Marketing Strategies to Sell Online

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One of the most popular questions any online business has with regards to selling products online is what marketing strategies are there and how effective are they. We try to outline some of the popular methods below and hopefully help kick-start your online business.

One thing we have found is that there is no one way to market your site, and a good mix of all these methods is the best approach. Try to cover your basis and be realistic about the approach you are taking and the expected results from that effort. The question of whether or not it pays to do a marketing tactics is always the defining question and will vary depending on your given business, customers, and consumers.

 

Email Marketing

A very popular method with low cost and many times, low results. While spamming the world with emails is probably not the best marketing method, it is not something you should over-look. The biggest recommendation is to get followers who consciously sign-up for your newsletters and that you know are interested. Have a section on your site for sign-ups, download your subscriber lists and import into popular online email programs dedicated to sending messages.

popular sites: YMLP.com or ConstantContact.com

 

Pay Per-Click Advertising

Google Ad words is a marketing machine and can be very beneficial to the start-up business or online e-commerce system. It gets your brand name out on search engine sidebars with visitors who have searched for specific content. And best of all, you only pay if they click on the link. You are getting your message in front of those who want to see it, leaving your site to do the selling if possible. The best advice on these is to start with small budgets, and work your way up. Be sure to use the search engines tracking code to ensure you are converting from those and watch out for the point of no-return, but a good $50 or $100 dollar investment a month will get a lot of visitors.

Common types of Pay Per-Click advertising methods are:

CPM – cost per thousands impressions or another said metric
CPC – cost per click
CPA – cost per certain action on your site

The most popular being CPC, it is a good compromise between impressions shown to users and those actually interacting and making it to your site through the ad.

popular sites: Google Ads

 

Social Media Advertising

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and others can attract visitors and requires little effort other than posting a few hot topics about your business. The hardest part about social media is you have to keep up with it. Start by building a simple Facebook page for your business, get a small banner and logo going, links to your website, and a twitter page. You can connect Facebook and twitter so that when you post on Facebook, it automatically goes out on twitter as well. Be sure to spend some time liking and following those comparable businesses that you like and many will follow you back. It doesn’t take anything cost wise, but it does take a lot of time. Setup a schedule or a reminder on your calendar to post something of interest to keep the content fresh and consistently revolving.

Social media such as Facebook now have great promotional tools, and will show your ad across the Facebook network for fees. Give it a test and put out $30 dollars on a few of your important posts and see if you can attract new customers and convert some users into customers.

popular sites: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Digg, and others.

 

Local Advertising

Even though you probably are reading this to gain traction online, don’t forget your local advertising channels. Some businesses still profit from pointing local customers to a website for viewing, inventory and to see any new items. Radio, newspapers, and yellow pages are still good avenues to get your brand out to local customers. While they may not convert on the website as much, why would they when they can come to your store, it still gives a convenient path for them to check in and see what is new.

 

Tracking Your Efforts

Once you have all your advertising channels in place, be sure to track your investments. There is no way to see if your online social media campaign, email campaign, or Pay Per-Click campaign are working without tracking them, and Google adwords, Bing Ads, and yahoo make this easy using their tracking tools. The best part is you do not have to use their proprietary tracking system. Just use Google Analytics and put a small piece of code in your header and your site will begin tracking page statistics on where customers come from, what they searched for, what city they are from, how long they were on your site, and where they went once on your site.

To track a specific advertisement, simply use unique URL identifiers at the end such as ?adwords=101 and then you can analyze the results each time someone visits with that unique link. Each ad can be tracked this way, and with the WP EasyCart shopping system, we track Google e-commerce results, so each order and product gets results back in analytics. This way you can see not only which ads are clicked on, but which ones get converted the most.

This leads you to spending money in the appropriate marketing campaign that pays the most converters and therefore, makes you a successful online marketing machine!

5 Helpful Tips for E-Commerce Startups

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We here at WP EasyCart have been in the business of online selling and e-commerce for many years. ?And as a developer of a WordPress Shopping Cart system, we can tell you from experience we have seen it all. ?We have seen start-ups struggle in the e-commerce world, and sometimes failing, because of unrealistic expectations, poor planning, or sometimes the lack of knowledge in what is available.? Often times a small tweak to what a business is doing can push them from struggle to success!

So we thought we would release some helpful e-commerce tips for those looking to make their mark in the world wide web of online selling.

Rule #1: ?Sell something that people want

It seems like common sense. ?It seems like something you have probably thought of already. ?But many online business sell goods and services that just don’t have demand. ?This is a hard question to answer, because deep down you know people want your goods, otherwise, you would not try to sell your goods online, right? ?But take a deeper look at how large that pool of customers might be and see if the risk to reward is there.

Rule #2: ?Customer or Consumer?

Do you know which is which? ?Who is your website going to target? ?Your customer might not always be the consumer, especially in the case of children. ?We have seen many website owners build websites for children, when the actual customer will always be the adult purchasing the item. ? Don’t confuse your consumers with the customers of your website. ?If they are going to be the same, then you can design as such a shopping system that treats them as one. ?If they are separate entities, be sure to cater to your online shoppers and customers in the shopping areas, while giving the consumers a good place to view and ‘Read-Up’ on your business. ?Often the consumer is the one influencing the customer to buy the product, so both need space and both need to be impressed with information and flow.

