Have you just created an online store and are looking for the right strategy to get your first sales?

Or have your online store sales not been growing for a long time?

In this article we have collected the experience of the Livepage team in digital promotion of online stores.

We've covered the main channels: SEO, contextual advertising, email marketing, SMM, working with aggregators, media advertising.

5 practitioners who deal with the promotion of online stores every day took part in writing this article.

It is important to clarify that the article did not touch upon channels such as radio and television. Although they are also digital marketing tools.

Who will benefit from the longread?

The guide will be useful for both beginning entrepreneurs and owners of profitable online stores.

It will help you create the right strategy for promoting your store on the Internet and select effective sales channels at different stages of business development.

Feel free to add the article to your favorites. We tried our best for you.

Worked on the article:

Author of the article: Oksana Artyushenko
Editors of the article: Mikhail Shcherbachev, Alexey Andrusenko
PPC, SMM, and Email blocks wrote: Pavel Khazov, Ekaterina Grechko, Sergei Shcherbakov, Victoria Proshnichenko

1 The most popular digital channels for an online store

The most popular digital channels for attracting users to an online store are arranged in the order of their use:

• paid advertising in search engines - Search Engine Marketing (SEM or);
• free search traffic - ;
• price aggregators and marketplaces;
• sales through mailing lists - ;
• coverage of information about the store in online publications, PR and writing guest articles (content marketing);
• social networks - Social Media Marketing (SMM);
• different types of content marketing (advertising with bloggers, on Youtube, special projects, etc.).

2 Quick sales after launch

This will sound strange.

For many business owners, it is a revelation that the store itself does not generate sales.

Even if you spent a large budget on creating a store and bothered with a beautiful design, this does not guarantee sales in the first month after the launch.

To get quick and effective results, you need to follow a simple rule:

• First we plan promotion.
• Then we build the website according to the created plan.
• We launch the site and get quick results.

3 Preparatory stage for a quick start to sales

Before starting any work with the store, it is necessary to determine the competitiveness of the niche and the activity of competitors.

Important!

Select products or product categories that you could rely on at the start of sales.

Determine traffic channels that will provide optimal conditions on the path to self-sufficiency.

To optimize your budget at the start, select the main promotion region where you will promote your priority products.

The note: You may know that the largest online stores started out by selling specific products. The outlet started with the sale of laptops, Amazon - with the sale of books.

At this stage it is worth analyzing:

• products with high demand and good margins on which you can make money. When choosing products, it is also advisable to take competition into account. Can you compete on the basis of these products in the market?
• market share occupied by competitors.
• marketing channels and strategies that competitors use to promote products.
• competitive advantages of your business and offers - how you stand out among other similar stores.
• objective weaknesses that may hinder your progress.
• main groups of potential clients, their portraits.
• basic principles for choosing your product group: fears and concerns when choosing a store to purchase; the client’s problems that he wants to solve with the help of your product/offer; main points of the offer that may interest buyers, etc.

All collected information can be visualized in different ways for a better understanding of the business.

The Lean Canvas model is effective for visualizing information

For the main business proposal, the information presentation model Value Proposition Canvas, which is shown in the picture below, is effective.

The information collected at the preparatory stage will help in promoting your business and will be useful to contractor companies when drawing up a promotion strategy.

Important! The quality of the preparatory stage affects the effectiveness of traffic attraction strategies compiled later.

Offer and its importance

A quality offer is a stumbling block in all business niches. Since the online market is already filled with competitors, and the consumer chooses between different offers, rather than buying in the first store that he opened in the search.

Regardless of which channel you choose to attract customers to your site, users will evaluate your offer based on many parameters.

Many store owners believe that the only parameter by which the user evaluates the offer is this is the price.

Price is an important characteristic of an offer, but not everything is limited to it.

Other characteristics play an important role in the offer:

• terms of payment
  • Is it possible to purchase on credit?
  • is there an interest-free loan;
  • Is there an installment plan from a specific bank?
• delivery terms
  • Is prepayment required when sending to another city or is cash on delivery possible;
  • whether the store cooperates with the required transport company - which is important for small settlements where the possibilities of delivering goods are limited.
• purchase terms
  • is there a pick-up point or showroom in this city;
  • Do they provide a gift with purchase?
  • is there a bonus program?
• availability of the best service offer
  • better quality of service;
  • better warranty conditions;
  • hassle-free exchange and return of goods;
    and so on.
• store credibility
• availability of complete information about the product with videos, reviews and reviews
• range.

When drawing up an offer, it is very important to take a sober look at the strengths and weaknesses of your own business, as well as the portrait of your store’s audience.

Imagine that you are the owner of a new hardware store. Nobody knows anything about your brand. The price of the product is the same as in other stores. Accordingly, people who value the lowest price in the region are unlikely to order from you, or those who buy goods exclusively from reputable and trusted stores.

However, you have a showroom in a specific city, where many stores do not have representative offices. For users who are interested in looking at a product in person, holding it in their hands, or picking up an order in a showroom, the presence of an offline store can be a strong argument in favor of purchasing from you. And these will be your first clients.

Different store customers will be interested in different features of the offer.

Therefore, the characteristics of the offer should be chosen taking into account the portrait of your client, his fears and problems. It should be of interest only to a potential client.

You know that the target audience of your home appliance store is people who have a bank card and a good credit history with the bank. Customers do not want to pay for the entire purchase at once in the store.

They agree to pay the market average or a slightly higher price, but only in installments. You understand that this audience is interested in a certain list of products, and major competitors in this region do not have similar offers. Based on this, you offer a group of products with interest-free installments. Your clients will be interested in such an offer.

Correctly composed offer- this is a solution to a client’s problem by purchasing a product from you. To correctly compose an offer, it is very important to understand:

• Who is your potential client?
• What are his problems?
• What are his fears related to the purchase?
• How does he solve his problem now?
• Are there alternative offers from direct competitors?

With all the necessary information, you can easily come up with an offer that will hook your target audience. Your unique offer will be reflected on the pages of your store and will turn its visitors into buyers. All you have to do is bring visitors to the site.

Technical changes

The modern user is accustomed to a wide variety of websites that load quickly, display conveniently on mobile devices, are intuitive and have functional necessary for selecting products.

If your online store is not like this, then users will leave his, without making a purchase, and advertising budgets will be wasted.

Technical audit - searching for possible problems in the functionality of an online store that may affect the effectiveness of the resource when promoting on each of the advertising channels. A number of recommendations for correction may coincide, despite the fact that each of these channels has its own operating characteristics and requirements for the site.

So, for many digital channels the following will be important:

• high site loading speed;
• correct operation of the ordering functionality;
• ease of use and correct display of the online store on mobile devices;
• correct configuration of analytics systems;
• hosting fault tolerance;
• availability of correct adaptive layout on the site.

• availability of static URLs for filters;
• correct operation of URLs with utm, gclid and yclid tags;
• no redirects on landing pages.

And for SEO promotion the following are very important:

• absence of duplicate pages on the site;
• correct formation of URLs;
• absence of internal technical errors;
  presence of micro markup on pages;
• compliance of the site with the recommendations of the search engines Yandex and Google, described in the help;
• correct notification of search robots about language versions of the site.

If you send transactional emails to clients and plan to engage in email marketing in the future, make sure that the DKIM/SPF/DMARC records in DNS are correct so that your emails do not end up in the recipients' Spam folder.

To work with other digital promotion channels, additional technical changes to the store may also be necessary, since each digital channel has its own minimum requirements for effective operation.

Thus, for price aggregators it is necessary to automatically generate a special xml or yml price list file with prices and products that will be used by sites to display information about the store’s assortment.

SEO- check list for online store 14 most productive points

4 Development of product catalog structure

The structure of an online store is an important component of successful integrated store promotion. It should be convenient and clear for the user how to use your catalog.

• make it easier for the user to search for products and information in the catalogue;
• make using the site intuitive;
• attract more traffic from search engines using SEO and PPC - the structure should include all landing pages that can receive traffic from search;
• simplify accounting of turnover and analysis of sales statistics.

When compiling the structure of the site, the principles of thematic classification of information (the transition from general concepts to more specific ones), search queries on the topic and user convenience when searching for the necessary information are taken into account.

Since in some areas thematic classification for finding the right products is inconvenient, the site may have different ways of classifying and structuring the same products so that the user can find them faster.

In this case, one of the classifiers may be main, and the rest auxiliary.

Drawing up a website structure is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process of processing information about a business, its subsequent structuring and visualization. Without special preparation, there is a high probability of errors (missing categories, excessive nesting depth, etc.).

Important! It is better to entrust the creation of an online store structure to professionals, since subsequent elimination of errors in its implementation requires significant time and financial costs.

As part of SEO and PPC work, a check of the existing site structure is required, edits and options for creating the necessary landing pages are recommended, based on the semantic core. Without such fixes, attracting quality traffic to your site with good conversion rates will be problematic.

Website traffic is the flow (number) of visitors to a specific website over a certain period of time. Conversion is an indicator of the site’s effectiveness, which tells how many users took the target action (placed an order on the site, subscribed to the newsletter, etc.).

5 First sales

Depending on the store’s niche and competition, different channels and methods for attracting first sales can be chosen.

It is more correct to rely on the features of each channel, taking into account your niche. Only after carefully weighing all the pros and cons can you choose the appropriate channel options and respectively distribute the budget.

For example, with a limited budget for promotion to get the first traffic and orders you should start by launching paid advertising.

The use of SEO promotion should be delayed for 2-3 months to allow additional advertising budgets to appear. Since the effectiveness of search engine optimization work can be assessed only after 4–6 months of constant work.

First sales from contextual advertising

For many online stores, setting up paid advertising in search engines (SEM) will be a good leap toward first sales. Using this sales channel, you can quickly (5-7 days or more) set up advertisements and immediately attract targeted visitors to the site.
The speed of receiving your first purchases depends on a number of factors:

• Decision-making time - the longer it is, the longer you will have to wait for the first results.
• Volume of purchased traffic - the smaller the volume of purchased traffic at the start, the longer you will have to wait for the first purchases;
• Offer - if your offer is uncompetitive, then there will be practically no conversions, despite a good amount of traffic to the site.

Since all these variables are very individual, it is impossible to accurately indicate the volumes and timing of the first sales.

At the same time, it can be argued that contextual advertising will work for stores that sell popular products.

