ECommerce business became very competitive because of many big fishes who is in the ecommerce business since ages and still expanding their business day by day. Apart from it each year many ecommerce business is being launched with new products, new concepts & unique offers but only few gets noticed. Ecommerce business will get success only if they hit the right audience with right approach & right platform. Some big Ecommerce businesses have their own marketing team or think tank team so, they do have proper channel for marketing. Here we will provide some of the verified and tested ecommerce marketing ideas for those ecommerce businesses who recently launched their business, small or medium size business or wanted to launch their ecommerce business.
There is plenty of different ways to do Ecommerce marketing including online and offline channel. Few of the popular Ecommerce marketing strategy includes
- Run ads on TV
- Run ads on Newspapers
- Huge Banners across the country
- Online Ads platform (FB, Google Ads etc)
- Social Media Marketing
- Influencer Marketing
- & Many More…
One of the primary attribute in Ecommerce marketing which needs to be add in any advertisement is promotions / offers / discounts & deals. These are the important things which should be and must be there always. Here we will discuss about different promotion strategy for eCommerce businesses which needs to be implemented to get more sales.
So, Let’s start…..
Struggling to set the right promotion strategy for your Ecommerce business? Well, here we have compiled the various Ecommerce marketing/promotions strategy which you can apply on your store [Believe Us – All promotions strategy tested on various businesses]. Some E commerce businesses also raise doubts that even after applying promotion strategies, they couldn’t achieve sales as expected. So, here we are also listing the steps about how one can promote the coupon codes, promo codes or discounts to their targeted audience using various platforms.
Setting up an E-commerce website to sell products online – is doing just this enough to make money in the ecommerce industry? The answer is a big resounding No. Offering lucrative promotions and special offers to your prospective ecommerce customers is an effectual process of driving huge traffic to your site, gaining new customers, and boosting revenue. And the best part is you can harness the power of these promotions to encourage new visitors to become loyal, repeat customers of your business.
But in today’s competitive market, online consumers have become more savvy than ever and there are countless online buying options for them. Thus, standing ahead of the crowd is only possible when you can develop innovative promotion ideas. Implementing these strategies correctly with additional persuasion can help your visitors buy your products instantly and give you a great return on investment (ROI). But from the many tried, tested and suggested ways to promote ecommerce website out there, have you been able to plot the right one for your own business? If not yet, then get ready to find your answers today. So, without further ado, let’s start the discussion.
Types Of Effective Ecommerce Promotion Ideas
Just like brick and mortar stores, if you do not welcome your customers to your ecommerce store, it will take just a second for them to choose another option to make a purchase. To welcome your customers, you need to engage them. Special offers and promotions play an important role in engaging customers to an ecommerce website. There are some effective ecommerce promotion ideas that work wonderfully. Here is the list of some killer promotion ideas which you can include in your ecommerce marketing strategy.
Just Remember – “First Impression is the Last Impression”
#1 Free Shipping Promotion
A study says, 9 out of 10 shoppers prefer free shipping when it comes to buying things online. A majority of consumers consider free shipping as an appealing offer and thus it can drive remarkable sales conversions.
In pay-per-click advertising, you only pay when a user clicks on your ad in a search engine. Irrespective of the number of times your ad is displayed or how many users see your ad, you pay for the actual clicks only. PPC offers a cost-effective solution and guarantees more visibility and better traffic on your website.After learning about PPC, let’s look into how you can benefit from it:
There are mainly two ways through which you can offer free shipping on your e commerce business – conditional free shipping and unconditional free shipping. Conditional free shipping sets certain conditions to the free shipping offer for example.
- Minimum order value
- Select Items
- Economy Delivery
- Area-specific delivery
On the other hand, unconditional free shipping applies on every item and every order across all brands. Choose a method depending on your profit margins, shipping costs, and competition. Some Ecommerce store goes one step further by providing same day shipping, one-day shipping or free returns offers. This kind of promotion offers surely benefits to the business as people need their product as soon as possible.
