Last weekend I was putting together a proposal for a potential client and was going back to my notes of how I have previously helped eCommerce stores with their marketing and increasing sales.

This article will go in-depth into 16 effective tips and tricks for marketing your eCommerce store. I have tested these strategies with many different types of businesses with great results!

1. Grow Your Email List

I would say this might be the most important tactic for eCommerce store owners.

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective and powerful tools you can use to grow your eCommerce business. Many store owners concentrate too much on social media but neglect their email marketing.

If you are not using email to grow your business, then I would highly recommend setting up a system that will allow you to collect customer emails. You can do this in many ways with different Email Service providers and even free services like Mailchimp or Convertkit.

By capturing your customers’ contact information via email, you’ll be able to market your eCommerce store directly to them and grow your business.

Email marketing is a great way to keep in touch with current customers, offer discounts or specials for loyal buyers, stay top-of-mind when they are ready to purchase again – whether it’s right now or six months from now.

2. Nurture Visitors into Subscribers and Subscribers into Customers

Not everyone who visits your site today is ready to buy now. But visitors have a terrible memory, and they would forget your website in minutes. You can’t blame them. They visit 100s of websites every day.

So how do you ensure you don’t lose them? By converting them from visitors into subscribers. Once they are on your email list, they will be happy to hear from you if you send engaging emails, and when the time comes, they will buy your products. Imagine this as a funnel.

This conversion time could vary between seconds to even months. But when it happens, you would be thanking your lucky stars that you nurtured the visitors into subscribers and kept them engaged.

Now, how do we get them to subscribe? One way is by using an email pop-up on your website just before they leave or near product pages where users are more likely to buy.

For eCommerce sites, coupons and discount codes are a popular way to get subscribers. But you could also give PDF eBooks or other lead magnets.

For example, if you have a men’s clothing store, you could create different PDFs for dressing for different occasions.

Or, if you are selling protein shakes or supplements, you could give a 30-minute exercise video to help grow muscles.

3. Create Highly Valuable Blog Posts

Even though you have an eCommerce store, you can’t ignore blogging. It’s one of the best ways to increase organic traffic to your website and educate your customers.

Make sure your content is helpful, entertaining, and engaging. It should provide answers to questions your customers have in their mind. Once you educate them, you’ll increase your credibility and authority in their eyes.

Readers will come back for more because they know you’re a trustworthy source of information.

Moreover, you’ll rank higher in Google for your keywords because it increases the authority and relevance of your site.

4. Create Pillar Posts

Pillar posts are long-form blog articles that talk about a specific topic in your industry or niche. These articles are typically in-depth and cover lots of information related to the topic you’re discussing.

Pillar posts should be at least 2000+ words long, feature multiple images, and link back to other important product pages on your eCommerce site.

For example, if you are selling Orthopaedic equipment, you can create a pillar post about the top five most common orthopaedic conditions and create links to each of the products related to that condition.

5. Create Downloadable Offers

Continuing on the blogging theme, once you get the right content in place and get enough traffic, it is time to create downloadable offers. This can be eBooks, PDFs and so on.

eBooks or PDFs for an eCommerce store? How does it even help?

If you create such downloadable content, the perceived value of your physical product goes up.

One example is a customer who was selling plants and flowers. Instead of just shipping the actual product, I suggested she create tutorials and eBooks that she can email customers as soon as they buy. This gives immediate value to the customer even if the product is yet to be shipped.

And no other competitor is doing this. Which means your customer become repeat customers.

6. Create a Series of Style or How-to Videos

Gone are the days of just having a Shopify or Woocommerce site. If you want to stand out and attract new customers, you will need to do more than just uploading basic product descriptions.

One way is to create a series of style or how-to videos on your eCommerce store page. This can be in the form of tutorials (e.g., for different jewellery styles) or demonstrations from skilled individuals that showcase various aspects of your product line.

Some types of videos you can publish:

• Style Tips: These video tutorials are perfect for showing off the latest styles, tips and tricks to make your outfit pop
• How-To Videos: If you have an instructional product or service (e.g., how to style hair), then this is a great way of showcasing that information in a short, high-quality video that entices your customers.
• Product Demonstrations: These videos show off your products and services in an interesting way that is informative yet entertaining for the viewer
• Product Reviews: These videos help other customers make informed decisions about their purchases.
• Behind the Scenes: These videos give a sense of your company culture and show what goes on behind the scenes to provide products or services.
• Product Teasers: These are usually short clip showing a teaser of your product to increase curiosity.

7. Create Pinterest-Specific Images

Pinterest is one platform that many eCommerce Stores do not use. It is particularly suitable for specific niches like Home Improvement, Beauty, Landscaping, gadgets, etc.

You can experiment with different types of images. Ensure that your eCommerce store always has some beautiful, eye-catching and enticing Pinterest-specific (tall) images to make customers want to click through on them.

8. Capture Abandoned Carts with an Exit Intent Pop-Up

If someone spends half an hour browsing your eCommerce store and adds a few products to the cart, they’re at least interested in purchasing something. They’re so close to converting, it is worth the effort to show an Exit-Intent Pop-Up to try and capture their abandoned cart, or at the very least qualify them for a marketing campaign.

One of the best eCommerce Exit Intent Pop Up templates I’ve found is from Sumo.com by the AppSumo guys. They have numerous templates that have been tested extensively with hundreds of different variations to know what works best. And they also have a free version that can get you started.

Here are some ideas for what you could do in an Exit Intent Pop Up:

• Offer a discount code if they abandon their cart but sign up for your email newsletter.
• Capture their email address so you can remind them in a few days to come back for their forgotten items.
• Offer them a free product to try if they abandon the cart but give you an email address.

Read this article on how to create an effective Exit Intent Popup.

