In the process of acquiring new customers, retaining them sometimes takes a backseat. Studies have shown that retaining customers costs seven times lesser than acquiring a new one. To prevent such situations, businesses have to focus on extending their customers’ lifetime with their brands, a.k.a., customer retention. They have to keep giving their audience opportunities to  hold onto so that they do not think about switching to other brands or products.

Retention can help boost revenues significantly as  customers trust the brand and keep coming back to it for repeat purchases. To help you out, here are five plans of action that will help keep your audience hooked - 

Cultivate your Listening Skills

Businesses should focus on becoming active listeners as this helps in enhancing their customers’ overall social experience. To do the same, a social listening software can be employed wherein listening alerts can be set up to understand customer queries better. It can also be used to give product/service information. This makes two-communication much faster, and the customer feels acknowledged.

Several kinds of social listening tools can be used to open potential windows for link building by digging up unlinked product/brand mentions. Also, by using different active listening approaches, businesses can identify customer pain points and design compelling offers to engage and retain them in the future.

Infer engagement Analytics

Businesses can find out a lot about their customer by analysing their online behaviour on social media platforms, as they offer better insights into the customer’s life and choices. They can interact with their customers on social media platforms like Snapchat and Twitter as it will help them create an in-depth user experience via hyper-personalisation.

Tools like Instagram Insights or Facebook Analytics can be utilised to keep a real-time track of activity duration, online purchases, customer demographics, and content statistics. Furthermore, analytics can be divided into separate categories like prescriptive, descriptive, predictive, diagnostic, and consumption to have a more streamlined content creation approach. This way, personalised content can be used to engage the customers.

Upscale your CRM game

Businesses must have a  good CRM game-plan as that can be a huge selling point. It genuinely helps with customer retention and also creates a huge window for building long-term relationships. Brands can open support accounts across all kinds of social media platforms to actively interact with their customers, boost brand health, and reduce customer dissatisfaction.

To take it a step further, well-segmented community-specific groups can be created on social media pages that can employ customers as brand ambassadors. This will have a powerful impact on purchase decisions and bring positive results. Additionally, there is an option for ‘Profile Enrichment Services.’ This can be employed to get better information about customers, complete their profiles, and address their actual needs. 

Incentivise Incessantly to boost ROI

Businesses should always ensure that they provide incentives to their customers as this will kickstart a cycle of giving and receiving, which will help boost sales and increase ROI. There should keep an active lookout for brand advocates across platforms so that incentives and rewards can be given to them to ensure a lasting relationship.

Marketing gimmicks like ‘irresistible offers’ can be used to ensure that customers do not switch brands and continue to be loyal to the business’s products and services. A thorough analysis of customers’ social media profiles should be done to maintain the correct timing and tonality of sending out incentives as this will impact CTRs significantly.

Automate to be efficient

Businesses should make an active habit of using automated systems and scheduling tools to ensure flexibility of posting content and information. Today, customers are more into raising queries on social media platforms rather than calling on customer service numbers. Automation will address their issues in real-time and keep them interested.

Social media scheduling tools like Buffer, Taggbox Commerce, Google Analytics, Hootsuite, and many more can be used to track UGC, competitors, content, and optimisation. Also, businesses can invest in marketing automation software as it will allow them to have a clear insight into the customer journey and help develop customised deals to keep them coming back for more purchases.

Customer retention is not something that can be achieved overnight. It takes consistent dedication and time to get to that point wherein your customers will return to your business for more. You need to have some plans or strategies in place so that you can give them the incentive to do so - like finding ways to delight them, improving their experience, giving them discount offers, and making them realise that your business enjoys and appreciates their goodwill and support. The more consistent your efforts are, higher will be the retention!

A few core fixes can significantly impact your search traffic without needing to earn new links. It is the art of converting more visitors on your website to boost your sales. On an average, companies are spending as much as $2,000 a month on CRO tools.

With the classic mix of SEO and social media tactics, you can watch the number of new visitors to your store skyrocket when you originate. These strategies will continue to encourage more traffic as your business grows. 

Here’s how your E-commerce business can achieve organic growth with helpful SEO strategies:

Phase out your SEO plan

By understanding your target market better and creating a strategic, data-driven SEO plan, your business will be able to market your website more effectively. Your business should make use of tools like Google Keyword Planner that will help you narrow down your list of the right keywords.

A study reveals that search engines contribute to 93% of the web traffic while the number of web searchers who make it to the second page of search results is less than 5%. To ensure your website is truly optimised, the key is to average out metrics from multiple 3rd party SEO tools. This can help audit your site, observe how it performs against your top keywords, and what your consumers are precisely looking for.

