The Best E-commerce Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses

Are you a small e-commerce business struggling to increase your sales? Take a look at the 14 best e-commerce strategies to boost conversions!
Faye Chong
Faye Chong

Content Marketing Lead

Reading time: 5 minutes

The present business environment is one where it is not only important for small businesses to integrate the best e-commerce strategies, but also crucial to ensure that the strategies are implemented well

Online shopping is growing at a breakneck pace — fueled by consumers’ shifting behavior and larger investments in proper e-commerce marketing plans. In fact, e-commerce sales in the US reached $870 billion in 2021, a 14.2% increase over 2020 and a 50.5% increase over 2019.

Geographical or location borders no longer restrict brands but more by their creativity level and their willingness to use new technologies and strategies. 

That said, it’s not only important for e-commerce businesses to adopt the best e-commerce strategies, but also crucial to ensure the strategies are implemented well. Let’s look at 14 e-commerce strategies and tips for small businesses that might contribute to their success. 

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Contents

E-commerce strategies and tips for small businesses

Adopt chat marketing software

Chat marketing refers to using messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Messenger to acquire and engage customers. This method involves direct 1-on-1 conversations with customers on these platforms to deliver personalized messages such as product updates, promotions, notifications, and many more. 

Chat marketing works because it has an 82% open rate and a 10% conversion rate. Furthermore, 43% of people said they have proactively texted a business. 

As you’re inserting your business into an environment where people mainly communicate with their friends and family, you automatically create a more personal setting to chat with your customers. 

Fortunately, many chat marketing software are extremely affordable while still giving you tons of robust features like a shared inbox, a multi-channel widget, and more. 

Use good product descriptions and high-quality pictures

Straight-to-the-point product descriptions and top-quality product photos are some of the most crucial parts of your e-commerce digital marketing plan. They are necessary for catching the attention of prospective online buyers.

Online buyers cannot touch the products you are offering. They are making their purchase decision entirely based on product feedback and imagery. So, the product descriptions and images must be accurate.

Use live chat

Live chat allows customers to express their concerns and ask questions before making the final buying decisions. Take this as an opportunity to share knowledge base articles and product information to help your customers make better and informed decisions.

Add trust badges to your website

Trust badges are seals that are added to your website to instill trust in your customers and boost your credibility as a business. These badges can be placed on your homepage, product pages, and checkout pages. 

These are the types of trust badges you can include on your website:

  • SSL certificates
  • Accepted payments
  • Secure payments
  • Free shipping and returns
  • Third-party endorsements
  • Money-back guarantee 
  • Customer logos

Use a one-click checkout

A one-click checkout is as it sounds like — allowing customers to check out in ‘one click’. This means that customers only need fill in their personal details like their name, email address, and shipping address once.

This helps to save a lot of time and provides a better experience. It greatly reduces the number of steps customers need to take before payment, which ultimately increases their chances of making a purchase. 

Personalize your homepage

Personalizing your home page based on the customers’ previous purchases or real-time data like time or location will bring in more sales for you.

59% of the online buyers believe that it is easier to get hold of more interesting products on personalized online stores. Amazon is the pioneer in personalized homepages, with its homepage helping shoppers easily find the products they require in the personalized blocks available in the first log-in section.

Educate customers with content

Content marketing is among some of the most effective e-commerce strategies. With a powerful e-commerce content marketing plan implemented well, you will be able to offer more value to the customers.

First, gather insights about the customers’ pain points, requirements, and demands, and then create valuable and relevant content with easy-to-share options. Checklists, topical posts, infographics, help articles, and listicles are all examples of great content to educate customers about your offerings.

Provide free shipping

Customers like everything that they get for free — And free shipping can potentially increase your small business’ sales and revenues.

70% of buyers strongly believe brands that provide free shipping and delivery. 84% of individuals have higher chances of shopping on sites providing such services. In comparison, 75% say they are likely to buy if there’s a free shipping promotion available instead of other types of discounts and promotions.

This goes to show that if you’re able to offer free shipping, you’d be able to generate more sales. 

However, if you don’t, be transparent about it. Your customers would much rather know that they have to pay for shipping costs up front than at the checkout page, which can lead to high checkout abandonment rates

Ensure your shopping cart functions well

Your shopping cart should function properly if you do not want customers to just abandon their carts. And by properly, we mean being able to navigate easily, not glitchy, and it loads quickly. 

Pay attention to the user journey when optimizing your shopping cart. Ensure that it’s easy to add items to your shopping cart on your site. Remove all distractions and possible sources of exit while clearing the checkout page completely. This helps in preventing any confusion during the checkout procedure.

Work on your social media marketing plan

Make sure your social media marketing plan connects with your content marketing plan. You can repurpose the content on your site across different social media platforms guaranteeing larger audiences and boosted visibility.

You can make videos, gifs, or graphics out of your content and publish them to your social media platforms to generate brand awareness. You can even join communities and groups to discuss about topics and have conversations with like-minded people. 

However, pay attention to which social media platforms you use. Depending on your target audience, decide which platform they frequently use and double down on that. 

It’ll also help to create a content schedule so you’re consistently posting quality content.

Improve your email marketing game

Proper email marketing is crucial for the success of your e-commerce business. Capture lead information through pop-ups and sign-up forms so you can funnel them into your pipeline and send them newsletters. 

You can use emails to promote upcoming products, offer discounts or promotions, send helpful and relevant blog posts, and ask for customer feedback.

Create a chatbot

Chatbots are one of the most significant e-commerce technology trends you can use for fielding questions on platforms like Facebook Messenger. This way, your brand will remain available 24/7.

Chatbots are great at adding an extra dimension to online stores, providing customers the helping hand they need when there are no support teams available.

Leverage the power of UGC

User generated content (UGC) can help you gain more site leads. UGC refers to content like pictures, videos, reviews, blogs, and testimonials about a brand posted by customers on social media networks or other sites.

UGC is 2.4 times more likely to influence people’s purchasing decisions than influencer content. You can ask your customers to generate content for your brand by organizing product contests on social media and motivating individuals to share how they use your products.

You can also feature customer quotes and images on your site to give them social recognition and build brand trust and loyalty.

Consider user experience and optimize for mobile

User experience on your site is everything. If the customers on your site abandon it instantly because of poor design or slow loading pages, you might lose sales forever. And it will also make you seem untrustworthy as a brand.

Pay attention to how you design your site and the way you categorize and display products. Employ all possible measures to offer the best user experience on your site.

Also, take note of your website experience on mobile devices. Retail mobile e-commerce sales hit $359.32 billion in 2021, and is expected to reach $728.28 billion by 2025. To add to that, the amount of time spent on mobile devices has increased to 234 minutes in 2021.

These numbers show no signs of slowing anytime soon, so be sure to optimize your website for mobile users.

The bottom line

Starting a small e-commerce business and taking up all the pains is not a walk in the park. And that’s the reason why you must use the best e-commerce strategies and tips to help you gain traction and achieve success.

For more of such tips and advice, check out these resources! 👇👇👇

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