One way to increase sales on Shopify is to use apps that allow you to sell on other platforms. This can be a great way to reach more customers. Here are some great apps for Shopify that can help increase sales.
1. Replug
If you are looking for a tool that can help you with both branding and tracking your audience, to serve them better, then Replug.io is for you.
What’s Replug?
It’s the best link management platform to create shorten links and govern them hassle-free. It also includes rich features, such as retargeting pixels, A/B testing, tracking analytics and much more, as explained below.
Branded Links
Branded links have become a necessity for online branding and marketing. Usually when we create social campaigns, branded short links look friendlier to eyes and remember compared to any random long URL with multiple characters and numbers. Here is an example of Pepsi brand using a branded URL given in the image below.
Adding to the benefits of branded URLs, they are also easy to share, specially where there are character limits (e.g. Twitter only gives you a limit of 280 characters for the Tweets).
Maximize marketing ROI
by transforming ordinary URLs into branded short links that convert.
Try Replug for free
Retargeting Pixels
Retarget your Shopify audience on other platforms, such as retargeting your Shopify audience on Facebook using Replug retargeting pixels.
For example,create a retargeting campaign in Replug, and connect your Meta pixel with the campaign created. Any one that clicks on your shortened Shopify URL will be tracked, and you can retarget them on Facebook using Retargeting Ads.
Test your webpages, content or campaigns using Replug’s A/B Testing. Compare up to 10 versions of a single URL, and choose the one that gets most traction. A/B testing is a handy feature for e-commerce owners, who can use it when running a special campaign or testing a product/landing page etc.
Call To Action
Create catchy call to actions buttons with CTA phrases that create a sense of urgency to and turn clicks to conversions. Set different types of CTA’s i.e.
Exit Intent
Social
Bridge Page
Pop up
Scroll Box
Bio Links
Create one awesome bio link for all social platforms. Using Replug bio links, you can direct your social media audience to your e-commerce store by designing a custom bio link webpage. No technicalities required, just simple drag and drop functions. Easily place your links, social icons, image, videos, text, and much more to design an appealing bio link webpage.
Here’s an example of bio link webpage.
What else?
A link shortener tool gives you the control of shortening, customizing, analyzing and managing branded links.
That’s not just it. There’s more….
Replug has some other cool features that you can check out and make most of your online marketing across the web and social channels.
Another great option is the Shopify Sales Booster app, which helps increase sales by offering discounts and coupons to customers who purchase through your shop. This app is also free and a great way to boost sales on any platform.
Multi-orders
Multi-orders is one of the most popular Shopify apps that allows you to manage and fulfill orders from multiple sales channels in one place. It integrates with popular marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, and Etsy, as well as with Shopify POS. With Multiorders, you can save time through automation.
3. One Click Checkout & Stickybar
One click checkout & stickybar is a great app if you want to increase sales on e-commerce platforms. The app allows customers to checkout with multiple payment methods and shipping methods. The app also allows customers to track their order status and view their order history.
ContentStudio is the best social media management tool out there that lets you post and schedule content, track your analytics, and engage with your audience – all from one platform.
Shopify integration with ContentStudio makes sharing products easier from your e-commerce stores across all social channels.
5. Omnisend
Omnisend is an excellent email marketing app for Shopify. By adding Omnisend to your store, you can increase the number of emails collected from visitors, cultivate leads with email campaigns, and improve sales and marketing. This app is designed to help you quickly build an email list, grow your Shopify store with email, SMS and push marketing, or drive more sales with email automation.
Google Shopping Actions is a program that lets shoppers purchase products from your store directly through Google search results and Google Assistant. This app makes it easy to set up and manage your participation in the program.
Oberlo is my favorite among the best Shopify apps. It is a drop-shipping service that allows the user to find popular products online and start selling immediately. Get products from various suppliers and add them to your online store. Oberlo is a great tool for entrepreneurs who want to start an eCommerce business without investing in inventory.
8. ReferralCandy
Referral Candy is a Shopify app that allows you to create custom referral programs for your store. If you have customers who are satisfied with your products, they will be more likely to tell other people about them. If you don’t have a referral program, you could be missing out on some potential sales. .ReferralCandy has a wide range of customization options to choose from so you can build a referral program that fits your brand perfectly. It is also a system that automatically delivers rewards to make the referral process easier.
9. Product Reviews by Shopify
Product Reviews is an excellent app that allows customers to write reviews for products they have purchased. Customers can also rate products they have purchased. The app also allows customers to share their reviews with their friends and followers on social media.
What are the essential steps to set up an essential influencer marketing campaign? Influencer marketing campaign steps are to establish goals, identify the right influencers, set strategy, measure results and readjust strategy.
You may have heard the term “influencer marketing” thrown around a lot lately, but what does it mean?
Influencer marketing is about leveraging relationships with key individuals who hold sway over their audience. These people could be bloggers, vloggers, celebrities, or highly engaged customers.
If you want to set up a successful influencer marketing campaign, follow the five essential influencer marketing campaign steps. And, to make managing all those steps easier, consider using a powerful link optimization platform, like most top-notch brands are doing currently.
Read on to find out more!
1. Establish Your Goals
Before you start reaching out to potential influencers, you must first establish your goals. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Drive traffic to your website? Boost sales?
Once you know what you want to achieve, you can start identifying the right influencers to help you reach your goals.
Pro tip: As with any other marketing campaign, these goals must be “Smart”.
Let’s say you want more visitors to your website. A SMART goal would sound like this:
“I want to increase traffic to my website by 10% within the next three months.”
Why is this important?
Having a precise goal helps you establish concrete key performance indicators to track it.
You can pick the right strategy, tools, and messages for this goal.
You can find the right influencers for your purpose.
Take this example:
Andy Neal is a plus-size model, hiker, and micro-influencer. His (funny, emotion-filled) posts mostly show him hiking in different environments. Andy has talked at length about his mental health and how hiking outdoors has helped him become more grounded.
As an advocate for health at every size, Andy Neal is the perfect influencer for companies retailing plus-size clothing.
Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/CgumCYsu6TI/
In the post above, you can see Andy touching on a current online controversy: does promoting plus-size gear also mean promoting obesity?
That question raises people’s interest, warming them up as the presented opinion elicits different emotions (intrigue, indignation, approval, and so forth). After reading Andy’s arguments, the followers are presented with a question and the author’s answer:
“Do you have a favorite brand you wear for the trail or the gym or for exercise?
You all know my answer, @columbia1938 !”
After warming his followers up with his diatribe, Andy savvily introduces the brand he’s wearing. That way, after building up people’s approval, they’re more likely to click on the brand mention, thus increasing the traffic.
As such, this post’s primary goal is to raise traffic. The subordinated objective could be increasing sales as people who like the brand’s Instagram posts may also click on its website.
However, raising sales isn’t the main goal because there’s no discount code or direct link to the company’s product pages. You can also notice the perfect fit between the brand and this influencer.
That brings us to the next influencer marketing campaign step.
2. Identify the Right Influencers
Not all influencers are created equal. When looking for people to promote your brand, it’s important to find ones that are a good fit. This means considering factors such as audience, engagement rate, content style, and personal values.
Let’s say you run an eco-friendly fashion brand. You would want to look for influencers who care about sustainability and are likely to resonate with your target audience.
Remember: You also need the right influencers for your goals.
But can you tell if one content creator is better to increase your visibility, boost your sales, or win back old customers?
Yes, and here’s how:
a) Suppose your goal is to increase traffic to your website:
In that case, you’re looking for influencers likely to link to your site in their content. That’s why looking for content creators in your industry would be beneficial.
These people should be popular and know how to push their follower’s emotions. They should create FOMO, desire,trends, and controversy like no other.
That’s exactly what Andy Neal did in the previous example.
b) Or suppose you want more people to buy your product:
In that case, you’ll be looking for influencers with an engaged following on social media, preferably people who have previously talked about similar products.
In this case, you’re looking for more objective influencers. These people can have direct conversations with your audience, convincing them of your product’s true benefits.
One good example, in this case, is Carter Sullivan for the Mogo App. Mogo is an online app that helps people become more financially responsible as they keep track of their expenses. As such, users can get out of debt, save money, and build their financial freedom. If you’re already dealing with financial strain, particularly from existing debt, finding a debt relief service near you can be a practical way to regain control and ease financial stress.
The company’s main audience is Gen Z, Carter Sullivan is an excellent choice. As a Zoomer with some previous debt she got out of by using Mogo, she’s perfect for explaining to people the app’s advantages.
Pro tip: Nano-influencers, although they have smaller audiences, are better at direct contact. That means they can actively engage in conversations about your product with their fans, convincing them to buy your brand.
c) Suppose you want to re-engage old customers that have moved on to a different brand:
In this case, looking for an influencer who’s already talking about your industry but isn’t necessarily promoting any one brand would make sense.
You want an expert in the field who’s identified one key issue with their audience that only your brand can solve.
Here’s a potential example:
Let’s say you’re retailing organic food, but following the latest financial developments, your products have become too expensive for some of your audience. In this case, you can focus on one of their most poignant needs.
And studies show that people often buy products if they feel they’remaking a difference. This is especially valid for Gen Z and Millennials, but also Gen X.
So, you could partner with a local influencer that explains the importance of supporting local producers in troubled times. Alternatively, you could partner with a content creator that promotes eco-friendly, locally sourced brands.
Focusing on health and supporting the environment may bring back some old customers.
However, the premise we started from was the price being the central issue. To solve this, you can consider adding a discount or exclusive access to some products through your content creators.
It’s all about strategy. We’ll talk about that below, but for now, here are just a few reminders before we get started:
Some influencers may be fake:
To avoid being duped, use a fake influencer checker.
Use an engagement rate calculator:
Regardless of your goals, you want to ensure your content creators hold sway over your audience. So, simply having a large following isn’t enough; you want to make sure those followers are involved (quality comments and shares are just a few examples).
Use the proper channels to find influencers:
From Google to hashtag searches on social media, geolocation searches, and dedicated platforms or AI software – the world wide web is your oyster. You can also use your professional network, search through your customer & supplier databases, or Google your brand mentions. But all that may take a lot of time. If you’ve never worked with content creators, your best bet is contacting an influencer marketing agency. The best ones will work with you tightly instead of ignoring your plans, offering comprehensive services. That way, you can learn the ropes and adjust the process to your needs seamlessly.
Before boarding your influencers, create foolproof contracts:
Outline all terms, rights, and obligations for both parties. That way, you can ensure your influencers deliver the promised content without delays orsocial media risks.
3. Define Your Influencer Marketing Strategy
Now that you know your goals and who the right influencers are, it’s time to start planning for your influencer marketing campaign.
Remember: There arevarious ways to collaborate with an influencer, but not all of them will be a good fit for your brand. The key is to find the one that best aligns with your goals.
Some standard options include:
Shout-outs:
A mention of your brand on social media, in a blog post, vlog, or even in a podcast. The goal is to increase visibility, driving more traffic to your website. The influencer may or may not receive compensation for this.
Shaina, a creative fitness and yoga teacher, offers a good example. She usually posts Instagram and TikTok videos showing quick (but muscle-torching) routines, thus promoting her app. In this post, however, she mentions Altra Running using emphatic words: “officially hooked,” “shoe struggle,” “ONE time,” etc. You can also notice the build-up and the hyperboles paired with the objective product description. The CTA “Go get yours” written in capital letters and followed by three exclamation marks is very convincing because:
It’s the natural continuation of the previous points.
It’s nicely fitted between an accurate product description and the workout’s structure details. As such, Marie’s CTA pops out between two less intense arguments with a rhetorical force that would make Aristotle proud.
The content creator uses and reviews your product on their channels, driving awareness and teaching their audience about its features and benefits. These videos work great for products that are hard to explain with words alone or if you’re targeting tech-savvy audiences that prefer seeing a product in action before they buy it.
Tutorials & how-to’s:
The influencer uses your product to create content that’s helpful to their audience. For example, a cooking influencer could use your kitchen supplies to show their audience how to cook a specific dish. These videos are great when you want to position your product as the solution to a problem your target audience is facing. It’s also what Carter Sullivan did for Mogo in the above example.
Contests & giveaways:
The influencer runs a game on their channels, with your products or services as prizes. This is a great way to increase engagement and get people talking about your brand.
Sponsored posts:
The influencer promotes your brand on their channels in a paid partnership. These can be in the form of written blog posts, social media posts, or even videos.
In the post below, Jo promotes three products: a wig, underwear, and a new pantsuit – all from three different brands. What makes this sponsored post different?
You can see Jo using the products, showing how they fit her specific body shape and image.
Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cgqz5o4Ar4P/
You can see a nice contrast with the following example. Dr. Noc is a Ph.D. immunologist. Both his TikTok and Instagram clips aim to educate a large young audience on different science and medicine-related topics.
This is a great way to increase engagement and get people talking about your brand, leveraging user-generated content on TikTok or Instagram.
Bonus: Dr. Noc is always dressed up, wearing a shirt and a nice pair of pants.
That’s why this clip below is so catchy.
Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/CgRxCIRg9bp/
People can get a kick from seeing Dr. Noc running on the treadmill and lifting weights in his Mark Weldon shirt and pants. Besides, the video is the visual representation of a pun; Dr. Noc asks his followers if they ever get tired in the gym, saying that it never happens to him because he’s always “professionally attired.”
Why it works:
Humor is an effective rhetorical strategy because it suspends critical analysis. On this permeable ground, the 20% discount code is the final push people need to access the Mark Weldon website and buy from it.
Remember: Both these videos use emotion and strategies that fit the content creators’ personalities. The result is they don’t seem sales even if they’re sponsored posts.
Product placement:
The influencer features your product prominently in their content without explicitly talking about it or promoting it. This is a great way to subtly get your product in front of a new audience.
4. Measure the results of your campaign
There’s no point in running an influencer marketing campaign if you’re not going tomeasure the results. After all, you need to know what’s working and what’s not to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Some of the most important metrics to track include:
Reach:How many people saw your campaign?
Engagement:How many people engaged with your campaign (liked, commented, shared)?
Website traffic: How much traffic did your website get due to the campaign? Note: You needURL tracking for this. Consider using a trustworthy URL shortener to get this job done efficiently.
Sales: How many sales can be attributed to the campaign? (Follow your discount codes andUTM links)
You can use Google Analytics, social media analytics tools like Replug or ContentStudio, or even a simple spreadsheet to track these metrics. Just make sure to monitor progress over time to see whether your campaign is successful.
Remember: The indicators above will differ according to your goals. Even if all companies eventually want to increase their ROI, your objective, for now, can be a higher reach without emphasizing sales, traffic, or engagement.
Warning:Don’t become complacent!
If your audience is warmed up enough to buy your products, don’t create yet another engagement campaign. That’s another reason why working with aninfluencer marketing agency is essential at first; an experienced agency will be able to guide you outside your comfort zone, advising you wisely according to your current stats.
5. Adjust your strategy as needed
Lastly, once you’ve measured your campaign results, the next step is to make some adjustments to your influencer marketing campaign. If something isn’t working, don’t be afraid to change it.
For example, suppose you’re not getting the reach you wanted.
In that case, you might need to consider working with bigger-scale influencers, diversifying your channels, or including social media ads into the mix. If engagement is low, you might need to adjust your content or offer more incentives for people to engage.
The important thing is to be flexible and willing to change things up if necessary.
Influencer marketing is an ever-evolving field, and what works today might not work tomorrow. The only way to find out is to experiment and see what works best for your brand.
Wrap Up
Influencer marketing can be a great way to reach new audiences and promote your products or services. Following the steps above, you can set up a solid campaign to help you achieve your business goals.
Frequently asked questions
What is an influencer strategy?
It is a strategy that brand use and collaborate with other influencers to promote their brand services and products.
What are the 5 characteristics of a good influencer?
It is funny how very few people know about content remarketing. Some confuse it with usual content marketing, but it is actually a separate technique that has its own aims and practices involved.
Don’t worry, you are on the right foot steps as this walk-through and guide is what you need to begin with content remarketing.
What is content remarketing?
Content remarketing is a strategy of targeting to bring back and re-engaging with people who have already visited your website or have been past customers of your brand.
What is the goal of remarketing?
With this strategy, marketers strive to capture the attention of your site’s visitors to make them come back to your website and complete an action they didn’t make during their first visit. This can be anything from purchasing your product to subscribing to your newsletter. Content remarketing is like that second chance you needed desperately.
