The competition that exists between online e-commerce businesses is fierce. Marketing tactics large and small are closely analyzed to gain any possible advantage over the competition. With quarter four upon us leading into 2021, this is the perfect time to optimize all your marketing tactics for the following year. Where should you get started? Review the five following e-commerce marketing trends that are certain to help you end the year strong and get a running start rolling into 2021.
E-commerce Marketing Trends
Customer Service
Although customer service has always been an important factor for shoppers, there's never been such a drastic variance with online shopping. Considering consumers turn to e-commerce sites to avoid visiting physical locations, it's crucial that your customer service tactics are on point. Without being able to walk up to a store associate to ask for assistance, how can you best answer their questions or address their concerns?
- Be sure to always review your social platform for questions coming through on your public pages and direct messages.
- Implement chat bots on your website, and if applicable Facebook, for quick and easy responses.
- Make sure that all communications coming from your website and contact email address are being properly forwarded onto the correct personnel.
Influencers
With so much time spent on social platforms like Instagram and YouTube, consumers are beginning to develop trusting relationships with the users they follow. As these users begin to gain followers, they become a viable option for influencer marketing. You'll often see this with popular online personalities like athletes and movie stars promoting products to their followers, but although these types of influencers have millions of trusted followers they can be very expensive to work with. As a smaller business, or if you just want to get your influencer strategy off the ground floor, it can be more beneficial to start with multiple smaller influencers. Having between 10K-50K followers, these micro-influencers tend to be more interactive with their audience, making them a reliable resource for product recommendations, and tend to be a more financially viable option.
Mobile
Online shopping is, without a doubt, on the rise, but so is mobile shopping. It's never been easier to pull your phone out of your pocket and browse the internet when you're bored sitting on the couch. This makes website responsiveness a massive priority. When you browse and review your website from a desktop computer, it may look great. This unfortunately may not be the case when viewing from a phone or tablet. Negative user experiences lead to nothing but decreased sales and lower website traffic. Be sure to contact our web development team with any questions on responsive design.
Social Shopping
As stated above, mobile shopping is on the rise with so many people spending time on their phone or tablets. But what are people spending most of their time on? You guessed it, social media. People love to constantly see what's happening in the lives of their friends and loved ones. As they scroll through their newsfeed, they'll stumble upon products or businesses that they've never heard of before but their friends might have shopped at. This is where social shopping comes into play. Promoting your brand on social platforms like Facebook and Instagram can connect you with your ideal audience.
Personalization
Tying it all together is personalization. As consumers, we like to be seen and recognized for our individual interests. If you are marketed to on social media or YouTube with a product or service that you're not interested in, you can't click "skip" or scroll past the ad fast enough. It's important that when looking into your audiences for each of your individual marketing tactics that you're targeting the correct audience. Just as important, that you are also promoting the best suited products or services to these audiences. While it might not seem like rocket science, you're only throwing money down the drain and turning away potential future clientele if you don't keep these concepts in mind.
By implementing these five tactics into your e-commerce marketing strategy, you are certain to end the year on a high note and move into 2021 well ahead of your competition. If you are having a difficult time implementing any of the strategies above, or have additional questions, be sure to reach out to the digital marketing experts at Informatics. We are excited to hear from you!