The main thing is to use contextual advertising correctly to get a positive effect in the form of profit, and not in the form of wasted budget and disappointment. Depending on the competition, niche and budgets, they use different techniques to attract first buyers to the site.

With a limited budget for promotion in a very competitive topic - electronics, it is important to start promoting not with broad requests (such as buying a laptop), but with narrow ones.

Broad queries can bring a lot of visitors to the site, but at the same time they have high competition, cost of transition to the site and low conversion. And narrower queries, such as article numbers and product names, by themselves bring in few visitors. However, due to the large number of such requests, the volume of users who go to the site can be quite significant. At the same time, such requests generally have low competition, the cost of user transition to the site and high conversion.

Effective queries to start in this topic are queries like: products and articles (for example ASUS X550ZE-XX216T), combinations of “product type + brand + characteristics” (asus intel core i5 laptop), etc.

A similar technique when setting up the context will allow you to achieve successful first sales even in a little-known store with a minimal budget. Then, gradually increasing your advertising budgets, you can move on to broader queries with greater coverage. When contextual advertising begins to pay off, you can further increase the advertising budget and attract other digital channels, such as SEO.

Benefits of contextual advertising

• Short time to set up and put into action - setting up and launching an advertising campaign will take from 7 days, depending on the volume of your online store.
• The ability to quickly make changes - once you receive the first data, you can make changes, increasing conversion and traffic quality.
• The need for minimal software changes to the online store. Amendments may only be necessary in the event of serious technical difficulties.
• The ability to work with a warm audience that has already visited your site, or make additional sales to your customers using remarketing tools.
• Flexible settings to maximally reach the target audience - the ability to create personalized offers by device type, gender, age, region of residence, etc.
• Detailed analysis of the results is possible.
• Quickly get to the top of search results. See screenshot below:

You have an online store of natural cosmetics with a lot of technical errors. You want to attract customers to your website using SEO.
But you don’t know whether investments in SEO promotion will generate enough sales to pay for the entire project as a whole. In addition, correcting technical errors on the site takes time; with standard promotion, this will delay the receipt of the first results.

Therefore, you can first order an SEO audit, which will allow you to prepare your site for SEO promotion and does not require monthly fees for promotion.
To test a niche for sales volume and get quick results, you can launch contextual advertising, which will immediately attract the first customers and allow you to estimate the volume of the niche.

Disadvantages of contextual advertising

• Requires constant costs for the advertising budget, which depends on the volume of the niche and the number of your product offerings.
• Contextual advertising on the search network will only be effective if there is established demand for the store’s products. In case there is no demand, you can use display advertising or Youtube advertising, but the conversion may be lower.
• In some niches, the auction in search engines is so heated that, with the existing high The cost of a click will not pay for itself.
• Contextual advertising systems have a number of limitations. For some niches, such as pharmaceuticals, finance, political advertising and others, advertising is limited or completely prohibited.
• Requires constant monitoring and adjustments due to dynamically changing conditions.

First sales from free search (search engine promotion for an online store)

After creating an online store, owners very often begin to invest money in the SEO channel - in the hope of reaching the TOP 10 for basic queries within 2-5 months.

They expect that after such investments they will quickly reach the level of self-sufficiency, and expect to never depend on advertising budgets for contextual advertising.

This opinion is very often erroneous. Every year, bringing a website to the TOP becomes more and more difficult due to the improvement of search engine algorithms and increasing competition.

The minimum time frame for SEO promotion of an online store to the stage of receiving first sales has increased up to 4–6 months. The time it takes for a store to reach self-sufficiency in competitive niches can be 9 or more months.

The minimum required promotional expenses also increase every year and include:

• writing quality content;
• link building;
• technical improvements to the site (often a significant expense);
• SEO promotion services.

There are still niches where the first SEO results can be obtained quite quickly. Especially if you don’t have access to the entire country. The main thing is that there are a sufficient number of buyers of your product in the region, and that you have a high-quality offer.

You are the owner of a local online store of branded decorative plaster. The niche is quite competitive, very narrow and has a pronounced seasonality.

Compared to household appliances, competition in decorative plasters is much lower. Most competitors focus their attention on more frequent category queries, which bring more visitors, but at the same time convert less well.

The entire focus of promotion should be directed to the products and develop high-quality content with the most complete and comprehensive information on the products. Products have little traffic but sell better. Especially within the region where the store is located. This will allow you to see the first results within approximately 3 months. By gradually occupying the TOP for all product offerings, you can move on to working on categories and get even more visitors to the site. An example of such growth is shown in the graph below.

As part of SEO promotion services, the following work will be carried out from the first months:

• detailed SEO audit of the store and elimination of all detected technical defects of the site;
• selection of key queries for store pages, if necessary, editing the existing site structure based on the collected key queries;
• writing and posting store content or editing it taking into account the collected key queries. First of all, this work is carried out for priority goods and product categories. Next comes gradual scaling to the entire store. It makes sense to work with product positions only in niches where there is actually product traffic (for example, household appliances and electronics). In niches where there is no product traffic (for example, clothing and building materials), the main work will be carried out specifically with product categories;
• adding a store to search engine optimization of information about the company in these tools;
• implementation of an optimal system for linking website pages;
• creating content for the store blog;
• link building.

Benefits of SEO

Advantages of SEO promotion of an online store as the first digital channel for attracting customers:

• Compared to contextual advertising, this channel does not require a large infusion of money in the long term;
• In some niches, competitors invest more money in contextual advertising than in SEO. This makes it easier to reach the TOP of the search and each client attracted through this channel will cost less.

Read more about SEO promotion of an online store in the article:.

SEO Disadvantages

Disadvantages of SEO promotion as the first digital channel for attracting customers:

• in most niches, to achieve payback, it is necessary to invest in website development for 6 to 12 months, i.e. this channel cannot quickly generate income;
• for high-quality promotion of an online store in competitive niches, many site edits are often required by programmers;
• There will be free search traffic on the site only if there is demand for the store’s products. If there is no demand for the product, then more general and related requests will be attracted, which can convert very poorly and require large promotion costs;
• A change in search algorithms can significantly affect a site’s rankings. Today you can be TOP-1, and tomorrow even beyond TOP-10;
• contextual advertising always occupies up to the first 4 positions on the search page. Therefore, the 1st place in a free search may in fact be the 5th for the user, which can significantly reduce the number of transitions.

You are a little-known manufacturer of unusual cardboard construction kits and want to get sales from a free search.

There are no search queries for your designers and brand. Promotion of an online store using SEO for general queries constructors And construction kits for children- will be ineffective. Competition for such requests is great, as is the assortment in children's stores. Such promotion requires large budgets. But this is unlikely to generate sales.

In this case, it is advisable to use for promotion: content marketing and PR, targeting (including Display Network, YAN, Facebook, VKontakte, etc.), video advertising (especially YouTube), social networks, offline advertising. In all of these channels, you need to create demand for your own brand, but do not try to do this using SEO.

First sales using email marketing

There are many things associated with email marketing. misconceptions This is why online store owners are in no hurry to implement this tool at the start of the project.

Here are some of them:

• Email marketing is spam, my clients will not be interested in my mailings.
• To start implementing email marketing, you need to collect a large customer base, otherwise it will be of no use.
• If I don’t have my own base yet, you can buy it.
• Newsletters should be sent more often or, conversely, as rarely as possible.
• You can only write about promotions and discounts in your newsletters.

Email marketing as a sales tool is actively developing and its two main trends are process automation, as well as the connection and use in conjunction of additional channels of communication with clients (SMS, web-push, Viber).

Additional channels can be used for bulk and triggered mailings, while information about all customer activity can be stored in one place. For example, you create a script for sending an email message, and then, if the client does not read it within a few days, you send an SMS or push reminder about the offer.

In general, the email prefix no longer determines the quality of this tool. It is most associated with the stage of marketing that begins after attracting a lead:

• converting a lead into a client;
• retention of new and current customers;
• targeted work with VIP clients;
• reactivation of leaving clients;
• customer support and building brand loyalty.

Basic steps at the start

The main actions with which you should start working in the direction of email marketing:

1. Organize the collection of your contact database through subscription forms on the website. This will allow you to launch regular mass mailings within 5–6 months. It is better to use different forms on different pages of the site. For example, a widget on the main page, static forms in the body of blog articles, a pop-up window for users who leave the site. To prevent pop-ups from negatively impacting your site's conversion rate, you need to configure them to only show to users who have not previously subscribed or registered on the site, and are far from the target action during the current session.
2. For all forms, set up a double-opt-in procedure (double confirmation of subscription) to protect your mailings from being classified as spam.

Automation in email marketing

Automation in email marketing makes it absolutely effective and universal for any online store, regardless of whether you launched your project yesterday or a year ago. Of course, the larger your base, the more effective your mailings (both mass and triggered). But the sooner you launch basic automatic campaigns, the better the database you collect will be, and the faster you can start earning money.

Here are the main automatic email campaigns that you should set up for your online store after launching the project:

• A series of emails after subscribing to the newsletter/registration - we build loyalty and stimulate the first purchase.
• Post-Purchase Email Series - Since a purchase may be the first touch point, bypassing a subscription or registration, it's worth setting up a post-subscription email series for these customers to keep them coming back to you.
• Trigger letter “Abandoned viewing” - we remind you of the products you viewed and encourage you to purchase.
• Trigger letter “Abandoned cart” - we figure out the reason for the abandoned cart, stimulate the purchase.
• Trigger series “After purchase” - we take feedback and offer products for the next most likely purchase.
• Reactivation letters for those who have not made purchases for 1/3/6/12 months - we return customers with tempting offers and discounts.
• Letters of loyalty for VIP clients - we create a feeling of special care and provide a higher level of service.

Automatic emails will allow you to maintain communication with all subscribers and clients throughout the entire period while you collect a base for mass mailings.

Mass mailings (across the entire database or large segments) should be started when the costs of their development are recouped. If you prepare letters yourself based on ready-made templates and do not waste resources on a designer and layout designer, you can start with very small volumes, for example, 500 subscribers. If you want to involve a designer, layout designer and copywriter in your work, it is optimal to start with a database size of 3000 contacts, then the investment will pay off.

You are the owner of an online store for handmade goods. The segment of experienced craftsmen who make regular purchases and already have preferences for brands and categories brings you the most income. For these customers, you can set up trigger emails to generate regular repeat sales by offering customized product selections based on what these customers have previously purchased.

