eCommerce marketing is taking over as the world continues to leverage technology to run the daily business operations. Putting up an online business alone is not enough and does not guarantee you immense profits. You have to work towards employing proper channels to market your franchise for it to grow and generate the revenue that you need. Managing e-commerce is not easy, here are 5 mistakes that you can avoid to be fruitful:

Inadequate use of SEO

While Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often emphasized, not many of you know how to make use of it. SEO is a key component in marketing for e-commerce stores. With the growing numbers of online businesses, you should know how to make your store stand out from the competition. Most of the websites used are often unattractive and lack thought-provoking content. In case you didn’t know, it is great content that will make your customers keep coming back to your site thereby improving your SEO. Studies conducted to look at the impact of user experience revealed that customers are drawn to simple content with eye-catching images. Well, is your content good enough? If not, there are companies such as SEO Tactica that can help you avoid common mistakes that could affect your optimization such as:

• Use of generic content
• Failure to use marketing terminology
• Keywords omission issues
• Overuse of content for multiple purposes

You ought to know that failure to work on user optimization is one of the major mistakes that you can make when running e-commerce. 

Working for an unknown audience

How well do you know your audience? While you may have a good product, if you do not understand your customer’s needs, you are doomed to fail. Most entrepreneurs use a defined audience to design a product and fail to familiarize themselves with the final consumer. The main reason why you need to know your audience is because they impact your possible marketing channels. An analysis of the target audience enables you to:

• Beat your business competitors by averting blank advertising that causes reduced leads and conversions.
• Reduce marketing costs because you can tailor campaigns to a particular audience.
• Avoid boring your audience

A good audience analysis will enable you to find people who will find value in the products that you are trying to promote. 

Failure to use social proof

Social proof is an affirmation or validation by people that they have used your product. It is seen in customer testimonials, reviews, and social shares. The use of social proof is to encourage other people to buy your products or services. It also allows you, actual consumers, to tell their stories about their experiences with your products. The lack of this element in your e-commerce makes it difficult for people to trust your brand. When consumers have no confidence in you, your business is bound to collapse because no one will want to transact with you. Social proof can be built by:

• Using influencers to endorse your brand
• Displaying customer reviews
• Providing incentives to your loyal customers
• Sharing customer testimonials

Poor customer service

When you lack strong customer service, your e-commerce business is likely to suffer. Consumers do not condone poor services at all. In this digital age, when consumers are rendered with poor quality services, they take to social media to voice their grievances. Such backlash will promote poor reviews and testimonials and will taint your brand no matter how good it is. Thus, as a manager, you should emphasize the need to have cutting-edge services to retain your clients. 

Substandard email marketing automation

Email marketing is one of the most influential tools that you can use to advertise yourself. Given its influence, it can either build you or cause your ruin. When well implemented, email marketing offers the highest conversion rates. Newbies in e-commerce often struggle with e-commerce and are more prone to make mistakes that can cause customers to unsubscribe from their sites. Suppose you are new to this, you could make use of email segmentation as well as shopping cart reminders to transform customer site visits to purchases. Email marketing can give you a chance to enhance a close relationship with your clients.

Conclusion

While numerous mistakes can be made, there are effective ways of turning these shortcomings around. Most of these challenges will present themselves in different stages of your business. Your goal should be to keep on improving every step of the way.