9. Send Shopping Cart Abandonment Emails

This is taking Cart Abandonment to the next level. Once you have their email address and the product they abandoned, you can send them a personalized email with some incentives to get them back on your web store.

Send them an abandoned cart email with the product they were looking at and a discount code they can use if they check out in the next 24 hours.

This is a great way to get more sales, adds a bit of urgency, and serves your customer by reminding them of the product they wanted.

10. Get People Back to Your Website with Remarketing

Facebook, Google and other popular websites allow you to track your visitor’s actions and then use that information to target them with more relevant ads.

Remarketing is a great use of technology to follow your users on different platforms and advertise them with the particular product they showed interest in.

It might look creepy to some, but remarketing is a fantastic way to keep your business in the minds of previous visitors. And remarketing campaigns are usually cheaper than cold campaigns.

It’s a quick and easy way to keep your brand top-of-mind for your visitors and also decrease your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

11. Work with Influencers in Your Niche

Influencer marketing has existed many years back with bloggers and review websites. But with Instagram, Youtube and Tik Tok, many content creators are making influencer marketing easy and profitable.

For eCommerce businesses, these networks offer a great way to market your store – you can work with an influencer in your field and collaborate on content that will help them promote their own products while also promoting yours.

You can even consider creating an affiliate program with influencers, where they promote your products, and you give them a commission for the sale.

It’s important to choose the right influencer: this doesn’t mean someone with millions of followers. Instead, target nano or micro-influencers with tens or hundreds of thousands of targetted followers. This way, you get more bang for your buck.

12. Host a Giveaway

People like winning free stuff. As a store owner, you like leads and new customers. How to convert this into a win-win scenario?

Host a giveaway to encourage your customers base to invite their friends. Ask them to share the giveaway on social media to get more entries into the contest.

When the giveaway ends, you can announce the winners and send them their free product. But even better: you can give a huge discount on those same products to all the other participants in the giveaway.

Since they were interested in those products, a sizable percentage of them would convert and buy if you give the right discount.

13. Ask Customers for Reviews

One common mistake business owners make is not asking for reviews. Reviews from your customers can help you grow exponentially. When customers leave reviews about your products and services, they become social proof that other potential customers follow suit.

• Clearly ask them to review the product after receiving it.
• Offer an incentive in exchange for a review. A discount code would work.
• Use these reviews strategically on the product description page and also check out pages.

14. Share User-Generated Content

Reviews are one type of user-generated content. But nowadays, Youtube and Instagram are fast becoming a new and better way to collect and show customers content.

When your customers post an unboxing video or a review on Youtube, they become nano influencers themselves. Their social circle and followers who trust them become your next set of customers.

To incentivise them to post videos, you can give a referral code for a discount for their followers. And collect these videos to create ads for your products.

15. Upsell AND Downsell

When is the best time to sell a customer who just added something to the cart? Not 1 or 2 months from now. It is, in fact, at the moment when they are checking out.

A customer who is currently buying is a hot lead and is ready to buy more.

You can increase the customer’s Average Order Value by selling them an upsell or downsell, depending on what they are buying. If they are buying a Suit, you can upsell a Shirt, a tie or a belt. The combinations are endless if you have the right products and the right technology.

16. Maintain a Wishlist & Send Reminders

Many eCommerce sites don’t have a wishlist option for their customers. Adding products I’m interested in a wishlist gives a highly accurate signal of whether I like it or not.

If the product is sitting on the wishlist for a week or so, you could send a timed email promoting that particular product and give a discount for it with a short expiry.

Conclusion

Marketing is one of the most important aspects of an eCommerce site. It’s also constantly changing, and it can be difficult to keep up with all the new strategies thrown your way.

That said, you should always be looking for ways to improve your marketing efforts to align with what customers want and need at every stage in their decision-making process.

Use these 16 tips as a starting point, but don’t stop there when it comes time to build out your digital marketing plan!

What marketing tactics have you not used yet in your store? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

Here are 5 ways to determine whether or not your product idea is the one that your audience will pay for.

1. Share your idea with a small group of people

The most common mistake people do when they have an idea is to be secretive about it. They think that they might be the next Steve Jobs and don’t want to share their product idea with anyone for fear of someone else copying it.

The problem is, if you’re not sure whether your product would sell, then how can you go ahead and put all your time and effort into building a business around an unproven concept?

You think you have an innovative idea. But all ideas are thought of already. How much ever you think you are creative, you can’t be the first person to think of it.

The best way to validate an unproven product idea is by sharing it with a small group of people and asking them for honest feedback. This has numerous benefits: you’ll know whether or not they think the product is worth buying, you’ll get a sense of what’s missing from your idea and how to improve it, and you can validate if there are any legal issues before fully investing in its development.

The more you share your idea, the more feedback you’ll get. So you idea becomes better, or if it’s a bad one, you know it immediately, before building it.

2. Find products you already use

Also called as “solve your own problem”. But how do you know it is a problem worth solving? If you are paying for a product to solve your problem, then there might be a few thousands like yourself who would pay for it.

The easiest way to check this is to get out your credit card bills and see what subscriptions you have. See which product is something that you can’t live without. This could be a potential idea that has merit.

It doesn’t mean it will definitely work, but you will have a better chance of validating the product idea. And you can reach out to others who are similar to you.

3. Find Products That Already Exist

This is closely related to the previous point, but one difference is you don’t have to buy/subscribe to it. Basically check out your competition.

Many feel competition is bad, but it can actually be quite useful. It shows that there is a solid problem that people are willing to pay to get solved.

If you see a product with lots of reviews that’s doing well in its niche then this is good validation that there is demand for the product and you should consider entering the market too. Similarly if you find a product that is almost monopolistic and very popular and it has no competition or at least none as strong, again this would be good validation to enter the market.

