It’s only getting more and more crowded in the eCommerce industry out there. Online shopping has always been popular — but since the pandemic strike, now it’s become people’s favorite way to buy things they need.

Today, at least 2.14 billion people shop online (equivalent to 27.2% of the world’s population). And more than 24 million eCommerce sites are leaving no stone unturned to attract more customers and make them spend their money on the products.

Now that the competition is getting bigger and your potential customers are getting pickier, how can you make your online store stand out from the crowd?

One of the best ways to stay ahead of the competition is to optimize your online store. Yes, Your eCommerce business needs to take an SEO-friendly approach to sit on the top pages of search engine results pages.

It might sound daunting. But, there is one SEO-friendly, engaging medium that can help you improve your eCommerce search rankings hassle-free: video content.

So, how can you use videos to optimize your eCommerce website? Here are all the basics you need to know.

E-Commerce Video: Why Do You Need It?

Not only are videos well-known for their power to convey messages succinctly, but they are also a powerful tool to boost a website’s rank on search engines. According to the stats, a website with a video is 53 times more likely to reach the front page of Google.

The reason?

Because Google itself thinks that video is a unique multimedia format, it should come as no surprise that the world’s largest search engine loves this format and is much quicker to index it than the 1000-word text you write on your eCommerce website.

Of course, the perk of using videos for your eCommerce marketing and optimization is so much more than that. Here are some other reasons why you should incorporate videos into your eCommerce website:

Set the Customers Expectations

Simply looking at product images and reading the text-heavy product descriptions are not enough to help them understand what to expect. In this case, videos can show your potential customers what your products look like in real life, making it easier for you to educate them about your product.

Videos allow the potential customer to take a closer look at your products from different angles. Therefore, they should have a better knowledge of what your product is all about and avoid any surprises (or potential disappointment) in the future.

Show the Products’ Fullest Potential

Videos are an ideal medium to show how your products work and how potential customers can benefit from them. You can create explainer videos or product videos for your products to guide them using your product to its fullest potential.

No more plain, underwhelming text-based descriptions. You can rely on videos to convey the essence of the products you sell on your eCommerce website.

Make the Customers Stay Longer

You can also use videos to make your potential customers spend more time on your online store. It helps you increase dwell time. And the higher dwell time you have, the higher your chances you will get to boost your eCommerce website ranking.

Videos are so much more engaging and entertaining compared to other types of content. All the potential customers need to do is to click on the play button, and the video will deliver snackable messages to them effortlessly.

Address Any Product-Related Concerns

Videos also offer you a light-hearted way to generate more trust. It shows off the products in a typical box and demonstrates your value proposition. Therefore, the potential customers can be more convinced to purchase from you.

By watching a video, potential customers can find the most answers to their questions. Therefore, they can have reasons why they need your product.

How to Boost Your eCommerce Rank with Videos?

Not all eCommerce videos bring and help you reap all the benefits mentioned above. You need to invest more time and effort to optimize the videos.

Here are some handy and actionable ways to boost your eCommerce website rank with videos. This way, it would be much easier for potential customers to find your online stores.

Do an In-Depth Keyword Research

Just like a regular SEO practice, you will need keyword-based titles and descriptions for your eCommerce videos. Many eCommerce websites embed their videos from social media platforms like YouTube or other video hosting sites. This is where keyword-based titles and descriptions are needed.

Make sure to choose the keyword that has low competition and a quite decent amount of volume. You can also opt for long-tail keywords to reach more specific, highly-targeted potential customers.

Here’s an example of a keyword-based eCommerce video from Love Hair. They use “pure coconut oil” as a target keyword.

Keep Them Short and Crispy

Make sure you keep your eCommerce videos short and straightforward. Long-duration videos can only make your potential overwhelmed and lose interest in watching it.

After all, no one wants to see a 10-minute video of a brand bragging about their products, right? This will lead to a higher bounce rate and harm your eCommerce SEO ranking.

Eight seconds. That’s the time you have to grab your potential customer’s attention with your videos before you can engage them. That is why it’s crucial to include only information that brings value to your target customers.

The sweet spot for eCommerce videos is around 2 minutes. After two minutes, potential customers tend to get distracted and move on to the next thing.

See how Essie can give their potential customers a 1-minute how-to video to encourage them to buy their products:

Optimize Videos for Mobile Users

Do you know that younger generations (i.e., Generation X and Millennials shop online more often than older generations? Millennials make at least 60% of their purchases online. And that group age now makes more than 36% of their total purchases using mobile devices.

Those staggering numbers are quite obvious since younger generations are mostly digital natives. In this situation, you need to make sure that your eCommerce videos are accessible for hand-held users.

Mobile-friendly videos will help you expand your reach as it caters to mobile users. The more people click on your eCommerce website, the more likely you will gain more authority in your industry. And you know that Google will prioritize a website with high authority.

See how Nine Line Apparel nailed their mobile responsive eCommerce video on their About Us page.

Create Eye-Catching Thumbnails

The thumbnail is the first thing your potential customers see when they find your video on your eCommerce website or search engine results. It’s a big deciding factor whether or not they click on your video. So, the more you create them eye-catchingly, the more people will click them.

Video thumbnails have a direct impact on your eCommerce organic search visibility and click-through. It helps you to spark potential customers’ curiosity and even may transform their expectations of what the target URL is about.

This key here is to give a more professional look to your video and make it more appealing to click. Make sure to make it clear and convey the content in the most effective way.

You don’t have to go all fancy just to create catchy thumbnails. You can simply use your professionally-taken product photos just like what Bliss did for all of their product videos.

Make the Content Engaging

SEO can only get your eCommerce video to appear on your potential customers’ screen. But, it’s actually up to you to keep them engaged with your brand and move them through to the sales funnel.

You need good, related content for this. The best way to do this is to put yourself in your potential customers’ shoes so you can think and behave like them towards the eCommerce website.

Ask yourself, “what kind of content do I want to watch and make me spend money on the products?”

For instance, if you want to create a product video, always make sure to highlight the benefits instead of bragging about your awesome features. And if you aim to make a brand history video for your About Us page, it’s always better to include your beginning and where you are now — avoid including any fluff and any unnecessary moments whenever possible.

Not only will an engaging eCommerce video optimize your online store, but it will also make those potential customers come back for your content.

See the eye-capturing and engaging video from ESQIDO. It demonstrates the easiest way of applying false lashes to get visitors’ attention and engage them right off the bat.

Final Thoughts
Video can be a powerful addition to your eCommerce website. One of the perks of having them on your online store is that it can boost your website presence, making it much easier for target customers to find you through the organic search for relevant keyword searches.

When you optimize your online store, it would be much easier for you to drive more traffic to your website. This, as a result, will lead to an increase in conversion rate and revenue. After all, the more traffic you drive, the more chances you will get to convert them into paying customers, right?

Author

Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award-winning explainer video company. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order).

Lead generation is a top priority for every organization. Cold emails have been an excellent avenue for lead generation for several brands.

Using the right cold emailing formula, this form of lead generation can generate desired results. 

Are you someone hoping to find the right formula to generate leads through cold emailing? 

When you craft the perfect message and include all the elements needed, a successful cold email campaign will be your result. From warm to hot leads, results are almost guaranteed when cold emailing is undertaken in the right manner! 

What is cold emailing? 

The act of ‘cold emailing’ is best described as contacting a recipient without having any prior contact with the intent of converting them into paying customers. 

Cold emailing has been around for decades and has proven to generate beneficial results for several reasons. While some might argue, cold emails are a shot in the dark; when done right, cold emailing can result in qualified leads and eventually conversions. 

But how does one guarantee cold emails will land in the prospects’ inbox? How can one say with assurance that the email won’t get lost in a sea of existing emails? 

Marketers and salespeople need to keep in mind that their prospects are individuals with feelings and their own set of challenges in life. If they view their prospects as more than just mere numbers, the results of cold emailing can be magnificent. Introducing empathy in your cold email outreach campaign is essentially what it all boils down to. 

Writing the perfect cold email with the right structure and an effective subject line can in fact aid your organization in locking in on a prospect. 

Despite its intrusive nature, cold emailing holds a number of benefits. Here are 5 reasons why you should absolutely invest your time and efforts in cold emailing: 

• Cold Emails Reach Prospects At Favorable Timings: Everyone checks their emails daily, especially working individuals. With advanced email tracking tools, you can get notified as soon as someone opens your email. This can help you formulate a plan to send emails at the right time to recipients thus increasing your chances of visibility. 
• Personalized Reach: Cold emails are highly targeted and can be tailored to each and every individual. When recipients read emails crafted specifically for them (various tools are available that allow mass personalization), the chance of a conversion is far greater than an impersonal email. 
• Scalability: This is probably the most important advantage cold emails have to offer. While cold calling is effective for creating immediate, personal connections, cold emailing stands out in its ability to scale outreach efficiently across large prospect lists. You can reach a large number of prospects in one go as compared to cold calling. Various email tools are available to help you reach mass recipients all in one go. 

• Cold Emails Are Persistent: Some folks probably don’t view this as an advantage. But from the POV of a sales or marketing manager, persistency is advantageous. With several follow-ups beyond the primary email, prospects can be persuaded a number of times. 
• Brand Awareness: Every email sent out to a prospect is an opportunity for potential conversion. Cold emails act as an avenue for brand awareness. Even if the prospect does not require the product/service you are offering at the time they will still be made aware of your brand and will remember it for the future. 

According to Clearbit, the average cold email response rate is as low as 1%. It makes one question the effectiveness of cold emailing. As mentioned earlier, if cold emailing is undertaken meticulously, it can achieve wonderful results. 

Lead generation is the first step in any kind of sales form. Using the art of cold emailing, sales managers and marketers can secure leads using this low-cost marketing tool and achieve highly favourable conversion rates. 

Keep these 5 tips in mind when drafting your cold email campaign and you will be guaranteed to secure leads: 

5 Tips to generate leads through cold emailing

1. Personalization Needs To Be Your Mantra!

Put yourself in the shoes of the recipient for a moment. You are sitting in front of your laptop, browsing through your inbox. Suddenly, you come across an email with the subject line that reads ‘{Your_Name}, this is just for you!’. Now, won’t that pique your interest? It will! 

Uplandsoftware found that open rates can be increased by 22% if the recipient’s name is included in the subject line. 

Additionally, adding custom snippets like {First_Name} or {Company Name} can ensure a higher level of personalization that will speak to the email recipients directly. 

In this regard, these emails will work because the recipient will feel that you personally took the time out of your day to compose the email specially for them with some interest. 

Researching your prospects and gaining valuable information that can amp up the personalization process will go a long way. 

2. Subject Lines Matter More Than The Content 

Source: MailerLite

What is the first thing your prospects will see before they even consider opening your email? The subject line! 

