Have you just created an online store and are looking for the right strategy to get your first sales?

Or is your online store sales not growing for a long time?

In the article, we have collected the experience of the Livepage team in the digital promotion of online stores.

We covered the main channels: SEO, contextual advertising, email marketing, SMM, working with aggregators, media advertising.

This article was written by 5 practitioners who deal with the promotion of online stores on a daily basis.

It is important to clarify that the article did not touch upon such channels as radio and television. Although they are also digital marketing tools.

Who will benefit from longread

The guide will be useful for both novice entrepreneurs and owners of profitable online stores.

It will help to draw up the right strategy for promoting a store on the Internet, to select effective sales channels at different stages of business development.

Feel free to add the article to your favorites. We tried for you.

Worked on this article:

Article author: Oksana Artyushenko
Article editors: Mikhail Shcherbachev, Alexey Andrusenko
PPC, SMM, and Email blocks wrote: Pavel Khazov, Ekaterina Grechko, Sergey Shcherbakov, Victoria Proshnichenko

1 The most popular Digital channels for an online store

The most popular digital channels for attracting users to an online store are arranged in the order of their use:

• paid advertising in search engines - Search Engine Marketing (SEM or);
• free search traffic - ;
• price aggregators and marketplaces;
• sales via mailing lists - ;
• coverage of information about the store in online publications, PR and writing guest articles (content marketing);
• social networks - Social Media Marketing (SMM);
• different types of content marketing (advertising with bloggers, on Youtube, special projects, etc.).

2 Quick sales after launch

This will sound strange.

For many business owners, it becomes a revelation that the store itself does not generate a sale.

Even if you spent a large budget on creating a store, you got confused about a beautiful design - this does not guarantee sales in the first month after the start.

To get a quick and effective result, you need to follow a simple rule:

• First we plan promotion.
• Then we make the site according to the created plan.
• We launch the site and get quick results.

3 Preparatory stage for a quick start of sales

Before starting any work with the store, it is necessary to determine the competitiveness of the niche and the activity of competitors.

Important!

Select products or product categories that you could rely on at the start of sales.

Determine the traffic channels that will give you the best conditions on the way to self-sufficiency.

To optimize the budget at the start, select the main promotion region where you will promote priority products.

The note: You may know that the largest online retailers started out selling specific products. The outlet started with the sale of laptops, Amazon - with the sale of books.

At this stage, it is worth analyzing:

• products with high demand and good margins that you can earn on. When choosing products, it is also desirable to take into account competition. Will you be able to compete on the basis of these products in the market?
• market share held by competitors.
• marketing channels and strategies that competitors use to promote products.
• competitive advantages of your business and offer - what makes you stand out from other similar stores.
• objective weaknesses that may hinder your progress.
• main groups of potential clients, their portraits.
• basic principles for choosing your product group: fears and concerns when choosing a store to buy; customer problems that he wants to solve with your product / offer; the main points of the offer that may be of interest to buyers, etc.

All collected information can be visualized in different ways for a better understanding of the business.

The Lean Canvas model is effective for visualizing information

For the main business proposal, the Value Proposition Canvas information presentation model, which is shown in the picture below, is effective.

The information collected during the preparatory phase will help in promoting your business and will be useful to contractors in developing a promotion strategy.

Important! The quality of execution of the preparatory stage affects the effectiveness of the strategies for attracting traffic, compiled in the future.

Offer and its importance

A quality offer is a stumbling block in all business niches. Since the Internet market is already filled with competitors, and the consumer chooses between different offers, and does not buy in the first store that he opened in the search.

Regardless of which channel you choose to attract buyers to the site, users will evaluate your offer in many ways.

Many store owners believe that the only parameter by which the user evaluates the offer is this is the price.

Price is an important characteristic of an offer, but not everything is limited to it.

Other characteristics play an important role in the offer:

• terms of payment
  • Is it possible to buy on credit?
  • Is there an interest free loan?
  • Is there an installment plan from a particular bank?
• delivery terms
  • whether an advance payment is required when sending to another city or cash on delivery is possible;
  • whether the store cooperates with the right transport company - which is important for small settlements where the possibility of delivering goods is limited.
• purchase terms
  • is there a pick-up point or showroom in the given city;
  • whether they give a gift with the purchase;
  • Is there a bonus program?
• having the best service offer
  • better quality of service;
  • better warranty conditions;
  • hassle-free exchange and return of goods;
    and so on.
• store credibility
• availability of complete information about the product with videos, reviews and reviews
• range.

When compiling an offer, it is very important to take a sober look at the strengths and weaknesses of your own business, as well as the portrait of the audience of your store.

Imagine that you are the owner of a new home appliance store. Nobody knows anything about your brand. The price of the goods is the same as in other stores. Accordingly, you are unlikely to be ordered by people who care about the lowest price in the region, or those who take goods exclusively from reputable and trusted stores.

However, you have a showroom in a particular city, where many stores do not have representation. For users who want to see the product live, hold it in their hands or pick up an order in the showroom, having an offline store can be a powerful argument in favor of buying from you. And these will be your first customers.

Different store buyers will be interested in different features of the offer.

Therefore, the characteristics of the offer should be chosen taking into account the portrait of your client, his fears and problems. It should be of interest only to a potential client.

You know that the target audience of your home appliance store is people who have a bank card and a good credit history in the bank. Customers do not want to pay for the entire purchase at once in the store.

They are willing to pay the market average or slightly overpriced, but only in installments. You understand that this audience is interested in a certain list of products, and major competitors in this region do not have such offers. Based on this, you offer a group of products with interest-free installments. Your customers will be interested in such an offer.

Well-written offer is a solution to the problem of the client through the purchase of goods from you. For the correct preparation of the offer, it is very important to understand:

• Who is your potential client?
• What are his problems?
• What are his fears associated with the purchase?
• How does he solve his problem now?
• Are there alternative offers from direct competitors?

Having all the necessary information, you can easily come up with an offer that will hook your target audience. Your unique offer will be reflected on the pages of your store and will turn its visitors into buyers. All you have to do is bring visitors to your site.

Technical edits

The modern user is accustomed to a wide variety of sites that load quickly, are conveniently displayed on mobile devices, are intuitive and have functional required to select products.

If your online store is not like that, then users will leave his without making a purchase, and advertising budgets will be wasted.

Technical audit - search for possible problems in the functionality of the online store that may affect the effectiveness of the resource when promoted on each of the advertising channels. A number of recommendations for correction may coincide, despite the fact that each of these channels has its own characteristics of work and requirements for the site.

So, for many digital channels, the following will be important:

• high site loading speed;
• the correct operation of the functionality for the order;
• ease of use and correct display of the online store on mobile devices;
• correct setting of analytics systems;
• hosting resiliency;
• the presence of the correct adaptive layout on the site.

• availability of static URLs for filters;
• correct work of URLs with utm, gclid and yclid tags;
• no redirects on landing pages.

And for SEO promotion are very important:

• no duplicate pages on the site;
• the correctness of the formation of URLs;
• no internal technical errors;
  the presence of micro-markup on the pages;
• compliance of the site with the recommendations of the Yandex and Google search engines described in the help;
• correct notification of search robots about the language versions of the site.

If you send transactional emails to clients and plan to engage in email marketing in the future, make sure that your DKIM/SPF/DMARC records in DNS are correct so that your emails do not end up in the recipients' Spam folder.

To work with other digital promotion channels, additional technical changes to the store may also be required, since each digital channel has its own minimum requirements for effective operation.

So, for price aggregators, it is necessary to automatically generate a special xml or yml price file with prices and products that will be used by sites to display information about the store's assortment.

SEO check list for online store 14 most working points

4 Development of the structure of the product catalog

The structure of an online store is an important component of a successful integrated store promotion. It should be convenient and clear for the user how to use your catalog.

• make it easier for the user to search for goods and information in the catalog;
• make the use of the site intuitive;
• attract more traffic from search engines with SEO and PPC - the structure should include all landing pages that can receive traffic from search;
• simplify the accounting of turnover and analysis of sales statistics.

When compiling the structure of the site, the principles of thematic classification of information (transition from general to more specific concepts), search queries on the topic and user convenience when searching for the necessary information are taken into account.

Since in some topics thematic classification for finding the right products is inconvenient, the site may have different ways of classifying and structuring the same products so that the user finds them faster.

In this case, one of the classifiers can be main, and the rest auxiliary.

Drawing up the structure of the site is a laborious and time-consuming process of processing information about the business, its subsequent structuring and visualization. Without special training, there is a high probability of error (missing categories, excessive nesting depth, etc.).

Important! It is better to entrust the creation of the structure of an online store to professionals, since the subsequent elimination of errors in its implementation requires significant time and financial costs.

As part of SEO and PPC work, the existing site structure is checked, changes and options for creating the necessary landing pages are recommended, based on the semantic core. Without such fixes, attracting quality traffic to the site with good conversion rates will be problematic.

Site traffic is the flow (number) of visitors to a particular site for a certain period of time. Conversion is a site performance indicator that tells how many users have taken the target action (placed an order on the site, subscribed to the newsletter, etc.).

5 First sales

Depending on the niche of the store and competition, different channels and methods of attracting first sales can be chosen.

It’s better to rely on the features of each channel, taking into account your niche. Only after carefully weighing the pros and cons, you can choose the appropriate channel options and respectively distribute the budget.

For example, with a limited promotion budget to get the first traffic and orders start with paid advertising.

The use of SEO promotion should be delayed for 2-3 months so that additional advertising budgets appear. Since the effectiveness of search engine optimization can be assessed only after 4-6 months of constant work.

First sales from contextual advertising

For many online stores, setting up paid search engine advertising (SEM) is a good jump to first sales. Using this sales channel, you can quickly (5-7 days or more) set up advertisements and immediately attract targeted visitors to the site.
The speed of receiving the first purchases depends on a number of factors:

• Decision-making time - the longer it is, the longer it will take to wait for the first results.
• The volume of purchased traffic - the smaller the volume of purchased traffic at the start, the longer it will take to wait for the first purchases;
• Offer - if your offer is not competitive, then there will be practically no conversions, despite a good amount of traffic to the site.

Since all these variables are very individual, it is impossible to accurately indicate the volumes and timing of the first sales.

At the same time, it can be argued that contextual advertising will work for stores that sell popular products.

The main thing is to use contextual advertising correctly in order to get a positive effect in the form of profit, and not in the form of spent budget and disappointment. Depending on the competition, niche and budgets, different methods are used to attract the first buyers to the site.

