How to Market Your E-commerce Store on an Extremely Limited Budget

e-commerce marketing limited budget

How to Market Your E-commerce Store on an Extremely Limited Budget

E-commerce marketing indeed requires a lot of resources, and investment is, of course, one of them. But, when you have a tight e-commerce budget, feeling exasperated while marketing your online store is quite natural. But that definitely doesn’t mean the end of the world. Having a tight budget for promotion and marketing can sometimes be a boon in disguise.

Now, when it comes to marketing your e-commerce business, there are a few cost-effective techniques that you can utilize even with a limited budget. Believe it or not, but having a tight budget will compel you to think out-of-the-box, and you will be forced to make the most out of your available resources.

In this post, we are going to walk you through a few methods that will help you succeed with e-commerce marketing despite a tight budget. By the end of this content, you will learn that it is not just about money but also about the creative strategies you will invest to maximize the results. Here, we will talk about a few high-ROI strategies that can be easily carried away even if you have very little money allotted for your e-commerce marketing.

The foremost objective behind crafting this post is to make you feel confident and pursue your creativity with the perfect e-commerce marketing strategies on a tight budget.

So without wasting any more words, let’s get started!

Spread the Word on Social Media

Social media could be a power-house for your e-commerce brand if you can maintain consistency. You need to post regularly, but make sure that they pop up at the time when your customers are active on social media. This will increase the reach and multiply the engagement by many folds.

Instead of just randomly going for every second social media channel on the planet, you can narrow down your choices and only go for the ones where your potential customers are the most active. This, undoubtedly, can fetch you some great results.

If you are clueless about which platforms are the most profitable for your e-commerce store, you can use tools like Google Analytics. The tool helps you see which of the social media channels are getting you the maximum tractions in terms of targeted traffic, quality leads, and goal conversions.

You just have to choose your customers’ favorite social media platforms and create industry-related posts, trending news, and offers and discounts to keep your accounts exciting and engaging for your potential customers.

Also, sometimes, make sure to share the links that can direct them to your website and products but obviously, don’t overdo that. Too much self-promotion is never a great thing to do; it destroys the impression you created. You need to strike a perfect balance between promotion, information, and entertainment.

Now, if you feel it’s too much trouble for you to post regularly on social media and monitor them simultaneously, you can use tools like Buffer or Hootsuite. These can help you schedule posts ahead of time, and also you can track the overall growth of your social media channels from one easy-to-use central dashboard.

Utilize PPC Advertising

Next, you have the option of PPC advertising. As you might know, PPC stands for pay-per-click, where you will have to pay for every single click your ads might receive. This type of advertising can help you determine whether the cost of the campaign is worth the amount of traffic and sales generated by them.

One of the most common and popular PPC campaign types is Google Ads (AKA AdWords). The tool helps you create targeted ads that appear on Google search results and other partner websites when someone searches for something relevant to your products.

You have to target your locations and bid on keywords you want to rank or display your ads for. Afterward, you link your analytics and Google Ads account together so that you can keep a tab on your customers’ clicks and subsequent conversions.

Other than Google Ads, you can use paid social media advertising as well. With this type of PPC campaign in place, your ads will appear on your targeted customers’ feed or timeline. Be it Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, Pinterest, or even Snapchat; you can run social media PPC campaigns in all of them.

Always remember that with PPC, you will have to stick to extensive trial and error methods to consistently improve the ROI of your campaigns. This is how you will ensure that the money you are investing in PPC ads generates a really high profit for your e-commerce store.

Form Strategic Partnerships

You have to generate enough buzz if you want to promote your online store properly on a tight marketing budget!

But how do you do that?

Well, it’s simple; you have to connect with some of the big shots and micro-influencers in your industry and convince them to talk about your products or the online store. This way, your website may get featured on their channels.

What could be better than this to drive more and more traffic to your e-commerce store?

