It is easier to start an e-commerce store but to ensure that tour store is popular is a big task. In fact, no matter how much we spend on advertising, it is always difficult to get people to talk about your store. This word-of-mouth popularity is what we often seek. For this to happen, we must often resort to viral marketing.
Viral Marketing Is a Great Way to Promote E-Stores
Viral marketing is one of the best techniques to promote your ecommerce business. It allows you to advertise your products throughout the world and thankfully, it’s not as complicated as it seems. Viral marketing is based on the analysis of human behavior and using the technique of social marketing. When I talk about social marketing, I mean using Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook and other networking sites in order to ensure that people are talking about your store. Simply put, for your e-commerce store to go viral, you will need to get down there and begin to engage as much as possible.
Principle Behind Viral Marketing
The principle of viral marketing is to entice your customers, your resellers and all your other contacts to voluntarily promote your business. Your ecommerce store will quickly develop if one of your customers is talking about your store in front of 6 people around him, and if in turn these 6 people speak to 6 other people each.
To succeed in your viral marketing campaign, the first thing to do is to define the message you want to convey. This message should be short and easy to remember. Then, you will need to choose your target audience and take action. Internet promotion is a great thing and it allows you to choose several solutions for creating and animating networks. Among these tools we find blogs, discussion forums, campaigns, e-mailing, offers of discounts or gifts, and affiliate programs.
Referrals, Recommendations and Letters of Gratitude
The integration of ‘send to friend’ button is an interesting technique that allows you to increase the visibility of your website. This button allows a person reading an article on your ecommerce website to send a link to friends or colleagues. You can also encourage them to promote your site in exchange for a gift, but this may sound too intrusive unless done the right way. You can also ask your visitors to earn money by publishing a link to your store on their site and engage in an through an affiliate program. Such a strategy allows creating external links to improve your SEO passage from search engines. The idea is to reward the efforts of your customer, and encourage them to continue promoting your ecommerce store.
Another effective technique, but less used, is to send a thank you letter to each person who is related to you. All that you would need to do is send a single sentence email that expresses gratitude for their initiative and reward them with a discount, perhaps. This kind of reward drives customers to recommend your web store to more people.
Viral Marketing Is Possible with a Little Effort and Hard Work
At the end of the day, we need to remember that the web has changed a lot in the last couple of years. It is more social and personalized than ever. In order to succeed online, we need to be as honest, transparent and social as possible. We will need to ensure that no stones are left unturned in our efforts towards viral marketing. Using all the social networks effectively, rewarding loyal customers, surprising new customers with discounts when they do not expect it, requesting for feedback and recommendations from clients and customers and asking them to refer their friends to you are all ways to increase your success at viral marketing.
Personalized searches on Google highlight the importance of web reviews and recommendations. This is yet another reasons why you should consider negative feedback and reviews as opportunities for public relation efforts. It may take a little effort on your side, but viral marketing is certainly not out of reach. If a little effort is going to pay huge dividends, then a little extra effort will take us a long way ahead.