With a limited budget for promotion in a very competitive topic - electronics, it is important to start promotion not with broad requests (such as buying a laptop), but with narrow ones.

Broad queries can bring a lot of visitors to the site, but at the same time they have high competition, cost per click to the site and low conversion. And narrower queries, such as article numbers and product names, in themselves bring few visitors. However, due to the large number of such requests, the volume of users who have moved to the site can be quite significant. At the same time, such requests generally have low competition, the cost of a user going to the site, and high conversion.

Effective queries to start in this topic are queries like: products and articles (for example, ASUS X550ZE-XX216T), combinations of “product type + brand + feature” (asus intel core i5 laptop), etc.

A similar technique when setting up the context will allow you to achieve successful first sales even in a little-known store with a minimal budget. Then, gradually increasing advertising budgets, you can switch to broader queries with greater reach. When contextual advertising starts to pay off, you can further increase the advertising budget, attract other digital channels, such as SEO.

Benefits of contextual advertising

• Short time for setting up and putting into action - setting up and launching an advertising campaign will take from 7 days, depending on the volume of your online store.
• The ability to quickly make changes - when you get the first data, you can make changes to increase conversions and traffic quality.
• The need for minimal software changes to the online store. Amendments may be needed only in case of serious technical difficulties.
• The ability to work with a heated audience that has already visited your site, or make additional sales to your customers using remarketing tools.
• Flexible settings for maximum exposure to the target audience - the ability to create personalized offers by device type, gender, age, region of residence, etc.
• Detailed analysis of the results is possible.
• Get to the top of the search results quickly. See screenshot below:

You have an online store of natural cosmetics with a lot of technical errors. You want to drive customers to your site with SEO.
But you don’t know if investments in SEO promotion will give enough sales to pay off the entire project as a whole. In addition, it takes time to correct technical errors on the site; with standard promotion, this will lead to a delay in obtaining the first results.

Therefore, you can first order an SEO audit, which will prepare the site for SEO promotion, and does not require monthly payments for promotion.
To test a niche for sales volume and get quick results, you can run contextual advertising, which will immediately attract the first customers and allow you to estimate the size of the niche.

Disadvantages of contextual advertising

• It requires fixed costs for the advertising budget, which depends on the size of the niche and the number of your product offerings.
• Contextual advertising in the search network will be effective only if there is a generated demand for the store's products. In the case where there is no demand, you can use display ads or Youtube ads, but the conversion may be lower.
• In some niches, the auction in search engines is so heated that, given the existing high the price of a click advertising will not pay for itself.
• PPC systems have a number of limitations. For some niches, such as pharmaceuticals, finance, political advertising, and others, advertising is limited or completely prohibited.
• Requires constant monitoring and adjustments due to dynamically changing conditions.

First sales from a free search (search engine promotion of an online store)

After creating an online store, owners very often begin to invest in the SEO channel - in the hope of reaching the TOP 10 for the main queries within 2–5 months.

They expect that after such investments they will quickly reach the level of self-sufficiency, and they expect to never depend on advertising budgets for contextual advertising.

This opinion is very often wrong. Every year, bringing a site to the TOP is becoming more and more difficult due to the improvement of search engine algorithms and increasing competition.

The minimum terms for SEO-promotion of an online store to the stage of obtaining the first sales have increased up to 4–6 months. The terms for a store to become self-sufficient in competitive niches can be 9 months or more.

The minimum required promotion costs also increase every year and include:

• writing quality content;
• link building;
• technical improvements to the site (often a considerable expense item);
• SEO promotion services.

There are still niches where the first SEO results can be obtained fairly quickly. Especially if you are without access to the scale of the whole country. The main thing is that the region has a sufficient number of buyers of your product, and you have a quality offer.

You are the owner of a local online store of branded decorative plaster. The niche is quite competitive, very narrow and has a pronounced seasonality.

Compared to household appliances, the competition in decorative plasters is much lower. Most competitors focus on more frequent categorical queries that bring in more visitors but convert worse.

The entire focus of promotion should be directed to products and develop high-quality content with the most complete and comprehensive information on products. Products have little traffic, but sell better. Especially within the region where the store is located. This will allow you to get the first results within about 3 months. Gradually occupying the TOP in all product offers, you can move on to the development of categories and get even more visitors to the site. An example of such growth is shown in the chart below.

As part of SEO promotion services, the following work will be carried out from the first months:

• a detailed SEO audit of the store and the elimination of all detected technical flaws of the site;
• selection of key queries for store pages, if necessary, editing the existing site structure based on the collected key queries;
• writing and posting store content or editing it based on the collected key queries. First of all, these works are carried out for priority goods and product categories. Next comes the gradual scaling to the entire store. It makes sense to work with commodity items only in niches where there is really commodity traffic (for example, household appliances and electronics). In niches where there is no product traffic (for example, clothing and building materials), the main work will be carried out with product categories;
• adding a store to search engine optimization company information in these tools;
• implementation of an optimal system for linking pages of the site;
• creating content for the store blog;
• link building.

SEO Benefits

Advantages of SEO-promotion of an online store as the first digital channel for attracting customers:

• compared to contextual advertising, this channel does not require a large infusion of money in the long run;
• in some niches, competitors are investing more money in contextual advertising than in SEO. This makes it easier to achieve the TOP search and each client attracted through this channel will cost less.

Read more about SEO promotion of an online store in the article:.

Disadvantages of SEO

Disadvantages of SEO promotion as the first digital channel to attract customers:

• in most niches, in order to achieve payback, it is necessary to invest in the development of the site from 6 to 12 months, i.e. this channel cannot quickly generate income;
• for high-quality promotion of an online store in competitive niches, it is often necessary to make many changes to the site by programmers;
• There will be free search traffic on the site only if there is a demand for the store's products. If there is no demand for the product, then more general and close requests will be attracted, which can convert very poorly and require large promotion costs;
• Change of search algorithms can significantly affect the position of the site. Today you can be TOP-1, and tomorrow even TOP-10;
• contextual advertising always occupies up to 4 first positions on the search page. Therefore, the 1st place of a free search can actually be the 5th place for a user, which can significantly reduce the number of transitions.

You are a little-known manufacturer of unusual cardboard construction sets and want to get sales from a free search.

There are no search queries for your constructors and brand. Promotion of an online store using SEO for general queries constructors And constructors for children- will be less effective. The competition for such requests is great, as is the assortment in children's stores. Such promotion requires large budgets. And it's unlikely to sell.

In this case, it is advisable to use for promotion: content marketing and PR, targeting (including CCM, YAN, Facebook, Vkontakte, etc.), video advertising (especially YouTube), social networks, offline advertising. In all these channels, you need to create demand for your own brand, but never try to do it using SEO.

First sales with email marketing

There are many things associated with email marketing. delusions, which is why the owners of online stores are in no hurry to implement this tool at the start of the project.

Here are some of them:

• Email marketing is spam, my clients will not be interested in my emails.
• To start implementing email marketing, you need to collect a large customer base, otherwise it will not be of any use.
• If I don't have my own base yet, I can buy it.
• Newsletters should be sent more often or, conversely, as rarely as possible.
• In mailing lists, you can only write about promotions and discounts.

Email marketing as a sales tool is actively developing and its two main trends are process automation, as well as the connection and use of additional channels of communication with customers (sms, web-push, Viber).

Additional channels can be used in bulk and trigger mailings, while information about all customer activity can be stored in one place. For example, you create a script for sending an email message, and then, if the client does not read it within a few days, send an sms or push with a reminder of the offer.

In general, the prefix email no longer determines the quality of this tool. To a greater extent, it is associated with the stage of marketing that begins after attracting a lead:

• converting a lead into a client;
• retention of new and current customers;
• targeted work with VIP clients;
• reactivation of departing customers;
• customer support and brand loyalty.

Basic steps at the start

The main steps to get started in email marketing are:

1. Organize the collection of the contact base through the subscription forms on the site. This will allow launching regular mass mailings in 5–6 months. It is better to use different forms on different pages of the site. For example, a widget on the main page, static forms in the body of blog articles, a pop-up window for users who leave the site. In order for pop-ups not to negatively affect the conversion of your site, you need to configure them to be shown only to users who have not previously subscribed or registered on the site, and are far from the target action during the current session.
2. For all forms, set up the double-opt-in procedure (double subscription confirmation) to protect your mailings from getting into spam.

Automation in email marketing

Automation in email marketing makes it certainly effective and versatile for any online store, regardless of whether you launched your project yesterday or a year ago. Of course, the larger your database, the more effective mailings (both bulk and triggered). But, the sooner you launch the main automatic campaigns, the better the base you collect will be, and the faster you can start earning.

Here are the main automatic email campaigns that you should set up for your online store after the launch of the project:

• A series of letters after subscribing to the newsletter / registration - we form loyalty, stimulate the first purchase.
• Post-purchase email series - since a purchase can be the first touch point, bypassing a subscription or registration, it is worth setting up an email series similar to the post-subscription email series for such customers so that they return to you again.
• Trigger email "Abandoned viewing" - reminds you of the viewed products, encourages you to buy.
• “Abandoned Cart” trigger email - we deal with the reason for the abandoned cart, stimulate the purchase.
• Trigger series "After purchase" - we take a review, offer products for the next most likely purchase.
• Reactivation letters for those who did not make purchases for 1/3/6/12 months - we return customers with tempting offers and discounts.
• Loyalty letters for VIP clients - we create a feeling of special care, provide a higher level of service.

Automatic emails will allow you to keep in touch with all subscribers and clients during the entire period while you are building a base for mass mailings.

Mass mailings (throughout the entire database or large segments) should be started when the costs of their development will pay off. If you prepare letters yourself based on ready-made templates and do not spend resources on a designer and layout designer, you can start with very small volumes, for example, 500 subscribers. If you want to involve a designer, layout designer and copywriter, it is optimal to start with a base of 3,000 contacts, then the investment will pay off.

You are the owner of an online store for handmade goods. The segment of experienced craftsmen who make regular purchases and already have preferences for brands and categories brings you the greatest income. For these customers, you can set up trigger emails to generate regular repeat sales by offering customized selections of products based on what those customers have bought before.

Newbies make up half of your target audience, but they bring in little to no revenue. Encourage them to sign up for a learning series of emails. This way you will increase the conversion of the subscription form, stimulate sales of goods that beginners need for learning, and help them move to the segment of experienced craftsmen that is most interesting to you.

