How do you give clients that good-old-fashioned customer service feeling when all your business is online?!

Once upon a time, building customer loyalty was as easy as having smiley, attentive sales assistants and a helpful attitude. But when you’re starting out in ecommerce, it takes a bit more time and effort to stand out from the rest.

With a whole arsenal of social media sites at the disposal of ecommerce sites, you’d think most would have nailed it by now - but this isn’t the case.

Are you doing it right?

How’s Your Social Media Strategy? 

Social media has the potential to be a great marketing tool -  but it can be a deceptively awkward beast. The trick is to make sure you establish exactly who your audience is; the kinds of messages they find useful, and the right channels to reach them.

When you’ve identified your customer’s job role, pain points and interests - it’s time to put together a strategy that will encourage interaction and give your team lots of opportunities to engage. It’s definitely worth doing a bit of research into the different audiences for each social network, and the times of day your market is most likely to engage.

Tip: You shouldn’t just be promoting products - be useful! It’s much better to have a small following of engaged social media users than a lot of followers who ignore your posts. Have fun with it and enjoy talking to and getting to know your customers.

Keep in Touch with Email Marketing 

There’s a lot more to e marketing than firing emails out to a database. A good emarketing strategy will integrate with your website and is highly customiseable. Specialist emarketing tools allow you to recapture people who visit your site and leave without making a purchase, remind existing customers to make a repeat order, and nurture leads.

Tip: Don’t forget existing customers! Reward them for engaging with your brand by offering discounts and promotions to remind them you care.

Reach Out to Influencers

Word of mouth is still one of the best ways to build a loyal customer base. A recommendation from a trusted source is worth far more than an expensive ad campaign. It’s worth investing a bit of time to research influential and well respected social media users in your industry. Offer to let them try your product or service for free in return for a write-up on their blog. This is a sure fire way to get some great word-of-mouth recommendations out there.

Tip: Check previous reviews or tweets by your chosen reviewer- if they’ve been scathing about other businesses, it might be safer to find someone a little easier to please!

Reuse and Recycle

Sometimes, trying to reinvent the wheel can leave you with a useless piece of rubber that doesn’t get you anywhere! If a campaign has worked for you in the past, sometimes all you need is a few minor tweaks to bring it up to date. That tweet you sent last week about your new product will only be read by a small percentage of your followers - so if it’s nice, say it twice!

Share Your Knowledge 

Guest posting on well known blogs is great for improving your site’s search rankings. The aim of the game is not to promote your company, but to get links back to your site. The more the blog post is shared by people, the better for your SEO. When writing a guest post the aim is to be as thought provoking / entertaining / useful as possible, so abandon your brand tone of voice and get creative! Many blogs prefer posts with images, so consider adding some from a stock photography website - you don’t need to purchase these until the blog master accepts your guest post submission.

Tip: Don’t make the mistake of writing a press release instead of a guest post - the content must be useful to web users to get as many shares as possible, not own-trumpet-blowing material about your company.

Analyse This! 

It’s really important to understand the hard science behind your site. Getting to grips with Google Analytics and Google Analytics’ ecommerce tracking tool will show you exactly which parts of your site are hard to find; which products are too expensive and which of your marketing activities are the most successful.

Tip: The world of analytics can be a minefield - there are lots of great sites and blogs which can help you learn, but it may be worth considering allocating part of your marketing budget to enrolling on a short course that will really help you get to grips with everything.

And last but not least - don’t forget to give great customer service!

Just because you’re not interacting face to face, it’s still important to give great customer service - even if it’s just following up with an automated email. If you’ve made a customer’s day, the next step is to encourage them to spread the word. Don’t forget that all your customers are also potential reviewers - see TripAdvisor.com if you need any more proof of this! A quick tweet to check your client is happy (and ask for a few words of recommendation) is a great way to get a testimonial for your website.

Tip: Your client may be too busy to write a testimonial, so make it easy for them - write a draft and have them approve it - make sure to give them plenty of opportunity to edit as they wish. Authenticity is key.

Have you got an ecommerce start up success story? We’d love to know how you made your marketing budget work overtime for you - let us know in the comments!

Author Bio:
This article has been created by Christine de Largy the Managing Director of Impact Executives, a leading interim management provider to organisations across the globe. Contributions from Sam Allen the director of Zeta, specialists in ecommerce web design.