Effective marketing tools for your e-commerce store

Marketing ideas on how to use some of ProductCart's advanced marketing features

ProductCart includes a number of marketing-oriented features that can help you increase your online sales, promote repeat purchases, and boost customer satisfaction. Use your creativity to put these powerful features to work for your business.

Among other things, our shopping carts include support for very flexible electronic coupons. By combining multiple filters and discount types you can create a variety of offers that can be used in many different scenarios. Here are some ideas for your e-commerce store!

• Increase the average order amount
  You can do this by rewarding customers that spend more than $XX on your store by granting them a discount on the purchase (e.g. 10%). $XX is your average order amount. The discount code in this scenario could be advertised right on your store’s home page to motivate customers to place orders that exceed the amount set in the discount settings. In ProductCart, you can even have the coupon be automatically applied to the purchase when the order fits the requirements.
• Acquire new customers.
  For example, you could create a discount for a local business that says that everyone that works at Company XYZ gets 10% off. You could mail the discount certificate to the human resource department of that company and ask them to let all the employees know about it. In this example, the discount code would be printed on the letter sent to the company.
• Boost repeat purchases.
  You could add the discount code to the order confirmation e-mail that is automatically sent to your customers after they place an order, advertising that they will receive $10 off the next order from your store by using the discount code. You could add extra filters to this coupon by limiting its applicability to orders above a certain amount, or only to products assigned to the category “Clearance”, etc.
• Reward "Preferred Customers".
  Make your best customers feel like they are special by creating a coupon that only selected customers can use, and then e-mail the discount code to them. Only those customers will be able to use the coupon by logging into their existing accounts. Or using the new "Pricing Category" feature in ProductCart v3, you can assign preferred customers to a special customer category that automatically grants a certain discount on your products (e.g. 10% off the retail price - the discount can be different on different products).
• Free shipping on first order.
  You could attract new customers by setting up a One-Time only coupon that gives them free shipping on selected services (e.g. Free UPS Ground). Since can easily be done in ProductCart. Studies have shown that shipping expenses are often the number 1 reason for customers not to purchase.
• Big Discounts on Clearance Items.
  You could create a coupon that gives a large discount on selected, clearance items, then e-mail it to customers that have purchased those or similar products in the past. You can use the Newsletter Wizard to quickly create a list of customers that have purchased certain products from your store. Of course, you can also create quantity discounts (tiered pricing) and apply them to any number of products or entire categories of products to allow any customer that comes to your store to enjoy special pricing if they order multiple units.
• Tracking the Effectiveness of an E-mail Promotion.
  You could create three different discount codes, all for the same amount (e.g. all three give 15% off). You could then use the different discount codes in three different e-mail messages sent to a sample of your customers. For example, assuming you have 1,000 customers, you could send each message to 100 of them. Since you can track sales by the discount code used for the order, you could easily determine which one of the three messages was the most effective. You would then use that message to send the e-mail promotion to the remaining 700 customers. In this and other scenarios, discount codes can help you measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. Note that the discount codes do not necessarily have to be used as part of an e-mail campaign. They could also easily be printed on a mail piece, and used to track the effectiveness of a direct mail campaign.
• Use Gift Cards to win customers back
  You could send a $10 electronic Gift Card to all customers that have purchased more than $100 in the last year to encourage them to purchase again. You can obtain the list of customers that meet that requirement from ProductCart's sales reports. Then you would create a $10 discount, with expiration after the first use, and e-mail it to them.
• Use Gift Registries to promote word of mouth.
  There is nothing like letting someone else do the marketing for you! Gift Registries do wonders to this extent: the person registering on your store will invite friends and family to come and shop for them. New sales and new customers, without spending a dime in marketing! You can promote the creation of a gift registry by, for example, giving your customers a few free gift certificates to spend on your store when they reach a certain amount of sales from their gift registry.
• Use Gift Certificates to gain new customers.
  You could encourage your existing customers to buy Gift Certificates for friends and family by giving them a discount when they purchase more than a certain amount in gift certificates. The discount code would be added to the order confirmation e-mail. ProductCart includes advanced support for gift certificates.

We hope that you find some of these marketing ideas useful for your online store! Ultimately, your creativity is the most important ingredient in any successful marketing campaign. On our end, we have designed our shopping carts to give you plenty of tools to put your ideas to work, and will keep adding marketing features to our e-commerce software for the years to come.

Finally, remember that our shopping cart software's support for Google Analytics can help you closely track what happens with most of the marketing campaigns that you create. Take advantage of this or other Web statistics services to keep a close eye on what happens on your e-commerce store and fine-tune your offerings "as you go".