Part 3
Part 3 of is your ecommerce site ready for the Holidays? We will discuss about some final details of how your site can be ready to get traffic online and marketing.
1. Email
Capture the emails for additional business from previous customers also you may capture additional emails from referrals or provide coupons. Create email campaigns to this targeted audience. This will give you the ability to upsell or sell other products in the future.
Ensure branding is consistent with website and business, with logos, taglines, color scheme
Emails can help your ecommerce site get reviews on products after purchase
Use an email marketing management service such as Constant Contact to manage email campaigns
Some shopping carts allow you to automate follow-ups from abandoned purchases.
Emails can be also automated for special events such as birthdays, holidays and other special occasions.
Set up lead capture forms to gather information including email
Use also a web based or desk top customer relationship management (CRM) software.
2. Social Media – engage with customers today like ASAP!
Social Engagement/Paid Advertising
Facebook – Engage with customers who will be able to share posts about products, deals and discounts. Very powerful with images, ensure that Open Graph tags are implemented in the meta. Facebook also gives marketers the ability to use paid ads called Facebook Ads.
Twitter – Engage with this platform also using Tweets and images also, make sure Twitter Card are created in the metatags. Twitter has an ads platform that can also enable marketers to reach various targeted audiences with Twitter Ads.
Google+ (this surprisingly is a very useful tool)
Video
YouTube – is a great platform to visually display products in video format. You can take advantage of putting product brand name, sku, etc. You should be able to rank well in the search engines using YouTube along with adding backlinks to your site to that exact product, similar line of products, upsell and cross sell.
Images
3. Affiliate Marketing
A great way to get more traffic to your site by partnering with other web site owners and online marketers. There are a few top notch affiliate networks that can help you do this:
CJ, Rakuten, Share-A-Sale, and others or you could roll out your own but it may be difficult without knowledge of affiliate marketing management.
Blogs to read if you are interested.
http://www.amnavigator.com/blog/ – Geno Prussakov for a management perspective.
http://affiliatetip.com/ – Shawn Collins for an affiliate perspective.
To run an affiliate program, you will need an affiliate manager for managing all the affiliates and offers you may be promoting from your ecommerce site. If you do not have the resources to currently hire an affiliate manager, then you use an OPM. OPM or outsourced performance management agency can help your company with affiliate management.
4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Last but not least is SEO, the long haul process of internet marketing but worth it. The reason it take a while is that the search engines have to spider and index websites then algorithmically rank them according to certain specification. Please use a shopping cart with SEO features. It takes a long time for a site to rank on the search engines if you are in a broad and very competitive space like electronics for instance. Many Ecommerce websites have already targeted the term Cyber Monday or Cyber Monday +”year” already on one page.
· Use Google Keyword Tool to find targeted keywords with paid traffic
· Update meta tags: title, description, and use Open Graph and Twitter Card
· Ensure your site is in Google Webmaster Tools
· Sitemap is up to data and there are no 404 errors if there are errors then have them redirected back to a live page on your site.
· Add content to your site and blog if you have one most hosted shopping carts. Update sitemap.xml, webmaster tools.
· It may be a little too late rank for broad terms but it is easier if you are in a niche market or targeting long-tail terms
5. Look into getting a new shopping cart.
Sometimes as your online business grows so do your needs, especially technologically. Modern shopping carts have various features for today’s online commerce. You have the choice of using and managing open source carts or plug-in for the various content management systems.
Open source
· Presta Cart
· WordPress
· Joomla
· Drupal
Third-party hosted
· Big Commerce
· Shopify
· Volusion
Both of the categories of shopping cart platforms have additional plug-ins for third party applications. Some of the plug-ins maybe for accounting, inventory management, customer relationship management and third party logistics.
6. Get Customers to Review Products on Site
Product reviews can help your site increase more conversions because of an inherent trust factor. Reviews can bring to light about the quality of products and usefulness and satisfaction with products. Reviews can also help gauge the performance of your ecommerce operations.
This will be easier is you have an email list already so you can ask for reviews.
The post Is Your Ecommerce Site Ready for The Holidays? Last Chance, Hurry! – Part 3 appeared first on Composite Internet Marketing, Inc..
