E-commerce in India has grown by over 30% over the last few years, and at present, India is a thriving digital economy with more than 500 million users. Platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, Jio Mart, and many others show e-commerce is here to stay in India. Today’s millennials find e-commerce platforms very easy to use. 

Some actionable points in your eCommerce marketing strategy 2022 to increase your sales volume and profitability in your e-commerce store include the following eCommerce marketing tools. 

Remember, maximising your social media applications is one of the essential eCommerce marketing tips.

• Upsell your products: When a customer considers buying a particular product in your eCommerce store, you convince the customer to buy a premium product through either superior packaging or better quality. Be aware of how sensitive the customer is to price changes. The customer remembers the price of the original product he contemplated buying, so the new proposed change must be discernibly better and meet the customer’s needs more appropriately. The customer must feel that the pricier product meets his needs more suitably than the previously considered product in the same product group.

• Integrate Instagram: With 500 million daily users, Instagram is one of the most powerful social media apps. It brings influencers, consumers and brands together through pictures. You can run a contest to engage your audience or show pictures of your product development process. Adding products to the Instagram posts provides a link that enables your customers to purchase from your e-commerce stores.

• Reduce the number of carts abandoned at checkouts by customers: There are many reasons why customers abandon their carts at the checkout. Use email recovery campaigns to persuade your customers to return to the e-commerce store. You can add inducements like discounts, free shipping or cashback. Something catchy like “forgot something? Those items are still here waiting for you”. Retarget these customers so that you convert them into paying customers during their second visit.

• Launch a Facebook store: Facebook is one of the essential social media channels for e-commerce marketing. It is the largest social network with 2.90 billion monthly active users globally. Facebook can integrate directly with your account, so you don’t have to keep a separate inventory. Facebook audience insight tools help you delve into your potential customers to collate information about gender, education, location, language and even past purchases. You can set up a Facebook business page and allow customers to contact your store through Facebook Messenger.

• Capture your email subscribers: Emails contribute about 24 per cent of the revenues of the e-commerce store. You can give more personalised messages through email than on social media websites. Your blog or newsletter can be sent to customers through your email. Emails have to be regularly and consistently sent to your customers. When a new customer joins, you can send a welcome email. Promo codes can follow this up, thank you emails etc., to personalise the emails. Wish list reminder emails can be sent to customers who don’t purchase during their last visit to the store. 

• Make it easy for customers to navigate your store site: Have clear, easy to read fonts on your store items, show that the customers are getting a clear value proposition and avoid any confusing directions in your store. Customers should find it easy to shop at your store. The design of your store page and the segmentation of products on your page should be clear and straightforward.

• Use live chat tools on your page: You can use live pages to interact with your customers when they visit your store. You can have direct conversations with your customers and address their concerns immediately when they visit your store. This improves their shopping experience. WhatsApp and WeChat are equipped to handle commerce and payments within the apps. Artificial Intelligence can be used to deliver better and faster responses to customers.

• Content marketing campaigns: Content marketing is a strategy to attract and retain your audience by creating product and store related articles, videos, podcasts and other media. Coke’s “share a bottle” allowed everyone to personalise their favourite drink. This is a classic e-commerce marketing strategy example. You can also use influencers’ recommendations and content to drive traffic to your eCommerce store webpage.

• Personalisation: Based on their past purchase experience, preferences and actions, you can personalise your customer experiences when visiting your eCommerce store. According to a McKinsey and Company report, the world’s leading producer for marketing insights, the personalisation tactic can help to boost the sales and ROI of the E-commerce store.

• Leverage User-generated content: When people see their peers’ purchasing patterns, they will try to emulate them. This sometimes outweighs the demand from customers who have brand loyalty. Customers occasionally even post their pictures and create a product following. According to a Qualtrics survey, it is estimated that 90%-95% of online customers read online reviews by peers before making a purchasing decision. This creates increased customer trust, establishes a direct line to the customer, and your store also appears higher in search engine rankings.

• Think Local: Online stores can think like brick and mortar stores in a retail locality. Identify the local concentration of your customers and run promotion campaigns. Local or seasonal campaigns can help to drive up sales. You can consider expedited or free shipping to customers from warehouses in the area. 

• Optimising your product pages: Conversion rate optimisation helps to maximise the online conversions of customers into paying customers. Both quantitative and qualitative research can be carried out to study the conversion of potential customers to paying customers.

• Optimise your mobile pages: The mobile phone is an essential tool for brands to interact with their customers. Mobiles are ideal for marketing to customers in India’s Tier II and Tier III cities. Most retailers in India expect 90% of their sales to come through smartphones in the next few years. 

• Reward loyal customers: Start a customer loyalty point program. This will induce customers to buy from your store. This will generate brand loyalty to your store and give them extra incentive to make purchases from your store. The customer loyalty points may be converted into gifts, shopping, or increased product discounts.