Make sure to go ahead and connect with the social media influencers in your industry who can amplify your brand’s voice and create better reach. First, spot the accounts you want to connect with. Once it’s done, start engaging with them on a regular basis – like and comment on their posts, follow their pages, and send across personalized messages to appreciate their works.

You can retweet or reply to your influencers’ tweets, especially if they are from a similar niche. You should also thank them in return to show your gratitude if they retweet your tweets.

Easily search the people who use your hashtags on Instagram to see if any major influencers are using the same ones. This way, you can identify them quickly and start following and engaging with them.

When you connect and interact with the bigwigs in your industry, you create an immense amount of credibility and awareness in your customers for your brand.

This will widen your reach and expose your brand to new horizons. If you are clueless as to how to start networking, use apps like Group High. It will help you connect with the bloggers and influencers from your industry.

Launch Podcast Ads

While video marketing is definitely super-effective, it’s not the only kind of marketing you can go for when you have a tight e-commerce budget. For example, you can use podcasts as a great medium to reach a new audience base. Various online stores around the world are using this method to increase their brand’s reach, credibility, and sales.

Hence, you can simply reach out to the podcasters relevant to your industry to discuss and explain the value your brand can add to the industry and its consumers.

Their podcasts can indeed imprint a great image of your company on your customers’ minds. And as a result, they will better understand the worth of your products and be compelled to buy from you.

Make sure to ponder over the content of your message when you feature your brand on a podcast. If the message is quite short, you can go for a pre-roll or post-roll spot at the beginning or end of a podcast. But if it is a bit lengthy, then you can opt for a more extended mid-roll ad that appears in the middle of the podcasts.

The cost, indeed, will vary depending on your choice.

Go Multichannel to Attract More Buyers

Never settle for one channel to sell, especially when you have a limited e-commerce marketing budget. Instead, go for ramping up your sales with multiple channels, including Amazon, eBay, or even niche e-commerce sites like Etsy.

According to recent research, e-commerce sellers who sell on 3 or more platforms generally sell 144% more than others who don’t.

Staggering! Isn’t it?

When you sell your products on multiple e-commerce channels, it will automatically increase the overall visibility of your items and brand.

Needless to say, each of the platforms has something unique to offer. And you will obviously get a new set of potential buyers who might not have encountered your online store.

Offer Exciting Promotions and Discounts

Who doesn’t love offers, discounts, and free gifts? Believe it or not, but promotional offers have always been one of the most effective ways to acquire more customers. It always works like a charm.

The moment your customers recognize that they can gain or win something more than what they are paying for, they will inevitably be interested. This is the main motivation behind buying more from them who offer amazing value at a much-discounted price. If you can make your customers feel that missing out on these promotions can be a huge loss, they might get enticed even more to buy from you.

You can go for discount coupons, reward points, free shipping, free gifts, and product bundles.

Plus, one thing, I am sure; you would definitely agree that these promotions are a practical solution for clearing your back-logs or items that have been sitting idle in your inventory for a long. This is indeed an excellent technique for all online merchants to quickly clear old items from their stock yet make profits.

But that’s not all; the leftover items that you might have will not have too much value. Hence, you can just give them away for free and improve your customer-seller relationship.

As we all know, sometimes the customers prefer free products over buying something on sale. But make sure you strike a balance and do not over-apply the promotional strategy. Too much or frequent discounts can create a tendency among your customers not to pay at all for the products and can even break your e-commerce revenue model.

Otherwise, you can conduct a social media contest and giveaway the leftover products as gifts to the contest winners. You can ask your customers to shoot a short video with your product in their hands and post them on social media with the given hashtags and brand mentions.

This way, when the winners will be happy to receive their prizes, your e-commerce brand will create a lot of buzz on social media and thus generate more visibility and sales.

Sell More with Upselling and Cross-Selling Techniques

This is a great technique to boost up your revenue and increase the average time your customers generally spend on your e-commerce store. Upselling is nothing but alluring and convincing your customers to upgrade their purchase with something much more exclusive and expensive.

