We are often contacted by business owners who believe they are running their e-shop properly and that what they do is enough to make their online shop profitable. After talking with us, they realise that what they do may not even be 10% of what they really need to be doing.
To be more precise, marketing an e-shop covers much more than advertising the online shop. It includes everything you need to do, such as email marketing, writing articles, presenting products properly and much more
What needs to happen to increase the profits of an e-shop?
In short, you need to do a bit more than your competitors. If they do nothing, a little is enough for you to make a profit. Be careful: your competitor on the web is the one competing with you nationally, or even globally, and that is a much bigger field than your local competitors. And of course, the goal is always the repeat customer.
Why is my e-shop not performing?
An e-shop may underperform for many reasons. The first thing to look at is the product. Is its price right compared with the competition? Are there good photos and plenty of information about the product? Next, look at your advertising. Are you advertising on every channel you could, and is your budget right compared with the competition? Finally, look at the e-shop itself and how it has been built.
Videos with marketing tips for your e-shop
What I need to do today to have a successful e-shop
First, let’s list briefly the minimum that anyone with an e-shop needs to do for it to be successful:
- Advertising on Facebook / Instagram
- Advertising on Google Ads
- Good product photography and presentation
- Writing articles on topics related to the e-shop
- Active social media
- Email marketing
- A well-built e-shop
- Advertising on other channels, such as TikTok
Advertising on Facebook / Instagram
Advertising on Facebook and Instagram is vital for an e-shop. To put it in numbers, a budget under 1,500 euros a month on Facebook / Instagram is no longer realistic, even for small and medium-sized e-shops. A few years ago, a 500-euro budget would have been more than enough, because there was less competition and there were no restrictions on personal data. If you want to find out what has changed in advertising on Instagram/Facebook, read our earlier article. A big mistake companies and e-shops usually make is that they invest nothing at all in awareness, in other words in simply letting people get to know the e-shop through social media, and go straight for the sale. Just think how much harder it is to sell to someone who is seeing your brand for the first time. The more expensive a product is, the more you need to invest in awareness, meaning ads whose goal is simply for the end customer to see the brand, with no sale in mind.
Advertising on Google Ads
There should no longer be a single e-shop that does not invest money in Google Ads advertising. In our personal view, the minimum spend on this channel should be at least 1,500 euros a month. Of course, just as with Facebook and Instagram, everything depends on the competition and the product sector (in fashion, for example, even 3,000 euros may not be enough). In Google Ads you need well-structured search campaigns, which take a long time to set up properly and to prove themselves (over 6 months), display campaigns for remarketing (ideally no-bounce), and Performance Max campaigns, which do it all and have replaced Smart Shopping campaigns.
What are Google Performance Max campaigns?
A Performance Max campaign is essentially the easiest way to get started with Google Ads. You connect Google Merchant Center to Google Ads (in other words, the products of your e-shop), add text headlines for the whole range or the subset you are advertising, add videos and photos, and tell Google “do whatever you want”! According to tests, these campaigns get fairly good results! The audience and the budget you set play a big role. In our experience, because of how broad the campaign is, the minimum budget is 25 euros.
To advertise properly on Google Ads, all the tags must be connected correctly so that every event is tracked properly. You also need Google Analytics 4 (GA4) set up correctly, as it works perfectly with Google Ads.
Good product photography and presentation
The attention you give to the product inside the e-shop, and to the photos in your ads, is vital. You need to understand the following very well
ONLINE, WHAT YOU SELL IS THE PHOTO OR VIDEO OF THE PRODUCT
Once you understand this, you will see that each product needs more than 1 photo (ideally 5), a product video and every one of its features listed. In short, you need perfect photography and perfect product presentation.
In e-commerce today, product photography needs to be high quality and high resolution. For example, in a clothing e-shop the garment should be worn by a model, photographed from every side, ideally with a close-up zoom photo, and with one shot of the garment on its own against a white background. As you can see, in a case like this even 8 photos may not be enough!
A product page should also ideally include product reviews and related products. Finally, a long description with well-written text is always a plus.
Writing articles on topics related to the e-shop
The best thing you can do for your e-shop is to write articles. This way you will get FREE visitors who are interested in the subject your articles cover. Bear in mind that visitors interested in articles on topics similar to your products are very likely to become your customers.