What are the benefits of remarketing?
Remarketing helps you to:
Increase brand recall and branded searches.
Turn abandoners and bouncers into leads.
Improve the repeat visitor rate and engagement.
Improve SEO
What’s the difference between remarketing and retargeting?
The two terms can confuse many as they are very interrelated.
In general, the goals of both are focused on targeting and converting potential clients that have bounced from your socials or website.
But what really makes remarketing different from retargeting?
In the beginning, remarketing was thought off as sending just email campaigns to re-engage with customers to inform about discounts, trial expiry or to follow up potential clients, whereas retargeting involved paid advertising.
However, with the evolution of internet and social media both have evolved though the goal is still the same.
Retargeting still involves paid advertising to target and convert potential clients. While, remarketing involves reaching out or following up to past customers or potential clients through various channels that may be Instagram, Facebook, Email, SMS or Whatsapp etc.
Generally, the key medium of remarketing strategy is still email. Both strategies can be used in conjunction, where emails are sent with a paid advertisement.
Further in-depth study of the both terms makes one thing clear that they are not the same.
According to Neil Patel, a famous digital marketing expert,
“I see remarketing more as an umbrella term for marketing to the same prospect multiple times, whereas retargeting really is targeting online ads at the same traffic again and again.”
So it’s safe to say that retargeting ads and remarketing emails are actually two sides of the same coin. However, retargeting is more of a subset of remarketing which only targets website traffic, while remarketing is more concerned with getting back to past visitors using personalized content mostly confined to emails. The image below will develop a better understanding of the subject.
Now that the difference between the two is clear. Let’s move on further.
What are the different types of remarketing?
Remarketing is categorized into 5 types. The five types are
Standard Remarketing
Email Remarketing
Dynamic Remarketing
Video Remarketing
Remarketing Lists for Search Ads
When to use remarketing?
Use remarketing strategy for
Up-selling products and services
Cross selling
Special offers
Re-engagement campaigns
Customer support campaigns
Inventory update campaigns
Follow ups such as cart abandonment or trial expiry etc.
The right tools and channels for content remarketing
You can create personalized content using these different channels that can be used for remarketing are
Facebook ads
It’s an analytics tool by Facebook containing a pixel code that can be put on your website. A pixel is a small box that is placed on a webpage. When someone visits the page, the pixel is able to collect information about the visitor. This information can then be used by other websites to target that person with ads. In remarketing, an advertiser places a pixel on their website. When a user visits the site, the pixel is able to track everything from their web browser’s cookie to their IP address. This data is then used to track people who have visited other websites or viewed certain content. The advertiser can then use this information to show them relevant ads across multiple websites. For example, if a user has visited Amazon and viewed an item for sale, an ad for the same product could be shown on Facebook which would drive more purchases for the advertiser.
The Google Display Network is a web-based advertising network run by Google. The network allows advertisers to place text, image, video and Native ad units on websites and mobile apps.
One of the best things about using GDN for remarketing is that it gives you a lot of reaches. You will be able to find your tagged site visitors on the network several times per day across many different sites. In general, you will be able to connect with the people you tagged several times per month.
The first step in remarketing is to create an audience of users that you will be remarketing too. This can include people who visited specific pages on your website or read your blog, but you will have to group
them into separate audiences depending on your goals.
By grouping your tagged site visitors into audiences, you will be able to reach out to only certain people and persuade them to come back to you.
Another benefit of grouping your audience is that you can bid more aggressively. Consequently, this will lead to more impressions and higher ad positions. Some pages on your website such as the pricing or product pages are way more valuable than your blog. By selecting those who visited specifically your product and pricing pages, you can write follow up mails to them.
In order to define your audience, create a new remarketing list on GDN and define which website visitors you want to include and which you want to exclude. Don’t worry about cookies and such, because Google will take care of them itself.
Yet another great idea is to group your blog audience by the posts they read. So, for example, if you have articles on three different topics, create three remarketing lists for each of these topics’ visitors.
Once you have your remarketing lists set up, you must decide on your audience membership duration. In remarketing, this refers to the number of days you follow a user around. This means that setting your audience membership duration to 30 days will make your site visitors see your ads for, you guessed it, 30 days.
The problem with deciding on the “right” audience member duration is that there is such a fatigue which results in overly aggressive remarketing. Many experts believe that being too “creepy” with your ads may result in the loss of ROI of your campaigns or can even damage your brand. This is why so many marketers advocate for shortening audience membership duration, even though the reality seems to be different.
Fortunately, remarketing has shown to be way more effective. In fact, they stay effective even after ad fatigue starts setting in and viewers are more likely to engage with remarketing campaigns.
This brings us to the fact that being bold with your remarketing is the way to go. Set your audience membership duration for longer time (something like three times your average sale cycle length). Having more impressions means a higher conversion rate and can help you fight ad fatigue.
Prior to Google ads and Facebook ads, emails were the original form of remarketing. With email remarketing, you can take advantage of existing customers who’ve visited your website and email them with targeted offers. By targeting specific segments of customers who have shown interest in your product or service, you can increase the likelihood of success with your campaign.
For example, you might use an email remarketing list to send out emails to past customers with discounts on flights or hotel stays.
Another way to use email remarketing is to show ads to people who have already looked at your website. This allows you to broaden the pool of potential customers, while also reducing the cost of running an ad. While email remarketing can be a powerful tool for reaching out-of-the-people, it does require some preparation and maintenance.
First, you’ll need to create a custom audience that’s carefully selected so that you don’t run into any false positives. Next, make sure that your campaign doesn’t overreach by carefully monitoring performance and experimenting with different tactics until you find the one that works best for you.
Look at the example of Tarte Cosmetics remarketing email.
The “Ends Soon” call to action button creates a sense of urgency and persuades the customer to click and reach directly to the meaningful content.
Email remarketing is the practice of sending out an email to people who have previously expressed interest in your product or service. It’s a great way to reach out to customers who were previously interested in your brand, but may no longer be actively using it. Remarketing allows you to keep them in the loop and possibly re-engage with them. There are two types of remarketing lists:
1. Remarketing lists for customers who’ve already completed a purchase. These are referred to as Customer Lists.
2. Remarketing lists for people who have shown interest in your company in some way, but have never purchased from you (yet). These are referred to as Leads Lists. Remarketing is a very effective way to keep in touch with existing customers and generate new ones.
In addition to GDN and Facebook, you can also use Replug (a reliable link management platform for URL shortening, tracking, optimization, and deep analytics) which is quite valuable for content remarketing. You can use other platforms as well to send personalized messages and ads to your past visitors on the respected platforms.
Using Replug’s custom URL shortener tool, you can create a retargeting pixel campaign and add relevant tags to track for any shortened URL. Here’s a preview of it.
Here are the best practices in content remarketing for you to use:
Ads that push to “hard” offers: The best way to get your ads working is to promote your best offers. If you have a bestselling product, make an ad for it, because this will make it sell even better and will help you get your other products selling too.
Conversion path analysis: Do a conversion path analysis and figure out which pages the user usually visits before converting. Once you know what these pages are, target them with your ads.
Ads that push to content: Your content may be even more important to visitors than your products. This means that it may be better to target an article in your ad rather than promote a product page.
Social shares on your blog content: Analyze your blog content and see which content gets the most shares to social media. This will give you a general idea of what kind of content people are interested in and you will be able to target your ads at those articles on your blog.
Email segmentation: Segmenting emails lists depending on specific actions taken by the customer when making the purchase. Depending on the actions, you can send more information and a personalized email using CRM with email marketing software to target specific segments.
Reengage with inactive subscribers: There are a lot of people that subscribe to emails but remain inactive, reengaging with such potential customers by reminding them at the first place that why they subscribed the email. Adding an CTA within the email can encourage them to complete the journey.
Below is an example of American Giant who sent an remarketing email to its subscriber by including the product they browsed previously.
20 tips for remarketing
Lastly, to give you more ideas about how to retarget your ads and remarket your content, here are twenty examples from the past:
1. The right link
One of the biggest mistakes you can possibly do is sending your customers to the wrong place. Imagine you posted a picture of one product, but linked to another one. The person who clicks on the link wants to see the product in the picture, but once they see something different, they quickly lose interest. Instead of doing this, act like Kelley Blue Book on Twitter – link the corresponding product that is in the image you attach to the post.
2. Customer buying window
A common misconception in remarketing is that you have to retarget potential buyers with ads for the product they haven’t bought. In reality, there are many customers who can’t afford certain products and have simply browsed through your catalogue before and viewed these very products. As Rob Weatherhead, the owner of Agent Wolf, says, you must retarget these individuals only for a certain amount of time while their interest is still present. If they don’t convert during this time, it means they either decided not to purchase your product or bought something similar elsewhere.
3. Separate landing pages
This is a mistake done not only by those who practice remarketing but also by many experienced marketers. Instead of linking their ads to separate landing pages, they simply link them to the homepage which is a big turnoff for many consumers. Neil Andrew, Marketing Manager at PPC Protect Limited, recommends creating separate landing pages for your ads and always linking to them.
4. Cheap alternatives
Philippe Côté-Léger, Marketing Director at Lab Urbain, believes that using Facebook and Google is not mandatory. You can follow suit and make use of cheaper alternatives that can prove to be just as effective as Google and Facebook. For example, a content discovery network like Outbrain offers inexpensive CPC.
5. Dynamic remarketing ads
This is one of the simplest yet overlooked tips. Using dynamic remarketing tips is essential for getting the best results.
For example, Ryan Scollon says that dynamic remarketing ads allow him to show ads with products that customers have viewed before. This makes the ads way more interesting instead of leaving them generic. The only thing to keep in mind when designing dynamic remarketing ads is that your imagery must be on point to capture the attention of your target audience.
6. Email promotion
Learning Success Systems has been implementing this technique into their strategy for quite a while now. They match their retargeting campaign with email promotion making it twice as effective. There is no logical explanation for why this works so well, but it has been proven to be successful for many businesses. Perhaps, people remember their emails once they see the ads.
7. Reviews
Karen Sahetya, the founder of Brand Central Marketing, says that one of the best ways to build social proof is to use reviews for retargeting and remarketing. Those who viewed your products but didn’t make a purchase are more likely to buy once they see that others have had a positive experience with your brand and with some particular products of yours. It is the equivalent of someone considering buying a car in real life and a friend telling that person about their positive experience with this model.
8. Social proof
This is very similar to the previous example, but it is still quite different. Let’s look into this practice with the help of Birchbox. They have successfully integrated social proof into their retargeting ads. You can either send those who click on the ads to reviews of your products or include quotes from your past customers about your brand into the ads themselves among other things.
9. Audience segmenting
Audience segmenting is crucial for your digital remarketing campaign. Separating your targeted audience into those who have converted and those who haven’t will allow you to show corresponding ads to different individuals. This practice has been proven effective by many businesses that used it and Evoke Strategy LLC in particular. Its co-founder Devon Vocke says that audience segmenting has always helped them make their campaigns more effective.
10. Best offer
Displaying your best offer is essential for attracting the most attention. One of the best examples of this is Handy’s home cleaning retargeting banner that appears after a customer views other similar websites with home cleaning services. Making such ads catchy is also very important. They have to have bright colors, a promotional offer, and a call to action that stands out and speaks to the audience.
11. Prioritizing users
Joe Castro from Elevation says that prioritizing users that are close to completing a purchase is crucial for achieving more conversions. Those who added products to the cart or went as far as to get to the billing stage are more likely to purchase something than those who simply visited your homepage or product pages. Be ready to invest more in targeting the former ones and offer them free shipping or something similar to get them to convert.
12. Potential clients over sales
Instead of focusing on making a sale, nurture potential clients. Take WordStream, for example. The company offered a free assessment instead of a discount for their products. Consequently, many customers let their guard down because they weren’t pressured into purchasing. WordStream offered a service of value related to what their customers wanted based on what their remarketing “sensors” detected. Always think of customers first and sales second.
13. Urgency
Many marketers know of this simple characteristic that always works. Creating a sense of urgency will motivate your customers to complete the action you want them to faster. For example, Expedia uses urgency in their retargeting ads to prompt users to book travel from their site. Expedia uses irresistible deals with a last-minute offer and this works like a miracle. This is credited to the fear of missing out that most people experience when they see such ads.
14. Interesting & relatable
It has been said before, but it will never be old: make your ads interesting and relatable. There is also a great example of this technique. Mazda and Merchenta worked together to create ads that would attract more potential customers to test drive their cars. Merchenta built customized ads that were based on geographic radius matching individuals to the nearest Mazda dealership. The ads displayed the nearest dealership houses that had the specific Mazda car models that customers viewed online. This, in turn, raised the chances of these people visiting the saloon and test driving the car.
15. Frequency cap
Using a frequency cap can prevent overexposure. As Kyna Garrett from Strike Social points out, social media ads are everywhere, so applying a frequency cap can prevent potential customers from being overwhelmed by your ads. In fact, overexposure can be very damaging to your brand, so it is important to determine the right frequency (which is also not that easy). Find the perfect balance by testing different frequencies and then use the one that works best.
16. Avoid spammy ads
Patric Kreidler from Power Digital Marketing talks about something very closely related to the previous example. Such ads as pop-ups, countdown ads, ads with sound on autoplay, and so on are seen as spam by many users and usually ignored. Moreover, they often lead to viewers associating them with a bad experience. Obviously, no brand would want that, so avoid using such ads at all costs.
17. Emotional connection
It has long been proven that ads that create an emotional connection in viewers are way more powerful than usual ads. For example, Think Engraved uses cute pictures in a combination with cute statements to draw a smile or make the viewer laugh. This draws in potential customers and hooks them onto what else the brand can offer. You can also add an extra something to such ads to make them even more appealing (e.g. a discount or a gift).
18. Videos & slideshows
What can be better than visuals that “speak” to the audience? Images are so common that most ads get lost even if they have a stunning design. This is why videos and slideshows are now becoming so popular. However, you must remember to keep your slideshows with no audio and disable autoplay on your videos. Otherwise, they can become annoying.
19. Relevant sites
Thomas Budnik from Auto Accessories Garage says that including only those sites that are relevant to your brand will ensure that you don’t waste your money for nothing and target only the relevant audiences. Before letting your remarketing campaign go live, check that only the relevant websites are included or the irrelevant ones excluded.
20. Content messaging
Last but not least, Robb Hecht has adopted a social content messaging strategy to help his remarketing efforts. This simply means that you use a special framework that breaks down your ads and serves them to customers at different stages of your sales funnel.
Bonus Tip: Raising your click-through rates will reduce your click prices. This way, you will be paying for a greater volume of clicks, but they will cost you several times less. Just remember to have image ads rather than text-turned-image ads.
Final thoughts on content remarketing
All in all, content remarketing is one of the best techniques to use in your online marketing strategy, and you will definitely get something useful out of it. Make sure to read this article carefully again to refresh your memory about what content remarketing is and how to use it properly.
How long have you been going back and forth between Google ads and Facebook ads?
I’m no psychic that knows everything; I just stumble upon so many Google and Facebook ads from the brands I’m aware of that use these ad platforms.
Undoubtedly, both are excellent paid ad options in digital marketing, but the point is that these aren’t the only options out there.
There are several other online advertising options that some of you may not have even explored yet. When most advertisers plan to start their paid ads journey, they look out for better ROI without breaking the bank.
This is why I decided to put some light on the Quora ads platform. Before I dig deeper into the nuts and bolts of how to advertise on Quora, I’d like to lay the foundation first.
In case, you aren’t familiar with the Quora platform, here’s what you should know about this social media platform:
Quora is a popular questioning and answering platform that connects people through this social media network. It’s a platform that lets users ask questions from industry-relevant users as well as allows users to reply to the questions they stumble upon on the platform.
It’s similar to Reddit on some level, but I find Quora easy-to-use, effective, and user-friendly. On the contrary, Reddit is more cluttered, difficult-to-get-attention, and hard-to-figure-out.
Besides the questioning and answering concept, the platform has a lot to offer. You could manage your bio, profile, and credentials. Plus, you could build followers base on Quora through your interactions, activities, and responses.
If you’re wondering how you can get the ball rolling on this platform from a building the followers base standpoint, then let me tell you more.
The Quora algorithm detects the relevancy of the questions and puts them in front of the specific users to answer based on their credentials and profile activities.
You don’t necessarily need to be an expert on a subject to answer the questions on Quora. All it needs is that you’re interested and knowledgeable on the topic.
