7 Smart Ways to Market Your E-commerce Business on a Budget

Whether you're just starting or you have already reached a point where you already have a wide customer base, it's essential that you have to stay up to date with the current marketing trends and strategies for your e-commerce business. 

To start your own e-commerce site is already a big achievement for your business. The next step that you need to take is to invest in an effective marketing strategy. 

In this post, we're going to talk about the ways how you can market your e-commerce business if you're on a budget:

1. Start a blog to generate traffic

We all want to have traffic on our site. There's no better way to do that than blogging. 

You see, when you're running an e-commerce store, the one thing that you need to focus on is getting traffic. The more traffic your site has, the more sales and revenues it will bring you. 

One of the simplest (and easiest) ways to generate traffic is through blogging. Sites that have blogs are more trusted by site visitors since it showcases expertise and credibility. 

Having a blog also enhances your SEO, telling people that your brand exists. Over time, this will help you reach your target audience.

2. Engage in social media

You can utilize social media to connect with your audience and generate engagement and interaction from them. Over time, this helps improve your traffic and create a wider base of customers. 

Also, when you utilize various social media platforms for a variety of purposes, this helps you create a solid online presence in the long run. Thus, you are diversifying your efforts and abilities.

 It also allows you to cater to your audience's needs in a way that helps grow your business in the long run.

3. Find an influencer in your industry

Influencer marketing is on the rise. They are people who are passionate about a certain niche, attracting a large number of people that share the same interest.

When you work with them, you can also tap into their following, and therefore amplifying your reach. 

To be able to get the most out of influencer marketing, work with someone who has a strong following that's also related to your niche. Then, produce content consistently. 

You don't necessarily have to work with people with millions of followers. All you need to do is work with the right people who have the right set of audience.

4. Offer exciting promos

Promotions work like a charm in converting more customers. 

If customers feel that they're getting more benefits from their purchase, then they'll feel much more inspired to make a purchasing decision. 

You can place additional value for your e-commerce store like offering appealing offers such as free shipping, product bundles, discounts, gifts, and so on. 

Let's say you're giving out gifts to those who bought higher valued products. Often, people love free products more than buying something that's discounted or on sale. 

However, keep in mind that excessive use of promotions could also cause your sales to plummet. Frequent discounts could mean that people are always buying full prices in your e-commerce store.

So, see to it that you're using them with consideration.

5. Upsell and cross-sell

Up-selling is a sales strategy in which the buyer is influenced to buy the product at a higher cost than they would initially buy. This happens when the prospect usually realizes the additional benefits he gets when picking a better product.

Using this strategy makes sales more profitable for businesses, and also gives the client better benefits.

Cross-selling, on the other hand, is the act of selling something else, which starts from the primary sale. This strategy lets you offer the clients other related products that complement the purchase they had made.

These techniques, when properly executed on email, yields surprising results. It's also more effective with clients that are already familiar with your brand, as compared to brand new clients.

6. Reward loyal customers

While it's a given that every company wants new customers, the costs of acquiring them are significantly higher as compared to keeping your existing ones. 

That's why, during the planning period of your marketing strategy, it's always a good idea to encourage repeat business. 

One of the best ways to keep your customers satisfied is to reward them with loyalty programs. For instance, Starbucks developed an app meant to ease the friction of the check-out process. 

It also layered an excellent customer loyalty program in the My Starbucks Rewards application. So each time a customer makes a purchase, the company rewards them with points and other exciting promotions to incentivize them and keep them coming again and again. 

Whatever the structure of your loyalty program, see to it that it's relatively easy for your customers to understand how it works. It helps that you track their progress to their next incentive. 

Most e-commerce sites that succeed in doing this make their customers feel more valued.

7. Do referral programs

You can also encourage your loyal customers to be brand evangelists, by helping them spread the word about your products and services through a referral incentive program. 

This referral reward could be a form of exclusive discounts, free product, or a cash bonus. 

The key here is to offer a valuable incentive that encourages referrals, without being too generous with the products that can cost you a lot of money. 

Also, promote these referral and loyalty programs on your social media channels and in your store.

Over to You

So, there you have it. Those are some of the low-cost marketing ideas that you can apply to market your ecommerce business. 

The mentioned tactics can help you reach your goals. Take it and tweak it to fit your niche if you have to so that you could build a perfect strategy that's fit for your business. 

There are also countless more, and keep in mind that not all of them follow the rule book of marketing. When you come up with ways how you can creatively connect with your audience online, over time, you'll get to experience a spike of traffic and sales.

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