Call out for Call To Action

It is essential for your business to keep your CTAs effective. Run A/B tests continually to assess which CTAs are performing better. Tie in your CTA with your value proposition, giving your audience an incentive that motivates them, whether to save or make money, get fit, lose weight, or anything else.

Make use of social sharing CTAs as this helps boost your visibility, follower count, and website traffic. According to conversion researcher Michael Aagaard, first-person language is powerful as it becomes the internal dialog in the visitor’s mind. Rather than talking ‘to’ them, the CTA speaks ‘as’ them.

Pin it to Win it

Pinterest Pins help your business to reach a wider audience, create a seamless E-commerce experience for your customers and increase brand awareness and conversions. These pins work consistently to let your business provide impeccable customer service.

Research from Pinterest has found that 93% of pinners use Pinterest to plan purchases. And 87% have made a purchase after seeing something they liked on Pinterest. Use Pinterest SEO to capture sales immediately and bring in impressive revenue for your business.

Powerful Promotions for Page Traffic

To continue your business's growth trajectory, you need to and out to potential customers in your niche with a toolkit of organic promotional tactics and campaigns at your disposal. A study has shown that 93% of online buyers are encouraged to buy more products if free shipping options are available, whereas 58% of consumers add more items to the cart to qualify for free shipping.

To optimise on-page website SEO content, highlight Offers & Discounts to drive clicks/taps. Factors like headlines, URL slugs, and meta tags, alt tags can be used to sprinkle your primary and related keywords throughout your body copy. To incentivise hesitant shoppers to make a purchase, deploy the BOGO (Buy One Get One) promotional tactic. It also helps keep the SKUs in check and increases time spent per page.  

Quest with Quora

Quora is an excellent marketing strategy tool to generate organic awareness, build an E-commerce rapport, and enlighten you about your prospective audience. Demonstrate brand value and image by answering detailed, meaningful questions from the audience and interest them to look into the website or app links.

When running a social campaign, using a high domain authority website like Quora to magnify search engine ranks and generate high-quality traffic is essential. It builds credibility and thought leadership. According to the analytic website Alexa.com, Quora ranks 80th for global traffic. Track your E-commerce referral traffic on Quora to gain an incredible source for leads. 

If you are able to convince a customer that is intending to leave your site to finalise a purchase, the chances are high that they will leave a good review on your website, share their favourite products on their social media, or even participate in your referral plans, all of which help bring additional people to your E-commerce stores.

Traffic is the lifeblood for any E-commerce store. If people aren’t visiting your site, you’re missing out on huge sales. You must grab onto each opportunity to your advantage and drive traffic back to your store!

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Influencer Marketing promotions have become an absolute necessity for E-commerce businesses in 2021. They are quick and effective to increase brand recognition, trust and consumer loyalty. Data reveals that around 49% of consumers make online buys based on influencers' recommendations. Such is the potential of this powerful symbiotic relationship. 

When you launch an influencer marketing campaign for your business, the influencers’ followers become your audience, and in addition, they also bring in new ones! Here are five pro-tips to strengthen your E-commerce strategy, increase your social media exposure and reinforce consumer decisions:

Plan a Platform-First Influencer Mix

A well-planned influencer media mix will add a human touch to the brand. It makes the promotional experience through social media platforms more personalised and credible for your audience. Businesses should collaborate with influencers having different follower levels, be it micro, nano or mega influencers, as this will help in increasing their reach and allow them to tap into niche audience segments.

Brands can also organise quizzes, competitions, and contests for their consumers via influencers on social media to create buzz and enhance brand exposure. Influencers, too, can implement affiliate marketing by using customised URLs and promo codes to bring organic traffic to your E-commerce website. 

Sell Stories and Experiences 

People do not buy just goods and services; they buy relations, stories, and magic. Hence, businesses should focus on selling stories and experiences through influencers to build trust and relationship with consumers. Influencers can push consumers to break their 'media fasting' and support in giving your brand the required consumer attention and acknowledgement. 

Data says that influencer content performs 2.7 times better than regular branded advertising content through paid channels. Take brands like Urban Outfitters and Nordstrom; for example, they have collaborated with various fashion influencers to promote their brand stories on Instagram via innovative posts and reels. This made the consumers embrace brand authenticity and also assisted in increasing business revenue.

Amplify Your ROI

An influencer marketing campaign is fundamental to boost your E-commerce sales and to drive heavy returns on investment. Studies tell us that influencer marketing strategies offer an ROI that is eleven times higher than non-influencer digital marketing campaigns.