The subject line is often overlooked and more emphasis is placed on the content of the email. Your subject line is the one that catches the attention of the prospect first, and then it is the content. 

Attention-grabbing subject lines are a must when cold emailing. Adding a question, their name, promo, call to action directly in the subject line may very well increase your open rates. 

Experts recommend that subject lines be below 60 characters and ten words in length. A great subject line should work in any environment the recipient receives the email in. 

Before you craft the perfect subject line, consider asking yourself the following 3 questions:

1. Is my intent clear? 
2. Is the message I am trying to convey relevant currently?
3. Has a sense of urgency been established?

Testing out different subject lines is another beneficial practice to add to your strategy. Some individuals prefer receiving emails with enticing offers upfront. Others could probably want to know what you are offering before considering your services. There is a 26% increased likelihood of readers opening your email with personalized subject lines. 

Additional tip: Creating a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) will invoke a sense of curiosity in the recipient. 

Here are a few examples of subject lines that work: 

“{First Name}, we have found exactly what you are looking for”

“{First Name}, do you want some time off?”

“What would you do if you had [number] more hours per week?”

“Why {Company_Name}?”

“You missed it!”

3. Using Social Proof To Your Advantage

Social proofing is one of the oldest techniques used in the sales industry. Think about it for a second, if you hear that person X increased their revenue by 30% in under 6 months after using a particular product; would you not be intrigued? You would. 

Thus, using social proofing techniques to bolster your email pitch can help you achieve your desired results. Of course, we don’t recommend embellishing your content with white lies. 

Having more credibility will increase the chances of your prospects trusting you. Mentioning actual statistics and facts from existing or previous clients who have succeeded after using your services will strengthen your pitch. You can share customer success stories and achievements to convince recipients to opt for your services. 

For example:

“Hey {First Name}, 

We have worked with over [500+] clients in the past, providing them with state-of-the-art [email marketing services]. 

Recently, we worked with [ABC corp], and were able to increase their lead generation by 18%. They were having trouble generating leads through conventional methods and felt they needed to opt for professional email marketing services”

Social proofing will make your cold emails a lot more compelling. As it is well known that people are more likely to adopt the opinions of trusted individuals. 

Beyond mentioning organization names and quantifiable data, you can also include mutual connections and your professional credentials. 

4. Follow-Ups Are Pivotal To The Success Of Your Campaign 

Follow-ups are extremely important when cold emailing. Some would even go as far as to say that follow-ups are more critical in securing a reply than the initial email. 

70% of email chains generally stop sending emails after the initial attempt. No response in the first email does not necessarily mean the prospect is not interested. 70% of email chains generally stop sending emails after the initial attempt. The primary email is a part of a much bigger picture in the process of cold emailing. 

The initial email is only to grease the wheels; the follow-ups are the ones that do the heavy lifting. Also, persistency is key, remember? 

Your cold email outreach should be an ongoing conversation. 80% of deals require an average of at least 5 touches before closing. 

The graph below shows at which point a recipient is more likely to reply to your email. The more emails one sends out, the more they are likely to get noticed. If your prospect keeps seeing your name in their inbox, in some sense they will have been familiarized with your existence. 

Source: Yesware

Eventually, they will want to know what you have to say. If you use the correct verbiage in your follow-ups, prospects won’t feel like they are just another name on a mass emailing list. 

Additionally, by sending follow-ups, prospects actually feel like you care about their response or lack thereof. Thus, a humanizing element comes into play and that increases your chances of a reply. 

It is entirely up to you, how many follow-up emails you want to include in your outreach. Experts recommend sending out at least 5 follow-up emails at timely intervals. 

Here is a rough sequence you can follow: 

• Follow up 1 (After 3 days)
• Follow up 2 (After 7 days)
• Follow up 3 (After 14 days)

• Follow up 4 (After 30 days) 
• Follow up 5 (After 60 days) 

5. Ensuring The Prospect Is The Right Fit With Actual Intent

Sending out cold emails to recipients that are not interested in your services would be a pure waste of time and resources. Marketers and salespeople often use intent data to skip ahead of the line and identify individuals that require the solution you are offering. 

Intent data highlights behavioural signals that show the intention of your prospect to purchase a product or service. Recent studies have found that an average B2B prospect is already 67% into the purchasing journey. This data helps organizations jump ahead and use it to their advantage in securing prospects and qualified leads. 

This technique is helpful for cold emailing, as you can reach out to prospects before they contact you; and this is especially effective since you are reaching out to them at the right time. 

There are several other ways to find prospects besides this, these include: 

1. Social Media 
2. Referrals 
3. Networking 
4. Online Forums (Quora, StackExchange, Reddit, etc) 
5. Google Analytics Data 
6. Website Visitation 

Now that you have locked in on a prospect, how do you ensure they are the right fit? If you already have a buyer persona in mind, that would be a great place to evaluate the fit. 

Besides that, with data enrichment and predictive lead scoring technologies on the rise, evaluating fit can be assessed with a microscopic lens. 

Below are 3 questions to consider when evaluating if a prospect is a right fit for your organization: 

1. What technologies are they currently using? 
2. How many employees do they have? 
3. How much funding do they have? (i.e. can they afford your services?)

Additional Tips For Lead Generation Through Cold Emailing 

• Use Conversational Language: A successful email outreach program involves using language and verbiage that is conversational in nature. It is recommended that cliche or overused phrases be avoided altogether. Sticking to the basics is the best way to get your message across. 

For example, “Hey there! John, are you ready for the weekend?”, “Hope you have a splendid week ahead”, “I am ready for the weekend” “Hope you aren’t having a bad case of the Monday Blues!” 

• Ensure All Your Contact Information Is In Your Signature: This is an often-overlooked tip but is one that is quite important. All of your contact information should be included in your email signature, including your phone number, office address, LinkedIn, and website URL. An email signature acts as a digital card and shows professionalism.Through your email signature, you can provide extra resources. If someone were sceptical about your credentials, checking your LinkedIn account can help put their mind at ease. Additionally, if a prospect wanted to get in touch with you directly, they could contact you through the phone number provided and perhaps speed up the process of closing a deal.

  

• Use Cold Emailing Software: Using cold emailing software, you will be able to automate several time-consuming processes if undertaken manually. Cold emailing software also provides users with real-time data and analytics that can be used to your advantage to refine your campaign.
  You should also be using software to help create the template for your email marketing campaigns. A good email template builder software can save you hours of your time which would otherwise be required to set up email campaigns.With email software, you can segment lists into different target audiences with specific preferences. Each mass email sent out can be personalized for each prospect as if you were having a one-on-one conversation with them. 
• Avoid Long-Form Content: If you intend to capture and retain your prospect’s attention, then avoiding long-form content is advisable. Keep your emails short, not more than two paragraphs.When people check their inboxes, they do it with the intention of clearing it out; if they come across a long-winded email, especially when they’re short on time, they will not read it. Remember that emails are not books, they are meant to be short. 
• Ensure Your Timing Is Right: Timing is indeed everything and plays a huge role in the success of your cold email campaign. Familiarize yourself with your prospects before reaching out to them. Look at their social profiles to gain relevant insights into their professional life.You want to avoid being labelled as ‘spam’, so decide upon the perfect timing best suited for your prospect. Conduct A/B split testing to see which timings and days have recorded the highest open rates. This will tell you the best time to send an email.
• Canned Content Is A No Go: If there’s one thing people dislike it is impersonal and canned content. Canned content is pre-made generic content that is used to speed up the email writing process.This content is generated with general ideas and assumptions of the customer’s needs and preferences. Personalize your content to the specific needs and preferences of your prospect. Try to make it as personal as possible, adding minor details can do wonders to your reply rate.

• Don’t Beat Around The Bush: People are busy! If they do open your email, then you want to capture their attention as soon as possible. Be direct and get to the point in the second line. Keep your opening line/paragraph short. Building up to a point, with irrelevant details about yourself and the organization will impersonalize the content of the email.Get to the point directly, and present your value proposition within the first two lines. Show them the problem you aim to solve through your product or service. 
• Add Call-To-Actions (CTAs): Adding a CTA at the end of your email will help you measure the success rate of your campaign. The real success metric is not open rates, but rather the number of people who actually undertook the desired action in the form of a CTA. Not all CTAs have to be too salesy. Emails with a single CTA have been known to increase clicks by 371% and sales by 1617%.Some CTA examples include, provide a specific day or time, learn more, read more, watch now, get the app, schedule a call, etc. Aesthetically appealing CTAs are also on the rise, so design your CTA in a way that prompts the user to click on it. 

Conclusion

Cold email outreach is a great opportunity to find qualified leads and increase your conversion rate. This method works amazingly when undertaken in the right manner. It is a great way to start conversations with prospects and help them become aware of your brand. 

The most effective method to date is in fact personalization. Instead of sending out generic messages that would instantly cause a prospect to turn away, offer tailor-made solutions. Hone in on their specific needs and then craft the perfect cold email. 

Improved targeting can help you achieve desired results. A high open rate does not signify much if you are receiving no replies. Undelivered emails also affect your open rates thus it is best you re-verify your email marketing database using email verifier tools. 

Trying out A/B split testing is another way of analyzing the effectiveness of your campaign. LeadGenius tried A/B split testing for their subject lines and concluded that they saw a 49% increase in open rates. 

Cold emailing requires patience and persistence. It can be tricky and even feel monotonous but it is rewarding if you take the time to do it right. Use sales prospecting tools, CRM platforms, email marketing tools, and email tracking software to track, analyze, measure, and improve your results to maximize your efforts.  

Happy Cold Emailing! 

Author Bio:

Dhruv is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Saleshandy, a sales engagement platform that helps sales professionals close more deals. He is an empathetic marketer, people person, SaaS enthusiast, hustler, and growth hacker. He is passionate about identifying customer needs, measuring success and delight. He loves to write on customer-centric problem solving and growth, enabling customers and businesses to make better decisions.

You’re reading about building a successful e-commerce website. Maybe, you want to venture into the e-commerce business. Who doesn’t know that e-commerce is a lucrative B2C business model? 

However, you’ve got to have a proper plan in place because launching an e-commerce business isn’t that simple. You must know that it does sound like fun when you’re working a 9-to-5 job and want to start something on the side (or even quit your job to go all in). 

But, of course, you’re in luck. I’ve got you covered.

This isn’t the first time I’m helping people to build an e-commerce website. I have had several talks with friends and relatives who wanted to get into this business. Most of them were afraid to “jump off the cliff”. 

Maybe, there were two reasons why most people don’t start their these businesses:

   1. They lack the right skills

They don’t have any idea where to begin when starting an e-commerce site. They think that launching an e-commerce website might cost them thousands of dollars just because they have no idea where to get started. Let me correct you right off the bat, it won’t cost you thousands of dollars to set up an e-commerce business. 

