Top eCommerce Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in 2021 [With Easy Fixes]

90% of online startups fail within 120 days.

The eCommerce business world is tricky and full of hurdles to plan and implement. Although eCommerce has become the lifeline for various businesses; eCommerce marketing mistakes have failed many online marketing agencies.

“Sears” – have you heard of it? 

It was one of the earliest online business marketplace similar to Amazon. However, Sears was the early adopter but wasn’t fully developed to offer online sustainability to its customers. Hence, it resulted in bankruptcy and failed miserably. 

Sears was just one of the many online marketing agencies that failed because of eCommerce marketing mistakes they made.

Often, eCommerce entrepreneurs ask, “What are the main reasons for the eCommerce marketing agency failures?”

Well, there can be many reasons that are commonly termed as eCommerce marketing mistakes and are further discussed in this blog.

Read on to learn more about eCommerce marketing mistakes and the ways to avoid them.

eCommerce Marketing Mistakes: 7 Reasons for Failures

1. Lack of Basic Business Sense and Business Goals

Bad business acumen flattens companies’ profits – be it either online startups or large businesses.

The lack of knowledge to employees at all levels fails the business in establishing the synchronization between various departments and their activities. It is often recommended to have a clearly defined business plan, goals, and objectives while starting a business.

However, entrepreneurs and online marketers get so occupied with the overhead tasks and processes that they lose their focus on the following questions –

• What am I offering?
• What are my long-term goals?
• Why is it desirable?
• Who is my customer?
• How does this benefit them?

The first major mistake that marketers make out of many eCommerce marketing mistakes is not knowing their purpose for business.

Not only the information regarding the business model and its goals are important, the capital(funds) planning and investment capacity also matter in the case of business survival. Even the inadequate planning of funds and investments leads the business towards bankruptcy.

2. Design Failures

Even the best business plan cannot always overcome a bad website.

A modern eCommerce site must be functional, have a great look and feel, easy navigation and search options, secure, mobile-responsive, and fast-loading speed. Anything less is unacceptable.

a. Store/Website Design

Although animated and 3D graphics make your website look more attractive, it often increases the per page load-time too. While user interface matters the most, designers recommend using a flat website design approach.

The flat website design approach uses minimal stylistic elements to provide a 2D or flat interface appearance. In fact, along with a classic look, it also offers a better user experience through fast page-load speed. Usage of stripped-down elements, flat colors/gradients, and drop shadows are common stylistic elements preferred for a flat website design approach.

b. Multiple-device Compatibility

The eCommerce-based shoppers are not limited to desktops only. They seek their convenience first. If your website isn’t compatible with their device, they’ll simply move to the other. And with the emerging competition in the industry, you cannot afford to lose customers for such a mere reason.

There are many ways to make your website mobile-friendly. You can opt for responsive store designs or using larger fonts and bigger design elements, especially form filling, etc.

c. Inserting CTAs & Pop-ups

Remember, the viewing area is much smaller on mobile screens and you need to show everything together without hassling the visitors. Therefore, be sure to make your website ‘fat finger friendly’.

Using CTAs and pop-ups works wonders if placed correctly. Since mobile users have no static position to hold and use the devices, uxmatters.com claims to follow the following “thumb rule” for CTA placements.

• For one-handed use – 
  • right thumb on the screen—67%
  • left thumb on the screen—33%
• For cradling with –
  • thumb on the screen—72%
  • finger on the screen—28%
• For cradling in – 
  • left hand—79%
  • right hand—21% 
• For two-handed use when holding the phone –
  • vertically, in portrait mode—90%
  • horizontally, in landscape mode—10%

3. Complex Checkout Process

Although checkout process design falls under the website/e-store design category; the checkout process still needs a separate and careful analysis. It is often experienced that online stores with complex or lengthy checkout processes witness high abandoned cart rates too.

According to consumer psychology and behavior trends, consumers feel difficult checkouts as a waste of time and energy when they can go for a one-click checkout process at other stores.

To overcome this, you can cut short your registration processes with simple one-click social logins and avoid using multiple payment windows. Including payment gateways like PayPal is also a considerable option to shorten your complex checkout process to a simpler one.

4. Little or No Understanding of Products/Services

Products or services sold online need perfect timing and understanding to sustain and flourish. Often, people start with online ventures but forget to consider their customers and their requirements.

All they do is copy their competitors and try to sell the same products with better deals. This strategy may work in the short term. However, if you’re planning to stay in business for the long run, this strategy wouldn’t be fruitful.

To sustain your products’ demands online, you must consider the major aspects of your customers’ requirements and how you pitch them.

a. Selling Wrong Products

If your business isn’t growing the way you estimated it to be, analyze your products first. Check if you’re selling the right products to your customers. There can be multiple reasons for business failure. But failure due to selling wrong products will reflect in either of the five signs.

1. Pitching products that don’t support the near future requirements
2. Your products/services are getting terrible review and poor ratings
3. You’re not excited about selling those products
4. The company isn’t adjusting with the market flow
5.  You’re consistently lashed out by your competitors

b. Product Mistiming

Did you plan your product launch strategy well?

