Category: Blog

From personalization to social media store integration, take your marketing to the next level with these top five digital marketing tips for eCommerce stores with waterfall consumer financing. 

1. Personalize Your Customer’s Experience & Introduce Waterfall Consumer Financing

Personalization is the name of the game in the modern eCommerce, or me-Commerce, environment. Every aspect of the online shopping experience can be personalized, from showcasing customer names when browsing to sending birthday coupons, promoting items related to their interests, and encouraging feedback to hear what they have to say. Double-down your personalization efforts with waterfall consumer financing from ChargeAfter. This financing plugin provides your shoppers with access to lenders that tailor loan plans according to their shopping needs. Depending on their orders, customers can receive comprehensive financial coverage without having to go through credit checks. Furthermore, these payment plans come with no interest on loans. This encourages purchases while also ensuring that every customer’s unique shopping requirements are met when they arrive at the checkout. 

2. Invest in Public Relations and Distribution

Public relations management is crucial to eCommerce success as digital magazines can attract new customers to websites and encourage purchases. From blog articles featuring on the best journalism sites to backlinks to your store via social media content on news platforms, you can leverage the power of public relations to improve your digital marketing efforts. Distribution channels also include guest posting, which is a great way to drive new traffic to your website of the audience of another popular platform as well as grow your SEO results. 

3. Integrate Your Store With Social Media

Your eCommerce store should not only sell your products via a website but also utilize social media’s selling platforms for greater revenue potential. Meta’s primary platforms Facebook and Instagram enable product selling via their business profiles and pages. You can embed your store into every aspect of your socials to diversify your sales channels as well as attract audience members who are returning customers. Customer retention is essential to eCommerce success, further emphasizing the need to integrate your store with social media. 

4. Build a Better Email Database

An email database is essential for driving return visits to your website as someone who is willing to provide their email address for notifications is particularly interested in your products or services. In this day and age, it is vital that you inspire email sign-ups with beneficial lead magnets like free resources or discounts available upon sign up. To integrate a successful email marketing campaign, you need to start with building a better email database. This database will become one of the cornerstones of your customer loyalty and retention strategy. 

5. Take Advantage of Video Marketing

Video content, from long-form YouTube videos to short-form reels, has become a mainstay in the modern digital marketing world for eCommerce stores. No matter what products or services you sell, you should take advantage of video marketing to diversify your audience base, attract new visitors, and build a unique presence on video content platforms. You can incorporate influencers to build your video content, collaborating with popular social media users to tap into their audiences. They can become the spokespeople for your brand, driving great traffic through consumer advocacy. You should also have branded video content on your pages that are search engine optimized to further your reach. To double down on your video marketing efforts, be sure to post your content on Pinterest as this platform is a highly beneficial but underused sales avenue. 

Personalize your customers’ experiences, build your database, and take advantage of more of these five digital marketing tips for eCommerce stores with waterfall consumer financing. 

Email is far from being a dated communication strategy for businesses. In fact, email marketing is one of the most powerful tools in an eCommerce store’s arsenal of marketing tools. In this article, we explore email marketing in more detail and discuss how you can use it alongside consumer financing to secure more sales. 

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing refers to the process whereby businesses encourage sales through emailers sent to an existing email database. An email database is made up of all customers, potential consumers, and leads that have supplied an online store with their email via several lead magnets used during the marketing process. These lead magnets often include pop-ups asking for customers to sign up to newsletters to receive discounts, free resources that consumers can access after providing their email addresses, and post-purchase emails asking customers to provide their addresses for future notifications and specials. Tapping into one’s existing email database through email marketing is critical to eCommerce success as businesses can attract individuals who are less motivated by social media advertising and other promotional consumer touchpoints. 

How Consumer Financing Supports Email Marketing

To be a successful eCommerce store, one should integrate email marketing into the brand’s holistic marketing strategy. That said, email marketing will not work alone. Email marketing is bound to bring customers to the website, but there needs to be a reason to buy beyond an appealing email, good prices, and quality customer support. eCommerce platforms can go above and beyond to support their shoppers using consumer financing from ChargeAfter. Consumer financing is a means of providing your customers with immediate access to zero-interest loans via a network of trustworthy lenders. ChargeAfter is a leading consumer financing partner that can deliver this solution with great return on investment potential. The addition of consumer financing from ChargeAfter on your website will secure more sales as a consumer’s shopping experience is made easier than ever before. 