Have you ever heard of a tool called WooCommerce? You might not need to spend a dollar because it’s an e-commerce tool that installs merchandise features to your self-hosted WordPress website. However, there are several paid tools for launching e-commerce sites that are even better; you’ll learn more about them in this article.or a more dynamic and seamless user experience, consider integrating Angular Spreadsheet Controls into your website development. These tools streamline data management and enhance functionality, ultimately contributing to a user-friendly interface. This can be particularly advantageous if you’re using platforms like WooCommerce, making it easier for customers to interact with your digital storefront effectively.

   2. They’re afraid of failing

One of the biggest reasons why most people don’t take that leap of faith is that they’re afraid of failing. Most of them overthink the whole thing, but some of them can’t take risks at all. In other words, they’re afraid of failing so they never take action.

If you’re planning on starting an e-commerce website in 2022 or beyond, then don’t let the fear of failing stop you. Gary Vaynerchuk often says to his fans and followers that pay attention to who’s giving the advice. The point is that if you’re asking about starting an e-commerce venture with someone who hasn’t done any business before, you need to rethink your strategy.

As far as my experience with e-commerce websites is concerned, I don’t consider myself an expert in this genre, but I’ve been running a personal online store for the past 15 months. 

Plus, I have had some experience selling e-products via 2checkout and Fastspring. 

Let’s just say I won’t hire an e-commerce guy if I ever want to scale my e-commerce business because I might not need one.

You’re about to learn:

• • • • What an e-commerce website is, and why it is important
      • 3 W’s of building an e-commerce website
      • The steps involved in building an e-commerce website
      • The tools that are used for creating e-commerce websites
      • How to market your e-commerce business in today’s world

So before we dig deeper into building such websites in 2022 or even after that, it’s important to take care of the basics. For those who’re slightly unsure about an e-commerce website, here’s some explanation:

What’s an E-commerce Website?

It’s a website that sells products online and provides a facility for customers to shop on the internet without having to visit a brick-and-mortar store for shopping. It is also known as an e-store or online shop. 

Furthermore, some e-commerce websites sell softwares, printables, and digital content, whereas others also sell tangible items. However, for tangible goods, the e-store may ask for freight charges and address of the recipient.

We’re living through a time of Technology and the Internet. Therefore, buying stuff online is no mystery, especially for millennials. Most e-commerce websites accept PayPal, debit cards, credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Play, and other payment options.

The best part about the e-commerce business is that anyone with a certain set of skills can venture into it and start their entrepreneurial journey without a ton of investment. You’ll learn about the e-commerce website building tools that make the launching process a whole lot easier.

3 W’s of Building an E-commerce Website: Who, Why, and What

This might seem like a section that most of you would want to skip so that you can get to the cream of this piece. However, this brief section might turn things around for you. The following three W’s could be crucial to your e-commerce business success:

 1.  Who is the target audience of the e-commerce business?

The understanding of the target audience means you know who you want to reach out to for selling your products. For instance, if you only sell products in the US, you might not need to run Facebook ads for Canada. It shows that you’re well aware of your target audience.

 2. Why did you choose the e-commerce business model?

It’s essential to get the basics right. If you aren’t sure why you entered the e-commerce market, then you should rethink your whole strategy before investing your hard-earned money into this business. You must choose the e-commerce business model if you’re passionate about selling online or you’ve got some experience in sales and marketing.

 3. What is your brand’s value proposition?

A brand’s value proposition is the ability to stand out from the crowd. It could be anything from efficient customer support, quick free delivery, to low prices. Make sure that you develop your e-commerce company’s value proposition that sticks with your sales and marketing. Using a strategic clarity canvas, you can visually outline your business objectives and ensure alignment across teams.

That’s pretty much it.

Let’s jump right into the cream of this article.

Five Step Guide on Building an E-commerce Website

Let’s take a look:

1. Understand the E-commerce Business Model Inside-out

The stepping stone of building an e-commerce website is understanding the e-commerce business model. Starting an e-commerce store doesn’t mean you shouldn’t jump straight to choosing the e-store’s name and go for it.

Instead, the groundwork includes several things to be taken care of before you go ahead and launch your e-commerce business. You must first figure out what to sell, where to sell, and who you should sell to before taking any further steps.

So here are some essentials of starting an e-commerce business that you should work on:

 1. Business Model

Decide the business model of your e-commerce website whether it’s going to be B2B or B2C. It may vary from business to business. For instance, AliExpress is a popular e-commerce website that caters to both B2B and B2C consumers. However, it’s mainly a B2B business portal that connects wholesalers/manufacturers with retailers. 

 2. Products Selection

Product selection is one of the fundamental steps of starting an e-commerce website. It’s highly unlikely that you want to start an e-commerce website but you don’t have any products in mind. Choosing the right product requires knowing the products’ categories inside-out. A lot of entrepreneurs either work for others before they venture into the e-commerce industry or they create their own products to sell online. 

 3. Stock Management

Stock management is managing your product inventory. You don’t need a fancy POS or stock management software in the beginning. However, the first thing you might want to figure out is how you’re going to keep your stock. Do you have a warehouse to store it in or will you buy the product when an order comes? 

4. Fulfillment/Shipment

Once you’re done with the product selection and stock management, the next step is the fulfilment or shipment. When you opt for the 3PL fulfillment company it usually means you don’t have to ship the product, but instead, a third-party online store ships your product from their warehouse. On the other hand, when you don’t work with any major e-commerce platform and, instead, sell products through your website, you’d have to manage the shipment yourself. You would be better off striking a deal with a courier company that offers lower charges to you as compared to walk-in customers. In such cases, using a courier invoice template can help streamline the invoicing process, ensuring all details are captured clearly for both the customer and your records. You can also strike a deal.

5. Website Development

E-commerce website development is one of the pillars of launching an e-commerce business. You may want to hire a full-time developer to launch your website or work with a freelance web developer if you have some know-hows of website development. You may also want to check out e-commerce platforms that help you launch your online store within minutes.

These were some fundamental areas to think through before you hop on the e-commerce train and journey ahead. You might also want to consider incorporating some of the latest web design trends before you set out full swing with your web development projects. To ensure a smooth and efficient development process, it’s highly recommended to consult with ecommerce website development services that can guide you through the complexities of creating a site that meets both your business goals and user experience expectations. Building a successful online store requires a strategic approach, from choosing the right platform to optimizing user experience. Investing in ecommerce web development ensures that your website is not only visually appealing but also functional, secure, and scalable for future growth.

2. Choose the Type of E-commerce Business

Step no. 2 might clear things up for many of you. The launch of an e-commerce website isn’t as simple as it seems. Sure, you may have figured out the advanced logistics management such as products, stock management, and shipment, but next up is choosing the type of e-commerce business.

When we hear about an e-commerce store, we simply think of a website that sells products online. You might be intrigued to know that there are several types of e-commerce stores, and choosing the right type of e-commerce business is crucial to your success.When starting an e-commerce store, it’s essential to formalize your business structure. Registering your business or forming a legal entity, such as an LLC (Limited Liability Company), will not only protect your personal assets but also add credibility to your brand. An LLC is particularly popular among e-commerce entrepreneurs because it provides limited liability protection, tax flexibility, and straightforward management options. To further enhance your business presence, consider using a virtual address for LLCs, which offers privacy, professionalism, and flexibility for remote operations.

At this step, you don’t need to jump right into the product creation process, but instead, take your time to decide what e-commerce website type is most likely to work out for you.

Let’s take a look at the different types of e-commerce stores to choose the most suitable one:

Types of E-commerce Stores

Here we go:

 1. Online Retail Stores

These are the e-commerce websites that only retail, meaning they buy the products from the wholesale market and resell to the customers. It’s by far the most common e-commerce business model. The best part about choosing this sort of store is that you could sell a million types of products on your e-store.

B&H is an online retail store that sells cameras, lenses, and microphones. They’re an e-commerce website, but they’re different from the others I’m going to share with you.

 2. Dropshipping Websites

Dropshipping is rather different from an ordinary online retail store. If you haven’t had a chance to learn dropshipping, then let me briefly explain how it works. When the customer places the order on your website and completes the checkout process. You go to the wholesaler or manufacturer for order fulfillment and complete the purchase. The only difference is that you use the customer’s name and address so that the manufacturer/wholesaler ships the product directly to the customer.

PopLyfe is a dropshipping store that sells t-shirts related to fatherhood. They aren’t just a niche store, but what makes them stand out is that they dropship the merchandise. 

 3. Online Storefronts

Online storefronts are e-commerce stores, but they aren’t widely popular. A storefront is a website page that an e-commerce website provides to a seller or brand. Such storefronts are often offered to sellers or brands that bring huge sales to the platform. So basically storefronts are e-commerce platforms, but they’re limited to a fewer number of brands and sellers. 

You must have heard about the Amazon FBA program. It stands for fulfillment by Amazon. When a merchant signs up to the Amazon FBA program, the platform provides the storefront to the merchant.

Here’s the example of Amazon storefront:

Petcube is an e-commerce store based on the Amazon storefront feature. There are hundreds of thousands of brands on Amazon that have storefronts. Similarly, there are thousands of giant e-commerce platforms out there that have millions of storefronts.

 4. Merch Stores

Merch stores are online stores for selling merchandise. Normally, celebs, sports personalities, and famous YouTubers launch their merch stores where they sell their merchandise directly to fans. Not only is it a great way to make money, but it’s also used for donating to a noble cause. Since there is a selling activity that happens on these websites, it’s safe to say that merch stores are e-commerce websites.

Marques Brownlee is a popular tech YouTuber; he has a merch store just like other top YouTubers in the world. He sells his merchandise on his online store.

That’s it.

Choosing a type of e-commerce business is inevitable; you can’t get away from it. The good news is that you now know there are several types of e-commerce businesses. Some of you might have heard about merch stores but may not have any idea about dropshipping and storefronts. 

Anyway, the most common one is setting up a retail store for selling your own products or reselling (wholesalers’ or manufacturers’) products.

3. Create/Buy the Products to Sell on the Online Store 

You must have some idea about what you want to sell because that’s why you have been doing your research on how to build an e-commerce store. Well, it’s time to discuss whatever you want to sell online. 

Step #3 is all about streamlining the product purchase or creation to put it out on your e-commerce website. Therefore, it’s necessary to finalize the product (or products if you have multiple items).

The point is that if you’re planning on buying the products from different wholesalers, then go ahead and order some samples. On the other hand, if you’re creating your products, then speed up the creation process. 

For instance, when fashion designers want to establish an e-commerce website to sell clothes online, they don’t launch their site out of the blue. Instead, they spend time creating clothes to display on the website.

Since your online store hasn’t been established just yet, you’d be better off laying the groundwork that could lead to building a successful e-commerce business. 

