In the increasingly competitive ecommerce marketplace, sports e-tailers need to promote themselves effectively. Thankfully it’s much easier to carry out marketing activities for an online rather than a physical store.
When people search they type a ‘keyword’ or ‘key phrase’ into their search box and the search engine presents the results based on the sites it considers are the best match to the words or phrases searched for. Many ecommerce software suppliers provide tools to assist in optimising your site around your chosen keywords. It is essential to set up your site to be easily found and optimised for the search traffic you desire.
Pay per click
A fast and effective way of promoting your site is with pay per click, the most popular of which is Google Adwords. Google still takes the lion’s share of the search traffic – the last time I checked our website figures, over 90 per cent of search traffic came from it – but there are others such as Bing, Yahoo! and Facebook also worth considering.
Costs depend greatly on the keywords you plan to bid on, so use the Google Keyword Tool to get an indication of the cost for each click. Try and reach a balance, so the keywords and phrases you choose are not so generic that you get irrelevant traffic, but not so specific that you don’t get enough.
Integrate social networking into your site
An ever growing proportion of internet users’ time is spent on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, so it’s important for anyone marketing an online store to be completely familiar with the opportunity.
Have prominent buttons on your site to your social media accounts and make it easy for information and products to be shared. Regularly contribute news, event details and product information to keep visitors engaged.
Don’t forget email marketing
Once you have sufficient opted in contacts, email marketing is a great way to communicate with your customers. It works well for promoting special offers that can be triggered simply by clicking a link in the email.
There are plenty of providers. MailChimp, for example, is both effective and fun or some ecommerce providers include a service within the platform. Actinic integrates with Emailvision, which makes it convenient to target customers based on what they did or didn’t purchase or to offer them related products.
Email vouchers or coupons
A person with a voucher or coupon feels they have a special deal and it ties them into buying from you. Issuing vouchers to customers for placing an order means you reward loyalty without losing out on potential revenue from one time buyers.
Text messaging
SMS is a great way to engage with customers and prospects in the manner they want to communicate. In the UK 92 per cent of adults use or own a mobile phone, making text messaging an effective and convenient way to communicate. SMS marketing is the perfect complement for e-tailers who have a mobile optimised version of their website to help drive traffic to their store. Campaigns work particularly well for time sensitive offers or to announce new products and sales promotions.
Reward and loyalty schemes
Loyalty cards or vouchers are commonplace when shopping in supermarkets to collect points and redeem them on a future purchase. Online retailers can also set up reward schemes to show customers their appreciation for them placing orders. This can help build loyalty and encourage customers back to place repeat orders.
Another way to gain new customers and build relationships with existing ones is to offer a referral scheme. This incentivises customers to promote your products and company. You are much more likely to make a sale if you are recommended by someone as a trusted source.
Analyse everything
As with any marketing activity, you need to check its effectiveness to know what is working for your business. The essential tool for this is Google Analytics, which is free and can show you everything about the visitors to your site. It can tell you where visitors have come from, what device they were using, what keywords they used and much, much more.
