E-Commerce
Why You Should Start Your Own E-Commerce Business

What Is E-Commerce?

First of all, what is E-commerce? Electronic commerce is a powerful concept and process that has fundamentally changed the current of human life. Electronic commerce is one of the main criteria of revolution of Information Technology and communication in the field of economy. This style of trading due to the enormous benefits for human has spread rapidly. Certainly can be claimed that electronic commerce is cancelled many of the limitations of traditional business. For example, form and appearance of traditional business has fundamentally changed. These changes are basis for any decision in the economy.
Existence of virtual markets, passages and stores that have not occupy any physical space, allowing access and circulation in these markets for a moment and anywhere in the world without leaving home is possible. Select and order goods that are placed in virtual shop windows at unspecified parts of the world and also are advertising on virtual networks and payment is provided through electronic services, all of these options have been caused that electronic commerce is considered the miracle of our century.

Interaction between communication systems, data management systems and security, which because of them exchange commercial information in relation to the sale products or services, will be available, so the definition, the main components of electronic commerce are: communication systems, data management systems and security.

Types Of E-Commerce

There are many various classifies of electronic commerce and many different methods to characterize these clusters. Academics determined a number of frameworks for classifying electronic commerce but each one want to illustrate it form a unique perspective. The main different classifies of electronic commerce are Business-to-Business (B2B), Business-to-Consumer (B2C), Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C), Consumer-to-Business (C2B) and Mobile Commerce (M-Commerce).

B2B

Business-to-Business is a type of commerce transaction that exists between businesses or a transaction that occurs between a company and other company to transfer of services and products. A possible explanation for this might be that Business-to-Business includes online wholesaling in which businesses sell materials, products and services to other businesses on the websites.

B2C

Business-to-Consumer refers to transactions between a business and its end consumer and so it create electronic storefronts that offer information, goods, and services between business and consumers in a retailing transaction or it is an Internet and electronic commerce model that indicates a financial transaction or online sale between a business and consumer.

C2B

Consumer-to-Business is the transfer of services, goods or information from persons to business or it is a business model where end users create products and services that are used by business and institutions.

C2C

Consumer-to-Consumer is an electronic Internet facilitated medium, which involves transactions among users and it is a business model which two consumers deal business with each other directly.

M-Commerce

The term of Mobile Commerce was invented in 1997 to aim “the buying and selling of products, information and services” via wireless handheld devices such as cellular phones, laptops and personal digital assistants. These wireless devices interact with computer networks that have the ability to conduct online merchandise purchases. Mobile commerce allows to users access to Internet and shopping in it without needing to find a place to plug in. Mobile Commerce transactions continue to improve and the phrase includes the purchase and sale of a wide range of products and services, online banking, bill payment, information delivery and so on.

Why E-Commerce?

The reason, as you shall see, is that e-commerce technology is different and more powerful than any of the other technologies we have seen in the past century. While these other technologies transformed economic life in the twentieth century, the evolving Internet and other information technologies will shape the twenty-first century.

Prior to the development of e-commerce, the process of marketing and selling goods was a mass-marketing and sales force-driven process. Consumers were viewed as passive targets of advertising “campaigns” and branding blitzes intended to influence their long-term product perceptions and immediate purchasing behavior. Selling was conducted in well-insulated “channels.” Consumers were considered to be trapped by geographical and social boundaries, unable to search widely for the best price and quality. Information about prices, costs, and fees could be hidden from the consumer, creating profitable “information asymmetries” for the selling firm.

Below are the seven unique features of E-commerce technology that make some good reasons for you to start your own e-commerce business.

Ubiquity

In traditional commerce, a marketplace is a physical place you visit in order to transact. For example, television and radio typically motivate the consumer to go someplace to make a purchase. E-commerce, in contrast, is characterized by its ubiquity: it is available just about everywhere, at all times. It liberates the market from being restricted to a physical space and makes it possible to shop from your desktop, at home, at work, or even from your car, using mobile commerce. The result is called a marketspace—a marketplace extended beyond traditional boundaries and removed from a temporal and geographic location. From a consumer point of view, ubiquity reduces transaction costs—the costs of participating in a market. To transact, it is no longer necessary that you spend time and money traveling to a market. At a broader level, the ubiquity of e-commerce lowers the cognitive energy required to transact in a marketspace.

Global Reach

E-commerce technology permits commercial transactions to cross cultural and national boundaries far more conveniently and cost-effectively than is true in traditional commerce. As a result, the potential market size for e-commerce merchants is roughly equal to the size of the world’s online population. The total number of users or customers an e-commerce business can obtain is a measure of its reach.

In contrast, most traditional commerce is local or regional—it involves local merchants or national merchants with local outlets. Television and radio stations, and newspapers, for instance, are primarily local and regional institutions with limited but powerful national networks that can attract a national audience. In contrast to e-commerce technology, these older commerce technologies do not easily cross national boundaries to a global audience.

Universal Standard

One strikingly unusual feature of e-commerce technologies is that the technical standards of the Internet, and therefore the technical standards for conducting e- commerce, are universal standards—they are shared by all nations around the world. In contrast, most traditional commerce technologies differ from one nation to the next. For instance, television and radio standards differ around the world, as does cell telephone technology. The universal technical standards of the Internet and e- commerce greatly lower market entry costs—the cost merchants must pay just to bring their goods to market. At the same time, for consumers, universal standards reduce search costs—the effort required to find suitable products. And by creating a single, one-world marketspace, where prices and product descriptions can be inexpensively displayed for all to see, price discovery becomes simpler, faster, and more accurate. And users of the Internet, both businesses and individuals, experience network externalities—benefits that arise because everyone uses the same technology. With e-commerce technologies, it is possible for the first time in history to easily find many of the suppliers, prices, and delivery terms of a specific product anywhere in the world, and to view them in a coherent, comparative environment. Although this is not necessarily realistic today for all or many products, it is a potential that will be exploited in the future.

Richness

Information richness refers to the complexity and content of a message. Traditional markets, national sales forces, and small retail stores have great richness: they are able to provide personal, face-to-face service using aural and visual cues when making a sale. The richness of traditional markets makes them a powerful selling or commercial environment. Prior to the development of the Web, there was a trade- off between richness and reach: the larger the audience reached, the less rich the message.

Interactivity

Unlike any of the commercial technologies of the twentieth century, with the possible exception of the telephone, e-commerce technologies allow for interactivity, meaning they enable two-way communication between merchant and consumer. Television, for instance, cannot ask viewers any questions or enter into conversations with them, and it cannot request that customer information be entered into a form. In contrast, all of these activities are possible on an e-commerce Web site. Interactivity allows an online merchant to engage a consumer in ways similar to a face-to-face experience, but on a much more massive, global scale.

