How to Start an Online Store: Part 5 – Ecommerce Marketing, Sales Channels and Testing

Here we are. The fifth and final part of the guide to starting your online store. It’s  been a fun ride for me and I hope it hase been fun and informative for you. Before we dive right in, let’s take a moment and go through a quick recap of the steps we’ve covered so far.

As you remember, Part 1 covered planning and finding the right business model. Part 2 was focused on registering your business, finding and negotiating with suppliers. Fulfillment operations and making your back office work were the main subject of our third part and last week we’ve covered branding, ecommerce software and content in part 4.

Now … it’s marketing and sales time!

During this section of the guide you’ll discover how to expand your reach through additional sales channels, market your brand and products and finally – how to test the main areas in your online store.

So let’s go ahead and have a look at…

Adding Sales Channels to your Online Store

First of all – what is a sales channel? The answer is quite simple: any method of getting products to the market so customers can purchase them. For example, your online store (the actual web store) is a sales channel. It showcases products, it tells their price and allows customers to purchase these products.

Let’s assume that by now you have already started your online shop. The web store is up and running and customers start showing up. But the web store should not be your only sales channel. Your customers are complex and their habits diverse. One day they’re browsing your store, the next they’re hanging out on Facebook and meanwhile they search product info on their mobile phone. You should be there also.

You could have your products lined up in a Facebook store. You could build a mobile app that engages customers outside your store and collects orders.

It’s not just online, either. Offline engagement shouldn’t be a taboo either. Maybe a brick and mortar showroom for your main products is not cost – effective. But you could set up a pop-up shop occasionally.

There are numerous ways you can add sales channels to increase your market reach and some are really easy to set up. Others are a bit more complicated but in the end it’s mostly about your product, your brand and of course your budget. Let’s see which are the most popular sales channels and how you could benefit from them.

Call center

Out of all the sales channels you may choose, one really complements the online store. The call center can be a simple line you for customers to demand information on products.

(Zappos’ call center is legendary and effective. It’s both a sales and suppor channel.)

 

It can just as well be a full fledged call center with operators answering calls and helping customer choose the right product, handling orders and managing complaints. It can also mean people calling prospects or indecisive potential customers or just plain cold calling sales leads. No matter the choices you will be making, the phone is a great connection to the customer and you should build a smooth phone support operation.

 

Social media

You could ask – isn’t social media more about marketing and communication, connecting and understanding your customer? Yes it is but it can work just as great as a sales channel.

For example – Twitter is testing purchase options (right now with just a few high profile retailers such as Amazon) and ways to drive targeted traffic to stores through offers. Pinterest is also testing options to drive targeted customers to your online store and they do that through their ads. That is great news as Pinterest is more efficient into turning views to sales than any other social network. It works awesome for industries such as travel, home-deco and fashion.

And let’s not forget Facebook. Being the largest social network in the world it is a place you should be digging into. For a while, the network was so popular with retailers that a term was coined to split Facebook commerce from everything else: f-commerce. Recently, the company lead by Mark Zuckerberg has focused more on advertising revenues than helping retailers get close to their customers but it is a great channel to study, nevertheless.

There are some companies that will make selling on Facebook as easy as it gets. And if a Facebook store may look like a great option for your store, this involves apps connecting your store to Facebook.

(Shopify, among others, built options for users to connect their stores to their fan pages and sell directly on Facebook.)

On the previous chapter we’ve discussed the most popular ecommerce software choices. Turns out most of them get some sort of support for a Facebook store by third party apps. Here are some of them:

1. Shopify for Facebook: Shopify provides useful tools for store owners that want their Facebook fans to browse products and place orders directly on Facebook. These add-ons work as extensions for online stores that retailers can set up easily.
2. StoreYa is a simple solution for owners of stores running on the usual ecommerce platforms. The company supports Shopify, Magento, Prestashop, WordPress and even marketplaces such as Ebay or Etsy. Although the Facebook Shop is their main product, they also offer other effective marketing apps for store owners.
3. StorefrontSocial works with new and existing retailers to connect them to Facebook fans and allow for an easy store set-up. Unlike previous options, StorefrontSocial works as a standalone platform where you can either set up a new store or import existing products. It doesn’t allow for an existing platform connection.
4. Beetailer is yet another option extending your existing store to work on Facebook. It integrates great with platforms such as Magento, Shopify, Prestashop or even Amazon Store. Plus – if you have less then 30 products, you get a free account so you can test and see how it all works.