#2 Percentage Based Discounts
Offering your prospective customers discounts on every buy is a way to draw people’s attention to your store and products. And eventually, this becomes helpful for your ecommerce business in increasing sales, improving reputation and boosting success. And one of the most common ways to provide discounts is with a percentage based discount. Usually, ecommerce retailers use small to large discounts as incentives to purchase. And sometimes, when it comes to flash sale or clearance sale, some brands even offer 50% or more discounts [Don’t judge, read next line]. Which discount you will choose to offer your customers completely depends on your profit margin and inventory stock.
In the above screenshot, you can see that how this E-commerce business provides discount offer directly on product listing page. Apart from the discount offer, the product listing page perfectly sums up the details of the products. It has product image, available colors variants information, product name, price range, discount offer, ratings and reviews and finally, call to action button.
#3 Buy One Get One Free Discount
Buy one get one free (BOGO) offer helps ecommerce retailers allure their customers easily. Usually, this offer happens during festivals, events and major national holidays. Through this offer, you can create a perception for your customers that they are getting a great deal. And that is what drive sales for your business. The BOGO offer is designed in such a way that helps in clearing out, moving inventory and creating cash flow for an ecommerce business. To make people aware of this offer, set up a banner across your website showcasing BOGO offer through a compelling copy.
As mentioned earlier, this kind of BOGO offers specially available during the festivals or holidays so, be prepared for it and announce such offers on your store a bit earlier before the offer starts to make the customers aware and get themselves for purchase. We have seen some Ecommerce businesses set up this offer specially on few product categories which directly connected to specific holiday. For e.g. few jewelry portals provides BOGO offer on mother’s day specially on jewelry items which can be gifted to mother. Ecommerce business can set up above BOGO offers during below holidays list.
- Black Friday
- Cyber Monday
- Boxing Day
- Carnival
- Christmas
- New Year
- Diwali
- Easter
- Fall Sale
- Father’s Day / Mother’s Day
- Halloween
- Hanukkah
- Labor Day
- Independence Day
- Eid
- Rosh Hashanah
- Winter Sale
- Valentine’s Day
- & Many More (Yes, Holiday Season Never Ends)
#4 Get Free Item On $$$$ Purchase
This offer applies to a certain amount of purchase of any particular product, working in various ways, such as a flat discount, a fixed percentage of discount and more. By offering these discounts, ecommerce websites can gain profit from individual customers as well as distributors and wholesale merchants. And every customer loves having free item when buying something. Thus giving away free stuff on a certain amount of purchase can certainly encourage your website users to often make bulk orders. Jewelry Ecommerce business is one of the ideal businesses to offer such promotions.
#5 Discount / Coupon Code On Sale Price
This offers the customers the chance of getting a certain amount of concession on sale or bill price by including a discount or coupon code. Just make sure your coupon or promo code is easy to remember and apply. The easier a promo code is easy to remember and apply the more it will be used and eventually the better transactions you will have over the time. To harness its maximum benefits, other than your website, share the coupon codes on third party websites as well to drive more traffic.
Some Ecommerce websites provides coupon codes or discount for first-time users to encourage them to buy more products from the store to gain trust.
#6 Quantity Discounts
Offering lucrative discounts on a certain quantity of purchase can drive sales for ecommerce businesses. This offer can be advantageous for both the sellers and consumers when there’s any bulk order placement gets done.
#7 Reward Points
Offering reward points to customers has a significant impact on customer loyalty program in e-commerce business. And when you give importance to customer loyalty program, you get customer retention, new customers through referrals and an increased conversion. Show reward points based on affiliate sales or total products bought by your customers and give discounts accordingly.
One More Important Thing….
Each & every ecommerce business has their own range product categories or business model so, from above list it may or may not possible to apply all promotions for your business. It completely depends on the profit margin, inventory stock, ROI and other important things. So, decision is yours.
And, if you haven’t decided your range of product categories for your ecommerce business than here is the statistics of what users prefers to buy most from online.
#8 Sell on Multiple Platforms
Many eCommerce businesses now promote and sell their products on other platforms besides their own website. Some of the best multichannel platforms are like Amazon, eBay, Opensky, Etsy or Instagram. A multichannel sales strategy is a great backup plan in case your primary sales channel doesn’t work well. This is considered to be the most effective way because this will not only help you to stretch your business reach but also help you in fetching more potential consumer for your site and generate leads.