Benefits of email marketing

Benefits of email marketing as the first digital customer acquisition channel:

• can be launched and will generate income in the early stages of the store;
• mandatory for use if you want to quickly build a database of contacts and not lose the interest of these people by the time mass mailings are launched;
• this is the cheapest marketing channel (on average - $2 per 1000 emails);
• trigger emails will allow you to build awareness and brand loyalty even before you launch bulk emails, which will reduce spam complaint rates once you start sending bulk emails.

Disadvantages of email marketing

Disadvantages of email marketing as the first digital customer acquisition channel:

• significant profit from this channel will appear only 3-4 months after the launch of trigger mailings and building up the contact base, at least up to 3000;
• this tool is most effective for those niches where regular repeat sales are possible - if a client can make only 1 purchase in several years, then your profit will depend only on the growth rate of the contact base;
• An important element of effective mailings is interesting content, so in niches with a very wide range, where it is difficult to use a universal content strategy, you can only bet on mailings about promotions and discounts.

You have an online store of luxury plumbing. Work only with retail clients. Most likely, one customer will make a purchase in your store only 1 time and may return in a few years.

The only actions that can be implemented in the field of email marketing are setting up a warming series, for example, after ordering a consultation or requesting a price download. The letters can be used to gradually reveal your advantages, talk about the benefits and work with the objections of a potential client, in accordance with your standard sales funnel.

The second point is setting up a post-sales series, with which you can collect reviews to attract new customers and help SEO promotion in updating content on the pages, as well as sell related products.

With the help of email marketing, you can increase conversions among a new audience, but you should not count on regular repeat sales from the old base.

First sales from social media

Social networks have now become so popular that they can no longer be ignored as a channel for sales and interaction with your audience. Depending on the purpose of the presence of an online store in social networks, SMM promotion strategies will differ.

There are the following goals for promoting an online store in social networks:

• sale of goods;
• attracting buyers based on the recommendations of other people;
• attracting a target audience that makes impulsive purchases of the “saw-bought” type;
• communication with the user (in fact, there are a lot of people who subscribe to social networks of stores to track news and subsequent purchases);
• creating a core of loyal audience that can be active, take part in contests and promotions, and also recommend the store to other users;
• brand development and promotion through communication with the audience, promotional materials, viral content, etc.

If we talk about the “First sales” stage in an online store, then, first of all, it will be sales and attracting the target audience in various ways that will make purchases. To achieve this at this stage, you can use:

• ordering advertising publications, holding joint contests and other advertising activities with industry bloggers, reviewers, opinion leaders to quickly grow your audience and attract sales;
• ordering advertising publications from groups and accounts with a large audience, through advertising exchanges and special services such as sociate.ru, plibber.ru, etc.;
• for emotional products, you can post photos on Instagram, dilute them with thematic photos and get the first sales from there.

Benefits of SMM

Advantages of SMM as the first digital channel to attract customers:

• allows you to quickly get the first orders, as well as contextual advertising;
• ease of management of advertising tools and quick receipt of changes when making changes to advertising campaigns;
• a wide variety of settings for advertising tools;
• a lot of statistical data for the analysis and optimization of advertising campaigns in the advertising account;
• you don’t need anything special to set up targeting - just time, a good offer and an advertising budget (in rare cases, a programmer or layout designer will come in handy; in especially rare cases, for example, when working with Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki networks, the ability to use parsers);
• Lots of options for detailed settings.

You have an online lingerie store - this is a very visual product that is important to see, and even better to feel before buying. An advertising campaign for such a product on social networks should be built on attracting attention to the brand with the help of promotional photos of various types (photos of the lingerie itself, models in lingerie and even sketches of lingerie), videos, advertising publications from social media bloggers, promotion of publications. The purpose of all this is to make users want to see in more detail and then buy.

You can create a group on Instagram, post all these photos there, run advertising campaigns and attract an audience from there. You can also attract an audience by promoting commercials, showing the product in dynamics.

Similarly, you can work with Facebook and other social networks, creating bright advertising offers with high-quality visual design.

Disadvantages of SMM

Disadvantages of SMM as the first digital channel to attract customers:

• as soon as you turn off ads, audience activity drops to 0;
• works with an audience that has the characteristics we need, and not with an audience with a generated request. Therefore, standard search contextual advertising has a higher conversion rate;
• will be effective only with a good offer;
• requires a constant investment of money in the case of working with advertising;
• may not be effective for advertising certain types of products. There are product groups whose target audience does not use social networks to find information about these products or does not buy online at all;
• like contextual advertising, SMM has a list of prohibitions and restrictions on topics, for example: pharmaceuticals, politics, gambling, sex-related products, etc.;
• requires constant attention from a specialist for adjustments, as your advertising may become annoying to the audience, which reduces its effectiveness, or changes in budgets may be necessary.

You are the owner of an online plumbing store and want to attract an audience from social networks to buy boilers or taps. You have ordered the setting of targeted advertising for men who may be interested in such products, and are waiting for purchases. However, they are practically non-existent. Despite the fact that the advertising itself is set up with high quality.

With a deeper analysis, you can find out that your target audience is chosen correctly, however, its representatives do not use social networks to select these products. They are interested in something completely different in social networks, for example, viewing photos of acquaintances, searching for funny videos, etc. When it comes time to choose a boiler or a tap, this audience will rather use search engines or go directly to a convenience store than remember your ads in in social networks. In this case, the use of the SMM channel at the start of work is ineffective.

First sales through price aggregators and marketplaces

Price aggregators and marketplaces allow you to show many offers from different stores for each item at once. In this case, the choice of the user is greatly facilitated. Examples of such projects are Yandex Market, Price.ua, Hotline and a number of others.

For online stores, price aggregators, on the one hand, are a way to quickly access a huge number of customers who, often, have already made their choice and are ready to part with their money.

On most of these sites, you pay for clicks to the site and the price is generally low, so you only pay for a ready-made client. However, on the other hand, in the face of a huge number of offers for each unit of goods, the buyer is likely to make a purchase in a store that will offer a competitive price, will have a high seller rating on this site and will give good delivery conditions.

Also, not all product categories in price aggregators have a huge number of customers, for example, the most popular products there are electronics, household appliances and computers. And it will be difficult to find customers for children's goods or furniture.

Despite everything said earlier, such platforms for an online store can be quite profitable even at the start, especially if the store has adequate market prices for the product and it works in popular aggregator topics.

To work with aggregators, you will either need to register an automatically updated price list of the company in the price aggregator, or integrate a special site module to your website. This will allow the following information to be transmitted to the site:

• Name of product;
• a short description of the product;
• stock availability;
• price;
• product warranty period;
• Product URL in an online store with UTM tags for effective sales tracking in analytics systems;
• and so on.

Price aggregators are a constant control over income and expenses

Price aggregators, like any other marketing channel, require management, experimentation, and adjustments. It is not enough just to submit information to him and expect the same result for all trade names.

When working, you will need to regularly analyze sales results and make decisions about which products should be left in the price aggregator and which should not. Since the indicators of profitability for goods will be different.

If some products are not profitable to sell, they do not sell well on a particular site, or the product has been completely sold out, you should disable the transfer of information about them to the price list. Also, you should not initially transfer information about products whose prices are higher than those of competitors in the aggregator - they are unlikely to be bought. To do this, the online store must provide the ability to disable the transfer of goods and product categories to the auto-generated price list for the price aggregator.

Different price aggregators are presented differently on the Internet, some may have well-developed traffic for certain categories and individual products, and others for others.

Therefore, in order to optimize advertising costs, an online store will have to analyze not only sales for different product groups, but also experiment with different aggregators and form its own price list for each of them with the most advantageous offers.

Only within the framework of such a work strategy will it be possible to increase profits and optimize costs for this sales channel.

Advantages of price aggregators

Advantages of price aggregators and marketplaces as the first digital channel to attract customers:

• requires a minimum budget to launch and can generate income even in the early stages of the development of an online store;
• leads customers who are ready to buy and who have already decided on the product;
• relatively low price of an attracted transition to the site compared to other digital channels;
• high level of traffic conversion from price aggregators;
• wide coverage of users on the site;
• payment mainly for unique transitions to the site;
• a good channel for selling goods with a small margin;
• separate employees are not needed to work with this sales channel;
• some aggregators provide a wide range of payment options, and not just pay per click, such as commission per order and pay by day;
• you can additionally order banner advertising to increase sales within the marketplace;
• quick launch and return on investment.

You are the owner of a young online electronics store and you want to start promoting your business on the Internet, but you need first sales.

Your site is working and user-friendly, only there are very few visitors, since it is new. Prices for goods are average for the market, and for some models even a little lower. At this stage, in addition to contextual advertising, it would be advisable to place it on a price aggregator.

Yes, at the start you will have a zero rating, since you are a new client, and you will lose somewhat to competitors who have been there for a long time. However, due to better prices and some products for which there is very little competition on the site, you will have a chance to attract customers.

You can submit to the aggregator not your entire range of products, but only those that have the best price offer, and those where there is the least competition on the site. Or even start immediately with only low-competitive categories on the site. This will allow you to get the first buyers from the site and stimulate the first ratings of your site. As the rating grows, you will be able to connect additional product categories and develop on this channel.

Disadvantages of price aggregators

Disadvantages of marketplaces as the first digital channel to attract customers:

• goods whose price is higher than those of competitors will not sell well in the aggregator;
• you need to monitor the rating of the company in the aggregator, since with a low rating and bad reviews about the store on the site, sales can drop significantly;
• what sells well on one aggregator may sell poorly on another due to varying degrees of site development, so it’s always worth experimenting with different products and sites to find the right configuration with the best ratio of income and expenses;
• such platforms are not suitable for all stores, since such services mainly sell products with a logical, rational choice. Topics that are poorly represented on all such services, or products with an emotional choice will sell poorly, such as jewelry and women's accessories;
• in aggregators, in general, only well-known models and brands of goods are sold well, and unfamiliar brands are unlikely to be of interest;
• for effective work with aggregators, it is necessary to introduce special functionality on the site for the formation of automatic price lists;
• when working with aggregators, you need to carefully monitor the availability and price of goods so that there are no empty user transitions;
• if the information in the price list is unreliable or other requirements of the site are not met, the store's account in the price aggregator may be blocked;
• the cost of the transition is set on the basis of an auction and varies, so for some products the cost of the transition may not be profitable. It is necessary to constantly monitor the effectiveness and manage rates, as well as commodity items in the price list, which requires time;
• for regional stores, you will have to look for sites with a regional audience if you have an average price for the market, since there will be few orders from oversaturated regions such as the capital;
• For quality tracking of the effectiveness of this channel, you need to fully configure analytics tools.