There you have it – these applications are easy to set up and you can start selling directly on Facebook thus adding a new sales channel. And once you start adding sales channels, you now you have to look into …

 

Mobile Apps

What is the device you think customers use the most throughout the day? It’s the smartphone. Mobile usage has gone through the roof lately and its bound to continue.

(Number of smartphone users in the US (millions). Source)

So you want to be close to your customers. Mobile apps provide a special sales channel, one that’s personal and it makes impulse buying all the more attractive.

How do you add a mobile sales channel?

There’s an app for that. Actually more:

1. Shopgate makes it possible to turn your store into an app. It connects with Magento, Shopify, Prestashop and other ecommerce platforms to enable store owners to build mobile apps. It works on both iOS and Android operating systems and provides support for both smartphones and tablets.
2. Shoutem is not built specifically for eCommerce but among others it supports building mobile apps for your Shopify store. The interface is quite simple and doesn’t offer many options but it gets the job done if you happen to be a Shopify user.
3. MobiCart works with established ecommerce platforms and can help you build your mobile app. They integrate with Prestashop, Magento and others.

Give mobile apps for your store a try. The more smartphones become a part of our daily lives, the more we will use them. Your store can benefit from users that are not strapped to their desktop or notebook. And speaking of that, a great way to interact with customers are the …

 

Pop-up Shops

Pop up shops are temporarily stores, in the real world, where online store owners can showcase their products and interact with their customers. The pop-up shop sales channel has really taken off recently and store owners have started adopting this online-offline connection.

(Adidas pop-up shop. Not exactly low-budget but hey – one can dream, right?)

Setting up a pop-up shop is a personal choice but works great if it’s posted either in a high-traffic area (such as a popular shopping center) or at an industry event. For example you could set up a pop-up shop at a home-deco event if you are a store selling home decorations. It is a great way to interact with customers and get feedback on your merchandise.

Companies such as Storefront help shop owners find retail space temporarily by connecting them with retail space owners. To help online stores they’ve put together an ebook that is free for download. I encourage you to have a look at it as it explains the main steps in setting up (pup-up) shop.

 

Online Marketplaces

Last but definitely not least – the marketplaces. Amazon, Ebay, Etsy, Sears, Buy.Com, NewEgg.com and more. You name them. They provide lots of options to lots of users and chances are your next customers are there shopping right now.

( Ebay – the original online marketplace )

The reason marketplaces are the last on potential sales channels is because I want to emphasize just how important they are. Just like the “old” shopping centers, customers go to marketplaces because diversity means options and options mean they can find what they are looking for.

Diversity drives customers. It drives sales. So you want to be there but plan ahead before you dive in.

As an online store start-up you should be looking for as much exposure as you can get but still try to focus on the right marketplace. Amazon and Ebay are the obvious choice but before you join them you have to ask yourself:

• are these marketplaces right for me? Not all that’s great is great for you. Just because they have traffic, that doesn’t mean you will get traffic and if you do, you don’t know whether that traffic will turn to sales. The most important aspects you should be looking for are exposure and sales.
• can my product be found? expect to have competition. If you are among the few selling the product AND your product is popular, than the answer is YES, the product will by found by the customer. If your product is also sold by hundreds of other sellers, there are thin chances you will be the one showcasing the product. Try to make your product look special and attractive through copy, media and of course, price.
• will my product be bought? If you have indeed managed to get customers to have a look at what you are offering, you must also get them to buy. Most important things are the way you showcase the product to create desire (“A beautiful hand-crafted lamp“), urgency (“A beautiful hand-crafted lamp in LIMITED offer”) and affordability (“just $49.50“).
• do customers trust me? Marketplaces usually have some sort of peer-review mechanism. Customers can review sellers according to their fairness. Your reviews are your digital reputation. Positive reviews mean more sales, negative reviews can mean NO sales. So try to be as fair, effective and open with your customers.

