Advanced Guide to Marketing your eCommerce startup

Once you’ve established a startup you need to have a handle on core metrics to not run into unnecessary losses.

Estimating a Conversion Rate

You need to be able to wrap your head around basic conversion terms. For instance you need to know conversion rates on your website and other channels of customer acquisition. It’s important to measure newsletter signups. What’s the traffic you get and how much of that traffic is signing up. Divide the later by the former to arrive at the number.

Next find conversion rates from trial or newsletter subscribers to paid customers. If there are 100 new sign ups per month with 10 people becoming paid customers within the month your conversion rate is a high 10%.

Keep track of these numbers month to month. Also find the lifetime value of the customer.

If you know how many of your leads convert and how much those conversions generate for your startup, you can assign values to goal completions like newsletter signups. $1,500 per month from your newsletter is a lot more indicative of success than 100 new newsletter signups.

Set a Budget

Budgeting is necessary to understand how long until operations go smooth. If it’s possible to bootstrap the whole thing and so on. There’s a lot of expenditure and the one we’re concerned with right now is how much money can you spend for marketing your startup.

Inbound marketing is way cheaper but doesn’t come free either.

A mix of inbound and outbound strategies could be the best way forward.

Perhaps your blog being the most powerful tool to date and you want to invest 40% of the budget on it. Or maybe you want to spend 35% of the budget to develop a new eBook or online course. Just be sure you have the logistics settled before you start spending (or you might just lose your hat).

Social Media Investment and choice

Social media is often a hard nut to crack but is a popular medium to bring traffic, reach influencers and get more people know about you.

Here are a few tricks to get the most out of it.

Start by choosing the best networks for you. If you’re food startup- Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook are a must. Twitter not so much. A SaaS. You can’t do without twitter and LinkedIN. As I hinted at before, social media traffic can be elusive and it’s better to engage your strengths at mastering and getting the most out of two or three rather than getting a profile everywhere.

Remember there are millions of accounts getting created on Facebook everyday. A lot of them business and on similar social networks. Just because you’ve a presence there doesn’t translate to traffic and leads from that network. It’s where you have your presence built is where you get those from.

Also note that each social network has different workings. The community is different and so is how they consume information. Reddit is often referred to as a very guarded network and detests spammers. Unlike twitter, here you can’t just schedule various messages every day. The content you share in Reddit has to be specific and unique to the categories you choose. Reddit, like other networks, requires a slower approach. You can’t just jump on, run some ads and expect people to upvote all your content. Be mindful of the network and community you are trying to reach, it may not be in the social space you first thought.According to Dan Zarella).

Facebook:

  • Saturdays are best.
  • 12 p.m. EST is the best time to share.
  • 0.5 posts per day is the best frequency.

Twitter:

  • 5 p.m. EST is the best time to get a retweet.
  • 1 to 4 link tweets per hour is the best frequency.
  • Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays are best.
  • 6 a.m. EST, 12 p.m. EST and 6 p.m. EST are the best times to tweet in terms of clicks.

Set Up a Blog

Setting up a blog is the simplest thing ever thanks to ton of tutorials and the evolution of different CMSes. It’s a matter of downloading the software, uploading it to your server and following the setup instructions. WordPress, for example, is free and offers many amazing plugins. One for example, is Yoast SEO. Start by adding a SEO plugin that will help Google and other search engines locate and rank your content. (Other great plugins include Akismet, Calendar, and featured posts) Then, setup the basics like blog categories and tags.