The platform does the rest of the job through the feedback it gets on the answer from the users interested in the subject.
That’s pretty much it.
Now let’s get back to our topic. Shall we?
If you’re curious why you need to advertise on Quora in the first place, then it’s time for you to find that out.
Why Should You Advertise on Quora?
Quora is one of those top-tier social media platforms that are a little bit underrated when it comes to building a followers base and reaching out to the masses.
However, my personal experience on the Quora platform tells a different story altogether. Perhaps, this is why I’m a big advocate of using Quora let alone advertising on this question-and-answer platform.
When I ran the first few campaigns with Google ads, they turned out to be a failure. Then I took an online course about Google ads and it helped me run a few successful Google ad campaigns afterwards.
The point is that there is no shame in learning something that you don’t know. This is why I’m excited to share my expertise and knowledge on Quora with you.
You might wonder why you should advertise on Quora instead of any other platform. I’m a big fan of testing out all the options available at my disposal. However, four key elements that might convince you to give Quora advertising a try:
I. A large User Base
Quora is undoubtedly one of the top-tier social media platforms among Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram. However, the audience size may not be even close to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, but it has a sizeable audience.
Ryan Browne, VP of Revenue on Quora revealed in December 2019 that Quora has over 300 million monthly active users. It’s not rocket science to figure out that the number would have gone up over the past couple of years.
Therefore, the Quora ad platform is worth a try if you’re trying to spice up your digital marketing campaign.
II. Retargeting
Quora ads program is embedded with several advertising features that make your online advertising experience a whole lot better. One of those features is the Quora Pixel that helps the ad platform identify the occurrence of specific actions on the consumer end, which influences the ad campaign results.
In simple words, It is a tracking code that is placed in your website code to track traffic and conversions.
Furthermore, the Quora Pixel has two parts; the Base Pixel code and the Event Pixel code. The Base Pixel goes into the header of every page of the website, which enables you to leverage website audience building for remarketing and targeting the Lookalike audience.
Whereas, the Event Pixel code tracks the conversion and needs to be installed on the “thank you” pages which indicate that an event has occurred.
The availability of multiple ad formats is the cornerstone of any ad platform. The Quora ad platform does have multiple ad formats that make it easier for the advertisers to A/B test different ads formats in the same ad campaign to analyze the difference.
The Quora ad platform offers four ad formats which are text ads, image ads, promoted answers, and lead gen forms. To find out what these ad formats look like, check this PDF guide from Quora.
IV. User-Friendly Dashboard
Indeed, I have successfully run a few Google and Quora ad campaigns back in 2019-20, but I’m no expert at PPC advertising whatsoever.
And, I have never had any problem with the Quora ad platform. I believe the Quora ad platform’s dashboard is quite user-friendly and easy-to-use even for beginner advertisers.
So these are four of the important elements to keep in mind when getting started with Quora advertising.
Note: If you want a link tool that pairs beautifully with Quora campaigns, check out Replug.io for branded short links, retargeting, and more.
Now, let’s dive deep into the process of advertising on Quora.
How to Advertise on Quora?
To get started with Quora ads, you don’t need to be an online advertising ninja. However, there are some basics that you should know before running Quora ads. Take a look at the following steps:
#1: Create a Campaign to Get Started
Understanding the Quora ad structure is crucial to starting a successful ad campaign. It’s no surprise that the first couple of online ad campaigns don’t do very well because most advertisers don’t know how to run them.
Before I put some light on the campaign creation process, it’s essential to know the types of ad campaigns available in the Quora ad platform.
Types of Quora ad Campaigns (or objectives)
Conversions: It’s the ad campaign objective that is used to push the paid visitors to do a certain action, for instance, sign up for a trial account or buy a product. The conversion ad campaign records the event as soon as the visitor completes the process/transaction cycle.
App Installs: The Quora ad platform pays close attention to a mobile audience. Besides the distinction between the desktop and mobile audience, the platform also allows you to advertise your mobile app. The app install objective is selected when you need to increase your mobile app users.
Traffic: One of the most popular objectives of the Quora ad campaign is traffic. It’s typically used for driving traffic to the advertiser’s website. The primary focus of running a traffic-based ad campaign is to increase website visitors.
Awareness: Online advertising isn’t always intended towards selling a product. Instead, sometimes, brands want to create brand awareness through content or ads. Therefore, the awareness ad campaign is used for spreading the word about a brand or product.
Lead generation: This ad campaign type does exactly what it sounds like. The lead generation objective is best for generating leads through Quora advertising.
Once you’re clear on the objective of your ad campaign, you’re good to go.
How to Create a Quora ad Campaign?
To start running ads on Quora, you need to create an ad campaign to determine the nitty-gritty of the advertising campaign.
This is the area where you need to put the basic information about the campaign. It starts with putting in the campaign name followed by the selection of the campaign objective and campaign budget.
Let me walk you through the process of creating an ad campaign for Quora ad:
To create a campaign, click on the profile button and go to the Ads Manager.
Once you’re in the Ads Manager, click on the New campaign button.
Name your Quora ad campaign and select the objective of your campaign.
The next up is the budget; it’s up to you whether you choose a lifetime budget or allocate a daily budget for your campaign.
However, daily budget allocation gives you more control over your ad spending because it won’t spend more than you chose for a single day.
In the next step, you’ll learn how to set up ad sets.
#2: Make Suitable ad Sets
After creating an ad campaign in Quora, the next up is the process of creating ad sets. The ad sets are a good way to differentiate between multiple ad strategies within the same campaign.
Simply put, you can create a single Quora ad campaign for a specific brand and come up with different ad sets over time.
Here’s how you can build ad sets:
Once you have created the Quora ad campaign, just click the next button to proceed with the process. In the next step, you’d stumble upon the ad settings page.
You’d be required to name your ad set right away.
Then, you’d have to put the location targeting for your ad where you could type in the countries or cities you want to target.
You’ll be required to choose the primary targeting of your ad set afterwards.
Here are the targeting options:
Contextual targeting: It’ll show your ad to the specific topics, keywords, and questions. It means that your ad would show up in front of the audience that is searching or following the similar topics, keywords, or questions that you’d choose in your ad.
Audience targeting: The audience targeting option would show your ad to the audience that would match the web traffic, lookalike audience, or contact lists.
Behavioural targeting: It’s the targeting option that allows you to target the audience based on their interests or retarget them based on their interaction history on the Quora platform. Source
Broad targeting: Broad targeting is a rather wide targeting strategy that encompasses a broader audience across the Quora platform.
Furthermore, there are a few additional targeting options such as devices/browsers and gender that need to be selected for accuracy.
Lastly, you’d need to set the bid for your ad campaign. To do this, choose the ad delivery model; you can either optimize your ad units for clicks or impressions.
If you opt for clicks, you’d have to go with the CPC model, whereas if you select the impressions, you’d see the CPM model.
It does sound a bit confusing if you haven’t run a Quora ad campaign before, but in reality, it’s quite simple.
#3: Prepare an ad Unit
The Quora advertising gets a little confusing, especially if you’re a beginner. When I was getting started with Quora ads, I had no idea what to do after creating a campaign.
However, the best part is that the Ads Manager’s dashboard walks you through the whole process. And, you’re able to create your first ad up and running within no time.
Let’s head over to the third stage of the Quora ad creation process. By now, you have created a Quora ad campaign and an ad set as well.
The third step in the Quora ad process is the creation of the ad unit. One of the hacks of winning at Quora advertising is that you should make multiple ad units within the same ad set.
Once you create multiple ad units in the ad set and run them simultaneously in your ad campaign, you could A/B test multiple ads units to see which one works better for you.
Without any further ado, let’s jump right into the process of creating ad units.
After you hit the next button on the ad set page, you’ll reach the ad units section.
It’s the section where you need to put in all the ad details. Let’s take a look at the information you need to fill in the ad unit section:
Ad Name: You must name the ad unit to differentiate it from other ad units.
Format: You can either choose an image ad, text ad, or promoted answer for ad format.
Creative: The creative includes Business name, headline, body text, and call-to-action.
URL formatting: It’s the URL section where your landing page URL goes.
As you finish creating your ad unit, you’re almost done with creating an ad on Quora.
Move on to the final step of the Quora ad process.
#4: Submit ad for approval
The Quora ad creation process has give or take three major steps which start with creating a campaign, then adding an ad set, and finally making ad units.
Once you finish all three steps in the process, the next up is the ad submission. When you submit an ad, it goes into the review. Then, the Quora ad team reviews your ad and decides it.
The Quora ad team closely analyzes your ad and accepts it if everything seems okay or rejects it if there are discrepancies in the ad copy or formatting. Plus, they’d let you know what needs to be fixed to get the ad approved.
Once it’s approved, your ad would go live right away.
Don’t worry if your first couple of ads get rejected. Try learning about the Quora ad requirements and resubmit your improved version of the ad.
Once you submit your ad, wait about 30 minutes to 3 hours to get your ad reviewed. Don’t panic if takes a day or two to get your ad reviewed, especially during the holiday season.
5 Key Components of Quora Ads
It wouldn’t be fair if we don’t discuss some key components of Quora advertising that go hand-in-hand when it comes to running Quora ads:
Ads manager
It’s the dashboard where everything related to Quora ads starts. To access the Ads manager, you need to click through your profile icon and choose the Ads manager from the drop-down menu.
Pixels & events
Pixels & events are the sections where the Quora Pixel code and the Event code are created. Both these codes are inserted into the website code to track the users’ activities and performances. As a result, the Quora ad platform can target those users and show them the ads, and this process is called retargeting. Read more about these codes by clicking here.
Audiences
The Quora ad platform allows you to create an audience to showcase ads through three ways:
1) Website traffic audiences,
2) List match audiences,
3) Lookalike audiences.
To better understand how to set up the audience targeting, check out this guide.
Lead gen
The Quora ad platform has now the lead generation option as well. It flawlessly integrates with over 2,000 apps. The idea behind the lead gen feature is that it helps you natively generate leads through Quora ads. This feature provides advertisers with customizable forms, performance measurement, and connectivity with over 2,000 apps via Zapier.
Reporting
Reporting is an essential component of online advertising or digital marketing campaign. The Quora ad platform does have an excellent reporting dashboard that allows you to generate ads reports on demand.
Mistakes to Avoid While Advertising on Quora
There are no hard and fast rules for winning on Quora ads. When you go through the Quora advertising process a few times, you start to realize what’s working and what isn’t. However, sometimes, you need an expert to walk you through the whole process.
Therefore, I’m sharing a handful of things that could go wrong in your Quora ads. In other words, try to avoid the following mistakes during advertising on Quora:
Setting the incorrect campaign targeting
Campaign targeting is crucial to reaching out to the right audience. If you choose the wrong objective, there is no way the campaign would perform well.
Similarly, if you messed up with location targeting or primary targeting strategy during creating the ad sets, it’s going to hurt the ad outcome. So try to avoid incorrect campaign targeting.
Lack of understanding of the pricing model
The Quora ad platform offers three bidding options which are cost per click (CPC), cost per thousand impressions (CPM), and cost per action (CPA). With CPC, you could bid and pay as low as $0.01 per click, whereas in the CPM pricing model, you can bid and pay a minimum of $0.20 per thousand impressions. Lastly, you can target for a CPA and pay per impression.
Things go south when you don’t have a clear idea of how the Quora ads pricing model works. It’s no surprise that you would choose the wrong bidding option when getting started with Quora ads.
Choosing the lifetime budget for every campaign
One of the tips digital marketers and Quora ad experts give is that never set a lifetime budget. What it does is that it could rapidly consume the whole budget over a short period, and you end up finishing the campaign much sooner than expected.
What you can do instead is try choosing the daily budget, which means the ads won’t consume more than the allocated budget in 24 hours.
Using a single ad unit instead of multiple units
Creating just one ad unit is a rookie mistake that almost every first-timer makes. In fact, I also did this mistake when I was getting started with Quora ads back in 2019.
The biggest perk of having multiple ad units is that you could see which ad unit is outperforming the other one. There is no way that two ad units perform the exact same way.
Sticking with One ad Format
Most beginner advertisers make the mistake of sticking with just one ad format. Quora ad platform provides you with three ad formats which are text ad, image ad, and promoted answer. You shouldn’t stick to just text ads. Instead, try testing the other two ad formats as well.
In digital marketing, it’s said that images grasp the attention of the audience. I reckon you should try out the image ads once in a while to see the difference.
Ignoring the Top-Tier Countries
It’s important to understand where your potential exists so that you could set the location targeting accordingly. However, if you’re going after the global audience, then the only way to get the ROI is by hitting the bullseye.
I can tell you off the top of my head that Quora ads work quite well if you target the top-tier countries such as the USA, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia as compared to the rest of the world. I have had several chances to run Quora ads for European and Asian countries, and the results weren’t very impressive.
The Final Words on Advertising on Quora
Quora advertising doesn’t seem to be as popular as other social media ad platforms, but shelving this option might be a huge mistake.
As you must know ad prices are sky-rocketing on Google ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but it doesn’t mean I’m writing them off. These top-tier social media platforms and their advertising options are absolutely vital to digital marketing.
However, Quora advertising is still under-priced as compared to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube ads.
Therefore, I tried to come up with a comprehensive yet to-the-point tutorial on how to advertise on Quora.
This article encapsulates why it’s important to pay close attention to Quora ads as well as the basic steps to make your Quora ad campaign up and running.
If you have been planning on scaling your digital marketing campaign, then I’d highly recommend adding Quora advertising to your marketing mix before it gets too late.
Don’t shy away from leaving your thoughts on the Quora ad platform in the comments below.
It’s only getting more and more crowded in the eCommerce industry out there. Online shopping has always been popular — but since the pandemic strike, now it’s become people’s favorite way to buy things they need.
Today, at least 2.14 billion people shop online (equivalent to 27.2% of the world’s population). And more than 24 million eCommerce sites are leaving no stone unturned to attract more customers and make them spend their money on the products.
Now that the competition is getting bigger and your potential customers are getting pickier, how can you make your online store stand out from the crowd?
One of the best ways to stay ahead of the competition is to optimize your online store. Yes, Your eCommerce business needs to take an SEO-friendly approach to sit on the top pages of search engine results pages.
It might sound daunting. But, there is one SEO-friendly, engaging medium that can help you improve your eCommerce search rankings hassle-free: video content.
So, how can you use videos to optimize your eCommerce website? Here are all the basics you need to know.
E-Commerce Video: Why Do You Need It?
Not only are videos well-known for their power to convey messages succinctly, but they are also a powerful tool to boost a website’s rank on search engines. According to the stats, a website with a video is 53 times more likely to reach the front page of Google.
The reason?
Because Google itself thinks that video is a unique multimedia format, it should come as no surprise that the world’s largest search engine loves this format and is much quicker to index it than the 1000-word text you write on your eCommerce website.
Of course, the perk of using videos for your eCommerce marketing and optimization is so much more than that. Here are some other reasons why you should incorporate videos into your eCommerce website:
Set the Customers Expectations
Simply looking at product images and reading the text-heavy product descriptions are not enough to help them understand what to expect. In this case, videos can show your potential customers what your products look like in real life, making it easier for you to educate them about your product.
Videos allow the potential customer to take a closer look at your products from different angles. Therefore, they should have a better knowledge of what your product is all about and avoid any surprises (or potential disappointment) in the future.
Show the Products’ Fullest Potential
Videos are an ideal medium to show how your products work and how potential customers can benefit from them. You can create explainer videos or product videos for your products to guide them using your product to its fullest potential.
No more plain, underwhelming text-based descriptions. You can rely on videos to convey the essence of the products you sell on your eCommerce website.
Make the Customers Stay Longer
You can also use videos to make your potential customers spend more time on your online store. It helps you increase dwell time. And the higher dwell time you have, the higher your chances you will get to boost your eCommerce website ranking.
Videos are so much more engaging and entertaining compared to other types of content. All the potential customers need to do is to click on the play button, and the video will deliver snackable messages to them effortlessly.
Address Any Product-Related Concerns
Videos also offer you a light-hearted way to generate more trust. It shows off the products in a typical box and demonstrates your value proposition. Therefore, the potential customers can be more convinced to purchase from you.
By watching a video, potential customers can find the most answers to their questions. Therefore, they can have reasons why they need your product.
How to Boost Your eCommerce Rank with Videos?
Not all eCommerce videos bring and help you reap all the benefits mentioned above. You need to invest more time and effort to optimize the videos.