Handling orders from marketplaces.

Listing your products on all marketplaces can seem like the right choice but it’s usually not. Each marketplace is a sales channel itself. You should be sticking to those that work for you and improve your experience there. Until your business is large enough to allow you to handle orders from more marketplaces, focus on fulfilling orders effective and quickly.

Most marketplaces offer some form of integration with your existing store and you should use those. Product information should be going out of your online store and orders should be synced with your order management system. This way, the order management team can have a single point of entry for orders instead of getting lost in a dozen of order management systems scattered throughout the marketplaces you are using.

The big ones will get bigger

Marketplace orders will continue to be a large part of your business. So large that they will, in the future, dwarf those from your online store. The reason is people tend to gather and shop where they will find diverse products and retailers. Just like in the real world. Online is even more so – marketplaces get even more traffic from search engines, have more money to spend on ads and are better at keeping customers returning.

Connecting sales channels

Each sales channel you will be adding will bring you more exposure and more sales if handled correctly. The sales channels I’ve described so far are the most popular ones right now. But they are not the only ones. As technology evolves, so will commerce. New channels will pop-up and some I haven’t mentioned here will probably increase in importance.

Think about the impact Internet of Things will have. Maybe in the future the greatest sales channel for groceries will be smart appliances. Think of a refrigerator than can place orders for customers when it’s depleted. It sure is going to be an interesting challenge to integrate those in a sales channels mix.

( Omnichannel means connecting all sales channels in a way the customer finds natural )

By adding sales channels you wil turn from an online retailer to an multichannel retailer and if all channels work seamless together you will become an omnichannel retailer. If you want to know what that means – have a look at Macy’s omnichannel strategy. And if that is not enough dive into this omnichannel report I’ve wrote to help retailers integrate their sales channels.

Marketing your Online Store

Marketing is one of those concepts that’s so hard to understand and yet so overused. Most of the times its meaning is so cluttered by useless acronyms and buzzwords that people have trouble understanding what it actually is.

I am not saying that marketing is easy. It’s not. Yet is not the Holy Grail of human knowledge either. It’s just communication. Talking, showing, describing products to the people most likely to buy it.

It’s that simple. The basics need to be simple.

If you are going to survive as an online store owner, you need to keep your marketing basics simple. You have a product. Hopefully a great one. There are people who want to buy that product. Most don’t know they want to buy it from you. You need to show them why they should buy the product you’re selling. You need to show them why they should buy it from you. And then, if everything I’ve shown you so far has been decently implemented, just let them buy it.

Everything else is gimmicks. If you’ve got the basics right, everything else will fall into place.

The market

To get people to buy your product, you need to know who these people are, what they want and how they act. Most likely not everybody will want your product. But if you’ve done your planning right, you pretty much have know a lot about your market.

Targeting demographics

Yup, your customers are “the target”. Why is it called that you ask? Well, because your communication targets them. Until the internet became the norm and we’ve started gathering more data than we can handle on customers, we used to define them through demographics. That means basic info on consumers. Age, sex, marital status, location, education … this kind of data.

( Pictured here: advertising in the 60s. Not pictured here: Google algorythms and tabacco advertising ban )

These targeting methods were made popular when mass marketing was just blooming, in the days of TV, print and outdoor ads made by the likes of Mad Men. When you ran your ad in the magazine or on national TV, you needed to know who’s going to use your product, make sure you understand their psychology and shout from the top of your lungs how cool the product is. Once the ad was approved, there was no going back. Advertising agencies would research, create and test the ad before the campaign was launched because there was no way you could change, tweak or even pull back a campaign in real time.

