4 Digital Marketing Facts to Inform Your E-Commerce Efforts

The e-commerce market has created a focus on digital marketing because this is an area that can provide a significant return on investment.

Digital marketing has always been important, but it is evolving, forcing e-retailers to keep a close eye on their digital marketing strategies. The more traffic generated for your e-store, the odds that you will end up with more sales improves. Let’s dive into four digital marketing facts to inform your e-commerce efforts.

Customers Love Reviews

When potential customers search for a product and find your e-store has it in stock, odds are they’ll check out some of your product reviews. If you don’t have any from your customers, ask for them. According to a report conducted by Trustpilot, only 14 percent of consumers are “very likely” to write an unsolicited review, while 29 percent are “very likely” to write a review if the company invites them.

The same report found these telling facts regarding customers and the importance they place on your reviews:

• 19 percent of consumers read reviews before they visit a company’s website.
• 57 percent use search engines to find those reviews.
• 79 percent want to see how companies respond to negative reviews.
• 89 percent check reviews at least sometimes when they shop.
• 47 percent check online reviews while on a brand’s website before adding items to their cart. All of which demonstrates consumers check to see what previous customers think of products while they’re actively looking to make a purchase.

Product-Focused Emails Pay Dividends

The focus of many email marketing campaigns is to get customers to a website. More traffic generally means more sales, but these email campaigns are not focusing on any product or cart abandonment in particular. Sending a post-purchase email campaign to customers instead of cart abandonment or product abandonment email campaigns, e-retailers could be missing out on sales.

Email campaigns focused on cart abandonment or product abandonment have a much higher conversion rate than post-purchase emails. For every $100,000 of revenue that cart abandonment emails drive, retailers can generate an additional $65,000 from product abandonment emails, $28,000 from price decrease emails, $22,000 from new product arrival emails and $10,000 for back-in-stock emails.

Satisfied customers can quickly become dissatisfied email subscribers. While post-purchase emails have a 40 percent open rate, the conversion rate is just 0.4 percent, and the unsubscribe rate is higher than any other type of triggered email type.

Personalization is Key

One of the main reasons e-commerce is slowly replacing brick-and-mortar is the more personalized experience. When a customer walks into a retail store, it’s rare for an employee to greet the customer by name or have the ability to customize a product specifically for the customer. E-commerce offers all of that and more when it comes to personalizing a customer’s shopping experience.

80% of consumers say that the more personalized and interconnected their online, mobile and in-store experiences are, the more likely they are to shop with that e-retailer. Nearly the same amount of consumers (87 percent) said they’d be more loyal to a retailer who was capable of accomplishing this level of personalization.

For prospective e-retailers, building an e-commerce website is crucial to providing customers with a personal experience. Your platform should give you the reporting tools and backend analytics to create groups of customers based on information like their locations and average order values. These details can be used to understand customer behaviors better and target specific customers with marketing emails.

Video Marketing Boosts Conversion Rates

With the help of Facebook videos and YouTube, e-retailers are using video marketing to their advantage. 60% of consumers say watching a video on social media influenced them to make a purchase. Something as simple as having a video on the landing page of your website can boost conversions by 80% or more.

Because of this, marketing is increasingly shifting toward video, especially in e-commerce. Internet video traffic made up 69% of all global consumer internet traffic in 2017. By 2019, internet video traffic will account for 80 percent of all consumer internet traffic.

With consumers’ buying behavior continually changing, e-retailers need to stay up to date with new customer habits if they want to keep business thriving. Areas like reviews, engaging product emails, personalized shopping experiences and strategic video marketing can all help e-retailers generate more traffic and boost their sales numbers.