Information Density

The Internet and the Web vastly increase information density—the total amount and quality of information available to all market participants, consumers, and merchants alike. E-commerce technologies reduce information collection, storage, processing, and communication costs. At the same time, these technologies increase greatly the currency, accuracy, and timeliness of information—making information more useful and important than ever. As a result, information becomes more plentiful, less expensive, and of higher quality. A number of business consequences result from the growth in information density. In e-commerce markets, prices and costs become more transparent. Price transparency refers to the ease with which consumers can find out the variety of prices in a market; cost transparency refers to the ability of consumers to discover the actual costs merchants pay for products.

Personalization/Customization

E-commerce technologies permit personalization: merchants can target their marketing messages to specific individuals by adjusting the message to a person’s name, interests, and past purchases. The technology also permits customization— changing the delivered product or service based on a user’s preferences or prior behavior. Given the interactive nature of e-commerce technology, much information about the consumer can be gathered in the marketplace at the moment of purchase.
With the increase in information density, a great deal of information about the consumer’s past purchases and behavior can be stored and used by online merchants. The result is a level of personalization and customization unthinkable with existing commerce technologies. For instance, you may be able to shape what you see on television by selecting a channel, but you cannot change the contents of the channel you have chosen. In contrast, the online version of the Wall Street Journal allows you to select the type of news stories you want to see first, and gives you the opportunity to be alerted when certain events happen.
Social Media Content Strategy

We are currently living in the 21st century where social media has taken over our daily lives. It has been the game changing phenomenon in the technology world. The impact that social media has on internet marketing is so powerful that every single business, be it online or offline, has now integrated their marketing through social media. Internet marketers make use of the social media marketing to reach out to all level of audiences in every possible way.

As an E-commerce store owner, you should know that social media is playing an increasingly important part in how consumers learn about your products and make purchasing decisions based on the information you provided.

There’s a fair amount of customers online that make purchasing decisions upon being influenced by social media posts. You can use social media to:

• raise brand awareness

• create engagement with your customers 

• target and drive traffic to your site

• build rapport and trust

• standout from the bunch

In this module, you will be getting a couple of social media content strategies to brainstorm on so you can customize your own E-commerce store into a business with eager and loyal customers.

# Focus On One Or Two Targeted Channels

A lot of small businesses tend to make a mistake of trying to be on every social media channel all at once. Then problems arise when they don’t have the time to focus on one. Inadequate and imbalanced effort on all the channel will lead to diluted work done on the channels, which most of the times ending up with no results. Your effort will be wasted.

So rather than being on all social media platform at once, try to focus on one or two for the time being until you’re stable and organized with constant positive results. Proper organization as such will ensure your effort being executed effectively.
Target on your ideal customers, research on their demographic, what channel do they often or prefer using. Certain countries prefer using different social media sites from other countries.

# Create Captivating Content

Your content needs to be engaging and specially made to cater to your customers’ needs. Carry out some research on your customers’ background and desires based on their profile or you can directly ask for their opinion or suggestion via social media or email. Some social media users might not be on the site based on the sole intention of wanting to make a purchase, they might be there out of curiosity or social purposes. So you can spend some effort targeting that bunch of users as well by finding out about what interests them and you can work to fulfill their desires.

Creating content that caters to their interest will significantly increase your traffic and sales. You should focus on establishing rapport and trust with your customers. Allow Q&A and review submission on your social media site so existing customers can provide their feedback and future potential customers can get an idea about your business. An E-commerce business that focuses on relationship building with its customers can go a long way because there is established trust and rapport. Be mindful to feedbacks and improve from there. Everybody likes it when your words are being heard.

# Compelling And Effective Strategies

There’s plenty of strategies you can apply to your social media marketing. The most common but also the most effective one is to post content on how to use your product. It can be a tutorial on how to navigate your site, how to use a certain product you’re selling, what are some extra tips on achieving better result from using the product and more.

For example if you’re selling cosmetics, you can post a makeup tutorial using the cosmetic products you’re selling. By introducing each product used in the tutorial, you can review the pros and cons, ways to use them, and also the results of using them. This method will not only provide a detailed insight to your customers, it can also enhance their confidence in your products, therefore attracting them to make purchasing decisions.

Another great strategy is to present user-generated information. This is a very powerful strategy because it takes one customer to convert another customer. The social media has a great power on influencing customers because we always seek for other people’s opinion and recommendation before we make a purchase. Simply because we want to make sure our money is well spent. Most of the times we don’t get the chance to sample a product we want to buy, therefore we seek for others’ review on the product and from there we decide whether to buy it or not.

User-generated content like customer reviews can come in many forms. Some really effective and widely accepted ones include reviews submitted via common hashtag, or a discussion thread where customers share their opinions and questions on the product. Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest are the most popular social media platform used for this purpose.
Targeting Your Traffic

What’s better— 1,000 uninterested random visitors or 100 eager and engaged customers?

Definitely the 100 engaged customers.

The problem is people too often focus on getting more new visitors to their sites. That’s actually not a bad thing and I’m not asking you to stop focusing on traffic. It’s just that you have to know about the difference between visitors and customers, whether your goal is to increase traffic or to increase conversions. Yes, it is important to gain visitors in order for your site to reach out and further. But it is also essential for you to make sure these visitors get converted into customers who buy your products.

There’s plenty of traffic analytic tools on the internet that you can use to analyze your traffic, their geography, their behavior, their preference, and many more aspects in order to target and customize your post accordingly. Online ventures don’t just get successful by giving them the final shape, but it comes with many challenges, especially with gaining traffic to your blog being the most difficult one to achieve. When we set up our blog, we are often asked to set up any traffic analytic for our blog and most of newbie bloggers don’t know why is it important to set up an analytic like Google analytic on their blog. In this module, I’m going to tell you how you can increase traffic using the Google Analytic stats.

Google Analytics is a free tool provided by Google that gives you detailed information about the visitors to your blog. Information like the new visitors, the amount of time they spend on your posts, the number of pages they visited, and also the source from where they access your blog or website. It’s free to sign up for this tool, but you just need to have a Google account - that is free too. A lot of internet marketers use this tool to analyze their traffic.

Google Analytics is extremely simple to use and it provides amazing statistics. Firstly, let’s see what are the pages that gain the most traffic on your blog or website. The concept here is pretty straightforward, we need to find out which pages are attracting the most traffic and improve them more in order to increase your traffic. So let’s discover the secret to improving search engine marketing. I’ll be showing you step by step how to use Google Analytics to increase your traffic.

1. Sign into your Google Analytics account and connect it with Google Webmaster Tools. You can then track your rankings, the number of impressions your listings are gaining, and also your click-through rates.

2. On your dashboard, look for the navigation option “Acquisition”, click on it. Then you will click on “Search engine optimization” and followed by “Queries”.

3. A window like this should appear next. Click on “Set up Webmaster Tools data sharing” and go through the steps Google will walk you through.

4. Upon completion, you can head back to the “Search engine optimization” where you will now have the access to three reports: queries, landing pages, and geographical summary of your traffic. And from here you can analyze and customize your website according to the reports.
 