So demographics were the bread and butter when you would push your message to the market. But the Internet changed that into …

Targeting behaviors

Basically, if you were a mid-class urban wife with no college education in the 60’s there were slim chances you would receive ads trying to sell you repair tools for your car. Even if you were actually a mechanic. The same would hold true if you were a man and would be looking for a sewing machine to fulfill your lifelong passion of becoming a fashion designer.

You would have to find those products yourself. We’ve come a long way and thanks God, we now have the freedom to fix our own cars and sew our pants, no matter the gender

That happened when contextual marketing (the ads you might see when searching on Google), interactive marketing (information instantly delivered when interacting with say an website) or behavioral marketing hit the shelves.

The last one, behavioral marketing, is probably the single most important aspect in online retailing. Technology now personalizes marketing and responds to customer behavior.

For example Amazon’s recommended products (“See what others have purchased”) is a form of behavioral marketing that is based on a complex research on previous customers behavior before they purchased something. Simply put, when people would purchase something, their interaction trail (the products they’ve seen so far) becomes an indication that people taking the same or similar steps would most likely purchase similar products.

The ads you see on Google feature a similar concept. They are shown as to answer your needs. Some ads respond better than others at what you are looking for and thus have a better chance of getting clicked. Google trusts this system so much that they invoice advertising on clicks, rather than how many people have viewed the ad.

So basically we went from effectively targeting people to targeting people’s behavior. Still, demographics and customer profiles are very important and a lot of what you will be doing is to try to guess customer responses based on demographics assumptions. Such assumptions might mean you will favor ladies over men if you are selling women’s clothing (doh!) or rather more complex assumptions such as “Men over 32, employed and married are more likely to buy a family car”.

Indifferently of your assumptions, test them and always quantify your results with …

Analytics software

Here you go … numbers. Charts. Estimates. Hope Miss N., your math teacher, was your favorite back in school, because this is going to be damn complex. Nah, just kidding. Most analytics software is pretty much plug and play and the numbers and charts I mentioned are usually generated on the fly and in such a manner you can easily understand.

You can’t have marketing without analytics and research. Fortunately, it is a lot easier now for a small online store than it was 40 years ago for the largest companies in the world. What is not so fortunate is that it’s easier for everybody so you’ll have to dive deep and understand what your analytics are saying. So will the competition.

Once you have installed Google Analytics or one of these other ecommerce analytics software, you will probably dive in and see what your customers are doing. What you will want to look for is patterns that lead to increased sales. Special products, a certain type of copy, products featuring media versus those that don’t have media. Look for what makes your sales increase.

Targeting, knowing, marketing – the most important ecommerce marketing strategies for your online store

So you know the target, you have the analytics figures, now it’s time for the actual marketing. The web is full of resources to fine tune your online marketing understanding. I will show you which are the most effective ways of marketing so you will have a bird’s eye view on what makes an online store sell.

Search Marketing: SEO

As a startup there are really little things you can do better with smaller budgets than writing quality content and optimizing for search engines. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a really large concept and many people earn their living through SEO services. You will probably ask a SEO expert to help you find the perfect balance so your store will show up in search engine results. But before you do that, have a look at the basics. These are the things you will need to keep in check so Google will bring the right customers to your store:

• content: write great and extensive content. For humans. Describe your product like you would want it described for yourself. Don’t do “keyword spamming” which is the result of cramming keywords in your description so more people would find you. It just doesn’t work that way.
• code: your webstore is visible on customers’ browsers thanks to programming languages that output information in the way we are accustomed to. Search engines index this information and if you are to have your store indexed properly, you need the right code. If you are not technically savvy, better call someone who knows what they are doing. In the previous part there is a section dedicated to finding technical support when integrating your store.
• links: get other (relevant) websites to post links to your store. Although not so important now as they were in the past, links are necessarily so search engines can find and index your web store’s content.

Email marketing

Ask your customers to leave you their email address so you can update them on news and offers. This is a great way to get people right back on your store.

But don’t annoy them and don’t do spam! Everybody hates unsolicited email. Make sure your customers give you their permission to send them emails. You can use apps such as Mailchimp or CampaignMonitor to save customers’ emails and then send them newsletters.