4. Create a Lite version of the product

I love how many indiehackers start off with small projects and gradually build it up to more ambitious products that sell well.

Non tech startups do this all the time. If you want to open a restaurant, it’s better to test the market with a food truck first.

When you’re testing your product idea, it’s important to remember that scale is not the goal. You want to find out if people like what you have and how much they’ll pay for it. If you can’t sell enough of the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) at a low price point then there’s no need in trying to build a complex product.

You also get feedback pretty fast in a matter of weeks than months.

And it doesn’t have to be just SaaS products. If you are creating a course for example, it is better to create a series of short videos first and start selling them on Udemy or Skillshare. Or release an eBook and sell it on Amazon.

You can also test this product idea by running a Kickstarter campaign to see if people are willing to pay for your product or not. Either way, you’ll get valuable feedback that will help shape and validate your product ideas before investing too much time and money into them.

5. Sell, then build

I would say this is very important as I have burnt my fingers many a times. The first product I launched was an personal search engine for everyone. When we launched, it was the perfect product for ourselves. But we spent 8 months focused on building it, that we couldn’t find anyone to buy it.

If you really want to know whether a product will sell or not, you have to get people to take out their wallets and pay for it. If you can presell it before you even build it, you have a winner.

Selling lifetime deals or beta plans that are available only during development will give your customers the satisfaction of getting in on the product at an early price. And you also get capital to build the product.

Conclusion

Validating a product idea is not easy. There are a lot of things to consider before you get true market validation. But these 5 steps are a great way to begin your journey.

I am interested to know about your product idea. Share it in the comments below and I will reply back with how you can validate it quickly.

A product idea could be the right one for a particular audience group but would fall flat for a different set of audience.

If you’re building a product and haven’t done any audience research yet, you need to read this blog post.

Audience research is essential for many reasons: 

• to find out who your customers are, 
• how they use your product or service, 
• what their challenges are
• and more importantly, what their pain points are!

In this post, we will look at the top 7 reasons why starting with Audience Research (instead of the idea) is the right way to building a product.

1. Understand who your target audience is and their needs.

You first need to understand who your target audience is and their needs.

• What demographics do they belong to?
• Where do they work?
• Do they need the product whatever you are thinking of building?
• And so on.

The more questions you answer before starting your project, the better understanding you’ll have. Knowing this will allow you to build a much better product than your competition.

2. Ask them questions to find out their pain points, frustrations, and desires

Your audience might say they need something, but are they willing to pay for it?

Yes. We all want to lose fat and look like a model. But that doesn’t mean everyone will pay for a personal trainer. But if you have a problem in your heart, you will pay whatever you can to get it fixed.

You need to identify such pains so that you can focus on creating something that solves them.

Let’s say your audience is freelancers. And your idea is to build a CRM tool to manage their leads.

But only by understanding their pains you will realise that many freelancers already use Excel to manage their leads.

It’s not that they don’t need such a product, but managing leads is just one pain among many others, such as dealing with no leads, delayed payments, etc.

Understanding their most challenging pain points allows you to build products that solve the most acute pain that will make them pay.

3. Know what they’re looking for in a product

Getting the right audience makes sure you are building a product that is relevant for them.

Say, for example, if you build an online Photoshop alternative and expect all digital designers to switch over, it will not happen. 

But if you find out web developers or WordPress developers doesn’t want to pay a subscription to Adobe CS. You can market your alternative to them.

4. Find out how big a market you have

Understanding whom you will sell to helps you understand how big your Total Addressable Market (TAM) is. If you can identify this, you can more accurately assess the size of your market, which is needed to build a business model.

There are a few tools that allow you to understand the market size without even talking to anyone. But if you spend some time talking to actual people, you can learn a lot more about them and the company they work for.

This is also great because this research will tell you what value to build into your product to charge more money per customer or what features you can give away for free to bring in more free users.

This research should be done BEFORE building your product and before you start spending money on anything else, as it’s important to know the size of the market that will buy or use your service so you can manage expectations appropriately.

The better researched we are about our audience, the easier time we’ll have when marketing and generating leads.

5. Find out what they’re already using and how they use it

However much you try to believe, you don’t have a unique idea. You are just trying to solve someone’s problem in a new and better way.

So unless you know how your existing audience currently solves their problems, you will be solving the wrong problem.

To find out what they’re already using and how they use it, start by asking them – send a survey or do an online focus group among your target audience. See what forums they hang out on. What do they discuss?

What’s more important is understanding why people do these things today. What pain points does their current solution solve for them?

Understanding these basic things will help you identify the best solutions and most important features that need to be built.

This is essential for building a product people actually want, not just what they say they want when you ask them via an online survey or focus group.

Most importantly of all, it helps save time by ensuring your team builds a useful product instead of one that’s useless because it doesn’t solve any problems.

6. Know how you can sell to them

Having these conversations with your audience early on will give you a good idea of how you can sell to them.

• What are the barriers they face while buying a product like yours?
• Do they buy it through a company or personal? What’s the purchasing process in their company?
• What kind of offers work?
• Do they buy a product only if a friend refers?

Knowing this early on will allow you to tailor your product and marketing messages accordingly, which will give you a much better chance at being successful!

This is also an excellent way to understand how to retain them as customers. Many products suffer from high churn. But if you know your audience from early on, you can find ways to keep them happy.

7. Build a community of True Fans

This is one of the most important benefits of building an audience early on before creating your product.

Every product needs a tight-knit community of True Fans or Early Adopters. These loyal hardcore users of your product are the ones who will help spread it through word of mouth.

These are the people who would be spending $1000 on your product before it even exists. They will go ahead and promote your product to all their friends, family members and colleagues.

The number one way to create such a community of True Fans is to build an email list and regularly sending them engaging emails. 

Even though Social Media is also a great place to get fans, I prefer owning your list of customers to having Facebook or Twitter hold your customer base.

