Tools & Strategies to Boost Ecommerce Sales in 2022

Whether you are just starting an online store or have reached the point of maintaining a well-established customer base, it’s important to stay updated with the most current ecommerce marketing trends and strategies for your business.

Any digital marketing plan should be driven with a structural approach to reach potential audiences very easily. The most effective and easiest way to reach audiences is through paid online advertising. But all the marketing efforts have to be supported by a comprehensive list of tools to improve your online business marketing and performance. Let’s find out what are the best tools for different stages of ecommerce marketing and advertising.

According to eMarketer, the share of ecommerce sales of total global retail sales will hit 23% by 2023.
ecommerce businesses must be able to create, edit and publish stores without or with little coding. So, here are some of the best content management systems that let you build online stores in a jiffy.

WordPress
WordPress is an online open-source stage to create your ecommerce website. It is one of the most used platforms today.

40% of the websites across the globe now run on WordPress.

For a non-technical person, it's an ideal tool that can be adapted rapidly.
Some of its astounding highlights include:

• Multiple free and paid website themes
• Effective free and paid plugins
• Easy content management
• Easy SEO to rank the website
• 100% support and assistance
• High site security

Its Freelancer plan is available at Rs.280/month (billed yearly). You get:

• Free Domain for One Year
• Best-in-class hosting
• Remove WordPress.com Ads
• Collect payments
• Unlimited Email Support
• Live Chat Support
• Earn ad revenue
• Upload videos
• Google analytics integration

Joomla
With 70+ languages, it is one of the most popular CMS platforms in the world. The community members provide valuable support at no cost. It has the "One Click Version Update" feature to keep the software up to date. It also provides over 7500 extensions to extend your website’s functionality.
Joomla offers a free version where users can create and host websites on their own servers or a Joomla subdomain. Professional plans start at $199/year per user.

Wix
This site builder offers a high degree of personalization in terms of branding modifications and customization. SMBs can create beautiful websites without spending a fortune. Wix’s premium plans offer ecommerce functionalities.
Wix’s ecommerce website plans start at $225/month while their Freelancer plan (Unlimited bandwidth, 10GB storage space) costs $185/month -- both plans are billed yearly.

Improving Customer retention and ecommerce Sales

The following ways can help you bring repeat business and grow custom-base.

1. Do email marketing:

ActiveCampaign

• Gives a 40-day free trial
• Cost of the lowest monthly plan for up to 2500 email contacts: $61
• Deliverability rate: 91.1%

It is known as one of the best email automation tools. It also allows you to send text messages, build landing pages and create A/B testing campaigns. It gives you a CRM feature, in-depth reporting and lots of integration options as well.

Constant Contact

• Gives a 60-day free trial (for people in the US and Canada). For the rest, it is a 30-day free trial.
• Cost of the lowest monthly plan for up to 2500 email contacts: $45.
• Deliverability rate: 91.1%

GetResponse

• Gives a 30-day free trial of its premium features. It has a free plan that lets you send unlimited newsletters to max 500 email contacts.
• Cost of the lowest monthly plan for up to 2500 email contacts: $25.
• Deliverability rate: 83.8%

Go for this if you want something more than email marketing. GetResponse offers features like sales funnels, webinars, A/B testing landing pages, and more.

AWeber

• Its free plan lets you send up to 3000 mails/month to max 500 email subscribers.
• Cost of the lowest monthly plan for up to 2500 email contacts: $29.99.
• Deliverability rate: 77.6%

ConvertKit

• Its free plan allows max 1000 email contacts.
• Cost of the lowest monthly plan for up to 3000 email contacts: $49.
• Deliverability rate: 96.3%

It has some good landing page design templates but limited email templates. Good for creating simple texts and image-based emails.