D2C E-commerce businesses should offer lucrative incentives through influencers in the form of referral codes or tracking links in order to increase traction and engagement numbers. Capitalising across social media platforms can be done, wherein influencers use hashtags/tags within their stories and posts to redirect followers and new consumers to your website. 

Brand Awareness & Promotion

In today's D2C landscape, brands can take advantage of influencer-created content to improve engagement, create brand awareness, enhance promotions and post more content without overwhelming followers’ feed. Influencers can help narrow the business sales funnel and get more leads for conversions by prompting relevant, targeted customer traffic.

Influencers can contribute to your website blogs and write product reviews to create more natural social interaction with your target audience, which can easily be converted into sales. For example, Glossier, a beauty brand, has an influential community called 'Glossier Girls' wherein followers can use their unique URLs and get a 20% discount on their first purchase. 

Beef up Brand Loyalty

Businesses should encourage consumers to give referrals by offering influencer-specific brand loyalty memberships, which will make them feel like a part of the influencer community. While collaborating with influencers, businesses should focus on GenZ and millennial demographics to re-share UGC (User-generated content).

Work on cross-promotions aggressively wherein consumers can see that the relationship between the influencer and the E-commerce business is positive. This will help urge more sales. Businesses should use influencer marketing platforms like Trend to enable them to verify preferable influencers, hyper-target consumers, and cut campaign costs.

Influencer marketing is an absolutely viable and essential strategy for us as marketers. The goal becomes to utilise an army of influencers supporting in building and developing the E-commerce business faster. It is not needed for a company to spend big bucks here, as there is a little known truth that more followers do not necessarily equate to more influence. 

It is critical to focus on setting your marketing campaign in sync with the influencers, your audience and your objective. Businesses must focus on cultivating trusting relationships with influencers to engage them with their brand and manage them to build a vast media network.

Converting potential leads into customers is one thing but retaining them is where the challenging work begins. Customer retention saves you more money than acquiring new ones. As per data, there is a 45% chance of purchase from a second-time buyer. This further moves up to 56% by the time they come around for their fourth visit. Taking good care of your customers, helps your business grow and thrive while retaining them brings in profits and enhances your brand image without any added efforts.

A small group of loyal customers can be vital contributors to a majority of sales.  Since retained customers make for such valuable assets, we bring you five effective strategies to make your customers return for those repeat purchases. 

Go for Multi-Channel Marketing

Businesses should analyse their consumers’ purchasing behaviour online and deploy this strategy to keep them engaged in the future. Time is of the essence when it comes to replenishable items. This is why businesses must segment their customers on the basis of products they buy on a regular basis and send across reminders via e-mails, in-app notifications, messages, etc.

The RFM Model (Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value) should definitely be used for automated marketing to retarget customers, re-engage them, and ensure faster cart checkouts in the process. Further, businesses should run trigger campaigns to have an in-depth understanding of their customers’ response rates, as this will help immensely with personalised messaging.

Cultivate Effective CRM Plans

Ensuring a great customer experience is crucial for any business if they want retention to come into play. This is where Customer Relationship Management comes in. Businesses should use CRM software to centralise all customer data in one place, analyse it, and provide customer experiences that are consistent with their promises. 

They should also leverage CRM analytics to segment their customers on the basis of who is more profitable, who purchases more often, etc. This helps in making regular updates to their shopping requirements. Another interesting way is to create dialogues with customers through integrated marketing communications. This will improve brand positioning, build loyalty, and ultimately lead to retention.

Connect with Your Customers

Customers like to be a part of the brand family as much as they like the brand. Businesses should try and partner with them by sharing. This way, caring will automatically come in from their side. One method can include sending personal invites via effective channels for any big product launch or brand event. This will make the customers feel acknowledged and important, and they will feel a sense of belonging and obligation towards your business.

Genuine interest should be shown while taking feedback and reviews from your customers on ways of providing frictionless experiences. However, you have to be careful to not spam them in the process. Additionally, separate chat rooms should be made with the sole purpose of piloting strategies, beta testing, and experimenting with their customers.

Accessibility-first Customer Support

Providing impeccable customer service is an important and effective one-way ticket to customer retention. If the service is good, the business will surely have its customers’ long-term attention. Data suggests that around 92-93% of customers will engage in repeat purchase if they experience good post-purchase service.

Businesses should focus on having a 24*7 portal for addressing criticism and providing prompt and efficient service to their customers - be it via calls, mails, or live chats. A feedback loop system should be in place that works on collecting, distributing, and analysing customer feedback. 

Personalise Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are simply a way of letting your customers know that they are valued for their relationship with your business. Businesses should focus on building strong loyalty programs to turn customers into committed brand advocates and members of your brand community. 