Newbies make up half of your target audience, but they generate virtually no income. Invite them to sign up for an educational email series. This way, you will increase the conversion of your subscription form, stimulate sales of products that beginners need for training, and help them move into the segment of experienced craftsmen, which is most interesting to you.

Benefits of Email Marketing

Advantages of email marketing as the first digital channel for attracting customers:

• can be launched and will generate income in the early stages of the store;
• must be used if you want to quickly collect a database of contacts and not lose the interest of these people by the time you launch mass mailings;
• this is the cheapest marketing channel (on average $2 per 1000 letters);
• Trigger emails will allow you to maintain brand awareness and loyalty before launching bulk emails, which will reduce spam complaint rates once you start sending large emails.

Disadvantages of Email Marketing

Disadvantages of email marketing as the first digital channel for attracting customers:

• significant profit from this channel will appear only 3-4 months after launching triggered mailings and increasing the contact base to at least 3000;
• This tool is most effective for those niches where regular repeat sales are possible - if a client can make only 1 purchase in several years, then your profit will depend only on the growth rate of your contact base;
• An important element of effective mailings is interesting content, therefore, in niches with a very wide assortment, where it is difficult to use a universal content strategy, you can only rely on letters about promotions and discounts in mailings.

You have an online store of luxury plumbing. You work only with retail clients. Most likely, one customer will make a purchase from your store only once and may return after a few years.

The only actions that can be implemented in the field of email marketing are setting up a warm-up series, for example, after ordering a consultation or requesting to download a price list. In letters, you can gradually reveal your advantages, talk about the benefits and work with the potential client's objections, in accordance with your standard sales funnel.

The second point is setting up a post-sale series, with which you can collect reviews to attract new customers and help SEO promotion in updating content on pages, as well as sell related products.

With the help of email marketing, you can increase conversion among a new audience, but you shouldn’t count on regular repeat sales from your old base.

First sales from social networks

Social media has now become so popular that it can no longer be ignored as a channel for sales and interaction with your audience. Depending on the goals of the online store’s presence on social networks, SMM promotion strategies will vary.

The following are the goals of promoting an online store on social networks:

• sale of goods;
• attracting customers based on recommendations from other people;
• attracting a target audience that makes impulse purchases of the “saw-bought” type;
• communication with the user (in fact, there are a lot of people who subscribe to social networks of stores to track news and subsequent purchases);
• creating a core of loyal audience that can be active, take part in competitions and promotions, and also recommend the store to other users;
• development and promotion of the brand through communication with the audience, advertising materials, viral content, etc.

If we talk about the stage of “First sales” in an online store, then, first of all, sales and attracting the target audience in various ways who will make purchases will be important. To achieve this at this stage, you can use:

• ordering advertising publications, holding joint competitions and other advertising activities with industry bloggers, reviewers, opinion leaders to quickly grow your audience and attract sales;
• ordering advertising publications from groups and accounts with a large audience, through advertising exchanges and special services such as sociate.ru, plibber.ru, etc.;
• for emotional products, you can post photos on Instagram, add themed photos and get your first sales from there.

Benefits of SMM

Advantages of SMM as the first digital channel for attracting customers:

• allows you to quickly receive your first orders, just like contextual advertising;
• ease of managing advertising tools and quickly receiving changes when making changes to advertising campaigns;
• a wide variety of settings for advertising tools;
• a lot of statistical data for analyzing and optimizing advertising campaigns in the advertising account;
• To set up targeting, you don’t need anything special - just time, a good offer and an advertising budget (in rare cases, a programmer or layout designer will come in handy; in especially rare cases, for example, when working with the VKontakte and Odnoklassniki networks, the ability to use parsers);
• many possibilities for detailed settings.

You have an online lingerie store - this is a very visual product that is important to see, and even better, to feel before buying. An advertising campaign for such a product on social networks should be built on attracting attention to the brand using advertising photos of various types (photos of the underwear itself, models in underwear and even sketches of underwear), videos, advertising publications from social network bloggers, promotion of publications. The purpose of all this is to make users want to look in more detail and then buy.

You can create a group on Instagram, post all these photos there, run advertising campaigns and attract an audience from there. You can also attract the audience by promoting commercials, showing the product in dynamics.

In a similar way, you can work with Facebook and other social networks, creating bright advertising offers with high-quality visual design.

Disadvantages of SMM

Disadvantages of SMM as the first digital channel for attracting customers:

• as soon as you turn off advertising, audience activity drops to 0;
• works with an audience that has the characteristics we need, and not with an audience with a formed request. Therefore, standard search contextual advertising has a higher conversion rate;
• will be effective only with a good offer;
• requires constant investment of money when working with advertising;
• may not be effective for advertising certain types of products. There are groups of products whose target audience does not use social networks to search for information about these products or does not buy online at all;
• like contextual advertising, SMM has a list of prohibitions and restrictions on topics, for example: pharmaceuticals, politics, gambling, sex-related products, etc.;
• requires constant attention from a specialist for adjustments, since your advertising may bore the audience, which reduces its effectiveness, or changes in budgets may be necessary.

You are the owner of an online plumbing store and want to attract an audience from social networks to buy boilers or taps. You have ordered the setting up of targeted advertising for men who may be interested in similar products, and are waiting for purchases. However, there are practically none. Despite the fact that the advertising itself is set up with high quality.

With a deeper analysis, you can find out that your target audience is chosen correctly, however, its representatives do not use social networks to select these products. They are interested in completely different things on social networks, for example, viewing photos of friends, searching for funny videos, etc. When the time comes to choose a boiler or tap, this audience would rather use search engines or go directly to a store near their home than remember your advertisements in in social networks. In this case, using the SMM channel at the start of work turns out to be ineffective.

First sales through price aggregators and marketplaces

Price aggregators and marketplaces allow you to show many offers from different stores for each product at once. In this case, the user's choice is greatly simplified. Examples of such projects include Yandex Market, Price.ua, Hotline and a number of others.

For online stores, price aggregators, on the one hand, are a way to quickly access a huge number of customers who, often, have already made their choice and are ready to part with their money.

On most of these sites, payment is made for transitions to the site and the price is generally low, so you only pay for a ready-made client. However, on the other hand, in the conditions of a huge number of offers for each item of goods, the buyer will most likely make a purchase in a store that offers a competitive price, will have a high seller rating on this site and will provide good delivery conditions.

Also, not all product categories in price aggregators have a huge number of customers, for example, the most popular products there are electronics, household appliances and computers. And it will be difficult to find customers for children's goods or furniture.

Despite everything that has been said earlier, such platforms for an online store can be quite profitable even at the start, especially if the store has adequate market prices for goods and operates in popular aggregator topics.

To work with aggregators, you will need to either register an automatically updated company price list in a price aggregator, or integrate a special platform module into your website. This will allow the following information to be transmitted to the site:

• Name of product;
• short description of the product;
• availability in warehouse;
• price;
• product warranty period;
• Product URL in the online store with UTM tags for effective sales tracking in analytics systems;
• and so on.

Price aggregators provide constant control over income and expenses

Price aggregators, like any other marketing channel, require management, experimentation and adjustments. It is not enough to simply submit information on it and expect the same result for all product names.

As you work, you will need to regularly analyze sales results and make decisions regarding which products should be left in the price aggregator and which ones should not. Since profitability indicators for goods will be different.

If some products are unprofitable to sell, they sell poorly on a specific site, or the product has been completely sold out, you should disable the transfer of information about them to the price list. Also, you should not initially transmit information about goods whose prices are higher than those of competitors in the aggregator - they are unlikely to be bought. To do this, the online store must have the ability to disable the transfer of goods and product categories to the auto-generated price list for the price aggregator.

Different price aggregators are presented differently on the Internet; some may have well-developed traffic for certain categories and individual products, while others may have traffic for others.

Therefore, to optimize advertising costs, an online store will have to analyze not only sales for different groups of goods, but also experiment with different aggregators and create its own price list for each of them with the most advantageous offers.

Only within the framework of such a work strategy will it be possible to increase profits and optimize costs for this sales channel.

Advantages of price aggregators

Advantages of price aggregators and marketplaces as the first digital channel for attracting customers:

• requires a minimum budget for launch and can generate income even in the early stages of online store development;
• brings customers who are ready to buy and have already decided on the product;
• relatively low price of attracted traffic to the site compared to other digital channels;
• high level of traffic conversion from price aggregators;
• wide coverage of users on the site;
• payment mainly for unique transitions to the site;
• a good channel for selling goods with a small margin;
• no separate employees are needed to work with this sales channel;
• some aggregators provide a large selection of payment options, not just pay per click, such as commission for an order and payment by day;
• You can additionally order banner advertising to increase sales within the marketplace;
• quick start-up and return on investment.

You are the owner of a young online electronics store and want to start promoting your business on the Internet, but you need your first sales.

Your site is functional and user-friendly, but there are very few visitors, since it is new. Prices for goods are average for the market, and for some models they are even slightly lower. At this stage, in addition to contextual advertising, it would be advisable to post on a price aggregator.

Yes, at the start you will have a zero rating, since you are a new client, and you will lose somewhat to competitors who have been there for a long time. However, due to more favorable prices and some products for which there is very little competition on the site, you will have a chance to attract customers.

You can submit not your entire range of products to the aggregator, but only those that have the best price offer and those with the least competition on the site. Or even start right away only with low-competitive categories on the site. This will allow you to get the first buyers from the site and stimulate the first ratings of your site. As your rating grows, you will be able to connect additional product categories and develop on this channel.

Disadvantages of price aggregators

Disadvantages of marketplaces as the first digital channel for attracting customers:

• products whose price is higher than that of competitors will sell poorly in the aggregator;
• you need to monitor the company’s rating in the aggregator, since with a low rating and bad reviews about the store on the website, sales can drop significantly;
• what sells well on one aggregator may not sell well on another due to the varying degrees of development of the site, so it is always worth experimenting with different products and sites to find the desired configuration with the optimal ratio of income and expenses;
• Such platforms are not suitable for all stores, since such services mainly sell products with a logical, rational choice. Topics that are poorly represented on all such services, or products with an emotional choice will sell poorly, for example, jewelry and women's accessories;
• in aggregators, generally only well-known models and brands of goods sell well, and unfamiliar brands are unlikely to be of interest;
• To work effectively with aggregators, it is necessary to implement special functionality on the website for generating automatic price lists;
• when working with aggregators, you need to carefully monitor the availability and price of goods so that there are no empty user transitions;
• if the information in the price list is unreliable or other requirements of the site are not met, the store’s account in the price aggregator may be blocked;
• Switching costs are auctioned and vary, so some products may not have a cost-effective switching cost. You need to constantly monitor efficiency and manage bids, as well as product items in the price list, which requires time;
• for regional stores you will have to look for sites with a regional audience if your price is average in the market, since there will be few orders from oversaturated regions such as the capital;
• To properly track the effectiveness of this channel, you need to fully configure analytics tools.