This will ensure that you have the most engaged people in your email list or social media followers who are interested in getting updates about what’s coming next for your company.

Once you have this community of customers, you can even use their advice to help drive your product decisions.

Conclusion

Audience research is fundamental, whether you are selling an ebook or starting an eCommerce store or a SaaS product.

And even more important is doing this research early on in the process. Doing research early on will help you create a product that people are willing to buy, and if it’s successful, it will make your life much easier down the road because there is already an audience ready for it.

Question for you: What is your product, and what kind of audience have you identified for it? Please leave them in the comments below.

The main reason people think blogs aren’t relevant is they don’t seem to get the results that they got even a few years back. Yes, it has become a lot more competitive, but the underlying concepts and rules are still the same for blogging. The rules haven’t changed, but there are just a lot more people running the race.

Even though Google keeps changing the algorithm frequently, causing you to lose sleep over it, blogs are still one of the easiest ways to rank on Google SERPs. If you start a blog today, you can’t expect to be on page 1 by next week.

SEO is a slow process. It will take a few months even to get ranked on pages 4, 5, or 6 for your keyword. That too is only possible if you do it right. Many of our clients come and say, I have been writing blog posts, but I didn’t work. I didn’t get any results.

Unless you are a big brand like Amazon, Nike, or Apple, you can’t rank immediately. You are just starting, and Google still needs to understand your site and gauge how important your brand is. I always say my clients, “Don’t expect to see any results before six months.”

To ensure you get it right, there are a few tactics that work, even today.

Optimise your blog

You need to ensure that your blog is optimised. You should make sure you focus on the right keywords that are relevant to your niche or industry and whatever you are trying to sell. If you are selling Orchid plants, you should start writing about growing and nurturing various types of orchids, what kinds of insects or pests would you face, how to protect your flowers from them organically, etc.

Think about the problems your clients would face even if they didn’t already buy from you. You need to focus on long-tail keywords, even if it means you don’t get thousands of searches per day. Also, if you solved the burning problem of one visitor from your post, you would get a customer for life.

Keyword Density and Advanced Tactics

Many experts claim to use various tactics to get the right keyword density and using other advanced techniques like LSI, etc. I generally keep away from those complexities.

I use the Yoast SEO Plugin on my WordPress sites and make sure I try to get a green light for most of the factors it shows.

Mostly it means using the keyword in the title, introduction paragraph, description, slug, use headings, and good images, etc. The more “greens” you get, the better optimised your post is.

Go after Easier and Long Tail Keywords

When you are starting as a new blog, you should try to rank for easier keywords. There are many tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, etc., which give you a difficulty score. But if you don’t want to pay for those, you can also use UberSuggest which gives a keyword difficulty score for each keyword. Try to write posts that have a score of 40 or less. Those are all easier to rank.

Optimise for Mobile

Your site needs to be optimised for mobile devices. Google finds that every year more searches are coming from mobile devices. If your website doesn’t look good on a mobile device, your visitors are going to bounce as soon as they come.

Having a faster website also helps as Google uses page speed as a significant ranking criterion. Use the Google Pagespeed Insights tool to analyse and measure how fast your website is, on both desktop and mobile.

Use Google Analytics the right way

Many businesses, don’t use the free tools that Google provides. Google Analytics gives you a lot of insight into your visitors. But it’s not just installing a piece of code in all your pages and calling it done.

You need to analyse where your visitors are coming from, which referrals are causing the highest conversions, what pages are converting better. Sometimes you would get a lot of traffic to a particular page, but it won’t convert at all. Identifying those types of pages and cleaning them would get your better results.

Go beyond just SEO

I have seen a lot of sites just creating their site post content and wait for traffic to come in. There was a client who wrote a super authoritative blog post about a topic in a crowded niche. She kept waiting for traffic to come in and start ranking. But since she was a new site, she couldn’t rank on the first page yet.

If she didn’t get any traffic, Google doesn’t get a good idea of whether your content is good or not. She could’ve waited for 6 months to start ranking or she could drive traffic from other sources.

I suggested she try other channels and driving traffic via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. She even ran a small paid campaign to drive visitors to the page. Once Google got a decent sample of visitors coming to the page, staying and reading it, she started ranking on the first page within 3 weeks.

You should try to get all kind of help possible to show that you are the best in your industry. The best way to do it is to be present on all channels as possible. Become the most seen brand and, soon you will be considered as the expert. Start building human connections.

Conclusion

These are some of the ways to make your blog and blog posts relevant and succeed in 2020. Even though it’s going to be harder as more sites come, if you are consistent with your effort, you have a better chance at succeeding than your competitor.

If you want help with your site ranking better, book a free call with us, and we will help you identify 3 easy fixes that you can do to your site to rank better.

I am not going to talk about that, for two reasons:

1. I haven’t done such a complex analysis at all.
2. I think almost 90% of products are priced by pulling a number out of thin air. Or at least, our of a competitor’s page.

For a product that’s a commodity, you can just pull a number from your competition’s pricing page and just replicate it. It should work fine. But there is nothing differentiating you from them and most entrepreneurs end up reducing the price. The minute you compete on price, it’s a race to the bottom.

There are a few ways to think about pricing that can make or break your product. It shows that you are different from them.

Problem with Single price

Most entrepreneurs just have single pricing for their products or services. Let’s say you are selling a SaaS product, you can go the easy route and have a single monthly price for the product. Or if you are consulting or running a service business, you would probably have an hourly rate for whatever you sell.