There might be a dozen things required for building any business from the ground up and starting an e-commerce store is no different. 

Here’s the checklist for coming up with the products to sell on your e-commerce website:

 1. Prepare Your Products

You have to have some products in your stock before the launch. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling handmade crafts or camera equipment online. You need to prepare some products to put up on the online store. Once you have some products in hand, you could move ahead to the next step in the checklist.

 2. Take Product Pictures

Pictures are vital to any e-commerce website. It’s almost impossible to sell a product without a proper picture. In most cases, e-commerce websites use multiple photos of the same product to convince the buyer or to better explain the product. So take your time in taking loads of good photos of your products. 

 3. Write Product Descriptions

When you’re adding products to your e-commerce website, you won’t just write the product name and add its pictures. Instead, you’d also have a descriptive text that explains every bit of detail about the product. Not only does this description help buyers in picking the product, but it also helps search engines understand your website better. So don’t run away from writing in-depth, meaty product descriptions. 

 4. Set the Pricing

Pricing is an essential part of the process. Even though the online store hasn’t launched yet, you have time to fix all the loopholes. Use this opportunity to decide the prices of your products and note them down. You may not want to get confused about pricing when the e-commerce website is about to go live.

The gist of step #3 is to be fully prepared for the launch. You might not want to switch the e-store name to a different one or change the product catalog after the launch. Therefore, preparing ahead of time is the way to go.

4. Build Your Store with the Right E-commerce Tool

It all comes down to this step. Choose the right e-commerce tool to get started with building your e-commerce website. You might wonder why I didn’t mention choosing the right e-commerce tool at the beginning. Well, had I started straight away with that, I would have missed so many essential steps that are key to success.

I’m going to briefly discuss a few e-commerce website-building tools that are widely popular among website developers and entrepreneurs. I have tested a few of them, but you shouldn’t blindly take my word for it. Instead, do your research before choosing the e-commerce tool.

Without any further ado, let’s get right to it:

 1. Shopify (Recommended)

Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce tools for creating online stores. Some might say it’s a bit pricey, but they have everything you need to set up and grow your website. Shopify isn’t a self-hosted platform, meaning it doesn’t require a web hosting space. Instead, the platform hosts your online store on its own servers. 

However, you could register your domain with Shopify or use your already existing domain with another registrar. As far as the plugins/modules are concerned, there are several third-party Shopify plugins available on the market to fine-tune your Shopify online store. 

Free Trial: 14-day free trial and no credit card required

Price: $29 per month

 2. Squarespace

Squarespace is an all-in-one website building platform that allows you to build a blog, business websites, and e-commerce stores. Its users don’t need any third-party services such as domain registrar, web hosting, SSL certificate service, or website templates because Squarespace takes care of everything. 

It’s safe to say that Squarespace is a main competitor of Shopify. Both these services are popular for e-commerce website building. However, Squarespace might have a slight edge over Shopify because their service caters to all types of website builders, whereas Shopify only attracts e-commerce website builders. 

Free Trial: 14-day free trial with no credit card required

Price: The commerce plans start at $35 per month

 3. Wix

Wix is yet another popular website builder that serves both website owners and e-commerce customers. Just like most website builders, Wix offers templates, domain registration, SSL, business emails, web hosting, and e-commerce solutions.

Besides the basic attributes, there are certain features such as analytics, advanced SEO configurations, mobile-friendliness, unlimited fonts, media galleries, and app market that make this tool stand out from the crowd. Furthermore, Wix also offers a mailbox, Wix chat, social media tools, and contact management to take your e-commerce store to the next level.

Free Trial: No free trial, but there is a 14-day full refund policy

Price: The business & eCommerce plans start at $17 per month

 4. Weebly

Weebly is one of the website builders on the market that allows you to set up your website in minutes. The best thing about such online website builders is that you don’t have to be an expert to create websites with them.

Weebly does have an e-commerce feature that lets you create e-commerce websites with it. So this is why Weebly has made it to the list of e-commerce tools. It’s affordable, easy-to-use, and effective. 

Free Trial: N/A 

Price: $12 per month

 5. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a free e-commerce WordPress plugin that adds e-commerce functionality to a WordPress website. It’s an open-source tool owned by WordPress parent company Automattic. It is a fantastic tool for WordPress users and bloggers who want to sell products online without switching to any other e-commerce tool. Even though this plugin is free, you may want to buy other third-party plugins that connect with WooCommerce for better functionality.

Furthermore, the WooCommerce plugin integrates with several payment processors to manage your income. There are hundreds of thousands of WordPress users that are using this plugin for selling products and services online.

Free Trial: N/A

Price: Free 

I’ve shared a bunch of e-commerce website building options that you can check out, but if I were you, I’d launch my e-commerce website with Shopify. 

The reason for this is that it is the best e-commerce website tool out there and it offers everything you need to run your e-commerce business. 

Though it may seem costly at first, if you start making money from your online store you’d see its worth. 

Building a professional ecommerce website is more than just launching an online store; it’s about creating a seamless shopping experience that builds trust and encourages repeat business. A professional ecommerce website features intuitive navigation, fast load times, and secure payment options, all of which are essential for converting visitors into loyal customers. Investing in quality design and development ensures your business is ready to compete in today’s digital marketplace.

      Here are five crucial steps of launching an e-commerce store:

 1. Register a Domain

You can always register a domain for your online store through your e-commerce tool, but I’d highly recommend registering your domain separately. The reason for that is if you ever want to switch to a different e-commerce tool, you won’t have to deal with customer care which may cause a delay in the process. 

Register your domain with your favorite domain registrars such as Namecheap or GoDaddy. All you need is to select the option that you already have a domain name while launching your e-commerce store. You will find the instructions for pointing your domain to the e-commerce tool’s web hosting servers afterwards. 

 2. Setup Your E-commerce Store

The next step is setting up your e-commerce store. Pick the best e-commerce site builder to create your e-commerce store and get started with it. You’ll fare well if you opt for a recommended e-commerce tool.

A lot of beginners choose free tools such as WooCommerce, but end up frustrated at some point. It doesn’t mean you can’t achieve your goal with it. The point is that if you don’t want to spend money on your e-commerce store setup, you’re going to miss out on some opportunities along the way. 

 3. Add Products to the Store

Once you have set up your online store, the next most important step is adding the products. Adding the products doesn’t mean just adding the products. You must know how to properly do it. 

To make things easier for you, let me mention some key things to consider while adding the products to your online store: use clear names for the products, add pictures, write its functions, its details, etc. 

 4. Optimize the E-commerce Website

Every website needs to be optimized for better user experience and search engine crawling, so an e-commerce website is no exception. If you’re using an e-commerce tool such as Shopify or Squarespace, reach out to these companies to find out how you can optimize your e-commerce websites. 

Besides speeding up the website using caching and hosting on a high-end web server, you might have to use compressed yet high-quality product pictures. Furthermore, try to optimize the URLs for the products, so that it becomes easier for search engines to discover pages and drive traffic to the site. 

 5. Add Multiple Payment Methods

Try adding multiple payment methods to your online store. The more payment methods you offer, the easier it gets for the customers to buy from you. Check out payment processors such as FastSpring, 2Checkout, and Stripe. 

Now you know a handful of e-commerce tools to build an online store. Plus, I shared some crucial steps that could help you make the process smoother. 

I reckon you’re all set to build your store. Once you’ve built it with one of the tools I mentioned, the next thing you might want to do is establish a marketing strategy for your e-commerce business.

5. Design a Marketing Campaign for the E-commerce website

Hopefully, your e-commerce website is up and running, but the job isn’t done yet. In fact, it’s just the beginning. 

The next thing you might want to do is to come up with a marketing plan for your e-commerce business. A marketing campaign means there would be a handful of strategies to test out. A lot of them might not work for everyone, but you must try them out. 

There is a misconception about marketing for e-commerce businesses. A lot of people think the it means running social media and Google search ads. 

It’s true that online advertising is a major marketing strategy. However, there are various other tactics that are equally important to achieve the goal. 

I’ll give you a quick rundown on designing a marketing campaign for your e-commerce website. 

Here are the top-notch marketing tactics to try out:

 1. Use Content Marketing

Content marketing strategy my comprise of using content to attract, engage, and convert your audience into subscribers, leads, or paying customers. In other words, it’s an art to sugar-coat your value proposition or offering with impeccable information that becomes irresistible for the prospective audience.

One can use various types of content such as written, audio, images, and videos to fuel their content marketing campaign. Similarly, an e-commerce website could also leverage content marketing techniques by putting out useful articles on its official blog, attractive pins on Pinterest, and uploading helpful videos to YouTube. You can even create infographics, which are awesome for sharing lots of information without overwhelming people.

 2. Run Facebook Ads

Online advertising is an integral part of any e-commerce business development strategy. Some businesses prefer Google search ads, whereas others opt for Facebook ads. You don’t have to stick to just one platform for that matter, but instead, test out different ad platforms to see what brings the most attention.

Since people like to stumble upon new products and services through Facebook, a lot of e-commerce websites run Facebook ads. Try the ‘A/B test’ for different types of campaigns in Facebook ads to see which ones work best for you.

3. Retarget the Audience

Retargeting the audience refers to a marketing tactic that allows advertisers to target website visitors that have previously landed on your page. The advertisers use a piece of code that goes into the website, which lets the advertising platform recognize the person who has previously visited. You can now retarget your audience through Google ads, Facebook ads, and Quora ads. 

 4. Try Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a rapidly growing marketing trend. Brands offer lucrative deals to top bloggers, social media experts, Instagrammers, and YouTubers to help spread the word about their brand or product. 

An e-commerce website could also use an influencer marketing strategy to attract audience. Make sure that you’re working with influencers from the region you’re doing business in. Otherwise, it won’t make much of a difference. 

 5. Build an Email List

Establishing an active email list is imperative to creating a successful marketing strategy in today’s world. If you put out an opt-in form and expect people to subscribe to your email list, it might not work very well. Instead, try publishing useful content and write a compelling message on your opt-in forms to entice people to interact with it. Furthermore, don’t overlook the psychology of colors in your emails because that matters too. 

The point is that email marketing is an essential part of the modern-day digital marketing strategy. The biggest perk of building an email list is that you can always reach out to your customers or subscribers through it without hesitation.

You’ve got to use every single way to attract, engage, and convert your audience into paying customers. Most successful e-commerce stores pay close attention to cart abandonment, and they use email marketing to communicate their offers, discounts, and whatnot.

That’s it. 

It’s difficult to succeed just by focusing on a single source. Make sure to create a mix of several top-notch marketing tactics to make an impact.

Introducing Replug: Why it’s beneficial for your e-commerce website

Replug is a state-of-the-art URL shortening tool that enables you to shorten the long and clunky URLs into short and sweet ones. Additionally, it flawlessly integrates your short branded URL and helps you take your social media marketing to the next level.