#9 Run Cart Abandonment Offers
Ecommerce retailers may calculate and track their cart abandonment rate to better understand the reasons for revenue increases and decreases. However, the shopping cart abandonment has nothing to do with the visibility of the website or the deals featured in adverts. But this kind of ecommerce marketing strategy help in determining the percentage of purchase intent displayed by site visitors who do not purchase despite having things in their cart. This is a serious problems and need to necessitate a comprehensive examination of why users are leaving the website despite plainly loving the offerings.
There are number or reasons like as:
• Website had errors/crashes
• Long and Confusing Checkout Processes
• Customers are required to create an Account before purchase.
• Concerns about payment security
• Return Policy Wasn’t Satisfactory
#10 Cross-sell Products
Cross-selling is amazing ecommerce marketing ideas used by stores to increase order values by promoting complementary products. It works by recommending complementary products to clients who are close to making a purchase. Today consumers are becoming gradually accustomed to purchasing things from a variety of online platforms, such as online marketplaces and social media which is growing rapidly. Cross selling helps in Building Loyalty. It also, Increases Earnings and helps in understanding customers requirement.
#11 Offer multiple payment options (Easy EMI installments)
Offering multiple payment option is another most effective way to fetch customers. This will help your customers to get assurance regarding the safety and security of their payment which they do for their purchases from your website, it will enhance your brand perception too.
#12 Contest and Giveaways
Contests and Giveaways no doubt are great option by which you can capture a wide range of your audience’s attention. This is considered as most interactive ecommerce sales promotional ideas which make your audience engaged and with this form of marketing you get an opportunity to show off your products to a wider group of people.
It is also believed that the Contests that are well-designed immediately answer the fundamental question about “What’s there in it for me?” Through this approach you may encourage your readers to help and develop original content that will help you build your business and provide value to your visitors–by awarding cash, items, free services, and even notoriety.
#13 Live Chat Assistant
Live chat support service is a great way to engage with your customers in order to earn their trust and build your brand’s credibility. Through this ecommerce promotion strategy you can save the time of customers by pointing them in the right direction when they visit the site for the first time. You can also serve multiple customers at the same time.
#14 Offer/Create Personalized Recommendations
Personalized recommendations on email definitely strike a user and business to generate massive revenue for your e-commerce store. Based on your visitor’s browsing history, actions, location, device, add to cart options, likes or favourites, this is believed to be one of the most powerful and prevalent way of product recommendations.
We hope now you might get good idea about promotions…..Now let’s talk about marketing platforms or types of online ads where you can promote above promotions to right audience.
How to Promote Promotions via Online Ads?
Confused? Don’t worry, we are here to help !
Offline businesses who owns any fashion store, toys store, mobile store or any other store still provides various promotions including discounts, BOGO offer and other benefits. They promote their promotions via different advertisements including local newspapers, local tv channels, radio, pamphlets, huge hoardings and other sources. But, here we are talking about Ecommerce website which has a large number of audience and above methods may or may not work.
By simply displaying discount coupons and freebies on your ecommerce website won’t make the cut, you will have to make potential buyers aware of such coupons and freebies. And the best way to do so is online ads. Powerful online ads not only make your offers and freebies known to your audience but also build brand awareness for your ecommerce website.
Here are some popular ways of running online ads to increase ecommerce sales:
#1 Google Ads
Google Ads are perhaps the most powerful online ads platform that allow ecommerce businesses to connect with a large audience. You have a wide range of options to run Google Ads campaigns.
Here are the main types of Google Ads:
Via Search Campaign
Google search campaign allows you to place your ads in the search engine result page. Through search advertising, you can bid to place an ad in the search results and fix the maximum amount you want to pay when someone clicks your ad. To get quality leads, make sure your ad reaches only the people who are likely to buy your products.
Ad Copy
Just create a compelling ad copy and add the promotion details such as discounts, coupons, deals, offers etc. in ad title & description. This will help you reach a niche audience as compared to any other advertising method.
Search Campaign Extensions
Google Ads also provides one more feature called as extensions. Ecommerce store can promote their promotions via callout extensions which allow you to expand ads by 25 characters. So, one can set up callout extension with promotional offers.
Recently Google launched one more extension named Promotions extension where Ecommerce business can add their promotion details easily along with % discount, monetary discount and coupon code details. This extension works like a charm in search ads.
