As an online business owner, marketing is your best friend. Every bit of your success will start with marketing. There are a variety of ways to market your business, and you should definitely be dabbling in more than one. But, there are quite a few common errors that people make when first starting out in trying to market their businesses. If you’re a new business owner and want to prevent some of these before they occur, here are 4 of the most common e-commerce marketing mistakes.
1. Putting Too Much Faith in Facebook Marketing
Facebook is a great place to begin marketing your products. But, depending on what you sell and what your main customer base is, it might not be the end all be all when it comes to marketing. What’s worse is, assuming so will only lead to fewer conversions. Facebook is great if that’s where your audience is, but you need to know your audience well enough to find out if this is or isn’t the case.
2. Implementing the Wrong CMS
Especially for new business owners, the temptation to go with a cheaper CMS platform is very real. It’s not uncommon for new small business owners to be strapped for cash and this can seem the right place to cut costs. This is not always the case, though. In fact, going with a cheaper CMS can actually worsen the customer’s buying experience and hurt your sales in the end.
To avoid this mistake, pick a CMS that is user-friendly, scalable, automatable, and able to be integrated with different backend software like ERP, shipping, inventory, customer service, and CRM tools.
3. Not Automating Emails
If you aren’t automating emails, you better have somebody on your payroll who is exclusively typing them up, personalizing them, and sending them at recurring times. Seeing as this isn’t very cost-effective, you’re better off going with an email automation service.
Doing so will free up a huge chunk of your time. Don’t worry about the quality of them suffering, either. There are services out there right now that can send your customers emails based on their behavior and speed up the production of your recurring emails, as well as effectively target your messages in real time.
4. Not Testing Enough
This one comes down to impatience. But, if you’re building an online business from the ground up, you have no room for impatience because you’re playing a long game. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. So test everything before you scale it up. This includes A/B testing with website copy, email outreach, advertising, and more. Perfect your process, then worry about scaling up.
Avoiding These Rookie Mistakes Will Help You Soar to Success
The mistakes covered in this article are pretty basic, yet somehow quite common. If you want to take the fast track to success and profit, you should avoid the mistakes like the plague. Building a booming, profitable online business is less about what you do, and more about what you don’t do.