3 Steps to Ensure Sales With Email Marketing

Considering the combination of email marketing and consumer financing at checkout should bring success, let’s take a closer look at 3 steps to ensure that these efforts lead to valuable customer conversions. 

1. Develop a Comprehensive Plan

Most email marketing failures can be chalked up to a lack of planning. In today’s day and age of online shopping, eCommerce platforms must formulate clear and concise plans for a profitable return on investment. An email marketing plan should include a clear audience definition to ensure you are sending the right information to the right people in a way that will grab their attention. The email marketing plan should also establish a frequency output and goals to assess success. The frequency will depend on your existing analytics and goals will help you analyze future analytics for email marketing optimization.

2. Design Better Looking Emails

Email marketing has become visual, and the best eCommerce store’s go above and beyond to curate beautiful-looking emailers for their customers. Gone are the days where a paragraph or two of written content will do the trick. Today, emails need to express a narrative. They need your logo, colorful pictures, bold headlines, clickable buttons, and a variety of design elements that attract consumer interest. To begin designing better emails, consider using Mailchimp.

3. Highlight Added Value

From discounts to consumer financing, customers are more likely to purchase from eCommerce stores that offer added value. You should make your added value offerings clear in your emails to grab the attention of consumers. You could have a big discount value highlighted in big and bold colors at the top of your email. Maybe reconsider the positioning of your subject line, using this key call to action as a selling point to showcase your added value offerings. Either way, you should make it clear that you provide value beyond the competition. 

Email marketing is a powerful strategy to diversify your sales channels and encourage more conversions, and you can utilize consumer financing to take advantage of the revenue generation potential of a solid email marketing strategy.

Want to learn more? Reach out to us here.

In the modern digital marketing world, eCommerce stores need to leverage new tools and solutions to increase sales and stay ahead of the competition. A combination of one or more marketing tools, including online financing, SEO, SEM marketing, influencer marketing, and loyalty programs helps eCommerce platforms drive profitable return on investment for their marketing initiatives. In this article, we discuss these 5 best marketing tools for online businesses and how they can support your eCommerce platform. 

1. Buy Now Pay Later at Checkout

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) financing is a powerful checkout integration that can encourage sales during consumers online shopping experience. ChargeAfter provides eCommerce businesses with cost-effective and reliable BNPL solutions. They work by giving a brand’s consumers access to a network of reputable lenders capable of financing their orders. This system requires no credit checks and repayment plans come with no interest on installations. This is an extremely beneficial selling point for consumers, that you can market on your online store. The ability to source online financing at the push of a button, and without having to seek assistance from a third-party financial service provider makes this one of the most efficient and effective new marketing tools for eCommerce. 

2. SEO for Web and Content

If you sell products via a website, then it is essential that you optimize your site for search engines. SEO is a crucial strategy for appearing higher in the search rankings, resulting in an increase in organic traffic to your website. This increase will likely mean greater sales as more users are actively engaging with your content. All of your website content pages, product pages, and social media platforms should include specific search terms to make your content more discoverable. You can use this resource to explore the best ways of developing an SEO strategy that attracts eager shoppers. 

3. SEM Marketing

Search engine marketing involves increasing online visibility through paid advertising efforts. Typical types of SEM marketing include Google Ads campaigns and PPC advertising. This marketing tool is highly effective as it is an instant way of appearing first for specific Google search terms or displaying ads directly on other websites for immediate results. The immediacy of this marketing tool is the key driving force behind its use as a valuable sales-driven approach to marketing. It is a far faster means of increasing online visibility than more traditional SEO approaches, meaning the combination should yield a great response of organic and paid traffic. 

4. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing refers to the process of using powerful social media figures to advocate for a brand’s products or services. This particular marketing tool involves collaborating with reputable social media icons that are willing to share product recommendations with their existing and extensive audiences. As a more promotional form of user-generated content, influencer marketing appears more authentic to audiences, yielding valuable sales that require less advertising budget than other means of promotion such as social media marketing and SEM marketing. 