If you did, then you’d know that your customers are probably eagerly waiting for your product. And then, when you launch them, you get a great business opening for that product.

Nevertheless, if you didn’t bother doing market research before launching your product. And you have launched it, just like that, you may witness a poor reaction from the same audience. 

Launching a product when it is least required will never bring you great success. Product timing is hence very important for the business to sustain.

c. Product Pricing

It is one of the major eCommerce marketing mistakes that marketers unknowingly do. Product pricing isn’t always in direct proportion to earning profits.

Pricing a product is a wholesome process. Rendering products to customers with high pricing would want them to opt for price comparison shopping. While extremely lower prices may make them doubt the quality of your products.

d. Poor Product Photos and Descriptions

Online shoppers cannot inspect the product physically. Therefore, they need a strong visual and textual representation of the products before they make their decision.

Therefore, poor picture quality or vague images of the products and inappropriate product description can confuse or mislead your customers.

5. Inappropriate Marketing and Lack of Segmentation

Is it enough to build a website and get the inventory ready for purchase?

How do you think your customers will know about you?

It is one of the most common eCommerce marketing mistakes that business owners do. They think they can solely get traffic to their website while performing the best SEO practices. Although SEO best practices do get you organic traffic, it also needs time to rank on search engine results.

It is important to spread the word out sooner to your customers to grasp the best opportunities to grow business. A proper marketing plan is a MUST. Your marketing plan should include owned, earned, and paid media, and consist of useful and relevant content like emails, push messages, social media postings, blogs, etc.

Remember, who your audience is and what they expect from you? Do they prefer emails? Or which social media platform they use most? All these questions will help you in planning your marketing campaigns and strategy.

With 1.39 billion monthly Facebook active users, social ads are a cornerstone for successful marketing campaigns. Paid advertising is also a great way to target a bigger market audience.

Also while formulating your marketing plan, you don’t need to share the same information with all your customers. Because frankly, not everyone will be interested in everything you say or share. This is where the role of customer segmentation emphasizes itself. 

Segmenting customers according to their preferences, age or other demographic criteria will help you to plan your marketing campaigns well without spamming your customer’s inboxes.

6. Content & SEO Perspectives

Content and SEO always go hand-in-hand. Poor SEO can fail great content while even mediocre content can rank well with proper SEO practices. Even when you’re thinking about doing SEO for your website, Content should be your priority. Creating valuable, authentic, and quality content is critical for your website’s search engine visibility while it also helps you engage, inform, support, and delight your customers.

Ignoring quality content and overlooking content types and variations to share information with your customers will only devalue your brand and products. Because content is everywhere from your web stores home page to product descriptions to extended customer supports.

a. Emphasize More on Content Marketing

Content is the strength of online marketing concepts. Settling realistic goals and planning content strategy to create and promote content plays a role of catalyst in boosting your search engines’ visibility also.

Creating quality content will make your customers feel more aware and confident about you and your products. The more confident they’ll feel, the more they’ll be willing to purchase from you. 

Building content around your products may induce variety too like buying and user guides for the products, videos, and images of the products, and more. It is important to let your visitors know about you first and believe in what you have to deliver before selling them.

b. Website Traffic, Search Visibility & SEO Optimized Website is Crucial

According to research conducted by PowerReviews, 35%of shoppers start their search with Google to purchase a product online”, says SearchEngineLand.

eCommerce marketers can’t sustain a business with no new traffic coming to their website. One major reason for eCommerce business failures out of many eCommerce marketing mistakes is poor traffic and no visibility on the first page of search engine results.

Having an SEO optimized eCommerce website simply refers to leveraging key SEO factors to improve your sites’ ranking and make it visible in search results. Using keywords that are high performing and specific to your niche in your webpages and product descriptions will boost your search engine rankings. Hence, driving more sustainable traffic to your website.

7. No Customer Support Facility

Products sold online often face more post-purchase queries than the product physically sold. If you’re selling products or services online, the buyer will, for sure, have queries and questions about it. And if you fail to satisfy them with your answer or even fail to answer their queries, they’ll simply shift to your competitors. They’ll certainly not wait for you to comprehend the situation even. One customer shifting from you to your competitor can drop your major sales graph. It’s the age of technology and people are all aware of their rights.

It is no more concern now whether you are a big or small company. If you don’t have proper customer support facilities, you will doom sooner or later.

Some More eCommerce Marketing Mistakes

To get your customers to your doors, your marketing plan must include:

1. Advanced planning
2. Targeting the right audience
3. Deliver the right message
4. Spread awareness across various channels

And you must avoid doing these:

Summing-up

Although every business is different and unique, there are common reasons for eCommerce failures. eCommerce marketing mistakes are a set of deadlocks that will trap your business once and won’t stop drowning it until you take a step out of it. Therefore, recognizing these possible traps may help you in avoiding them. And serve you a successful eCommerce business.