You are the owner of an online jewelry store. Your product is emotional, and it is unlikely that it will sell well on the pages of price aggregators. It doesn't have product traffic and can't have a good description within a platform like this, where everything is mostly based on technical specifications. You can try to place a partial assortment on a similar site, but if you see that there are no good sales, it is better to refuse it and focus on other sales channels.

6 Content marketing for an online store

Content marketing is a channel that allows you to capture an audience that is blind to other types of advertising channels. This is because content marketing efforts are primarily aimed at providing visitors with high-quality useful information, helping them choose and use a product. And, secondly, for sales. He is not aggressive or intrusive.

In order for content marketing to bring the greatest effect, you need to answer yourself the following questions before investing money:

• Who is your target audience? The answer to this question will allow you to choose the right content topic.
• Where will the audience be interested in the content and in what form? The answer to it will affect the choice of platform (start a blog, Youtube channel, Instagram photo gallery, etc.) and the type of content (write articles, shoot videos, draw infographics, do cool photo shoots, do reviews, etc.).
• What is the primary goal of promotion on the channel? Here you can understand where you should publish in the first place - on your own resources or on the pages of third-party sites.

This channel is especially interesting for young stores, as it can become the first source of free search traffic. In addition, the competition for information requests is lower than for commercial ones, which allows you to get SEO traffic on them faster.

Benefits of Content Marketing

Advantages of content marketing as the first digital channel to attract customers:

• increasing brand awareness;
• creating and increasing demand for goods that are little known to the market;
• safe increase in SEO traffic to the site through informational articles;
• assistance in collecting subscribers for Email and SMM channels;
• interaction with the target audience;
• the ability to get away from price wars with competitors due to the fact that you attract a buyer before choosing a product, and not after;
• the ability to attract customers at the stage of choosing a product and help them with it;
• solving a number of user problems when using the product and building brand loyalty;
• assistance in the purchase of goods;

You are the owner of a mono-brand household appliances store, and customers often call you asking for help sorting out product lines and choosing a product for themselves. You understand that this question is quite popular among your customers, as well as a number of others, so you decide to use content marketing on your own blog pages and write articles about the features of your brand products.

Such a solution allows you, on the one hand, to reduce the number of calls with this question to the store, and on the other hand, to attract additional visitors to the site who are concerned about the same issue.

If your article turns out to be interesting and relevant, then users can share it on social networks and forums, put links to it. This will allow you to attract an additional audience to the site, and natural links to the article will help SEO-promotion of your resource.

Disadvantages of Content Marketing

Disadvantages of content marketing as the first digital channel to attract customers:

• errors in determining the target audience and content topics lead to a zero result in sales;
• the conversion rate to sales of this type of traffic is often lower than that of other user acquisition channels;
• without maintaining the quality of materials, the channel will quickly lose its effectiveness;
• for a viral effect, it requires creative solutions in content, which not everyone can provide, especially at the stage of first sales.

You are the owner of an electronics store and, looking at your competitors, you understand that everyone is developing content marketing (running a blog, YouTube channel, etc.). You decide to do the same.

However, you are not ready to write expensive and high-quality content, so you decided to simply rewrite the content of competitors from third-party copywriters with an inexpensive price for writing.

As a result, you make the first publications, but since they are of poor quality, your audience does not read them, they do not attract SEO traffic and sales too. In this case, you can be completely disappointed in this channel and refuse it. Although, in fact, the main rule of this channel was initially violated - high-quality content.

External content marketing

Content marketing has a variety - external content marketing. This is establishing communication with opinion leaders and bloggers that your potential buyers follow, attracting authoritative links to your resource by posting interesting content on third-party sites.

This is the most time-consuming channel, as it takes time to communicate and properly present your products, articles, photos and videos.

Its task is to provide high-quality information that may be of interest to a third-party resource, and encourage publishing it with a link to your resource.

In different niches, this channel can manifest itself in different ways, but for a number of products it can be a source of customer acquisition. Especially for goods for which there is no demand yet, and it has yet to be created. In addition, external content marketing is a great help for SEO, as it allows you to get the first quality links to the site.

Benefits of Offsite Content Marketing

Benefits of external marketing as the first digital channel to attract customers:

• can be effective in creating demand for goods and services that were not previously in demand;
• increases brand awareness;
• increases user loyalty to the brand;
• affects the domain name authority of the business, therefore, has a positive impact on the growth of free search traffic;
• if implemented correctly - a source of traffic to your site;
• in the case of creating really high-quality viral content, it can give a huge increase in sales.

You are the exclusive importer of a quality brand of electronics to the country. But your brand is little known, and even your own online store sells products of other brands more actively, as they have good product traffic.

To change this, you can create a content plan for working with influencers and popular electronics blogs. You offer site owners to write objective reviews of your products with advantages and disadvantages, as well as provide a link to your site. And, if your brand is really high-quality, and the reviews turned out to be interesting and positive, then your site will receive transitions and interest in your products will increase.

If you additionally carry out brand marketing activities in other online sales channels, this can enhance the effect.

Disadvantages of offsite content marketing

Disadvantages of external marketing as the first digital channel to attract customers:

• requires high-quality content and creative approaches in promotion;
• unlikely to become a major sales channel, as its role is to increase brand loyalty;
• only viral publications can give a big growth, which is quite difficult to implement for a store at the start;
• financial and time-consuming method;
• often requires professional assistance in implementation.

7 Web analytics of promotion results

To save the budget and adjust strategies, it is important for online stores to clearly monitor the effectiveness of all ongoing marketing campaigns, each digital channel, goods sold and turnover of funds. This will help to set up high-quality analytics systems on the site.

Conversion Tracking

At the start of promoting an online store, you need to set up goal tracking in the Google Analytics and Yandex Metrica analytics systems.

The analytics system should track conversions, i.e. the number of users who have completely passed all stages of the sales funnel on the site and got to the “Thank you for your purchase!” page. This option is usually easily configured in most CMS sites and requires minimal participation of programmers in the settings. This setup is much cheaper and allows you to understand how many people visited the site, and how many of them completely passed all stages of the order.

Analytics allows you to get more information about sales through the site and sales channels. Unfortunately, these data do not say anything about how much each channel sold in monetary terms.

For example, your online store currently uses only 2 traffic channels: SEO and PPC. Users from the SEO channel made 30 purchases, and users from the PPC channel - 15. The total amount of orders is $1000.

This can be seen in the admin panel of the store and in your accounting. Based on the available information, we can conclude that the SEO channel gives more sales, it makes sense to expand it in the first place. But, in fact, we do not know exactly how these $1,000 are distributed across both channels, and whether our conclusions are correct.

After correctly setting up conversion tracking in analytics systems, you will be able to see the following information on online orders:

• how many conversions there were (visits to the “Thank you for your purchase!” page);
• from which pages the users who converted came from;
• what keywords were used by users who converted (for contextual advertising);
• conversion rate by device;
• analyze traffic in terms of demographic data;
• and so on.

Electronic commerce

To get more detailed information on sales from the site, namely, what profit a particular sales channel brought, at what stage of the sales funnel users leave, and much more - use Google Analytics with configured advanced e-commerce or Yandex Metrica with e-commerce. Although these tools require some software implementation, they provide more accurate sales data for each channel. This makes it possible to more accurately allocate marketing budgets across channels.

In the example described earlier, you can use e-commerce to find out that the SEO channel, despite its 30 orders, brought in sales of only $330, while PPC made $670 in sales from 15 purchases. It turns out that the SEO channel converts website users into buyers well, but they buy a cheap product and the average check for it is only $11. While contextual advertising sells a more expensive product with an average check of $44.67. With the information received, we already understand that in the first place, if possible, it is worth increasing the budget for contextual advertising in order to get the most out of this channel before investing heavily in the SEO channel.

Without e-commerce, our conclusions would be fundamentally wrong and would lead to an incorrect distribution of budgets.

After correctly setting up e-commerce in analytics systems, you can see for online orders:

• how much the product was sold for each of the digital channels;
• which pages of the site brought sales and for what amount;
• user behavior when placing an order;
• the user's path through channels and traffic sources to conversion;
• what income was brought by key queries in contextual advertising;
• and much more.

At the start of work on promoting the store, it is necessary at least to set up conversion tracking settings so that specialists do not work blindly when optimizing each of the sales channels.

The optimal setting for analysis is still using e-commerce for more complete analytics.

Call tracking

Enhanced e-commerce cannot provide complete information on all orders on the site, as some customers always place orders by phone. The share of such orders ranges from 20-80% and depends on the theme of the store.

Such users visited the site, studied the offers, but placed the order by phone. These orders, even if they are passed to analytics by the store, have no connection with information about the channel from which the user actually came in the standard e-commerce setup.

Call tracking systems are used to link information about traffic sources with calls to the store, as well as to clarify information on targeted / non-targeted calls to the call center and data on orders made by phone.

After correctly setting up call tracking in analytics systems, you will be able to see not only detailed information about online orders, but also about orders made by phone.

Your online store had 350 orders according to monthly sales data. At the same time, your analytics records that only 200 of them go through the electronic basket, and the rest are not visible in the analytics system. And it is not clear which channels generated these 150 orders. According to the analytics, the recorded 200 orders came from the following channels: SEO - 120, contextual advertising - 45 and direct visits - 35.

After analyzing the available data, you decide to turn off contextual advertising, as it does not pay for itself. But due to the fact that you did not take calls into account when making a decision, the total number of orders in the store fell sharply. Since the bulk of the calls were from advertising, where expensive goods were being promoted, for which a manager's consultation was necessary.

Call tracking systems are separate third-party services that connect to the store and pass the necessary information to analytics. Their integration with the site and work require additional costs, but sales analysis and business planning for the development of the store are greatly facilitated. Although at the start of work with the store this costly part can be neglected, but with its development this information may be necessary, as it allows you to analyze marketing activity in depth and optimize the store.

8 Stage of confident development of the store

An online store enters a stage of steady growth, when it becomes self-sustaining, taking into account the cost of its advertising. At the same time, the store owner should have a desire to encourage repeat orders from users, develop his personal brand and attract even more new customers.