Customised loyalty programs will provide personalised and brand-specific rewards to your customers. Furthermore, businesses must use reward gamification methods to motivate their customers to reach exclusive VIP tiers in their loyalty programs. Data reveals that around 92% of customers will take recommendations from their trusted friends. This is why businesses should give points to their customers for providing referrals. This will ensure both retention and acquisition.

Retaining customers is definitely an excellent way to sell more and create a hurdle-free road to achieving business aims and goals. Therefore, businesses should continuously try to garner their customers’ trust and loyalty through well thought out marketing strategies. It will ensure a proactive retention approach and healthy profits in the long run!

Cart Abandonment is plausibly one of the most significant hurdles that E-commerce retailers face on a daily basis. Most online businesses lose out on their conversion rates and revenue due to the same. Data tells us that around 67.91% of consumers abandon their carts. Apparently, in the E-commerce industry, this is pretty common. Despite the business’s best efforts, consumers seem to casually visit their websites and window shop, but never complete their purchase. This is a clear indicator of opportunities missed. 

Fortunately, this is a problem that can be fixed. There are several ways to reduce this number. Here are five game plans that your business can implement to stop consumers from abandoning their carts -

Deploy Exit-intent Pop-ups

Businesses can employ this strategy to change their consumers’ minds at the exact juncture where they choose to abandon their shopping carts. Consumer attention can be captured effectively using exit-intent pop-ups that will show a business’s campaign when consumers are actively opting to leave the checkout page. Simultaneously, pop-ups regarding feedback can also be triggered to understand why they are choosing to abandon their carts at all.

Related Article : Everyday Tactics for E-Commerce Marketing

Further, incentives like coupons, promo codes, and discount offers can be used via pop-ups to ensure that consumers go ahead with the purchase and help boost conversion rates for the business. One huge benefit here is that these pop-ups will help in converting casual window shoppers into loyal consumers who fall back on the business’s website for repeat purchases.

Avoid Price Shockers

Usually, consumers exit the checkout page once they realise that they will incur charges that they did not anticipate at all. These hidden costs are typically discovered after entering the shipping details. This is something that businesses should be absolutely transparent about from the very beginning of a consumer’s shopping journey.

They can make use of floating bars on their E-commerce websites to showcase their free-shipping offers based on order value. Tools like shipping calculators can be used during the shopping process to ensure clarity so that the consumers know exactly what they are supposed to pay in terms of taxes and home delivery. Additionally, businesses can make use of campaigns to give their consumers incentives based on the number of products they add to their cart. This will help in increasing the number of cart items and also help make the purchase decision final.

Bolster Social Proof

The consumers of today look for extensive reviews and testimonials before buying a product. They basically want to ensure that they are getting what the product promises. This is precisely where social proof comes in. Businesses can make use of social proof notifications when a consumer is shopping to show how others have positively connected and engaged with the brand. This also helps in creating FOMO (Fear of missing out).

Related Article : E-commerce Must-Do’s Post Pandemic

This method critically helps in building strong relationships with consumers by making the brand look trustworthy and pushing hesitant buyers to make the purchase.  Further, businesses can use ‘trust badges’ on their websites to show that their consumers’ data and payment details are secure and remain private to them only. This makes the shopping experience and journey more comfortable for the consumers.

Promote Guest Checkouts

Sign-in requirements are bottlenecks that push customers to avoid your website. While this option may work with many consumers, but more often than not, they end up looking for alternatives. This is why businesses should focus on removing the sign-in barricade on their E-commerce websites. It will help avoid excessive bounce rates. 

The guest checkout option is a great solution here. This way, businesses can ensure better conversions and also get their consumers’ required information from their shipping details, which can be used later for retargeting. Also, options like ‘social login’ can be provided to the consumers to avoid the lengthy sign-in process. This tactic uses information from social media platforms, provides verified user data, and helps businesses with personalisation in the future.

Improve Browsing Experience

Businesses should focus on keeping the checkout process simple, short, and straightforward. Consumers like nothing more than a crisp online checkout experience. Too many ‘fields to be filled up’ option should be avoided entirely, and website checkouts should be wrapped up in  a maximum of four to five steps only. 

CTA or Call to action buttons can be used in the shopping cart by making use of time-sensitive words like ‘buy now’ or ‘try now.’ Further, progress bars can be used to show the consumers where they are in the purchase process. This helps create momentum that pushes consumers to reach their goal of completing the purchase and owning the item.

While consumers exhibit different shopping patterns, there are certain aspects that remain the same for most of them - be it in terms of delight or frustration. It is up to the businesses to turn things around and make the most of their opportunities. The more they work on the user experience they provide, the higher will be the benefits!

