What is Inbound Marketing?
The most important thing that needs to be understood in an e-commerce business is that most of the people are in exploration stage. Online audience is in research mode. Before taking any final decision they might visit hundreds of websites and that too not even guarantee purchase. So, in this case Inbound Marketing is an essential tool as it is a pulling effect for your business. Thus, it becomes important to move customers to the stage of buying.
Need of Inbound marketing
Inbound marketing is a way of personalizing communications with your audience. As the competition among e-commerce businesses in increasing, e-commerce marketing has shifted from simple product promotion to creating strong communicative relation with customers. Thus it becomes significant to decide the stage in which customer is, and to trace his digital footprints to shift them to buying stage.
E-commerce Inbound Methodology
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Attract your Audience
Spreading awareness is the very first step towards any business. To make people buy your product or service you need to make them familiar with your service/product. This can be done by various methods called reach building ways
Following are the reach building ways to aware people about service or product
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Search Engine Optimization
In simple words use all the techniques to optimize your e-commerce business to rank high on google. SEO techniques include Keyword research, content optimization, On page optimization, off page optimization , link building and much more. Get all these things right and keep yourself updated with Google algorithms to rank high on Google. This will increase your visibility among audience and thus attract more people to your e-commerce business.
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Search Engine Marketing
It is one of the way of ranking high on Google among ads and this method is paid. This also requires keyword research and proper techniques to make your ad rank high on Google. Here the budget is decided and each time viewer pay on your ad on Google, then you have to pay for it. This is also one of the significant method to come into focus among your relevant audience.
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Blogging & Creating communities on Social Media
Social Media & blogs play a huge role to attract audience now a days. Therefore, it is very important to show your presence on these platform as it will attract audience at a bigger scale.
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Email Opt-ins
Subscriptions or asking for information like email ids whenever visitor visits your e-commerce website helps you get implicit permission of the audience and one can easily build credible relationship with their audiences through email.
2. Conversion Optimization
It is the process of creating outstanding experience for your visitors on your website to convert them into customers. Conversion can occur in various forms and is basically different for every site. For example, for a blog site conversion rate will be a subscription, for an e-commerce business conversion rate will be sales and so on.
There are different ways for conversion optimization:
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Segmenting your customers
All visitors on your website can not be clubbed under same category and are in at different levels. Inbound marketer need to understand the psychology of the customers and then provide them with the needed resources. For an instance, some people land on your website from other resources and do not have any intention to buy. Some may come to compare it from other website or few might have an urgency to buy. Therefore, it is important to segment your customers and to provide them credible resources based on the stage in which they have reached.
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Design
Design plays an important role in conversion. With A/B testing for two different landing pages you can see which landing page will help more in conversion. Design will include colour, spacing, allignment and page layout too. There are various free tools for A/B testing that can help in creating bets landing pages for your website.
3. Nurturing leads
Lead nurturing is a substantial part of inbound marketing. In order to make a strong relationship with potential buyers, this part of marketing becomes important as it self educate the potential buyers and helps in building the trust with the company.
Lead nurturing tactics
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Targeted content
Based on the stage of customers it becomes essential to feed them with the right content in order to push them close to sales journey. This step can increase the sales by more than 20%.
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Multi-channel lead nurturing
Most of the time email sent to inbox are not opened up so it becomes important to look for alternatives.
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Timely contact with customers
It is really important to contact the customers in short period of time to convert them into leads.
- Personalised emails
Personalised emails are better in generating leads as compare to non personalised emails.
Thus, Inbound marketing if used properly can increase sales and take your business to very high position. Brands like Nike, Dominos, Dunkin Donuts use Inbound methodology cogently and hence are the results.
Conclusion
Inbound marketing plays a crucial role in your online business. It helps you by attracting visitors toward your website, and turn them into sales. Thus, to get an in-depth understanding of Inbound Marketing, join our Inbound Marketing Course.
Pic Credits: Hubspot Blog
