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You’ve built an optimized store with products that consumers love, so how do you ensure your store stays top-of-mind for your current customers, fosters repeat buyers, and appeals to new prospects? Word-of-mouth is a powerful form of advertising, but you can’t just depend on customers who love your brand to tell others to open a web browser and go to your store. You need to stay in front of prospects in the places they already are — digitally.
Here are a few powerful marketing tools to get the word out about your online store and keep potential buyers’ attention.
Email might feel a little bit old-school, but the simple fact is it’s still one of the most effective ways to market your ecommerce store. A strong subject line, action-based or demographic segmentation, and a juicy CTA in an email can go a long way. Some examples of engaging emails to drive repeat and new customers alike are:
- Retargeting emails
- Thank you emails
- Trigger-based emails based on an action
- Cross-selling emails
- Abandoned cart emails
- And more
It’s important to constantly build your email list and run both ongoing and single send campaigns to collect email addresses, get people signed up for new offers, and keep them updated with meaningful and interesting content throughout the customer lifecycle. Recent adjustments to third-party data rules mean that collecting and utilizing data correctly is crucial. Collecting data first hand on your website via popups, email sign up, lightboxes, and digital offers, is more important than ever. That data also needs to be cleaned and hygiened to ensure it stays up to date, as churn is a natural part of having a contact list.
Whether you’re highlighting blog content; video content; or promoting a new product,feature, or event — keep people informed. With proper segmentation and send rate, marketers don’t need to be afraid of overdoing email.
Social media
There are 4.65 billion social media users worldwide, according to an analysis by Kepios. If your company isn’t on social media, you’re losing out on potential views, sales, and awareness growth every single second. Well-developed and maintained social media profiles can be informative and effective at driving actual conversions. Keep your social media feeds updated with information about your online store just like you would with your email list. Promote offers, videos, and anything else educational or inspirational related to your products on social media. Consistency is key.
Ideally, you increase engagement with current and prospective buyers by incentivizing them to follow you on social media. Some ways to do so include:
- Give them loyalty/reward points if they follow you or share your posts
- Give them discounts for sharing, posting, or following your brand
Be creative in how you engage with your customers on social media. It will benefit your brand and its customer relationships to have your customers engage with your brand in their free time.
SMS
SMS and MMS marketing are the best way to reach customers in 2022. Over 90% of text messages are opened within 3 minutes! People open and view text messages more than any other form of contact, and year after year it absolutely delivers the highest engagement rates from prospects and customers.
But, there is a flipside. It’s very easy to irritate your customers with text messaging, and the laws in the United States are strict about sending unwanted messages. It goes without saying that messaging people who have not explicitly given you permission to text them is an absolute no-no.
Text messaging is an incredibly powerful way to reach people, but you need to be very careful about acquiring permission, keeping your messages short, providing value in each send etc. If you want to use messaging with SMS or MMS, keep your messages very impactful and to-the-point, and always have a link in the body of your message. Curate a list with pop-ups, exclusive offers for opting in a phone number, and with email and other lifecycle marketing to your most engaged segments of customers.
Google Ads
Remarketing and retargeting using Google Ads is an essential strategy for keeping both prospects and buyers coming back for more.
Remarketing using Google Ads means that you can target those that visit, browse, or buy off your website. You can segment and personalize the display ads that appear to match user actions using dynamic remarketing.
You have several different options when it comes to remarketing using Google Display ads. They include:
- Standard – display ads that appear while users browse websites and apps on the display network
- Dynamic – allows you to show ads to past visitors of products and services they already used
- For mobile apps – If a prospect visited your mobile site or app, Google will show your ads on other mobile sites or apps
- Lists for search ads – allows brands to target past visitors while they search on Google
Remarketing and retargeting beat all other ad placements by a lot with a 10x efficiency rate. That means you get your money’s worth retaining your hard-earned customers.
Affiliate and Influencer Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a fantastic way to get the word out about your business and products. Affiliate marketing involves creating a way for people to receive some kind of incentive (usually financial) in exchange for sharing your site and helping to facilitate a sale.
An affiliate program can be a great way to keep loyal customers engaged. It serves to give your most engaged customers an incentive or portion of the sales to tout your offerings. This will increase the net of potential buyers of your offering and make your current customers more loyal and likely to buy again.
You can set up your site with people-specific links so that if someone becomes an affiliate with you, they can share their unique link with a friend or their own network. Once someone buys based on that link, your affiliate makes a little money!
This can be powerful because instead of just trying to share your website with your network, you’re reaching a whole new audience from the respected and trusted voice of the affiliate. Their followers know and trust their POV and experience and will thus be more likely to purchase products (like yours) that they recommend. Affiliates can be paid either by website visit or by conversion depending on your business, goals, and budget. Customers turned affiliates are more bought into your brand than the average buyer.
Learn more about setting up an affiliate marketing program here.
Conclusion
It’s more expensive to onboard new customers than it is to turn a single-time buyer into a repeat customer. It’s worth resources to reengage customers, and leverage those customers to reach new audiences. The best question to ask is, “What makes me buy from a company again? What content and tactics make me a loyal, repeat buyer?” Think with the mind of a customer as you build your re-engagement campaigns. Looking for help? An agency like Hawke Media is a great place to start. Get a free consultation on the books here.