• SEO has driven marketing and Pay per Click Advertising: This measures your website with Google algorithms and ranks your website higher in Google searches. Pay per click advertising is when a customer clicks your page; you will only pay for the advertisement. Both help with increasing traffic to your website through keyword search.

• Wearable and Virtual Reality tours: Virtual reality product campaigns will enable the customer to see product demonstrations and experience the product virtually. This will entice them to buy the products in your e-commerce stores. Do virtual reality advertisements for your quality products. This could be an expensive proposition, so you must do a cost-benefit trade-off before committing yourself.

• Use different e-commerce platforms: Customers may prefer to visit popular, generic e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Flipkart, so make sure your products are featured on them in addition to your e-commerce store. Increase festival season discounts and offers to induce seasonal buying, especially in products like consumer durables, apparel etc.

Conclusion

Your social media campaigns play a crucial role in eCommerce marketing strategies and make your e-commerce store a success. Using the above tactics, you can increase the footfall and improve your sales. Your store will soon have a competitive edge with the mix of the right technology, design, and e-commerce marketing strategies. Add a payment platform like PayU to integrate with your eCommerce platform seamlessly.

PayU is a secure online payment solution provider that can provide a seamless checkout customer experience. PayU is one of the most secure systems available. It is PCI-DSS compliant (Payment Card Industry Service Data compliant). It also has 128-bit SSL (Secure Sockets Layer Encryption), which reduces the possibility of phishing attacks. All your customers’ credit card information is stored on secure computers. Any refunds initiated by your eCommerce store are also processed quickly. PayU is a Netherlands based service provider to online merchants.

If you want help accessing the proper technology and obtaining an on-demand settlement of customer payments for your eCommerce store, click here.

FAQs

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Consumers today are used to purchasing on credit. There’s been a 220% rise in EMI transactions since the pandemic, a 65% rise in adoption of Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), discounts, and cashback have been powering purchases for the last decade.

Indian markets are grossly underserved when it comes to access to formal credit, with only 62 Million Indians having access to credit cards. But the consumer of today has the desire to purchase and is looking for credit to increase their purchasing power. In fact, consumers are looking to get these services in real-time on their mobile without having to do cumbersome paperwork.

So, the question is – Is your business ready to offer the flexibility and affordability modern Indian consumers desire?

How does PayU Enable You to be Festive – Ready?

PayU’s Affordability Suite empowers customers to make the purchases they desire with payment modes such as Card Based EMIs, No Cost EMIs, Buy Now Pay Later, and Cardless EMIs.

These can be used for high-ticket purchases such as consumer electronics with EMIs or low-ticket high-frequency purchases such as food orders with BNPL.

You reduce the one-time purchase cost for a consumer, nudging higher order values and increasing sales for your business.

What is PayU’s Affordability Suite?

The PayU Affordability Suite offers:

• PayU Offers Engine: Enables you to create customized offers at a brand, category and even product level across all payment modes. With real-time analytics, you can optimize your campaigns to power more purchases.
• White-Labelled Customer Base: We give you access to 50 million white-labelled users to whom you can show the exact offers they are eligible for across all payment modes. The personalized experience increases the probability of final purchase.

What Do We Do for You?

• Offer the best coverage of payment options in the industry
  
  We enable you to offer affordability options across all payment modes and banks- Credit Card EMIs, Debit Card EMIs, Cardless EMIs, Buy Now Pay Later. In fact, our direct integrations with banks lead to 5% higher success rates on transactions.
• Enable you to offer the best customer experience
  
  A fully digital, mobile- first payment experience enables your customers to opt for EMIs and BNPL within minutes. We also standardize the flow for all EMI transactions by enabling you to capture the OTP on your website, this giving you full control on the customer experience.  
• Offer affordability in retail/ omnichannel stores as well
  
  You can also enable EMI availability using Contactless QR Codes or your POS device at your retail outlets.

How Can You Get Started?

Just reach out to us at affordability@payu.in or your respective Account Managers, to enable the Affordability Suite for your business.  

Co-authored by Dhruv Mathur-Assistant Manager, Content, PayU India

The post How to maximize sales this festive season? appeared first on PayU Blog.

Quality product images are a driving force of engagement, conversion, retention and overall customer lifetime value. In this blog post we will precisely walk you through the benefits and best practices of good product photography to drive sales.

Benefits of Good Product Photography to Drive Sales

There are many factors to drive sales and the first one being the product itself! As per a popular Hindi proverb ‘jo dikta hai, voh bikta hai’, it is essential to present products well to scoot the sales higher and faster.

Whether you hire a professional to click your products or opt for DIY hacks using your mobile, these key benefits of product photography mentioned below are to be enjoyed by all:

Grabs Customer Mood

You cannot take your potential customers to a camping site and show them how good and comfortable your backpacking kit is. You can convey this feeling through your pictures majorly. Hence, it makes sense to plant a seed that your product is the ultimate solution for all the issues they may have. This gesture can be exceptionally conveyed via worthy and quality images.

