How to integrate Twitter into your eCommerce strategy

63% of companies don’t have a formal marketing strategy, but that doesn’t mean your eCommerce business has to be one of them. With a little research and some trial and error, you can easily develop a strategy that knocks competitors out of the water. Social media, for example, is still a great method of dominating your industry. The main platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are great opportunities for this. 

In fact, thousands of people access social media on a daily basis, and many of them are your ideal customers. These potential customers have particular pain points your product can solve, but they aren’t always going to find your website with a simple Google search. That’s why a major part of having a successful eCommerce strategy is bringing your product to these customers. 

After all, it doesn’t matter how great your product is if they aren’t able to find you they aren’t going to buy from you. You need visibility, a way to consistently and reliably get out in front of your customers if you are going to succeed. To that end, let’s examine the role Twitter can play in your eCommerce strategy and the methods you should employ to integrate it.

Get to know your audience

The first step to successfully integrate Twitter into your eCommerce strategy is to get to know your target audience. As a business, your main goal should be to provide value. This is impossible without a solid understanding of the problems your business is facing. For example, you need to know how your product can solve those problems and the people who make up your target audience in the first place.

The factors you use to define your audience can often include things like age, gender, income, and educational level, but also more niche search elements like the city, family structure, and sexual orientation. Keep in mind, though, that defining your audience isn’t about making assumptions. It requires deep research into your current customers and their similarities. This research can be through engagement methods like online surveys and discussions. This enables your current client base to answer questions about themselves, their needs, and their satisfaction with your product.

Twitter is a great platform to conduct these tests on, as it offers versatility in how you can choose to start conversations. You have options like Twitter Chats, direct messages, mentions, and Twitter polls. These are different mediums through which you can get to know your current customers and their needs. From there, you can begin to craft the ideal “buyer persona”, as well as any relevant secondary personas, to target with your content.

Just make sure that as you grow your Twitter following you don’t lose track of who your audience really is.

Set KPIs

The definition of success differs from business to business, but one thing that doesn’t change is the need for clearly defined KPIs. KPIs provide milestones for your eCommerce strategy that you can set to keep yourself focused on attaining your goals. They’ll define what you hope to accomplish in terms of website traffic, lead conversions, retweets, comments, likes and revenue. They’ll keep you on track for successfully turning Twitter into a valuable component of your eCommerce strategy.

Although no two companies will have the same KPIs for their eCommerce strategies, they will have close similarities. This is because KPIs typically call for you to reach a specific number, such as 50 email subscribers, 7-figure monthly revenue, higher ratings, and triple the amount of website traffic.

Your ability to meet these goals is dependent on how well you’ve done your research into potential clients and their needs. Not only this, but it also depends upon how well you customize your content according to your findings.

Identify Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

If you want to meet your goals, you must ensure they’re measurable. Do this by setting KPIs on your marketing strategy.

These KPI tools provide milestones that you can compare against your goals. They’ll state what you want to attain in terms of SEO, traffic, revenue, and various aspects of online marketing like social media and email marketing metrics. 

Typically, KPIs will attach a specific number. For instance, you may want to: 

  • Attract a certain number of new email subscribers. 
  • Hit a specific revenue target within a week, month, or year. 
  • Increase traffic and engagement to your content. 
  • Raise the search engine ranking to help increase traffic to your site. 
  • Get a specific number of shares, mentions, and comments on your posts. 

You’ll also need to pay close attention to your marketing expenditure and keep an eye on costs for making sales.

Social media marketing is key to the expansion of any contemporary business. Whether you like it or not, social channels are part of the entire digital marketing ecosystem, and they should never ever be neglected.

You have two options. The first (and the most common one) is to create an average social media campaign and reap its benefits. That means a few leads here and there, but not something that truly changes the dynamic for your business. This kind of social media campaign is just business as usual, something you push a button on every few weeks and extract some moderate amount of revenue from. 

The second option is to take your social media marketing to the next level. The first requirement is an amazing strategy, the second is the ability to take persistent action. Make your choice, do it quickly, and please get to work!

Spreading The Word 

Spreading the word is about connecting with customers, letting the customers know about the store and the products they can purchase and connect with. Here ranking in the search engines and social media popularity matters. Also, the eCommerce stores can try customizing their advertisement by setting up the specific target market. 

According to invespcro, 84% of online customers refer to at least one social media platform for recommendations before purchasing online.

eCommerce stores should begin blogging and do listings on recognized social media platforms and perform digital advertising. The more genuine popularity and customer reviews a store can get, the more likely it is to be accepted by people all over the world. 

The more value an eCommerce store can provide to the customer service and in the quality of products, the customers are more likely to generate online content for them i.e., showing off the products purchased from a store or commenting for the same and spreading mouth publicity. 

Customers are more likely to believe in like-minded people. In short, customers believe in customers. So the user-generated content plays a crucial role and this can be achieved by social proof, onsite customer reviews and more sort of user-generated content.

Considerations For Being Proactive & Upselling Of Product:

  • Let customers know the difference between products (sharing unique features)
  • How opting for a better product would help?
  • How the additional piece of information is going to help a particular customer? 
  • To what extent offering perks gains conversion? 

Adding such useful information to the product would drive conversion traffic to the eCommerce portal. Also, there are chances that a customer would prefer your online store from the next time.

Influencer Marketing Is Going To Get Even Bigger

The reality of influencer marketing is simple: influencers hold a lot of power.

Out of the companies that had employed influencers in 2017, 92% were satisfied with the results, a Linqia report found out. Another figure speaks for the level of their satisfaction: 39% were planning to increase the respective budget.

When it comes to influencer marketing, you have to know your target audience. Millennials and the following generations are more susceptible to it but that’s not to say it doesn’t work with older people. However, you’d have a harder time finding influencers who are popular enough with them.