You are the owner of an online jewelry store. Your product is emotional, and it is unlikely to sell well on the pages of price aggregators. It has no product traffic and cannot have a good description within such a platform, where everything is mainly based on technical characteristics. You can try to place a partial assortment on such a site, but if you see that there are no good sales, it is better to abandon it and focus on other sales channels.

6 Content marketing for an online store

Content marketing is a channel that allows you to capture audiences that are blind to other types of advertising channels. This happens because content marketing efforts are primarily aimed at providing visitors with high-quality, useful information and assistance in choosing and using a product. And, secondly, for sales. He is not aggressive or intrusive.

In order for content marketing to bring the greatest effect, you need to answer the following questions before investing money:

• Who is your target audience? The answer to this question will allow you to choose the right content topic.
• Where will the audience be interested in the content and in what form? The answer to it will influence the choice of platform (start a blog, Youtube channel, photo gallery on Instagram, etc.) and type of content (write articles, shoot videos, draw infographics, do cool photo shoots, do reviews, etc.).
• What is the primary goal of promotion on the channel? Here you can understand where you should publish first - on your resources or on the pages of third-party sites.

This channel is especially interesting for young stores, as it can become the first source of free search traffic. In addition, competition for information queries is lower than for commercial ones, which allows you to get SEO traffic for them faster.

Benefits of Content Marketing

Advantages of content marketing as the first digital channel for attracting customers:

• increasing brand awareness;
• creating and increasing demand for goods that are little known to the market;
• safely increase SEO traffic to the site through informational articles;
• assistance in collecting subscribers for Email and SMM channels;
• interaction with the target audience;
• the opportunity to avoid price wars with competitors due to the fact that you attract buyers before choosing a product, and not after;
• the ability to attract customers at the stage of choosing a product and help them with it;
• solving a number of user problems when using the product and building brand loyalty;
• assistance in purchasing goods;

You are the owner of a mono-brand household appliances store, and customers often call you asking for help in understanding the series of products and choosing a product for themselves. You understand that this issue is quite popular among your clients, like a number of others, so you decide to use content marketing on the pages of your own blog and write articles about the features of your brand’s products.

Such a solution allows you, on the one hand, to reduce the number of calls to the store with this question, and on the other hand, to attract additional visitors to the site who are concerned about the same issue.

If your article turns out to be interesting and relevant, then users can share it on social networks and forums, and put links to it. This will allow you to attract additional audience to the site, and natural links to the article will help SEO promotion of your resource.

Disadvantages of Content Marketing

Disadvantages of content marketing as the first digital channel for attracting customers:

• errors in determining the target audience and content topics lead to zero sales results;
• the conversion rate into sales for this type of traffic is often lower than that of other user acquisition channels;
• without maintaining the quality of materials, the channel will quickly lose its effectiveness;
• for a viral effect, it requires creative solutions in content, which not everyone can provide, especially at the stage of first sales.

You are the owner of an electronics store and, looking at your competitors, you understand that everyone is developing content marketing (running a blog, YouTube channel, etc.). You decide to do the same.

However, you are not ready to write expensive and high-quality content, so you decided to simply rewrite competitors’ content from third-party copywriters with an inexpensive price for writing.

As a result, you make the first publications, but since they are of low quality, your audience does not read them, they do not attract SEO traffic or sales. In this case, you may be completely disappointed in this channel and abandon it. Although, in fact, the basic rule of this channel was initially violated - quality content.

External Content Marketing

Content marketing has a variation - external content marketing. This is establishing communication with opinion leaders and bloggers who are followed by your potential buyers, attracting authoritative links to your resource by posting interesting content on third-party sites.

This is the most labor-intensive channel, as it requires time for communication and proper presentation of your products, articles, photos and videos.

Its task is to provide high-quality information that may be of interest to a third-party resource and encourage them to publish it with a link to your resource.

This channel may manifest itself differently in different niches, but for a number of products it can be a source of attracting customers. Especially for goods for which there is no demand yet, and it is yet to be created. In addition, external content marketing is a great help for SEO, as it allows you to get the first high-quality links to the site.

Benefits of External Content Marketing

Advantages of external marketing as the first digital channel for attracting customers:

• can be effective in creating demand for goods and services that were not previously in demand;
• increases brand awareness;
• increases user loyalty to the brand;
• influences the authority of a business's domain name, therefore, has a positive impact on the growth of free search traffic;
• if implemented correctly - a source of traffic to your site;
• if truly high-quality viral content is created, it can give a huge increase in sales.

You are the exclusive importer of a high-quality electronics brand into the country. But your brand is little known, and even in your own online store, goods from other brands are more actively sold, since they have good product traffic.

To change this, you can create a content plan to work with opinion leaders and popular blogs on the topic of electronics. You invite site owners to write objective reviews of your products with advantages and disadvantages, as well as provide a link to your site. And, if your brand is really high-quality, and the reviews turned out to be interesting and positive, then clicks will come to your website and interest in your products will increase.

If you additionally conduct brand marketing activities in other online sales channels, this can enhance the resulting effect.

Disadvantages of External Content Marketing

Disadvantages of external marketing as the first digital channel for attracting customers:

• requires high-quality content and creative approaches to promotion;
• is unlikely to become a major sales channel, since its role is to increase brand loyalty;
• Only viral publications can achieve great growth, which is quite difficult to implement for a store at the start;
• financial and time-consuming method;
• often requires professional assistance in implementation.

7 Web analytics of promotion results

To save budget and adjust strategies, it is important for online stores to clearly monitor the effectiveness of all ongoing marketing campaigns, each digital channel, products sold and turnover of funds. High-quality setup of analytics systems on the site will help with this.

Conversion tracking

At the start of promoting an online store, you need to set up goal tracking in the Google Analytics and Yandex Metrica analytics systems.

The analytics system should track conversions, i.e. the number of users who have completely completed all stages of the sales funnel on the site and ended up on the “Thank you for your purchase!” page. This option is usually easy to set up on most CMS sites and requires minimal programmer involvement in the settings. This setup is much cheaper and allows you to understand how many people visited the site, and how many of them completely went through all stages of the order.

Analytics allows you to get more information about sales through the website and sales channels. Unfortunately, this data does not say anything about how much each channel sold in monetary terms.

For example, your online store currently uses only 2 traffic channels: SEO and PPC. Users from the SEO channel made 30 purchases, and users from PPC made 15. The total amount of orders was $1000.

This can be seen in the store admin panel and in your accounting department. Based on the available information, we can conclude that the SEO channel gives more sales, it makes sense to expand it first. But, in fact, we do not know exactly how these $1000 are distributed across both channels, and whether our conclusions are correct.

After correctly setting up conversion tracking in analytics systems, you will be able to see the following information on online orders:

• how many conversions there were (visits to the “Thank you for your purchase!” page);
• what pages the users who converted came from;
• what keywords were used by users who converted (for contextual advertising);
• conversion rate by device;
• analyze traffic in terms of demographic data;
• and so on.

Electronic commerce

To get more detailed information on sales from the site, namely what profit a particular sales channel brought, at what stage of the sales funnel users leave, and much more, use Google Analytics with configured advanced e-commerce or Yandex Metrica with e-commerce. Although these tools require some software implementation, they allow you to obtain more accurate sales data for each channel. This makes it possible to more accurately distribute marketing budgets across channels.

In the example described earlier, you can use e-commerce to find out that the SEO channel, despite 30 of its orders, brought in sales of only $330, while contextual advertising made sales of $670 from 15 purchases. It turns out that the SEO channel converts website users into buyers well, but they buy a cheap product and the average bill for it is only $11. While contextual advertising sells a more expensive product with an average bill of $44.67. With the information received, we already understand that first of all, if possible, it is worth increasing the budget for contextual advertising in order to extract the maximum from this channel before investing large amounts of money in the SEO channel.

Without e-commerce, our conclusions would be fundamentally incorrect and would lead to incorrect allocation of budgets.

After correctly setting up e-commerce in analytics systems, you will be able to see the following for online orders:

• how much the product was sold for each of the digital channels;
• which pages of the site brought sales and for what amount;
• user behavior when placing an order;
• user path through channels and traffic sources to conversion;
• what kind of income did key queries in contextual advertising generate?
• and much more.

At the start of store promotion, it is necessary to at least set up conversion tracking settings so that specialists do not work blindly when optimizing each sales channel.

The optimal setting for analysis is still to use e-commerce for more complete analytics.

Call tracking

Enhanced e-commerce cannot provide complete information on all orders on the site, since some customers always order by phone. The share of such orders ranges from 20–80% and depends on the theme of the store.

Such users visited the site, studied the offers, but made the order over the phone. These orders, even if transferred by the store to analytics, with a standard e-commerce setup have no connection with information about the channel from which the user actually came.

Call tracking systems are used to connect information about traffic sources with calls to the store, as well as clarify information on targeted/non-targeted calls to the call center and data on orders made by phone.

After correctly setting up call tracking in analytics systems, you will be able to see not only detailed information about online orders, but also about orders made by phone.

According to your monthly sales data, your online store had 350 orders. At the same time, your analytics records that only 200 of them go through the electronic shopping cart, and the rest are not visible in the analytics system. And it is not clear which channels generated these 150 orders. According to analytics, the recorded 200 orders came from the following channels: SEO - 120, contextual advertising - 45 and direct calls - 35.

After analyzing the available data, you decide to disable contextual advertising, since it does not pay for itself. But because you didn't take calls into account when making your decision, the total number of orders for the store dropped sharply. Since the bulk of the calls were from advertising, where expensive products were promoted, for which a manager’s advice was needed.