Mailchimp

• Its free plan includes up to 2000 mails/day to 2000 contacts. Max monthly send: 10,000 emails.
• Cost of the lowest monthly plan for up to 2500 email contacts: $31.
• Lets you create sign-up forms, build landing pages, send out email broadcasts.
• Deliverability rate: 86.9%

Mailerlite

• Its free plan offers 12,000 mails/monthly for up to 1000 email subscribers.
• Gives a 14-day free trial of its premium features.
• Cost of the lowest monthly plan for up to 2500 email contacts: $15.
• Lets you create sign-up forms, build landing pages, send out email broadcasts.
• Deliverability rate: 96.3%

It is one of the few free tools that let you create free email automation sequences.
It is an easy to use platform with a good user interface. Excellent for beginners. If you don't need advanced automation options, you can try this tool.

Sendinblue

• Its free plan lets you send 300 free mails/day. No limit on email contacts.
• The Lite plan includes a monthly sending limit of 10,000 and costs $25.
• Deliverability rate: 96.3%

Every other email marketing platform has a monthly subscription. However, this email tool charges you based on the number of emails you send. So if you send out relatively fewer emails and do not want to pay out a subscription, go for it.
Source for deliverability rates: email tool tester

How to decide which email marketing platform you should use?

The features that come with all the above plans vary between the different providers. So the pricing totally depends upon what features you want for your business. So check out the plans and their features before making your decision.

You can take this short survey created by Metics Media to get recommendations on choosing an appropriate email marketing campaign:

2. Offer rewards to repeat customers

It pays well to reward your customers with offers to maintain their loyalty. This can pay off handsomely in the long run.

3. Send our weekly newsletter or updates

This will help maintain a relationship with your existing customers and keep them coming back.

4. Maintain a strong social media presence

Tools you can use for social media marketing:

1. Zoho Social
2. Agorapulse
3. Hootsuite
4. Buffer
5. Buzzsumo

Zoho Social
This social media marketing software includes a bunch of exciting features like — smart scheduling, repeat post, bulk scheduling, collaboration, and interesting visual reports.
In addition, you can track brand reviews, mentions and brand keywords and more.

• It offers a 15-day free trial.
• Cost of lowest plan: $12.11/month. It includes 7 channels for 1 brand.

Agorapulse
Use it to publish, engage, listen, and collaborate with your social networks. It has a built-in CRM to group your audience into segments. It lets you add internal notes to give your team context before contact.

• It offers a free plan for individuals just getting started. You get 3 social profiles and 1 user
• It offers a 15-day free trial.
• Cost of lowest plan: $99/month. It includes 2 users, 10 social profiles.

Hootsuite
One of the best known social media marketing platforms, it offers post scheduling, social monitoring, in-depth analytics, and a lot more features. It is also quite an easy-to-use platform.

• It offers a 30-day free trial.
• Cost of lowest plan: $25.78/month. That includes 1 user, 10 social profiles.

Buffer
This social media post scheduling platform offers a plethora of features including analytics, insights & reporting. You can create a landing page and a shopping grid as well that help your Instagram audience buy your products.

• It offers a 14-day free trial of its premium features.
• It has a free plan where you can manage up to 3 channels for 1 user. Schedule up to 10 posts per social channel.
• The lowest plan starts at $5/month per social channel for 1 user (billed annually).

Buzzsumo
It is a great tool to build your content creation and distribution strategy! Get to know what's working and what's not by looking at your competitors. Research similar articles in your niche and see what gets the most shares. Post publishing the article, you can even find relevant influencers to share the article with.

• It offers a 30-day free trial of its premium features.
• Its free plan gives you 10 free searches/month and a max 1000/per year.
• The lowest plan starts at 99/month featuring unlimited monthly searches for up to 5 users.

5. Improve customer engagement

Customer service tools for ecommerce businesses:

1. SnatchBot
2. Zendesk
3. Yotpo
4. Intercom
5. Segment

SnatchBot
It lets you create smart chatbots for multichannel messaging. Its omnichannel platform provides robust administrative features such as action buttons, payment processing, translations, and email extractions.
It supports the entire lifecycle of the bot, from developing to deploying and further monitoring.