There are advantages and disadvantages of having a single price for your product or service. It is easier to explain and reason about. If you say, everyone pays only $20/month or $50/hour, you don’t give any preferential treatment to your customers. Your customer doesn’t have to think too much if they could get a better deal or maybe they need to choose a different plan. But the disadvantage here is that you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

Different customers have different needs. A solo founder might be able to pay only $20 per month for your SaaS product, but an enterprise would not even consider your product unless you have an “Enterprise” plan.  Your customer is buying your product or service because they are in a lot of pain and you are solving that pain. If you are able to give them multiple pricing options, you get the advantage of increasing your average cart value.

Multiple Packages for EBooks

This doesn’t have to work only for SaaS products. Even if you write ebooks or informational products, you can have multiple price points by having different packages. Nathan Barry (of ConvertKit) initially started out writing design ebooks. But the way he priced his books were slightly different.

He learned that one can never become rich by having just a single price. He used 3 price points for 3 packages for his EBook + Video Courses.

In the initial 48 hours, his sales were (initial sale prices had a 20% discount):

• The Book ($39) Units: 151; Revenue: $4,448
• The Book + Videos ($79) Units: 104; Revenue: $6,296
• The Complete Package ($169) Units: 67; Revenue: $8,803

He got the maximum revenue from the highest package, even though the number of people opting for it was just 67. If he just had a single price point, he would have made only $11,117 vs the $19,547 he got in total.

In a blog post, he explains in detail about the various experiments he ran for his next book launch.

Upsells and Downsells

Another method to increase your revenue is to have a sales funnel instead of a sales page. In a sales page, you have a single page where you have the pricing for the product and your customer buys it. Once the sale is completed, instead of showing a thank you page, find out another product and offer that would complement the original offer you had just sold and pitch it on the second page. This is called an upsell.

If the user buys the upsell, you can take him to the next page of the funnel. If he doesn’t take up the upsell, you can show him a down-sell offer. A downsell is an offer that is much cheaper than the original upsell or has a payment plan to make the purchase decision easier.

Here is a simple diagram that explains it.

The reason why its important is, once common psychology. If a customer is buying something, it is easier to make another additional sale as compared to selling them something a few weeks down the line.

What you are packaging as the upsell/downsell offer is also important. Let’s say you have a SaaS product like MailChimp and your customers send marketing emails every day. The other problem that they might have is to write persuasive copy for their emails.

So you can bundle an ebook and video course for them on copywriting. This would be upsell and you could maybe sell it for $97 or $197. If the customers choose not to buy, you can show them a downsell offer of just the ebook for $37. People who can’t spend $197 for an entire course, can instead spend $37 for an ebook.

The number of upsells and downsells depend a lot on the product and niche you are in. But overall, if you use a sales funnel with at least one upsell and downsell, you are sure to make a few extra sales.

These are the different ways to price your product to increase the average cart value and thereby increasing the total revenue for your company.

Understanding Direct Response Copywriting

Decades back, before the internet, people were selling stuff differently. Let’s say you are trying to sell houses and you need people to come to your office, take a look at the model house and eventually buy a house. But the first step is to make people know that you exist and you have houses to sell.

You would have to print flyers, buy ads in newspapers or magazines, send postcards, etc., to tell your potential audience. But all these are expensive.

Now you have to make sure your ad performs really well as you don’t want to lose money on this. Let’s just take a look at two headlines for the ads and see which is better.

If your ad headline just says “Own your own home in the best location of the city” not many would read it. Yes, the location is important, but unless you explain the benefit of the location, your audience isn’t going to understand why they need it. Not many are going to read the ad nor respond to it.

Instead, just imagine seeing this headline for the ad “Your next home is just a 15-minute drive from your work and has plenty of space for your kids to grow and play.” If you are the right target audience (say someone who has kids and also working in a busy office) this headline really strikes the right chord in their mind.

They can imagine seeing themselves coming back home early, spending time with their family and having a healthy work-life balance.

If just a headline can make such a huge difference, what would be the effect if we could change all parts of the ad?

Measuring Performance

Let’s say, for example, you are running a full-page ad in a magazine with a reach of 100k readers and it costs $1000 (just to make the calculations easy). And your competitor is running the generic version of the ad and you are running an ad written by a professional copywriter optimized for your audience.

Out of 100k readers, only 100 people read through your competitor’s ad and only 10 people call to ask more details. And no one comes for a visit and buys.

Instead, since your ad is optimized, at the minimum 1000 people read through your ad and 100 people call. And now, even if 10 people visit the property and only 1 person buys a house, you have made a sizeable profit. This shows the power of writing persuasive copy.

Copywriting in the Digital World

The concepts are almost similar in the current digital channels. Instead of an offline magazine, you have an online website or social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, etc.

You have a short headline and description for your ad and your audience may click on the ad if it’s intriguing enough. The ad might take them to a landing page or a lead form where they can enter their details and you can collect their information.

The tricky part here is your audience has a much-reduced attention span than ever and you have only a few seconds to grab their eyeballs and make them read your ad. So copywriting has become much more difficult and harder. You need someone who can understand your niche, your target audience and how to bring out the right emotions in them.

That’s why most copywriters charge thousands of dollars for a landing page. And since the internet allows you to sell to anyone around the world, you can get much more returns out of a single landing page or email copy by just sheer scale.

Copywriting is everywhere you see online. Be it the ads you see on Facebook or Google, the landing page your visitors come to, the images and video you have, emails and messages that you send to your leads, blog posts you write, webinar scripts, autoresponder email sequence you send and more.

If you want to sell more and become profitable by hiring a copywriter who can persuade your audience, book a free call.

There are two problems with this:

A. Coming up with new topics and ideas for your blog.

It’s not easy to come up with new topics every day. Many companies have dedicated content team and an editorial team whose job is to come up with a schedule for their content. But as a startup, you would be wearing multiple hats and content-writer might be one of them.

B. Coming up with topics which are relevant and worthy of sharing

Even if you published a blog post every day, it means nothing if no one reads the content. Your blog should have posts that are relevant to your industry. It should also make people go beyond the headline and read the entire post.