The Three Reports

# Queries

In this report, you can see your website’s keyword rankings, click through rates, and impressions. Identify the keywords with the most number of impressions you are receiving. The most effective way to increase your traffic is by increasing your click-through rate (CTR).

Improve your CTR by customizing your page titles, descriptions, and keywords you use. Keep your titles approximately within 50-60 characters and descriptions within 200 characters. Too long of a text will risk you losing readers because most people only skims for their interest. Focus on creating powerful and effective keywords that is related to the keywords you are getting the most traffic from. A great strategy to improve your ranking is to sculpt your descriptions and page titles with the same keywords.

# Landing Pages

Similar to the queries report, the landing pages report give you an insight to your most visited pages, showing you the number of impressions and click-through rate as well.

Looking at this report, you should be able to identify the aspects you can improve your search engine traffic. Optimize your page according to what gives the highest impressions rate and also CTR. Make sure you use the similar keywords or phrase within your titles, landing page text, and description tag. Create social sharing icons that are user-benefit-driven to attract readers into your site.

Some examples of the most click-through keywords analyzed using the Google Webmaster Tools are “how to”, “you”, “best”, “why”, “tricks” and “free”. Use these words in your title and description tag to increase your CTR.
 
# Geographical Summary

This reports show where your traffic is coming from. Identify where are most of your readers coming from. You have the option of targeting on just one country or the whole world. You can customize your postings according to the timezone of your readers’ whereabouts. Plan your posting to the hours where most readers would be online and up about to catch your instant posting. This will increase your CTR and help your sales. Another way to make use of this report is to cater your posts to specific countries that score the highest number of impressions. You can increase your traffic by translating your site into different languages to cater to your readers of different nationality.
Using Live Chat Services

Customer support has always been revered to as the most important aspect in running a e-commerce business and it is also known for the most complex aspect to manage. When it comes to customer support services, e-commerce merchants tend to rely solely on e-mails and at times phone calls or text messages if the buyer is a local. But that trend has started to become the thing of past when live chat services are widely acceptable and applied throughout all forms of communications. Even today e-commerce business are already in the trend of using live chat services as part of their customer support services and it has proven to be highly effective form of communication compared to other forms of communications such as e-mail. That being said e-mail is still the leading communication tool throughout the world but live chat is getting up to pace in terms of being applied and used.

Best Live Chat Vendors

Now if you are searching for live chat services, you may find yourself crossing path with wide range of different live chat services. Some are free, open source and some are paid. That being said here is a list of the best live chat services that was widely use in the e-commerce business with each option you if it’s best services for you.

LiveChat Inc.

LiveChat Inc. is one of the more stable and feature-rich live chat solutions, with a simple chat module that clears out all the bells and whistles. Handle several chats and receive a notification whenever a customer wants to chat. Use customization to fine tune the look of your chat, and push long conversations to tickets. With tags, file-sharing and archives, you really can’t go wrong with this one. I particularly enjoy that the customers can leave you feedback, and you can always go to the integrations store to add more to your chat box.

It is priced at $16 per user per month, and going all the way up to $149 per user per month. This service is a nice solution for companies that already have a decent customer base, since the pricing is reasonable, but not free, of course. The ticketing system is the standout feature here, since you can look back and understand customer problems.

Zopim

The Zopim app is a common live chat solution for companies who sell online, particularly because it has a free version for testing or when you only have one person speaking to customers. Triggers are included to assist customers when they don’t know where to go, and you have the ability to track and monitor your visitors when needed. The powerful metrics serve you well, and the integrations are ideal for those working on common e-commerce platforms. It is Free to $44 per user per month and this service is best for those with one person on the customer support team, or for those companies who uses SHOPIFY.

HelpFlow

The HelpFlow app is one of the most expensive live chat tools on the market, but it provides much more than a simple chat box. The idea is to use the proprietary system to identify who needs help on your site and who would never call you or send you an email. After that, it’s a complete service, where HelpFlow chats with your customers instead of you. In short, this gives you the time needed to spend on other areas of your business. It is priced at $147 per week and it is best for anyone who doesn’t have the time to work on their own customer service. If you have the cash flow, and you would rather outsource your customer service, this is your spot.

ZazaChat

ZazaChat has a strong suite for chatting with your customers online. The system also comes with mobile chat features for when you aren’t in the office. The company provides a free version, but it’s pretty watered down compared to the pro version. I would recommend testing out ZazaChat with the free version then moving up when you are serious about selling. Its starting price is at $24.99 per user per month. This app is for companies who check their visitor reports on a consistent basis and the chat module is just fine in this as well, but the reports stand out.

SnapEngage

SnapEngage is the live support tool used by AirBnB, so you know it has some sort of credibility. The intelligent integration works well for connecting with your current CRM system, and the customization tools are some of the best I’ve seen. Chat with customers on your mobile phone, and offer proactive invitations to people who are just sitting around on your site. It is price at $60 per month to $420 per month. This one works well if you have a small team of maybe four people and you don’t want to pay per user. I also enjoy this for those who really want advanced branding and customization tools.

ClickDesk

ClickDesk is a rather affordable live chat tool, and it delivers both live and video chat for the ultimate customer support experience. The live chat modules are really creative, and the social toolbar ensures people can get in contact with you in various ways. It is price from $16.99 per user per month to $67.99 per user per month. ClickDesk is suitable for those who are interested in working with a dedicated ACCOUNT manager. It’s also not a bad idea if you have been working with a certain CRM and want to integrate with that.

PURECHAT

PURECHAT is a solid choice if you don’t want to spend much time on setup. It’s one of the more simple options on this list, with the ability to make minor customizations like changing colors. Operators have a single dashboard, and the canned responses let you send out quick messages to your customers. I enjoy the mobile notifications and the multiple chat management for larger teams.

PURECHAT offers free version and the other two options are $4.99 and $8.99 per user per month. PURECHAT is ideal for smaller companies that don’t want to pay that much upfront. The setup is really simple, and you can integrate with WordPress, SHOPIFY, Squarespace and more.

ZOHO Chat

Zoho Chat provides an interesting Shoutbox feature, which lets your website’s customers chat amongst each other while on your site. The live chat is simple, but effective, and the mobile access is always nice for when you leave the office and still want to see what your customers are asking. It is FREE, but the basic ACCOUNTS start at $19 per user per month ZOHO Chat is suitable for companies that are already utilizing any ZOHO products, since they integrate really well. It’s also a wise decision if you’re looking to SAVE MONEY.

CASENGO

CASENGO has a unique advantage because it uses WhatsApp to help you provide customer care. The multi-channel customer service brings in all of your customer support channels into one dashboard. For example, if someone posts a comment on FACEBOOK, it reveals itself to you through CASENGO. No more jumping around from platform to platform. They have a free account, but the paid versions start at $9 per month but you only get three users though. This works wonders for small teams who want to integrate the WhatsApp technology into their chat system. The pricing is really nice, considering you get three users for only $9 per month.