Related Article : In the Cart: The New World of E-Commerce Marketing

None of us is a stranger to influencer marketing techniques employed by businesses to promote their products and services. Digital and social media has taken off as a marketing and advertising platform in the past few years, turning influencers into a marketing tool. As content creators on social media began gaining popularity, several businesses started roping them in for enhancing brand awareness on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Influencer marketing empowers brands to market their products and services in a more personable and cost-effective way. According to a report released by Zefmo Media in 2019, nearly 65% of strategists and marketers revealed that influencer marketing had helped them substantially improve their brand awareness and recall. Around 50% of them agreed that the marketing technique is an effective way of managing the brand’s reputation as well as consumer sentiments along with reaching out to new audiences. As influencer marketing took off, it was also accompanied by social media malpractices and fraud being committed by several pseudo influencers, along with the persisting menace of fake news, owing to the lack of fact-checking and absence of concrete guidelines for influencer advertising. In light of the rising concerns regarding social media advertising, the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has decided to lay down some guidelines to safeguard the interest of the public. As per the newly drafted guidelines, influencers and brands would be required to add prominent disclosure labels with all kinds of sponsored content that is being shared online. The draft suggests that all sponsored content must contain a disclosure in the description of the post or be superimposed on the video or photo in case of the absence of a description. While it is all but a new concept for Indian businesses and influencers alike, influencer marketing regulations have become a norm in several western countries in the past few years. Similar to the new guidelines by ASCI, America’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also requires all social media influencers to reveal their relationship with the brands within their posts. To comply with these guidelines, social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube made provisions for the influencers to add “paid partnership with X” tags and disclosure statements. The new guidelines are aimed at promoting transparency between the influencer and their audience and also elevate the level of trust between the consumer, influencer and the brand. It would also ensure that the audience is aware of whether the post they are viewing is a paid promotion or an organic post by the influencer. Nothing, however, is written in stone yet. The latest draft of these suggested guidelines is open for debate and feedback until the 8th of March, post which ASCI would release the final guidelines on the 31st of March. The new guidelines are expected to be applicable to all sponsored content starting on the 15th of April.

Marketing is all about change, and in these unprecedented times, brands have to keep adapting to the spiking expectations of their consumers in order to provide the best products and services.  Here is where Design Thinking for Digital Marketing is helping these brands in chasing ideas and implementing them to emerge as leaders in their domain.

It is interesting how a tool like design can help drive a brand’s name, image, and message. If implemented correctly, this process can help businesses come up with many unique and exciting solutions. It further saves brands from giving out the wrong solution to their consumers and empowers them to perform better. Here are five principles of Design Thinking you must implement to have a consumer-centric outlook, improve brand preference, increase loyalty, and provide impactful user experiences.

Empathise to Realise

To empathise with their users, businesses should be on the same wavelength as their consumers and figure out why they are facing a potential bottleneck. That is how they can step in and navigate their way through a probable solution. For that, businesses need to have a thorough understanding of their consumers’ pain points. Data reveals that around 62% of consumers appreciate content that directly addresses their pain points.

Therefore, it should be ensured that the advertisements that these businesses release have an empathetic approach  to the consumers’ requirements - whether the product is not affordable, whether it has become obsolete, and so on - to drive maximum response out of them. Social media posts and other digital content designed from this approach will enable businesses to engage their consumers better.

Define to Decipher

One of the core fundamentals of Design Thinking is that businesses should always focus on collecting and analysing all the user information they possibly can to figure out what problem they need to address. Defining the problem will enable businesses to be in their consumers’ shoes and look at products from their perspective. This will ensure a good relationship build-up with consumers in the future and also bring in new consumers via word-of-mouth.

It will also help improve their ideation methods and processes when making blueprints while also being able to tackle challenges in a streamlined manner. This will enable businesses to break down their plans/strategies into critical steps/stages to integrate their ideas and data better and create a detailed customer insight for better understanding.

Ideate to Create

This is the part wherein all the teams come together to brainstorm different ideas, pool them together, and start moving towards creating an ideal solution. Businesses should continuously gather feedback and data to trigger the ideation process as this stage enables them to ask the right questions, go beyond the ordinary, and tap into innovative solutions. This often helps in solving more than one problem and creates consumer delight.

Here, businesses can make use of different marketing concepts and gauge plausible outcomes for the near future. This helps them proceed with higher assurance as to how their product/s will perform in the market. Further, ideation enables businesses to tap into areas that are otherwise left untapped or unexplored, leading to better formulations and solutions. 