Call tracking systems are separate third-party services that connect to the store and transmit the necessary information to analytics. Their integration with the site and operation require additional costs, but sales analysis and business planning for store development are greatly facilitated. Although this costly part can be neglected at the start of working with a store, during its development this information may be necessary, as it allows for a deeper analysis of marketing activity and optimization of the store’s operation.

8 Stage of confident store development

The online store is entering a stage of confident growth when it becomes self-sustaining, taking into account the costs of its advertising. At the same time, the store owner must have a desire to stimulate repeat orders from users, develop his personal brand and attract even more new customers.

At this stage, it is worth doing only comprehensive promotion - expanding the number of sales channels used, working to increase store conversion, developing existing channels and increasing customer loyalty. The following tools will help with all this:

• Email Marketing
• PR and content marketing

You are the owner of a hairdressing tools store and used contextual advertising in search to get the first sales from your website. Next, 3 months after the start of work, you connected SEO promotion. After 8 months, this allowed you to get 2 positions on the first page of search engines (1 advertisement and 1 line in organic search) for the most important commercial queries for you and significantly increase sales in the store.

All the time since you started working on the site, you have been collecting a subscriber base and collected more than 8,000 clients. Now, for the further development of the store, it makes sense to think about using email marketing, SMM, display advertising, targeting and creating a blog in the store to attract additional information traffic through the SEO channel.

Development of a free search channel

The bulk of search engine promotion work is the same, regardless of the stage of business development. But some elements in working with an online store that was previously promoted will be slightly different.

If at the start more attention was paid to working with product or store category pages, then further attention is paid to content marketing on your own blog (i.e., a combination of SEO and content marketing) and writing high-quality articles with selling elements based on information search queries. This attracts additional traffic to the site. Although such articles have a much lower conversion of readers into buyers than is usually the case in products and categories, they are a way to scale a business that can generate income and form an audience loyal to the brand.

You are the owner of a mono-brand decorative plaster store. The store pages have already been optimized for basic brand and commercial requests. However, during semantic analysis it was discovered that there are many more general queries such as “product category + effect”, “product category + effect imitation” decorative plaster with marble effect, brick imitation with decorative plaster, etc.).

Articles are often ranked for these queries, so content marketing (writing blog articles on these topics) with relevant products attached to the article is most suitable here.

This solution is a combination of 2 sales channels - content marketing and SEO, which will attract additional traffic to the resource, increase sales and store recognition.

The link building strategies of such a store will increasingly resemble classic PR, external marketing or advertising events (in the case of ordering advertising end-to-end banners on websites).

Technical or global content edits at this stage are possible only if search algorithms are changed and the range of products is expanded.

If an online store has a huge assortment and at the stage of first sales it was not possible to work through all product categories, then at the stage of store development, SEO work will be practically no different from the starting stage. To speed up website development, additional budgets may be needed to quickly carry out content optimization of all store categories.

PPC Channel Development

Contextual advertising systems are very extensive tools that help solve many problems. The main thing is to correctly set these tasks and correctly identify the necessary tools, and there are many options for developing a PPC channel:

• improvement of search advertising,
• setting up remarketing advertising,
• connection of media advertising,
• use of video advertising.

Search Advertising

At the start of a store, your main task is to receive the first orders at the lowest price; we discussed ways to solve this earlier. Sooner or later, the store comes to a point when:

• a positive result has already been obtained from the use of contextual advertising;
• additional budgets for advertising appeared;
• The potential of low-frequency traffic in the niche has been completely exhausted; it is no longer possible to buy significantly more traffic using the previously described scheme.

In this case, it’s worth thinking about where to develop next and additionally trying new approaches in advertising.

The first thing to start with is to expand your search advertising towards using more frequent queries. They can bring you dramatically more traffic, however, you need to remember that these requests have a lower conversion rate and will not work as effectively as those used at the start.

For an electronics store, a similar step in development would be adding advertisements for queries like: “product type + description” (gaming laptop), “product type + characteristics” (Intel core i5 laptop) and any other filters that are on your site, for example “product type + color” (red laptop).

Only after the advertising campaign for all such filters and characteristics has been properly configured and optimized, can you move on to more general queries by type of product, for example, “buy a laptop” or “price of a laptop.” Such requests usually come from people who have not yet decided what they want and are in the process of choosing models, so they have a very low conversion rate. However, such requests are still worth using in advertising campaigns, as they bring a lot of traffic, which can be converted into sales later. People who use such queries will eventually decide on the model and then still order the product.

All considered types of requests can be very close in cost per click, but they can also differ radically. Therefore, in order for your advertising to work profitably, you need to carefully analyze conversions and bids at the keyword level, and adjust advertising costs.

Remarketing

Once your site has achieved a steady amount of traffic, you can use remarketing.

This tool can solve a number of important business problems:

• return visitors who did not make a purchase in order to bring them to it;
• make repeat sales to users who have previously purchased from your website;
• notify customers about current promotions and special offers;
• stimulate writing reviews of products on your website by users who purchased but did not leave reviews.

In all of the above cases, remarketing will be assessed by different KPIs. But, of course, its main goal is sales.

KPI (Key Performance Indicator or key performance indicator) is an indicator of success in achieving certain goals that are important to the business.

To work effectively with remarketing, it is advisable to create remarketing audiences in advertising systems already at the moment when you have just launched your website. The sooner you start collecting and dividing your users according to various characteristics, the more effectively you can use this data in the future.

To get started with this tool, you should set up at least these audiences:

• all users who visited the site (data storage period is 540 days)
  • can be used for New Year sales, black friday and other mass promotions;
• all users (data storage period equal to the time the purchase decision was made)
  • this audience can be used in various combinations at the purchasing decision stage. Remembering to exclude from it users who purchased or moved further along the funnel;
• users who made a purchase (data storage period is 540 days)
  • used similarly to all users on 540, only this is a more loyal audience for which you can pay a little more;
• users who added an item to the cart (data storage period equal to the time the purchase decision was made)
  • Remind users that they added an item to their cart and did not complete their purchase.

With data like this, you can quickly start working with remarketing. Further, depending on your marketing strategies, you can expand your lists of audiences based on various characteristics and fine-tune your offers.

You are the owner of an online clothing store and want to increase the number of repeat sales. To do this, collect lists of users who bought brand products in the 10th century through Google Analytics. your store more than once. Next, when new products appear from brand X, you can set up their display for these visitors. If they are interested in the brand, then such an offer will lead to new purchases.

Display advertising

• increasing audience coverage in cases where it is no longer possible to receive more visitors from search. Here, media advertising is indispensable;
• building a brand and increasing its awareness on the Internet;
• promotion of promotions and special offers;
• creating demand for a new product/service;
• selling emotional goods that need to be shown to the user in order for him to have a desire to buy.

Display advertising has a fairly low conversion rate, its goal is to get the user to know you, your offer and give them an idea for a purchase. After the user becomes interested and goes to the store, he will have to be picked up by remarketing and then led step by step to a purchase. A good result is considered if, after visiting a site with display advertising, the user leaves you his contacts, for example, by subscribing to a newsletter.

In media advertising, the store’s main weapon is texts, images, creativity and a good offer. In order for this tool to generate income, you need to clearly identify a group of potential clients, decide which sites they visit, and provide an offer in advertising that will interest them as much as possible.

You are a manufacturer of unique handmade bags that are priced above average. This is not your first day on the market, so you have branded traffic and are running advertising campaigns on it, but you want even more sales via the Internet and expansion of production.

If you run an advertising campaign for general queries like “buy a bag” or “buy a leather bag,” this will drive traffic to your site. However, such requests will have a very low conversion rate, since your price is high. You will get a lot of clicks on them from users who expect to see an inexpensive product, a store with a large assortment, or something completely different.

• create banners with very high-quality photos showing the benefits of your product;
• select the audience you need to display banners, for example, based on queries that interested them in the search (for example, based on queries from stores or brands similar to yours), gender or age;
• show this audience your offer.

In this case, the user will see your offer even before moving to your website, his expectations will be formed and there will be more transitions with conversion. And your brand will become even more recognizable.
However, it is worth remembering that this advertising tool has a very low conversion rate and there is no need to run such advertising if you have a limited budget and your main goal is payback in a short time.

Video advertising on Youtube

• formation and promotion of your brand;
• reminding the user about the brand using videos (video remarketing);
• creating demand for a new product/service.

You have a product for which there is a good offer, and there is an interesting video. You can collect links to channels or specific videos, such as those where bloggers review similar or related products.

Next, by uploading this list to Google Adwords, you can start showing your advertising video on it in the In stream format - this is a video advertisement that is shown in the stream of another video with the ability to skip it. This way, you can find a target audience on YouTube that could potentially be interested in your offer.

• growth of brand traffic;
• coverage by unique users;
• increase in CTR in paid and organic search results.

Email marketing channel development

After setting up the main trigger campaigns and expanding the base to the minimum required value, which usually happens during the active development of the store, you can begin to:

• launching mass mailings;
• setting up non-standard trigger letters;
• testing hypotheses and applying collected data.

In the section on the initial stage of development of an online store, we already mentioned the main trigger campaigns (welcome letters, abandoned views and carts, chain after the first purchase, reactivation campaigns). Now you can complicate the existing model. And here's how:

You can also use additional personal data about subscribers and data about their behavior:

• Give gifts on the eve of the client's birthday. For gift, flower and jewelry stores, collecting data on important dates. For children's stores - child's birthday.
• Personalize mass and trigger mailings. Use different blocks with goods depending on the gender of the client, if this is a clothing or accessories store, or on the place of residence, if you have offline stores - use different addresses in letters.
• Segment customers based on the product categories they prefer. Offer related and recommended products based on your last purchase.
• Record clicks in emails. For example, if a client clicks on promotions, you can automatically send him personal promotional offers.

At this stage, it is worth starting to monitor the level of anxiety of subscribers and make sure that one client does not receive too many emails, otherwise he will quickly lose loyalty. If there are many triggers configured in the store, then this situation is quite likely. Some services provide special functionality that allows you to regulate your anxiety level. This is also one of the main functions of artificial intelligence that modern marketing automation platforms are starting to use.

You will have to regulate the number of emails sent. The fresher the subscriber, the more emails you can send to him. As you lose activity, you need to reduce the number of emails you send in order to more effectively influence departing subscribers.