Olark

Olark is best suited for those who are just getting started. Try out the free module and see if the core features like chat ratings, in-browser chatting and targeted chat works out. The developer API isn’t that bad with Olark, meaning you can create your own integrations or use other add-ons to make your chat module look cool. They have a free plan, but the paid versions start at $15 per month for one user.

TIPS on making your LIVE Chat better!  

Determining and optimizing live chat hours: If your e-commerce business deals with international buyers as well. Use analytics to determine when most of your visitors are using your site. If you have a problem sourcing local employees to cover off hours, consider outsourcing help using services like Upwork.

Treat your customers like how you would treat your friend: The whole point of having live chat available is to provide warm, human help to a customer’s shopping experience. Having robotic greetings or responses can kill the effectiveness of live chat.
Consider hiring people with sales experience. For the most effective use of live chat, consider using inside sales people and not just customer service representatives. People who have sales experience will more likely lead customers towards sales and increase the possibility of up-selling.
How To Build Your E-commerce Mailing List

The Strategies

First of all, let’s talk about the strategies. Here’s the deal, and it should go without saying. If you’re running any kind of business, online or off, you need to stay in communication with customers, potential customers, and website visitors. So you need a list. You must build a list of people who are not your customers yet.

Use An Exit-Intent Pop-up To Capture Emails

Some of you might think that’s obvious, and it should be obvious. It’s actually fundamental. Surprisingly, though, we have worked with multimillion-dollar companies who put little to no emphasis on list building. The most effective way we’ve found recently of capturing emails is to use an exit intent pop up. First, you need to create an offer in exchange for an email, whether it is discount, free shipping or credits. And then, identify all opportunities to capture an email and add an exit- intend pop-up to your website.
Don’t Just Collect Emails. 

Indoctrinate And Then Ascend

And now, you are getting opt-ins to your email list. What you need to do now is teach them about who you are. Don’t start blasting off discount emails or new product emails the minute they sign up, and don’t just add them to your weekly or monthly newsletter list.Just like any new relationship, they need to get to know you. Who are you? What do you stand for? What’s your purpose? What should they expect from you?You might think that one email will do the trick, but in reality indoctrinating a new lead could take a few “get to know us” emails just like any new relationship. You need to list out who are you, what you stand for, your purpose, what they should expect from you, and anything else that you think would help a new subscriber get to know you.Create 1-2 auto responder emails within your email service provider that explains what you just wrote down in a bit more detail. Next, create an email that ascends them to the next level – engagement. Ask them to engage with you. That could be responding to an email, liking your Facebook page, following you on Twitter, or provide them an offer and ask them to buy.

Avoid Display Errors

If your recipient opens your email, the last thing that you want is for display issues to cause any professional impression to evaporate. To guarantee flawless display in all current email programs, you should definitely test your newsletter before dispatching it. Professional newsletter software offers pre-tested templates that you can use without having to worry about display.

Securing Content Display

Preview windows in email programs are limited in size. Therefore it is important to make sure that your newsletter does not exceed 600px in width, otherwise your recipient will be forced to scroll across laterally to reach all of the content. You should also ask the recipient to allow the images in the newsletter to be displayed.

E-commerce Email Marketing Campaign

Stage 1 - Interested

Did you know that 74.4% of consumers expect a welcome email when they subscribe to a company’s mailing list?As a result of this expectation, subscribers who receive a welcome email show, on average, 33% higher engagement, than subscribers who don’t receive a welcome email.This engagement translates to 4 times more open and 5 times more clicks than standard bulk newsletter promotions.Ultimately, this means that welcome emails see more than 3x the transactions and revenue per email compared with regular promotions.

The Welcome Emails

The welcome email has several components that make it effective. Let’s look at each one separately. Before you do anything else, say hi to them. Welcome them to the family. You can do this by saying “Welcome” or “Hi”.After you have welcomed them, it’s time to begin the brand indoctrination process. There is no perfect way to do this. You can do it by listing a few bullet points on what makes you special, or by adding a few sentences or a paragraph of copy on the same thing.Once you’ve told them what makes you different, you need to explain what they should expect from your emails.The details will vary from company to company, but the goal is the same: tell them what happens next so they know what to expect from you.

Regardless of whether you offer anything in exchange for their email address, you should make them an offer in the welcome email. If you don’t want to give them a discount, give them free shipping, a free gift, or some amount of points. Just give them something, and make sure you communicate it clearly in the email with big, bold text, and a button that stands out.Finally, add links to your social profiles at the end of the email — whether this means social icons linked to your profiles on each social platform or asking them to “Like” you or “Follow” you on any social media platforms.

Lead Nurture

Nurture emails all share one quality: their goal is not to sell.If you keep that in mind, you’ll be a good “nurturer”.Think about it this way, your customers have other problems in their lives aside from the problems that your product solves. Most companies focus solely on selling their products. They don’t care about the other problems their customer has.

Here are some specific ideas for your nurture emails:

Brand Indoctrination

One of the best things you can do with nurture emails is to continue your brand indoctrination process. Ideally, all the following ideas should be designed to fit into and reinforce your brand.

Education

I speak to a lot of online retailers and E-commerce companies who don’t believe that it’s possible to educate their prospects and customers. They’re selling kitchen knives, or soap, or automotive parts. They can only write so many emails about their products and then what? They run out of ideas.

Entertainment

Funny cat videos, songs you’re listening to around the office, the latest joke you heard... it’s all fair game for entertainment in nurture emails. Of course, what you can share will depend on your brand, but keep in mind that providing entertainment is a great way to stand out from the hordes of boring companies out there.

Stories

You can tell stories about your business, where and how it got started, and what drives you today. You can also tell stories about your employees, and your customers.Customer stories are great, however you need to be careful to avoid over- selling the testimonial or story.

Promotion For First Purchase

This is the easy part. You’ve welcomed your subscribers into your tribe. You’ve warmed them up with content, brand indoctrination, and more. You’ve even made a few “soft offers” to people in the content of your emails. Now it’s time to sell and sell hard. The goal? Get people to make their first purchase.Creating promotions is relatively straightforward. First, you pick an offer, create an email and then send it out. Whenever you make some kind of special offer, include a reason for the offer. Don’t offer a discount with no reason. Instead, tell them it’s because you bought too many and now you need to clear space in your warehouse. And if you offered an incentive for the signup, your welcome email will contain the coupon code and a big, bright, shiny button for purchase.

Stage 2 - Engaged

It’s amazing how many stores overlook their customer base as a fantastic source of sales and revenue.Did you know that it’s 10x more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to sell something to an existing customer?