• Its free plan includes SnatchBot branding, access to all the basic features and a community help center.
• Pro-plan for advanced features starts at $24/month.

Key Benefits:

• Easy-to-use platform
• No coding skills required
• Build feature-rich bots in minutes
• Highly secured

Alternatives to SnatchBot:

Aivo: The AI-powered chatbot platform allows your business to respond to customers in real-time with either text or voice. It can also be programmed to recognise the various rules that apply to each channel and adapt to provide the appropriate auto-responses. Aivo service rate starts at $240 per month for 1,000 monthly sessions. It also offers a 30-day free trial.

EBI.AT: With AI assistants that go far beyond your basic FAQ bot, EBI.AT creates novel chat and voice experiences across all channels. Delve as deeply as you want into conversational AI. Their AI assistants assist people with a variety of tasks, such as finding recipes, booking appointments or tickets, and arranging travel plans on the fly.

Zendesk
It offers customizable tools that build customer service portals, knowledge base and online communities.
The tool provides a personalized experience to each customer across channels with automation and AI-powered bots.
The basic plan for growth starts from $19 per agent/month billed annually.
Its most popular plan is Suite Professional, $99per agent/month billed annually. Some of the unique features of the plan include;

• Industry-leading ticketing system
• Messaging across web, mobile and social
• AI-powered automated answers - UP TO 500
• Conversation routing based on agent skill

Yotpo
It offers a full suite of solutions for customer reviews, SMS marketing, referrals, loyalty and visual marketing.
It is one of the best user-generated content marketing platforms. Marketers can leverage content throughout the buyer's journey to gain greater brand awareness and sales using the company's enterprise technology and integrated solution.
It is built specifically for eCommerce stores and is scalable to a wide variety of online businesses.

• It has a free plan that gives up to 50 orders/month.
• The growth plan starts at $15/month.

Intercom
It is a customer communications platform with bots, apps, product tours, email, messages, and a help center. Solutions offered by Intercom;

• Conversational Support: To provide personalized support to the customers.
• Conversational Engagement: To attract new customers with targeted messages, email campaigns, and product tours.
• Conversational Marketing: To convert website visitors into customers.
• Intercom offers a 14-day free trial.
• For very small businesses the paid plan starts with $67 per month (billed annually).

Segment
It collects data from web and mobile apps to give a complete data toolkit through which brands can understand their customers better.
It unifies customers’ touchpoints across all platforms and channels. The tool can easily track and collect data of the events such as email opened, products views or added, and checkout initiated.

Key Benefits:

• Organized customer data management
• Effective data to plan marketing campaigns
• Insightful customer analytics
• Its free plan includes 1,000 visitors/mo, 2 Sources and 300+ Integrations.
• The team plan starts at $120 per month. There is custom pricing for the business plan

To increase ecommerce sales, we learnt about many marketing tools. Now that you know about these ecommerce marketing automation tools, we talk about the next phase of marketing solutions that can help grow ecommerce sales.

6. Personalize the experience by creating multiple landing pages

Tools for optimizing your website for better performance

1. Hotjar
2. Google Search Console
3. Ahrefs
4. Kwfinder
5. Google Analytics

Hotjar:
It is a conversion optimization tool. It understands, consolidates, and communicates user needs to you. It provides you with a real-time visual record of your visitors’ actions and behaviours on-site.
Hotjar uses interactive heatmaps to uncover insights from the clicks and actions. Besides, you get:

• Actual video recordings of visitors’ journey
• It has a forever free plan up to 35 daily session captures.
• The pricing starts at $29/month.