Basically, it’s a one-stop-shop for shortening your URLs, tracking the clickability, adding the UTMs, retargeting the visitors, and driving social media followers over to your website. 

Simply put, it’s not just a URL shortener, but instead, it comes with a whole package to take your social media engagement and website visitors to the next level.

Key Features of Replug

Here are the features of Replug you shouldn’t overlook:

  1. URL Shortener

It could save you from the embarrassment of sharing messy and lengthy URLs on social media. It’s the best URL shortener tool out there. So turn your long URLs short to give it a professional look.

 2. UTM Parameters

Replug allows users to add a UTM parameter to their short URLs, which is an optional feature for users to use. However, if you’re trying to track the performance of your social media sharing campaign, you should create and insert a UTM parameter to your short link.

 3. Branded URLs

A branded URL is a short URL that is easy to remember and use on the internet. You must have seen some companies use short URLs for their social media posts or otherwise. For instance, YouTube uses youtu.be and Amazon has the amzn.to domain.

 4. Social Media Bio Links

One of the perks of the Replug tool is that it lets you create an all-in-one social media bio link that takes visitors to a landing page displaying all of your social media profile links. 

 5. Retargeting the Audience

One of the benefits of using Replug is that you can retarget the people who clicked on the short URLs through various ad networks that support retargeting.

 6. Call-to-Action to Social Media Links

One of the features that make Replug stand out from the rest of the URL shorteners is that it has a call-to-action feature. What it does is that it lets you add a CTA snippet to the URLs you’re shortening. So whenever you shorten someone else’s article to share on your social media, your CTA snippet shows up on the screen, and it could bring traffic back to your website.

How to Use Replug for Your E-commerce Store

Here’s how e-commerce website makers can use Replug to make the most of this tool:

1. Shorten the Long Product Page URLs

Have you ever noticed that e-commerce websites have very lengthy URLs, especially for product pages? 

Well, who would want to share those long URLs that look spammy? That is where Replug comes to your rescue; you can always shorten your product page links with Replug and make them look beautiful on social media. 

2. Use a Branded URL for Social Media

Since Replug does allow you to add a custom branded URL to your account, you could use its short branded URL for your social media campaign. Make the most of this opportunity for your e-commerce website. It’ll eventually shorten your product page links to some extent.

3. Drive Social Media Traffic Back to the Store

The call-to-action feature of Replug lets you create CTA snippets that could be added to the short URLs, for instance, when sharing influencers’ content on your social media for engagement and interaction, you could add a CTA to your website in the blog post URL. As a result, when people click-through the short link of the influencers’ article, they’d land on their website and also see your CTA snippet on the page.

4. Retarget the Audience through Ads

When you’re shortening the URLs with Replug and people are clicking through your clicks, you can retarget the audience that clicked on the short URLs through various ad networks. 

Replug allows you to add a retargeting pixel for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Quora, and custom websites. The impact wouldn’t only be limited to social media marketing, but in fact, you might see a little spike in conversion as well.

So these were some of the ways to use Replug for your e-commerce business. 

What Else Would You Do for Building an E-commerce Website?

I dug deep into the details of establishing an e-commerce website.

Some of you would be excited not just to launch your e-commerce store but also to make it a success story. 

I have this temptation to ask you a question: What else would you do if you were to build an e-commerce website? 

Some of you might be social media experts, serial entrepreneurs, and e-commerce professionals.

So I’d like to pick an experts’ brains on building an e-commerce website. Feel free to leave your answer in the comments section.

What is the best day and time to send an email?

If you are a marketer and running an online business, then you are probably spending more money, resource, energy, and time on email marketing to build a connective relationship with the audience. 

Right?

In 2022, attracting more customers to your website or business is not a cup of cake anymore. Why is that? 

Causes, there are 4.88 billion internet users in the world who accumulate information, looking for the solution to their problems and receive promotional emails.

If you genuinely want to capture the audience’s attention and give a powerful brand impact on the audience’s mind, then all you need to do is to find the best day and time to send emails.

Makes sense?

I have another intriguing question for you: 

Is it important to email at a time that certainly works for your targeted audience?

Absolutely yes, It’s incredibly essential to email at the right time to the right audience, it not only influences your outcome but also sustains you to improve click-through rate (CTR), open rate, and boost your ROI.

Are you aware of email marketing challenges in 2021?

I’m sure you all do. For the past decade, people used to interact with the other business partners and teams in the same office, but now we all prefer to connect through Zoom, Microsoft team, Slack, and more. Things constantly change, but it doesn’t mean email marketing lost its worth. 

Even with all these fancy apps, Email marketing is still one of the best and most competent strategies to communicate with customers and others. The study forecast the number of active email users to reach 4.3 billion in 2023 and 4.6 billion in 2025. So that means Email is not dead, it is still alive and more hard-hitting.

In this article, I’ll introduce the five most reliable studies that reveal the best time and date to send emails to your audience after having sent billions of emails.

Read on and find out to make the biggest splash through it. 

What’s the best day of the week and time to send emails to your audience?

Let’s dive into some relevant studies:

Yesware

The first study, conducted by Yesware, discovers hundreds of thousands of email activity over the last quarter to analyze the best timing for cold emailing, email campaigns, and follow-ups.

Yesware studying based on the replies rate they have received. According to their data, there are two best times for sending emails that are:

One best time to send an email is: 1 pm

The second best time to send an email is: 11 am

They found sending emails around these frequencies increases the reply rate that assists you to prompt the potential customers into sales customers. On the other hand, the best days to send emails are:

The best day to send an email: Monday and Tuesday

The worst day to send an email: Friday

All marketers want their audience to give some time and importance to emails, newsletter and for that, marketers have to put themselves in the audience’s shoes and select a perfect period to send an email.

Mailerlite

There is another study of Mailerlite, as opposed to Yesware data, Mailerlite reveals Tuesday is the best day to send out the emails, but Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays can also be convenient to send an email. It certainly enhances the highest open rates and click-through rates rapidly.

The Best day and time to send an email: Tuesday at 11 am

The Worst day to send an email: Saturday and Sunday

GetResponse

GetResponse found in its studies that Tuesday is the best day to get the most emails opened compared to any other day of the week and accomplish a click-through rate of 2.33%. The second peak day is Friday in order to attain an open rate of 20.58%. 

The Best time to send emails for open rate: 4 am 

The second-best time to send an email for click-through rate (CTR): 6 am

WordStream

In another study from WordStream, they advise email marketers to avoid Monday anxiety and Friday’s itchy feet.

Because on Monday; people usually march into the office and are flooded in the barrage of emails, and on Friday, people are trying to wind up the thing rather than replying to emails.

So, they also found the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are traditionally the favorite:

The best day and time to send email is: Thursday 8–9 am

The Worst Time to Send Emails: Tuesday & Wednesday 8–10 am

Coschedule

Data from Coschedule reveals Tuesday is one of the most effective days to send an email. In any case, you want to send two emails in a week, then go on Tuesday and Thursday.

The Best time to send email is: 6:00 am, 10 am, 8 pm, and 2 pm

So what is the best day and time to send an email?

What factors should we consider while selecting the time and data?

No doubt, sending emails at the best time is important, but there are some other factors we have to look into before creating an email campaign:

• #1. Understand the customer’s behavior and demographic segmentation

Knowing your audience’s behavior and demographic is the most pivotal factor in email marketing efforts. Think about how your audience’s day goes. You wouldn’t want to send your email in the middle of their busy schedules. Doing this might cause them to overlook your message unintentionally. Understanding customers’ needs and wants are the effective approach to sending your email at the right to the right audience and also assists you to improve your ROI, click-through rate, and response rate. 

Here we take an example:

Let’s say you have a large no of the audience doing their jobs at night like bartenders or barista, then you are more likely to send your email at night, which gets a more open rate. We have different studies that reveal sending emails at the night is not a good option to increase the click-through rate, but in this case; it is. 

• #2. Identify your niche

You want to send emails to the audience, but there is the thing that holds your back is: Who is your market niche? 

To answer this question, you have to find the audience’s problem, interests and what do you have for them. Let us say you are targeting B2B and B2C marketers, then weekdays are the best days to send emails for you and Tuesday is the peak day to send an email.

• #3. Frequency Emails

After identifying the niche and customer demographic segmentation the next step, you need to focus on the frequency of email and the subject line with an intriguing title. If you are looking to enhance your open rate, click-through rate, collect lead and sales then you should send one email per week, and sending one or two bulk emails a week is the ideal situation to enhance your brand visibility and improve ROI. 

• #4 Identify the Products and Service Offerings

  
  

  The best time to send your emails is also determined by the type of business you are in. Are your products and services fit under the B2B model or the B2C model?Based on your solutions and offerings, your time and data can vary accordingly. For example, if you are sending B2B emails then the beginning of the week such as Monday or Tuesday first half usually works the best. Even if you are sending B2B emails, segment your audience to accommodate different modes of working and behaviours. Are you sending to employees? Or entrepreneurs? Or executives?However, if you are sending B2C emails there are other factors that contribute as well. Such as, is it a retargeting email? If there is an event coming up? For example, if you are promoting fun entertainment activities with family or the hospitality industry, then Friday evening or the weekend will work best.

  
  

  #5 Test Different Subject Lines

  
  

  The first thing your reader will notice about your email is the subject line. It is the first and only determining factor whether your reader will open the mail or not.Based on your niche you can test which subject line will work the best. You can experiment with subject lines to build curiosity, offer value or highlight time sensitivity and the value the email will provide.Your subject line will determine the open rate of your emails which will eventually lead your reader to take the action you want them to take.

• #6 Make the Best Use of Seasonal Consumer Behavior

  
  

  According to Campaign Monitor, Black Friday emails had the highest open rate and highest link click rate. Another insight about consumer behaviour during holidays shows that 20% of online holiday shopping happen because of emails sent during this season. Therefore, it is important that you have a good strategy of email marketing in place to capitalize on seasonal consumer behaviour.

  
  

  

  If you are sending the promotional email about Sales or the New Arrivals, you can schedule the emails for weekends or during lunch hours because they are most likely to take action from your emails during these hours.

• #7 Design Mobile-Friendly Emails

  
  

  More than 47% of your consumers check their emails on their mobile devices. This shows the significance to design mobile-friendly emails. For designing user-friendly emails, you can work on good graphics, flow of content, copy and personalization. These elements will also determine if your user will take any action from the email or not such as clicking on the link.

6 Email Marketing tools to save your time and money

Marketing trends change with time, but email marketing still has its place in the market. Choosing the best email app to send the right email is another important factor that not only affects your email marketing efforts but also assists you to grow your business smartly with the help of valuable analytics against your email campaign.

Do you need email marketing software, which is cost-effective, easy to use, time and money-saving? 