Transactional Email

In this section, we’re talking about transactional emails and we’ll talk about just how you can use these as an opportunity to sell to your existing customers. Optimizing your transactional emails is easy. Take your default email receipts — your shipping and order confirmations and add the following:

Up-sells and Cross-sells

Add up-sells and cross-sells for other products you sell. If possible, customize these recommendations like Amazon does (ie. people who bought this also bought...)

Brand Indoctrination

The brand indoctrination should never really end. Every moment you have your customer’s attention is another moment to reinforce your brand’s message and what makes you different.

Benefits

Free shipping, your return policy, how and where to get in contact with support. Never stop selling people on the benefits of doing business with you.

Cart Abandonment Email

According to the Baymard Institute, an independent web research company, 67% of online shopping carts are abandoned. This means online retailers lost as much as $4 Trillion to cart abandonment in 2015, says Business Insider.Cart abandonment is a big problem for online retailers and E-commerce stores. So, what should you do to overcome this problem?Don’t use the default cart abandonment email that comes with your E-commerce platform or email marketing provider.You’ll get much better results if you customize the emails, and send more than one. We like to send 3 emails.

Email 1: Reminder.

The first email is just a reminder.Unfortunately, most companies offer a discount in their first email. This eats into revenue unnecessarily, as some people just need a simple reminder.Show them a photo of the product that’s in their shopping cart, and give them a link to return to your website and complete their purchase.

Email 2: Objection.

No discounts yet.In this email, we attack one or several objections.The objections might come from simple common-sense thinking (ie. maybe they don’t know we offer free shipping), or research and data (ie. based on survey responses and support requests).

Email 3: Discount.

If they haven’t bought yet, after an email reminder and an email about why you’re awesome, maybe they’re just price-sensitive and a discount would push them over the edge.

Online Retail Customer Email

Now, someone has purchased. Maybe for the first time. This is an important moment!If you get this right, your new customer will stay for life. Get it wrong, and you’ll be another shoddy company your customer avoids forever. Here’s what you should do:

Welcome

The first thing you want to do when someone purchases for the first time is welcome them into your family.Just like the welcome email for new subscribers, this email is designed to welcome them, explain what’s next and continue the brand indoctrination process.

Brand Indoctrination

Never stop selling. Continue the brand indoctrination process in the welcome email, and in every other email you send.You should make it a priority. Always be subtly reminding people about what makes you special, and why they made a good decision in purchasing from you.

Nurture

You should never stop nurturing your customers either. Remember, it’s 10x more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to sell to someone who has bought before.Continue sending emails with the primary goal of helping them.
Surveys and Product Reviews.Your customers will provide you with a wealth of insights about your products, your marketing, and your operations if only you ask them.Remind people to leave product reviews. Send them surveys to find out what products they’d like to see more of, and to discover why they decided to buy from you instead of your competitors.

Stage 3 - Lapsed

And lastly, the stage 3 of the campaign would be reengagement campaign. Over time, people are going to begin ignoring you. They’ll stop opening your emails. They’ll stop clicking your links. And ultimately, that means they’ll stop buying your products.

Reengagement Campaign

Fortunately, there’s a nifty category of email marketing campaigns we can use to reactivate and reengage people.That’s where reengagement emails come in. The idea with reengagement campaigns is simple:

Set up strategic email marketing campaigns to go out to people who haven’t opened or clicked an email in 60 days. We can also target people who haven’t bought products within a specific time period.

Once you’ve chosen your segment, use one or all of the following ideas to reactivate and reengage.
Send Surveys.Find out why they’ve stopped buying or responding.People disengage for a reason. Send them an email and ask them why they stopped responding to your emails (whether opening, clicking or buying).Offer an incentive incentive for completing the survey to increase the number of responses you receive.

Offer Incentives For Visits. Get people clicking on links to get to your website.Link to a blog post, create a simple game which gives them a coupon if they win (great for sweepstakes-style businesses) or create a video and give people something if they watch the video until the end.

“No Brainer” Promotions. If someone has stopped responding, there’s a good chance you’re just not making the right kind of offers. Maybe they want bigger discounts. Maybe they want products they can’t find anywhere else. Maybe they want additional benefits, like a rewards program.For example, instead of your normal discount of 10% off, try offering 50% off, or 75% off, in order to encourage the person to repurchase.
Building Up Your Affiliate Army

Why Do You Need Reviews

Aside from having a solid inventory, product reviews are by far the most important part of any e-commerce empire as they have the potential to be a real asset for your businesses. By having a solid amount of reviews across the board – similar to how Amazon does – you build trust and credibility with your potential customers.Reviews go far beyond trust, though. Everyone knows that they’re important – but do you know all of the reasons why? Here’s the reasons:

Social Proof

There are many parts to making the user trust your site, and one of the biggest one is having reviews on at least some of your products.If you don’t have reviews, no one knows if your site is actually popular, and that’s bad. People always want to shop where other people are shopping because it gives them a sense of safety with their purchases.

SEO

Assuming bots can read your comment text, comments can do wonders for your organic search rankings.The thing is, product descriptions are limited – even on more complex products, and you’re always going to be limited to a paragraph or two. It’s up in the air as to whether or not longer pages affect SERP ranking... however, logically, it would make sense that reviews are favored by Google – they improve user experience.

Become “The Guy” For That Item

Five different e-commerce stores have the same product at the same price. Except one of them has 17 reviews on the product, whereas all of the other ones have 0, 1, or 2.Which site are you going to be looking at the item on? Likely, you’ll be on the one with 17 reviews. And when the time comes to purchase, because of the reviews, you’ll likely trust that site the most (unless another one is a major name) and purchase from it over the rest.

Answer Personal Question

A lot of the time, users share purposes for products. If a positive review touches on one of these purposes (reviewers will), other users that need the same thing from the same product will relate to the review and be more likely to purchase.There are often user questions that you’re not even aware of... and most won’t go to the trouble of sending you a message to clarify. Reviews can answer questions and concerns in an indirect way – this leads to more sales and more money in your pocket.

How To Attract Reviews From Customer

Getting reviews for your e-commerce store is one of the ways merchants and online retailers can add value and create a point of differentiation to their online store. So, how are you going to get reviews for your e-commerce business? Here’s some ways for your reference:

Set Up An Incentive

The first hurdle you need to overcome is getting initial reviews and reaching a critical mass of reviews that create value to consumers. It’s human nature that more people will complain when they have a problem or negative experience than a positive one, so you will need to provide an incentive to get a good cross section of reviews, not just negative ones.For example, if you sell $15 shirts, giving everyone a free shirt when they submit a review is a shortcut to going out of business. However if you sell
$500 digital audio equipment, providing people who submit a review with a free t- shirt is probably not going to impact the bottom line.

What do you do if you have a small profit margin on your products? One suggestion is to hold a contest. Enter everyone who submits a review into a contest and give away one or a few of your products every month. Another option is store credit or a gift card. By giving away a store credit, you can build loyalty and encourage repeat customers.However if your business doesn’t have repeat customers, like say a moving company, offering a gift card is another good option. Choose a generic gift card such as one from American Express, Mastercard, Amazon or iTunes. You could make the offer even more consumer friendly by giving them three or four options and letting them choose their own prize.