It’s worth approaching mass mailings like research. Test different email elements (button color, banner size, animation, amount of text), sending time, subject lines and other variables to arrive at the email marketing approach that is optimal for your target audience.

More attention will have to be paid to segmenting the database, experimenting with automatic chains of letters in order to find new points of sales growth.

Content marketing channel development

Many stores begin to use content marketing only at the stage of confident development of the store, while for the first sales they use PPC, SEO and SMM channels. However, if you started using this channel much earlier, then the main work within its framework should be aimed at:

• analysis - what type of content brought the most sales and/or interactions with the brand;
• more active use of worked scenarios;
• identifying and correcting content that does not generate profit;
• SEO optimization of written content to attract more traffic per piece of content;
• experimenting with new platforms for content distribution and more actively attracting opinion leaders with large audiences of their own;
• creating your own additional platforms for posting content (i.e., if you immediately developed only your own blog, then you can then open a YouTube channel and do product reviews, or open a blog thread on a third-party thematic portal).

These actions will allow you to increase sales from your current content at minimal cost, as well as develop your content marketing channel with greater efficiency.

You have your own brand of high-quality kitchen knives, previously unknown in your country, and a branded online store.

At the start of brand promotion, you mainly used article content marketing on your own website and third-party sites. This allowed you to get your first sales and income.

After that, you allocate a marketing budget so that, at the stage of active brand development, you can offer your products to a popular culinary YouTube blogger for review in one of the videos.

The review turned out to be positive and interesting. It was viewed by a huge audience, and interest in your brand’s products grew. Not only retail buyers, but also wholesalers who are interested in offering your products in their store have already begun to contact your store.

By developing this successful technique through other popular bloggers, you can increase the demand for your products and, as a result, sales from your own store.

SMM channel development

At the stage of development of the SMM channel, it is already possible to set as the main goal not only the receipt of sales, but also communication with the audience and the formation of loyal fans of the store brand. Here you can already use different tools to promote your online store on social networks:

• targeted advertising on social networks;
• maintaining thematic communities;
• deep work with client databases;
• working with industry trends or opinion leaders;
• etc.

Targeted advertising on social networks

At the start of the store, the goal of this advertising tool was to quickly attract the target audience to purchase goods in the store. To implement it, targeted advertising was mainly configured in a rough form based on hypotheses with minimal budgets, optimized specifically for making a profit and testing offers.

Now, at the stage of development of this channel, it is already possible to fine-tune advertising campaigns based on retargeting using accumulated statistics on advertising offers and user behavior on the site. You'll be able to offer more personalized offers that convert higher than your initial offerings, and expand your reach by engaging similar audiences on social media.

You can use dynamic retargeting. This tool requires a long time to set up ads with the involvement of programmers, so it is not recommended in the first stages of launching a store. This requires additional budgets for setting up and editing the site. But at the development stage, dynamic retargeting will be more than relevant; it will allow you to create personal recommendations for all site visitors and automate the process of creating product ads.

Dynamic retargeting retargeting for online stores or projects with a wide product line. Its difference from regular retargeting is that when using it, the user is not shown universal offers, but advertising banners are automatically generated for each user with those goods/services that he recently viewed on the site, but did not order.

You are the owner of an online store of socks with a large assortment of different models and colors. At the start, you worked with social networks only as part of attracting visitors to the site with general advertising, while all this time you collected audiences with a pixel.

Now you have accumulated enough analytical data, so you set up dynamic retargeting for users who visited the site, looked at products, but never made a single purchase. In this case, you no longer show a general ad with a store advertisement to this user, but an ad with products that he previously viewed or a group of products similar to those viewed. And in this way, you additionally attract an audience familiar with your store, which is more likely to make a purchase than the audience that comes through general advertisements.

Thematic communities

At the stage of store development, it is already worth thinking about attracting users who have not yet made a purchase decision and are still choosing a product, as well as about forming a loyal audience of regular customers who will respond to the brand’s offers and buy on the site again. Although the idea of ​​attracting such audiences is interesting for any store and at any stage, but... Generating interest among such audiences requires time, budgets and brings results mainly only in the long term, so it is worth actively addressing this issue at the stage of development, when limited budgets are not so critical .

During this period, you can start running thematic communities under the store brand. To make the community interesting for users and attract an audience, you need to create interesting, useful content in the form of publications, images, infographics, photos and even videos. At this stage, community development will largely depend on content marketing. And the SMM tools themselves will help grow the community’s audience.

Community development will generate sales slowly, usually requiring 6-12 months of active work to break even. Successful work with communities will further help with demand generation and will solve the problem of interaction with the client at all stages of the purchase decision and choice, as well as between multiple purchases. Additionally, a community of active readers and buyers will eventually become a core brand fan base that can attract new readers and buyers to you.

You are the owner of an online women's clothing store with your own brand, where the main product range is dresses. The peculiarity of these products is that women do not buy similar products every day, but compare, price, consult and choose for some time.

In order to start working with an audience of women at the selection stage and attract existing customers to repeat purchases when they have a similar need, you decide to maintain a community on social networks.

In the community, you regularly publish information about how to choose clothes, how to combine them, what is in fashion now, how you sew your clothes, and much more. This content attracts the attention of women who are interested in the topic, and through regular publications, you continue to keep their attention, since they see your publications in their feed every day.

You do not scare away your readers with overtly promotional posts with daily promotions, but, on the contrary, constantly provide them with useful content. Occasionally you try to attract them by leaving your contact information on the website (subscribe to the newsletter), periodically informing about new collections and expanding the range of your brand (1 similar publication for every 10 publications of useful information content).

Within 8 months of active work, your group will begin to bring you regular sales and become profitable.

9 Stage of consolidating and maintaining positions

This is the stage when all possible digital marketing tools have already been connected, and all work will come down to:

• maintaining what is;
• analytics of all marketing channels and search for growth areas for each of them;
• testing new ways to attract customers (for example, CPA networks and referral programs);
• active brand development (investment of budgets for brand advertising both online and offline, native advertising, PR),
• finding ways to create viral content to grow a brand’s audience;
• searching for new growth areas for business in general.

You are already a well-known clothing store in the country and have successfully occupied SEO, PPC and SMM channels, using content marketing both external and internal. But you are looking for additional channels for growth. Thanks to your own statistics, you clearly understand how much you can spend to attract 1 client. For additional growth, you offer an affiliate program for beauty blogs.

With this program, you only pay the blog owner if their readers make purchases from your site. You calculated the amount of affiliate payment based on the optimal cost of attracting a client, taking into account market trends for affiliate programs.

Thus, you no longer advertise your own product yourself, but allow other sites to do this and pay only for orders. At the same time, more and more people learn about your products and you and you earn more. This technique also helps increase the popularity of your brand, and therefore will have a positive effect on other channels of attracting customers.

Comprehensive promotion of an online store and careful testing of channels - the secret to successful business development.

The combination of working channels for each business is individual; they are selected based on the characteristics of the niche, competition, market situation and a number of other parameters.

Equally important is the correct setup of the channel and the selection of the optimal time required to test the channel so that the conclusions based on the results of the advertising campaign are correct. It is worth approaching the issue of promotion comprehensively, never relying 100% on just 1 sales channel, since each channel is not ideal.

To ensure that your costs at all stages of testing and development of the advertising channel are optimal, it is better to entrust the setup and optimization of advertising to specialists who have experience in your business area and can correctly recommend working techniques.

Talks about the problems that you will face if you intend to create your own marketplace.

The idea of ​​marketplaces as a business model originated in 1995, when the online auction site eBay was created. It received a new round of development in the 2000s after the release of Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, translated into Russian under the title “Long Tail. An effective online business model." At that time, it was obvious to many that e-commerce was becoming a leading area of ​​business, and the book for the first time voiced to a wide audience the idea that the key to increasing sales on the Internet was the widest possible range.

The marketplace model, which aggregates offers from a large number of sellers and offers buyers the opportunity to compare products and prices and place an order on one platform, fits this idea perfectly and has already proven its effectiveness in practice.

Marketplaces have quietly become an integral part of our lives - we use Head Hunter, call a taxi on Uber, book accommodation on Airbnb, buy everyday goods on Yandex.Market, because it is convenient, fast and cheap. The experience and success of existing marketplaces inspires entrepreneurs to create new projects in a variety of areas. However, creating and managing a profitable marketplace is not as easy as it seems at first glance. We propose to consider a number of problems that all marketplaces face one way or another, no matter what niche they occupy.

What and how to sell?

A relevant idea and its professional implementation, adequate to modern realities, is the first step on the path to success. A business that does not focus on the needs of the target audience, does not take into account the interests of trading, information and other partners in today's market situation is doomed to death.

A marketplace differs from regular online stores in that it sells goods or services that are not owned or provided by the company itself. The task of the marketplace is to promptly notice the existing gap in the market between buyers and sellers, and offer them a simple and effective service instead of a complex chain of intermediaries. At the same time, it is important not only to occupy a free market niche, but also to provide professional, high-quality service and build an accessible communications system.

Online aggregators can be both universal and specialized, thematic. When choosing a format, you need to clearly understand what exactly your client is interested in.

For example, eBay in Russia relies on a wide range of non-imported goods from Europe and the USA, Alibaba on cheap offers from the mass market segment, and Yandex.Market positions itself as a platform only with trusted sellers. The more specific the USP formulation is and the more clearly the orientation towards a specific market segment is indicated, the easier it will be to develop and promote the site.

Some economic activities in our country require mandatory licensing or certification and have legal restrictions on advertising and promotion. “Problem” products include alcohol and alcohol-containing products, tobacco products, medicines and pharmaceuticals, weapons, and custom knives. On the one hand, these problems slow down the pace of business growth, but on the other hand, they reduce the level of competition and provide an opportunity to take a leading position in the segment.

Positioning

Marketplaces operate in the B2C (Uber, Booking, Aviasales, MoscoWine, Edadil), B2B (Head Hunter, Alibaba), C2B (Freelince, Qcomment) and C2C (BlaBlaCar, Yula, Remontnik) segments. Sometimes areas can overlap, for example, Alibaba operates in both B2C and B2B segments. But to build a successful, managed business, it is necessary that the positioning of the site be defined as clearly as possible.