Don’t forget that by writing articles you also have content you can post on social media from time to time to keep your audience informed.
Of course, we know that writing articles is hard and not everyone does it well, but if you never start trying, you will never manage to write one. At first it will be 300 words, then 700, and then 2,000. Remember something very important: nobody will write a better article than you, because you know your business better than anyone. Your article may not have the most beautiful wording, yet it will give the visitor real value. If you like, you can pick up some tips on how to write the best article for your blog in one of our articles.
Be careful: the content of all your articles must be original and give the reader something of value.
Active social media
A business’s social media must be active, with rich content and strong engagement. Through your social media posts you keep your would-be customers informed with news, and you also remind them that you exist.
Through social media you need to communicate your presence and show off your business’s strengths every day. To give some direction, we believe an e-shop should post at least 2-3 stories a day and 4 posts a week. Collaborations with influencers are, of course, ideal for increasing the awareness and engagement of your account.
It is essential to keep your account consistent and uniform on Facebook and Instagram. We also count YouTube as social media, and our presence there needs to be strong and ongoing. If you think about it, YouTube is the second-largest search engine after Google (!) and people often look for answers there.
Email marketing
Email marketing used to be the king of digital marketing, until it lost the crown to advertising on the various platforms. Today, in the age of GDPR and strict rules on sharing personal data, email marketing is back in the place it deserves.
Every single e-shop should be emailing its customers throughout the sales journey. If someone did not complete their purchase, we can send them an email and give them an incentive to buy (e.g. free shipping). If someone has bought from us and we believe in our products, it is a good idea to send them a series of emails through automation, telling them about new products or even sending them a discount coupon for their next purchase.
Of course, our newsletter list needs regular cleaning, removing contacts who no longer engage with the emails we send, so that our email marketing does not end up costing too much.
Something important we tend to forget is that simply appearing in the inbox of an existing or potential customer is a small victory, because it makes them think about our business without realising it.
Finally, with our customers’ email addresses we can show ads only to them on Google Ads and Meta ads, or use them to build a lookalike audience.
A well-built e-shop
Building your e-shop properly in terms of appearance, functionality and speed is what makes a sale easier. An attractive e-shop will raise your potential customer’s level of trust (but don’t overdo it). Good functionality will help them find what they are looking for in your e-shop easily (use more filters than categories). High speed will stop customers leaving your e-shop and help them complete their purchase quickly.
Put a lot of emphasis on how your e-shop looks on mobile, as 85% of users visit and buy from their phones. Only in rare cases will desktop traffic go above 30%, and these are mainly B2B shops.
Advertising on other channels, such as TikTok
The web is constantly evolving, and we need to evolve with it. We must keep finding ways to stay ahead of the competition.
One example is TikTok, which has grown remarkably. Large companies were quick to create accounts and to start advertising on this channel, while many smaller ones are still waiting and losing time. TikTok delivers excellent results for awareness.
We should keep testing new types of advertising on new platforms and see what performs best.
Among these channels, besides long-established Skroutz (Greece’s largest price comparison site and marketplace), there is now also Shopflix. Have you tried it? Or perhaps you are not even on Skroutz while all your competitors are?
Why my profit is gradually falling over the years
We are confident that if your product is good and has value for your would-be customers, the problem is that you have stood still over the years and not evolved. You are certainly not doing one, or most, of the things above.
It is also possible that you are doing your digital marketing the way you did it 2 or 3 years ago. Unfortunately, that is no longer enough, even in terms of budget. Within a single year, the number of e-shops grew twentyfold, and very large companies entered the market and are not going to leave. This has driven advertising spend up. For example, an e-shop that spent a total of 1,700 euros on ads had an average of 750 visitors a day, while a year later it had 500 for the same amount. (The sector and the creatives in the ads always play a big role, but we believe their quality has not changed.)
If you do not want to spend excessive amounts on advertising in the future, use some of the free methods above, such as writing articles, email marketing or social media, which will bring free visitors to your e-shop.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly in this whole article, everything you do should aim to win a permanent, repeat customer for life, with today’s sale as only the first step! Only then will your e-shop be profitable.
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