5 E-Commerce Marketing Activities To Restart

Have you just returned from holidays, and are you ready to restart your e-commerce in a big way?

Did you know that seasonality greatly influences the performance of an e-shop site and generates a continuous change in traffic?

For this reason, it is very important to take targeted actions and create content intended for each season, event or holiday. And with September in mind, don’t be caught unprepared!

Find out in this article what are the 5 things to do to optimize your e-commerce!

Change course in September! Establish a well-defined marketing plan and plan for an update of your e-commerce, monitor income and expenses, the new trends of the upcoming season and create new loyalty programs. Help yourself with Google Trends to monitor and exploit current trends.

Also, create a seasonal content plan. It will help you improve your SEO ranking and get more traffic to your e-commerce site.

But planning and theory aside, what are the practical and immediate actions to take to give a new face to your online store?

Below, we show you the 5 things to do to start again after the summer break.

Refresh your e-commerce slideshow

The main purpose of a slideshow is to offer impactful content the moment a user lands on your online store. The first impression a user has of your e-commerce has a huge influence on their purchasing decision.

A slideshow is a website design element; therefore, it must be designed and reasoned based on your target audience and the type of products available in your catalogue. Furthermore, it must be consistent with the style of the e-shop.

In 3 or 4 slides, you enclose the strengths of your e-commerce and insert elements that attract the target audience’s attention.

It is very important to refresh the slideshow during the change of season because it is the first new element that a customer notices when they return to your e-commerce site. For example, you will be able to immediately notice the latest featured discounts, last-minute promotions or new products added to the catalogue.

Updates, news and changes not only positively affect sales but are useful in keeping users’ curiosity towards your e-commerce alive and constant.

Why update a slide with only 3 or 4 contents?

This limit is very important because it allows you to summarize the most important contents to be absolutely noticed by the user. Every single slide must be easily readable and maintain an excellent balance between text and image. Making too many changes to a single page or loading it with promotions and banners risks confusing the user, who, unable to decide, could leave the page without purchasing anything.

How do you create an engaging slide?

There are three most important elements to include in a functional slide:

• Eye-catching images: beautiful, bright and vibrant. They must not leave room for questions or doubts about the product; they must attract the user’s attention so as to make him click on the product page.
• Incisive text: short, direct and engaging. It must have the ability to be read and understood in seconds.
• Effective call to action: positioned inside or near the slide, clearly visible and with colours that attract the customer to click.

Select 3 flirty products and make them visible

Using owl products is a promotional technique that serves to draw consumers’ attention to your e-commerce by reducing the price of one or more products in the assortment.

After a hypothetical drop in summer sales, you can use this technique by highlighting at least 3 flirty products on the home page of your e-commerce site. This will help you immediately increase sales in September and will also increase traffic to your site.

How to best use the owl product technique?

One of the most applied and functional examples is product comparison: this process is based on the quality/price ratio. Pair a new item with a flirty product with a reduced price (e.g. 70% discount), and the majority of customers will purchase the more expensive product because it is “better in quality”. To work, this technique does not have to be based exclusively on price, but there are more factors that come into play. Among these, the most important is the functional description of the two products.

Often our decisions are based on comparison rather than direct choice; therefore, the flirting product technique is a psychological strategy which, if used with discretion, can encourage the user to purchase by offering him a balanced choice, from the most expensive product to the owl product. The consumer’s mind will direct the purchase.

Optimize the checkout process.

People look for novelty. Design a change in the checkout process based on your customers’ opinions in the previous months. Communicate this change via newsletter or social media.

How can you optimize the checkout process?

• Analyze the required data. Try to include short forms and request only essential data for the sale. Update your form layouts, and you’ll make the checkout page more interesting.
• Give more space to social networks. Update the checkout page with the addition of social networks: allow your customers to access your e-commerce site via their Facebook, Twitter or Instagram accounts. Reassure them of complete data security. Accessing a site via social networks is quick and helps build loyalty with users.
• Allow purchasing without an account. Recommending registration to users is not a bad practice, but it should be done with caution. Forcing a person to create an account on your site to allow them to purchase your products is a completely dysfunctional technique. This way, most users will get tired and not make the purchase. In this case, you can use two techniques: 
• Leave the mandatory registration only after having freely inserted the product into the cart as the last step before confirming the purchase;
• Let the customer choose whether to register on your e-commerce site (perhaps encouraging them with a welcome discount or coupon) or purchase by entering their details without creating an account.
• Update your shipping and payment options. We are in a fast-paced technological world, so do a search on the new online payment methods that even your e-commerce cannot do without! Enter the most sought-after and safe ones on your checkout page.
• Change photos and refresh the layout of your product pages.

As you well know, photography plays a primary role in an online store, especially on product pages: the impact of photos goes beyond the product itself.

The season changes, and the photos within the site also change; they must be beautiful and consistent with the change in the layout and the entire e-commerce. Also, insert some minimal effects that make the change in the graphics of the product pages even more noticeable. In this way, the customer will feel the air of change and be more interested in visiting again.

Create a content plan that will have consistency across images, text and layout. Visualize everything before putting it into practice; this way, you will make fewer mistakes, and you will already have a well-defined project to follow.

The layout change is important and needs your attention.

You can decide to transform the entire site or just some elements: in the first case, if you carry out a total transformation, communicate this change via newsletters and social networks and create a clear guide that leads the user to discover the new layout step by step. In this way, the customer (especially if loyal) will not feel lost and will face the change with more curiosity and positivity.

Add an important novelty.

There are many strategies to apply to ensure that the customer willingly returns to your e-commerce. An effective seasonal marketing plan will help budget new revenue through new end-of-season offers and discounts.

The primary objective for September is not to increase sales with 80% discounts; this way, your e-commerce will make a loss. Your goal is to maintain or regain a customer relationship after a summer season of consumption and fun.

Add novelties close to a potential customer’s mood: insert, for example, a loyalty program so that your customers can accumulate points after each purchase. The loyalty program will also help you learn about consumer habits.

Don’t draw customers’ attention only to discounts, but push their focus on new products arriving or new collections already available. In this way, the consumer will always remain alert and with the desire to find out which future products they can purchase.

Help yourself with the use of newsletters and SMS marketing to sponsor news within your e-commerce. Send an announcement that mentally prepares customers for the news and then notifies you of the publication of new content on the site.

Also, learn about loyalty programs, for example, cashback. Cashback is one of the most used loyalty systems in recent years. Literally translated it means “money back”: 2 words that win over most people.

But how does cashback work?

Companies decide to “give back” to customers part of the money spent on e-commerce. Unlike the discount, this bonus attracts the customer more because:

• It guarantees a benefit: the customer will feel more satisfied if he realizes he has euros in his account and not points.
• It encourages him to buy again to earn more money: he will make constant purchases, even small sums, to increase his cash back. He usually uses the money accumulated in his account to buy something more expensive.
• It triggers the “more you spend, the more you are rewarded” mechanism, which seems to be increasingly effective in customers’ minds.

Also Read : Fundamentals Of Marketing Automation For E-Commerce