Reach Out To Consumers And Customers

Start with your existing customers who have purchased products with the past 6-12 months. Send them a polite and short email asking them to review their product purchase, and telling them about whatever incentive method you have chosen.If you have repeat customers, it could be annoying for them to receive 6 emails asking them to review the 6 items they purchased in the past year. Contact them about the last purchase, but let them know they can submit reviews for all of their purchases from you. If you sell generic products that are available from other merchants, allow them to review them as well.

As part of your buying cycle, you should ask all new and future customers to submit a review. Hopefully your inventory control system knows when a product ships, and you have an estimate of how long it takes for the product to arrive. Give the customer 7-10 days after the arrival date before sending them an email asking them to review the product, with your incentive offer.Another option to consider is advertising you are running a contest for reviews. Social media websites like Facebook, Twitter or forums that are about your topic or products are sources to promote your contest to the right audience. Don’t forget to create a press release and promote your incentive using services like PR Web or PR Leap.

Moderating Reviews

Moderating reviews is tricky issue, for consumers to trust you and your reviews they have to believe they are honest. You don’t want to create a store where everything has 5 out of 5 stars, the customers love all the products and the world is filled with sunshine, rainbows and unicorns prancing in meadows, you need to have some negative reviews.That said, you need to protect yourself from slander, defamation, and questionable fake negative reviews submitted by competitors or ex-employees with a grudge. A suggestion is to develop a review policy or set of review guidelines that allow you a wide editorial latitude to not publish reviews that don’t pass the sniff test.

Additionally unless you have a trusted customer rating system, you would want to be cautious about publishing any reviews without examining them first. What you want to check for is inappropriate language, potential legal issues, fake reviews or reviews with an agenda. What you don’t want to do is moderate out any negative reviews, you may think it helps sales in the short run, but all it really does is undermine your credibility in the eyes of the consumer. Sometimes fake reviews can have unexpectedly pleasant results.

Use A Reviews Provider

One guaranteed method of getting enough customer reviews to make your product pages more persuasive for shoppers is to use a third party reviews provider, such as Reevooor Bazaarvoice. Many retailers, including Comet, Tesco, and Argos use these companies to add reviews to their sites. This is a useful way to build up a body of reliable reviews for product pages which could otherwise take some time.

These reviews are also authenticated, so customers know that the person leaving the review has actually purchased the product in question. Drawbacks include the fact that such reviews tell other potential customers nothing about buying from your site in particular, as reviews are generally syndicated.

Email Customers Post-Purchase

Sending an email after a customer has purchased an item to ask for a review is a good idea, but the timing is a key issue here.You need to give customers enough time to have received the product and had to chance to start using it and form an opinion, but it still needs to be sent when the purchase is fresh in the customer's mind.

Make The Process As Simple As Possible

Some users may not have a lot to say about some products, or may have a limited attention span, so make it nice and easy to leave opinions. Offering customers the option of leaving a quick rating out of five or ten is one way, and provides a useful summary score to add to product pages, while another way to get a little more useful detail is to ask users to give different aspects of products a rating, as Reevoo does.

Legal Issues

When you decide to add reviews to your website there is a big temptation to add “fake” or “artificial” reviews, you should avoid this. First, it’s extremely unlikely you will be able to create reviews with a different style and language structure that reads like more than one person wrote them. Nothing says “you are a shady merchant” like fake reviews.Secondly, in some jurisdictions, writing or publishing fake reviews is illegal and may result in a hefty fine. Another issue to consider is how you incentivize your reviews, again some states or countries have legal issues regarding how you incentivize actions, and contests laws vary considerably, so be sure to do your research.
Retargeting Marketing

What Is Retargeting?

First of all, what is retargeting marketing? Retargeting, also known as re-marketing, is the strategy that lets advertisers serve online ads to visitors who’ve previously visited their website. Over the past few years, retargeting has become a must-have marketing channel, in addition to search engine marketing and email marketing, for reaching and converting customers.

Retargeting often performs better than other forms of display advertising, and adding it into the digital marketing mix can help drive incremental conversions, increase customer loyalty, and raise brand awareness. In a recent survey of AdRoll’s customers, 87% of respondents indicated that retargeting is important to their overall marketing strategy, and 76% expected to increase their retargeting budget in 2014. With retargeting seeing mass adoption across the industry, agencies are learning the nuances of retargeting and developing a better understanding of best practices.

Types Of Retargeting

To give you a better understanding of the types of retargeting, here’s a summary of a few popular forms:

Site Retargeting

On average, 98% of website visitors leave the site without completing a desired action. With site retargeting, often shortened to “retargeting,” advertisers can display ads to this group as they visit other websites across the web. This keeps the brand top-of-mind and encourages the user to come back and complete the transaction.This strategy works well with e-commerce businesses, retailers, auto, tech B2B, travel, media and entertainment—anyone interested in engaging current or prospective customers online. If you’re just getting started with a retargeting program, this is where to begin.

Retargeting On Social

Recently the largest social media networks have opened up their ad platforms and launched ad exchanges. Facebook has been leading the movement with the announcement of Facebook Exchange (FBX). Facebook Exchange is a new way of buying ads on Facebook through the use of real-time bidding. Advertisers can work with an FBX, qualified partner to retarget their website visitors on Facebook with ads placed directly into the News Feed as well as on the Right-hand Side. Initial reports from Facebook reveal 20-40x higher CTR with these retargeted ads than standard FBX ads. AdRoll’s advertisers have seen a 16x return on their ad spend, making new FBX campaigns a high-value complement to traditional retargeting.

Mobile Retargeting

Consumers are shifting their digital browsing and buying behavior to mobile, but many marketers are still struggling to reach their mobile audiences effectively. To keep up with this shift to mobile, agencies have begun recommending mobile- specific marketing strategies like mobile app marketing and mobile retargeting. With mobile retargeting, advertisers can retarget desktop site visitors as they’re browsing Facebook and Twitter on their mobile devices, or retarget mobile site visitors directly as they browse other mobile sites.A popular use case for mobile retargeting is driving mobile app downloads by retargeting desktop audiences on mobile devices with App Install ads. Agencies can also help clients increase mobile conversions by driving desktop and mobile-optimized visitors to their mobile E-commerce site and dedicated landing pages.

Creative Retargeting

Creative retargeting, another method of retargeting, is the placement of the retargeting tag within online media that appears on a web site other than the marketer’s own site. A cookie can then be placed in the browser’s cache of a visitor who is served Flash creative or clicks on a standard banner that will identify that person when visiting other sites within the advertising network at a later time. Also known as fourth-party tagging, marketers can use creative running on expensive contextual sites to enable them to reach these same visitors again with future messages, or exclude them, as they visit other sites.