5. Loyalty and Reward Programs

Customer retention is more cost-effective than customer acquisition. Hence, online stores need to consider loyalty and reward programs that increase customer lifetime value. This is a highly profitable marketing tool as it can long-term sustainable growth with an audience of interested buyers. These shoppers are more encouraged to browse and buy from one’s online store as there is an element of added value driving the purchase decision.

The combination of these 5 marketing tools for online businesses will lead to greater sales as marketing costs are optimized for more valuable conversions. If your business has not yet implemented one or more of these marketing tools, then now has never been a better time to do so!

Instagram has grown from a social media app to a viable sales platform in a short space of time, and if you are not taking advantage of its ability to push products to consumers then you are missing out on a massive touchpoint for revenue generation. In this article, we discuss why you should use Instagram as an eCommerce sales platform with waterfall consumer financing to maximize your revenue potential.

Why You Should Be Using Instagram

The value of using Instagram as a sales platform lies in the popularity of the app itself. Furthermore, the number of people worldwide that are now using Instagram to shop as opposed to other digital channels like Google Shopping. According to authoritative sources, “130 million Instagram users tap on shopping posts every month”. That is a massive figure, and if you are not using Instagram as a shopping avenue then you are missing out on a huge part of your potential consumer base. 

Furthermore, Instagram has made adding shopping features to a business profile extremely simple. The process is far less complicated than setting up a Google Shopping channel through Google Merchant Center or uploading your product catalog onto your Facebook page. The platform is extremely well-optimized, giving eCommerce owners efficient access to the benefits of using Instagram as a sales platform. 

How Waterfall Consumer Financing Encourages Instagram Sales

Waterfall consumer financing is a powerful web integration that can encourage conversions of consumers that arrive on an eCommerce store from Instagram. ChargeAfter is a leading provider of waterfall consumer financing solutions that businesses big and small partner with to leverage the benefits of online financing. The solution itself is a plugin that appears on a website’s checkout page, allowing all consumers to access it when arriving at their online shopping carts and initiating the checkout process. ChargeAfter’s waterfall consumer financing solution can give an eCommerce store’s customers access to instant loans with no additional interest at the push of a button. This is done by connecting the consumer with ChargeAfter’s network of lenders on the fly and providing repayment plans without the need for credit checks. The process ensures that consumers stay on the eCommerce site for longer and do not have to deal with third-party financial service providers. It streamlines their shopping experience, leading to an increase in conversions and Instagram sales. 

How to Use Instagram as a Sales Platform Best

Many brands have turned to Instagram as a sales platform to tap into new audiences and broaden their consumer base. But, not many of them are doing it effectively. There are several ways that you can get ahead of the competition when using Instagram as a sales platform beyond introducing waterfall consumer financing into your website. 

1. Utilize Shopping Tags

Shopping tags help Instagram’s algorithm categorize your products and send them to users that may be interested in the specific or similar categories. You can add tags to just about every type of Instagram content, and it also allows your customers to easily browse more items in your catalog without having to jump through various user experience hurdles. 

2. Encourage User-Generated Content

User-generated content on Instagram is essentially a new review strategy that can put an eCommerce platform in good stead for increasing sales. This type of content refers to content that is posted or shared by customers who have had pleasant experiences with your brand. They become brand advocates for your store, encouraging their friends and family to buy from you as well. This can have an extremely positive domino effect on revenue generation via Instagram. 

3. Collaborate With Influencers

Beyond the general public, influencers are powerful individuals that can advocate for your brand. You can collaborate with influencers to launch new products, discounts, and other strategies, associating your brand with theirs and enticing their existing following to check out your store. 

Instagram continues to grow in popularity and has quickly become a powerful sales platform for eCommerce businesses. Using Instagram and waterfall consumer financing, you can tap into new audiences and increase revenue generation. 

Want to learn more? Reach out to us here.