Perfectly clicked, comfortable and useful product images draw attention within nano-seconds. Thus, increasing chances of high sales.

Builds Your Brand

A picture is not a short-term plan but a long-term solution to get your company recognised as a market leader.

Putting up branded product images consistently over months, can communicate your brand as:

• Professional

• Valued

• Quality

• Diverse

• Innovative

It helps your customers believe that your brand really cares for their preferences and that it is humble enough to cater to them all.

Promotes Silent Communication

Images speak louder than words! This fact still stands strong and tall when to comes to brands who believe in less word and more work.

People skimming through various online platforms have limited time and patience to actually read all the text or product descriptions. Hence, in this case: mention all the available product sizes, colors, features that are up for sale.

Pro-tip: Make an exhaustive list of your product’s important information and then state what to show in your images.

Sets Right Expectations

As mentioned above, 22% of products sold online are returned because ‘items look different than the photos”. Convincing people to buy products offline is comparatively easier than doing so online.

Hence, it is always advisable to show product images as they are instead of adding unnecessary filters, effects and the likes. Set your customer expectations about what they are looking at right.

Another expectation setter would be the number and days within which you can entertain product returns. People who make an impulsive purchase decision exist too! They are aware of the fact that any product bought online can be returned if felt unsatisfied with.

It is good to be a considerate online business but not at the cost of your added expenses. Setting customer expectations right by Inculcating a limited return policy is healthy.

Keeps Competitors Away

You might feel your product is 100% unique, but it is not a 100% true fact. There are millions of products globally, that might have the same features as yours does.

The cheat here is to talk with your images. Show that your products are way more attuned to detail and better than your competitors’, by using high quality product images.

These benefits prove beneficial only when teamed up with certain best practices of product photography mentioned below:

Lights

Irrespective of what your product is, lights play a huge role in product photography. Technically there are 2 types of lights in photography:

1. Natural Light: Products clicked in natural sunlit environments. It is also known as “soft light”. Natural light is the most preferred and suggested set-up by professionals as it highlights product’s true features and details better than a bulb or so. You can use natural light if your product is meant to be used outdoors or to be shot on or is worn by a person.
2. Artificial Lights: Candles, fire, bulbs, etc are all considered as artificial lights and are also referred to as “hard light”. Artificial lights produce smaller but focused light surface. Hard lights are preferred by professionals while clicking focused or close up product images for online shopping.

Camera

As a business you have the option to explore multiple devices for getting that best shot for your products. Broadly, you can either a hire professional photographer who comes along with all sorts of ‘best shot’ ideas and equipment or you can make the best use of your smartphone which comes with a decent camera technology.

If you opt for a smartphone camera to click your products, then the rawness can be your advantage as it makes people believe the genuineness of the product. It also saves your pocket of additional expenses of hiring a professional.

You can also consider investing in a professional camera (DSLR) for quality product images. But, it is highly recommended to do your research well on which model, company, etc is apt for your need.

In case you go ahead with a professional photographer, you save on a lot of time getting the angle, lights and settings right. He/she is the master of his/her artistry and knows exactly how to get any product clicked. The professional can also work up his expertise in post-production formalities.

Background

As per research, 76% of products images are clicked against white backgrounds. Along with the other factors that contribute to a picture-perfect product image, backgrounds is a crucial element as it changes the entire appearance and hence ‘need’ of a particular product.

Most of the online businesses opt for white or pastel backgrounds because they make a product look, grand, desirable, true and classic. Whereas, a black or darker background eludes luxury and desirability of the product.

Composition

Composition is composed of various elements which include; angle, texture, mode, etc of an image. It depends on how engaged and open your business with its audience is.

For example: If you are selling a nail paint or any cosmetics you can freely opt for a slant angle or a grainy or blur the background or opt for a portrait as well as a landscape mode. This is because your product segment is lighter and stylish.

Whereas, if you are a food centric business, then you should opt for darker or wooden backgrounds, lay the dish in the middle of the frame with portrait mode on. This setting is usually preferred as it makes the food look ultra-vibrant (with colorful ingredients) and more tempting because of the center placement.

Apart from these best practices, we would like to give away 2 pro-tips for most effective product photography:

1. Cut the clutter and make your images breathe-able. Let there be negative or empty space in your images.
2. Click product centric images. Zoom into the nitty-gritties of the detailing of your product. This accentuates the product all the more thus making it attractive to your audience.

Today, there are many smart apps that help businesses to indulge in healthy product photography which saves time, efforts and money. Snapseed, Focalmark and VSCO are a few to name.

There are many ways to increase your product sales by just making optimum use of a tool named: photography! Online businesses like yours must leverage this tool to the fullest in order to influence your audience to purchase your products.

With all your marketing efforts for your business in place, it’s a good idea to have an all-in-one payment solution in place as well. Now to enjoy the best payment gateway experience and grow your business effortlessly!

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