What does it take to make an online store take off?

After creating an online store, your online presence is just beginning. To make your website visible to potential customers, you need a set of measures.

So what do you need to make your online store take off?

In fact, it's difficult to give a definitive answer to this question, because many factors affect business success: product category, market, service, and your approach to marketing in general. But let's try to reveal the side of online marketing, which is now the main source of sales for an online store.

To begin with, you need to understand that none of the online marketing tools work by magic. That is, for example, if you launch advertising campaigns on Google, it is not a given that they will pay off. But you can influence this.

The standard set of services for an online store today looks like this.

Web analytics

You shouldn't launch any online activities to drive traffic to your website until you have analytics set up. The most popular free service is Google Analytics. With the help of analytics reports, you will understand the results of advertising campaigns, social media, or email newsletters. Without analytics, you will work blindly and never understand what worked and what didn't.

Additionally, we recommend installing Hotjar. Hotjar heatmaps will help you determine which places on your website are most visited and, accordingly, optimize your conversion rate and increase sales on your website.

Contextual advertising in Google/Yandex

This is your main source of sales in the beginning. No one knows you and no one will come to your name/brand. But your products will most likely be searched for on Google, which means you can get sales from there. So, we need to connect Google Shopping, Smart Shopping, and dynamic remarketing (remarketing is a technology that allows you to return users to your site if they have previously visited it). A good agency will set everything up and make sure everything works like clockwork.
After everything is tested, we scale up and increase the budget. We also connect other sources, such as Facebook/Instagram advertising, programmatic platforms (programmatic advertising is a type of display advertising where you buy the display of an ad banner to the audience you choose), etc.

Exception: a new product that is not known in the market. In this case, you don't need to launch search ads right away, because your product won't be searched for. You should first connect display advertising and video, because you need to tell potential customers about the product and explain what it is and why the consumer needs it. And only then do we move on to using search advertising campaigns.

SEO

SEO - Search Engine Optimization - a set of measures to increase the position of the site in the search engine results for the queries that are necessary for an online store.

It is best to start working on SEO at the stage of creating an online store. This will allow you to avoid unnecessary development costs and changes to the site that are required for SEO.

Website optimization gives excellent results and sales. But, unlike contextual advertising, you will have to wait. On average, good results begin to appear in 3–5 months. Due to the constantly changing algorithms and filters of search engines, it is worth carrying out all SEO work carefully and gradually in order not to get banned and lose positions.

Email marketing

This area is most similar to remarketing in terms of how it works. Well-configured email marketing is not spam emails. These are well-planned chains of emails that respond to certain triggers on the website. For example, if a user hasn't completed a purchase but left us his or her email, a chain of emails is triggered:

• Letter 1 is a greeting.
• Letter 2 - you forgot to complete the purchase.

If the user hasn't bought it, they get it:

• Letter 3 - you forgot to complete the purchase, so keep the discount.

If the user hasn't bought it, they get it:

• Letter 4 - here we have selected the products that you will most likely like.

If the user bought on email 2, they won't see the rest of the emails. If they didn't, then email 4 will be the last in the chain.

You will also build up a loyal customer base to whom you can send special offers.

SMM

It's important to understand the original purpose of your social media presence. It can be to sell a product, support users, or just a group of interests. Depending on the goal, the promotion strategy will be determined. For example, if your goal is sales, then you are not so interested in likes and comments, but sales that come from social networks are important. We just have a case study with a similar example, in which we do integrated online marketing for a children's clothing store.

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