You own an online business, promoting products and services, and you want to see those profits on the rise. If marketing is done properly, you are going to see indeed profits hitting the ceiling; but if you implement poor marketing tactics, your sales agenda will stay poor as well.
One of the most important things that you must keep in mind is that aggressive marketing will take you nowhere. For instance, sms marketing, where you send people 3 annoying messages per hour that X product is “only for the next ten minutes 50% off” is a sort of aggressive marketing.
You have to be tactful and inviting, and let people decide for themselves, but of course by taking care of a few tips and tricks that you will implement.
Pictures speak for themselves
Instead of cramping your website/blog with poorly written walls of text articles stuffed with random keywords, you should better focus on uploading some very good quality photos.
These can be pictures of your products if that is what you are marketing, or some very suggestive pictures for the services you are trying to sell. Try to stay original- just browse crowdsource portals such as Poptent for example, where you will find a lot of young and talented artists selling unique photography materials. Make your blog/website unique.
Make your clients feel exclusivity
You should dedicate a corner “for members only”. Those clients that became members after subscription will have access to special deals. Word of mouth as you may already know is the best marketing strategy from ancient times; so if you treat your special members well, you will soon have more.
Implement the referral program
For a start, you could offer $10 shopping credit for those clients that can bring you new customers. If you don’t want to offer shopping credit, you can offer instead say 5% off for the next purchase for any item.
Of course these are only suggestive prices/percentages, and it highly depends on what kind of products/services you sell and how much you can actually afford to pay out.
Top notch customer service
If you don’t have the necessary time for it, you should hire one virtual assistant. He/she should be online at least 8 hours per day, and the main task is to help people in their decision making process.
Shopping online many times is a too “empty” experience. You just browse, put your desired products in the e-basket, check out, pay with your card, package arrives on your doorstep.
But wouldn’t you like much better a nice little online store that has an assistant you can talk to, just like in real world shopping.
You might have questions regarding the products/services, or the accepted payment methods. Try to make your online store more real lifelike. It will definitely bring you more customers.
Remember the specials
Make sure that every week you do a change, you bring a new product, or you offer a special discount. Freebies are men’s best friend online, so you can offer with a product a free e-book, a free ringtone, a T-shirt, anything that will make customers tell their friends about your business.
Make your existent customers get used with the fact that you are a very interactive business, and not just a stagnating one that sells the same things for the last 6 months.
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