In the case of our marketplace, the assumption was made that the alcohol market lacks a technological B2C platform that would help sellers and buyers better communicate with each other. For example, a person constantly visits a certain boutique and knows the assortment by heart. Then he downloads the application and sees that there are several more points around with an interesting assortment. In addition, he can compare prices and get an additional discount when booking an order. Of course, such a service will be of interest, firstly to ordinary consumers, secondly to connoisseurs and connoisseurs of wine (and other alcoholic products), and thirdly, to employees of organizations purchasing alcohol for the holidays.

Wide coverage is one of the main competitive advantages of the marketplace. Target audiences of sellers and buyers are established at the stage of drawing up a business plan, and taking into account their requests and needs, the main business processes are established and a general promotion strategy is built.

Representatives of small businesses primarily pay attention to the cost of placement, for medium-sized businesses the volume of traffic comes to the fore, and large federal and international companies require targeting and integration of the site into the general advertising and marketing strategy. Obviously, the terms of cooperation with each of these groups will be completely different, and the activities of the marketplace will be unified depending on which of them is of the greatest interest to it.

To create a client base, it is now impossible to do without extensive investments in marketing. Methods of attracting traffic are chosen in such a way that the cost of attracting a client is less than the total income from his purchases and, if possible, cheaper than that of competitors. It is this ratio that affects the growth rate of the marketplace and its investment value.

Based on an understanding of the target audiences of the marketplace, the main goals of its promotion, communication and creative strategies are formed. The most effective tools, in terms of speed of getting results, are contextual and display advertising on the Internet. The task of the latter is to build a strong link between “brand and positioning” in the minds of users. However, for some product groups (alcohol, tobacco) these types of advertising are not available due to legal restrictions. A long-term strategy for promoting such marketplaces involves the integrated use of online marketing tools - SEO, SMM, PR to build a positive brand reputation, increase market recognition and consumer trust.

Attracting sellers

The profitability of the marketplace is ensured by a large number of transactions with a relatively low receipt, and this requires the widest possible range. In order for the marketplace to reach even self-sufficiency, it is necessary to attract a sufficient number of sellers to cooperate with it on favorable terms. This is not an easy job for a startup without a name or reputation in the market. Some companies fundamentally do not cooperate with projects that do not guarantee immediate profit, others enter into an agreement, but treat the work formally, and only a few work with enthusiasm for the future.

When starting cooperation with sellers or service providers, you must first create the most comfortable conditions for them:

set a low entry threshold and provide a free testing period;

create transparent instructions;

add products to the catalog yourself;

talk about the advantages of the site that compensate for the lack of a large number of orders at the initial stage.

What can the marketplace offer as a technologically advanced digital platform, in addition to sales income:

providing unique content;

top positions of the site in search results;

convenient user interface, navigation system, selecting products by filters and parameters, sorting by popularity and/or price;

To quickly connect partners to new projects, personal contacts play an important role. In the case of our marketplace, they played an almost decisive role. I am a member of the London International Vintners Exchange (Liv-Ex) and a consultant for the selection of wines from the top and HORECA segments. During my work in this area, I developed business relationships with many players in the alcohol market, so I was able to quickly reach agreements on their participation in the new project.

It’s paradoxical, but true – not only startups, but also quite wealthy projects are distrusted. The reason for this is an unsettled communication system and the lack of complete, reliable information about the company’s activities, blocking the negative information flow.

There are a lot of misinformation and myths about marketplaces. Marketplaces supposedly do not work with startups, in order to receive orders you must dump, all top positions have been bought by larger sellers, the business model is only suitable for online stores, placement is too expensive...

In fact, by providing quality services and receiving positive feedback from customers, even a small and highly specialized store can earn a good rating and reach the top. When working with a marketplace, the seller pays for customers who already know everything about the products they need and chose it among all the offers. This means that the chances that they will become regular customers become much higher than when visitors come from a contextual advertising ad. This information about marketplaces must be accessible and widely disseminated so that market participants are interested in listing goods or services on them.

Scaling problem

The main goal of any marketplace is its maximum scalability. Companies that automate large market niches have very high financial growth potential. The problem is that expanding the seller base involves serious risks associated with the quality of services provided by the marketplace.

It is vital for the management of a marketplace company to maintain a balance between the number of sellers and the quality of their interaction with customers.

For example, Yandex.Market regularly checks the quality of services provided to customers and disconnects from the service those stores whose work is often found to have shortcomings. For us, the problem of balance between the quality of services and the number of partners is not too acute, given that the alcohol market is strictly regulated by the state and all the players are known.

Finding sources of funding

Attracting investment is one of the most important tasks for the creator of a marketplace. Where can you find people willing to invest in an idea that has not yet proven its worth and cannot boast of impressive sales volumes?

There are domestic accelerators for support. Their work criteria are quite subjective, but if you meet the conditions and find a curator, there is a real chance of financial support for the project.

The decision about the need to attract additional investments to ensure further scaling of the business was made at MoscoWine approximately nine months after the launch. The startup is currently collaborating with several leading domestic accelerators. The mechanism of cooperation with these organizations comes down to approximately the following: the applicant fills out a detailed questionnaire describing the project, current performance indicators and business growth forecasts. Then a series of interviews takes place, the task of which is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the project, adjust the business plan and outline the main points of growth.

If the project is considered promising, funds are allocated for further development and scaling.

Cooperation with accelerators is very useful for a startup, as it allows you to look at work from the outside and build business processes more competently. Difficulties include a large amount of time spent filling out the necessary forms and interacting with accelerator representatives.

For an operating startup, which usually does not have very many employees, this can become a significant problem.

The second working option is foreign or international accelerators. As a rule, they do not consider local projects, but if they are of a certain scale, they are ready to finance and closely advise the team on the correct strategy and tools for entering the market.

Another option is to contact investment funds, Russian or foreign (the latter are relevant for projects with the prospect of international cloning). If you present the project in a favorable light and prepare a convincing justification for scaling at the startup stage, funds can buy a small stake in the capital at an early stage. There is a much greater chance of finding understanding and financial assistance among specialized investment funds that understand the business industry, can objectively assess the prospects of a startup, and, in addition, will help adjust the strategy and give the right direction for development.

You shouldn't have high hopes for venture capital investments. The boom in easy investment money in the venture capital market is over, and it is almost impossible for young companies to secure generous investment rounds.

In online trading, there are essentially two models for sales development: place yourself on a popular trading platform with ready-made infrastructure and services, or create and develop your own platform.

There is always a great temptation to take the simple and obvious path. It's no wonder that many entrepreneurs are attracted to the idea of ​​placing products on third-party sites: Amazon or AliExpress on the Western market, as well as "Yandex Market", Goods or “I’ll take it!”, if we talk about expanding the audience of Russian buyers. There are at least three weighty arguments in favor of aggregators and three against them. I'll start with the good.

Arguments for the marketplace

1. Company size. Small companies may not have enough funds to create a full-fledged platform with analytics, strong marketing and full customer service throughout the sales territory. Placing on large marketplaces opens up excellent prospects for the development of small businesses.

2. Start of sales. Placing on the marketplace can be the first step for the active growth of the company’s brand. Subsequently, having gained experience, you can switch to a combined sales model by opening your own online store and trading through the marketplace. However, it is worth determining the line beyond which there is a risk of losing the entire business: from experience, the share of sales through trading platforms for a developed brand should be no more than 20-30%, all other sales should be controlled by their own platforms.

3. Boosting current sales. On the marketplace you can place some separate groups of products that are not sold well enough on your own website. Using third-party platforms to solve problems with the sale of certain categories of goods is a good solution, but it is not necessary to upload the entire range to the site.

Arguments against aggregators

For all their convenience, marketplaces are a business model focused on maximizing profits from the sale of goods. If your competitor allows you to earn more, all sales volume can quickly go to him. Considering that a marketplace can periodically change its monetization model, a large share of marketplace revenue is a big, unmanageable risk for a business. Therefore, if any of the points below are your priority, try to determine the share of “risk-free” presence on the aggregator and stick to it.

1. Low potential for analytics. The marketplace will generously share with you resources, traffic, work patterns, but not customer data. Only your own metrics on the internal resource will allow you to analyze how many people are interested in the product and how many actually buy it. This means improving conversion through descriptions, prices and other factors.

Thus, after analyzing sales statistics on the Amazon Business site, it was revealed that the fastest growing sector is equipment and materials in the natural sciences industry. As a result, the trade giant expanded the range of these product categories, which attracted hundreds of research centers and pharmaceutical companies to the site, leaving competitors far behind.

2. Management of offers and prices “blindly”. Any marketplace is technically an intermediary that lives off a percentage of sales or the implementation of another monetization scheme. Many such sites limit the number of goods for sale for one site participant or provide an unlimited volume of uploading product cards in exchange for a paid subscription. This makes sellers dependent on the site, forcing them to adjust their pricing policy. While on your site you can manage prices based on the volume and frequency of customer purchases, and not for reasons of dumping.

Online store ELC Russia I decided to experiment with personalization in email newsletters: in the letters, some clients received shopping recommendations based on recent product views. The second half of customers were sent regular letters with an overview of promotions and discounts. As a result, the number of orders from buyers from the first group was 44% more, and the profit from these sales was 27% higher than from the second group with regular mailing. A marketplace with hundreds and thousands of sellers could hardly offer such personalization conditions.

3. Loyalty to a popular site, but not to the brand. A trading platform for a loyal buyer is not just goods at a specific price, but also a level of service, delivery conditions, bonuses and participation in promotions. When working on your own site, all the laurels go to you, in cooperation with the marketplace - the platform on which you are located.

Many online hypermarkets use loyalty programs to motivate customers to return again and again. Among them, for example, Gilt– for accumulated points, customers are offered access to early sales, free shipping, and a 30% discount.

At the same time, on your own trading platform, the problem of competition is not so acute: the buyer chooses not only by price, but studies related products and content.

So, LED manufacturer Flexfire has been “pumping up” its own site since 2009. The company initially relied on the quality of products and educational content on the site. During the period 2013-2015, sales of Flexfire products increased by 832%. The current growth rate of sales volumes is not so impressive, but remains consistently high: the increase in 2017 was 30% (sales reached $5 million), the same growth is expected at the end of 2018.

What to choose?

Having your own trading platform is prestigious, representative and, in many cases, profitable. But if placement on the marketplace at this stage of the company’s development represents more advantages than developing its own site, you should not refuse the benefits.