Prototype to Perform

This is a big time-saver for all businesses as producing a rough draft of the product helps in providing  a snippet of the trajectory it will take once it is officially released into the market. It can help businesses decide whether the product idea should be taken forward, modified, or cancelled. Initially, providing product prototypes at a lower price will help pull in meaningful feedback and enable businesses to create products that increase brand recall and brand resonance for the consumers.

Also, prototyping gives ample time to experiment with user interfaces and include elements that provide value to the customer. It helps businesses in avoiding mistakes that are either irreversible or too time-consuming to change. Massive cost cuttings can be achieved in this stage as unnecessary elements and ideas get eliminated from the process.

Test to Analyse

Once prototyping is cleared, Businesses should release the product into the market for testing purposes and patiently wait while the feedback, data, and market performance can be collated and analysed. The test product should be allowed to speak for itself rather than the businesses giving too much information in the beginning. The raw user experience will help with in-depth understanding and insights about what is missing or what could have been better. 

This allows businesses to pick back up from one of the five stages in the Design Thinking process depending on the conversion rate in the market. Also, this stage can be carried out alongside  the prototyping stage as it gives an open front row seat to consumer experience and enables businesses to better interact with them. This helps in breaking down the results and improvise on the required solution.

It is certainly possible that there might be several blips on the radar when this process is being carried out. There may be changes in the problem statement midway or developments during the process that might change the problem statement altogether. However, since it always boomerangs to empathising with the consumers, the final solutions are real and meaningful - and that is why Design Thinking should definitely be a part of your marketing arsenal.

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused a significant shift in the online shopping behaviour of consumers. As more and more of them get well-acquainted with the digital environment, E-commerce businesses are trying to develop fresher strategies to attract, engage, and retain their target audience and give them an immersive online shopping experience. Businesses must adopt these new methods because the said change is expected to last years as the economy continues to recover from the pandemic after-effects.

To give you a headstart, here are five E-commerce tactics for 2021 that you must make use of to ensure quicker checkout rates and drive those big sales numbers.

Retain before acquiring

Having a well-defined customer retention strategy in place holds vital importance for E-commerce businesses. Due to excessive digitalisation throughout the pandemic, the E-commerce sector is getting a lot of new customers. Since consumers are becoming more mobile-friendly, it would be smart to run SMS marketing campaigns. As per a survey, less than 15% of businesses use this method, which is why using this method might give your business an edge over the competition. 

Efforts should be put into introducing a greater variety of customer loyalty and reward programs as this pushes customers to make a higher number of purchases to avail premium benefits and discounts. Further, including a dashboard for customers irrespective of whether they are members of your E-commerce website or not will enable them to track their purchases and give them an incentive to return for repeat purchases. 

Illustrate to demonstrate

Visuals have always been big on grabbing attention, be it through an image, a GIF, or a video. This aspect should be taken full advantage of as it will help generate website traffic and get more leads in the process. Consumers love visual demonstrations as it provides a holistic view of the product or service being offered. UGC or user-generated content should be used more aggressively to increase promotions and boost sales, improving both the brand and the customer journey.

Videos end up having higher ranks on Google, which is why they must be a go-to for marketing a product or a service. Sponsorships gather a higher number of views as well. Businesses should try and tell their brand stories via customer testimonials as their first-hand experience makes the brand sound reliable and trustworthy.

Go all out on holidays

Holiday sales usually garner a lot of success as consumers tend to make more purchases on these days since they can make the time to indulge properly in shopping. This opportunity should definitely be used in the online space to convert these shoppers into loyal customers. Businesses should personalise their websites as much as possible and give lucrative and customised offers on every landing page to drive impulse marketing. 

A separate category should be included for holiday sales, and the website navigation should be made smoother, especially during this time, to ensure that the customers do not get stuck on any page. Focusing on bundling and complementary offers on holidays will make the customers feel like they are getting value for their money which will further help make profits.

FOMO your way into sales

FOMOing is an excellent tactic that businesses can use to ensure faster checkouts and make the consumers feel like they have gotten a fantastic deal. This helps in brand development and also pulls in the crowd by the minute. Businesses can try a few interesting tactics here. They should apply time limits on offers to create a sense of urgency so that the consumers act on it before the offer runs out. 

Missed offers and opportunities should be mentioned at regular intervals during the customer visits to ensure revisits, and this process will also help with cross-sales.  Showing real-time purchases of other customers will help your customers move past their dilemma of buying or not buying a product. This will make the customers trust your brand more and will help in increasing business revenue.