Here are some handy and actionable ways to boost your eCommerce website rank with videos. This way, it would be much easier for potential customers to find your online stores.
Do an In-Depth Keyword Research
Just like a regular SEO practice, you will need keyword-based titles and descriptions for your eCommerce videos. Many eCommerce websites embed their videos from social media platforms like YouTube or other video hosting sites. This is where keyword-based titles and descriptions are needed.
Make sure to choose the keyword that has low competition and a quite decent amount of volume. You can also opt for long-tail keywords to reach more specific, highly-targeted potential customers.
Here’s an example of a keyword-based eCommerce video from Love Hair. They use “pure coconut oil” as a target keyword.
Keep Them Short and Crispy
Make sure you keep your eCommerce videos short and straightforward. Long-duration videos can only make your potential overwhelmed and lose interest in watching it.
After all, no one wants to see a 10-minute video of a brand bragging about their products, right? This will lead to a higher bounce rate and harm your eCommerce SEO ranking.
Eight seconds. That’s the time you have to grab your potential customer’s attention with your videos before you can engage them. That is why it’s crucial to include only information that brings value to your target customers.
The sweet spot for eCommerce videos is around 2 minutes. After two minutes, potential customers tend to get distracted and move on to the next thing.
See how Essie can give their potential customers a 1-minute how-to video to encourage them to buy their products:
Optimize Videos for Mobile Users
Do you know that younger generations (i.e., Generation X and Millennials shop online more often than older generations? Millennials make at least 60% of their purchases online. And that group age now makes more than 36% of their total purchases using mobile devices.
Those staggering numbers are quite obvious since younger generations are mostly digital natives. In this situation, you need to make sure that your eCommerce videos are accessible for hand-held users.
Mobile-friendly videos will help you expand your reach as it caters to mobile users. The more people click on your eCommerce website, the more likely you will gain more authority in your industry. And you know that Google will prioritize a website with high authority.
See how Nine Line Apparel nailed their mobile responsive eCommerce video on their About Us page.
Create Eye-Catching Thumbnails
The thumbnail is the first thing your potential customers see when they find your video on your eCommerce website or search engine results. It’s a big deciding factor whether or not they click on your video. So, the more you create them eye-catchingly, the more people will click them.
Video thumbnails have a direct impact on your eCommerce organic search visibility and click-through. It helps you to spark potential customers’ curiosity and even may transform their expectations of what the target URL is about.
This key here is to give a more professional look to your video and make it more appealing to click. Make sure to make it clear and convey the content in the most effective way.
You don’t have to go all fancy just to create catchy thumbnails. You can simply use your professionally-taken product photos just like what Bliss did for all of their product videos.
Make the Content Engaging
SEO can only get your eCommerce video to appear on your potential customers’ screen. But, it’s actually up to you to keep them engaged with your brand and move them through to the sales funnel.
You need good, related content for this. The best way to do this is to put yourself in your potential customers’ shoes so you can think and behave like them towards the eCommerce website.
Ask yourself, “what kind of content do I want to watch and make me spend money on the products?”
For instance, if you want to create a product video, always make sure to highlight the benefits instead of bragging about your awesome features. And if you aim to make a brand history video for your About Us page, it’s always better to include your beginning and where you are now — avoid including any fluff and any unnecessary moments whenever possible.
Not only will an engaging eCommerce video optimize your online store, but it will also make those potential customers come back for your content.
See the eye-capturing and engaging video from ESQIDO. It demonstrates the easiest way of applying false lashes to get visitors’ attention and engage them right off the bat.
Final Thoughts
Video can be a powerful addition to your e-commerce website. One of the perks of having them on your online store is that it can boost your website presence, making it much easier for target customers to find you through the organic search for relevant keyword searches.
When you optimize your online store, it would be much easier for you to drive more traffic to your website. This, as a result, will lead to an increase in conversion rate and revenue.
Many e-commerce businesses use Replug.io to manage, brand, and track all their video-driven links, helping them stay organized while maximizing performance.
You can also shorten a link before sharing your product or video URLs, making them clean and easy to share across platforms.
After all, the more traffic you drive, the more chances you will get to convert them into paying customers, right?
Lead generation is a top priority for every organization. Cold emails have been an excellent avenue for lead generation for several brands.
Using the right cold emailing formula, this form of lead generation can generate desired results.
Are you someone hoping to find the right formula to generate leads through cold emailing?
When you craft the perfect message and include all the elements needed, a successful cold email campaign will be your result. From warm to hot leads, results are almost guaranteed when cold emailing is undertaken in the right manner!
What is cold emailing?
The act of ‘cold emailing’ is best described as contacting a recipient without having any prior contact with the intent of converting them into paying customers.
Cold emailing has been around for decades and has proven to generate beneficial results for several reasons. While some might argue, cold emails are a shot in the dark; when done right, cold emailing can result in qualified leads and eventually conversions.
But how does one guarantee cold emails will land in the prospects’ inbox? How can one say with assurance that the email won’t get lost in a sea of existing emails?
Marketers and salespeople need to keep in mind that their prospects are individuals with feelings and their own set of challenges in life. If they view their prospects as more than just mere numbers, the results of cold emailing can be magnificent. Introducing empathy in your cold email outreach campaign is essentially what it all boils down to.
Writing the perfect cold email with the right structure and an effective subject line can in fact aid your organization in locking in on a prospect.
Despite its intrusive nature, cold emailing holds a number of benefits. Here are 5 reasons why you should absolutely invest your time and efforts in cold emailing:
Cold Emails Reach Prospects At Favorable Timings: Everyone checks their emails daily, especially working individuals. With advanced email tracking tools, you can get notified as soon as someone opens your email. This can help you formulate a plan to send emails at the right time to recipients thus increasing your chances of visibility.
Personalized Reach: Cold emails are highly targeted and can be tailored to each and every individual. When recipients read emails crafted specifically for them (various tools are available that allow mass personalization), the chance of a conversion is far greater than an impersonal email.
Scalability: This is probably the most important advantage cold emails have to offer. While cold calling is effective for creating immediate, personal connections, cold emailing stands out in its ability to scale outreach efficiently across large prospect lists. You can reach a large number of prospects in one go as compared to cold calling. Various email tools are available to help you reach mass recipients all in one go.
Cold Emails Are Persistent: Some folks probably don’t view this as an advantage. But from the POV of a sales or marketing manager, persistency is advantageous. With several follow-ups beyond the primary email, prospects can be persuaded a number of times.
Brand Awareness: Every email sent out to a prospect is an opportunity for potential conversion. Cold emails act as an avenue for brand awareness. Even if the prospect does not require the product/service you are offering at the time they will still be made aware of your brand and will remember it for the future.
According to Clearbit, the average cold email response rate is as low as 1%. It makes one question the effectiveness of cold emailing. As mentioned earlier, if cold emailing is undertaken meticulously, it can achieve wonderful results.
Lead generation is the first step in any kind of sales form. Using the art of cold emailing, sales managers and marketers can secure leads using this low-cost marketing tool and achieve highly favourable conversion rates.
Keep these 5 tips in mind when drafting your cold email campaign and you will be guaranteed to secure leads:
5 Tips to generate leads through cold emailing
1. Personalization Needs To Be Your Mantra!
Put yourself in the shoes of the recipient for a moment. You are sitting in front of your laptop, browsing through your inbox. Suddenly, you come across an email with the subject line that reads ‘{Your_Name}, this is just for you!’. Now, won’t that pique your interest? It will!
Uplandsoftware found that open rates can be increased by 22% if the recipient’s name is included in the subject line.
Additionally, adding custom snippets like {First_Name} or {Company Name} can ensure a higher level of personalization that will speak to the email recipients directly.
In this regard, these emails will work because the recipient will feel that you personally took the time out of your day to compose the email specially for them with some interest.
Researching your prospects and gaining valuable information that can amp up the personalization process will go a long way.
What is the first thing your prospects will see before they even consider opening your email? The subject line!
The subject line is often overlooked and more emphasis is placed on the content of the email. Your subject line is the one that catches the attention of the prospect first, and then it is the content.
Attention-grabbing subject lines are a must when cold emailing. Adding a question, their name, promo, call to action directly in the subject line may very well increase your open rates.
Experts recommend that subject lines be below 60 characters and ten words in length. A great subject line should work in any environment the recipient receives the email in.
Before you craft the perfect subject line, consider asking yourself the following 3 questions:
Is my intent clear?
Is the message I am trying to convey relevant currently?
Has a sense of urgency been established?
Testing out different subject lines is another beneficial practice to add to your strategy. Some individuals prefer receiving emails with enticing offers upfront. Others could probably want to know what you are offering before considering your services. There is a 26% increased likelihood of readers opening your email with personalized subject lines.
Additional tip: Creating a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) will invoke a sense of curiosity in the recipient.
Here are a few examples of subject lines that work:
“{First Name}, we have found exactly what you are looking for”
“{First Name}, do you want some time off?”
“What would you do if you had [number] more hours per week?”
“Why {Company_Name}?”
“You missed it!”
3. Using Social Proof To Your Advantage
Social proofing is one of the oldest techniques used in the sales industry. Think about it for a second, if you hear that person X increased their revenue by 30% in under 6 months after using a particular product; would you not be intrigued? You would.
Thus, using social proofing techniques to bolster your email pitch can help you achieve your desired results. Of course, we don’t recommend embellishing your content with white lies.
Having more credibility will increase the chances of your prospects trusting you. Mentioning actual statistics and facts from existing or previous clients who have succeeded after using your services will strengthen your pitch. You can share customer success stories and achievements to convince recipients to opt for your services.
For example:
“Hey {First Name},
We have worked with over [500+] clients in the past, providing them with state-of-the-art [email marketing services].
Recently, we worked with [ABC corp], and were able to increase their lead generation by 18%. They were having trouble generating leads through conventional methods and felt they needed to opt for professional email marketing services”
Social proofing will make your cold emails a lot more compelling. As it is well known that people are more likely to adopt the opinions of trusted individuals.
Beyond mentioning organization names and quantifiable data, you can also include mutual connections and your professional credentials.
4. Follow-Ups Are Pivotal To The Success Of Your Campaign
Follow-ups are extremely important when cold emailing. Some would even go as far as to say that follow-ups are more critical in securing a reply than the initial email.
70% of email chains generally stop sending emails after the initial attempt. No response in the first email does not necessarily mean the prospect is not interested. 70% of email chains generally stop sending emails after the initial attempt. The primary email is a part of a much bigger picture in the process of cold emailing.
The initial email is only to grease the wheels; the follow-ups are the ones that do the heavy lifting. Also, persistency is key, remember?
Your cold email outreach should be an ongoing conversation. 80% of deals require an average of at least 5 touches before closing.
The graph below shows at which point a recipient is more likely to reply to your email. The more emails one sends out, the more they are likely to get noticed. If your prospect keeps seeing your name in their inbox, in some sense they will have been familiarized with your existence.
Eventually, they will want to know what you have to say. If you use the correct verbiage in your follow-ups, prospects won’t feel like they are just another name on a mass emailing list.
Additionally, by sending follow-ups, prospects actually feel like you care about their response or lack thereof. Thus, a humanizing element comes into play and that increases your chances of a reply.
It is entirely up to you, how many follow-up emails you want to include in your outreach. Experts recommend sending out at least 5 follow-up emails at timely intervals.
Here is a rough sequence you can follow:
Follow up 1 (After 3 days)
Follow up 2 (After 7 days)
Follow up 3 (After 14 days)
Follow up 4 (After 30 days)
Follow up 5 (After 60 days)
5. Ensuring The Prospect Is The Right Fit With Actual Intent
Sending out cold emails to recipients that are not interested in your services would be a pure waste of time and resources. Marketers and salespeople often use intent data to skip ahead of the line and identify individuals that require the solution you are offering.
Intent data highlights behavioural signals that show the intention of your prospect to purchase a product or service. Recent studies have found that an average B2B prospect is already 67% into the purchasing journey. This data helps organizations jump ahead and use it to their advantage in securing prospects and qualified leads.
This technique is helpful for cold emailing, as you can reach out to prospects before they contact you; and this is especially effective since you are reaching out to them at the right time.
There are several other ways to find prospects besides this, these include:
Social Media
Referrals
Networking
Online Forums (Quora, StackExchange, Reddit, etc)
Google Analytics Data
Website Visitation
Now that you have locked in on a prospect, how do you ensure they are the right fit? If you already have a buyer persona in mind, that would be a great place to evaluate the fit.
Besides that, with data enrichment and predictive lead scoring technologies on the rise, evaluating fit can be assessed with a microscopic lens.
Below are 3 questions to consider when evaluating if a prospect is a right fit for your organization:
What technologies are they currently using?
How many employees do they have?
How much funding do they have? (i.e. can they afford your services?)
Additional Tips For Lead Generation Through Cold Emailing
Use Conversational Language: A successful email outreach program involves using language and verbiage that is conversational in nature. It is recommended that cliche or overused phrases be avoided altogether. Sticking to the basics is the best way to get your message across.
For example, “Hey there! John, are you ready for the weekend?”, “Hope you have a splendid week ahead”, “I am ready for the weekend” “Hope you aren’t having a bad case of the Monday Blues!”
Ensure All Your Contact Information Is In Your Signature: This is an often-overlooked tip but is one that is quite important. All of your contact information should be included in your email signature, including your phone number, office address, LinkedIn, and website URL. An email signature acts as a digital card and shows professionalism.Through your email signature, you can provide extra resources. If someone were sceptical about your credentials, checking your LinkedIn account can help put their mind at ease. Additionally, if a prospect wanted to get in touch with you directly, they could contact you through the phone number provided and perhaps speed up the process of closing a deal.
Use Cold Emailing Software: Using cold emailing software, you will be able to automate several time-consuming processes if undertaken manually. Cold emailing software also provides users with real-time data and analytics that can be used to your advantage to refine your campaign. You should also be using software to help create the template for your email marketing campaigns. A good email template builder software can save you hours of your time which would otherwise be required to set up email campaigns.With email software, you can segment lists into different target audiences with specific preferences. Each mass email sent out can be personalized for each prospect as if you were having a one-on-one conversation with them.
Avoid Long-Form Content: If you intend to capture and retain your prospect’s attention, then avoiding long-form content is advisable. Keep your emails short, not more than two paragraphs.When people check their inboxes, they do it with the intention of clearing it out; if they come across a long-winded email, especially when they’re short on time, they will not read it. Remember that emails are not books, they are meant to be short.
Ensure Your Timing Is Right: Timing is indeed everything and plays a huge role in the success of your cold email campaign. Familiarize yourself with your prospects before reaching out to them. Look at their social profiles to gain relevant insights into their professional life.You want to avoid being labelled as ‘spam’, so decide upon the perfect timing best suited for your prospect. Conduct A/B split testing to see which timings and days have recorded the highest open rates. This will tell you the best time to send an email.
Canned Content Is A No Go: If there’s one thing people dislike it is impersonal and canned content. Canned content is pre-made generic content that is used to speed up the email writing process.This content is generated with general ideas and assumptions of the customer’s needs and preferences. Personalize your content to the specific needs and preferences of your prospect. Try to make it as personal as possible, adding minor details can do wonders to your reply rate.
Don’t Beat Around The Bush: People are busy! If they do open your email, then you want to capture their attention as soon as possible. Be direct and get to the point in the second line. Keep your opening line/paragraph short. Building up to a point, with irrelevant details about yourself and the organization will impersonalize the content of the email.Get to the point directly, and present your value proposition within the first two lines. Show them the problem you aim to solve through your product or service.
Add Call-To-Actions (CTAs): Adding a CTA at the end of your email will help you measure the success rate of your campaign. The real success metric is not open rates, but rather the number of people who actually undertook the desired action in the form of a CTA. Not all CTAs have to be too salesy. Emails with a single CTA have been known to increase clicks by 371% and sales by 1617%.Some CTA examples include, provide a specific day or time, learn more, read more, watch now, get the app, schedule a call, etc. Aesthetically appealing CTAs are also on the rise, so design your CTA in a way that prompts the user to click on it.
Conclusion
Cold email outreach is a great opportunity to find qualified leads and increase your conversion rate. This method works amazingly when undertaken in the right manner. It is a great way to start conversations with prospects and help them become aware of your brand.
The most effective method to date is in fact personalization. Instead of sending out generic messages that would instantly cause a prospect to turn away, offer tailor-made solutions. Hone in on their specific needs and then craft the perfect cold email.