Analytics are essential to making strategic eCommerce decisions, and business owners should work closely with marketing teams to make profitable decisions based on data. In this article, we discuss marketing analytics, the types of marketing analytics, and how online financing can support successful decisions based on marketing analytics.

What Are Marketing Analytics?

Marketing analytics refers to data collected on critical consumer touchpoints within a sales funnel. These analytics paint a clear picture of the buyer’s journey and give eCommerce businesses insights that prove critical to making profitable marketing decisions. Marketing analytics should be collected and reported on monthly to ensure that all eCommerce marketing initiatives are backed by strategic insight. 

Types of Marketing Analytics

There are several types of marketing analytics that eCommerce stores can assess to make strategic marketing decisions. While there are often too many to track simultaneously, marketing teams can prioritize relevant marketing metrics to track analytics that will help grow the particular eCommerce store. For example, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) businesses should keep a close watch on abandoned cart rates as these can offer valuable insight on the reasons why shoppers turn away from their stores right before making a purchase. Below are a few key marketing metrics that will yield valuable marketing analytics for online store optimization:

• Descriptive analytics
• Predictive analytics
• Prescriptive analytics

You can learn more about these types of analytics here.

How Online Financing Supports Marketing Analytics

With these marketing metrics in mind, let’s take a look at how online financing can support decisions made based on marketing analytics. 

1. Improved Customer Lifetime Value

eCommerce marketing teams can assess customer lifetime values to determine how profitable their customers are for the business. Customer lifetime value refers to the total spend an individual customer will make with an online store across all of their purchases. Improving customer lifetime values is a sign of positive customer retention, a profitable marketing strategy that requires attention. Online financing from ChargeAfter can help increase customer lifetime values as it provides many important consumer benefits. Customers are enticed by online financing as it provides an easy way to shop online, encouraging them to return to an online store to purchase again. It does this by giving them access to on-demand financing at the push of a button without credit checks and zero-interest repayment plans. 

2. Longer Time Spent on Site

eCommerce platforms should consider the time that customers spend on their sites. The longer a potential customer spends on a site, the more likely they will make a purchase. The time spent on site can provide insight into the user experience, the relevancy of branded content, the attractiveness of discounts and products, and more. To increase customer time spent on-site during checkout, integrate online financing from ChargeAfter. This integration gives customers access to instant financing options without having to leave your store to consult their bank or third-party lender. This can lead to greater sales during a business month. 

3. Higher Conversion Rates

Conversions are critical to the success of eCommerce stores. Marketing teams must look into the current conversion rates and determine avenues to grow these throughout the year. One such method is integrating online financing from ChargeAfter. The platform encourages consumers to shop as it provides greater financial aid than alternative platforms. Furthermore, the integration is easy-to-use. eCommerce platforms that integrate online financing will also yield more impactful marketing analytics as ChargeAfter’s round-the-clock customer service and data insights are a complimentary add-on to partnership packages. 

Marketing analytics are essential to making better business decisions in 2022. Online store owners should consider key marketing metrics and the insights gathered from analytics to drive success moving forward. With the inclusion of online financing from ChargeAfter, eCommerce stores will see improved customer lifetime values, longer times spent on site, and higher conversion rates. 

Want to learn more? Reach out to us here.

Another year has come and gone, and 2022 will bring with it new growth opportunities for eCommerce business owners. Marketing trends, web integrations, and consumer-centric considerations will drive success for online stores that return to business this year. In this article, we share several tips on how to grow your business in 2022. We cover consumer financing, SEO strategies, and more ways to offer richer shopping experiences. Implement one or more of these tips to see profitable growth in the first quarter of the new year and beyond. 

1. Integrate Leading Consumer Financing

It is vitally important that, as an online store, you offer consumer financing or consumer lending options. Consumer financing is quickly becoming a mainstay checkout feature of the best eCommerce businesses. But, it is not enough to partner with any old consumer financing company. In 2022, you should consider partnering with the leading consumer financing companies on the market. ChargeAfter offers a first-class consumer financing service to eCommerce businesses big and small that wish to leverage the benefits of online financing. The service differs from traditional bank lending as consumers can instantly tap into the company’s extensive network of lenders without credit checks. Furthermore, ChargeAfter lenders offer repayment plans with no additional interest charges. These benefits, coupled with comprehensive technical support and data-driven recommendations, ensure ChargeAfter offers a stand-out service for eCommerce partners. The integration of consumer financing with ChargeAfter will promote sales at checkout. 

