's story and not the product's page.
All multimedia files should have a similar format; e.g., the pictures should follow the same pattern for photo captions across all web pages.

Related : Best Ecommerce Platforms

6. Creating an Imbalance Between SEO and Content

Remember, it is not about your expertise in the language but the user's understanding that matters. Therefore, keep the terminology simple for the masses to understand and relate to.
If the website has good content but poor SEO, then it cannot work and vice versa. Both are the sides of the same coin and have to go hand-in-hand.
Ecommerce SEO will help your website crawl up on the search engine such that it is visible to users searching for certain keywords online.
Content creation is important, no doubt, but content distribution takes the higher road. After all the content you are creating has to reach the right audience, it is worth spending so much time and money on each word you type.

7. Confusing Check out Procedure

When the user has already added the product, he wants to buy to the cart, your website should not make him wait any further.
Within one or a maximum of two clicks, he should pay and be free from it.
However, when the user has added the product to the cart, instead of taking him to the payment gateway, if the website still shows some pop-ups or does not show the suitable payment options to choose from flexibly, he will certainly get irritated.
Further, that particular page needs to show the user the details of the product he has added and must accept the edits that the user is willing to make, in case any.

8. Including Inappropriate Captions and Multimedia Files

You should be aware that the user coming on your platform should receive authentic information both in text and audiovisual content.
It is important to be true to your content. Since the products are not tangible for the user, this virtual experience should be equivalent to real such that he gets to know about the product as much as possible.
The information on the website should clear all his doubts about the product and the brand.
The information should be concise yet in an enticing language such that it eases the customer's decision to buy the product. It is one of the best ways to reinforce your user's trust in the company and the commodity.
Always remember the best way to give information is to keep it simple.

9. Not Paying Heed to Your Customers

When companies start growing in size, they make one big mistake. They stop listening to what their customers have to say. Ecommerce marketing is a boon if you don't forget that your customer is the king.
Turning deaf ears to your users can prove devastating because you are lost in your echo chambers without addressing what your customers want to see or buy. It is important to understand that a company's role does not end as soon as it purchases the product.
Good customer service will help you retain your customers forever. They decide to buy something only when it is a quality product with an end-to-end service. Both should go hand-in-hand.
Your marketing should be such that when your customer thinks of your brand, he should only rate you five on five.

10. Overthinking and Never-Ending Iterations

In any Ecommerce website, there are high chances that you might get lost mid-way once you start focusing on micro details and forget the bigger picture.
Functioning of such a kind for any Ecommerce marketing amplifies the number of iterations. It leads to too much to and fro in each process.
This gives rise to miss management of teamwork and ultimately becomes an even bigger crisis among the team members. Sometimes you need to look at the road ahead and zoom out a bit to view the overall scenario so that processes can start moving.
Making mistakes is part and parcel of Ecommerce or any business, for that matter. The main plan should be to get started but keep eyes and ears open for any changes or updates required.

11. Not Improvising on Ecommerce Marketing Strategies

Ecommerce marketing shapes the realm of your company. Therefore, it should ideally form the crux to support your business plunge higher.
To make your product sellable, you should know what works. If you are skeptical about adopting any changes, then the doomsday for your business is just a turn away. Explore different options in Ecommerce marketing and take the upper hand on them.
For instance, show different ads or posts to your customers narrating your brand story and virtues about the products to build their trust in your business and retargeting your potential customers to buy your articles or avail your services.
If you are not willing to explore the world of online business, you might struggle to get leads, and conversions will certainly be a far-fetched dream.

12. Not Analyzing the Numbers

For every effort you put in, make sure you fetch the data and look at it. Deduce them and see what it is doing to your business.

Related : SEO Data: What is it? And Its Importance for Your Business

Change your plans and methodologies accordingly and focus on what you can do to improvise on them. Do not expect things will change in a day or two. Things take time, and you need to tweak your strategy accordingly. You can try using different methods of Ecommerce marketing and let the numbers guide you. Learn from the mistakes you have made and apply them in the next campaign. It is suggested not to get overwhelmed by these reports at once. Slowly and steadily, all these numbers will start making sense to you, and so will the strategies of your Ecommerce platform.

Ecommerce Marketing Tools

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1. Sending Out Newsletters or Emailers

Educate your target audience with something meaningful. Do not bore them by praising your own business. Enhance their knowledge and give them the go-ahead to be your subscriber forever. Ensure your newsletter is heavy on the visuals and less on text with a prominent call to action that makes the user click and reach your platform. It should have a captivating subject line and preview text that arouses the user's curiosity and makes them open your emailer out of thousands that end up in his mailbox.

2. Campaigning Through Digital Marketing Ads

Digital marketing ads are a great way to set up a trail for your users. Incorporate a funnel that marks the user's journey from not being aware of your business to becoming your loyal customer. There are various stages involved, but the process begins with:

• Brand awareness,
• Visiting your Ecommerce website,
• Seeing the product,
• Adding it to the cart, and
• Finally purchasing it.

You can show them such ads with impressive visuals and crisp content. It not only addresses their needs but also evokes their desires. Also, it makes them fall into your potential customers' bucket.

3. Making Use of Google Analytics

If you wish to see your efforts' fruit, you must use it to see how your website's content is performing. It is an efficient tool that you can use in your business to derive insights and strategize accordingly. With the help of this tool, you will be able to understand the number of visitors on your Ecommerce platform, what were the sessions, on which pages the users viewed, what call to actions invited them enough to click, where they landed, and how many of them bounced off.

4. Marketing Using Text SMS

With this new era of applications, text SMS is an old form of communication, but it is efficient. Nowadays, text notification is good enough to catch immediate attention. You have a small length of characters to communicate your point to your target audience. The best way is to get to the point and provide them with a link to click on and reach on the landing page where you want them to. You can even send bulk messages; it is a quick way to attract many.

5. Using SEO Tools

You need to make use of SEO tools that give you insights on organic traffic visiting your platform. You should optimize your website as per mobile phones as a wide majority of people look up any website on their phones rather than other screens. If you want them to visit your physical store, make sure your website is compatible with mobile phones for the users first to glance through. This will even help fresh users be aware of your business and build a better database for your platform.

Ecommerce Marketing Mistakes FAQs

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1. Is Ecommerce Marketing or Sales?

Ecommerce marketing is a process that involves each step, from making people aware of the fact that you exist as a brand and converting them into your customers. It is a practice to boost the sales of your stores both online and offline.

2. Is Ecommerce Marketing the Same as Digital Marketing?

No, Ecommerce marketing is a superset of digital marketing. It adopts many digital marketing practices. It goes a step ahead to involve other factors, such as advertising in

• Print media,
• Activities to enhance store walk-ins,
• Prompting through mutual collaborations and events, etc.

3. How Is Ecommerce Useful in Marketing?

Ecommerce marketing is a great way to pull customers worldwide. Moreover, as you are operating online, you give the users the flexibility to look for and purchase the product they want at their convenience. In a physical store, your users are time-bound, while online, your store is always available to them in their pocket.

4. How Do I Promote My Ecommerce Store?

There are several ways to do that. You can send out mailers, approach your potential customers through social media, create share-worthy content, use SEO, try digital marketing through ads, and the list is endless.

5. What Are the Components of a Great Ecommerce Strategy?

There are various components but to name a few:

• Know who your target audience is.
• Have a clear business model.
• Focus on retaining your customers.
• Be consistent in terms of branding.
• Present yourself in a way that you get highlighted as there is a huge range of competitors.

Speak to our ecommerce marketing experts to avoid making these ecommerce marketing mistakes.