Social media marketing

Where would you go if you were to market a product? The answer is fairly simple: where people gather and interact. Social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest are now used by billions of people. That’s where your online store should be.

Just like interacting with friends, some things work better than others. Here are some tips on how to use social media to interact with potential and existing customers:

1. listen first, talk later: social media is a great place to gather insights on your market, your products and even your brand. Some of those insights may not be friendly but you should pay attention to them nevertheless.
2. focus on building strong bonds rather than gathering masses: it’s just like with your friends. It doesn’t matter if you have 10 or 10 000 friends. What matters is how strong your connection with said friends are. It’s better to have few, engaged fans rather than many fans that do not relate to your brand or product.
3. find the influencers: some people wield more influence than others in their social circle. And they somehow do it naturally. You should get close to these people, develop relationships with them, show them your products and share content they might find interesting.
4. provide value, not sales pitches: yes, your products are great but don’t bore people with constant product sales. Provide content. If you sell hats, show fans their history, tell them about the manufacturing precess, showcase famous hats. Make it interesting and valuable.
5. be patient and constant: don’t tweet 40 times one day and than stop for a month because no one followed or retweeted you. Social media success takes time, patience and constant effort.

If your social media strategy is not going the way you’d want it to, there are always the ads. Most social networks provide ways for you to get closer to your potential customers, faster. Most people call them ads  . Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest – they all provide advertiser with the possibility of engaging fans through ads.

And speaking of ads, one of the most effective way of advertising your store and products is …

Paid earch

Remember those Google ads I’ve mentioned earlier? That is Google AdWords, a very effective form of advertising that places ads on search results, ads that are directly related to your search.

For example, if you were to search for “cars”, you will be shown the natural search results AND special search ads. These ads are fueled by advertisers that pay each time someone clicks one of their ads.

You can be one of those advertisers. By carefully analyzing traffic and allocating search ad budget, you can determine with high accuracy the number of clicks you need to convert visitors to buyers. Because search ads are contextual, this means you can optimize your ads in such a way that only those interested in purchasing your product might click it.

However, paid search campaigns are usually better managed by professionals. Even though you might spend a little extra for someone to handle your ads, just leave it to the professional.

And one more thing: Google is not the only one providing the option for paid search ads. Bing does it and Amazon does it, so there’s room to play there.

Performance marketing

Performance – well that sounds nice. What is it?

Performance marketing is a broad term that means advertisers pay a fee depending on how well an action is performed. This action can mean showing an ad a certain number of times or making that ad transform into a special action. The standard actions you might want to encourage are:

• clicking
• downloading a certain file (say a product catalog )
• showing interest in a product (the user becomes a lead)
• buying a product

And because marketing people happen to love acronyms, you might find the info above coded in three-letter words:

• CPM means Cost Per Mille (that’s Latin for thousand) – one thousands being the standard minimal block of ad views you can purchase to show an ad.
• CPA means Cost Per Action – the generic code for any action you might define with those selling the ad space. It is used for sales and therefore sometimes referred to as Cost per Acquisition.
• CPC means Cost Per Click – the cost you will be paying whenever someone clicks on your ads
• CPL means Cost Per Lead – the cost paid whenever a visitor shows interest in your product

Performance marketing is sometimes used interchangeably with affiliate marketing. That is  more of a misconception, as affiliate marketing, though popular, is a subset of performance marketing. It works as a shared revenue deal, where the retailer shares a portion of the revenue with the publisher (the one displaying the ad), whenever advertising turns into purchases.

Affiliate marketing is ran through affiliate marketing services, that cover three very important aspects: they connect advertisers to publishers, they make sure all sales are registered and attributed to the right publisher and they handle transactions between advertisers and publishers.