But it is important to understand one nuance. With the emergence of new Russian trading platforms and the development of long-existing Western marketplaces, the retail e-commerce sector is entering a stage of intense competition. It is unlikely to gain a foothold in it without a colossal “infusion” of funds. While the online wholesale sales market in Russia is just beginning to take shape. The grocery wholesale market and auto parts are actively moving online, and a trend is emerging for the digitalization of sales of construction products. All these new platforms are designed to unite many suppliers of one product segment, without trying to offer customers “everything in the world” or limit themselves to the products of a single company.

In my opinion, now is the best time to develop segmented wholesale trading platforms with small investments. Even if you do not become the second Amazon Business or Alibaba, you will be able to process data like these market giants. Find the best thing that will help you differentiate yourself from your competitors and occupy an ever-increasing market share.

In order to successfully promote on marketplaces, an online retailer needs to forget about stereotypes. At the same time, you must always remember the fears and needs of customers. You need to put yourself in the shoes of an ordinary person choosing a smartphone or a baby stroller. A lot will become clear right away.

Price platforms are a place where the stereotypes of sellers meet the fears of buyers. Owners of online stores are often confident that those who set the lowest price win on the marketplace. Some believe that the secret to success is to get your offer on the product card. Or they think that if they take up the entire issue, sales will flow like a river.

Buyers are worried about something completely different: they are afraid of overpaying or buying the wrong thing. They are worried about the prospect of receiving a low-quality product or simply a counterfeit product. Finally, they don’t want any problems with delivery: late couriers, broken boxes, lack of change and other inconveniences.

To successfully promote on price platforms, a store needs, first of all, to forget about stereotypes. The largest marketplace on the Runet - Yandex.Market - is visited monthly by about 20 million people (these are Yandex data; according to April data from Mediascope - 19.4 million). When the audience reaches such a size, behavior scenarios simply statistically cannot be reduced to “choosing a lower price” or “choosing the first offer in the search results.”

What sellers need to keep in mind is the buyer's fears and needs. To understand how to promote yourself on the price platform, you need to put yourself in the shoes of an ordinary person choosing a smartphone or a baby stroller. A lot will become clear right away.

First, a potential buyer must see your offers. After this, he needs to be convinced that after the purchase he will not have problems with the quality of the product, delivery, or service. And then it’s worth checking whether you are losing to competitors in terms of assortment, bonuses or prices.

This is what, in the most general terms, it looks like to develop a strategy that allows you to successfully be placed on a price platform. Below I will talk about this process in detail, and at the same time I will give examples from i-Media practice.

Step one. Tidying up your product feed

To compete for a place in a product card, you must first “become attached” to this card. And to compete in search results, you need to be in the right product category. An XML feed with the correct structure and thoughtful descriptions will help solve both problems.

Price platforms distribute products into categories automatically. If your feed has a tree of categories with a clear structure and names, most likely there will be no problems loading it. Difficulties arise when categories include service names like “warehouse 1,” “warehouse 2,” “remains from last season,” etc.

The product title is responsible for the correct “binding” to the card. It, like a tourist’s backpack, should have everything you need – and nothing extra. When creating a title, you need to use a minimum of words, but at the same time describe the product so that it cannot be confused with another.

Let's imagine that we are selling PlayStation 4 consoles. What should be the headline for a Slim model with a 1 terabyte hard drive? Correct answer: "PlayStation 4 Slim 1 TB." The shorter version “PlayStation 4 Slim” will not be entirely accurate, because the model with a 500 gigabyte disk also falls under this description.

The longer title “PlayStation 4 Slim 1 TB included with 2 joysticks” will also not work - information about the joysticks is not necessary.

This approach will allow you to create headlines that are logical, understandable to people, and not overloaded with information.

In addition to the correct headings, the feed must convey detailed product characteristics. They are very useful in cases where users refine search results using filters.

Let's take a common scenario: a user comes to Yandex.Market with only a general idea of ​​what he needs. For example, this is a young father who urgently needs to buy a new stroller. He asks the general query “baby stroller” and receives more than 18 thousand offers.

Realizing that everything is not so simple, he sets a couple of filters: by type (“walking”) and by weight (“up to 10 kg”). And the output is instantly compressed to 52 products.

It is possible that among the filtered strollers there were strollers weighing less than 10 kilograms. But no one will ever know this, because the sellers were lazy and did not transfer the relevant characteristics to Yandex.Market. And the young father will buy a stroller from competitors.

Step two. Setting up rates

If the seller is just entering the price platform, the maximum bids are calculated based on the average conversion rate (CR) in the store and the margin of each product. Let's imagine that we are selling a product with a price of 10,000 rubles and a margin of 1,000 rubles, and the average CR is 1%. The rate for the product will be 10 rubles (1000*1%=10). It won't necessarily be the most effective (conversion rates may vary from average, and a click doesn't always mean a purchase), but as a first approximation, the method works well.

Once some statistics have been accumulated, bets can be optimized. At this stage, products need to be divided into several groups depending on the conversion level. Most often, the situation looks like this: a relatively small share of products have CR 2-3 times higher than average. It is worth raising bids for them in order to improve positions, traffic volume and, accordingly, sales.

It may turn out, for example, that an already familiar product with a margin of 1,000 rubles provides a stable conversion of 3%. This means that the bet for him should be raised to 30 rubles (1000*3%=30). In the same way, it is necessary to adjust the rates for goods whose CR turned out to be below the average level.

Finally, at the last stage of setting up rates, they can be recalculated based on data on the check amount. To do this, you need to select groups of goods with a receipt higher and lower than expected (the price of the product is taken as the expected receipt).

A product with a higher-than-expected receipt plays the same role in a store as ice cream at McDonald's: it's inexpensive, but it encourages additional purchases. Let's imagine that we have a product with a price of 3,000 and a margin of 300 rubles. The initial bid for him was calculated based on this margin. Then it turned out that accessories were purchased along with the product and that the average bill for it was 5,000 rubles. This means that you can add up all the markups in the order and get a large amount for promotion (for example, 1,000 rubles). The new rate will be set based on this amount, and not on the product margin.

Products with a receipt lower than expected are usually overpriced. The usual story: the seller makes a large markup on some model and due to this he can afford a high bid. As a result, the product ends up on the product card, but does not bring in sales: the buyer finds an analogue for a lower price and chooses it. For such goods, rates need to be reduced.

By sequentially going through all three stages, you will set up effective bids for your products that will guarantee compliance with the CPA. If you are hosted on Yandex.Market, these works can be done using the free Pricelabs.

Step three. Let's talk about delivery

We have ensured that users of the price platform see our offers. Now we need to work on the factors influencing the buyer’s choice: delivery conditions, store reputation, prices, bonuses and others.

Let's start with delivery. According to a recent study by Yandex.Market and GfK Rus, although buyers use the services of couriers, pickup points and Russian Post with different frequencies, each delivery method reaches a large audience. Therefore, your lack of some method may be the reason why the buyer chooses another store.

Several delivery methods, on the contrary, make the store more convenient for different customers and different situations. For example, there are people who need the product right now. They are willing to overpay for the speed of delivery and even for the product itself. But buyers working in Moscow and living in the region appreciate the pick-up option: thanks to it, there is no need to spend money on expensive delivery outside the city.

From this we can conclude that the very presence of all delivery methods in an online store will result in an increase in conversions.

Step four. We are working on our reputation

One of the main scenarios for using a price platform is choosing a seller, not a product. The user comes to the marketplace after he has decided on the brand and model. He finds two or three stores offering the product he is looking for, and sees that their prices and delivery conditions are approximately the same. In such a situation, reviews and ratings of the store become the decisive factor.

To inspire user trust, the store must have different reviews: positive and negative, left a long time ago and completely recent. A seller whose last review was dated the year before last looks dubious. A seller with hundreds of “fives” and the same type of enthusiastic comments naturally arouses distrust. Customers understand that no store is perfect and that mistakes happen to everyone. Negative reviews will not spoil the impression if the store responds to them and helps solve customer problems. It is clear that there cannot be many negative ratings, and the overall rating of the store should strive for “five”.

How to earn a good reputation? First, send each customer an email asking them to leave a review of the store. Secondly, respond to negative feedback: reply that you will definitely sort it out; request additional information; tell us about the measures taken. Thirdly, remember that all this should not be a one-time event, but an ongoing, streamlined process.

Last fall, we noticed that one of our clients had few—about fifty—reviews on Yandex.Market. Upon closer examination, it turned out that there is no work with reviews, and most of the existing reviews are completely fake. And not only positive, but also negative too.

We advised the client to send requests to remove fakes and send mailings to customers, as well as assign an employee to work with reviews. The client listened, and the results were not long in coming. Within a month, the store had more than a hundred reviews, and most importantly, the conversion rate increased by 1.6 times.

Step five. We track competitors

The choice of store can be influenced not only by reviews and delivery conditions. There are also prices, assortment, loyalty programs and much more. Competitor analysis helps to understand whether everything is in order with these factors.

For example, this is how you can check whether your prices are too high. It is enough to compare them with the average prices on the price platform (such statistics are provided, in particular, by Yandex.Market). If it turns out that some goods are too expensive, there is no need to reduce the price to a minimum - just bring it closer to the average level. It is possible that due to this you will receive additional orders.

It’s also worth keeping an eye on new products and popular products in your categories. If a store doesn't offer the latest new items or styles that everyone is looking for, it creates distrust. Customers may have questions about what the store sells and why they need it.

Competitive analysis allows you to discover weaknesses in your offers, sometimes the most unexpected ones. Moreover, each product category and each online store may have its own.

So we have gone through all five steps towards an effective promotion strategy. As you can see, this road is not long and quite simple.

Instead of a conclusion, I will say about two important points related to price platforms. The first concerns the sequence of actions when developing a strategy. In fact, you can do them in any order. In the article they are arranged not chronologically, but by speed of return. Optimizing your product feed and bids gives immediate results. New delivery methods are launched quickly, but still not instantly. And working with reviews and monitoring competitors are long-term tasks; they give results gradually.

The second thing to remember: price platforms are not only Yandex.Market. There are a dozen more successful and effective marketplaces operating in RuNet. For example, Price.ru is good for promoting mobile phones, Avito - inexpensive goods that can compete with used ones, Nadavi - tools for the home and garden. The choice of optimal sites depends on your tasks and the nature of your business. The main thing is to maintain a pragmatic approach and monitor the effectiveness of the placement.