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  • Why Email Marketing is Here to Stay

    Although email marketing may not get as much time in the limelight in recent years, email marketing is here to stay. Here’s why.

    Email marketing has a significantly wider reach than all of the social networks combined. Email is also 40x more successful at acquiring new clients than either Facebook and Twitter according to this survey.

    At eFashionStarter, our marketers know how to harness email’s power to nurture relationships with our clients prospects and customers. With the advent of social media, it was previously touted that social media would replace email altogether.

    Despite the massive shift towards social in the digital landscape, email marketing has proven to be not only a viable marketing activity, but a superior one as well.

    Unlike marketing on other online channels such as Google or Facebook, with email marketing you retain significantly more control over your messaging and content.

    You should be leveraging two kinds of email messages — both broadcast messages and follow up messages.

    Depending on the software you use, these may be referred to slightly differently, but the concept is the same as described below…

    • Broadcast Messages are also referred to as campaign emails, and they are usually sent to promote a new product, service, or event that’s tied to a single business objective. These are normally created and scheduled during a specific timeframe to maintain relevance.
    • Follow Up Messages are usually automated in a sequence of emails over a set frequency after the initial interaction with your lead magnet. The goal is multiple exposures with your lead, usually offering free value and following up about an offer that they had responded to.  The end goal of all this is to maintain a top-of-mind awareness, and to create a conversion by getting them to take an important action.

    Our goal is to help our clients distinguish themselves in the inboxes of their ideal customers. While it’s easier than ever to reach your target market, it’s harder to get their attention in a sea of noise.

    Through extensive experience marketing on a wide array of platforms, we utilize proven psychological tactics to get your emails not only opened, but clicked on — getting your prospect to take the next desired action.

  • Inventory Management Solutions for the 21st Century E-Retailer

    Inventory Synchronization with your eCommerce platform is one of the most critical components for a free flowing operation.

    The problem with most eCommerce websites is there is a lot of manual labor involved because you have multiple suppliers that are not integrated into your platform, and you never know how much inventory is in stock.

    With our drop shipping solutions, you’ll have never have to worry about selling a product that is out of stock again with an inventory feed that syncs with your store every 15-30 minutes. It’s like having a dedicated inventory management team working for you 24/7.

    With our web based automation solutions, you’ll have access to your inventory feeds in real time to keep your business running smoothly, anywhere in the world. We’ll implement a way to synchronize your vendor’s inventory with your store, whether they are across the globe or right next door.

    You will never have to worry about selling a product that’s out of stock or deal with outdated inventory management solutions from yesterday. When your clients want to know what’s in stock, you’ll be able to find out in one click.

    With our inventory management solutions, we want to allow you to enjoy running your business and focus on what’s truly important. Imagine being able to seamlessly synchronize your inventory with all of your suppliers and have multiple inventory feeds that sync with your store at regular intervals.

    Imagine being able to track ALL of your suppliers all in ONE location. It doesn’t matter how your vendors publish their inventory feeds: FTP, HTTP, XML, manual uploads, etc. – we can implement a solution that enables you to spend more time growing your business and help you regain control. We want help you get back to running your business instead of having your business run you. No more headaches through spending your valuable time dealing with inventory issues, unhappy customers, and late orders.

    Regain control over your business and ask us about our inventory management solutions, whether you’d like to synchronize your inventory on-demand or have it completely automated and “hands-free” – we can handle it.

  • 5 Major Benefits of Drop Shipping

    Drop-shipping is a retail fulfillment method where a store doesn’t keep the products it sells in stock. Instead, when a store sells a product it purchases it from a third-party and is then shipped directly to the customer. The merchant never sees or has to handle the product.

    With drop shipping there is no need to manage a warehouse or invest thousands in extra inventory. Plus, there is no need to worry about packing and shipping orders. With a dropshipping model, you don’t have to purchase products until after you have made the sale and your customer has paid you.

    Are you looking to build a successful online business? Then read on to learn more about what you need to run an online drop-shipping business.

    Not only is this a very unique model, there are numerous benefits of drop shipping if you are an entrepreneur:

    Easy to Get Up and Running – Running a fashion eCommerce business is much easier than the traditional retail method because you don’t have to deal with managing physical products. Just imagine not having to worry about:

    Tracking your own inventory

    Paying for and managing a warehouse or fulfillment center

    Spending your valuable time packing and shipping your orders

    Ordering new products and continuously managing inventory levels

    Low Overhead

    This is by far one of the biggest advantages to dropshipping. With our eCommerce experts, we can setup your own drop-shipping business without the huge costs of you having to manage your own warehouse and your overhead will be much lower vs. the traditional retail model. Let us help you keep your product selection growing while keeping your inventory costs low.

    Scalability

    In a traditional business it’s typical that if you receive double the business, you’ll have to perform 2x the work. However, by leveraging our drop shipping services you can expect to do less work vs. a traditional business as you grow larger. Scalability is a huge issue that we help our clients solve. Your business should theoretically be able to handle 10 orders per week with ease in the same way it would handle 100 times the orders per week. At eFashionStarter, we help you make your business scalable.

