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How to Adjust your ECommerce Marketing Strategy During Coronavirus

June 26, 2020 / 4 minute read / By Robert Josefs

According to the Digital Economy Index (DEI), eCommerce shopping levels during COVID-19 (April to May) were higher than what retailers saw during the 2019 holiday season (November to December). While this may come as no surprise since many brick & mortar stores were closed or facing limited hours due to safety restrictions, many experts are predicting this shift to online ordering to be permanent, even as stores reopen, making this the time to adjust your eCommerce marketing strategy.

If you are a retailer who does not currently have an eCommerce presence now is the time to consider options to ensure you are ready for the 2020 holiday season and beyond. If you are already selling online, but haven’t seen your eCommerce sales increase in recent months it may be time to tweak your eCommerce marketing strategy.

Email Marketing

Utilizing email marketing is essential to growing your eCommerce business, there is no more cost-effective tool than targeted, automated, email marketing. Using details from the eCommerce POS system, you can schedule welcome emails, promotional emails, and newsletters. The more you are able to customize these emails to be relevant to an individual customer, the better your return will be on email marketing.

Your email marketing should also take into consideration that customer retention is critical to the success of your online store. Repeat customers tend to be more profitable than one-off purchasers. The email marketing strategy can be used to build a relationship with first-time customers and increase their likelihood of returning.

To collect email details and the client’s consent, you can use the Cumulus Retail POS system that has a field for email during checkout. The Cumulus Retail system includes a checkbox for the customers to give their permission for you to use the email in the future. Needless to say, email marketing is a worthwhile investment to boost and adjust your eCommerce marketing strategy during the coronavirus!

Download eBook: Email Marketing 101

Utilize Social Media

Social media usage has skyrocketed during the pandemic, the New York Times reported traffic to facebook.com up 27% since the pandemic. If you aren’t already utilizing social media now is the perfect time to start, your customers are already there. Growing your audience on social media is a great way to reach your customers, allowing you to showcase new products, store hours, and promotions free of charge and drive traffic directly to your eCommerce website. This is a great adjustment to your eCommerce marketing strategy that can be fun and engaging for you and your customers.

You can also utilize social media platforms as an advertising platform. No other channel offers the targeting possibilities that social media does. You can choose to serve ads based on a user’s age, geography, interests, previous web searches, and more. This targeting not only allows you to reach the people most likely to buy from your store but also allows you to scale your advertising spend up and down based on the size of the audience you choose and return the ads bring you.

Cross-Channel Promotions and Customer Incentives

A cross-channel marketing strategy focuses on increasing sales in all the channels you sell in both online an in-store. Offering promotions, loyalty rewards, coupons and gift cards that work both in store and online helps increase brand loyalty by allowing customers to shop the way they want to shop. With a POS system that supports integrated eCommerce the management of these promotions is seamless across all the channels that you sell, making it an easy adjustment to your eCommerce marketing strategy.

Promote to All Customers and Leverage Existing Customers

The returning customers might be profitable through recurrent purchases, but the best customers are those who utilize the different channels you offer for shopping. These multi-channel customers are the most loyal to the brand. They may use the conventional way of reviewing products on your websites and then post referral links in social media.

In eCommerce business, these are the ideal customers to court. Therefore, when you merge the components of your business by integrating a POS system to manage the multichannel promotion, you are bound to increase brand loyalty. Cross-channel promotion will also promote customer retention and attract new customers.

To attain success in eCommerce, strategic marketing is key. In online marketing implementing specific tools such as CMS and POS systems will ensure consistency and reliability in the customer experience across platforms. The POS system will ensure seamless integration of the online and in-store marketing strategies. In conjunction with all this, embrace robust digital strategies such as SEO and online reviews for best results.