Improved targeting can help you achieve desired results. A high open rate does not signify much if you are receiving no replies. Undelivered emails also affect your open rates thus it is best you re-verify your email marketing database using email verifier tools.
Trying out A/B split testing is another way of analyzing the effectiveness of your campaign. LeadGenius tried A/B split testing for their subject lines and concluded that they saw a 49% increase in open rates.
Cold emailing requires patience and persistence. It can be tricky and even feel monotonous but it is rewarding if you take the time to do it right. Use sales prospecting tools, CRM platforms, email marketing tools, and email tracking software to track, analyze, measure, and improve your results to maximize your efforts.
For a streamlined way to manage, brand, and track all your outreach links, especially when you’re dealing with high-volume emailing, consider using Replug.io, so that every URL you send looks polished and performs reliably.
Besides, if you want to keep your emails clean and professional, you can instantly shorten link with Replug’s URL shortener, giving your cold-email outreach a crisp, branded, and trackable link every time.
You’re reading about building a successful e-commerce website. Maybe, you want to venture into the e-commerce business. Who doesn’t know that e-commerce is a lucrative B2C business model?
However, you’ve got to have a proper plan in place because launching an e-commerce business isn’t that simple. You must know that it does sound like fun when you’re working a 9-to-5 job and want to start something on the side (or even quit your job to go all in).
But, of course, you’re in luck. I’ve got you covered.
This isn’t the first time I’m helping people to build an e-commerce website. I have had several talks with friends and relatives who wanted to get into this business. Most of them were afraid to “jump off the cliff”.
Maybe, there were two reasons why most people don’t start their these businesses:
1. They lack the right skills
They don’t have any idea where to begin when starting an e-commerce site. They think that launching an e-commerce website might cost them thousands of dollars just because they have no idea where to get started. Let me correct you right off the bat, it won’t cost you thousands of dollars to set up an e-commerce business.
Have you ever heard of a tool called WooCommerce? You might not need to spend a dollar because it’s an e-commerce tool that installs merchandise features to your self-hosted WordPress website. However, there are several paid tools for launching e-commerce sites that are even better; you’ll learn more about them in this article.or a more dynamic and seamless user experience, consider integrating Angular Spreadsheet Controls into your website development. These tools streamline data management and enhance functionality, ultimately contributing to a user-friendly interface. This can be particularly advantageous if you’re using platforms like WooCommerce, making it easier for customers to interact with your digital storefront effectively.
2. They’re afraid of failing
One of the biggest reasons why most people don’t take that leap of faith is that they’re afraid of failing. Most of them overthink the whole thing, but some of them can’t take risks at all. In other words, they’re afraid of failing so they never take action.
If you’re planning on starting an e-commerce website in 2026 or beyond, then don’t let the fear of failing stop you. Gary Vaynerchuk often says to his fans and followers that pay attention to who’s giving the advice. The point is that if you’re asking about starting an e-commerce venture with someone who hasn’t done any business before, you need to rethink your strategy.
As far as my experience with e-commerce websites is concerned, I don’t consider myself an expert in this genre, but I’ve been running a personal online store for the past 15 months.
Plus, I have had some experience selling e-products via 2checkout and Fastspring.
Let’s just say I won’t hire an e-commerce guy if I ever want to scale my e-commerce business because I might not need one.
You’re about to learn:
What an e-commerce website is, and why it is important
3 W’s of building an e-commerce website
The steps involved in building an e-commerce website
The tools that are used for creating e-commerce websites
How to market your e-commerce business in today’s world
So before we dig deeper into building such websites in 2026 or even after that, it’s important to take care of the basics. For those who’re slightly unsure about an e-commerce website, here’s some explanation:
What’s an E-commerce Website?
It’s a website that sells products online and provides a facility for customers to shop on the internet without having to visit a brick-and-mortar store for shopping. It is also known as an e-store or online shop.
Furthermore, some e-commerce websites sell softwares, printables, and digital content, whereas others also sell tangible items. However, for tangible goods, the e-store may ask for freight charges and address of the recipient.
We’re living through a time of Technology and the Internet. Therefore, buying stuff online is no mystery, especially for millennials. Most e-commerce websites accept PayPal, debit cards, credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Play, and other payment options.
The best part about the e-commerce business is that anyone with a certain set of skills can venture into it and start their entrepreneurial journey without a ton of investment. You’ll learn about the e-commerce website building tools that make the launching process a whole lot easier.
3 W’s of Building an E-commerce Website: Who, Why, and What
This might seem like a section that most of you would want to skip so that you can get to the cream of this piece. However, this brief section might turn things around for you. The following three W’s could be crucial to your e-commerce business success:
1. Who is the target audience of the e-commerce business?
The understanding of the target audience means you know who you want to reach out to for selling your products. For instance, if you only sell products in the US, you might not need to run Facebook ads for Canada. It shows that you’re well aware of your target audience.
2. Why did you choose the e-commerce business model?
It’s essential to get the basics right. If you aren’t sure why you entered the e-commerce market, then you should rethink your whole strategy before investing your hard-earned money into this business. You must choose the e-commerce business model if you’re passionate about selling online or you’ve got some experience in sales and marketing.
3. What is your brand’s value proposition?
A brand’s value proposition is the ability to stand out from the crowd. It could be anything from efficient customer support, quick free delivery, to low prices. Make sure that you develop your e-commerce company’s value proposition that sticks with your sales and marketing. Using a strategic clarity canvas, you can visually outline your business objectives and ensure alignment across teams.
That’s pretty much it.
Let’s jump right into the cream of this article.
Five Step Guide on Building an E-commerce Website
Let’s take a look:
1. Understand the E-commerce Business Model Inside-out
The stepping stone of building an e-commerce website is understanding the e-commerce business model. Starting an e-commerce store doesn’t mean you shouldn’t jump straight to choosing the e-store’s name and go for it.
Instead, the groundwork includes several things to be taken care of before you go ahead and launch your e-commerce business. You must first figure out what to sell, where to sell, and who you should sell to before taking any further steps.
So here are some essentials of starting an e-commerce business that you should work on:
1. Business Model
Decide the business model of your e-commerce website whether it’s going to be B2B or B2C. It may vary from business to business. For instance, AliExpress is a popular e-commerce website that caters to both B2B and B2C consumers. However, it’s mainly a B2B business portal that connects wholesalers/manufacturers with retailers.
2. Products Selection
Product selection is one of the fundamental steps of starting an e-commerce website. It’s highly unlikely that you want to start an e-commerce website but you don’t have any products in mind. Choosing the right product requires knowing the products’ categories inside-out. A lot of entrepreneurs either work for others before they venture into the e-commerce industry or they create their own products to sell online.
3. Stock Management
Stock management is managing your product inventory. You don’t need a fancy POS or stock management software in the beginning. However, the first thing you might want to figure out is how you’re going to keep your stock. Do you have a warehouse to store it in or will you buy the product when an order comes?
4. Fulfillment/Shipment
Once you’re done with the product selection and stock management, the next step is the fulfilment or shipment. When you opt for the 3PL fulfillment company it usually means you don’t have to ship the product, but instead, a third-party online store ships your product from their warehouse. On the other hand, when you don’t work with any major e-commerce platform and, instead, sell products through your website, you’d have to manage the shipment yourself. You would be better off striking a deal with a courier company that offers lower charges to you as compared to walk-in customers. In such cases, using a courier invoice template can help streamline the invoicing process, ensuring all details are captured clearly for both the customer and your records. You can also strike a deal.
5. Website Development
E-commerce website development is one of the pillars of launching an e-commerce business. You may want to hire a full-time developer to launch your website or work with a freelance web developer if you have some know-hows of website development. You may also want to check out e-commerce platforms that help you launch your online store within minutes.
These were some fundamental areas to think through before you hop on the e-commerce train and journey ahead. You might also want to consider incorporating some of the latest web design trends before you set out full swing with your web development projects. To ensure a smooth and efficient development process, it’s highly recommended to consult with ecommerce website development services that can guide you through the complexities of creating a site that meets both your business goals and user experience expectations. Building a successful online store requires a strategic approach, from choosing the right platform to optimizing user experience. Investing in ecommerce web development ensures that your website is not only visually appealing but also functional, secure, and scalable for future growth.
2. Choose the Type of E-commerce Business
Step no. 2 might clear things up for many of you. The launch of an e-commerce website isn’t as simple as it seems. Sure, you may have figured out the advanced logistics management such as products, stock management, and shipment, but next up is choosing the type of e-commerce business.
When we hear about an e-commerce store, we simply think of a website that sells products online. You might be intrigued to know that there are several types of e-commerce stores, and choosing the right type of e-commerce business is crucial to your success.When starting an e-commerce store, it’s essential to formalize your business structure. Registering your business or forming a legal entity, such as an LLC (Limited Liability Company), will not only protect your personal assets but also add credibility to your brand. An LLC is particularly popular among e-commerce entrepreneurs because it provides limited liability protection, tax flexibility, and straightforward management options. To further enhance your business presence, consider using a virtual address for LLCs, which offers privacy, professionalism, and flexibility for remote operations.
At this step, you don’t need to jump right into the product creation process, but instead, take your time to decide what e-commerce website type is most likely to work out for you.
Let’s take a look at the different types of e-commerce stores to choose the most suitable one:
Types of E-commerce Stores
Here we go:
1. Online Retail Stores
These are the e-commerce websites that only retail, meaning they buy the products from the wholesale market and resell to the customers. It’s by far the most common e-commerce business model. The best part about choosing this sort of store is that you could sell a million types of products on your e-store.
B&H is an online retail store that sells cameras, lenses, and microphones. They’re an e-commerce website, but they’re different from the others I’m going to share with you.
2. Dropshipping Websites
Dropshipping is rather different from an ordinary online retail store. If you haven’t had a chance to learn dropshipping, then let me briefly explain how it works. When the customer places the order on your website and completes the checkout process. You go to the wholesaler or manufacturer for order fulfillment and complete the purchase. The only difference is that you use the customer’s name and address so that the manufacturer/wholesaler ships the product directly to the customer.
PopLyfe is a dropshipping store that sells t-shirts related to fatherhood. They aren’t just a niche store, but what makes them stand out is that they dropship the merchandise.
3. Online Storefronts
Online storefronts are e-commerce stores, but they aren’t widely popular. A storefront is a website page that an e-commerce website provides to a seller or brand. Such storefronts are often offered to sellers or brands that bring huge sales to the platform. So basically storefronts are e-commerce platforms, but they’re limited to a fewer number of brands and sellers.
You must have heard about the Amazon FBA program. It stands for fulfillment by Amazon. When a merchant signs up to the Amazon FBA program, the platform provides the storefront to the merchant.
Here’s the example of Amazon storefront:
Petcube is an e-commerce store based on the Amazon storefront feature. There are hundreds of thousands of brands on Amazon that have storefronts. Similarly, there are thousands of giant e-commerce platforms out there that have millions of storefronts.
4. Merch Stores
Merch stores are online stores for selling merchandise. Normally, celebs, sports personalities, and famous YouTubers launch their merch stores where they sell their merchandise directly to fans. Not only is it a great way to make money, but it’s also used for donating to a noble cause. Since there is a selling activity that happens on these websites, it’s safe to say that merch stores are e-commerce websites.
Marques Brownlee is a popular tech YouTuber; he has a merch store just like other top YouTubers in the world. He sells his merchandise on his online store.
That’s it.
Choosing a type of e-commerce business is inevitable; you can’t get away from it. The good news is that you now know there are several types of e-commerce businesses. Some of you might have heard about merch stores but may not have any idea about dropshipping and storefronts.
Anyway, the most common one is setting up a retail store for selling your own products or reselling (wholesalers’ or manufacturers’) products.
3. Create/Buy the Products to Sell on the Online Store
You must have some idea about what you want to sell because that’s why you have been doing your research on how to build an e-commerce store. Well, it’s time to discuss whatever you want to sell online.
Step #3 is all about streamlining the product purchase or creation to put it out on your e-commerce website. Therefore, it’s necessary to finalize the product (or products if you have multiple items).
The point is that if you’re planning on buying the products from different wholesalers, then go ahead and order some samples. On the other hand, if you’re creating your products, then speed up the creation process.
For instance, when fashion designers want to establish an e-commerce website to sell clothes online, they don’t launch their site out of the blue. Instead, they spend time creating clothes to display on the website.
Since your online store hasn’t been established just yet, you’d be better off laying the groundwork that could lead to building a successful e-commerce business.
There might be a dozen things required for building any business from the ground up and starting an e-commerce store is no different.
Here’s the checklist for coming up with the products to sell on your e-commerce website:
1. Prepare Your Products
You have to have some products in your stock before the launch. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling handmade crafts or camera equipment online. You need to prepare some products to put up on the online store. Once you have some products in hand, you could move ahead to the next step in the checklist.
2. Take Product Pictures
Pictures are vital to any e-commerce website. It’s almost impossible to sell a product without a proper picture. In most cases, e-commerce websites use multiple photos of the same product to convince the buyer or to better explain the product. So take your time in taking loads of good photos of your products.
3. Write Product Descriptions
When you’re adding products to your e-commerce website, you won’t just write the product name and add its pictures. Instead, you’d also have a descriptive text that explains every bit of detail about the product. Not only does this description help buyers in picking the product, but it also helps search engines understand your website better. So don’t run away from writing in-depth, meaty product descriptions.
4. Set the Pricing
Pricing is an essential part of the process. Even though the online store hasn’t launched yet, you have time to fix all the loopholes. Use this opportunity to decide the prices of your products and note them down. You may not want to get confused about pricing when the e-commerce website is about to go live.
The gist of step #3 is to be fully prepared for the launch. You might not want to switch the e-store name to a different one or change the product catalog after the launch. Therefore, preparing ahead of time is the way to go.
4. Build Your Store with the Right E-commerce Tool
It all comes down to this step. Choose the right e-commerce tool to get started with building your e-commerce website. You might wonder why I didn’t mention choosing the right e-commerce tool at the beginning. Well, had I started straight away with that, I would have missed so many essential steps that are key to success.
I’m going to briefly discuss a few e-commerce website-building tools that are widely popular among website developers and entrepreneurs. I have tested a few of them, but you shouldn’t blindly take my word for it. Instead, do your research before choosing the e-commerce tool.
Without any further ado, let’s get right to it:
1. Shopify (Recommended)
Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce tools for creating online stores. Some might say it’s a bit pricey, but they have everything you need to set up and grow your website. Shopify isn’t a self-hosted platform, meaning it doesn’t require a web hosting space. Instead, the platform hosts your online store on its own servers.
However, you could register your domain with Shopify or use your already existing domain with another registrar. As far as the plugins/modules are concerned, there are several third-party Shopify plugins available on the market to fine-tune your Shopify online store.
Free Trial: 14-day free trial and no credit card required
Price: $29 per month
2. Squarespace
Squarespace is an all-in-one website building platform that allows you to build a blog, business websites, and e-commerce stores. Its users don’t need any third-party services such as domain registrar, web hosting, SSL certificate service, or website templates because Squarespace takes care of everything. You can also avail the Squarespace discount to enjoy their premium features for new businesses as well as larger projects.
It’s safe to say that Squarespace is a main competitor of Shopify. Both these services are popular for e-commerce website building. However, Squarespace might have a slight edge over Shopify because their service caters to all types of website builders, whereas Shopify only attracts e-commerce website builders.
Free Trial: 14-day free trial with no credit card required
Price: The commerce plans start at $35 per month
3. Wix
Wix is yet another popular website builder that serves both website owners and e-commerce customers. Just like most website builders, Wix offers templates, domain registration, SSL, business emails, web hosting, and e-commerce solutions.
Besides the basic attributes, there are certain features such as analytics, advanced SEO configurations, mobile-friendliness, unlimited fonts, media galleries, and app market that make this tool stand out from the crowd. Furthermore, Wix also offers a mailbox, Wix chat, social media tools, and contact management to take your e-commerce store to the next level.
Free Trial: No free trial, but there is a 14-day full refund policy
Price: The business & eCommerce plans start at $17 per month
4. Weebly
Weebly is one of the website builders on the market that allows you to set up your website in minutes. The best thing about such online website builders is that you don’t have to be an expert to create websites with them.
Weebly does have an e-commerce feature that lets you create e-commerce websites with it. So this is why Weebly has made it to the list of e-commerce tools. It’s affordable, easy-to-use, and effective.
