Imagup General Magazine 2024
When owning e-commerce, implementing an online marketing strategy is absolutely necessary in order to attract and retain customers on our website, and by far, more affordable than offline marketing. saleslayer.com is excellent in facilitating e-commerce businesses with useful resources.
However, offline marketing is frequently forgotten by online businesses, and this is a big mistake. Marketing your product in the physical world is especially useful to attract new customers since it is a way to gain their trust to purchase from us: marketing offline will attract both new, and current customers back into our online store.
Online businesses that are unknown to the customers generate mistrust unless we’ve heard that a friend or another trusted source bought the products before us. In fact, 40% of online purchases are initiated offline and followed online, while 60% of them are only made after a word of mouth recommendation. This is why having the customer believe in us enough to make that first purchase is so essential, and this is when offline marketing comes into play.
Take good product images
Working on taking good product images will for sure take you a lot of effort and time which is worth it if you want good customer satisfaction and results. You should also look into the post production of photos where photo editing plays a vital role. Photo editing images from UK Clipping Path gives you affordable yet excellent expertise on work like clipping path services and more. You can find out more about their services here.
Offline marketing is also great to create omnichannel experiences in an effort to not only attract new customers but also retain our current ones, and invite them to spend more. In this post, we’ll talk about several recommendations to succeed in your online business by making some smart offline moves.
Ideas to promote your online business offline
Make a Business Catalog
Even though online catalogs are extremely practical, cheaper, and have a higher reach, offline catalogs have better response rates than online catalogs do. According to Info Trends, 4.4% of those who receive catalogs visit the online store while online catalogs have a low response rate of only 0.12%.
Catalogs are usually given in events or directly mailed to the customer. Pay attention to a few aspects when producing catalogs:
Insert call of actions
Call of actions is an important push to drive people into our online store; a discount code is an example of an incentive for readers to visit us online.
Include QR codes
Remember that people are busy, so we need to make it as easy for them as possible to visit a store they’ve never heard of. In this case, I recommend that you implement a QR code in the catalogs in order to facilitate visits. Additionally, showing QR codes is a great way to measure response rates in offline catalogs.
By the way, I suggest getting creative with QR codes in your offline marketing strategy: they are usually found in business cards and in catalogs, but you can think out of the box and implement them anywhere!
Design
Make sure the catalog is visually attractive in terms of design. The easiest is to externalize the production by looking for a company that specializes in manufacturing them. Otherwise, you could find a graphic designer and organize the printing.
Use Guerilla Marketing
Perhaps the best of offline marketing is Guerilla marketing. This type of advertising uses creative and fun ways to promote a brand by gaining the attention and interest of anyone who catches an eye on the ad. It’s generally much less costly than buying a publicity space, and way more effective.
Guerilla marketing techniques involve utilizing heavily transited areas and using existing elements that can relate to the intended promotion. For example, McDonald’s created several paintings of their famous french fries in the streets utilizing zebra crossings as part of the fries. Ain’t that genius?
Remember, that if your goal is to drive new customers into the website, you should include the call of actions that will make that possible.
Attend Events in your field
Your brand should be present in events where potential partners and customers can be obtained. Here, elements like catalogs and business cards should be taken advantage of. So, Identify key events in your field and participate!
Keep in mind that offline marketing efforts can be used in events to obtain the customer’s online information. You could, for example, make a ruffle to encourage people to share their email address.
Online and offline strategies should complement each other
Having a perfect balance between offline and online strategies is the best way to amplify your customer base and retain your current customers. Offline efforts bring in many advantages, especially when it comes to promoting e-commerce. Remember, getting someone to trust a new product offline is way easier than doing it online.
If you want to go a step further, go fully omnichannel. The key is to always keep the customer at the center, this way all our actions will be seamlessly connected in order to provide the best customer experience.
Planning an online marketing strategy for your eCommerce business can be a tough task and it can require a lot of focus and attention to detail (if you need inspiration from the most popular Shopify stores, take a look at this article from Trend.io). You need to plan it from the bottom to the top. Most of the times, new businesses struggle a lot while trying to get name recognition so it’s essential for your first marketing campaign to be an effective one as it can make or break your startup.
Tada, one of the Shopify pop-up apps, has recently released the ultimate guide to planning your digital marketing campaign. Have a look it’s full of crucial information that you can’t miss!