According to Forbes, one of the most important things about an influencer is believability. First, they must be directly related to the product or service they are promoting. Nobody is going to believe, say, Gabe Newell’s endorsement of a fitness nutrition company, but if you were a hardware manufacturer and got him (sorry, can’t give you the precise amount of money he is going to demand it) to promote your goods, it would be extremely credible.

Second, even if an influencer’s field of expertise relates to what you produce, there are still ways it can all go wrong. It can happen if they look disinterested in the product and what they say about it reads like a paid promotion. Which, of course, it is, and your customers likely know it, but certain sincerity will help a lot.

To that end, it’s best to give your influencers a bit of creative freedom. This way, they will appear to be more natural to potential customers.

5. Keep Evolving 

Be it an online store, a brick & mortar store, or a product catalog. Keep things changing with time. A customer will not be surprised by the same homepage in an online store. A customer in a physical store will always want to see new products, new brands, or some alterations to the products. This will drive a customer decision for sure. 

Keep your products up to date with the new arrivals. Keep a section that defines new arrivals and stores should mean it in real sense. This will not only drive traffic to that section but also improve conversions remarkably. 

6. Trust

Do not just offer your product/service to the prospect but also build a relationship throughout the process so that he returns to you again, and can send more referrals to you.  

Understand the problems carefully that customers are seeking a solution for, attend them at every step, and also take feedback at the end of the service. This entire experience will encourage a positive image of your brand in the customer’s mind. And remember, the best marketing is through word of mouth.

Established Image 

Once established, it is always cherished. Yes, a customer can drive other customers’ decisions. Customer reviews and customer feedback are the best bet to drive a solid decision. Excellent product reviews always establish a positive brand image. Resolve customer problems and strive for the best solution. It will always leave an outstanding impact on customers. It will also inspire them to do mouth to mouth publicity of your products/services. 

For example, on an eCommerce website; we always look for product reviews first while purchasing. A negative review or lousy rating never inspires us to trust that product, even if we haven’t tried yet. 

So this is the way of establishing trust in customers. Once you give 100% integrity to products and solutions, customer feedback will play their role automatically. Here appreciating customers with some great rewards for a customer review will also motivate them to purchase the product and put a useful review often.

Businesses that care about the customers as much as their revenues have more probability of succeeding as they are brewing the perfect recipe for business success.

Wishlist 

Wishlist – for every customer, there is a unique set of wishlist. The things that fascinate a customer will insist him to add them in the wishlist and a customer can’t resist themselves from adding in. 

When a customer forgets to convert their wishlist to purchase, it is online stores who remind them. It’s a kind of an abandoned cart recovery email. 

This email reminder is closely identical to abandoned recovery emails but it’s not recognized as abandoning the cart but putting things in wishlist i.e., a customer wishes to purchase in the future or maybe now but delays it for a reason. 

According to invespcro, 64% of online shoppers tend to purchase the product when offered guaranteed exchanges and 36% of purchasers express that they compare the desired item between a number of sites and prefer the one that offers the lowest / affordable pricing. 

This email reminder convinces a customer to purchase the product he wishes to and showing a proactive approach in reminding them about the products they think are good. This sort of email reminder may contain discount coupons and offers. It is just that a customer is one step away from the purchase and need some inspiration for quick purchase. 

So for eCommerce stores, knowing the need of the hour is important when it comes to customers’ wishlist. 

Prediction & Product Lifespan 

Acquiring profound knowledge of the product prior to customers is a must. It helps the merchants in making the right move with the product promotion strategy. Going into the details, he can sense the lifespan of a product for a purchaser and so does he excels at the overall forecasting of a product. 

Using business intelligence tools such as glew, a merchant can easily see the customer lifetime value for a particular product and set the parameters accordingly. This way, the awakening of existing customers is possible, too.

The product prognostication can be tried using distinct approaches. A merchant can pre-sell the product, can create shopping-related polls, taking help from business intelligence, digital marketing and more. A merchant should use trial and error method for trying out the products. He can come to know by pre-selling multiple products that get more attention and the one that gets underrated. 

Optimizing Abandoned Cart Ratio 

Abandoning a cart is a common practice of customers at online stores. People don’t mind going in and ending up not purchasing anything. But there are some ways where this can be reduced and convert them into remarkable sales. 

According to hubspot, 24% of online consumers are interested in free shipping and ready to qualify for the same. So at the checkout process, suggesting the items that trigger a free shipping gateway, makes checkout quicker. 

The efficacious way of reducing such exercise is to conduct an email campaign. The advanced eCommerce platforms like BigCommerce is capable of providing accurate visitor data. Using that, drip email can be set up to target the audience who comes at the store, select some products but abandons the cart.

A personalized email draft would make customers rethink their decision. Also, the eCommerce store can offer some pricing discounts and better product options as well. An effectively done Abandoned recovery email campaigns can drive sales exceptionally.

Also, one should purchase their eCommerce themes having such functionalities and support to addons. If you’re opting for BigCommerce Development and Shopify platform respectively, here’s the link to BigCommerce themes and Shopify templates & themes. 

Keep Trying New Tactics

Whatever you do, it is imperative that you never quite experimenting. You won’t know what is best for your business until you’ve tried it. As you go forward marketing your eCommerce business, just remember that the only dumb idea is the one you never try!

About the Author

Zack Chambers

Zack Chambers is an expert on Twitter Marketing. Zack is a digital marketer with a focus on Twitter optimization and SEO. He enjoys helping his clients fulfill their dreams through whatever marketing approach can best assist them in their particular situation. In his free time, he likes weight lifting and reading just about any book he can get his hands on.

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