Work up on sales promotion

For customers, discounts, deals, and coupons play a crucial role in their shopping - online or otherwise. Data reveals that around 92% of customers eagerly look forward to promotional deals, and these offers act as critical drivers for bulk purchases. Businesses should try and include customised discount offers in exit-intent pop-ups as this will ensure that consumers do not exit the website. These pop-ups will keep them engaged and also help with sales.

Related Article : In the Cart: The New World of E-Commerce Marketing

To promote healthy sales and maintain SKUs, product-based discounts should be offered at regular intervals. This can be done on the basis of the requirement - whether there is a declining need for a product or the promotion of a new one. Further, value-added discounts like free shipping or an extra gift with the purchase should be given. This comes across as a token of appreciation on the brand’s behalf and helps create a good brand perception.

Changes in the E-commerce market and consumer behaviour are here to stay due to the sheer convenience of getting reasonable offers from the comfort of one’s home. Consumers have begun to understand the advantages of E-commerce, which is why brands should start prioritising their digital experiences. It will ensure that their offerings are the best in the market.

Related Article. : E-commerce Must-Do’s Post Pandemic

The Ecommerce industry is ever-changing, and every year brings in several new trends with itself. However, last year has considerably accelerated the digital transformation process, accompanied by significant online consumer behaviour changes. In the time ahead, we can only expect consumers to engage more and more in online shopping. Hence, businesses must realise that their pre-pandemic E-commerce strategies will not suffice to tackle this new change.

In order to adapt to the new reality, brands will need to develop new online capabilities to win the digital shelf and ensure a positive customer experience, including fulfilment, avoiding out-of-stocks and delivery delays, managing digital advertising, etc. Here are five do's that you can action to grow your E-commerce business and emerge as market leaders.

Revamp Supply chain processes

Supply chains face many challenges like return items, unpredictable demand, small orders, etc. To meet consumers’ rising expectations within a proper time-period, businesses should redefine their supply chain networks to optimise them into lesser, but larger operations. Demand forecasting will find critical use here. A higher number of third-party logistics providers should be brought into the picture to ensure minimum cost and maximum utilisation of stock when it comes to transportation, last-mile delivery, inventory management, and so on. Storage warehouses should be reorganised for optimal product placements, and high-grade analytics should be adopted for greater flexibility and productive online behaviour of the consumers. Alternative solutions like ‘click-and-collect’ can be considered so that consumers have higher autonomy in choosing their way of product-delivery. Constant communication and coordination should be ensured as this will help in making the whole process economically profitable.

Shift retail shelves online

Due to social distancing and home-isolation during the pandemic, consumers could not visit stores physically to buy products, which is why they had to resort to online methods for every requirement of theirs. The online purchase of food and beverages during the time shot up by a whopping 285% and grocery as a category spiked like anything in e-commerce. With this upward trend, businesses should include more categories of products on their online websites, such as - a full assortment of grocery items, long-term shelf-stable products, basic hygiene and medical-scale items, etc.  They should also put a spotlight on their ‘feature’ items and deals to attract a higher number of consumers. Apart from this, the regular brick and mortar stores should have tailored purchase options to address the meteoric rise in online demand.

Ameliorate visibility on social media

Data suggests that one in four purchases are being made via social media platforms, and about 17% of consumers prefer social apps for shopping. The reign of influencers was quite a rage during the pandemic as well, which automatically makes influencer marketing an important strategy. Businesses should collaborate with social media influencers, and focus on having a strong presence across every possible social media platform to create brand awareness, have a greater reach and boost sales figures. As per a survey, 74% of consumers visit social media pages before going ahead with a purchase decision, and 82% of consumers say they get information about products or brands mostly through social media marketing. Since social media engages consumers effortlessly, businesses should ensure their visibility in that space.

Adopt immersive and connected ads

There will be tough competitions between brands when it comes to digital advertising. Everything will depend on how one’s approach is better than the other and how widespread these approaches are.  Businesses should take advantage of listing their products on Google shopping for free as it will help them directly redirect consumers to their websites. Strong emphasis should be put on email reminders, subscriptions, coupons, etc. Businesses should also diversify their advertising channels to reach potential consumers in every corner of the world. They should further make more use of 3D and CGI in their advertisements to increase click-through rates (CTR) and drive website traffic. 

Improve digital payment trends

Research data tells us that consumers make around 10-30% of purchases on an average in the online domain. Though the digital payment trend was being led by the millennials and the Gen Z, the pandemic cornered other consumers into adopting these digital techniques. It is anticipated that shoppers aged 45 and above will switch to online purchasing trends, thereby creating a brand new segment of e-commerce users. To make this switch even more convenient, businesses should try and incorporate more online payment methods like NFC (Near Field Communication) and EMV (Europay, Mastercard, and Visa) for contactless payments. They should also tap into ‘Buy now, pay later’ apps as these methods are set to gain more prominence in the coming years. LazyPay and Simpl are some excellent examples. Other options like BOPIS (Buy online Pick-up in-store) should also be considered.