At this stage, it is worth doing only complex promotion - expanding the number of sales channels used, working on increasing the store's conversion rate, developing existing channels and increasing customer loyalty. The following tools will help with all this:

• Email marketing
• PR and content marketing

You are the owner of a hairdressing tools store and used contextual advertising in the search to get the first sales from your site. Further, 3 months after the start of work, you connected SEO promotion. After 8 months, this allowed you to get 2 positions on the first page of search engines (1 advertisement and 1 line in organic search) for the most important commercial queries for you and significantly increase sales in the store.

All the time since the start of work on the site, you have been collecting a base of subscribers and collected more than 8,000 customers. Now, for the further development of the store, it makes sense to think about using email marketing, SMM, display advertising, targeting and creating a blog in the store to attract additional information traffic through the SEO channel.

Development of the free search channel

The bulk of the work on search promotion is the same, regardless of the stage of business development. But some elements in working with an online store that was previously promoted will be somewhat different.

If at the start more attention was paid to working with pages of goods or categories of the store, then further attention is paid to content marketing in your own blog (that is, already a combination of SEO and content marketing) and writing high-quality articles with selling elements based on informational search queries. This will attract more traffic to the site. While articles like this have a much lower reader-to-buyer conversion rate than is typical for products and categories, it is a way to scale a business that can generate revenue and build a brand-loyal audience.

You are the owner of a monobrand decorative plaster store. The store pages have already been optimized for the main brand and commercial requests. However, during semantic analysis, it was found that there are many more general queries such as "product category + effect", "product category + effect imitation" decorative plaster with marble effect, imitation brick with decorative plaster, etc.).

Articles are often ranked for these queries, so content marketing (writing blog articles on these topics) with relevant products attached to the article is most suitable here.

This solution is a combination of 2 sales channels - content marketing and SEO, which will attract additional traffic to the resource, increase sales and store awareness.

The link building strategies of such a store will increasingly resemble classic PR, external marketing or promotional events (in the case of ordering advertising cross-cutting banners on websites).

Technical or global content edits at this stage are possible only in case of changes in search algorithms and expansion of the range of products.

If an online store has a huge assortment and at the stage of the first sales it was not possible to work out all product categories, then at the stage of development of the store, SEO work will be practically no different from the starting stage. To speed up the development of the site, additional budgets may be needed in order to quickly carry out content optimization of all categories of the store.

PPC channel development

Contextual advertising systems are very extensive tools that help solve many problems. The main thing is to correctly set these tasks and correctly determine the necessary tools, and there are many options for developing a PPC channel:

• refinement of advertising in search,
• setting up remarketing ads,
• connection of media advertising,
• use of video ads.

Advertising in search

At the start of the store, your main task is to receive the first orders at the lowest price, we considered ways to solve it earlier. Sooner or later, there comes a moment at the store when:

• already received a positive result from the use of contextual advertising;
• there were additional budgets for advertising;
• the potential of low-frequency traffic in the niche has been completely exhausted, it is no longer possible to buy cardinally more traffic according to the previously described scheme.

In this case, it is worth considering where to develop further and additionally try new approaches in advertising.

The first thing to start with is to expand advertising in the search towards the use of more frequent queries. They can bring you dramatically more traffic, however, you need to remember that these requests have a lower conversion rate and will not work as effectively as those that were used at the start.

For an electronics store, a similar step in development would be adding ads for queries like: “product type + description” (gaming laptop), “product type + feature” (intel core i5 laptop) and any other filters that are on your site, for example "product type + color" (red notebook).

Only after the advertising campaign for all such filters and characteristics is properly configured and optimized, you can move on to more general queries by product type, for example, “buy a laptop” or “laptop price”. Such requests usually come from people who have not yet decided what they want, are in the process of choosing models, so they have a very low conversion rate. However, such requests should still be used in advertising campaigns, as they bring a lot of traffic that can be converted into sales later. People who use such requests will eventually decide on the model and then still order the product.

All considered types of requests can be very close in terms of cost per click, but they can also differ dramatically. Therefore, in order for your advertising to work in profit, you need to carefully analyze conversions and bids at the keyword level, and adjust advertising costs.

Remarketing

Once your site has reached a steady volume of traffic, you can use remarketing.

This tool can solve a number of important business tasks:

• return visitors who have not made a purchase in order to bring them to it;
• make repeat sales to users who have previously bought from you on the site;
• notify customers about current promotions and special offers;
• Encourage users to write product reviews on your site who have bought but left no reviews.

In all these cases, remarketing will be measured by different KPIs. But, of course, its main goal is sales.

KPI (Key Performance Indicator or key performance indicator) is an indicator of success in achieving certain goals that are important for the business.

To work effectively with remarketing, it is desirable to create remarketing audiences in advertising systems already at the moment when you just launched your site. The sooner you start collecting and separating your users according to various criteria, the more effectively you will be able to use this data in the future.

To get started with this tool, you should set up at least these audiences:

• all users who visited the site (data retention period is 540 days)
  • can be used for New Year's sales, black friday and other mass promotions;
• all users (data retention period equal to the time of making a purchase decision)
  • this audience can be used in various combinations at the stage of making a purchase decision. Not forgetting to exclude from it users who bought or moved further along the funnel;
• users who made a purchase (data retention period 540 days)
  • used similarly to all users on 540, only this is a more loyal audience for which you can pay a little more;
• users who put the product in the cart (the data storage period is equal to the time the purchase decision was made)
  • Remind users that they have added an item to their cart and haven't completed their purchase.

With data like this, you can quickly get started with remarketing. Further, depending on your marketing strategies, you can expand the lists of audiences by various criteria and fine-tune your offers.

You are the owner of an online clothing store and you want to increase the number of repeat sales. To do this, collect through Google Analytics lists of users who bought brand X products in. your store more than once. Then, when brand X has new products, you can set them up for these visitors. If they are interested in the brand, then such an offer will lead to new purchases.

Display advertising

• increasing the reach of the audience in the case when it is no longer possible to receive more visitors from the search. This is where media advertising is indispensable;
• building a brand and increasing its awareness on the Internet;
• promotion of promotions and special offers;
• creating demand for a new product/service;
• selling emotional products that the user needs to be shown in order for him to have a desire to buy.

Display advertising has a fairly low conversion rate, its goal is to get the user to know you, your offer, and toss in an idea for a purchase. After the user has become interested and moved to the store, he will have to be picked up by remarketing and further led step by step to the purchase. A good result is considered if, after visiting the site with display advertising, the user leaves you his contacts, for example, by subscribing to the newsletter.

In media advertising, the store's main weapons are texts, images, creativity and a good offer. In order for this tool to generate income, you need to clearly identify a group of potential customers, decide which sites they visit, and give an offer in advertising that will interest them as much as possible.

You are a manufacturer of unique handmade bags, the price of which is above average. You are not the first day on the market, so you have branded traffic and conduct advertising campaigns on it, but you want even more sales via the Internet and expansion of production.

If you run an advertising campaign for general queries like “buy a bag” or “buy a leather bag”, then this will lead to traffic to the site. However, such requests will have a very low conversion rate, since you have a high price. On them, you will have a lot of transitions from users who expect to see an inexpensive product, a store with a large assortment, or something fundamentally different.

• create banners with very high quality photos showing the benefits of your product;
• select the audience you need to display banners, for example, by queries that interested them in the search (for example, by queries from stores or brands similar to yours), gender or age;
• show this audience your offer.

In this case, the user will see your offer even before going to your site, his expectations will be formed and there will be more transitions with conversion. And your brand will become even more recognizable.
However, it is worth remembering that this advertising tool has a very low conversion and you do not need to run such advertising if you have a limited budget and your main goal is payback in a short time.

Video ads on Youtube

• formation and promotion of your brand;
• reminding the user about the brand using videos (video remarketing);
• creating demand for a new product/service.

You have a product for which a good offer, and there is an interesting video. You can collect links to channels or specific videos, such as those where bloggers review similar or related products.

Further, by uploading this list to Google Adwords, you can start showing your commercial on it in the In stream format - this is a video ad that is shown in the stream of another video with the ability to skip it. In this way, you will be able to find the target audience on YouTube who could potentially be interested in your offer.

• brand traffic growth;
• reach by unique users;
• increase in CTR in paid and organic search results.

Development of the email marketing channel

After the stage of setting up the main trigger campaigns and increasing the base to the minimum required value, which usually happens at the stage of active store development, you can proceed to:

• launching mass mailings;
• setting up custom trigger emails;
• testing hypotheses and applying the collected data.

In the section on the initial stage of developing an online store, we already mentioned the main trigger campaigns (welcome emails, abandoned views and carts, the chain after the first purchase, reactivation campaigns). Now you can complicate the existing model. And here's how:

You can also use additional personal data of subscribers and data about their behavior:

• Give gifts on the eve of the client's birthday. For gift, flower and jewelry stores, collection of data on important dates. For children's shops - child's birthday.
• Personalize bulk and trigger mailings. Use different blocks with goods depending on the gender of the client, if it is a clothing or accessories store, or on the place of residence, if you have offline stores - use different addresses in letters.
• Segment customers based on the product categories they prefer. Offer related and recommended products according to the latest purchase.
• Record clicks in emails. For example, if a customer clicks on promotions, you can automatically send him personalized promotional offers.

At this stage, it is worth starting to monitor the level of anxiety of subscribers and make sure that one client does not receive too many emails, otherwise he will quickly lose loyalty. If there are many triggers configured in the store, then this situation is quite likely. Some services provide special functionality that allows you to adjust the level of anxiety. This is also one of the main features of artificial intelligence that modern marketing automation platforms are starting to use.

You will have to regulate the number of emails sent. The fresher the subscriber, the more letters you can send him. As you lose activity, you need to reduce the number of emails you send in order to more effectively reach outgoing subscribers.

It is worth approaching mass mailings as research. Test different email elements (button color, banner size, animation, amount of text), send time, subject lines, and other variables to come up with the best email marketing approach for your target audience.

More attention will have to be paid to database segmentation, experiments with automatic email chains in order to find new points of sales growth.