For example, if your customer plans to buy a medium-range mobile phone, you can suggest another model, a bit more expensive yet comes with a number of new features compared to the cheaper one. This will not only make your customers happy but also increase your profit margin.

On the other hand, cross-selling is the technique to increase the overall cart value. You can do it by recommending some other products relevant to the original item.

Suppose one of your customers is interested in a particular type of face foundation; you can try and sell her other makeup items related to the original product in her cart, like a set of a face foundation brush.

As per a new study, around 67.45% of shopping carts are abandoned before they’re completed. So, you can imagine the percentage of customers who are deserting your e-commerce store before they complete their purchases. All these are nothing but your potential customers.

Now you cannot expect them to just find their way back to your online store on their own! Thus, you need to take some action for it. If you have a relatively small e-commerce business and an even smaller abandoned cart percentage, you can track them down and send them emails manually!

It can eat up some time but will definitely be worth it! If you find some growth and money flow from the e-commerce store, you can go for an automated email marketing tool. You can look it up on the internet and find a number of tools and apps that can help you with automated email marketing.

For example, you have tools like Klaviyo that use AI algorithms to identify customers’ interests and behavior over your sales history. This can help you a lot to automatically send out welcome or reminder emails to your e-commerce customers.

Smart up the Popups

Believe it or not, with a bit of tweaking, even the simplest things can become something so much more. The same can be said for e-commerce website popups.

Smart popups can do a lot more than just asking your visitors to sign up for the newsletter or loyalty programs. They can dramatically increase your sales by retaining those customers who usually exit your online store without doing any shopping.

Hence, the moment you feel that the price can become an issue for them or they are just a bit hesitant with their purchase; you can simply trigger an intriguing discount coupon popup right before their eyes before they escape the site.

Now, the exit intention can be easily traced by customers’ mouse movements on a page. So the moment their mouse goes towards the exit button, a popup will be triggered, offering some discount coupons or freebies. Even if they might not just complete the purchase, they might still follow you on social media or sign up to your mailing list.

This is how you can create a high possibility of getting a second chance to convince them to revisit your e-commerce store and purchase from you. To understand the functionalities of smart popups, make sure to do extensive A/B testing always.

Reward Loyal Customers

As per studies, old and repeat customers spend 67% more than the new ones. This is why you should never fail to rekindle your relationship with your existing customer base. It can prove to be a vital e-commerce marketing strategy, especially if you face budget crunches and cannot afford to spend more on winning new customers.

You just have to encourage the customers to visit your site again with some loyalty program, and you can reward them with free products, coupons, or other treats that you can afford from your store. This simple initiative will not only stimulate the buying habit but also strengthen the bond between your brand and customers.

Develop Referral Programs

Referral programs demand a lot of time and work, but they are absolutely worth it. Here, you will use the power of word-of-mouth marketing to get new buyers who might become your loyal customers afterward.

One of the simplest ways to implement this strategy is to give your existing customers some special discount coupons or cash incentives the moment they refer your store and products to others who purchase from you. Always remember, the success of these programs heavily depends on customer satisfaction. So if your e-commerce shoppers are happy with your products, they will most likely share your site with others and give positive feedback about your online store.

Final Words on Low Budget E-commerce Marketing

So here are our 10 easy and cost-effective methods to market your e-commerce store on a tight budget. Undoubtedly, it’s a difficult task, and it will not be possible for you to taste the success unless you become creative with your methods.

So roll up your sleeves, be prepared to put in your blood, sweat, and tears, devise the strategies and supplement them with your out-of-the-box creative ideas.

Plus, never forget to improvise and experiment with your strategies, keeping in mind the customer behaviors. It can take some time, but you will surely acquire extraordinary growth.

So what are your methods to market your e-commerce on a tight budget? Tell us your digital marketing strategies that helped you kiss the success with your online store. I am sure your ideas will help our hundreds and thousands of readers around the world.

Till then, happy selling.

 

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