With most people still stuck in the midst of lockdowns or hesitant to leave their homes, online sales have never been higher, but so hasn’t the competition. As the pandemic continues to rage on, the stakes have never been higher for online retailers trying to compete with sellers flooding marketplaces left and right. If you want to increase sales, drive traffic, and inculcate an awareness of your product, you will need to increase your E-commerce marketing effort. If you are willing to go the extra mile to stand out in the crowd, and turn visitors into first-time buyers and customers into brand evangelists, here are a few out-of-the-box eCommerce marketing in UAE tips to try:

Convert Top-Of-The-Funnel Leads with Quizzes

Top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) leads are prospects that have expressed an interest in your brand but aren’t ready to engage with you yet. These people are usually your first-time website visitors or new email sign-ups. You need to understand these customers better, create awareness about your product and then try to meet their needs. First things first, you need personal details from these customers, which can prove to be impossible to coax out during signup. One way to get these people to divulge personal information without raising red flags is through lead generation quizzes. Don’t we all love quizzes that say “which Starbucks drink are you?”, “which Olive garden entrée are you?” or “which style of the bag are you?” The purpose of such quizzes is to collect segmented ToFu leads and recommend products that suit their needs. In the middle of the quiz, you can ask users to enter their email addresses so you can save the results. Once the users complete the comprehensive quiz, they are redirected to a landing page with their results, a valid reason, and research-backed product recommendations. This way you are simply recommending which products suit their style/needs/habits, rather than hard-selling your products. Now that you finally understand your customers and their pain points, you can follow up on your leads with paid ads and highly targeted marketing campaigns.

Offer an Incentive to Make Them Subscribe

We all know what upselling can do for our revenue. Even though most eCommerce stores are already capitalizing on upselling and cross-selling to boost their average order value, we are going to take it up a notch. We recommend that each of your product pages should incorporate two pricing options: regular price and member price. Offering a too-good-to-overlook price to your members highlights the obvious benefit of membership and pits it against the price of a one-time purchase. Non-subscribers risk passing on an exclusive member price, which I am sure they won’t want to do. Especially if you are selling a product that needs a refill, such as vitamins or medicines, offer your customers the options of one-time purchase as well auto stock. Offer a discounted price as well as free shipping to those who choose the latter. Sounds too good to resist, doesn’t it!

Highlight Sustainable business practices

These days, most people want to buy from socially conscious businesses only. In fact, more and more millennials are changing their habits to be more sustainable. A study predicts that by the end of 2021, customers will spend more than $150 billion on sustainable brands.  With the increasing demand for green business practices, buyers are willing to pay extra to go green. If you want to appeal to your environment-conscious demographic, start producing, packaging, and selling while keeping the environment in mind and make sure to make it the highlight of your marketing campaign. Whether you are going paperless or saving energy at work or using eco-friendly packagings like biodegradable pouches and compost bags, do make sure to let your customers know.

Tap into the Power of Wish lists

Don’t we all keep adding items that catch our fancy to our wishlist, never to look at them again? Unless you actually remember to buy a wish list item, which happens once in a blue moon, they simply slip your mind. As an e-commerce business, you have an amazing opportunity to tap into your prospects’ wishlists since they contain items that have already been chosen. Remember that your leads already wish to buy those items, they only need something like a gentle nudge or a little discount to complete the purchase. Wishlist reminder emails remind them of items in their wish list, notify them if their favorite items have gone on sale or if they are low in supply. If you want to convert idle wishlist items into sales, simply display those items against a powerful CTA to help your visitors re-consider the purchase and be redirected straight to them. You can include discount codes in your wishlist reminder emails that only apply to your subscribers’ wishlist items.

Try Google Shopping

Google Shopping is becoming an indispensable part of eCommerce marketing in UAE in 2021 because of its ability to bring better-qualified traffic and higher conversions. Being somewhat of a comparison search engine, Google Shopping ads put your product right in front of potential customers, including their price and your store link. If your product description meets the customer’s search phrase, it will appear in front of the customer. Since they pre-vet potential customers by showing the product image and the price, so advertisers only get highly targeted clicks. Another benefit of showcase ads is that even if a prospect doesn’t immediately make a purchase on your store, you still get to introduce your store to a wide audience, and build a warm audience to remarket to at a lower cost.

All the businesses that appear in the SERPs are credible and authentic, though people may not have heard of them. Customers also trust Google, especially because of the price comparisons, which helps them get the best bang for their bucks.  All you need to do to try your hands at Google shopping is to create a Google Merchant account, optimize your product pages, link your Google AdWords account, and create a campaign.

Play on sold-out products

For online shoppers, nothing can be more frustrating than seeing “sold out” on their favorite product pages. While this experience can leave the customer disappointed and exasperated, marketers can leverage this situation to their advantage.  You can somewhat lessen their frustration by offering out-of-stock notifications. This allows you to convert leads into customers once the item has been restocked. Meanwhile, try to redirect them to your best sellers or other similar products to get them back on track. This way, you’ll appease angry customers and improve your sold-out-page conversions.

Recover Abandoned Carts with Email Offers

In the world of eCommerce, 60% to 80% of carts get abandoned. If you wish to create an email campaign, make sure it’s around abandoned cars! People add a lot of items to their cart and then leave the website without finalizing the purchase. Whenever you see an abandoned cart, be sure to shoot them an email reminding them to go back. Increase the open rate of your abandoned cart emails by adding irresistible discounts and attention-grabbing headlines. Make sure you remind your shoppers that they have left something behind.

Dynamic Retargeting Ads

Dynamic retargeting ads are a relatively new trick in the book for marketing your online store. If you are not familiar with retargeting, it is a feature that lets you advertise to people who have previously interacted with your business. For instance, if you visit a website as a one-time thing but keep on receiving ads from the same business consequentially, you have been exposed to retargeting. Now imagine being shown the same product in ads like the one you had checked out; say hello to dynamic retargeting. You may have hundreds of products on your website but a dynamic retargeting ad only displays the product that a person had checked out earlier. So far, this feature is available on all major advertising platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Google. Dynamic advertising lets you capture leads who have already shown an interest in your website and products and are already ripe for the taking.

Incorporate Customer Testimonials in Emails

While you may already have incorporated product reviews and customer testimonials on your eCommerce store homepage or landing pages, only select users will eventually see and engage with them. Why not add them to your email marketing messages to widen their reach. When used right, customer testimonials and product reviews add social proof to your business and help visitors who are hesitant to buy from you. It is also a great idea to let testimonials and product ratings speak for the products/services/company in promotional emails instead of penning down lengthy product descriptions that no one will read. After all, a prospect is more likely to believe the words of an actual user than the brand itself.  Start by handpicking your favorite testimonials and customer feedbacks and send out occasional emails to spread the love. This helps you create social proof with every offering.