How to increase e-commerce sales (with blogging)
On today’s Internet, competition in the e-commerce industry is getting higher and higher. Sellers trying to distribute their products or services online are increasing every day, so to achieve your sales goals you need to offer more as well. I’m talking about the content of value to your audience, enabling you to attract, entertain and ultimately convert (and thus sell), creating quality, human relationships that can build customer loyalty.
To be able to distribute this content an indispensable tool is undoubtedly the blog, which not only allows you to share your articles but also to put in place real strategies to increase sales: let’s find out more together.
How do you increase customer loyalty through digital marketing?
Increase e-commerce sales
So, if your current goal is to increase your ecommerce sales and you’re not yet using the blog, or not yet taking full advantage of it, it’s time to go through all the methods which it allows you to grow purchases and achieve your goals.
1. Content marketing for e-commerce
Content marketing is a key strategy for businesses working on the Internet today. It is an approach that focuses on the creation and distribution of useful and valuable content, with the goal of accompanying visitors along the stages of the Buyer’s Journey, and thus toward the sale. Content marketing strategies lay their foundations on the customer, as the goal is to help them achieve their goals by providing means to educate and grow them. Through this, you will be able to build audience loyalty, an essential step in being able to convert a visitor into a customer.
And what platform allows you to deploy content marketing strategies better than the blog? Not only was this created with the goal of sharing interesting material with those who relate to you, but also, according to Hubspot, those who use it in their content marketing strategies get 67 percent more leads (compared to those who do not use it).
6 Marketing Methods to Increase Your Sales in E-commerce
No doubt, then. If today it is content that allows you to attract people and turn them into customers, you need to start making the best use of a blog to provide it.
2. Email marketing for e-commerce
Email marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable content via email, and according to Hubspot statistics today as many as two-thirds of consumers report making a purchase as a result of emails of this kind. But what is the connection between blogging and this very useful strategy for increasing sales?
In the previous point, we talked about the inclusion of CTAs on blog posts. Here, it is thanks to these CTAs that you can start collecting the email addresses of those who are interested in receiving the content you propose, thus laying the foundation of your email marketing. But that’s not all. If you create different and tailored CTAs for each stage of the buyer’s journey you can also immediately segment the collected emails into customized lists. Then you will be able to trigger automated email campaigns tailored to the needs, interests and requirements of each list.
To best carry out these steps, however, there is a need to connect a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) to your e-commerce, so that you can precisely collect and efficiently segment the data that the blog provides you with. It is worth exploring this topic in more detail, as CRM is one of those tools that, when used well, support increased sales.That is why we have written an article on both how to make the most of a CRM to do email marketing, and how to use a CRM to increase your e-commerce sales.
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3. Increase ranking
Ranking high on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is of utmost importance for customers to find your store on the Internet, and thus for your sales to increase. But on the SERP the rivalry is extremely high, and just offering your products or services on the shop is not enough to climb the rankings. That’s why there is a need to use a good tool like blogging, which provides various ways to do SEO for e-commerce, such as: keeping the site up-to-date, an important factor in showing both those who find you and Google that you are active, allowing you to climb the SERP; indexing long tail keywords, with which you can reach a more qualified audience and have less competition; do link-building, which is the key to growing your authority “in the eyes” of Google; demonstrating your expertise, which is useful for both building trust relationships and increasing your site’s relevance to Google; These are in a nutshell the ways in which a blog allows you to best do SEO, getting you ranked high and helping you increase sales. If you want to learn more about this topic, you can read this article.
4. Doing branding
Building a strong and authoritative brand is a long-term strategy, but very useful for increasing your e-commerce awareness, success and therefore sales.
In fact, doing branding means working to ensure that your product or service is recognized as unique compared to those in the market, prompting more and more people to want to buy it. To achieve this, you need to take care of the visual, emotional and cultural perception that e-commerce conveys to customers. And using blogging is a great way to accomplish this: in fact, many consumers perceive e-commerce businesses that feature a structured blog full of valuable content more reliably and authoritatively than those that do not.
There are two main reasons why blogging helps build brand image, allowing you to increase sales:
- first, the presence of well-written, targeted and useful blog posts demonstrates the brand’s expertise and willingness to help the buyer, through the sharing of beneficial information;
- second, the blog allows you to show the human side of your e-commerce. With an online store you have no way to welcome customers in store, but thanks to the blog you can outline this side of your brand on digitallyl as well. This familiarity will grow trust in your business, improving your relationships and thus driving more people to purchase.
Thanks to blogging you can then leverage branding, helping people create a built and consistent image of your brand and positioning you one step ahead of your competitors.
5. Increase site traffic
By blogging you create revenue for your ecommerce site: every new blog post you publish represents new access opportunities to your online shop, and that means building more and more doors to accommodate traffic.
But that’s not all. Every time you publish interesting articles and content on your blog you also give a way for those who follow you and find you useful to share your material on their social profiles, on their newsletter, or to mention you on their blog — as well as, of course, having a way yourself to promote this content on your various channels by driving new traffic.
As access points and shares grow, so will visits to your site. And the more visits grow, the more opportunities you will have to find new customers.
What are the reasons for the e-commerce development?
6. Showcase your products
On the blog, you have an opportunity to showcase the goods or services you sell in a more in-depth or engaging way. Of course, not all blog posts can be based on this, quite the contrary. As mentioned in the article, it is good if your content focuses primarily on providing useful advice to the audience without being overtly promotional: otherwise, it would lack that demonstration of experience and humanity that, as mentioned earlier, a brand must be able to convey.
This does not mean, however, that none of your articles can deal specifically with what you sell. On the other hand, just as you write articles for those who are in the awareness stage (and trying to understand what their problem/need is) and for those who are in the consideration stage (and wondering how to solve the issue), you should also devote content to those who are already in the decision stage, and who are therefore trying to identify who to turn to for purchase, making sure to make the best choice.
In this way you will be able to both increase the pages devoted to your products and to latch on to people who are already at the end of the buyer’s journey, and therefore one step away from buying.
7. Attract people at the beginning of the buyer’s journey
To top it off, thanks to blogging you can increase sales as this allows you to intercept people from the moment they enter the customer’s journey.
In fact, by limiting yourself exclusively to offering your products on the shop, you will only allow your audience to interface with you in the last step of the buying process, without having created the appropriate trust upstream. And this, unless you have a well-known brand, will make it more difficult to sell. Instead, by creating content for all stages of the journey through blogging, by attracting people earlier, you will ensure that you have an advantage at the point when someone moves on to the final decision: that is, who to buy from.
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How to add a blog to e-commerce
Now that it is clear why your online shop needs a blog to increase sales, let’s understand how to open, in practice, this section on your e-commerce. There are many platforms that allow you to create online stores, but on many of them to add a blog you need a plug-in.
Among them, however, one of the most important and advanced, namely Shopify, allows you to do this instead in a really intuitive way. In fact, here you can start a blog in just a few steps, without resorting to extensions: just go to the control panel, click on “Online Store”>”Blog Items,” click on “Manage Blogs,” and then do “Add Blog.” You can find the complete guide provided by Shopify here.
Conclusion
Although blogging is, as seen, a very valuable tool, many ecommerce businesses still do not recognize it as a means of supporting sales. But now that we’ve discovered all the ways in which it allows you to start increasing sales, all that’s left is for you to set up your strategy and hit the ground running! Also, if you’re looking for other ways to better develop your online shop and need support, you can take a look at all the ways Enkronos can support your growth. Contact Enkronos team today.