Channel development content marketing

Many stores start using content marketing only at the stage of confident store development, while for the first sales they use PPC, SEO and SMM channels. However, if you started using this channel much earlier, then the main work within it should be aimed at:

• analysis - what type of content brought the most sales and / or interactions with the brand;
• more active use of worked scenarios;
• identifying and correcting content that does not bring profit;
• SEO optimization of written content to attract more traffic per unit of content;
• experimenting with new content distribution platforms and more active involvement of influencers with large own audiences;
• creating your own additional sites for posting content (i.e., if you immediately developed only your own blog, then you can then open a YouTube channel and do product reviews, or open a blog thread on a third-party thematic portal).

These actions will allow you to increase sales from current content at a minimal cost, as well as develop a content marketing channel with greater efficiency.

You have your own brand of quality kitchen knives, previously unknown in your country, and a branded online store.

At the start of brand promotion, you mainly used article content marketing on your own website and third-party sites. This allowed you to get the first sales and income.

After that, you allocate a marketing budget to offer your products to a popular YouTube food blogger for review in one of the videos at the stage of active brand development.

The review turned out to be positive and interesting. It was viewed by a huge audience, and interest in your brand products grew. Not only retail buyers, but also wholesalers, who are interested in offering your products in their store, have already begun to contact you in the store.

By building on this successful technique through other popular bloggers, you can increase demand for your products and, as a result, sales from your own store.

Development of the SMM channel

At the stage of development of the SMM channel, it is already possible to set as the main goal not only getting sales, but also communication with the audience and the formation of loyal store brand fans. Here you can already use different tools to promote an online store in social networks:

• targeted advertising in social networks;
• maintenance of thematic communities;
• deep work with client bases;
• work with industry trends or opinion leaders;
• etc.

Targeted social media advertising

At the start of the store, the purpose of this advertising tool was to quickly attract the target audience to buy goods in the store. For its implementation, targeted advertising was mainly set up in a rough form based on hypotheses with minimal budgets, optimized precisely for making a profit and testing offers.

Now, at the stage of development of this channel, it is already possible to fine-tune advertising campaigns based on retargeting using the accumulated statistics on advertising offers and user behavior on the site. You will be able to offer more personalized offers that will convert more than the original ones, as well as expand your reach by attracting similar audiences on social networks.

You can use dynamic retargeting. This tool requires a lot of setting up ads with the involvement of programmers, so it is not recommended in the early stages of launching a store. Here we need additional budgets for setting up and editing the site. But at the development stage, dynamic retargeting will be more than relevant, it will allow you to generate personalized recommendations for all site visitors and automate the process of creating shopping ads.

Dynamic retargeting retargeting for online stores or projects with a wide range of products. Its difference from regular retargeting is that when using it, the user is not shown universal offers, but advertising banners are automatically generated for each user with those goods / services that he recently viewed on the site, but did not order them.

You are the owner of an online socks store with a large assortment of different models and colors. At the start, you worked with social networks only as part of attracting visitors to the site with general advertising, while all this time you were gathering audiences with a pixel.

Now you have accumulated enough analytical data, so you are setting up dynamic retargeting for users who visited the site, looked at products, but did not make a single purchase. At the same time, you show this user no longer a general ad with an advertisement for the store, but an advertisement with goods that he viewed earlier or a group of goods that are similar to those viewed. And in this way, you additionally attract an audience familiar with your store, which is more likely to make a purchase than the audience that comes from general advertisements.

Thematic communities

At the store development stage, it is already worth thinking about attracting users who have not yet made a purchase decision and are still choosing a product, as well as building a loyal audience of regular customers who will respond to brand offers and buy on the site again. Although the idea of ​​attracting such audiences is interesting to any store and at any stage, but ... Forming interest among such audiences takes time, budgets and brings results mainly only in the long term, therefore, it is worth actively dealing with this issue at the development stage, when limited budgets are not so critical .

During this period, you can start maintaining thematic communities under the brand of the store. To make the community interesting for users and attract the audience, you need to create interesting useful content in the form of publications, images, infographics, photos, and even videos. At this stage, the development of the community will largely depend on content marketing. And the SMM tools themselves will help grow the community's audience.

Community development will bring sales slowly, it usually takes 6-12 months of active work to pay off. Successful community outreach will further help create demand and solve the problem of customer interaction at all stages of purchase decision and selection, as well as between multiple purchases. In addition, a community of active readers and buyers will eventually become the basis of brand fans who can attract new readers and buyers to you.

You are the owner of an online women's clothing store with your own brand, where the main product range is dresses. The peculiarity of these products is that women do not buy similar things every day, but for some time they compare, ask the price, consult and choose.

In order to start working with an audience of women at the stage of selection and attract existing customers to repeat purchases when they have a similar need, you decide to lead a community on social networks.

In the community, you regularly post information on how to choose clothes, how to combine them, what is in fashion now, how you sew your clothes and much more. This content attracts the attention of women who are interested in the topic, and through regular posting, you continue to keep their attention, as they see your posts in their feed every day.

You do not scare your readers away with frankly promotional posts with daily promotions, but, on the contrary, you constantly give them useful content. Occasionally, you try to attract them by leaving your contact information on the site (subscribing to the newsletter), periodically informing about new collections and expanding the range of your brand (1 such publication per 10 publications of useful informational content).

Within 8 months of active work, your group will begin to bring you regular sales and become profitable.

9 The stage of consolidating and holding positions

This is the stage when all possible digital marketing tools are already connected, and all work will be reduced to:

• maintaining what is;
• analytics of all marketing channels and search for growth areas for each of them;
• testing new ways to attract customers (for example, CPA networks and referral programs);
• active brand development (investment of budgets for branded advertising both online and offline, native advertising, PR),
• finding ways to create viral content to grow the brand's audience;
• search for new areas of growth for the business as a whole.

You are already a well-known clothing store in the country and have successfully occupied SEO, PPC and SMM channels, use content marketing, both external and internal. But you are looking for additional channels for growth. Thanks to your own statistics, you clearly understand how much you can spend on attracting 1 client. For additional growth, you offer an affiliate program for beauty blogs.

Under this program, you only pay the blog owner if their readers shop on your site. You calculated the amount of affiliate payment based on the optimal costs for attracting a client, taking into account market trends for affiliate programs.

Thus, you no longer independently advertise your own product, but allow other sites to do this and pay only in case of orders. At the same time, more and more people will learn about your products and about you and you will earn more. This technique also helps to increase the popularity of your brand, and therefore will have a positive impact on other channels of customer acquisition.

Comprehensive promotion of an online store and careful testing of channels - the secret to successful business development.

The combination of working channels for each business individually, they are selected based on the characteristics of the niche, competition, market situation and a number of other parameters.

No less important is the correct channel setting, the selection of the optimal time required for testing the channel so that the conclusions based on the results of the advertising campaign are correct. It is worth approaching the issue of promotion in a comprehensive manner, never relying 100% on only 1 sales channel, since each of the channels is not perfect.

In order for your costs at all stages of testing and development of the advertising channel to be optimal, it is better to entrust the setup and optimization of advertising to specialists who have experience in your business area and can correctly recommend working methods.

Whitney Blankenship, E-Commerce Nations Portal Editor, explains why marketplace placement is the best choice for most stores and how to capitalize on the strengths of large online marketplaces

The e-commerce market is one of the most saturated, and we are all, one way or another, already aware of this. Starting your own website from scratch and starting to sell is not cheap and requires the creator to be an expert in everything (though this is important for any kind of entrepreneurship). But there are marketplaces that aim to simplify this process and allow you to focus on the core tasks of your business, on what you are uniquely strong in.

Today's marketplace model offers a variety of options for launching and growing your online store, and it makes sense to take a closer look at this option.It's relatively cheapcompared to the cost of hosting, which you will have to pay. And besides,marketplaces close questions on SEO and context,which you still need to order and pay if you work on your own.

Placed on leading marketplaces - great way to grow your sales whether you have your own website or not.

Marketplaces host and sell your products on your behalf, or even provide the opportunity to have your own store, such as the Etsy hand-made platform, or popular EVO.company projects: Prom.ua, Tiu.ru, Satu.kz, Deal. by. From a technical point of view,marketplace is a simple and convenient platform for sellerson the placement, description and cataloging of goods; order management; access to a secure payment system and sometimes even inventory management.

There are many well-known sites that everyone knows and uses: the giants Amazon and Ebay, as well as many others working in narrow and specialized niches, and, of course, local marketplaces that are popular in a particular country. EatTop 5 Benefits of Using Marketplacesto sell your products.

1. Get in the eye of another audience

The main reason why you should be placed on the marketplace is to reach an audience that usually does not reach your site. Perhaps they are not ready to buy on your site (due to distrust of the new online store), but on a well-known site they will agree to make a deal.

2. Sell leftovers or a poorly selling item

Many online stores use marketplaces to sell off leftovers. Instead of having sales after a sale, listing items on the marketplace can help you sell at a lower discount and free up space in your warehouse for new items.

3. Focus SEO on Fewer Products

This is a great way to get new traffic to your site. SEO and SMM promotion are mandatory, but, alas, expensive ways to attract new visitors. By focusing time and money on a smaller group of products, you can reach more customers at a lower cost.

4. Use a positive shopping experience on marketplaces

Consumers know and trust well-known marketplaces and even, as a rule, have accounts there. Purchases on the leading trading platforms are made for 4 reasons:

1) attractive prices: the more competition, the lower prices;

2) availability of goods: as a rule, there is a high demand for goods on marketplaces and therefore they are almost always in stock;

3) safety: sellers are checked and evaluated, which guarantees the buyer purchases from reliable companies;

4) choice: there is always the largest number of products in any category.

5. Marketplaces Offer Innovative Solutions

To stay competitive, marketplaces often introduce a wide variety of innovations, providing customers with new consumer benefits. Placing with them will allow you to benefit from all new solutions for little money. Imagine that for the implementation of the loyalty program you have to pay only for some part!

Criteria for choosing a marketplace

We have discussed the arguments for selling on marketplaces, and now it is important to understand how to choose the right marketplace for your purposes. It's easiest to just pick the biggest one. But by doing so, you doom yourself to serious competition, which, as a rule, is on large sites. Choosing a marketplace that is tailored to the type of your product can really significantly increase your sales. Here main criteria for choosing the best place to sell of your goods:

If SEO is a key point in your promotion strategy, then take into account that marketplaces work great with the context for their products, which will increase those important to youvisibility and popularity. We all know how important it is to be at the top of the Google search results, so by choosing a marketplace that matches exactly your products, you can achieve much higher conversions.

Some marketplaces are more hyped than others, but the point is to find the perfect balance between link volume and the presence and quantity of your competitors on the site.

