Ecommerce has seen an exponential rise in its application as more and more brands realize it’s potential. Ecommerce has brought with it an era of innovation with new methods of marketing now being discovered with an eye on detailed analytics and constant engagement. One of the more recently discovered and increasingly popular ways of marketing one’s products or services is email marketing.

Email marketing is considered as a great platform to inform your customers about products, services, events or any important events. The reason for its popularity is mainly attributed to it being relatively cost-effective and business-size friendly, as irrespective of the scale of your business, one can benefit from it. So how exactly can one benefit from email marketing?

Market research becomes easier

Everyone agrees that in order to be successful at marketing, research is paramount. Email marketing has become a useful way of conducting research as engaging directly with your customer’s help you understand preferences better in addition to feedback on products and services. The success of your research lies in how well you have drafted your communication and how simply you have designed a feedback mechanism.

Constant Engagement with your audience

Email marketing serves as a database providing tool that allows you to interact with your audience on a regular basis, creating a bond between your brand and your audience. Email marketing helps you build an audience in an over-sized market, differentiating it from the rest of the platforms you could be using.

Email is better than social media in terms of conversions

Marketing via social media is important too; as it helps you reach a wider audience. However, with email marketing one avails the benefit of personalized communication, as it reaches your audience directly in their inbox, allowing you to make your communication personalized and relevant to your audience. It has been estimated that email marketing has facilitated a rise in almost 20-30% for online sales.

Measurable Results

There is no purpose to marketing if it doesn’t allow you to measure the impact you have had. Email Marketing has made this process easier as it comes with tools that help you measure the direct impact you may have had. Metrics such as Click-through rate, open rates, deliverability, subscriber retention are available with email marketing which enables you to understand how successful your email marketing campaign has been, in terms of generating traffic on your website.

Generate Business leads through engagement

It has been proven that people who shop online have email ids that they check at least once a day. With the right kind of communication, email marketing helps in database collection and collecting other information from your audience that might lead you to potential customers.

There is no doubt that email marketing is here to stay, it’s main advantage being that it offers a choice to the person concerned on whether he would like to know more. It is a great way of keeping your audience informed and in this age of information, email marketing is slowly inching its way to the top.

In this digital age, establishing trust amongst your audience is becoming an increasing concern. Although online shoppers are becoming more confident with website details, they may still need some kind of assurance when they are visiting an unfamiliar website. In this case, especially if you are a new website, it is important to establish trust marks that reiterate your authenticity.

 

What exactly are trust marks?

Trust marks are essentially logos or trademarks that are displayed on your website that show that you have met different security and privacy requirements. They are mostly independently functioning third party assurances that are trusted names in the eyes of buyers, that reassure your customers that it is safe to shop from your platform. Some of the most commonly used trust marks include PayPal, McAfee and other established trust marks. Obviously, your website will have to meet certain specifications in order to legitimately display these trust marks on your website.

The psychology behind this operates in a simple manner. Essentially, if one of your potential customers has visited the physical store, they would be more inclined to visit the site of that trusted source. They may also trust purchases that are made through well-established platforms such as Amazon and eBay.

Apart from this, there are also other advantages of establishing a trust mark on your website. Applying for one of these schemes means that you are constantly protected against vulnerabilities in the security of your website. You are immediately notified if there are any chances of a hacker attack. This kind of service protects your reputation and keeps your business free from any kind of cyber-attacks.

 

How do you apply and get a trust mark on your website?

If you are deciding to opt for a trust mark, the first step would be to decide which are the trust marks with high recognition and then which are the ones that are relevant to the market you are servicing. This will obviously vary according to the market you are functioning in so it is always better to do a thorough research before you enter into this. When you contact a trust mark provider, they will conduct a vetting process which starts from conducting an initial assessment of your website to check it for security following up with feedback on its strength. You can be asked to incur the further expense if the trust authority identifies any potential threats with your website which will need fixing before you are eligible for the trust mark.

 

When you are going in for this trust mark, it is important for you to do an analysis of your conversion rate and basket abandonment rate, so that you know exactly what kind of impact the trust mark has had on your website. The other optimal way would be to conduct A/B testing on your website, that is establishing 2 versions of the page, one with the trust mark and one without, to evaluate the performance of both.  

When you are starting your online store, there are a number of factors that you must keep in mind in order for it to be successful. Let us look at some of them here:

Your products must be attractive and so should the market

The products that you are selling in your online store must be well-positioned and have a universal appeal. At the same time, it is also important to identify the market you want to cater to so that you understand exactly who your audience is. The advantage of selling online is the fact that you can reach a large audience and as a result of that, you can understand how consumers feel about your products, thereby proposing attractive prices.

 

Attracting visitors to your website is key

When you employ various marketing tools such as SEO, email marketing, keyword advertising, you are then in a position to undertake activities that will only propel your business further. When you are in a position where you can web-control, you can also decide which marketing action you need to take where.

 

Couple conversion with the benefits of greater usability

When you are designing your online shop, it is extremely important to keep your design strategy in complete sync with eventually converting the consumers. There are a few aspects that you must focus on in order to create a more responsive shop for your customers. Some of them include:

• A fully transparent product offer-This is something that can be extremely misleading for the consumer and it is imperative to get your communication right.
• Well-optimized keywords– This essentially means that while you are optimizing your shop with the right kind of keywords, it is important to focus on search functionality: this means that people should get what they are searching for.
• Building reassurance– It is important to understand that an online shop is an unknown territory for a customer, he is visiting your shop hoping to find authenticity and it is important to keep enough references in order to eliminate any suspicions. References could be in the form of trusted seals and marks which will go a long way in building credibility.
• Customer Service is key– Once you have converted a customer, it is imperative to ensure that you provide quality customer service. If you want to keep a customer loyal, one of the things you should be doing is ensuring that payments are made on time and are done correctly. Delivery should be impeccable. Provide regular shipping status. These are all things that go a long way in ensuring that your customers stay loyal.