Making the most of your online store marketing

Published on March 11, 2012 Making the most of your online store marketing

Building traffic and generating sales is more than just good prices, great products and excellent service. You need to be constantly thinking about your customers and what will appeal to them. What marketing tools do you have at your disposal? Many more than you may have thought.

Many people starting out think about online (Google) advertising and price based promotions (sales) as the main marketing tools they have at their disposal, along with seach engine optimisation (SEO). But Ozcart gives store owners many more marketing tools at their disposal that they may not have been aware of.

Some of these include:

• Cross-selling: There are two broad ways to do this – automatic cross-selling where the store looks at the purchases of existing customers in your store and suggests other items that those people have also bought. This is a really useful way of cross-selling items in the store without you having to do much because similar products that are often bought together will be automatically suggested. The downside is that high volume products will move, but slower volume products may become even slower – you may want more control to be able to suggest high profit items with lower profit ones. This is where manual cross-selling (also available in Ozcart) comes into play. It’s a pain to set up if you have a huge number of products, but worth it in the long run as you have the control to offer/cross-sell items together.
• 2-for-1 promotions or buy-x get 20% off y: People always like getting things for free or discounts off other items.
• Free shipping: If you buy courier or postal services in bulk you may wish to consider this, or if you just want to encourage fewer people to abandon their carts on checkout. Shipping costs are a known issue for potential customers making a purchase and making shipping free takes the hassle out of everything for them. Of course, if the shipping will end up costing you more than you are making (if you have bulky products) then you may want to put a minimum spend limit on free shipping or only offer it on certain products.
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and content (“landing”) pages. The system will automatically create titles and descriptions to give to the search engines when they index a page, but if you don’t like those auto-generated tags you can create your own. Pages will also be indexed by their name with friendly names, so that will help you create and promote particular content pages in your store e.g. visit www.ourstore.com/summer-sale or create pages for particular pages or promotions and send search engine advertising traffic straight there.
• Category promotions: Instead of putting individual products on sale, Ozcart allows you to put just one category on sale, a group of categories on sale, or run a store wide sale – and put an automatic end date on the specials so you don’t have to manually turn off al the specials when they end. E.g., 20% off cookware until 1 February 2012, 30% off all jeans on Australia Day.
• Discount vouchers and coupons are always liked by customers as they feel special. Send them out in the physical mail with a code on them, or as a mail drop for extra impact. Some mail drop companies can organise and distribute mail drops based on a particular target group of customers, so see our blog article on customer profiling too.
• After sales follow ups. Ozcart gives you the ability to send follow up emails to customers to encourage them to review your products, to follow up customers who have contacted you or signed up accounts and not purchased – or just to say thank you and build customer rapport.
• Abandoned Carts analysis: It’s worth looking at customers who put items in their cart but did not buy – to find out why they did this and see if you can overcome their objection to buying. Ozcart gives you the ability to see any customer who gets to the checkout confirmation screen without redirecting to the payment gateway through the Stuck Orders Centre.
• Phone Orders can be promoted online – you can go through the front end as if you were a customer while the customer is on the phone, or if they are already a customer, log in as them via your admin and place an order without having to ask them for their password.

This list is just some of the marketing tools you have at your disposal. There are more! Banners, Competitions, Music samples for downloadable products, using Google Analytics and Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools), Sitemaps for Google, FAQs, Slideshow/Carousel (depending on design), Checkout as Guest, Twitter and Facebook links, Twitter feed to your store front, Compare Products, Data Feeds, the list goes on. Combined with Australian ecommerce features and first-rate support, Ozcart is a great value for money option for your business.