There are many ways to come up with such topics and ideas, but here are 3 ways that I have tried and which are sure to make your readers also interested.

1. Use tools like BuzzSumo or UberSuggest

Coming up with generic blog topics and guessing if they would be shared on social networks is very risky. I spend at least 10-15 hours on research, writing and editing a blog post before I hit publish. What if it bombs on social media? What if no one shares it?

Instead, why not find topics which were already shared widely on twitter, facebook, etc., and use that as a starting point for your post?

That’s where BuzzSumo comes in. It is a paid tool (with a free trial) where you can search for your topic and see what articles were popular on various social media.

You get a few topics for free and can use that as a base. You can refine the keywords and get more results too.

For example, if I want to write blog posts for a travel agency, I would start off with a search for “travel destinations” in BuzzSumo. I can see that the top post (by facebook engagements) is “Top travel destinations on each continent for 2019” and 3rd post is a similar list of travel destinations for the budget traveler.

The other 3 posts are promotional posts about how a specific country is voted as the best travel destination in 2019 according to some criteria.

Looking at this we can identify that these two types of posts are performing well.

If you think 5 topics are not enough, you can also use UberSuggest, a free, feature-rich tool by Neil Patel.

You can do a search using similar keywords and identify blog posts that were shared widely. It also presents you with other keyword alternatives, which is useful to refine your search.

2. Search for Questions in Quora or Reddit

Sometimes, you might think of a particular topic, search in BuzzSumo or UberSuggest and see that no one has written about it at all. Does it mean you should drop it? Not so fast.

Many times people have questions which need to be answered, but can’t find a good quality resource to link to. There are many ways to find such good questions. You can do a quick search on Quora (a popular question-answer site) to see what kind of questions your audience is asking. Most questions would have been answered already. In that case, collect all the answers and write your own comprehensive post, covering all the topics. If not, you have to do a bit more research and come up with a good blog post that covers most of the topics that are related to the question.

Once your post is published, you can add your answer to the quora post and link to your post at the bottom.

But remember, unless you are adding more value than others, you would be marked as spam by others.

Reddit is also another popular site to search for such content. Reddit has numerous subreddits related to your industry, where there will be newbies asking questions. You can search for these types of questions and find what are the most asked questions and write your blog post accordingly.

For programmers, searching on StackOverflow would yield a better result than other sites. You have numerous programmers asking a variety of questions that you can use to write your blog post.

3. Search on Twitter and Google Trends for the latest news and topics people are talking about

If you are in an industry that requires writing about the latest news, what better source to find such topics than to search for twitter. Keep a close eye on the trending topics and tweets which are becoming popular. There are many publications that collect all the top tweets about a trending topic and do a round-up post about it. These types of posts perform well because not everyone follows everything on twitter. And even if they missed some trending topic, they can quickly cover most of it by reading these types of posts in 5 minutes.

Another place to find what is trending is to use Google Trends page. This tool allows you to explore what everyone around the world is searching for. You can see the trend for specific keywords and compare them across other search keywords too. You can filter it based on the country to find topics in your specific region too.

Google also has another tool that is not used widely – Google Alerts. This tool allows you to set up alerts for specific keywords and topics and will send you an email when something new comes up on the web.

Conclusion

Using these three methods, you can come up with topics that are new, fresh and guaranteed to perform well with your target audience.

Coming up with new topics is the most hard part of the content marketing process. Once you get the idea for a topic and the outline for the post, it is just a matter of writing it out and publishing it. You can hire content writers to write your actual blog post and edit it.

What industry are you writing content for and how do you come up with new topics?

The only companies which can afford to not talk to customers are the ones which don’t need customers to pay. All others, better do some quality customer development before you even think of writing your first line of code.

What is Customer Development

Customer Development is a way to get customer insights and ideas for products and services by conducting interviews and structured experiments. Customer development is used to help build products that customers want and most importantly avoid spending time and money on products customers don’t want.

By ensuring that you optimize the entire process for building only features and products that customers ask for, you save a lot of heartache and failure later.

Customer Development doesn’t have to be expensive. Today, I was talking to a market research company that was trying to make me use their services to conduct customer research and questionnaires. He was showing me all kinds of fancy reports and graphs of case studies that he has done, which would have cost me a couple of thousand dollars at the minimum.

I said to him that I am at a very early stage in building my product and I can instead do the same level of research with less than $100. And this post is a way to show you how you too can do customer development for your products or services easily.

Here are 5 tips to do customer development for cheap

1) Talk to your Customers

Duh! Talking to your customers is the first method every founder needs to do. Drop an email to your customers asking if they would be willing to spend 15 mins on a skype call. Just use this following script:

Dear Jane,

I see you have been a user of PRODUCT_NAME for 2 months. Can we get on a short 15-minute call to help me understand how you are using our product? It would help a lot in improving it for the next release.

Reply back with a time that would work for you.

Thanks.
Srini.

During the call, ask a few basic questions about why they use their product, what is the one problem that is currently being unsolved by your product, etc. It is important to make the customer talk 90% of the time during this call.

If you can extend the call, ask them if they could share their screen while they use your product. Observing users using your app in the wild reveals a lot of interesting behaviors.

During one such session, I noticed that the user was trying to select multiple pages of HTML tables and pasting them in an Excel Spreadsheet. It was literally painful to watch him do it. The user was non-technical and he was generating these reports by hand once a week. But he didn’t bring this up during any of the regular interviews.

We rolled out a quick “Export to CSV” feature and it immediately increased the productivity of the user. And instantly, we became heroes.

What would you do if you are still

2) Talk to your competitor’s customers

Competition research is a separate topic altogether. But in the context of customer development, it is important to talk to your competitor’s customers too.