Via Shopping Ads
You might be aware of Shopping ads because every online Ecommerce store runs this ad as it gives the highest ROI and very cheap. If you don’t know about these ads then you are missing a huge revenue source for your business. Don’t worry, we will explain about shopping ads here.
Shopping ads, also referred to product listing ads, feature specific products you sell in the search engine result page. To create a shopping ad and enable promotions feature to show your discount and coupon code to your targeted audience, you need to set up an account in Google Merchant Center and later you need to apply to Google team to enable the promotions feature for your store.
After enabling the Promotions feature for your Google merchant store, you can easily set up Promotions for all your products. Once you complete the set up, than users will able to view the coupon code/promo code details just below your product shopping ad which boosts chances of more sales.
Such ads stand ahead of the curve and help you grab attention, have a broad reach, get quality leads and gain high conversion and good CTR.
Via Display Campaign
Display advertising, also known as banner advertising, conveys a commercial message visually, utilizing logo, text, images, animations, videos and other graphics. You can harness the benefits of users’ behavioral targeting and geotargeting to get the maximum advantage from display advertising.
Remarketing Ads
Dynamic remarketing ads are one of the finest features for any online ads platform. It allows Ecommerce business to display ads to those customers who visited your website earlier but didn’t purchase anything from it. For retargeting ads we can build several custom audiences to achieve maximum return.
Here are few Audiences examples you can create in your online ads platform.
Audience 1 – Visited cart page but didn’t make any purchase (Average chances for sales)
Audience 2 – Visited Checkout page but didn’t make any purchase (Higher chances for sales/leads)
Audience 3 – Remained website for 45+ Seconds and didn’t make any purchase (Evaluate the average sale time and create audience accordingly)
Audience 4 – Visited particular product category page but didn’t make any purchase (High chance of product category sale)
We can build such custom audience on Google Ads, Bing Ads and even on Facebook Ads.
You can also promote your festival offers and deals through eye-catchy banner ads. Visually appealing banner ads create brand awareness among your targeted audience, give your products and offers great visibility and help you get a wide reach in an impactful way.
Note – Even if you don’t have main stream E commerce business and selling digital products then don’t worry, you can still run dynamic display ads for your business via Google AdWords using custom feed options.
#2 Facebook/Instagram Ads
Facebook and Instagram ads are a great tool to promote your ecommerce business, especially when you are targeting your products to the young generation. These are highly popular platforms to garner sales for ecommerce businesses. Report says, in 2021 Facebook advertising revenue has been amounted to 33.67 billion U.S. dollars. To stand ahead in this competitive arena, leverage all the lucrative benefits that Facebook offers.
Set up promo and offer ads on Facebook for your targeted and retargeted audience. Add discount or coupon code information in basic Facebook ads. Set up Instagram placement directly from Facebook ads. Post high-quality pictures on these social platforms, especially on Instagram, an image-heavy social network platform.
#3 Email Marketing
No matter what people say, email marketing campaigns (if run smartly) can increase your sales at a fraction of your marketing budget. Following are some email marketing ideas to grow your sales:
- Send email to those users who added product in cart and didn’t purchase at least for 2 days
- Send email to all existing customers/new customers
- Send email prior to days/events/holidays, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas etc.
The golden rule of email marketing is every marketing mail should offer some value to your audience. If you follow it, you will certainly taste the success.
Quick Take Aways & Conclusion
If you are an e commerce business owner or planning to be one in near future, it’s quite natural for you to find out proven tactics that will help you get a flood of sales. Hopefully, after reading this post, now you have the idea of ways to achieve that. Whether you opt for Google ads or decide to implement Facebook or Instagram ads or take advantage of email marketing – the options are many. No matter which option you choose, if you are not aware of your buyer persona, then all your efforts will go in vain.
In any case, as now that you know what should be done, get started and go through the tips above mentioned, working for your store.
So, which promotional tactic has worked for you when it comes to promoting your products and offers and boosting sales? Do share your experience here in the comment section. I’d love to know.
Ready To Generate High-Quality Leads and Conversions?
Niraj Bariya
Niraj Bariya is having 10+ years of experience in Digital Marketing field having vast experience in Google Ads, Bing Ads, Meta Ads, Linkedin Ads & Amazon Ads.
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