How can I increase my sales online?
Rewindr
It is a well-known fact that the e-commerce industry is booming globally. Global e-commerce sales amounted to more than $4.2 trillion dollars worldwide in 2020 and this number is expected to continue growing over the next few years, shooting up to an incredible $6.5 trillion by 2023. This means that more people will rush to take part in the big online opportunity as e-commerce becomes an increasingly lucrative option for businesses.
In the midst of an industry full of opportunities and in a world where most sales are prone to happen online, tech-entrepreneurs are increasingly bypassing traditional stores and are drawing their way out to target, engage, and convert people into buying their goods and products.
However, very few entrepreneurs forget the fact that with opportunity comes competition, and that many of the competitors will start selling similar products to a similar, or even the same audience online. Businesses are starting to mimic their counterparts, and before we even know it, the market will be drowning in repetitive marketing messages, to which customers will grow less responsive.
What happens when people become less sensitive to marketing messages?
Let’s have a look at the problems e-commerce businesses face when it comes to connecting with their potential customers. Strictly speaking, let us first have a look at the demographics of the buyer base of an e-commerce business in general. Most converted customers are pertaining to a more or less older generation. Now, if you are an e-commerce founder ask yourself this: Why are younger people not buying from you? Could it be because they’re digitally-savvy shoppers who can easily figure out how they want to discover and shop for products?
If this did not happen to you already, how long until your non-digital-savvy buyer segments get replaced by digital-savvy ones?.
Customers, nowadays, are growing less and less sensitive to marketing messages because everyone is bidding on the same audiences, with more or less the same marketing techniques, which engenders an increase in marketing cost without a corresponding increase in performance. And as we all know, a decrease in performance leads to profitability spiraling down.
It’s just the tip of the Iceberg!
Customer expectations have changed drastically with the course of time. Before the digital revolution, customers were making purchase decisions expecting a basic quality service and fair pricing. They were buying products and merely wished they worked. Nowadays, the expectations are off the charts. With an increased focus on user experience, young customers are now expecting an easy and fast buying experience that is customizable to their needs.
Today, customers have more choices than ever and businesses need to stay up-to-date with customer expectations. Take a look at what Amazon offers in the US: the business is offering a same-day and free shipping experience while other businesses are still playing the affordable and 48 hours shipping game. As long as big fishes like Amazon and ebay set the pace in this online ocean (because they can get preferential pricing and they will be able to go much lower in price.), small fishes will be forced to deal with an ever-shrinking profit margin to keep trailing the big players.
All you need is a different way to play the e-commerce game:
If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur or founder, whose spendings on marketing have exceeded your returns on investments in terms of acquiring qualified prospects, converting them to become casual purchasers, and retaining them to set off as power users (i.e. loyal customers), you are surely going through all of the above and trying to create new marketing messages, something that is rather costing you money, time and effort.
The real question is: How can you connect more with your audience and increase your sales online, while outperforming your competitors and staying ahead in the e-commerce game?
As mentioned above, customers are always looking for an experience that matches their expectations, and if we dig deeper into how these expectations are shaped we will conclude that they are informed by previous experiences, whether they are experiences with other or same products and services, and information received from social media, offline media, and friends.
Thus, your focus should shift from just acquiring new customers by spending money on standard marketing messages to actually remonetizing your current customers by guaranteeing them an ideal purchasing experience, of which they will be proud to share.
Yes, experiences shared by your customers should be at the top of your marketing strategy, rather than spending on repetitive, expensive and time-consuming marketing messages.
User Generated Content and user-reviews: A better way to generate high-quality marketing at minimal cost
In fact, because the e-commerce game is much like a chess game, and because content is King, User Generated Content is Queen, UGC can be a reliable, high-quality and cost-effective way that drives better return on investments than any marketing technique drafted by your internal team because
it is not the product copy that a company pays a copywriter to create and It’s also not the product description that the product team writes. NEIL PATEL
Look at it this way: In a chess game, the Queen is the strongest piece Because of her long range and ability to move in multiple directions. Following the same logic, in an e-commerce game, User Generated Content should be the backbone of your marketing strategy because it goes both directions: while, positive customer reviews are the manifestation of a strong retention strategy, these reviews can also play the role of a good customer acquisition tactic.
User-generated content is your must-have go-to-the-ecommerce-game tactic, because it’s content created by a real user offering you social proof of your product. Potential customers will trust it more than anything else, because people have always made purchase decisions relying on word-of-mouth recommendations and feedback.
Finally, because A great customer experience has a limited lifespan, e-commerce entrepreneurs should raise the marketing bar high and innovate tactics that actually work: a video-format customer review is your way to go. Read us more to know more about it.