Search Retargeting

Related to creative retargeting is the method of search retargeting. Here the tag is placed on one or more landing pages of the marketer’s web site and captures the search term a visitor entered into a search box to navigate to the marketer’s web site. These search terms can often provide insight into what products or services the visitor is looking for the web site to provide, and search retargeting gives the marketer the ability to reach a person who has already, for example, searched for the marketer’s product and clicked on a corresponding text ad to go to the site.One difficulty often overlooked with search retargeting is the ability to clean, disambiguate and categorize the raw search phases entered by visitors. Cleaning helps strip extraneous terms from the search phrases.

Factors For A Successful Retargeting

Given the combination of hype and confusion around behavioral targeting – not to mention the true potential of it – taking a closer look at one of its proven approaches is important for everyone with a stake in online advertising. To be successful, retargeting relies on three key factors: identifying interested visitors, crafting engaging content, and delivering this message at scale.

Identifying Interested Visitors And Visitor Interests

To retarget a visitor, advertising networks need to identify which visitors have already expressed the marketer-specified interest. A common method of capturing this interest is placing a retargeting tag on particular pages of the marketer’s web site or in Flash creative. This retargeting tag is also called an “invisible pixel” or “one- by-one image request”. Because the image is so small and due to content delivery networks, the retargeting tag does not impact the page load time or the user experience.When a visitor “sees” the retargeting pixel, a cookie is placed in their browser’s cache so the advertising network can recognize this visitor when he/she visits other sites in that network at a later time. The larger the network, the greater their ability to reach a marketer’s audience and re-engage them on behalf of the marketer.

There is an important distinction between the anonymous use of cookies that many advertising networks use and cookies tied to personally identifiable information (PII) that most web portals use. Because the latter can identify the visitor by their name, e-mail, home address and telephone number, this practice has drawn the scrutiny of both privacy advocates and government regulatory bodies. Interestingly, in the offline direct marketing world, consumer PII is readily sold to enrich direct marketing campaigns without any transparency or control offered to the individual. However, online marketing is held to a much higher standard. Accordingly, in working with a retargeting partner, the first question to ask is whether their retargeting cookies can be associated with PII.

Crafting Engaging Creative

One pitfall marketers often succumb to, is using the same creative in their retargeting campaigns as in their standard contextual campaigns. The ultimate goal for standard contextual campaigns is normally customer acquisition, which usually means driving first-time visitors to the web site. The goal of retargeting campaigns, on the other hand, is driving customer engagement, which involves getting those site visitors and loyal buyers to increase their activity within the site. Because the goals in these instances are different, different creative is called for. Messages focused on site-specific branding are best for the acquisition campaigns, while messages focused on discounts and product-specific branding work best for retargeting campaigns.

Delivering Retargeting At Scale

As with any advertising tactic, there are a number of considerations marketers need to bear in mind when implementing retargeting campaigns. First of all, when running these types of campaigns with an ad network, the total reach of the network is of fundamental importance as there is a need to see the visitor not just once, but for repeated exposes to ensure they have an opportunity to notice the creative. While there are hundreds of ad networks and many have a monthly unique visitor reach in excess of 100 million visitors, only a small handful have sufficient scale to see the same visitor more than once per month.
Additionally, to ensure maximum scale and success for a retargeting campaign, it is necessary to understand the role a marketer’s web site traffic plays in the equation. Because the audience available for site retargeting is directly proportional to the number of visitors who engage with the web site, retargeting campaigns are most successful for sites with high traffic volume or when used in conjunction with a companion campaign to drive additional traffic to the site.
Logistics Outsourcing

E-commerce business that sells physical products require warehousing, shipping, and fulfillment. These are logistics aspects you will have to take care of when you sell your products online. Upon making sales and receiving orders, there are three ways how you can deliver the products to your customers’ hands.

• You sell a product from a drop shipping service who will handles orders for you. (Drop shipping is a supply chain management technique where retailer transfers customer orders and shipment details to manufacturer/other retailer/wholesaler who then ships the product directly to the customer.)

• You fulfill your own orders, regardless on your own or with a team. (Order fulfillment is defined as the steps involved in receiving, processing and delivering orders to end customers.)

• You outsource a logistics company who will handle your warehousing and fulfillment.

There are pros and cons to each way to handle your orders and shipping. For businesses that are just starting out, it is more flexible and cheap to handle your own logistics. But when your business is on a rapid grow and you have the budget to outsource, you might want to consider the idea of outsourcing a third-party logistics company. Logistics companies will store your product, take care of packing, and shipping your orders to customers. In this section, you’ll be learning about the benefits of using third-party logistics and how to choose the suitable and best logistics for your E-commerce business.

# Benefits Of Outsourcing Logistics

The most obvious and main benefit is that you don’t have to do it yourself. Outsourcing logistics company to handle your warehousing and fulfillment can give a big impact on your business’ growth.

• Management Made Easier

When you handle your own orders, it is pretty difficult and impossible to do it alone. You will most likely need to hire staff or helper as your business grows bigger in sale. More sales equals to more work, and more work equals more manpower. Managing orders itself is a heavy job, let alone having to manage a team of staffs at the same time. So by outsourcing logistics, you can save yourself the hassles at one go by paying them and let them be responsible for both the aspects of handling orders and managing staff.

• Flexible Cost

When you handle warehousing on your own, you will need to rent your own warehouse to store your products, and it requires a lot of commitment and money. Many logistics company offer flexible pricing on their services. You can avoid having to get tied down to long term fixed warehouse leases. Logistics company offers month-to-month payment for the amount of space you occupy. They have the flexibility to adapt to your needs and adjust the cost accordingly. This can help you save money, especially when inventory levels fall during non-peak seasons, you can pay for only what you need.

• Increase Efficiency

Using a professional logistics provider will allow you more time and focus on other more important business functions. Outsourcing logistics company will lessen your burden on handling everything on your own. You can spent more valuable time on things that impacts on your business, like product sourcing, online marketing, and sales rather than having to work for back-end logistics.

# Choosing The Best Logistics Company

Do some research on the internet for reviews and recommendations on the market’s top logistics companies. Then from the options you found, based on the two aspects below, you can choose the one that suits your business best.

• Specializing In The Similar Industry

Every fulfillment company functions differently from one another, just like how every E-commerce business is different. It is important to outsource one that has similar specialization to your business.

• Similar Existing Clients

Outsource for logistics company that is already working with businesses similar to yours. This ensures that the logistics company has the adequate experience in fulfilling E-commerce orders and shipping just like your business. They will also be able to better assist you in any complications with your business by offering you advices based on their past experience working with similar business like yours.
O2O (Online To Offline)

O2O is a buzzword created by the E-commerce community for “online-to-offline”. O2O Commerce (Online to Offline) goes by the concept of connecting the online digital world to the offline world through the integration of internet-connected devices. Either customers are driven offline based on online information like e-coupons, store locators or customers are propelled online through call for actions in the offline world, like: QR codes & mobile payment systems. It can be summarized as a concept of making the first point of contact online and then driving customers offline via a reservation or financial commitment like paying for pre-booking or order.
 