2. Develop Stronger SEO Strategies

All online stores need an SEO strategy. Search engine optimization (SEO) ensures that your website is visible to shoppers browsing Google and other search engines. With a solid SEO strategy, eCommerce businesses can appear on the first page of the search results for specific keywords commonly entered by consumers looking for certain products or services. You may have an SEO strategy in place, but it’s time to develop a stronger one as the new year brings new opportunities to leverage powerful Google features. You should register your business with Google My Business even if your store is completely online. This will help shoppers closer to your operational location find you quicker through location-based SEO. You should also sign up with Google Merchant Center and link your catalog with Google Shopping. This ensures that your shop is visible on Google when shoppers are browsing for specific products, also giving them the ability to purchase directly from Google. This can speed up your sales funnel, leading to profitable growth.

3. Optimize for Omnichannel Marketing

Having a website and a Facebook page is the bare minimum for running a successful eCommerce business. In 2022, you must develop an omnichannel marketing strategy. Omnichannel marketing involves creating consistent brand messaging across a variety of platforms to leverage sales and brand loyalty at every consumer touchpoint. You should utilize email marketing, consumer financing at checkout, branded drop shipping, social media advertising, Google advertising, and more. The more places that your brand is visible, the better. 

4. Put Your Customers at the Center of Business

Don’t just say that you put your customers first, actually deliver on this promise. As an eCommerce platform, you should pride yourself in positive customer reviews and showcase this social proof on your website and social media platforms. You should deploy customer review collection strategies to acquire as much customer insight as possible, and then make decisions to mitigate the frequency of negative reviews. Rather than hiding or deleting negative reviews, respond to them timely with sincerity and put a customer service representative on the case to resolve the issue. This is one example of how you can show customers that they represent the core of your business operations. There are many more ways to put customers at the center of your business. 

Grow your eCommerce business in 2022 with consumer financing, stronger SEO strategies, omnichannel marketing, and a consumer-centric operational model. These are the key tips to implement in the new year for a profitable first quarter.

Want to learn more? Reach out to us here.

If your eCommerce store does not have an SEO strategy in place then you are missing opportunities to attract new customers daily. Moving into 2022, you must work with your marketing team to adopt an effective SEO strategy as it is critical to your organic click-through rates and online visibility. In this article, we offer several SEO tips for eCommerce success and suggest how online financing can support your strategy. 

Utilize Competitive Keywords

Keywords are a cornerstone of a successful SEO strategy. You must be using keywords on every web page so that Google can track and report on your SEO, potentially putting you higher up the search results so that you can attract new customers. Each piece of content that you write should be created around keywords that consumers search Google to find answers to. For example, if you sell electronics then you should consider keywords that consumers often type into the Google search engine when looking for electronics. Some keywords could be “electronic products for sale”, “the best phones to buy”, “70-inch TVs for sale”. These long-tail keywords can help your web pages and products appear when consumers search these terms. If you want to know how to do keyword research, then check out this helpful resource. Once you have your keywords ready to deploy, then install the Yoast SEO plugin on your website and follow their instructions on how to optimize every page of your website for SEO. 

Use Google’s Shopping Features

SEO goes beyond keywords, and you can improve the SEO of your eCommerce platform by using the range of Google Shopping features available to you. Specifically, the Google Merchant Center allows you to pull your product catalog into Google Shopping so that searchers will see your products as they browse for similar products or specific items in your catalog. The Google Shopping feature doubles down on your SEO efforts, prioritizing your products over other eCommerce platforms that are not using Google Merchant Center. 