Alternatives to Hotjar

RealEye: It is an online webcam eye-tracking platform for optimizing UX. It basically lets you follow your user’s eyes and see exactly what they see while looking at your website. Uncover user experience by combining this data with the tool’s heat maps and analytics.
RealEye offers a free trial. Moving onto pricing, the plans start at $29/month ranging to $59.00/project. RealEye is available for Cloud, Windows, Mac and Linux.
Session Replay by Zarget: This CRO tool helps you optimize the underperforming web pages and maximize the conversions. Find out why visitors are not converting or not performing the actions that you want them to do. Use Zarget at a pricing of $15/month.

Google Search Console:
It helps your business be found on Google for the correct search query. It also displays the errors that Google finds while crawling your website/app.

Search console shows you which terms lead people to your Google search result pages. Using this data, understand which pages are working best and what you can do to improve them further.

It’s a free service offered by Google.

Ahrefs
It shows you all the keywords that are bringing traffic to your competitors. Identify the SEO mistakes on your own website and how to fix them. Get automatic reports on your website backlinks and suggestions on ranking improvements.

Website auditing, competitor analysis, keyword research - all in one place.

• Its free trial gives access to all features of the plan for 7 days
• The lowest plan starts at $99 for 1 user

Kwfinder
It helps you find long-tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. So you can tap on the opportunities that your competitors are missing. The tool helps you with keyword analysis, showing potential keywords that you can rank for, their global search volume, as well as the difficulty to rank for them.

• The basic plan starts at $48/month with a 48-hour money-back guarantee.

Google Analytics:
Learn where your website visitors are coming from, which page are they bouncing off. Know the demographics of your visitors such as age range, gender. That way you can target the right demographics and platforms to bring in relevant traffic.

• The basic features are free. The advanced features, also known as Google Analytics 360, cost $150,000/year.

Watch a video on how to connect your website to Google Analytics

Bonus: Usually, we use pixels to track people visiting our website, social media pages and web properties. But what if you want to track people who visit someone else's website? So, here are some cool pixel integration tools that also double as a URL shortener.

PixelMe:
It is a URL shortener that includes retargeting pixels in any link you share.
For example, using PixelMe, you can add your Facebook pixel to any URL. This allows you to get Facebook pixel firings inside your own account even when people visit other websites than your own!

With PixelMe:
- track people who visited your landing page events page, even if they didn't sign up
- track people that clicked on an article you shared written by someone else
- track people that click on your blog article

You can then retarget all these people with Ads specific to their interests.

• Its starter pack is available at $29/month.

Switchy.io : It allows marketers to create custom links, add retargeting Pixels, UTMs tags, and much more. Their monthly plan starts at $47 that gives you up to 10,000 clicks, unlimited links, unlimited Pixels.

Pixela.io : It lets you generate tracking links by embedding retargeting pixels. It can be integrated into Adwords, LinkedIn, Quora, Pinterest and more. It offers a 30-day free trial for up to 500 clicks.

We learnt about many ecommerce business & marketing solutions tools. Now we follow this up with paid ads and remarketing efforts to reinforce the brand messaging. Give extra value to repeat customers with offers, and bring strategy to improve your cost per average value.

7. Focus on customer acquisition with online advertising tools

Platforms for online advertising:

Facebook and Instagram: You can run ads for any objective and even create custom audience campaigns or remarketing ads using your saved audience lists.
Google: You can run targeted shopping ads on Google search and display ads as well as remarketing campaigns for your saved audience list.
Amazon: Ads appear not only as sponsored search results on the platform but also as display ads on third-party sites. In any case, if you have a business listed with them, it makes more sense to use their ads for better visibility.

Pinterest: It is a must-have if your target audience matches its largest demographic of middle-to-upper-class women. You can advertise your products or services using promoted pins.

Mediaqart: It is an online automated advertising platform for businesses to run paid ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Google from a single platform. Instead of using different platforms and multiple objectives, you can use Mediaqart to simplify and optimize your advertising.

Recommended Reading

How to Create a Free Google Website For Your Business
How to Increase Sales with Google Ads
A Guide to Facebook Pixel Events and Campaign Optimization