What is Inbound Marketing for eCommerce?
Inbound marketing for eCommerce consists of creating data-driven strategies that naturally attract the customers to your online shop. Following the inbound methodology will help your eCommerce store generate more leads, visitors, and customers.
The Age of the Consumer:
To naturally attract visitors, you must first understand your target audience.
“Customer centric eCommerce companies are 107 % more likely to see an ROI from inbound marketing…” – HubSpot
Tap into the daily life of your target consumers by answering these questions:
1. How do they research products and make product decisions?
2. Which websites do they frequent most?
3. What problem are they trying to solve?
4. How do they like to shop?
Remember: people are online to be entertained or to find a solution to a problem. Put yourself in their place throughout the entire inbound methodology. See an image of HubSpot's inbound methodology below:
Inbound marketing for eCommerce attracts visitors by publishing content and engaging in practices the consumers enjoy, instead of displaying irrelevant ads and promotions. This marketing method has been the most effective since 2006, leaving traditional outbound marketing in the dust.
SEE ALSO: Inbound Commerce: Online Marketing for eCommerce
The largest factor contributing to inbound marketing success is the mutual relationship created between the business and the consumer. The following are 4 practices that will help keep your eCommerce shop visitors happily returning.
1. Attract Your Target Audience
Blogs, eBooks, and webinars help solve problems or entertain consumers with qualitative information. Providing these tools for consumers creates the opportunity of an initial interaction with site visitors. Make sure the content is always relevant, clear, and promotes a sense of urgency. The quality content your company offers will elevate your business’s reputation as a leading educational resource. Use the social networks your target audience uses most to promote the content.
Embrace social networks as they allow opportunities to attract and connect with consumers on a deeper level. Always pay attention to what people are saying about your company. Valuable consumer insights can be found on social networks as consumers share opinions and voice their concerns with friends.
Take control of your company’s reputation. People are now using social media to reach out to companies for fast responses. If your business is not actively engaging in social networks, questions will go unanswered and potential customers are likely to turn away.
2. Convert Visitors Into Leads
Once you have visitors coming to your site, there are numerous opportunities to engage with them. Not all visitors may be ready to buy from your site just yet- they may be in the pre-transactional stage. However, there are opportunities to obtain their information through newsletter sign-ups, white paper and case study downloads, or by offering a contest or sweepstake. Once they’re signed up, these visitors become leads that you can market to.
Using call-to-action buttons on these offers is imperative. To get visitors to take action, the buttons must be strong and demand attention. Don’t settle for basic ‘contact us’ pages that don’t drive conversions. Persuade visitors to download a white paper or case study by clearly stating the value the visitor will receive when giving up their contact information.
Use a platform that helps measure the effectiveness of the call-to-action button. Studies have shown that the color, size, and copy of the button affect the conversion rate. HubSpot’s inbound marketing platform provides a tool to create call-to-action buttons and shows each button’s analytics to help improve the effectiveness. Integrating the HubSpot inbound marketing platform with the Magento eCommerce platform makes for an unstoppable inbound commerce machine.
3. Close the Sale
Customers acknowledge and appreciate when their interaction with your business is personalized, instead of the one-size-fits all approach. Improve the engagement between your eCommerce store and customers by:
- Creating emails based on customer behavior to best tailor their eCommerce shopping experience.
- Suggesting products a customer might like based on previous purchases during checkout or inside a follow-up email.
- Sending the customers unique promo codes to thank them for being valued customers.
4. Keep Them Coming Back
Marketers often forget to acknowledge existing customers because they’re too busy trying to acquire new ones. Making your current customers happy is beneficial, since it costs much more to acquire new customers than it does to retain them.
Send your repeat customers promotions or offer them exclusive perks before another merchant has the chance to. Make them feel special. Providing great customer service should already be your eCommerce business’s #1 priority, so come up with new and unique ways to delight your valuable customers. Keep their interests in mind throughout the inbound methodology to deliver the extraordinary experience they’re expecting and they will keep coming back.
Analyze Your Efforts
Measure your results during AND after your inbound marketing campaign. Take notice of the strategies that are attracting more attention and buzz to continue on with those efforts. Use an inbound marketing platform that helps with analytics to gather the best data on customer insights. HubSpot’s marketing software helps measure results within each platform and campaign to help with future strategies.
Redirect Your Marketing to Include Inbound
If your company is not practicing inbound marketing, you are missing out on numerous opportunities to engage with visitors and increase your eCommerce store’s ROI. Traditional business practices are evolving- if your business is not keeping up, it is falling behind. Take action to attract more visitors, leads, and customers with inbound marketing. 