How to Optimize Checkout With SEO and Online Financing

ChargeAfter offers a powerful online financing tool that gives your consumers access to instant financing options at the push of a button during checkout. Your consumers can access ChargeAfter’s extensive network of lenders without having to apply for a credit check and receive repayment plans with zero interest. Therefore, they can shop easily and quickly on your eCommerce platform without having to procure the support of their financial service provider. This streamlines the user experience, playing in favor of Google’s SEO algorithms. Furthermore, there is an opportunity to further optimize your checkout process with online financing by deploying keywords on a brand new landing page. This landing page can serve as a runway to your store and facilitate an efficient sales funnel to checkout. Using keywords that center around getting the best value when shopping, securing financing easily, and eliminating the need to use third-party financial service providers, you can attract customers with a specific interest in the benefits of online financing. This will improve your online visibility for those benefits and attract customers to this new landing page. 

SEO is essential to a successful eCommerce business, and you should be thinking about how to leverage an effective SEO strategy so that you can attract new shoppers during the festive season and into the new year. By utilizing competitive keywords, using Google’s powerful shopping features, and optimizing your checkout and other landing pages with online financing and related keywords, you can build an SEO strategy that works for your business and grows your sales. 

Want to learn more? Reach out to us here.

Omnichannel marketing, or multi-channel marketing, is a strategy whereby brands clearly identify and deliver a holistic user experience via a myriad of marketing avenues. The strategy if deployed by the best eCommerce brands, and online store owners should consider the potential for eCommerce growth with omnichannel marketing in 2022. Adopting a clever omnichannel marketing strategy can set businesses apart from their competition, helping leverage greater sales and return on investment (ROI).In this article, we explore how you can utilize omnichannel marketing and discuss whether or not waterfall consumer financing is an essential addition to your strategy for the new year.

The Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing provides brands with more opportunities to immerse consumers in their brand lifestyle. It is a powerful strategy that businesses can harness in 2022 to deliver better advertising campaigns. The following expresses the key benefits of omnichannel marketing:

Improves the Consumer Journey

Businesses that deploy omnichannel marketing improve the user journey for their consumers, making their shopping experience far easier and increasing the likelihood of landing the sale. Using a diverse sales funnel of branded content at every touchpoint, businesses can position their brands as leaders within their industry and keep their services or products front of mind for their customers and potential consumers. 

Provides Stronger Analytics

Omnichannel marketing strategies give eCommerce businesses access to stronger analytical data on their consumers. Brands can track every touchpoint and metrics associated with the wide range of consumer-centric decisions. Using an omnichannel marketing strategy, brands can determine where their consumers are coming from, why they action specific areas of the sales funnel, and what they do after purchasing. Having access to these insights, marketing teams can make informed decisions that lead to longer customer lifetime values. 

Improve Customer Service

A positive customer service experience is critical to eCommerce success, and brands can improve their customer service with the implementation of omnichannel marketing. Omnichannel marketing calls for the automation of many areas of redundant customer service. For example, a chatbot can facilitate efficient communications with customers that have general queries and questions. A customer service representative is, instead, needed when problems require greater attention. This can save businesses money as they downscale their customer service budget while optimizing the user’s experience with customer service through the quick and reliable answering of common questions that users may have as they navigate the omnichannel brand experience. 

Support Omnichannel Marketing with Waterfall Consumer Financing for Greater Sales

As a massive part of omnichannel marketing involves supporting and improving consumers’ experiences with your store, you should consider additional tools to facilitate a better omnichannel marketing strategy. One such method is integrating waterfall consumer financing.

Waterfall consumer financing is a solution shared by leading fintech buy now pay later (BNPL) platforms like ChargeAfter. The service includes a financing option at the checkout that consumers can utilize to purchase goods. It differs from traditional financing models as it allows businesses to leverage ChargeAfter’s already existing network of lenders. Your consumers do not need to consult third-party financial service providers to procure financing to make their orders. Nor do they need to undergo credit checks and they receive comprehensive financial coverage with zero interest.

This is a very appealing strategy that supports the omnichannel marketing consumer journey as it is easy-to-use and accessible via a button at checkout. The streamlined process ensures that consumers convert as quickly as possible, generating greater revenue each month. 

Moving into 2022, it is essential that you integrate waterfall consumer financing at checkout to improve your omnichannel marketing strategy and experience greater sales after the festive season.

Want to learn more? Reach out to us here.