If you decide to go along the affiliate marketing path, here are the most important affiliate networks that can help you sell your products:

1. CJ Affiliate (formerly Conversion Junction) is the global leader in pay for performance programs. It is the home to many publishers that can help you run your ads.
2. Rakuten Linkshare is the big contender to CJ Affiliate and a fast growing one.
3. ShareASale is a great affiliate marketing resource for retailers. Slightly smaller as it may be, it is still very effective.
4. ClickBank works great for entrepreneurs and content creators. It is effective and easy to use.
5. Avangate is an young yet fast growing performance marketing company that’s focused on software and digital products.

Comparison Shopping Engines

A great way to get your product out there is place it in comparison shopping engines. These applications gather information from more online stores and show potential customers what is the best way to shop in terms of pricing.

It basically works for those that are price competitive so before you join such a program, make sure your prices are aligned with the market.

(Shopzilla is one of the most popular comparison shopping engines)

Most comparison shopping engines are CPC based and you will pay anytime people click your products, arriving at your web store. The top four most popular are Google Shopping, Shopzilla, Shopping.com and Pricegrabber. Getting listed can draw targeted traffic and can mean a very scalable way of converting traffic to sales.

Other marketing options

So there you have it – these are the most effective ways you can market your new online store. But don’t stop here, don’t settle. Marketing in the digital world is usually a matter of imagination. Be curious and try new things that might be fit for your online store.

For example you can attract relevant bloggers to mention your store and review the products. You can put out press releases and talk to the media. You can  run contests and sweepstakes to increase reach and turn fans into loyal customers. Once you have the basics up and running, you will be ready to add more and more marketing options to your online store.

Testing and optimizing

Remember: your work is never done. If you want to keep your customers happy and sales growing, you need to constantly optimize and tweak your store. To do so you can run tests that determine what works and what does not. When testing you will be looking for either errors, bottlenecks or usability issues. Do so through:

1. Functional testing: test your store’s functions. The navigation, user account, user login and others. Each needs to be thoroughly tested and improved
2. Process testing: we are talking business processes here. These are things like managing orders, fulfillment, shipping or warehouse management. If your company process don’t run smooth, customers get their orders delayed, mixed or canceled.
3. SEO testing: as I’ve mentioned previously, search engines will always be a very important factor in driving traffic to your online store. Check to see how you stand against competitors and against previous positioning.
4. Mystery shopping: put yourself in the customer’s shoes and see how’s everything going. Place an order and see how operators behave, how long does it take for the order to arrive and more. You might find some interesting things there.
5. Hot areas testing: some parts of your shop are more important than others. You can improve conversion rate through a careful  inspection and recurrent A/B testing of what you could call “hot areas”:
   • Homepage
   • Product page
   • Checkout cart
   • Payments
   • Forms requiring customer input
   • Mobile interfaces

Customer journey maps

A great way to see how customers interact with your company is drawing customer journey maps. These “maps” show your existing sales channels and how customers interact with them. Customers may find you on social media, browse products on the web store and place orders through the phone. This is a customer journey map.

When these journey maps get too complex you have to constantly test and look for signs of problems of sources of frustrations for your customers. It may be a poorly designed checkout cart or the voice of your phone operators. By understanding your target customers and their journey maps you can have a guide to testing what works and what doesn’t on your store.

( A blank example of potential sales channels. By connecting the channels you can draw journey maps )

Testing means improving and you should strive to make your store better and better. Little improvements and constant focus on making the customer experience better turns your store into a success. So keep testing :).

And that’s it!

We’ve got this far. Wow! Testing is the last section in our guide to starting an online store. It’s been a great ride and I hope these posts will help you build the store of your dreams. If you’ve managed to get this far I believe you are ready to start your own store. Give yourself a pat on the back for having the patience to get through all this data. It’s not easy, I know, but it is a lot easier than just starting a store and then figuring it all out along the way.

I am more than happy if I’ve managed to help you on your path to becoming an ecommerce entrepreneur. If this guide was useful to you, please refer it to someone else who may be in the need for know-how.

You’ve taken a large step ahead to running your own business and online store. You may be anxious and a bit scared but rest assured. So was Jeff Bezos when he started Amazon. Knowledge, hard work, innovation and persistence will get you far. Have a safe trip in reaching out for your dream!

 

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