We have listed the 5 most effective email marketing tools which help you to hit the targeted mark every time.

1. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is one of the most cost-effective and popular email marketing with over 130k customers. 

It allies you to reach the target audience, captures their attention with an interesting message, builds relationships, and aids them to address solutions to their problems. It makes it easy for their customers to run email marketing campaigns. A CRM that includes email and sales automation holds all the customer details in one place. Manage the pipelines, keep transactions up to date, and follow up at the right time.

2. Benchmark

Benchmark is another fascinating email marketing tool for agencies that help to create easy professional emails rapidly to keep customers stay and engage. 

It is a cost-effective tool and simplifies the assets you need so you can focus on developing connections, growing your market, and raising the bar.

It allows efficient leverage of your most valuable marketing assets, setup and customizes email without spending hours, builds stronger relationships with your contacts, gets access to a robust email marketing tool, and reaches out your goals faster.

3. eSputnik

eSputnik is a marketing automation tool that offers extensive functionality for customer data management and processing. It provides no-code solutions meaning you don’t need code knowledge to implement them for your business. 

The platform helps create and send mass and transactional emails, SMS, app notifications and browser notifications. Such features as advanced contact segmentation, support of multilingual messaging, the substitution of dynamic content and product recommendations allow to automate message personalization and deliver each subscriber and customer only relevant content.

Aside from messaging, eSputnik offers solutions for personalized website marketing such as forms and site recommendations. It integrates with numerous tools, for example, Tilda, Zapier, Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, which enables you to run multiple marketing activities within one platform.  

4. Zoho Campaign

Zoho Campaign is an email marketing platform that allows you to develop, deliver, and monitor emails using permission-based email marketing. Through a real-time analytics platform, it assists you in building a large and future client base. 

It assists you in creating visually appealing emails with your brand name, automating your emails, and forming personal relationships with customized emails. It is a malleable and budget-friendly email marketing plan for marketers.

To help you deliver customized messages to your audience, Zoho Campaigns includes features such as interactive content, email surveys, and automatic list segmentation.

5. Sendinblue

Sendinblue helps companies create and develop relationships by using marketing automation, email promotions, transactional communications, SMS messages, chat, CRM, Facebook ads, and retargeting ads.

It is more than just email marketing software for a marketer, offers a wide range of resources for marketing your product or service. So, no need to go anywhere; find anything relevant to digital marketing without leaving your couch.

One of the latest reviews expound upon its features including Email marketing, SMS marketing, and live chat applications will help you reach your target audience on social media, build a good bond with your consumers by using CRM while saving time and energy with email automation. 

6. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is the most leading tool for bloggers and small businesses because it was one of the first major email providers to have a fully free package forever. 

It let you generate emails, develop a website, register a domain, and design landing pages. It is a top-rated and well-trusted email marketing software that will assist you in growing your company by creating automated emails at critical points in the buyer journey, so you can send out welcoming emails, order confirmations abandoned cart updates, and more with ease.

However, there are many Mailchimp alternatives you should try too.

3 Email Metrics to Calculate the Impact of Your Email Marketing: 

It is important to understand the impact of your email marketing after you have identified the best time to send emails.

We have listed down the 3 most important metrics of email marketing to differentiate the best time for people to open emails and the best time for people to take the action (for example, buy a product, complete registration, download an item).

These metrics are:

1. Open Rate
2. Click-through Rate
3. Click-to-open Rate

Open Rate:

Open Rate tells you about how many people from your subscribers opened your email. For a better open rate, have short, crisp and value-added headlines, and add pre-header text.

Click-through Rate:

The Click-through rate tells you about how many people engaged with the email content after opening it. The Click-through rate is usually lesser than the open rate since readers abandon emails without reading completely and taking action. To make your emails more engaging, use the elements of personalization, improve the copy and mention CTA clearly.

Click-to-Open Rate: 

Click-to-open Rate is determined by comparing the open rate and the number of people who clicked on any link in the mail. This metric is helpful to understand which content is relevant to your audience.

You can calculate the Click-to-Open Rate by using this formula: 

Click-to-Open Rate = (Click through rate / Open Rate) x 100

Conclusion

Now, I’m sure you have learned how to get more traffic to your website through email marketing.

Email marketing is the cost-effective approach that takes your business to the next level and assists you to improve sales and ROI. Send an email on Tuesday at 10 am with an engaging subject line aids you to stand out in the market.

When will you send your promotional email to the audience?

B2B email marketing focuses on businesses ratfiher than individuals, and the purchase decisions are made on value transfer instead of impulsion. The sales cycle is considerably longer, and it may involve multiple decision-makers, making B2B email marketing significantly different from B2C. A lot of email marketers apply the same strategies for B2B email communication, which they use for B2C, thus never achieving the true potential of B2B email marketing. Today, I will discuss the top 5 B2B email marketing tips that will help you unlock the true potential of your mailing lists. Read on for a deep dive into the topic.

What makes B2B email marketing different from B2C and how to approach it

B2C is more focused on driving sales on almost every message, and it contains little to no educational content. Moreover, the purchase won’t have a long-term impact on consumers. However, B2B purchases have lasting effects on an organization, and one needs to invest in educational content spread over multiple emails before prospects start engaging truly. You will also have to optimize the messages to deliver value for each stakeholder who takes part in the buying processes. Thus, the B2C approach of generating revenue from single emails isn’t going to work out. We can consider that their identical objectives are the reason behind many email marketers applying similar strategies:

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Now that we know about the differences between the two, let us understand how to approach B2B email marketing. Firstly, you will need to curate your content for a rational buyer and focus on lead warming. You also need to understand your prospect’s requirements and satisfy multiple employees’ concerns before your message reaches the actual decision-maker. You can find the subtle differences in the approach in the below table:

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Emails have the best ROI as a digital marketing channel, and B2B emails have 47% higher CTR when compared to B2C messages. Also, checking work emails daily is still a part of every organization, and there’s no reason you should miss on B2B email marketing.

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That’s enough of polishing the basics. Let us explore those five B2B email marketing tips that will help you need to try without fail:

5 best B2B email marketing tips

#1 Use Personalization + Dynamic Segmentation Simultaneously

Just because you are going to communicate with different professionals from different levels of hierarchy, it doesn’t mean that you should give up on personalization efforts. You should segment your mailing lists in a way that helps you address different hierarchy levels and then run personalization efforts to make your messages relevant to the job profile. Focus on your prospect organization’s needs and send content as per the powers and understanding level of the concerned job profile.

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Dynamic segmentation comes in handy in filtering your mailing list proactively. It aids in targeting the contacts based on their recent activity on your website and response rates to your ongoing email campaigns. Thus, you will be able to get the benefit of staying relevant to the current phase of their buying processes instead of sending messages in a generic fashion.

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Personalization coupled with dynamic segmentation is one of the highly effective ways to achieve the right send times. For instance, if your prospect viewed a certain FAQ on your website, sending them a relevant resource on the topic within a few hours can significantly help the customer journey. 

#2 Develop content for multiple stakeholders and offer cascading value propositions

As I mentioned above, B2B email marketing relies on delivering value and establishing reliability. This will require you to create extensive content that complements all phases of the buyer journey. You should start by knowing which stakeholders are going to take part in the purchasing process. A finance manager’s concerns are always going to differ from that of a production or sales manager. Yet, all of them come into the picture at different times and even stay in the loop. You can use the below chart to create email content development guidelines for addressing them:

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Also, optimize the subject lines, preheader text, and CTAs for various stakeholders when creating resources. Once you develop the basic framework for your email content, you should use different formats to distribute it. This makes content consumption easier. Drip email campaigns are the best solution for offering cascading value propositions. They help you deliver the right content via emails based on engagement and timing. Instead of bombarding the readers with huge amounts of information that either doesn’t connect with their job role or is irrelevant to their buyer journey only discourages further engagement. Below is a schematic diagram of how drip emails deliver meaningful resources using cascading send rules:

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I find that using self-nurturing landing pages is a great way when you don’t know the exact profile of your recipient. You can use customized URLs from Replug to track their activity and improve your database. 

#3 Leverage newsletters to project thought leadership

Newsletters are a multi-purpose tool for B2B marketers. They help establish thought leadership by engaging the readers consistently over information that aids their business. They give you an opportunity to send insights on various aspects of your customer’s business and place your product/service as a facilitator of the benefits you mention. In many cases, it takes weeks to go through various offers, terms and conditions, technicalities, and discussions before they approach you again. You can use newsletters to keep your prospective clients engaged during those ‘colder’ phases, and it generally acts in your favour as opposed to brief periods of staying out of touch. No doubt, email is the hot favourite of B2B email marketers when it comes to content distribution:

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Sharing industry-level research, opinion pieces, and inputs from technical experts are some time-tested ways of projecting thought leadership. You can use tools like ContentStudio to keep your subscribers engaged through highly refined content pieces from third-party sources. The below email from Smartsheet helps it take an authoritative pose, and it will surely increase its trustworthiness among the readers:

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Similarly, if you are a SaaS company, you can send product-specific tips and tricks within your newsletter during the trial period. Here’s an example of doing so from Miro:

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#4 Be smart with curation in your email templates

Having the right B2B HTML email templates matters! Content plays a decisive role, but curation is another aspect that impacts your campaign’s overall performance. The number of B2B buyers remains less when compared to the B2C buyers, but the ticket size is considerably huge. Thus, you should invest in beautiful email marketing templates that provide dynamic content blocks as it helps your personalization efforts apart from improving aesthetics. It also saves you from degrading your brand value in situations like sending an email with wrong images or URLs, as you can change them even after sending it.

This is how Crowd Writer UK works when they email other businesses. Having personalized subject lines and simple and authentic content has boosted their email marketing campaigns. When curating your content blocks, use visual hierarchy rules for getting the best aesthetic appeal. Keeping the paragraphs and lines shorter is a must, but your email typefaces, branding elements, colour palette, the separation between adjacent elements, font size, and colour play a huge role in determining your message’s readability. Mobile optimization is also necessary as 51% of the total email opens come from smartphones. Here’s a great example of curating a B2B email template in the right manner coming from none other than Campaign Monitor:

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#5 Constantly track your success rates and redesign your efforts

Lastly, I would like to tell the readers that tracking your campaign results is 10x more important in B2B email marketing. The reason? Right from the decision-makers to the purchase cycle, everything keeps shifting while your competitors are going to target your leads far more aggressively than the B2C sector. Keeping a tab of how your email copies perform, the subject lines that get maximum opens, most coveted gated content, and CTAs apart from the regular email metrics will pave your way to success. You can learn from successful conversions and replicate the model that helped you convert in your ongoing efforts.

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Most businesses run an email audit on a yearly basis, but it is advisable for B2B firms to use real-time insights and constantly tweak their email marketing strategy as per the latest performance results. As the businesses continue to evolve with technological advancements and shifts in end-customer perception, B2B marketers will have to constantly evolve their processes through consistent evaluations.