Free Trial: N/A
Price: $12 per month
5. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a free e-commerce WordPress plugin that adds e-commerce functionality to a WordPress website. It’s an open-source tool owned by WordPress parent company Automattic. It is a fantastic tool for WordPress users and bloggers who want to sell products online without switching to any other e-commerce tool. Even though this plugin is free, you may want to buy other third-party plugins that connect with WooCommerce for better functionality.
Furthermore, the WooCommerce plugin integrates with several payment processors to manage your income. There are hundreds of thousands of WordPress users that are using this plugin for selling products and services online.
Free Trial: N/A
Price: Free
I’ve shared a bunch of e-commerce website building options that you can check out, but if I were you, I’d launch my e-commerce website with Shopify.
The reason for this is that it is the best e-commerce website tool out there and it offers everything you need to run your e-commerce business.
Though it may seem costly at first, if you start making money from your online store you’d see its worth.
Building a professional ecommerce website is more than just launching an online store; it’s about creating a seamless shopping experience that builds trust and encourages repeat business. A professional ecommerce website features intuitive navigation, fast load times, and secure payment options, all of which are essential for converting visitors into loyal customers. Investing in quality design and development ensures your business is ready to compete in today’s digital marketplace.
Here are five crucial steps of launching an e-commerce store:
1. Register a Domain
You can always register a domain for your online store through your e-commerce tool, but I’d highly recommend registering your domain separately. The reason for that is if you ever want to switch to a different e-commerce tool, you won’t have to deal with customer care which may cause a delay in the process.
Register your domain with your favorite domain registrars such as Namecheap or GoDaddy. All you need is to select the option that you already have a domain name while launching your e-commerce store. You will find the instructions for pointing your domain to the e-commerce tool’s web hosting servers afterwards.
2. Setup Your E-commerce Store
The next step is setting up your e-commerce store. Pick the best e-commerce site builder to create your e-commerce store and get started with it. You’ll fare well if you opt for a recommended e-commerce tool.
A lot of beginners choose free tools such as WooCommerce, but end up frustrated at some point. It doesn’t mean you can’t achieve your goal with it. The point is that if you don’t want to spend money on your e-commerce store setup, you’re going to miss out on some opportunities along the way.
If you already have a store that is not performing well, go for Ecommerce store migration to a faster and efficient platform like cloud hosting.
3. Add Products to the Store
Once you have set up your online store, the next most important step is adding the products. Adding the products doesn’t mean just adding the products. You must know how to properly do it.
To make things easier for you, let me mention some key things to consider while adding the products to your online store: use clear names for the products, add pictures, write its functions, its details, etc.
4. Optimize the E-commerce Website
Every website needs to be optimized for better user experience and search engine crawling, so an e-commerce website is no exception. If you’re using an e-commerce tool such as Shopify or Squarespace, reach out to these companies to find out how you can optimize your e-commerce websites.
Besides speeding up the website using caching and hosting on a high-end web server, you might have to use compressed yet high-quality product pictures. Furthermore, try to optimize the URLs for the products, so that it becomes easier for search engines to discover pages and drive traffic to the site.
5. Add Multiple Payment Methods
Try adding multiple payment methods to your online store. The more payment methods you offer, the easier it gets for the customers to buy from you. Check out payment processors such as FastSpring, 2Checkout, and Stripe.
Now you know a handful of e-commerce tools to build an online store. Plus, I shared some crucial steps that could help you make the process smoother.
I reckon you’re all set to build your store. Once you’ve built it with one of the tools I mentioned, the next thing you might want to do is establish a marketing strategy for your e-commerce business.
5. Design a Marketing Campaign for the E-commerce website
Hopefully, your e-commerce website is up and running, but the job isn’t done yet. In fact, it’s just the beginning.
The next thing you might want to do is to come up with a marketing plan for your e-commerce business. A marketing campaign means there would be a handful of strategies to test out. A lot of them might not work for everyone, but you must try them out.
There is a misconception about marketing for e-commerce businesses. A lot of people think the it means running social media and Google search ads.
It’s true that online advertising is a major marketing strategy. However, there are various other tactics that are equally important to achieve the goal.
I’ll give you a quick rundown on designing a marketing campaign for your e-commerce website.
Here are the top-notch marketing tactics to try out:
1. Use Content Marketing
Content marketing strategy may comprise of using content to attract, engage, and convert your audience into subscribers, leads, or paying customers. In other words, it’s an art to sugar-coat your value proposition or offering with impeccable information that becomes irresistible for the prospective audience.
One can use various types of content such as written, audio, images, and videos to fuel their content marketing campaign. Similarly, an e-commerce website could also leverage content marketing tips and techniques by putting out useful articles on its official blog, attractive pins on Pinterest, and uploading helpful videos to YouTube. You can even create infographics, which are awesome for sharing lots of information without overwhelming people.
2. Run Facebook Ads
Online advertising is an integral part of any e-commerce business development strategy. Some businesses prefer Google search ads, whereas others opt for Facebook ads. You don’t have to stick to just one platform for that matter, but instead, test out different ad platforms to see what brings the most attention.
Since people like to stumble upon new products and services through Facebook, a lot of e-commerce websites run Facebook ads. Try the ‘A/B test’ for different types of campaigns in Facebook ads to see which ones work best for you.
3. Retarget the Audience
Retargeting the audience refers to a marketing tactic that allows advertisers to target website visitors that have previously landed on your page. The advertisers use a piece of code that goes into the website, which lets the advertising platform recognize the person who has previously visited. You can now retarget your audience through Google ads, Facebook ads, and Quora ads.
4. Try Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a rapidly growing marketing trend. Brands offer lucrative deals to top bloggers, social media experts, Instagrammers, and YouTubers to help spread the word about their brand or product.
An e-commerce website could also use an influencer marketing strategy to attract audience. Make sure that you’re working with influencers from the region you’re doing business in. Otherwise, it won’t make much of a difference.
5. Build an Email List
Establishing an active email list is imperative to creating a successful marketing strategy in today’s world. If you put out an opt-in form and expect people to subscribe to your email list, it might not work very well. Instead, try publishing useful content and write a compelling message on your opt-in forms to entice people to interact with it. Furthermore, don’t overlook the psychology of colors in your emails because that matters too.
The point is that email marketing is an essential part of the modern-day digital marketing strategy. The biggest perk of building an email list is that you can always reach out to your customers or subscribers through it without hesitation.
You’ve got to use every single way to attract, engage, and convert your audience into paying customers. Most successful e-commerce stores pay close attention to cart abandonment, and they use strong email marketing strategies to communicate their offers, discounts, and whatnot.
That’s it.
It’s difficult to succeed just by focusing on a single source. Make sure to create a mix of several top-notch marketing tactics to make an impact.
Introducing Replug: Why it’s beneficial for your e-commerce website
Replug.io is a state-of-the-art URL shortening tool that enables you to shorten the long and clunky URLs into short and sweet ones. Additionally, it flawlessly integrates your short branded URL and helps you take your social media marketing to the next level.
Basically, it’s a one-stop-shop to generate shorten links, tracking the clickability, adding the UTMs, retargeting the visitors, and driving social media followers over to your website.
Simply put, it’s not just a URL shortener, but instead, it comes with a whole package to take your social media engagement and website visitors to the next level.
Key Features of Replug
Here are the features of Replug you shouldn’t overlook:
1. URL Shortener
It could save you from the embarrassment of sharing messy and lengthy URLs on social media. It’s the best URL shortener tool out there. So turn your long URLs short to give it a professional look.
2. UTM Parameters
Replug allows users to add a UTM parameter to their short URLs, which is an optional feature for users to use. However, if you’re trying to track the performance of your social media sharing campaign, you should create and insert a UTM parameter to your short link.
3. Branded URLs
A branded URL is a short URL that is easy to remember and use on the internet. You must have seen some companies use short URLs for their social media posts or otherwise. For instance, YouTube uses youtu.be and Amazon has the amzn.to domain.
4. Social Media Bio Links
One of the perks of the Replug tool is that it lets you create an all-in-one social media bio link that takes visitors to a landing page displaying all of your social media profile links.
5. Retargeting the Audience
One of the benefits of using Replug is that you can retarget the people who clicked on the short URLs through various ad networks that support retargeting.
6. Call-to-Action to Social Media Links
One of the features that make Replug stand out from the rest of the URL shorteners is that it has a call-to-action feature. What it does is that it lets you add a CTA snippet to the URLs you’re shortening. So whenever you shorten someone else’s article to share on your social media, your CTA snippet shows up on the screen, and it could bring traffic back to your website.
How to Use Replug for Your E-commerce Store
Here’s how e-commerce website makers can use Replug to make the most of this tool:
1. Shorten the Long Product Page URLs
Have you ever noticed that e-commerce websites have very lengthy URLs, especially for product pages?
Well, who would want to share those long URLs that look spammy? That is where Replug comes to your rescue; you can always shorten your product page links with Replug and make them look beautiful on social media.
2. Use a Branded URL for Social Media
Since Replug does allow you to add a custom branded URL to your account, you could use its short branded URL for your social media campaign. Make the most of this opportunity for your e-commerce website. It’ll eventually shorten your product page links to some extent.
3. Drive Social Media Traffic Back to the Store
The call-to-action feature of Replug lets you create CTA snippets that could be added to the short URLs, for instance, when sharing influencers’ content on your social media for engagement and interaction, you could add a CTA to your website in the blog post URL. As a result, when people click-through the short link of the influencers’ article, they’d land on their website and also see your CTA snippet on the page.
4. Retarget the Audience through Ads
When you’re shortening the URLs with Replug and people are clicking through your clicks, you can retarget the audience that clicked on the short URLs through various ad networks.
Replug allows you to add a retargeting pixel for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Quora, and custom websites. The impact wouldn’t only be limited to social media marketing, but in fact, you might see a little spike in conversion as well.
So these were some of the ways to use Replug for your e-commerce business.
What Else Would You Do for Building an E-commerce Website?
I dug deep into the details of establishing an e-commerce website.
Some of you would be excited not just to launch your e-commerce store but also to make it a success story.
I have this temptation to ask you a question: What else would you do if you were to build an e-commerce website?
Some of you might be social media experts, serial entrepreneurs, and e-commerce professionals.
So I’d like to pick an experts’ brains on building an e-commerce website. Feel free to leave your answer in the comments section.
If you are a marketer and running an online business, then you are probably spending more money, resource, energy, and time on email marketing to build a connective relationship with the audience.
Right?
In 2026, attracting more customers to your website or business is not a cup of cake anymore. Why is that?
Causes, there are 4.88 billion internet users in the world who accumulate information, looking for the solution to their problems and receive promotional emails.
If you genuinely want to capture the audience’s attention and give a powerful brand impact on the audience’s mind, then all you need to do is to find the best day and time to send emails.
Makes sense?
I have another intriguing question for you:
Is it important to email at a time that certainly works for your targeted audience?
Absolutely yes, It’s incredibly essential to email at the right time to the right audience, it not only influences your outcome but also sustains you to improve click-through rate (CTR), open rate, and boost your ROI.
Are you aware of email marketing challenges in 2026?
I’m sure you all do. For the past decade, people used to interact with the other business partners and teams in the same office, but now we all prefer to connect through Zoom, Microsoft team, Slack, and more. Things constantly change, but it doesn’t mean email marketing lost its worth.
Even with all these fancy apps, Email marketing is still one of the best and most competent strategies to communicate with customers and others. The study forecast the number of active email users to reach 4.3 billion in 2023 and 4.6 billion in 2025. So that means Email is not dead, it is still alive and more hard-hitting.
In this article, I’ll introduce the five most reliable studies that reveal the best time and date to send emails to your audience after having sent billions of emails.
Read on and find out to make the biggest splash through it.
What’s the best day of the week and time to send emails to your audience?
Let’s dive into some relevant studies:
Yesware
The first study, conducted by Yesware, discovers hundreds of thousands of email activity over the last quarter to analyze the best timing for cold emailing, email campaigns, and follow-ups.
Yesware studying based on the replies rate they have received. According to their data, there are two best times for sending emails that are:
One best time to send an email is: 1 pm
The second best time to send an email is: 11 am
They found sending emails around these frequencies increases the reply rate that assists you to prompt the potential customers into sales customers. On the other hand, the best days to send emails are:
The best day to send an email: Monday and Tuesday
The worst day to send an email: Friday
All marketers want their audience to give some time and importance to emails, newsletter and for that, marketers have to put themselves in the audience’s shoes and select a perfect period to send an email.
Mailerlite
There is another study ofMailerlite, as opposed to Yesware data, Mailerlite reveals Tuesday is the best day to send out the emails, but Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays can also be convenient to send an email. It certainly enhances the highest open rates and click-through rates rapidly.
The Best day and time to send an email: Tuesday at 11 am
The Worst day to send an email: Saturday and Sunday
GetResponse
GetResponse found in its studies that Tuesday is the best day to get the most emails opened compared to any other day of the week and accomplish a click-through rate of 2.33%. The second peak day is Friday in order to attain an open rate of 20.58%.
The Best time to send emails for open rate: 4 am
The second-best time to send an email for click-through rate (CTR): 6 am
WordStream
In another study from WordStream, they advise email marketers to avoid Monday anxiety and Friday’s itchy feet.
Because on Monday; people usually march into the office and are flooded in the barrage of emails, and on Friday, people are trying to wind up the thing rather than replying to emails.
So, they also found the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are traditionally the favorite:
The best day and time to send email is: Thursday 8–9 am
The Worst Time to Send Emails: Tuesday & Wednesday 8–10 am
Coschedule
Data from Coschedule reveals Tuesday is one of the most effective days to send an email. In any case, you want to send two emails in a week, then go on Tuesday and Thursday.
The Best time to send email is: 6:00 am, 10 am, 8 pm, and 2 pm
So what is the best day and time to send an email?
What factors should we consider while selecting the time and data?
No doubt, sending emails at the best time is important, but there are some other factors we have to look into before creating an email campaign:
#1. Understand the customer’s behavior and demographic segmentation
Knowing your audience’s behavior and demographic is the most pivotal factor in email marketing strategy. Think about how your audience’s day goes. You wouldn’t want to send your email in the middle of their busy schedules. Doing this might cause them to overlook your message unintentionally. Understanding customers’ needs and wants are the effective approach to sending your email at the right to the right audience and also assists you to improve your ROI, click-through rate, and response rate.
Here we take an example:
Let’s say you have a large no of the audience doing their jobs at night like bartenders or barista, then you are more likely to send your email at night, which gets a more open rate. We have different studies that reveal sending emails at the night is not a good option to increase the click-through rate, but in this case; it is.
#2. Identify your niche
You want to send emails to the audience, but there is the thing that holds your back is: Who is your market niche?
To answer this question, you have to find the audience’s problem, interests and what do you have for them. Let us say you are targeting B2B and B2C marketers, then weekdays are the best days to send emails for you and Tuesday is the peak day to send an email.
#3. Frequency Emails
After identifying the niche and customer demographic segmentation the next step, you need to focus on the frequency of email and the subject line with an intriguing title. If you are looking to enhance your open rate, click-through rate, collect lead and sales then you should send one email per week, and sending one or two bulk emails a week is the ideal situation to enhance your brand visibility and improve ROI.
#4 Identify the Products and Service Offerings
The best time to send your emails is also determined by the type of business you are in. Are your products and services fit under the B2B model or the B2C model?
Based on your solutions and offerings, your time and data can vary accordingly. For example, if you are sending B2B emails then the beginning of the week such as Monday or Tuesday first half usually works the best. Even if you are sending B2B emails, segment your audience to accommodate different modes of working and behaviours.
Are you sending to employees? Or entrepreneurs? Or executives?However, if you are sending B2C emails there are other factors that contribute as well. Such as, is it a retargeting email? If there is an event coming up?
For example, if you are promoting fun entertainment activities with family or the hospitality industry, then Friday evening or the weekend will work best.
#5 Test Different Subject Lines
The first thing your reader will notice about your email is the subject line. It is the first and only determining factor whether your reader will open the mail or not.
Based on your niche you can test which subject line will work the best. You can experiment with subject lines to build curiosity, offer value or highlight time sensitivity and the value the email will provide.
Your subject line will determine the open rate of your emails which will eventually lead your reader to take the action you want them to take.
