Thursday, January 16, 2014

HOW TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN E-COMMERCE

As you may know, online retail sales in 2013 are predicted to reach $262 billion — a rise of 13 percent over 2012’s $231 billion in online sales ( according to Forrester research)
Online selling is pervasive in today business and one vital factor constributing to this is social media. 
If you are still a stranger, you should aware that social media can be a powerful tool for the betterment of your e-commerce site.




 Let’s start with the Social Media topic with some basic essential tips:
1. Set your goals
One of the main mistakes e-commerce companies make is not having clear goals for their desire. 
In fact, If you don’t set goals, how will you measure the results of your social media campaigns?
Before you spend the time creating a Facebook fan base, it's a good choice to sit down and consider exactly  what  you want.
 The answers maybe different among companies, but most of them involve the following:
  • Increase brand awareness
  • Offer more responsive customer service
  • Increase sales 
  • Encourage customer loyalty and repeat businesses
  • Stay ahead of your rivals
  • Build a network of brand advocates
  • Expand your network to new customers 

Make sure your goals are realistic and try to find out helpful tools to reach your goals faster and take use of them to compete with your rivals
For example, to increase sales, make sure that your site run efffectively. Firstly, take care of your menu -one of the most essential parts of a website. It is expected to include all necessary information and navigate the users to major pages of the website,  it's a wise choice to take use of Magento Mega menu, and Magento Slicesshow to display all categories or whatever content on a mouse-over without going through cumbersome steps so
Moreover, you also should consider you Checkout process, whether they are running well or not?
As you may know, on average abandoned cart rate is over 66%? Many customers abandon online shopping at the checkout page due to a complicated process. Thus, we recommend you should improve it now by using One Step Checkout extension to  help your customers to check out faster. With Magento One Step Checkout you don't have to worry that your customers may leave you to your competitors
Secondly, to open your network to new customers you can use Daily Deals Magento Extension which allow you to setup countdown timer for daily deal, weekly deal or for any time period you want easily

2. Understand your customers
Before jumping into social media, take the time to understand your customers. 
What type of content do they prefer? 
Taking the time to plan out your social media strategy to avoid wasting time on social channels that your customers don’t see as valuable.

3. Offer attractive content regularly
Customers will only stay involved in your e-commerce business if you continually keep sharing worthy content.Most customers who befriend your company are hoping for exclusive discounts, coupons, or special offers that you don’t offer elsewhere. They may also be interested in new product launches, special announcements, and behind-the-scenes pictures and videos of your company.
Make your social media accounts interesting and fun. Start conversations with your customers—don’t just promote yourself. Show genuine interest in your customers as real people, and they prefer see your brand as human rather than as just a business.

4. Combine social media with other forms of marketing
If your social media marketing is separated from other forms of online and traditional marketing, you’re missing out. The best way to build your social media is to include links to your social sites on your website. The more options you give customers to interact with your brand,  the closer you’ll be to reaching your social media marketing goals.

5. Measure the results
As with any marketing campaign, you need to measure the results in order to fingure out what worked and what did not. Are you getting better? If not,change your strategy and start over. The only way to know if social media marketing deserve your time and effort is to measure the data and see the results.
Obviously, different online stores will have different strategies in making use of social channels. However, above are 5 basic tips that every e-store owner should know. We hope those tips will be useful for you.
One of the most powerful tools we recommend is Magento advanced report to help you have a perfect solution for your reporting.
                                                      sources: http://ecommerce-software-review.toptenreviews.com

1 comment:

  1. Use social media sharing button on your site so that your customer or visitor share your product & services among the people.

    ReplyDelete