Rule #3: ?Keep it Simple

Yes, you have a wealth of knowledge to give on your store, website, blog, and social sites… but resist! ?To much information is a turn-off for people visiting your site to look for goods and services. ?If you must have a lot of information, technical or otherwise, make sure the site flows well to that information, rather than smothering your home page with 10 pages of information because it’s important. ?Get a technical document repository somewhere in your site so IF people want to read it, they can. ?A good rule of thumb is to write your home page as you would like it with all the text, graphics, bulleted lists, etc… Then cut it in half!

Rule #4: Market Competition

Be sure to analyze your market place competition. ?If you sell goods in a neighborhood brick and mortar store and are looking to go online, be sure to compare the two market places. ?You may have a complete monopoly on a local brick and mortar environment, but venture online, and you now compete against thousands of online shopping systems. ?Will you stand out? ?Will you have something unique to offer? ?There certainly are ways to do this. ?Will your loyal brick and mortar customers buy online? ?will they continue to walk into your store? ?So be realistic about your expectations when entering a larger arena like online commerce. ?It is fair to say you can pick up some revenue streams, but it may not be fair to say you will dominate like a brick and mortar might. ?Be objective and be clear what your goals are before you begin.

Rule #5: Analyze

The beauty of online shopping systems is you can analyze your traffic patterns much better than any other avenue of selling. ?Be sure to tap into the Analytics market and study where traffic is going on your new start-up site. ?Make sure you let traffic analysis run for several weeks before making decisions, then change one aspect and analyze again. ?It is a long and repetitive process, but making small adjustments and looking for results is the only way to accurately tune your website or online e-commerce system.

In conclusion, be realistic, use good judgment, keep things simple, and analyze results periodically as you go forward in your new venture as a start-up.? Remember, nobody is an expert at everything, so don?t let someone sell you that they are!? We here at WP EasyCart try to follow our own rules as well, always rewriting, simplifying, analyzing, and adjusting to make the experience easier for customers and consumers.

Picking a Payment Gateway

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Here at WP EasyCart we deal with payment gateway companies on a daily basis and understand all the pros and cons to each. We consider payment collection as a 3 step decision:

  1. Sales Volume – Will you be selling enough to make the lower transaction fee pay?
  2. Location – Where is your business located? Not all payment gateways server all areas of the world.
  3. Pricing – Do you know all of the added costs for live payment gateways?

Sales Volume

The first thing to think about is sales volume and average transaction amounts. most live payment gateways charge you a setup fee, a monthly fee, a transaction fee, a batch fee, and an additional fee to process cards like discover and american express. We know that most business want to make payment as easy as possible and is why most look towards live payment processing, but if you are not making enough money in a month or per transaction then you will be losing money over a third party option like PayPal Standard! We have seen many companies pay the fees for months on end while they are getting started and all the while they could have just gone with a simple solution like PayPal.

Location

This is a really important factor to think about before starting your e-commerce site. Do your research and ask around before locking yourself into a payment company. The WP EasyCart is setup to have an option for all countries and more information can be found by clicking here.

Pricing

The other important factor, as all business owners know, is the bottom line. It seems simple, but many do not think about how a payment company can effect the business’s bottom line. Issues like setting up an SSL certificate and the yearly cost to keep this current on your site, charge backs and the risk your business takes selling from your own site, and unexplained transaction fees and the reason they are incurred. The following are a few things to keep in mind with pricing:

  • PayPal Standard is a flat rate with no fees and a very low chance of charge backs.
  • Live payment gateways require an SSL certificate which is about $100/year.
  • Additional fees typically apply for Discover and American Express when using a live payment gateway.
  • The more security you implement in your live payment gateway account, the lower the fees.
  • Using a gateway with 3D secure implemented will lower your fees and prevent charge backs.

What is a Charge Back

Many people who have not dealt with a credit card company do not realize that charge backs exist. A charge back is when the merchant is required to return the amount of money made on a transaction that is found to be fraudulent and to protect the credit card owner. In addition to returning the total of the order, the company typically charges a flat rate on top to pay for their “costs”. Also, do not forget, as a business you also lose the product!! This is one of the worst things that can happen as an online store owner and is important to avoid. To do this, try the following tips:

  • Require the AVS/CVV2 value to match in your merchant account.
  • Require the zip/postal code to match from the customer’s billing account (this is also set in your merchant account).
  • If available, require 3D secure checkout on your site.
  • If an order seems out of place or fishy, contact the customer and have them verify their info. If something still doesn’t seem right, simply refund the order and contact the customer. It is always better to be safe than lose the sale and product later and be charged for it.

Shipping Your Product

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Getting your shipping pricing just right can be a tricky task. As your business grows and expands where you are shipping your products, so does the complexity of calculating a shipping cost. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when developing a shipping system that will work best for you.

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  • No shipping system is perfect all the time
  • The goal of a shipping rate is not to be exactly correct, but to be an overall net cost of zero over the course of a year
  • Leverage the zone system as needed and create new zones to improve your rate accuracy
  • Choose a rate system that works best for your product
  • Many see the best results from live based rates through UPS, USPS, FedEx, and Australian Post. Keep in mind this may not apply to every one.
  • If shipping rates tend to increase evenly based on weight, choose weight based shipping.
  • If shipping rates tend to increase evenly based on price, choose price based shipping.
  • If a product tends to cost more to ship than all other products, use the additional handling charge option to adjust the shipping rate accordingly.

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