The Impact Of O2O On E-commerce

There are many industries out there where customers can’t directly make an online buying decision due to the need of first experience and preference to try out the product or service offline. This is where O2O comes in, it has the ability to build up the brand experience and buying process online, then closes the process offline.

Another reason why O2O is a profitable concept is because even though large part of traditional brick-and-mortar retail sales can be replaced by E-commerce, there are still elements to physical shopping that cannot (or should not) be replicated digitally. However, just because all retailing can’t take place online does not necessarily mean that there can’t be online elements to shopping. This is why O2O is growing bigger today, it is the potential for integration between E-commerce and physical retail shopping being the core of the O2O movement, you get best of both worlds.

Why You Should Consider O2O?

The key to O2O is that it finds consumers online and brings them into real-world stores. It is a combination of payment model and traffic generator for E-merchants (it is coined as a “discovery” mechanism for consumers) that drives offline purchases.
There’s a lot of benefits to doing an O2O business.

• Build Brand Image

Having an O2O business helps to build your brand image. Like mentioned earlier, there are many industries out there where customers won’t directly make an online buying decision due to the preference of first experience and to try out the product or service offline. Having an offline store allows your potential customers to see and try your product/service first hand and they can make better purchase decisions. O2O helps to increase confidence and trust of your customers in your brand.

• Convenient Tracking

The important thing about companies like O2O commerce companies is that performance is readily quantifiable, which is one of the tenets of O2O commerce. It is conveniently measurable and monitored, since every transaction (or reservation, booking, order) happens online, digital data allows simple management. Offline commerce do not have this luxury. But O2O makes this easy, because the transaction happens online, every completed order has “tracking code” and it is very convenient for tracking.
It is then integrated to the offline world, the whole thing is brokered via intermediaries like OpenTable or SpaFinder. This has proven to be more profitable and scalable model than selling advertising to local establishments.

• Better Flexibility

O2O enables customers to order online and control the fulfillment time according to their needs. Order fulfillment is defined as the steps involved in receiving, processing and delivering orders to end customers. O2O provides the option to customers if they prefer pick up their package at pre-defined locations at any time with the use of security codes or verifications. This increases the flexibility and wider options to customers to customize their fulfillment process according to their needs.
Secrets To Boost Your E-Commerce Sales

E-commerce is a thriving business with huge revenues globally. As technology is now easily available in almost everywhere in the world, your business has to position itself, ahead of your competitors, as the number one E-commerce site for online customers to go to for products or services in your industry. It is very important that you optimize your website in order to stand out among all other E-commerce businesses in order for you to improve your business sales. This module will reveal the secrets that could help turning your online traffic to sales.

# Customizing Your Very Own Terms And Conditions

All E-commerce business has terms and conditions. Having carefully crafted a terms and conditions page on your site about how you will treat certain transactions will form a contract between you and your customers. It is important to have terms and conditions on your website when you are selling goods or services over the internet because it gives you the opportunity to dictate how conflicts will be resolved, limit your liability, protect intellectual property, and give insight to customers of the special processes involved in transacting business on your website.

And here, you can customize your very own set of terms and conditions, where you can utilize this policy to be different from other E-commerce businesses by giving better offers to your customers. Many researches have shown that the biggest reason customers abandon their shopping cart is because of shipping fee. Most customers rather not make a purchase if the cost of shipping is too high as they find the risks of having to buy an item online with a high shipping cost not worth taking. Therefore you will probably find most E-commerce business nowadays offering free shipping.

You can either offer complete free shipping if it does not cause you liability, or you can offer deals like free shipping with purchase above 3 items. Free return policy is also a widely practiced policy to increase customer’s confidence and satisfaction towards a E-commerce business. You can up the game by offering unconditional return or refund policy.

# Seasonal Promotions

A seasonal promotion can help you boost sales by increasing your visibility among consumers. Everyone is either in shopping mood or will be looking to buy certain specific products during festive seasons. For the holiday seasons, try a new and different approach to your marketing. In order to be different from others, instead of pushing sales with a Christmas theme, try pushing sales with a New Year approach. Reason being, chances are many of your customers, especially the early planners, probably have already made their holiday purchases. They’re probably thinking ahead to the New Year.

If you start to sale your New Year items ahead of others, you’ll be able to get a head start on the New Year’s sales, while also sustaining typically holiday sales. With New Year’s sales, almost anything sells. You can sell coffee, clothes, digital goods, books — anything that you would ordinarily sell during the holiday season. People are just up for anything useful for the rest of the year. Because it is the New Year, people tend to be more willing to spend. The idea here is to market it differently. Instead of saying that it makes a great gift for a particular festive season, say that it makes a better New Year’s purchase.

# Mailing List

Most of the times, depending on the product or service you offer, customers may not necessarily buy from you the first time they visit your website. It may take a couple of contacts between your business and consumers before they eventually buy.
That is why it is crucial to have a mailing list for your E-commerce business to maintain a constant email marketing process. It is important to set up automated email (auto responders) for your subscribers. It is called the follow up strategy.

In the follow up emails, present your offer to new and old subscribers, telling them the benefits of the product/service you’re selling. Internet marketing specialists recommend at least a month’s worth of emails, sent every three to five days.
This strategy will allow you to build relationships and give you the opportunity to sell back end products. You can use Wishlist Reminders - they are email nudges that drive the person to make the purchase. Other than that, try to offer sales or sold out info to increase your customers interest on your product.

# Establishing Credibility And Trust

It's vital that you establish your credibility. It is how your customers come to trust you and feel comfortable enough to buy from you. There are several ways you can achieve this effectively. One of the best ways to establish your credibility is to include customer testimonials in your sales letter. These should be taken from genuine e-mails or letters from customers reviewing how your product or service helped solve the particular problem they faced.

Pick those that give bigger impact. For example, a customer’s testimonial that states how the product benefited them will be more effective than one that just says something like, "this product is good!". You can also enhance your credibility by adding a section to your copy that outlines your credentials, experience and any background information that makes you qualified to solve your customer's problem. Your goal should be to convince your customers that you’re the best person to offer them a solution to their problem, and that what you’re selling is the best in fulfilling their needs.
Conclusion

In conclusion, online stores are a great idea given that they simplify the process of shopping. As a serious entrepreneur, you need to consider maintaining your own online store. There are numerous ways that the internet can be used by organizations to popularize their products and also sell them. In appreciation of the growing importance of the internet, organizations have invested a lot of resources to make their presence felt online and, truth be said, a majority of them have realized success. The critical thing for the organizations of today is to recognize the need of their customers and with the products and services at hand, determine the most appropriate way of availing them via the internet. The market place has become a very resourceful tool and the organizations must today, more than ever, rethink their online business presence.