This is useful for two reasons:

1. As an early-stage startup, you wouldn’t even have a product or customers to talk to. Just because you don’t have customers, doesn’t mean you can’t get the insights you need.
2. What better person to talk to understand your field and industry than talking to existing customers and asking them what their problems are and how the current company is solving them.

3) Test before you build

Many startups make this common mistake of building their product in a vacuum without testing whether it works or not. It’s important to test a prototype or a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) before spending all your money, time and effort on it.

The quickest way to test it is to draw a wireframe of the product and test it with 5 potential users. You can find them easily on various user testing sites, forums, Reddit, etc. If you have a physical product, build a prototype and go to your nearest Starbucks and ask people if they are willing to test it out for a free coffee.

By spending a few hundreds of dollars on testing the initial version, you can save hundreds of thousands later.

4) Attend Meetups, TradeShows, and conferences

You can meet potential customers at various events in your city. Spend some time attending these events and talking with them. Listen to their problems. Understand their needs. Help them out and they will remember you when you email them when you launch.

Networking doesn’t mean selling. It involves helping them without any expectations. When you are seen as someone they can trust, then you can reach out to them and sell later.

5) Be your own customer

Every founder should try their own product or service as a customer themselves. If you have a SaaS product, signup for it, go through the onboarding, fill in your credit card, try to accomplish everything you wanted your customer to do.

If you have an agency, get your salesperson to sell to you and see how you are being handled. Only if you live the life of your customers, you would understand what they go through and how you can improve it.

Even a single conversation would trigger a massive change in your process that would increase the success of your business.

Customer development is a continuous process and you might have to experiment with various models to truly understand the right way to do it. But unless you do it, you would be stuck at the same level for a long time.

Do you have any other ideas that you have used for customer development?

Your website is your salesperson and has a single job to do – to bring in new leads and make sales. And most companies these days just create a plain static website which does nothing more than act as an expensive digital brochure. Having a proactive website, which actively helps your visitors increase the quality of the leads and revenue by 25%.

Conversational Marketing

Conversational Marketing is the new style of marketing coined by Drift, a popular chatbot service for your website. Traditional websites usually had a contact page that visitors would have to search for and then fill it up. That would trigger an email to you, and you can reach them out to start a conversation.

But nowadays you can embed a snippet of code in your website and your visitors are shown a small chat widget in the lower right corner of the page. You can customize the message you want to display based on various parameters like the page URL, time spent by the customer, etc.

And whenever your customer responds to the chatbot, the bot would provide them with links to relevant articles in your knowledge base. If the visitor wants to reach out to a human, the chat conversation gets routed to your support staff and they can continue from there.

Though there are much more involved in conversational marketing, these are the basics.

How to get most out of your chatbots

Here are 3 basic tips that would take 5 minutes to implement and also get many more leads from your chatbots.

Make your bot more proactive

Your visitors wouldn’t probably know you have a chatbot. Your bot needs to make the first contact with your visitor.

In all chatbot services, you can control when your bot gets triggered based on rules. Typically, if a user lingers around in the features or pricing page, pop a chat window and ask them if they would like more details.

Show them some basic questions based on the page the visitor is on and keep the conversation going.

One thing online marketers understand is that as long as the visitors actively keep engaging with your site, they tend to be highly qualified leads. Someone who is just checking out your site, wouldn’t waste time chatting with a bot.

Always ask for email through your bot

Even though chatbots and facebook messenger are hot, email still is important to reach out to your leads – especially if you are selling a SaaS product. You can’t throw out emails completely.
In your chatbot conversation, after the user has asked something, ask the visitor for his email address.

Something as simple as “I would be happy to help with that. But can I get your email address in case we get disconnected?”

This one line is sure to get more email addresses and leads into your system. You can experiment with different reasons to ask for email addresses like giving a coupon code or signing up for a giveaway or sending a free PDF report.

Have a Human backup

Remember, even though bots are getting very popular, they can’t replace humans yet. Think of bots as someone that your salesperson can outsource the mundane tasks. When it comes to closing the sale, you are going to need that human.

During your working hours, have a few support staff check your chatbots and see what visitors are online and maybe strike up an actual conversation with them. If you are an early stage company, I would suggest everyone, including the founders to chat with your visitors to know what they expect and how you can improve your website/product.

Adding that personal touch would increase the engagement and the number of leads you get.

Conclusion

Even if you dislike chatbots, it has become an important tool for your website. Be sure to add them on a few pages, experiment with it and see how the number of leads you get increases.

Are there any other creative ways you have used chatbots on your website? Comment below.

Is it even worth starting a blog?

Why would you even think of starting a blog today? There is way too much competition out there. Does content marketing still worth the time and money you need to spend?

Yes, it is easier to buy traffic through Google or Facebook ads. You can target your audience based on various demographics and interests. Paid ads are worth billions of dollars, and it is not going to go down any time soon.

But the problem with paid ads is that it’s just like living in a rented house. You pay money to Google and Facebook to rent out visitors. As long as you keep spending money, you would get visitors.

Some times, the price you pay for each visitor would go up. And once your cost of acquisition is more than your lifetime value of a customer, it makes no financial sense to put in more money.

Your blog is an asset

Compared to paid ads, having a blog is an asset to your company. You might spend a few hundreds or even thousands of dollars into researching and writing a 2000 word blog post. But, each of that blog post you write will earn you dividends for years after you have written them.

That’s the power of content marketing.

You can’t expect to write a blog post today and get visitors from Google tomorrow. It would take a few months for your content marketing efforts to kick in. But when it does, the quality of the leads you get through this is much higher than paid ads.

You have control

When you are dependent on Google or Facebook ads to drive traffic, you risk losing it all if they decide to shut you down. But if you have your content marketing, you can control how your visitors reach you.

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to put all my eggs in one basket.

