With the online marketplace getting increasingly crowded by the day, there’s cut-throat competition amongst the existing players. So, online retailers employ different tactics to stay ahead of the crowd and be successful. They also need to avoid errors that can prove detrimental to their business.
If you’re finding it challenging to figure out which of your approaches is wrong and how you can rectify it, we’ve got you covered in this blog. Read on to gain insights into the top ten e-commerce marketing mistakes in 2023.
Top 10 Ecommerce Marketing Mistakes Businesses Need to Avoid
With today’s generation being spoiled a lot for choice, it becomes more and more crucial for e-commerce businesses to avoid all possible marketing mistakes. So, here is the list of the top ten e-commerce marketing mistakes for you to know and prevent.
1. Choosing the wrong e-commerce platform
Today’s technological advancements have made available a range of e-commerce platforms. However, each of those isn’t the same. They are different in their features, functionalities, design, pricing, security, server use, upgrades, and maintenance. While some platforms offer only the basic features, there are others with high-end features and scalability.
And while some come with straightforward pricing, others involve many hidden and hefty pricing. Study the best e-commerce platforms available. Choose one that would best suit your needs and budget and would grow along with your business. If you find that you’re using the wrong one, migrate to a more appropriate one.
2. Unattractive website design
Your website is the online face of your business. So, it’s extremely vital to build a site that impresses its visitors and delivers a great customer experience. Invest money, efforts, and time into putting forward the best possible light. Hire the best developers, designers, and content writers.
They’ll ensure that your website loads fast, its contents are highly visible, it’s seamless to navigate, responsive, and looks professional. Besides, hiring experts saves you time and money and gives you a marketing edge.
Customers use the popup feature to embed Instagram live feeds on websites that add credibility and fresh, topical content.
3. Not investing in security
To attract customers, any business needs to appear credible. One of the most vital things to ensure in this regard is your site’s security. Else, it can lead to devastating effects. For, in an e-commerce business, customers would have to part with sensitive information such as credit card details, bank information, and more.
Making your site secure will help avert infected links, phishing scams, and financial fraudulence. Use HTTPS, SSL certificates, and antivirus software to foolproof your site against any potential malicious attacks.
4. Poor understanding of target audience
As an e-commerce business, you need to completely understand your consumers before developing a sales strategy. When you know who they are, what their pain points are, where they spend their time online, what are their relevant desires, and more, you’ll be able to appeal to them better through more targeted campaigns.
Begin by creating customer personas that include the common attributes of your audience. This should include factors such as gender, age, organizational role, income, and more. Use polls, web surveys, etc. to collect feedback directly from your subscribers and visitors. Additionally, use social media listening tools to learn how users are engaging with your brand.
5. Not being mobile-friendly
As soon as you launch your e-store, you should ensure it works seamlessly on mobile. People nowadays spend a lot of time on their smartphones shopping online. You’ll end up losing a lot of opportunities to your competitors if you aren’t mobile-friendly. An e-store will gain popularity only if it’s responsive and offers a seamless experience across all devices.
So, if you choose to use one of the third-party platforms for your e-store, choose one that has good navigation features and allows a great user experience. And if you’re creating your site, optimize it to be mobile-friendly.
6. Creating your own e-commerce CMS
While some e-commerce businesses might be fascinated by the idea of creating their content management system (CMS) to suit their preferences and needs, we don’t recommend it. For, besides being difficult to create, it can lead to a lot of other issues including:
- Lack of integration with other software.
- The features in it may turn out to be inadequate.
- Securing it can be quite difficult.
- You’ll need to train your staff on it.
So, go for an existing CMS platform.
7. Poor customer service
An e-commerce platform would have to perform numerous transactions with customers daily. There are chances of frictions arising in various aspects of those. That’s why you need a dedicated customer service department to tactfully handle those. We suggest that you include both human staff and AI chatbots for this purpose.
While chatbots can be allocated the task of resolving basic inquiries, the delicate and challenging ones. This way, you can affordably operate your customer service round-the-clock.
8. Lack of user-generated content (UGC)
People look to the recommendations, opinions, experiences, etc. of former customers for determining whether a brand, its products, and/or services will suit them. This holds more true for e-commerce businesses as the prospect or customer doesn’t get to see the actual product/service physically before buying it.
So, incorporate a provision for customers to leave reviews and ratings of each product they buy from your platform. This will act as social proof of your offerings. Work well to get good ratings and reviews. However, even if you get some negative reviews, don’t worry. For, these also let other customers know that your site is genuine, thereby, increasing e-commerce sales.
9. Similar Product Descriptions
Don’t use the product descriptions provided by your suppliers. For, suppliers usually give the same descriptions to all their retailers. When search engines see the same description given at multiple sites, they’ll be confused.
If your product description is identical to that of your competitors and they rank better than you, it would negatively impact your brand reputation, and beating them would simply be impossible. So, provide value to your audience and your site itself by writing your product descriptions. This holds for page titles too. Ensure that you have a unique page title for all your pages.
10. Poor quality of images on the site
Customers of online businesses rely a lot on the images uploaded on their websites. So, post high-quality images of products and services on your e-commerce platform. Avoid pixelated product images. Use only HD images with excellent clarity.
Hire an experienced and professional photographer. He’ll have an adequate understanding of the product background, editing, and lighting.
Bottom Line
Running an e-commerce store isn’t an easy thing. But with good knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, you can ace it. The topmost aspects you need to know are the common e-commerce mistakes. That’ll help you avoid them, and thereby, avert potential devastations to your business. Hope you were enlightened by the e-commerce marketing mistakes we discussed in this blog. Stay away from these to grow and prosper your e-commerce business.