The best and easiest way to figure out if a niche marketplace is right for your product is to run a search on it and see if this site drops out in the first results.

Marketplaces distribute all placed products into certain categories. This helps shoppers make choices and gives stores confidence that their product will be found by those looking for it. But you must determine for yourself: you need a smaller number, but only your target audience - or more traffic to your positions, but with a wider audience.

Price

Naturally, marketplace services are not free. Payment options are different: either a percentage of sales (usually sites take 9-20%), or a monthly subscription fee, or buying an annual package, which includes both the creation of the site and its support. This cost may vary depending on the site and sometimes on the volume of sales. For small online stores, high costs are fraught with big risks.

Ease of use and additional "chips"

Marketplaces offer various payment options and often partner with large logistics companies. They often also offer their site protection system using the SSL protocol. This greatly helps in building the trust of your customers.

How cool to sell on marketplaces

So, you already know that you need to be placed on marketplaces, you understand which ones, but for some reason you haven’t done it yet! Perhaps you are afraid that hosting on an external site will not "kill" your own site?

What products should I sell on marketplaces?

If you have a site separate from the marketplace, start not from the top positions. The point is to generate traffic to your website. Keep the top products for yourself and increase the loyalty of those who buy from you constantly.

Sell ​​the leftovers of your products: things that may have already fallen into dust and what you have long dreamed of getting rid of, as well as accessories for your top products, which, as a rule, make a good profit.

It is much better to give part of this profit to the marketplace in order, on the one hand, to increase sales and, on the other hand, to benefit from the release of the warehouse for the next purchases.

What information should be placed on marketplaces?

Make sure that you take into account that the description of the product and all the necessary characteristics must be provided in the volume and form in which it is accepted on a particular site and in which its visitors are accustomed to seeing it. This means not reusing the description you already have. Otherwise, duplicate content can lead to SEO errors. You are simply obliged to prepare a unique and complete description of your products for marketplaces.

Trading on marketplaces is not a one-time experiment. This can be a great promotion and traffic strategy even for large stores. So feel free to include this tool in your plans and increase the sales of your stores!

Translation: Natalia Mironenko

I’m talking about ways to promote the marketplace relatively cheaply after launch. These ideas can be useful for project owners with an audience of up to 1000 users who do not know what methods to use for promotion after launch, and for those who are just thinking about launching their own marketplace.

To bookmarks

I act as a technology partner for marketplaces, that is, I help with the implementation of applications and the site. But, in my opinion, the main problem with most marketplaces is user acquisition. This is what I want to talk about today.

At the start, any marketplace has a big problem - both customers and performers are needed. If there is more or less of someone, then a bias will begin: either some do not receive money, or others cannot receive full-fledged services.

Offline business

For the most part, we are approached by people who already have their own business and have been in their field for several years.

If you already have a real business on the basis of which you are launching, then the first users of the marketplace are your offline customers. For example, you have a production of plastic windows and a team of installers. We connect a person who wants to install a window and installers who know how to do it and want to earn money. The main advantage of such a service is that it is not limited - you can expand it and sell it as a franchise. That is, they launched first in their city, then in the nearest one, etc. Thus, your service grows out of your business and it has no limits, which, of course, will give you more profit potential.

An analogy can be made with car services. Suppose you have 4 garages, you have a small income, but you don’t want to stand still, so you make an online service where you include existing customers, and in addition, you agree with competitors that you place their services, thereby earning on in their garages and at competitors.

Such analogies can be built in almost any segment where there is competition and there is a struggle for customers.

Free advertisements

The next option concerns household services for individuals. It would seem how you can develop if these niches are already occupied in your city and all people are sitting on the same Avito. But here you can cheat a little: transfer various sites, ad groups to your site. Let's say you have an empty search service for performers for services in your city, and the question arises of how to promote it. At the start, I recommend taking a freelancer to post and update ads from Avito and publics with services for your service. So you will launch an aggregator of all ads with city services and give users value - it makes sense to go to Avito and public when you can see everything on your site.

Also, when developing, do not be afraid to contact your users. They will give you feedback and you will understand what they want and in what direction to improve your service or, for example, if someone did a bad job, ban him so that he could not place his ads on you. By contacting different users each time, you can understand what a person is willing to pay for and what not. Do not neglect this method! Yes, it is laborious, but very useful.

Promotion of a specific service sector

First, we collect a small number of performers, negotiate with them and make landing pages for them for our city (for example, on flexbi or tilde, this can be done for a penny). We pour in contextual advertising (moreover, payment for advertising can be taken from performers), thereby attracting users. And we force our performers to download the application so that they respond there. That is, all applications from the site will be in your marketplace. Accordingly, after providing the service, the client can be invited to the application, or subscribe to the blog mailing list (more on that below).

The idea is that we spend money only on attracting a contractor .. And at the very beginning, we do all the work for the customer (publishing an application and choosing a contractor).

Blog

Blogging is what I mainly do. For the most part it is:

• Content writing
• Video
• SEO to the above

In the past few years, many have ceased to trust contextual and banner advertising. In blogs, you yourself work on filling the content, you work on the comments yourself, you choose the site yourself .. These are the most relevant sites for me at the moment. In theory, each article should carry useful content and some useful advertising. YouDo still use their articles for promotion.

The key value of this approach is that you immediately motivate both customers (they see you as an expert who explains things that are incomprehensible to them) and performers (they want to receive applications from you). Of course, the key here is to provide useful content, not reprinting obvious things from the Internet.

Advertising with influencers

This method is not suitable for everyone and is used for the most part only in any specific industries. Let's say you have a manicure, pedicure, etc. service. Then it makes sense to order native advertising from some blogger on Instagram. Thus, the blogger's subscribers will already go to you or remember you at the right time. You can agree that the payment goes specifically for live users, thus you pay only for them, without overpaying. The most important thing is the number of live subscribers and the number of views. Look - are there popular bloggers in your segment?

Eventually

As a result, after you have already launched the artist search service, you can use several options for promotion:

• Own offline business
• Free advertisements
• Promotion of only one service sector
• Blogging, writing articles
• Advertising with influencers

Everyone chooses for himself which method to use. The main thing is to correctly distribute the budget for advertising and understand which method is most effective.

Also, if you have any questions and need to disclose them in more detail, write in the comments, I will answer everything.

In order to successfully promote on marketplaces, an online retailer needs to forget about stereotypes. At the same time, you must always keep in mind the fears and needs of buyers. You need to put yourself in the place of an ordinary person choosing a smartphone or a baby carriage. A lot will become clear right away.

Marketplaces are a place where sellers' stereotypes meet buyers' fears. Online store owners are often convinced that those who set the lowest price win on the marketplace. Some believe that the secret to success is to get your offer on the product card. Or they think that it is worth taking all the issue - and sales will flow like a river.

Buyers are worried about something completely different: they are afraid to overpay or buy the wrong thing. They are worried about the prospect of receiving low-quality goods or simply counterfeit goods. Finally, they do not want delivery problems at all: late couriers, broken boxes, lack of change, and other inconveniences.

To successfully advance on the price platforms, the store needs, first of all, to forget about stereotypes. The largest Runet marketplace, Yandex.Market, is visited by about 20 million people every month (this is Yandex data; according to Mediascope data in April, 19.4 million). When the audience reaches this size, behavioral scenarios simply cannot statistically be reduced to “choosing a lower price” or “choosing the first offer in the SERP”.

What sellers need to keep in mind is the fears and needs of buyers. To understand how to advance on the price platform, you need to put yourself in the place of an ordinary person who chooses a smartphone or a pram. A lot will become clear right away.

To begin with, a potential buyer must see your offers. After that, he needs to be convinced that after the purchase he will have no problems either with the quality of the goods, or with delivery, or with service. And then you should check if you are losing to competitors in terms of assortment, bonuses or prices.

This is how, in the most general terms, the development of a strategy that allows you to successfully place on the price platform looks like. Below I will describe this process in detail, and at the same time I will give examples from the practice of i-Media.

Step one. Tidying up the product feed

In order to fight for a place in the product card, you must first "attach" to this card. And in order to compete in the search results, you need to fall into the right product category. Both tasks can be solved by an XML feed with a correct structure and thoughtful descriptions.

Price platforms categorize products automatically. If your feed has a category tree with a clear structure and names, most likely there will be no problems loading. Difficulties arise when among the categories there are service names like “warehouse 1”, “warehouse 2”, “leftovers from last season”, etc.

The title of the product is responsible for the correct "binding" to the card. It, like in a backpack of a tourist, should have everything you need - and nothing more. When creating a title, you need to get by with a minimum of words, but at the same time describe the product in such a way that it cannot be confused with another.

Let's say we're selling PlayStation 4s. What should be the title of a Slim model with a 1TB hard drive? Correct answer: "PlayStation 4 Slim 1 TB". The shorter version of "PlayStation 4 Slim" will not be entirely accurate, because a model with a 500 gigabyte disk also falls under this description.

The longer title "PlayStation 4 Slim 1 TB bundled with 2 joysticks" won't work either - information about joysticks is not necessary.

This approach will allow you to write headlines that are logical, understandable to people and not overloaded with information.

In addition to the correct headings, the feed must necessarily convey the detailed characteristics of the goods. They are very useful in cases where users refine their search results using filters.

Let's take a common scenario: a user comes to Yandex.Market with only a general idea of ​​what he needs. For example, this is a young father who urgently needs to buy a new stroller. He asks the general query "baby stroller" and receives an output of more than 18 thousand offers.

Realizing that everything is not so simple, he sets a couple of filters: by type (“walking”) and by weight (“up to 10 kg”). And the issue is instantly compressed to 52 products.

It is possible that among the filtered strollers were strollers weighing less than 10 kilograms. But no one will ever know this, because the sellers were too lazy and did not transfer the relevant characteristics to Yandex.Market. And the young father will buy a stroller from competitors.

Step two. Setting up rates

If the seller is just entering the price list, the maximum bids are calculated based on the average conversion rate (CR) in the store and the margin of each product. Let's imagine that we sell a product with a price of 10,000 rubles and a margin of 1,000 rubles, and the average CR is 1%. The rate for the product will be equal to 10 rubles (1000*1%=10). It won't necessarily be the most effective (conversion rates can be off-average, and a click doesn't always mean a purchase), but as a first approximation, it works quite well.