Putting it together

Coming towards the end, I will draw your attention to one common trait among all of these five B2B email marketing tips: Cater to the needs of the buyer journey on a real-time basis and follow a flexible approach. No doubts that running email campaigns for business-to-business interactions is complicated but following these email marketing tips will help you focus on getting results through coordinated efforts. I hope these tips help you get greater success in your next B2B email marketing campaign.

Author Bio

Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest-growing full-service email marketing company that specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion, and free HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz, and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.

 

Affiliate marketing is a lucrative monetization method for bloggers and marketers. However, affiliate marketing isn’t just for bloggers and marketers. YouTubers, podcasters, and live streamers also make money off of affiliate marketing. If you’re looking for affiliate marketing guidelines, you’re at the right place as I’m about to spill the beans.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular money-making strategies in the online marketing world. However, most blogging beginners start their blog monetization through Google AdSense or a similar ad network, but later on, transit towards affiliate marketing. 

Affiliate marketing comes in handy for beginners who can’t make a ton of money on ad networks due to fewer monthly page views on their blogs. Therefore, the majority of them pursue affiliate marketing to find a better ad alternative.

You don’t always need a blog or website to make money with affiliate marketing. Instead, you can use multiple platforms to promote products and make money. I have a bunch of ideas in mind to share with you so that you could make the most of your affiliate marketing campaign.

Let me tell you a fact right off the bat: it doesn’t work out for every blogger or content creator. You’d find some affiliate marketers complain about the conversion. On the flip side, some affiliate marketers go gaga over this money-making strategy. It all comes down to finding the secret sauce that works for you.

Don’t worry, I’ll try to my level best to help you understand how to develop a perfect synergy between your affiliate offers and content to make the most of this monetization opportunity.

Some of you might be beginners in affiliate marketing, so the chances are, you don’t have a clear idea of affiliate marketing. Don’t panic as I’ll dig deeper into the topic and share some fundamental steps that would take your affiliate marketing to the next level.

But first things first, you should know the basics.

How Affiliate Marketing Works?

It’s a process of promoting the products and earning commissions when people buy through affiliate links. The majority of affiliate programs don’t have strict requirements and pretty much anyone can join them. However, a website or blog or social media account is mandatory in some programs. They make sure that only legitimate and serious marketers join in. 

Furthermore, some companies have an affiliate program limited to their paid customers, which means you can’t get access to their affiliate program unless you buy their product. In most cases, there aren’t any hard and fast rules for someone to join the affiliate marketing program. 

Moreover, all brands define their own terms of use that affiliate marketers must agree and oblige to for being a part of the program. There are several clauses in the terms of use, but one of the most important ones is that the brand has the right to terminate the affiliate marketer’s participation over any suspicious activity or violation of the terms of use.

That’s it.

Keep reading because you’re about to find out:

• How a beginner can get started with affiliate marketing
• Where you can promote affiliate products to earn commissions
• How much affiliate marketers can earn from a single affiliate sale
• How to choose the best affiliate product to promote
• How to get more clicks and sales in affiliate marketing

So if you’re serious about your affiliate marketing initiative, then don’t miss out on the steps I’m going to share with you.

Without any further ado, let’s get right into it.

A Step-by-Step Guide on Starting Affiliate Marketing

Here we go:

#1: Choose Your Niche

To make sure you’re off to a good start, choose your niche wisely. It’s a prerequisite not just for starting successful niche websites, but it’s also for authority blogs. 

The niche is a category or genre of the blog or website, which determines the type of content a reader can expect on the blog or website. 

A niche website or blog caters to a specific audience by solving their problems through their content.

A website’s niche and affiliate marketing success go hand in hand. It’s essential to choose the right niche. Otherwise, it’s highly unlikely that you’d rank on the first page in the SERP as it’s impossible to dominate the niche without having know-how on the subject.

Some multiple factors and metrics influence the search engine ranking. Nobody exactly knows what all of those factors and metrics are, so most bloggers and digital marketers kept on testing different techniques.

The more you bring the right audience to your website, the easier it would become to make money from your affiliate website. However, delivering value through your content makes a lot of difference. 

Affiliate marketing works on trust, authority, and reputation. People usually don’t buy recommended products quickly. Instead, they do their due diligence before opting for the product. Therefore, if your emphasis is selling, you might end up suffering in the long run.

There are two parameters of choosing the right niche:

• Exposure

It’s impossible to randomly choose a niche and grow a website. Bloggers and affiliate marketers get their hands dirty before they start to make money with affiliate marketing. You can’t promote a product if you haven’t had some experience with it. The experience gives you the exposure which differentiates an expert user and a rookie. Always try to get familiar with the product you’re going to promote. I’m a big fan of the ContentStudio tool; it’s my go-to software for scheduling social media posts. When I wanted to write the ContentStudio review on my blog, I started using it so that I could write the review with an authoritative voice. I didn’t want to write a review right off the bat. After using it for a while, I sat down to write the review. I’m not subscribed to the mentality of writing content just for the sake of publishing it. I always put my heart and soul into every piece of content. You can’t sign up for a new tool and instantly write a review.

So make yourself familiar with the niche before you jump into it. Don’t hesitate to invest a little bit of money into trying out the stuff before you talk about it on the blog. It’ll give you the exposure that might turn things around for you. 

• Strength

The strength means you have an interest in something or it’s your skill. It’s essential to choose a niche that’s your strength. If you play soccer and you have the basic knowledge of the game, and you start a blog about ice skating, which you haven’t done in your life, then it won’t be a wise decision.

Anyway, my niche is freelancing; I mostly write about freelancing on and off the platforms:

You can see most of the articles on my blog revolve around the freelancing niche. It didn’t happen on a whim, but instead, I discovered my blogging niche along the way. I kept on publishing content on the blog and freelancing-related content took off.

Plus, people reach out to me to ask freelancing questions all the time, so I decided to pay close attention to what people want from me. And, that’s how I choose my blog’s niche. 

Hence, it’s vital to choose the blog niche based on the exposure or strength to earn money from affiliate marketing. 

#2: Handpick online platforms

Affiliate marketing success isn’t possible without a bunch of tools and platforms. You got to be careful with the selection of tools and platforms. Presumably, you’re an affiliate marketing beginner and trying to hone in on your online money-making craft.

The most important tool for affiliate marketing is the primary platform. In most cases, bloggers and affiliate marketers choose a blog. So I’ll stick to the blog as our main tool for publishing, but I’d shed some light on other options too.

Once you’ve chosen your niche and you’re crystal clear on the audience targeting, the next move should be handpicking the online platforms to put out content and build an audience.

It’s the most crucial part of the process. You might find affiliate marketers solely rely on the YouTube or Facebook page, but you must future-proof your affiliate marketing business. 

There are different ways to go about it, but most of you might be first-timers. I’d highly recommend setting up a publishing platform as well as a social media platform to start on the right foot. 

Let’s take a look at the publishing and social media platforms:

Publishing platforms

There are various publishing platforms out there, but here are three of the most common ones:

WordPress [Recommended]

You can either choose the wordpress.com platform or self-hosted wordpress.org to launch your website. WordPress is by far the most popular content management system out there. According to an SEJ’s article, the data revealed by W3Techs showed that WordPress powers 39.5% of overall websites.

• Squarespace

It’s an online website builder which allows users to create websites without having any coding knowledge whatsoever. It’s a drag and drop-based tool for businesses, e-commerce stores, bloggers, and entrepreneurs.

• Medium

Medium has a publication feature that lets you set up your blog on the Medium platform. Affiliate marketers and bloggers could use the Medium publication for putting out content.

Jeff Bullas is a popular blogger and marketer. He publishes content and promotes products on the blog as well:

There are hundreds of thousands of such examples of beginner and expert-level bloggers who primarily use blogs to earn money from affiliate marketing.

Social media platforms

Affiliate marketers drive traffic and attract a new audience through social media. Not only do they run social media ads, but also engage the audience through sharing content. Let’s take a look at three wildly popular social media platforms among affiliate marketers:

• YouTube

YouTube is famous for bringing a lot of eyeballs to the business. The secret to winning at YouTube is making videos that the prospective audience might be interested in and then use the description box to further engage the audience. Affiliate marketers put the landing pages and affiliate product links in the YouTube description and earn a lot of money from affiliate marketing. 

• Quora

Quora is one of the most underrated social media platforms that could bring website traffic to your platform. It’s a questioning and answering platform that allows you to put links into your answers. Make sure that you aren’t misusing the links feature as its spam detection is quite effective. Your account could get banned over spamming. Affiliate marketers don’t share direct affiliate links on Quora, but instead, they occasionally add content links that may contain affiliate products. 

• Facebook

Facebook is a major social media player on the market. Affiliate marketers tend to build communities mostly in Facebook groups. They don’t focus much on getting sales by sharing links, but instead, they nurture the audience and drive them to the website from time to time. So don’t underestimate the power of Facebook groups; they’re very much relevant, active, and effective.

There are several other publishing and social media platforms out there which you should explore, but the above-mentioned are quite popular among pro-bloggers and expert affiliate marketers. 

Here’s an example of creating a community on social media.

Problogger is a popular blogging tips blog founded by Darren Rowse. He is an Australian blogger, author, and public speaker. 

Problogger has an active Facebook group of over 29k members. It’s a community where bloggers communicate, interact, and help each other out:

You won’t essentially find a team of Problogger pushing ProBlogger content or products all the time, but instead, they rarely share offers or announcements from Problogger. It’s mostly fans and readers that interact.

The point is that choose your platforms and stick with them. You’ll eventually start to see traction over time. And once the traction happens, it starts to drive affiliate sales as well.

#3: Do keyword research

Keywords have a significant role in establishing an effective affiliate marketing strategy whether you’re a blogger or YouTuber. However, the caveat is that it’s nearly impossible to find the exact keywords data. According to SEO experts, even the most popular keyword tools aren’t accurate when it comes to the number of searches against keywords. Don’t worry, you can still do keyword research. Here’s how:

Once you’re done with the niche and platform selection, the next up is keyword research. I’m not a fan of traditional keyword research through keyword tools. However, I’ll share some top-notch keywords tools that SEOs and content marketers use for finding the keywords. 

On the flip side, I’m more into search analysis through different ways, which I’ll uncover shortly. Before I mention the popular keyword research tool, I want to shed some light on the idea of doing keyword research. 

Most SEOs put in the keyword in the keyword research tool and look at the competition and number of searches. It’s also a fact that the number of searchers can’t be accurate since only Google holds that information. 

Therefore, I follow a different approach called search analysis. The way how it works is that we analyze the search query through certain ways and create content around that. 