#6 Make the Best Use of Seasonal Consumer Behavior
According toCampaign Monitor, Black Friday emails had the highest open rate and highest link click rate. Another insight about consumer behaviour during holidays shows that 20% of online holiday shopping happen because of emails sent during this season.
Therefore, it is important that you have a good strategy of email marketing in place to capitalize on seasonal consumer behaviour.
If you are sending the promotional email about Sales or the New Arrivals, you can schedule the emails for weekends or during lunch hours because they are most likely to take action from your emails during these hours.
#7 Design Mobile-Friendly Emails
More than 47% of your consumers check their emails on their mobile devices. This shows the significance to design mobile-friendly emails.
For designing user-friendly emails, you can work on good graphics, flow of content, copy and personalization. These elements will also determine if your user will take any action from the email or not such as clicking on the link.
6 Email Marketing tools to save your time and money
Marketing trends change with time, but email marketing still has its place in the market. Choosing the best email app to send the right email is another important factor that not only affects your email marketing efforts but also assists you to grow your business smartly with the help of valuable analytics against your email campaign.
Do you need email marketing software, which is cost-effective, easy to use, time and money-saving?
We have listed the 5 most effective email marketing tools which help you to hit the targeted mark every time.
1. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is one of the most cost-effective and popular email marketing with over 130k customers.
It allies you to reach the target audience, captures their attention with an interesting message, builds relationships, and aids them to address solutions to their problems. It makes it easy for their customers to run email marketing campaigns. A CRM that includes email and sales automation holds all the customer details in one place. Manage the pipelines, keep transactions up to date, and follow up at the right time.
2. Benchmark
Benchmark is another fascinating email marketing tool for agencies that help to create easy professional emails rapidly to keep customers stay and engage.
It is a cost-effective tool and simplifies the assets you need so you can focus on developing connections, growing your market, and raising the bar.
It allows efficient leverage of your most valuable marketing assets, setup and customizes email without spending hours, builds stronger relationships with your contacts, gets access to a robust email marketing tool, and reaches out your goals faster.
3. eSputnik
eSputnik is a marketing automation tool that offers extensive functionality for customer data management and processing. It provides no-code solutions meaning you don’t need code knowledge to implement them for your business.
The platform helps create and send mass and transactional emails, SMS, app notifications and browser notifications. Such features as advanced contact segmentation, support of multilingual messaging, the substitution of dynamic content and product recommendations allow to automate message personalization and deliver each subscriber and customer only relevant content.
Aside from messaging, eSputnik offers solutions for personalized website marketing such as forms and site recommendations. It integrates with numerous tools, for example, Tilda, Zapier, Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, which enables you to run multiple marketing activities within one platform.
4. Zoho Campaign
Zoho Campaign is an email marketing platform that allows you to develop, deliver, and monitor emails using permission-based email marketing. Through a real-time analytics platform, it assists you in building a large and future client base.
It assists you in creating visually appealing emails with your brand name, automating your emails, and forming personal relationships with customized emails. It is a malleable and budget-friendly email marketing plan for marketers.
To help you deliver customized messages to your audience, Zoho Campaigns includes features such as interactive content, email surveys, and automatic list segmentation.
5. Sendinblue
Sendinblue helps companies create and develop relationships by using marketing automation, email promotions, transactional communications, SMS messages, chat, CRM, Facebook ads, and retargeting ads.
It is more than just email marketing software for a marketer, offers a wide range of resources for marketing your product or service. So, no need to go anywhere; find anything relevant to digital marketing without leaving your couch.
One of the latest reviews expound upon its features including Email marketing, SMS marketing, and live chat applications will help you reach your target audience on social media, build a good bond with your consumers by using CRM while saving time and energy with email automation.
6. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is the most leading tool for bloggers and small businesses because it was one of the first major email providers to have a fully free package forever.
It let you generate emails, develop a website, register a domain, and design landing pages. It is a top-rated and well-trusted email marketing software that will assist you in growing your company by creating automated emails at critical points in the buyer journey, so you can send out welcoming emails, order confirmations abandoned cart updates, and more with ease.
3 Email Metrics to Calculate the Impact of Your Email Marketing:
It is important to understand the impact of your email marketing after you have identified the best time to send emails.
We have listed down the 3 most important metrics of email marketing to differentiate the best time for people to open emails and the best time for people to take the action (for example, buy a product, complete registration, download an item).
These metrics are:
Open Rate
Click-through Rate
Click-to-open Rate
Open Rate:
Open Rate tells you about how many people from your subscribers opened your email. For a better open rate, have short, crisp and value-added headlines, and add pre-header text.
Click-through Rate:
The click-through rate tells you about how many people engaged with the email content after opening it. The Click-through rate is usually lesser than the open rate since readers abandon emails without reading completely and taking action. To make your emails more engaging, use the elements of personalization, improve the copy and mention CTA clearly.
Click-to-Open Rate:
Click-to-open Rate is determined by comparing the open rate and the number of people who clicked on any link in the mail. This metric is helpful to understand which content is relevant to your audience.
You can calculate the Click-to-Open Rate by using this formula:
Click-to-Open Rate = (Click through rate / Open Rate) x 100
Conclusion
Now, I’m sure you have learned how to get more traffic to your website through email marketing.
Email marketing is the cost-effective approach that takes your business to the next level and assists you to improve sales and ROI. Send an email on Tuesday at 10 am with an engaging subject line aids you to stand out in the market.
Above all, if you want your message links to look clean and professional, especially when sending emails or newsletters, you can use a reliable URL shortener to create tidy, brandable URLs before you hit send. And for this, give Replug a try today!
B2B email marketing focuses on businesses ratfiher than individuals, and the purchase decisions are made on value transfer instead of impulsion. The sales cycle is considerably longer, and it may involve multiple decision-makers, making B2B email marketing significantly different from B2C.
A lot of email marketers apply the same strategies for B2B email communication, which they use for B2C, thus never achieving the true potential of B2B email marketing.
What makes B2B email marketing different from B2C and how to approach it
B2C is more focused on driving sales on almost every message, and it contains little to no educational content. Moreover, the purchase won’t have a long-term impact on consumers.
However, B2B purchases have lasting effects on an organization, and one needs to invest in educational content spread over multiple emails before prospects start engaging truly. You will also have to optimize the messages to deliver value for each stakeholder who takes part in the buying processes. Thus, the B2C approach of generating revenue from single emails isn’t going to work out.
We can consider that their identical objectives are the reason behind many email marketers applying similar strategies:
Now that we know about the differences between the two, let us understand how to approach B2B email marketing. Firstly, you will need to curate your content for a rational buyer and focus on lead warming. You also need to understand your prospect’s requirements and satisfy multiple employees’ concerns before your message reaches the actual decision-maker. You can find the subtle differences in the approach in the below table:
Emails have the best ROI as a digital marketing channel, and B2B emails have 47% higher CTR when compared to B2C messages. Also, checking work emails daily is still a part of every organization, and there’s no reason you should miss on B2B email marketing.
That’s enough of polishing the basics. Let us explore those five B2B email marketing tips that will help you need to try without fail:
5 best B2B email marketing tips
#1 Use Personalization + Dynamic Segmentation Simultaneously
Just because you are going to communicate with different professionals from different levels of hierarchy, it doesn’t mean that you should give up on personalization efforts. You should segment your mailing lists in a way that helps you address different hierarchy levels and then run personalization efforts to make your messages relevant to the job profile. Focus on your prospect organization’s needs and send content as per the powers and understanding level of the concerned job profile.
Dynamic segmentation comes in handy in filtering your mailing list proactively. It aids in targeting the contacts based on their recent activity on your website and response rates to your ongoing email campaigns. Thus, you will be able to get the benefit of staying relevant to the current phase of their buying processes instead of sending messages in a generic fashion.
Personalization coupled with dynamic segmentation is one of the highly effective ways to achieve the right send times. For instance, if your prospect viewed a certain FAQ on your website, sending them a relevant resource on the topic within a few hours can significantly help the customer journey.
#2 Develop content for multiple stakeholders and offer cascading value propositions
As I mentioned above, B2B email marketing relies on delivering value and establishing reliability. This will require you to create extensive content that complements all phases of the buyer journey. You should start by knowing which stakeholders are going to take part in the purchasing process. A finance manager’s concerns are always going to differ from that of a production or sales manager. Yet, all of them come into the picture at different times and even stay in the loop. You can use the below chart to create email content development guidelines for addressing them:
Also, optimize the subject lines, preheader text, and CTAs for various stakeholders when creating resources. Once you develop the basic framework for your email content, you should use different formats to distribute it. This makes content consumption easier. Drip email campaigns are the best solution for offering cascading value propositions. They help you deliver the right content via emails based on engagement and timing. Instead of bombarding the readers with huge amounts of information that either doesn’t connect with their job role or is irrelevant to their buyer journey only discourages further engagement. Below is a schematic diagram of how drip emails deliver meaningful resources using cascading send rules:
I find that using self-nurturing landing pages is a great way when you don’t know the exact profile of your recipient. You can use customized URLs from Replug.io to track their activity and improve your database.
Replug offers a top-notch URL shortener to create short links that look clean and professional. And what’s the best part, is that you can add your custom brand name to the generated URL or link as well!
#3 Leverage newsletters to project thought leadership
Newsletters are a multi-purpose tool for B2B marketers. They help establish thought leadership by engaging the readers consistently over information that aids their business. They give you an opportunity to send insights on various aspects of your customer’s business and place your product/service as a facilitator of the benefits you mention. In many cases, it takes weeks to go through various offers, terms and conditions, technicalities, and discussions before they approach you again. You can use newsletters to keep your prospective clients engaged during those ‘colder’ phases, and it generally acts in your favour as opposed to brief periods of staying out of touch. No doubt, email is the hot favourite of B2B email marketers when it comes to content distribution:
Sharing industry-level research, opinion pieces, and inputs from technical experts are some time-tested ways of projecting thought leadership. You can use tools like ContentStudio to keep your subscribers engaged through highly refined content pieces from third-party sources. The below email from Smartsheet helps it take an authoritative pose, and it will surely increase its trustworthiness among the readers:
Similarly, if you are a SaaS company, you can send product-specific tips and tricks within your newsletter during the trial period. Here’s an example of doing so from Miro:
Having the right B2B HTML email templates matters! Content plays a decisive role, but curation is another aspect that impacts your campaign’s overall performance. The number of B2B buyers remains less when compared to the B2C buyers, but the ticket size is considerably huge. Thus, you should invest in beautiful email marketing templates that provide dynamic content blocks as it helps your personalization efforts apart from improving aesthetics. It also saves you from degrading your brand value in situations like sending an email with wrong images or URLs, as you can change them even after sending it.
This is how Crowd Writer UK works when they email other businesses. Having personalized subject lines and simple and authentic content has boosted their email marketing campaigns. When curating your content blocks, use visual hierarchy rules for getting the best aesthetic appeal. Keeping the paragraphs and lines shorter is a must, but your email typefaces, branding elements, colour palette, the separation between adjacent elements, font size, and colour play a huge role in determining your message’s readability. Mobile optimization is also necessary as 51% of the total email opens come from smartphones. Here’s a great example of curating a B2B email template in the right manner coming from none other than Campaign Monitor:
#5 Constantly track your success rates and redesign your efforts
Lastly, I would like to tell the readers that tracking your campaign results is 10x more important in B2B email marketing. The reason? Right from the decision-makers to the purchase cycle, everything keeps shifting while your competitors are going to target your leads far more aggressively than the B2C sector. Keeping a tab of how your email copies perform, the subject lines that get maximum opens, most coveted gated content, and CTAs apart from the regular email metrics will pave your way to success. You can learn from successful conversions and replicate the model that helped you convert in your ongoing efforts.
Most businesses run an email audit on a yearly basis, but it is advisable for B2B firms to use real-time insights and constantly tweak their email marketing strategy as per the latest performance results. As the businesses continue to evolve with technological advancements and shifts in end-customer perception, B2B marketers will have to constantly evolve their processes through consistent evaluations.
Putting it together
Coming towards the end, I will draw your attention to one common trait among all of these five B2B email marketing tips: Cater to the needs of the buyer journey on a real-time basis and follow a flexible approach. No doubts that running email campaigns for business-to-business interactions is complicated but following these email marketing tips will help you focus on getting results through coordinated efforts. I hope these tips help you get greater success in your next B2B email marketing campaign.
Affiliate marketing is a lucrative monetization method for bloggers and marketers. However, affiliate marketing isn’t just for bloggers and marketers. YouTubers, podcasters, and live streamers also make money off of affiliate marketing. If you’re looking for affiliate marketing guidelines, you’re at the right place as I’m about to spill the beans.
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular money-making strategies in the online marketing world. However, most blogging beginners start their blog monetization through Google AdSense or a similar ad network, but later on, transit towards affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing comes in handy for beginners who can’t make a ton of money on ad networks due to fewer monthly page views on their blogs. Therefore, the majority of them pursue affiliate marketing to find a better ad alternative.
You don’t always need a blog or website to make money with affiliate marketing. Instead, you can use multiple platforms to promote products and make money. I have a bunch of ideas in mind to share with you so that you could make the most of your affiliate marketing campaign.
Let me tell you a fact right off the bat: it doesn’t work out for every blogger or content creator. You’d find some affiliate marketers complain about the conversion. On the flip side, some affiliate marketers go gaga over this money-making strategy. It all comes down to finding the secret sauce that works for you.
Don’t worry, I’ll try to my level best to help you understand how to develop a perfect synergy between your affiliate offers and content to make the most of this monetization opportunity.
Some of you might be beginners in affiliate marketing, so the chances are, you don’t have a clear idea of affiliate marketing. Don’t panic as I’ll dig deeper into the topic and share some fundamental steps that would take your affiliate marketing to the next level.
But first things first, you should know the basics.
How Affiliate Marketing Works?
It’s a process of promoting the products and earning commissions when people buy through affiliate links. The majority of affiliate programs don’t have strict requirements and pretty much anyone can join them. However, a website or blog or social media account is mandatory in some programs. They make sure that only legitimate and serious marketers join in.
Furthermore, some companies have an affiliate program limited to their paid customers, which means you can’t get access to their affiliate program unless you buy their product. In most cases, there aren’t any hard and fast rules for someone to join the affiliate marketing program.
Moreover, all brands define their own terms of use that affiliate marketers must agree and oblige to for being a part of the program. There are several clauses in the terms of use, but one of the most important ones is that the brand has the right to terminate the affiliate marketer’s participation over any suspicious activity or violation of the terms of use.
That’s it.
Keep reading because you’re about to find out:
How a beginner can get started with affiliate marketing
Where you can promote affiliate products to earn commissions
How much affiliate marketers can earn from a single affiliate sale
How to choose the best affiliate product to promote
How to get more clicks and sales in affiliate marketing
So if you’re serious about your affiliate marketing initiative, then don’t miss out on the steps I’m going to share with you.
Without any further ado, let’s get right into it.
A Step-by-Step Guide on Starting Affiliate Marketing
Here we go:
#1: Choose Your Niche
To make sure you’re off to a good start, choose your niche wisely. It’s a prerequisite not just for starting successful niche websites, but it’s also for authority blogs.
The niche is a category or genre of the blog or website, which determines the type of content a reader can expect on the blog or website.
A niche website or blog caters to a specific audience by solving their problems through their content.
A website’s niche and affiliate marketing success go hand in hand. It’s essential to choose the right niche. Otherwise, it’s highly unlikely that you’d rank on the first page in the SERP as it’s impossible to dominate the niche without having know-how on the subject.
Some multiple factors and metrics influence the search engine ranking. Nobody exactly knows what all of those factors and metrics are, so most bloggers and digital marketers kept on testing different techniques.
The more you bring the right audience to your website, the easier it would become to make money from your affiliate website. However, delivering value through your content makes a lot of difference.
Affiliate marketing works on trust, authority, and reputation. People usually don’t buy recommended products quickly. Instead, they do their due diligence before opting for the product. Therefore, if your emphasis is selling, you might end up suffering in the long run.
There are two parameters of choosing the right niche:
Exposure
It’s impossible to randomly choose a niche and grow a website. Bloggers and affiliate marketers get their hands dirty before they start to make money with affiliate marketing. You can’t promote a product if you haven’t had some experience with it. The experience gives you the exposure which differentiates an expert user and a rookie. Always try to get familiar with the product you’re going to promote.