Needless to say, the above-mentioned strategies will surely help businesses to go that extra mile and deliver better and wholesome experiences to their consumers. Implementing them will ensure that your methods are streamlined and structured, and as long as you are up to speed with the consumers’ changing requirements, you will definitely have a long-lasting impact on them.

Related Article : In the Cart: The New World of E-Commerce Marketing

The Covid-19 pandemic has introduced some defining changes in the world of E-commerce marketing, the implications of which are expected to have a ripple effect that will last years. Retail businesses are having to quickly adapt to changing consumer behaviour and the associated demand and supply rates. The pandemic significantly paced up the consumer mindset to browse, choose and purchase from the convenience of their homes, which consequently affected the fundamental functionings of the E-commerce industry. In evolving times like these, here are five avenues that your businesses can use in their E-commerce marketing strategies to enhance sales and increase customer delight. 

AR will drive check-out rates

Research data tells us that around 76% of the consumers will make higher purchases provided they have the option of Augmented Reality, and about 42% believe that AR will help them in making better buys. The ‘try before you buy’ trend will become all-consuming as businesses will now use a higher number of brand-specific AR filters in their social media for faster check-out rates.  Smart and interactive user manuals will be readily available, and brands will incorporate them into their websites. This will give the much-needed autonomy to the consumers and also improve automated customer services.  IKEA is an excellent example to draw inspiration from. Its own AR home decor app called IKEA Place enables customers to preview products in their own environment prior to making a purchase.

AI will improve B2C conversions

It is being predicted that in the upcoming years, over 85% of consumer interactions will be managed via Artificial Intelligence than humans. Businesses will analyse consumer data from several touch-points such as mobile apps, websites, email campaigns, etc., to provide a more hyper-personalised experience to the end-users. They will use ‘the assortment intelligence tool’ that will help in monitoring and analysing the competitor’s product and pricing strategy which will help them in gaining a competitive advantage. This way, businesses will be able to make the requisite changes for higher accuracy while targeting their audiences. They will use AI for inventory management for time-scale demand prediction of their products and reinforce learning systems to be better prepared for the future.  Sales of wearable technology will be encouraged as some of these gadgets collect a large amount of data that will help in giving personalised recommendations to the user. Furthermore, Chatbots will refine the shopping experience by looking into pre and post-sales customer service. 

Voice-search will boost SERPs

Voice-based searches will become heavily conversational and will play a key role in driving organic traffic to business websites which will ultimately culminate in good sales numbers. It will become more consolidated and better integrated with the customer experience, customer journey, secure payment gateways, store navigation, as well as personalised recommendations. As per research data, about  75% of consumers will own smart speakers by 2025, which will serve more relatable and less intrusive ads.   Basically, voice- search will become the preferred mode of communication as it takes up less time and requires no exertion. It will be a crucial differentiator, enhance the consumer experience, and help in building in customer loyalty. Related article : How Voice Search Will Change The Future Of SEO

Personalisation to reorient PPC rates

In today’s digital world, businesses have to come up with ways to stand out by creating highly personalised experiences for their consumers. On-site marketing experiences will become more popular to have an in-depth engagement with the audiences. Businesses will try new algorithms for psychographic personalisation, based on the individual’s personality rather than just basic demographics and big data. Surveys show that there is a 25% spike in revenue and a 45% downfall in bounce rates with hyper-personalisation - a fact that solidifies its importance even more. Further, tailor-made suggestions will play a key role in online search behaviour, and recommendations will pop up in real-time as and when the user moves on from one page to another online. 

Omnichannel Shopping will increase gateways

Businesses will focus on providing omnichannel shopping opportunities to their consumers that will look into providing a cohesive user experience at every touch-point across different channels and devices. Websites, payment channels, and apps will be well-optimised so that they are accessible across different devices and provide an end-to-end in-depth experience to their consumers. Businesses will also increase purchase options like - pick up from store, buy online and pick up from store, buy in-store and get home delivery, etc., to give autonomy to the customers where they have ample options to choose from.   They will try to improve their sales by selling on multiple platforms, collating data from these purchases and transactions, engaging via one on one analysis, and being present exactly where the customer is. With changing times,  everyone is trying to adapt and have a strong foothold in the market for better results. While you try to look after the needs of your consumers, it is hoped that the above-mentioned points will enable you to run your businesses in the best way possible.  Related Article : Digital Transformation Through E-Commerce