    As with any business model, dropshipping isn’t perfect and it has a couple downsides. However, we address these with the following solutions:

    Automate Your eCommerce Store  – Managing Multiple Vendors

    Shipping complexities can arise, especially if you are dealing with multiple suppliers. With our drop shipping automation solutions we can allow you to effectively automate your eCommerce business by sending your orders automatically, sync your inventory with vendors so your online store shows the appropriate items in stock in real-time. (Check out our blog post on Inventory management for more details!)

    Automated Order Management – No More Manually Fulfilling Orders

    As an example, let’s suppose you have multiple suppliers/vendors on your eCommerce store. If a customer orders, say, one shirt from each brand you carry – things can get pretty time consuming by manually routing orders to your vendors, suppliers, distributors, or fulfillment centers.

    But by automating your order management, you will have a solution we can implement that automatically routes your orders as soon as they come in by intelligently sending your orders to the correct place – even if the order contains products from multiple vendors. Get it right the first time and avoid costly and time-consuming mistakes – we have case studies we can show you, just ask.

    We’re here to help. Are you spending too much time managing orders? Are you feeling out of control? Are you customers unhappy? Let us help by automating your order routing, setting you up with an order and inventory manager, and accounting sync.

    How Does it Work?

    Allow us to explain how we can help you automate your online eCommerce business through dropshipping and dropshipping automation. Contact us today so we can get you started!

    P.S. Don’t forget to ask about our free 30-minute consultation.

  • 3 Top Conversion Optimization Tips for Fashion eRetailers

    Driving traffic to your website without optimizing for conversion is like pouring water into a bucket that has holes in it; the water will just begin pouring out of the holes almost as fast as you can fill it. Similarly, it doesn’t make sense to bring in more and more traffic when you should first be working to make sure you have a site that’s converting, i.e. getting sales.

    Unfortunately, no company is immune to oversight on this issue, which we’ll explain in this blog. After working with a wide array of companies for the past several years, we have discovered that regardless of the ad budget they may have, the focus often gets shifted towards traffic, lead generation, and sales without ever questioning if the conversion process can be improved.

    First of all, what is conversion optimization?

    In a nutshell, conversion rate is a marketing activity focused primarily on increasing the number of people who take a desired action on your page.

    You’d actually be surprised how few marketing teams actually split test, or conduct experiments on their lead magnets or front-end offers to improve their conversion rates, whether that’s in the form of click through rate, adding items to their cart, or making a purchase.

    Even if there is a marketing element that is working quite well, with the transitional landscape on the internet, most ads and content tend to fatigue and lose their flair — even over relatively short period of time!

    It’s important to internally analyze all of the data that we’re given throughout all of our marketing channels. Here’s our top 3 conversion optimization tips for fashion eCommerce businesses, and how they can be implemented.

    Lightning-Speed Load Times

    This is one of those obvious but overlooked reasons your website may not be converting the way it should. Perhaps, you are getting a lot of people adding items to the cart, but for one reason or another, once they reach checkout they aren’t purchasing from you.

    Surveys show that 40% of visitors expect a website to load in 3 seconds or less, or they’ll simply exit out. Load time can quite literally affect your bottom line. A lot of website owners think that they’re website is fast, and they may have only the homepage optimized for speed, but their collection pages or their order forms are taking much longer to load.

    It’s safe to assume that every second on the internet is an eternity, and that you need to ensure that your website is optimized for lightning-speed. Whether you like it or not, people expect the same type of experience they receive on the megabrand’s websites, and one of the most highly leveraged actions you can take is increasing the site speed.

    Oh yeah, you can test your website speed right here.

    The Fortune is in the Follow Up

    This is a time-tested way to get your customers to go from consideration to making a decision. If I am on your fashion eCommerce site, I add an item to cart, and maybe I made it the checkout but something came up.

    I didn’t have my credit card on me…
    My girlfriend got mad at me….
    My favorite show came on and got distracted…
    I got a message on Facebook and exited out for later…
    The dog had to be taken out for a walk…

    You get the picture. This is just the reality of most of your customers who arrive on your website will have multiple tabs open, external distractions, or maybe they simply decided against buying for now. But we as marketers need to be mindful of this behavior.

    Whenever someone adds to their cart and leaves your site, it’s imperative that you follow up, whether that’s through email or even a phone call. Cart abandonment has become a trillion dollar problem for online retailers in all industries. Yes, that’s T as in Trillion.

    That’s a lot of money to be leaving on the table, but it also represents a massive opportunity to significantly improve your cart conversion rates.  By sending up follow up emails within the first 24 hours after a cart is abandoned, you can bring people back to the items in their cart at a time that may be right for them.

    Use a Security Emblem in Your Checkout

    Trust on the internet is and always has been an issue for internet users. It’s very important to demonstrate your credibility and trustworthiness on one of the most important parts of your site: the checkout page.

    With the right security emblem, you can establish yourself as a trustworthy company to do business with.

    Often times, you’ll see a security emblem on the main pages of the site, but then you make it to the checkout page and — you guessed it — there’s nothing there!

    Make sure that you add a credible security emblem to your website, and make sure it’s legitimate. For instance, you don’t want to post about your site having 256-bit encryption if your site only has 128-bit encryption because that’s just deceptive.

    We now have the ability to now transcend the barrier that used to separate you from your customers. You will want to continually analyze the flow of your website, and let the data from your results guide your strategy.

    At EFashionStarter, we’ll deep dive through your website and plug the holes in your leaky bucket if you ever need us to. All you have to do is sign up for a free 30-minute consultation here.