I’m a big fan of the ContentStudio tool; it’s my go-to software for scheduling social media posts. When I wanted to write the ContentStudio review on my blog, I started using it so that I could write the review with an authoritative voice. I didn’t want to write a review right off the bat. After using it for a while, I sat down to write the review. I’m not subscribed to the mentality of writing content just for the sake of publishing it. I always put my heart and soul into every piece of content. You can’t sign up for a new tool and instantly write a review.
So make yourself familiar with the niche before you jump into it. Don’t hesitate to invest a little bit of money into trying out the stuff before you talk about it on the blog. It’ll give you the exposure that might turn things around for you.
Strength
The strength means you have an interest in something or it’s your skill. It’s essential to choose a niche that’s your strength. If you play soccer and you have the basic knowledge of the game, and you start a blog about ice skating, which you haven’t done in your life, then it won’t be a wise decision.
Anyway, my niche is freelancing; I mostly write about freelancing on and off the platforms.
You can see most of the articles on my blog revolve around the freelancing niche. It didn’t happen on a whim, but instead, I discovered my blogging niche along the way. I kept on publishing content on the blog and freelancing-related content took off.
Plus, people reach out to me to ask freelancing questions all the time, so I decided to pay close attention to what people want from me. And, that’s how I choose my blog’s niche.
Hence, it’s vital to choose the blog niche based on the exposure or strength to earn money from affiliate marketing.
#2: Handpick online platforms
Affiliate marketing success isn’t possible without a bunch of tools and platforms. You got to be careful with the selection of tools and platforms. Presumably, you’re an affiliate marketing beginner and trying to hone in on your online money-making craft.
The most important tool for affiliate marketing is the primary platform. In most cases, bloggers and affiliate marketers choose a blog. So I’ll stick to the blog as our main tool for publishing, but I’d shed some light on other options too.
Once you’ve chosen your niche and you’re crystal clear on the audience targeting, the next move should be handpicking the online platforms to put out content and build an audience.
It’s the most crucial part of the process. You might find affiliate marketers solely rely on the YouTube or Facebook page, but you must future-proof your affiliate marketing business.
There are different ways to go about it, but most of you might be first-timers. I’d highly recommend setting up a publishing platform as well as a social media platform to start on the right foot.
Let’s take a look at the publishing and social media platforms:
Publishing platforms
There are various publishing platforms out there, but here are three of the most common ones:
WordPress [Recommended]
You can either choose the wordpress.com platform or self-hosted wordpress.org to launch your website. WordPress is by far the most popular content management system out there. According to an SEJ’s article, the data revealed by W3Techs showed that WordPress powers 39.5% of overall websites.
Squarespace
It’s an online website builder which allows users to create websites without having any coding knowledge whatsoever. It’s a drag and drop-based tool for businesses, e-commerce stores, bloggers, and entrepreneurs.
Medium
Medium has a publication feature that lets you set up your blog on the Medium platform. Affiliate marketers and bloggers could use the Medium publication for putting out content.
Jeff Bullas is a popular blogger and marketer. He publishes content and promotes products on the blog as well:
There are hundreds of thousands of such examples of beginner and expert-level bloggers who primarily use blogs to earn money from affiliate marketing.
Social media platforms
Affiliate marketers drive traffic and attract a new audience through social media. Not only do they run social media ads, but also engage the audience through sharing content. Let’s take a look at three wildly popular social media platforms among affiliate marketers:
YouTube
YouTube is famous for bringing a lot of eyeballs to the business. The secret to winning at YouTube is making videos that the prospective audience might be interested in and then use the description box to further engage the audience. Affiliate marketers put the landing pages and affiliate product links in the YouTube description and earn a lot of money from affiliate marketing.
Quora
Quora is one of the most underrated social media platforms that could bring website traffic to your platform. It’s a questioning and answering platform that allows you to put links into your answers. Make sure that you aren’t misusing the links feature as its spam detection is quite effective. Your account could get banned over spamming. Affiliate marketers don’t share direct affiliate links on Quora, but instead, they occasionally add content links that may contain affiliate products.
Facebook
Facebook is a major social media player on the market. Affiliate marketers tend to build communities mostly in Facebook groups. They don’t focus much on getting sales by sharing links, but instead, they nurture the audience and drive them to the website from time to time. So don’t underestimate the power of Facebook groups; they’re very much relevant, active, and effective.
There are several other publishing and social media platforms out there which you should explore, but the above-mentioned are quite popular among pro-bloggers and expert affiliate marketers.
Here’s an example of creating a community on social media.
Problogger is a popular blogging tips blog founded by Darren Rowse. He is an Australian blogger, author, and public speaker.
Problogger has an active Facebook group of over 29k members. It’s a community where bloggers communicate, interact, and help each other out:
You won’t essentially find a team of Problogger pushing ProBlogger content or products all the time, but instead, they rarely share offers or announcements from Problogger. It’s mostly fans and readers that interact.
The point is that choose your platforms and stick with them. You’ll eventually start to see traction over time. And once the traction happens, it starts to drive affiliate sales as well.
#3: Do keyword research
Keywords have a significant role in establishing an effective affiliate marketing strategy whether you’re a blogger or YouTuber. However, the caveat is that it’s nearly impossible to find the exact keywords data. According to SEO experts, even the most popular keyword tools aren’t accurate when it comes to the number of searches against keywords. Don’t worry, you can still do keyword research. Here’s how:
Once you’re done with the niche and platform selection, the next up is keyword research. I’m not a fan of traditional keyword research through keyword tools. However, I’ll share some top-notch keywords tools that SEOs and content marketers use for finding the keywords.
On the flip side, I’m more into search analysis through different ways, which I’ll uncover shortly. Before I mention the popular keyword research tool, I want to shed some light on the idea of doing keyword research.
Most SEOs put in the keyword in the keyword research tool and look at the competition and number of searches. It’s also a fact that the number of searchers can’t be accurate since only Google holds that information.
Therefore, I follow a different approach called search analysis. The way how it works is that we analyze the search query through certain ways and create content around that.
A)Autocomplete
Autocomplete is Google’s intelligent search feature which provides recommendations upon typing in half of the search query. It usually recommends the search terms that are popular among the searchers, meaning people are using those search terms.
Analyzing what Google Autocomplete is suggesting gives you a good idea of what people need to know. Using those search terms in the content or writing content around those topics could bring a lot of search traffic.
Tip: the same autocomplete strategy also works for YouTube search.
B)Google Trends
The second most important part of the search analysis is looking at Google Trends. Go to Google Trends and type in your search term or keyword. If you’re using an upward trend or numbers are taking off, then it means there is a demand for this topic or keyword, and you can focus on this.
If Google Trends analysis doesn’t show any traction whatsoever, then you should think twice before covering that topic or keyword in your content.
C)Popular Content
Thirdly, analyze your popular content in Google Analytics or any other tracking software you use for your analytics. I use Google Analytics for analyzing the site performance as well as finding the top pages of my website in terms of page views. It helps me focus on the right topics and understanding the popularity of my content.
You can double-down on the popular content, meaning create similar content of what already working and gain momentum. Not only would it increase your page views, but it would also increase your ads and affiliate revenues.
That’s my search analysis approach. I know a lot of bloggers and affiliate marketers follow the same approach.
However, you can try out the typical keyword research tools, but I won’t recommend relying only on the keyword research tools:
Here are three popular keyword research and SEO tools:
Ahrefs
Long Tail Pro
MarketMuse
SEMRUSH
Once you find a bunch of keywords through keyword research tools and search analysis, get down to writing some top-notch articles and publish them along the way.
#4: Select affiliate products
Affiliate marketers and bloggers have mixed opinions about the timing of selecting affiliate products. There isn’t a right or wrong way of doing it.
Some expert bloggers and affiliate marketers think it’s wise to focus completely on finding the right topics/keyword and rank the articles in the SERP. On the other hand, a lot of bloggers teach and preach to choose the affiliate products beforehand. I tend to focus on the latter.
It’s good to have a list of products in mind before getting down to writing articles in bulk. I have done the mistake of writing articles in bulk without keeping the affiliate products in mind. So I have learned this lesson the hard way.
One of my blogs has 81 blog posts published so far, and more than 80% of the blog posts get fewer visitors every month. The good thing is that I realized my mistake a while ago and started focusing on the right topics, and it’s changing the trajectory of this blog.
So here are three recommendations on selecting the affiliate products:
Relevance:
Keep the relevance factor in mind while selecting the affiliate products for your blog or another platform. It means the product must have coherence with the content. You can’t promote a juicer machine on a mortgage blog.
Personal Experience:
A personal experience with the products goes a long way. You can’t talk about a product with confidence if you haven’t had a chance to try it out. On the contrary, when you have experience of using the product, you can share the details with authority because you know the product inside out.
Affordability:
Pricing matters in the affiliate products’ conversion rate. If you’re targeting beginners through your content, but promoting $500 to $800 products, it won’t work out. You have to keep the price affordability factor in mind while choosing the affiliate products.
Here are some of the popular affiliate marketing networks to find the affiliates:
ShareASale
Impact
FlexOffers
DigiStore24
JVZOO
ClickBank
#5: Put out content
Putting out content means publishing content online to attract, engage, and convert the audience. It’s nearly impossible to generate affiliate sales without putting out content.
Some affiliate marketing gurus create email marketing funnels and use online advertising to drive traffic. It could work as much as any other strategy, but the problem is that the majority of us won’t be able to spend a thousand dollars right off the bat. Therefore, putting out content essential becomes a viable option to pursue.
Once you have done some due diligence on the keywords and topic clusters to target, it means you’re all set for creating content. You’d primarily be using written content, but you’d also need to use other types of content along the way.
Let me breakdown different articles you should be writing on the blog to boost your affiliate marketing sales:
Informational content:
These are types of articles that would purely be providing information to the audience. For instance, if you have a furniture blog, then an article like “how to clean your sofa without hiring an expert” could be an informational piece of content.
Buyer guides:
Buyer guides are typically product guidelines that explain to buyers about the products and help them make a buying decision. Such articles could focus on both single or multiple products. Furthermore, these articles are intended for generating affiliate sales.
Response posts:
Response posts are published to cater to audience questions that are discovered through search analysis, keyword research, and audience feedback.
The story doesn’t end here, but instead, you shouldn’t just rely on the text content. Stretch your content plan further towards other types of content such as videos and images.
Use the power of image platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram. These platforms are massive from an attention standpoint. A lot of bloggers use Pinterest to drive traffic to their blogs and websites.
Similarly, YouTube is the second most popular search engine. Use the videos to drive traffic to your website as well as generate affiliate sales.
Income School once revealed a brand new YouTube channel in their video that they started around shooting sport.
The channel took off fairly nicely; they were able to get 9k subscribers in just four months. It didn’t end here because they also shared that they were able to generate a lot of affiliate sales through that YouTube channel. So it just validates my point of using a platform like YouTube to build a brand and generate affiliate sales.
#6: Run SEO and outreach campaigns
Affiliate marketing seems easy on the outside, but it’s quite tricky on the inside. If you ever come across someone who is making a good income from blogs or niche websites through affiliate marketing, then investigate what else that marketer is doing to stay ahead of others.
There are competition analysis and spying software such as Semrush and Spyfu that marketers and companies use to dominate search ranking.
What I mean is that most affiliate marketers whether they’re running authority blogs or niche websites build links from time to time even if link building isn’t an important part of their strategy.
Many bloggers believe that some niches are competitive enough that it’s becoming harder to outsmart the competition without building a few quality backlinks.
For instance, Carl Broadbent is a British blogger who asked an SEO company to analyze his niche website and report back on ranking against a search term. The SEO company revealed that top-ranking sites against that search term have 60 DA on average and his site needs 250 backlinks to compete with them.
What I’m saying is that I’m a big advocate of getting backlinks naturally, but in some cases, you need a little push to leap. Most affiliate marketers I know take link building very seriously, but they never compromise on the quality of the content.
You don’t need to spend money on outreach for SEO if you’re just a beginner, but if your site is taking off rather slowly due to fierce competition, then you could try out an outreach marketing strategy to see how it works out for you.
It doesn’t necessarily mean you should completely ignore on-page SEO. I’d highly recommend paying close attention to the following on-page SEO elements:
Page loading speed
Keywords targeting
Topic clusters
Page caching
Images compression
In-depth content
#7: Add social media shareability
You have to have a social media sharing strategy in your mix. What I mean by adding social media shareability is that you should create a system of maximizing social media.
You might not be aware of the power of social media posts when it comes to readers’ engagement. Have you ever heard of the phrase “social proof”?
Social proof is a public validation from the audience which puts any product or brand in the good books. People don’t share bad content because nobody cares about it. Plus, if you keep pushing hard bad content, people consider it spam and may start to unfollow you.
It’s vital to know for affiliate marketers how to leverage social media to their advantage. Clearly, shoving low-quality content down the followers’ throat doesn’t work out for anyone.
Here are four things you can do to make the most of social media:
Create compelling yet useful content:
To make sure that your content gets shared by followers, you must create helpful and effective content for the audience. A high-quality content works like a charm, for instance, you never know who comes across your content and shares it to hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. Similarly, when good-quality content gets ranked or goes viral on social media, it also brings backlinks, which plays a vital role in building site authority.
Engage followers on social media:
Engagement matters a lot on social media. What happens is that when someone engages with your content, their followers or friends get notified on the social media platform. Thus, it exposes your content to more people. That’s how engagement brings in more eyeballs and attention.
Make sharing easier for the readers:
Adding social media sharing buttons that are visible on both desktop and mobile versions of the site goes a long way. When a blog doesn’t have social media sharing buttons, it’s highly unlikely that most readers would go the extra mile to share the content. Sharing a piece of content through a sharing button is much easier than copying the link and title manually and then pasting it onto the social media platform. So add social media sharing buttons to your blog.
Share others’ content for more attention
Everyone shares their own content, but sharing others’ content puts you on the pedestal. When you share others’ content on social media, not only does it bring value to the followers, but it also helps the original creator of the content.
Replug is a top-notch link shortener that provides click tracking feature to its users. It’s an excellent link optimization platform for bringing the audience back to your website. When you shorten an article’s link and share it on your social media, the followers start to click-through and land on the article. Furthermore, they’ll see a small pop-up of yours that could take them to your website or profile.
So the takeaway from this step is that it’s good to focus on the keywords selection and putting out valuable content that people like to share, but it shouldn’t end here. Instead, making it easier for the audience to share your content does the trick.
Affiliate marketing success doesn’t only achieve by putting out content. Otherwise, every single affiliate marketer would have been a millionaire. One of the secrets of affiliate marketing success is assisting the audience whether it’s through a free ebook or by recommending a suitable product. Once you start doing that, you won’t be an affiliate marketing failure.
#8: Analyze site performance
No matter what approach of content creation, SEO, and affiliate marketing you adopt, you would ultimately need to analyze your campaign’s performance at some point. Otherwise, you won’t be able to find conclusive evidence of what’s working and what’s not working on your website.
So it’s important to do a little bit of sniff testing after deploying the strategies, but don’t start analyzing the performance of your website after a week or so. Give a good one month before you start examining the performance.
Here are three key indicators that you should look out for in your affiliate site performance analysis:
Clickability:
Analyze the number of overall clicks on your links; you can use the heatmap tools as well as check out the clicks on your in-content affiliate links. If the number of clicks is rising every month, then it’s a good sign.
Conversion Rate:
The conversion rate is the most important indicator to see whether or not your site is performing well. If your affiliate sales are increasing, then it means your tactics are working. In some cases, clicks increase but conversion doesn’t go up, it usually indicates that there is a problem with the audience targeting. Simply put, the right visitors aren’t landing on your website, so you need to fix your content strategy.
Total Pageviews
The number of pageviews is also an essential indicator of how well or poor your search analysis, SEO strategies, and audience engagement are on the site. When page views increase and you’re bringing the right audience to your site, you’d surely see an increase in clickability and conversion rate.
Affiliate marketing beginners must know when and how to analyze their affiliate marketing strategies. I don’t want to indulge you in the analysis paralysis, but you should analyze your blog monetization strategies once every quarter.
Did you learn something about affiliate marketing?
I have shared the lessons I learned over the course of 10 years. Had I known all these things a decade ago, a lot would have been different for me today.
That’s why I shared all these affiliate marketing strategies for beginners so passionately because I know it could turn the table around for anyone who is getting started.
I’m curious to know whether or not you’re taking away something valuable from this blog post.
Please do me a favor and let me know in the comments section.
Did this blog post on affiliate marketing help you in some way?