A) Autocomplete

Autocomplete is Google’s intelligent search feature which provides recommendations upon typing in half of the search query. It usually recommends the search terms that are popular among the searchers, meaning people are using those search terms.

Analyzing what Google Autocomplete is suggesting gives you a good idea of what people need to know. Using those search terms in the content or writing content around those topics could bring a lot of search traffic. 

Tip: the same autocomplete strategy also works for YouTube search.

B) Google Trends

The second most important part of the search analysis is looking at Google Trends. Go to Google Trends and type in your search term or keyword. If you’re using an upward trend or numbers are taking off, then it means there is a demand for this topic or keyword, and you can focus on this.

If Google Trends analysis doesn’t show any traction whatsoever, then you should think twice before covering that topic or keyword in your content. 

C) Popular Content

Thirdly, analyze your popular content in Google Analytics or any other tracking software you use for your analytics. I use Google Analytics for analyzing the site performance as well as finding the top pages of my website in terms of page views. It helps me focus on the right topics and understanding the popularity of my content.

You can double-down on the popular content, meaning create similar content of what already working and gain momentum. Not only would it increase your page views, but it would also increase your ads and affiliate revenues. 

That’s my search analysis approach. I know a lot of bloggers and affiliate marketers follow the same approach.

However, you can try out the typical keyword research tools, but I won’t recommend relying only on the keyword research tools:

Here are three popular keyword research and SEO tools: 

• Ahrefs
• Long Tail Pro
• MarketMuse
• SEMRUSH

Once you find a bunch of keywords through keyword research tools and search analysis, get down to writing some top-notch articles and publish them along the way. 

#4: Select affiliate products

Affiliate marketers and bloggers have mixed opinions about the timing of selecting affiliate products. There isn’t a right or wrong way of doing it. 

Some expert bloggers and affiliate marketers think it’s wise to focus completely on finding the right topics/keyword and rank the articles in the SERP. On the other hand, a lot of bloggers teach and preach to choose the affiliate products beforehand. I tend to focus on the latter. 

It’s good to have a list of products in mind before getting down to writing articles in bulk. I have done the mistake of writing articles in bulk without keeping the affiliate products in mind. So I have learned this lesson the hard way.

One of my blogs has 81 blog posts published so far, and more than 80% of the blog posts get fewer visitors every month. The good thing is that I realized my mistake a while ago and started focusing on the right topics, and it’s changing the trajectory of this blog. 

So here are three recommendations on selecting the affiliate products:

• Relevance:

Keep the relevance factor in mind while selecting the affiliate products for your blog or another platform. It means the product must have coherence with the content. You can’t promote a juicer machine on a mortgage blog.

• Personal Experience:

A personal experience with the products goes a long way. You can’t talk about a product with confidence if you haven’t had a chance to try it out. On the contrary, when you have experience of using the product, you can share the details with authority because you know the product inside out. 

• Affordability:

Pricing matters in the affiliate products’ conversion rate. If you’re targeting beginners through your content, but promoting $500 to $800 products, it won’t work out. You have to keep the price affordability factor in mind while choosing the affiliate products.

Here are some of the popular affiliate marketing networks to find the affiliates:

1. ShareASale
2. Impact
3. FlexOffers
4. DigiStore24
5. JVZOO
6. ClickBank

#5: Put out content

Putting out content means publishing content online to attract, engage, and convert the audience. It’s nearly impossible to generate affiliate sales without putting out content. 

Some affiliate marketing gurus create email marketing funnels and use online advertising to drive traffic. It could work as much as any other strategy, but the problem is that the majority of us won’t be able to spend a thousand dollars right off the bat. Therefore, putting out content essential becomes a viable option to pursue.

Once you have done some due diligence on the keywords and topic clusters to target, it means you’re all set for creating content. You’d primarily be using written content, but you’d also need to use other types of content along the way.

Let me breakdown different articles you should be writing on the blog to boost your affiliate marketing sales:

• Informational content:

These are types of articles that would purely be providing information to the audience. For instance, if you have a furniture blog, then an article like “how to clean your sofa without hiring an expert” could be an informational piece of content.

• Buyer guides:

Buyer guides are typically product guidelines that explain to buyers about the products and help them make a buying decision. Such articles could focus on both single or multiple products. Furthermore, these articles are intended for generating affiliate sales.

• Response posts:

Response posts are published to cater to audience questions that are discovered through search analysis, keyword research, and audience feedback. 

The story doesn’t end here, but instead, you shouldn’t just rely on the text content. Stretch your content plan further towards other types of content such as videos and images. 

Use the power of image platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram. These platforms are massive from an attention standpoint. A lot of bloggers use Pinterest to drive traffic to their blogs and websites. 

Similarly, YouTube is the second most popular search engine. Use the videos to drive traffic to your website as well as generate affiliate sales. 

Income School once revealed a brand new YouTube channel in their video that they started around shooting sport:

The channel took off fairly nicely; they were able to get 9k subscribers in just four months. It didn’t end here because they also shared that they were able to generate a lot of affiliate sales through that YouTube channel. So it just validates my point of using a platform like YouTube to build a brand and generate affiliate sales.

#6: Run SEO and outreach campaigns

Affiliate marketing seems easy on the outside, but it’s quite tricky on the inside. If you ever come across someone who is making a good income from blogs or niche websites through affiliate marketing, then investigate what else that marketer is doing to stay ahead of others.

There are competition analysis and spying software such as Semrush and Spyfu that marketers and companies use to dominate search ranking.

What I mean is that most affiliate marketers whether they’re running authority blogs or niche websites build links from time to time even if link building isn’t an important part of their strategy. 

Many bloggers believe that some niches are competitive enough that it’s becoming harder to outsmart the competition without building a few quality backlinks.

For instance, Carl Broadbent is a British blogger who asked an SEO company to analyze his niche website and report back on ranking against a search term. The SEO company revealed that top-ranking sites against that search term have 60 DA on average and his site needs 250 backlinks to compete with them. 

What I’m saying is that I’m a big advocate of getting backlinks naturally, but in some cases, you need a little push to leap. Most affiliate marketers I know take link building very seriously, but they never compromise on the quality of the content. 

You don’t need to spend money on outreach for SEO if you’re just a beginner, but if your site is taking off rather slowly due to fierce competition, then you could try out an outreach marketing strategy to see how it works out for you.

It doesn’t necessarily mean you should completely ignore on-page SEO. I’d highly recommend paying close attention to the following on-page SEO elements:

• Page loading speed
• Keywords targeting
• Topic clusters
• Page caching
• Images compression
• In-depth content

#7: Add social media shareability

You have to have a social media sharing strategy in your mix. What I mean by adding social media shareability is that you should create a system of maximizing social media.

You might not be aware of the power of social media posts when it comes to readers’ engagement. Have you ever heard of the phrase “social proof”?

Social proof is a public validation from the audience which puts any product or brand in the good books. People don’t share bad content because nobody cares about it. Plus, if you keep pushing hard bad content, people consider it spam and may start to unfollow you.

It’s vital to know for affiliate marketers how to leverage social media to their advantage. Clearly, shoving low-quality content down the followers’ throat doesn’t work out for anyone. 

Here are four things you can do to make the most of social media:

• Create compelling yet useful content:

To make sure that your content gets shared by followers, you must create helpful and effective content for the audience. A high-quality content works like a charm, for instance, you never know who comes across your content and shares it to hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. Similarly, when good-quality content gets ranked or goes viral on social media, it also brings backlinks, which plays a vital role in building site authority.

• Engage followers on social media:

Engagement matters a lot on social media. What happens is that when someone engages with your content, their followers or friends get notified on the social media platform. Thus, it exposes your content to more people. That’s how engagement brings in more eyeballs and attention.

•  Make sharing easier for the readers:

Adding social media sharing buttons that are visible on both desktop and mobile versions of the site goes a long way. When a blog doesn’t have social media sharing buttons, it’s highly unlikely that most readers would go the extra mile to share the content. Sharing a piece of content through a sharing button is much easier than copying the link and title manually and then pasting it onto the social media platform. So add social media sharing buttons to your blog.

•  Share others’ content for more attention

Everyone shares their own content, but sharing others’ content puts you on the pedestal. When you share others’ content on social media, not only does it bring value to the followers, but it also helps the original creator of the content.

Replug URL shortener provides click tracking to the users. It’s an excellent tool for bringing the audience back to your website. When you shorten an article’s link and share it on your social media, and the followers start to click-through and land on the article. Furthermore, they’ll see a small pop-up of yours that could take them to your website or profile.

So the takeaway from this step is that it’s good to focus on the keywords selection and putting out valuable content that people like to share, but it shouldn’t end here. Instead, making it easier for the audience to share your content does the trick.

Affiliate marketing success doesn’t only achieve by putting out content. Otherwise, every single affiliate marketer would have been a millionaire. One of the secrets of affiliate marketing success is assisting the audience whether it’s through a free ebook or by recommending a suitable product. Once you start doing that, you won’t be an affiliate marketing failure.

#8: Analyze site performance

No matter what approach of content creation, SEO, and affiliate marketing you adopt, you would ultimately need to analyze your campaign’s performance at some point. Otherwise, you won’t be able to find conclusive evidence of what’s working and what’s not working on your website.

So it’s important to do a little bit of sniff testing after deploying the strategies, but don’t start analyzing the performance of your website after a week or so. Give a good one month before you start examining the performance.

Here are three key indicators that you should look out for in your affiliate site performance analysis:

• Clickability:

Analyze the number of overall clicks on your links; you can use the heatmap tools as well as check out the clicks on your in-content affiliate links. If the number of clicks is rising every month, then it’s a good sign.

• Conversion Rate:

The conversion rate is the most important indicator to see whether or not your site is performing well. If your affiliate sales are increasing, then it means your tactics are working. In some cases, clicks increase but conversion doesn’t go up, it usually indicates that there is a problem with the audience targeting. Simply put, the right visitors aren’t landing on your website, so you need to fix your content strategy.

• Total Pageviews

The number of pageviews is also an essential indicator of how well or poor your search analysis, SEO strategies, and audience engagement are on the site. When page views increase and you’re bringing the right audience to your site, you’d surely see an increase in clickability and conversion rate. 

Affiliate marketing beginners must know when and how to analyze their affiliate marketing strategies. I don’t want to indulge you in the analysis paralysis, but you should analyze your blog monetization strategies once every quarter. 

Did you learn something about affiliate marketing?

I have shared the lessons I learned over the course of 10 years. Had I known all these things a decade ago, a lot would have been different for me today. 

That’s why I shared all these affiliate marketing strategies for beginners so passionately because I know it could turn the table around for anyone who is getting started.

I’m curious to know whether or not you’re taking away something valuable from this blog post. 

Please do me a favor and let me know in the comments section.

Did this blog post on affiliate marketing help you in some way?