As soon as some statistics are accumulated, the rates can be optimized. At this stage, the products need to be divided into several groups depending on the level of conversion. Most often, the situation looks like this: for a relatively small proportion of products, CR is 2-3 times higher than the average. For them, it is worth raising rates in order to improve positions, traffic volume and, accordingly, sales.

It may turn out, for example, that a product already familiar to us with a margin of 1,000 rubles provides a stable conversion of 3%. This means that the rate for him should be raised to 30 rubles (1000 * 3% = 30). In the same way, you need to adjust the rates for products that have a CR below the average.

Finally, at the last stage of setting rates, they can be recalculated based on the data on the amount of the check. To do this, it is necessary to select groups of goods with a receipt higher and lower than expected (the price of the goods is taken as the expected receipt).

A product with a higher than expected receipt plays the same role in the store as ice cream at McDonald's: it is inexpensive, but it stimulates additional purchases. Let's imagine that we have a product with a price of 3,000 and a margin of 300 rubles. The initial rate for it was calculated based on this margin. Then it turned out that accessories were bought along with the goods and that the average check for it was 5,000 rubles. This means that you can add up all the margins in the order and get a large amount for promotion (for example, 1,000 rubles). The new rate will be set based on this amount, and not on the margin of the product.

Goods with a receipt lower than expected, as a rule, are overpriced. The usual story: the seller makes a big markup on some model and due to this he can afford a high bid. As a result, the product gets into the product card, but does not bring sales: the buyer finds an analogue for a lower price and chooses it. For such products, rates should be lowered.

By going through all three stages in sequence, you will set up effective bids for your products that will guarantee compliance with CPA. If you are hosted on Yandex.Market, these works can be done using the free Pricelabs.

Step three. Let's talk about delivery

We have ensured that users of the price platform see our offers. Now we need to work on the factors that influence the choice of the buyer: delivery terms, store reputation, prices, bonuses, and others.

Let's start with delivery. According to a recent study by Yandex.Market and GfK Rus, although customers use the services of couriers, pickup points and Russian Post with different frequencies, each delivery method covers a large audience. Therefore, your lack of any method may be the reason why the buyer will choose another store.

Multiple delivery methods, on the contrary, make the store more convenient for different customers and different situations. For example, there are people who need a product right now. They are ready to overpay for the speed of delivery, and even for the product itself. But buyers who work in Moscow and live in the region appreciate the self-delivery option: thanks to it, you do not need to spend money on expensive delivery outside the city.

From this we can conclude that the very presence of all delivery methods in the online store will give an increase in conversions.

Step four. Working on reputation

One of the main scenarios for using a price platform is choosing a seller, not a product. The user comes to the marketplace after he has decided on the brand and model. He finds two or three stores offering the product he is looking for, and sees that their prices and delivery terms are about the same. In such a situation, the reviews and rating of the store become the decisive factor.

To inspire user confidence, the store must have different reviews: positive and negative, left a long time ago and very fresh. The seller, whose last review is dated the year before last, looks doubtful. A seller with a hundred "fives" and the same type of enthusiastic comments, of course, causes distrust. Customers understand that there are no perfect stores, and that mistakes happen to everyone. Negative reviews will not spoil the experience if the store responds to them and helps solve customer problems. It is clear that there cannot be many negative ratings, and the overall rating of the store should strive for "five".

How to earn a good reputation? First, send each customer an email asking them to leave a review for the store. Secondly, respond to negative feedback: answer that you will definitely figure it out; ask for more information; talk about the steps taken. Thirdly, remember that all this should not be a one-time event, but a continuous streamlined process.

Last fall, we noticed that one of our clients had few - about fifty - reviews on Yandex.Market. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that work with reviews is not being carried out, and most of the existing reviews are completely fake. And not only positive ones, but also negative ones.

We advised the client to send requests to remove fakes and send mailings to customers, as well as assign an employee to work with reviews. The client listened, and the results were not long in coming. Within a month, the store had more than a hundred reviews, and most importantly, the conversion rate increased by 1.6 times.

Step five. Tracking competitors

The choice of a store can be influenced not only by reviews and delivery conditions. There are also prices, assortment, loyalty programs and much more. Competitor analysis helps to understand whether everything is in order with these factors.

For example, this way you can check if your prices are too high. It is enough to compare them with the average prices on the price platform (such statistics are provided, in particular, by Yandex.Market). If it turned out that some goods are too expensive, you do not need to bring the price down to a minimum - just bring it closer to the average level. It is possible that due to this you will receive additional orders.

It is also worth keeping an eye on the latest and popular products in their categories. If a store doesn't offer the latest releases or the models everyone is looking for, it's distrustful. Customers may have questions about what then the store sells and why they need it.

Competitive analysis allows you to discover the weak points of your proposals, sometimes the most unexpected ones. Moreover, in each product category and each online store, they can have their own.

So we have gone through all five steps on the way to an effective promotion strategy. As you can see, this road is not long and quite simple.

Instead of a conclusion, I’ll tell you about two important points related to price platforms. The first concerns the sequence of actions in developing a strategy. In fact, you can do them in any order. In the article they are not arranged chronologically, but according to the speed of return. Product and bid feed optimization has an immediate effect. New delivery methods are launched quickly, but still not instantly. And working with reviews and monitoring competitors are long-term tasks, they give results gradually.

The second thing to remember is that price platforms are not only Yandex.Market. There are a dozen more successful and effective marketplaces in Runet. For example, Price.ru is good for promoting mobile phones, Avito - inexpensive goods that can compete with used ones, Nadavi - tools for home and garden. The choice of optimal sites depends on your tasks and the nature of the business. The main thing is to maintain a pragmatic approach and control the effectiveness of the placement.

In online trading, in fact, there are two models for the development of sales: to be placed on a popular trading platform with ready-made infrastructure and services, or to create and develop your own platform.

There is always a great temptation to go the simple and obvious way. Not surprisingly, many entrepreneurs are attracted to the idea of ​​placing products on third-party sites: Amazon or AliExpress in the western market, and "Yandex Market", Goods or "I'm taking!" if we talk about expanding the audience of Russian buyers. There are at least three weighty arguments in favor of aggregators and three against. I'll start with the good.

Arguments for the marketplace

1. Company size. Small companies may not have enough funds to create a full-fledged platform with analytics, strong marketing and full-fledged customer service throughout the sales territory. Placing on large marketplaces opens up excellent prospects for the development of a small business.

2. Start of sales. Placement on the marketplace can be the first step for the active growth of the company's brand. Subsequently, having gained experience, you can switch to the model of combining sales by opening your own online store and trading through the marketplace. However, it is worth determining the line beyond which there is a risk of losing the entire business: from experience, the share of sales through trading platforms for a developed brand should be no more than 20-30%, all other sales should be controlled by their sites.

3. Forcing current sales. On the marketplace, you can place some individual groups of products that do not sell well enough on your own site. Using third-party sites to solve problems with the sale of certain categories of goods is a good solution, while uploading the entire assortment to the site is not necessary.

Arguments "against" aggregators

For all their convenience, marketplaces are a business model focused on maximizing profits from the sale of goods. If your competitor allows you to earn more, all of your sales can quickly go to him. Considering that a marketplace can change its monetization model from time to time, a large share of marketplace revenue is a big unmanageable risk for a business. Therefore, if any of the points below is a priority for you, try to determine the share of “risk-free” presence on the aggregator and stick to it.

1. Low potential for analytics. The marketplace will generously share resources, traffic, work patterns with you, but not customer data. Only your own metrics on the internal resource will allow you to analyze how many people are interested in the product, and how many people actually buy it. So, improve the conversion through descriptions, prices and other factors.

So, after analyzing sales statistics on the Amazon Business site, it was revealed that the fastest growing sector is equipment and materials in the natural sciences industry. As a result, the trading giant expanded the range of these product categories, which attracted hundreds of research centers and pharmaceutical companies to the site, leaving competitors far behind.

2. Management of offers and prices "blindly". Any marketplace is technically an intermediary that lives off the percentage of sales or the implementation of another monetization scheme. Many of these sites limit the number of products for sale for one site participant or provide an unlimited amount of uploading product cards in exchange for a paid subscription. This makes sellers dependent on the site, forcing them to adjust their pricing policy. While on your site you can manage prices based on the volume and frequency of customer purchases, and not for reasons of dumping.

Online store ELC Russia decided to experiment with personalization in the email newsletter: in the letters, some customers received purchase recommendations based on recent product views. The second half of the buyers were sent ordinary letters with a review of promotions and discounts. As a result, the number of orders from buyers from the first group was 44% higher, and the profit from these sales was 27% higher than from the second group with a regular mailing. A marketplace with hundreds and thousands of sellers could hardly offer such personalization conditions.

3. Loyalty to a popular site, but not to a brand. A trading platform for a loyal customer is not just goods at a specific cost, but plus the level of service, delivery conditions, bonuses and participation in promotions. When working on your own platform, all the laurels go to you, in cooperation with the marketplace - the platform on which you are placed.

Many online hypermarkets use loyalty programs to motivate customers to return again and again. Among them, for example, Gilt- for the accumulated points, customers are offered access to early sales, free shipping, a 30% discount.

At the same time, the problem of competition is not so acute on its own trading platform: the buyer chooses not only by price, but also studies related products and content.

Yes, LED manufacturer flexfire has been “pumping” its own site since 2009. The company initially relied on the quality of products and educational content on the site. During the period 2013-2015, sales of Flexfire products increased by 832%. The current growth rate of sales volumes is not so impressive, but remains consistently high: an increase in 2017 was 30% (sales reached $5 million), the same growth is expected in 2018.

What to choose?

Own trading platform is prestigious, representative and in many cases profitable. But if placement on the marketplace at this stage of the company's development presents more advantages than the development of its site, you should not give up the benefits.

But it is important to understand one nuance. With the emergence of new Russian trading platforms and the development of long-existing western marketplaces, the retail e-commerce sector is entering a stage of intense competition. It is unlikely to gain a foothold in it without a colossal "infusion" of funds. While the wholesale online sales market in Russia is just beginning to take shape. The grocery wholesale market, auto parts are actively moving online, and there is a trend of digitalization of sales of construction products. All these new sites are designed to bring together many suppliers of one product segment, without trying to offer buyers “everything in the world” or limit themselves to the products of a single company.

For the development of segmented wholesale trading platforms with little investment, in my opinion, now is the best time. Even if you do not become the second Amazon Business or Alibaba, you will be able to process data like these market giants. Finding the best that will help you stand out from the competition and take an increasing share of the market.