Why content marketing works

Visitors searching for something on google are looking to solve a specific problem. If they reach your blog post and you are able to solve their problem, you are seen as an expert in their eyes.

And in the future, if you try to sell them anything, there is a much higher chance they would convert to customers.

Digital Ocean follows this strategy fantastically.

Digital Ocean creates hundreds of articles about installing and running servers. Any developer searching for how to deploy their code would get a digital ocean article in the top. By helping out their visitors, they are now an expert in servers and infrastructure.

And since the developers keep seeing the same brand and logo for any of their infrastructure questions, the visitors soon end up becoming customers.

Five things to make your blog successful

Creating a successful blog is not easy. But if you follow these five simple things, you have a better chance.

1. Consistency

If you want your blog traffic to keep growing, you need to keep adding more content. Publishing new posts regularly is very important, especially when you are starting fresh. At least aim for one post every week.

Seth Godin, one of the best marketers of our times, blogs every day. And he has been doing it consistently for the past several years. And each of his posts gets tens of thousands of visitors every day.

James Clear regularly posted twice a week for many years when he started blogging. That was the main reason behind his millions of unique visitors every year and his massive list of email subscribers. That allowed him to launch his book Atomic Habits and his other courses.

Always choose a specific day or days to publish your content.

• If you want to post one post every week, you can choose any weekday, preferable early in the week.
• For two posts every week, publish them on Tuesday and Thursday.
• And if you can post three posts a week, choose a Monday, Wednesday and Friday schedule.

These choices of days in the week make sure your audience gets your posts at regular intervals and also avoids content fatigue. You don’t want to push too much content at the beginning of the week and not publish anything for many days later.

It is best to have an editorial calendar and keep at least 3-5 posts in advance ready to publish. This is easier and essential if you have a dedicated content team.

2. Create Evergreen content

Just because you need to publish regularly, doesn’t mean you should post short blog posts with fluff content. Seth Godin can publish a post with only 50 words. But we don’t have the same luxury as Seth. He has established himself as an expert in his field.

If you and I have to establish ourselves, we need to create what’s called an “Evergreen Content.” Evergreen Content is something that is relevant and stays fresh for your readers for years to come.

That means the following types of posts are out:

• News Articles
• Posts about holidays or specific seasons
• Numeric reports and statistical analysis, cause they go out of date.
• Latest trends, pop culture, etc.

If you search for any historical figure or celebrity, the first result will always be Wikipedia. That’s because their wiki page has become an evergreen content. It has everything you want to know about that person.

And Google likes that kind of articles.

But you can’t compete with Wikipedia always. So what types of blog posts can be evergreen?

• Listicles
• Top Tips and tricks
• How-to tutorials (remember Digital Ocean?)
• Product Reviews

By creating posts with this template, you have a higher chance of getting your articles viral in social media. If you want inspiration for articles,  check out Buzzsumo. Type your topic and see which posts were shared the most in social media. Use that and create your version.

 

3. Regularly update old content

If you plant a sapling and leave it, it would soon die because of lack of water and other nutrients. If it is left in the wild, some animal might eat it up. You gotta nurture any plant to help it grow into a tree. Only then you can enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Content marketing is also similar. You can’t publish a blog post and leave it for eternity. You have to update it and nurture it regularly. Every popular Wikipedia article gets updated multiple times a day, and that’s what pushes it to the top.

Mark your calendar for a day or two, once in 3 months to go back through your old articles, see which have outdated information and update them. Even if you thousands of posts, the entire workload can be split up with a strong content team.

Do remember, while you are updating your posts, make sure you don’t change the permalink of the post.

By updating regularly, you are giving a strong signal to Google that your site is up to date and has better content than your competitors.

4. Promote and Engage with your Audience

Your visitors are the most important part of your blog. They are the ones who regularly read your posts and convert to customers. If they leave a comment on your blog post, make sure you reply to them. Prompt response is always appreciated.

And your audience wouldn’t always know that you published a new post. You would have to promote it to them. Make sure you collect email addresses of your visitors and send them updates whenever you publish new content.

Similarly, social media is another essential referrer to get new visitors, when you are starting your blog. Share your post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and everywhere. If possible, ask your family, friends, employees to like, comment and share that post.

Whenever there is a lot of activity and engagement on social media, these sites push your content to a lot more people. That helps a lot when you need to reach out to new visitors.

And just like comments on your blog, make sure you engage with people who promote/comment your blog posts on these social media.

5. Repurpose your content

Blogs are just one small slice of the much bigger content marketing pie. Gone are the days of writing blog posts and reaping the benefits.

Nowadays, your audience has a lot more distractions like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc. And not everyone would be active on all these platforms.

To reach these people, you need to repurpose your content specifically for them.

• After you write a blog post, create a 5-10 minute long video with the same content. Upload that to YouTube.
• Hire a designer on Fiverr to create a nice infographic of your blog post. Share it on Twitter and Pinterest. You can also create a PDF checklist.
• Publish the post as a podcast episode. Not everyone wants to read a 2000 word article, but they would readily listen to a 10-15 minute podcast episode on their commute.
• Create 60 second long chunks of videos and share them on Instagram and Facebook Stories.
• If you have created an excellent, long evergreen content, publish it as a nicely formatted PDF file and promote that. It could even act as a fantastic lead magnet to collect email addresses.

There are numerous possibilities. And you don’t even have to do it all on the day you publish your post. You can start with publishing the post first, then keep updating the post with the other files and content.

Conclusion

Blogging is not dead. As long as people need information and help, you can always make your blog one of the pillars of your marketing strategy. A good marketer utilizes his blog posts and squeezes the most out of it by creatively mixing it with other channels.

Of these five essential things, which ones have you been doing? And which are you planning to do a lot more this year? Also, comment below if you feel you are going to do something not mentioned here.