17 Ecommerce Marketing Tips & Tools

The ecommerce industry can be lucrative, if you know how to get the running start that you’ll need in order to succeed. Luckily, there are plenty of tools and services out there that you can use to help pave the road to more sales. We’ll deliver 17 ecommerce marketing tips and tools that you can use to improve conversions exponentially.

Users are going to have questions when they shop at your online store. How you choose to answer them and how available and informative that you are can play a strong role in converting shoppers to customers.

A great tool that you can consider using for this is called NanoRep. It’s a self-learning FAQ tool that you can drop into your website to help answer questions. It learns with each answer to reduce customer support time.

Since your prospective customers are unable to feel, smell our touch any of the products that you are offering, you have to go with the next best thing: visual perception. Web designers at large ecommerce stores use a carousel design to merge product images with navigation buttons and intuitive design.

Take a look at this DEBENHAMS screenshot below. A quick search on WordPress finds over 65 plugins that you can use to add carousel design to your store in just a couple of steps.

Whether you are using WooCommerce with WordPress, 3dcart, BigCommerce, MonsterCommerce, PayPal or others, don’t just restrict your wares to one platform.

Services like Pixlee let you create your own Instagram store in just a few steps, and have integrated marketing tools and analytics that you can use to help boost sales and improve cross-channel revenue.

If you are not yes using email marketing because you think it is dead, think again. According to SalesForce, over 60% of people will open an email with a catchy headline. And about 44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year, explains Convince and Convert.

Newsletter sign-ups and pop-ups can help you grab organic, opt-in email addresses, and you can use services like Campaigner to market to your sign-ups. Integrated and helpful A/B testing tools enable you to maximize results and drive more revenue.

Wondering how adding a live chat feature to your website can help you convert more? A KissMetrics report, which based its findings off a related Forrester study, found that 44% of online consumers say that live chat during the purchasing experience is of the most critical features an ecommerce store can offer.

What’s more, 62% of consumers said they are likelier to purchase in the future when they have had a positive chat experience. Helping you accomplish this is a service called Zopim, which simply plugs into your site to enable effective live chat with customers, as they shop.

There are a number of methods that you can use to gain publicity for your products, in particular if you are selling niche products. A great way to attract more traffic and social chatter about your products is by donating them to top bloggers and encouraging them to write reviews.

To get you started, here’s a list of 50 Blog Review Sites. You can also find thousands of other places to submit by searching Google with keywords like, “submit products for review.”

Studies have consistently found that consumers want the fewest clicks through the checkout process. A ComScore study that was conducted on behalf of PayPal highlights this, noting that when express checkout options are used, sales lift can increase by as much as 115%.

Look into custom shopping carts like XCart, where you can fully control the checkout process on your website, including how many clicks it takes to complete the process, and many other useful features.

We have already broken down the effectiveness of digital coupons in our most recent white paper on 2015 Social Coupon Statistics. With over 95% of users searching for digital coupons, and with billions being generated and redeemed each year, your store shouldn’t be missing out on the action.

Services like Coupon Factory let you create sharable digital coupons that can help you attract more customers and generate more sales. Plus they are social-friendly, too.

In ecommerce, the enemy of your enemy is, in fact, your friend. But only if you have a means of forging the alliance and sharing the aggregate traffic. That’s where a service called DandyLOOP comes in.

DandyLOOP helps your store partner with other, similar online stores so that you can both promote each other’s products to gain more organic, targeted traffic that results in more sales. Stores that partner up recommend noncompeting products to visitors to help increase sales by an average of 15%.

A great way to gain some traction in online news portals and across the search engines for your store is by simply issuing press releases that announce something. Your online store is certain to have plenty of news to announce, whether that’s product sales, a new line of products, a limited time discount code or other announcement.

A great service to consider is called Resonate. It allows you to target social, web and news feeds with robust analytics and hashtag prediction technology to help you stay ahead of the game.

Don’t risk losing customers that may otherwise convert just because a competitor offers a lower price than you do. The most successful ecommerce stores will offer to match or beat prices to earn customers’ business.

Take the Zzounds screenshot below (a large online musical instrument retailer). Shoppers can request a lower price based upon where they may have found the item elsewhere online.

Customer feedback and product reviews are very powerful ecommerce marketing tools that can help you engage customers on your website and across your social networks, helping to attract more targeted traffic and sales.

A great service to consider for this is called GIGYA, which offers an integrated ecommerce and social product review and feedback app complete with custom design, analytics and integration.

This is a saying that goes like this: “Earned media performs better than owned media.” Meaning that if you create effective, engaging content, like an awesome DIY blog or a white paper, you can earn traffic by merely sharing said content.

A service called OutBrain lets you syndicate your long form content over millions of websites, helping to generate millions of impressions, with you only paying for readers who clicked through to your online store.

Social networks are very powerful revenue-generation tools that can help you supercharge your sales when managed properly. According to our latest white paper on Social Media Shopping Statistics, over 157 million shoppers were referred to ecommerce stores via social media in 2013 (with the number a bit larger today).

Services like Hootsuite let you connect all of your social networks for easy signal monitoring, posting and management with analytics, so you can maximize on social referral conversions.

One of the most effective methods of driving targeted traffic to your store is via long form content outreach, typical used via blogging. But knowing what keywords that you should be blogging with is the hardest part. By using these keywords in your posts, you can help those pages rank on the search engines. The more that you get found, the more sales that you will generate.

To find these keywords, look to a tool called Wordtracker, which helps you research the most effective keywords to use in your ecommerce marketing campaign. Take those keywords and create engaging blogs to drive more traffic and attract more sales.

Getting visitors to your site is just half the battle. About 70% of them will leave your site without making a purchase, but not all hope is lost. You can still cater to this traffic by using a retargeting service like ReTargeter.

This service plugs into your site and follows your visitors to the sites they visit the most, after they have left your site, marketing your products and services to them again, typically resulting in a high conversion value.

Have a look at this infographic we’ve included below. It highlights the most pertinent ecommerce facts and statistics of the present day. Use it, and the tools and hacks we’ve delivered for you today to improve your operation and generate more revenue than ever before.

Commonly overlooked, one of the most powerful ecommerce marketing tools that you have is your returns policy. In fact, studies have found that it influences as much as 80% of sales and 90% of long term customer loyalty. Shoppers want to be confident in their purchase and this means assuring that returns are hassle-free.

Lucky for you, TrueShip actually makes the tool that you need here. It’s called ReadyReturns and it drops into any website to fully automate returns for you and for your shoppers.