[Marketing for consumer electronics shops] 5 effective strategies to increase your sales

Sam Smith

Ecommerce Consultant at Doofinder

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Let me guess:

You opened an online consumer electronics shop because you saw the enormous demand for these types of products – but you didn’t think of…

• The huge number of competitors (Amazon, big department stores, etc.)
• The small profit margins
• The stock, which sometimes becomes obsolete

And that stops your shop from growing.

Having an online business is great because you cut down on costs, but it forces you to constantly update your marketing strategy so that the giants don’t make a clean sweep of the market.

And that’s the reason for this post. We’re about to explain the sales strategies (specific to this sector) that are finding the most success right now.

Read, apply, and start selling (a lot). 😉

👉 How the consumer electronics eCommerce sector has evolved

Consumer electronics have been at the top of sales rankings in the eCommerce world for several years.

A trend that, far from short-circuiting as a result of the pandemic, has only grown since 2020.

In fact, according to several studies like the Consumer Electronics eCommerce Global Market Report 2021, all indicators seem to suggest that this growth will continue throughout the entire decade.

But as in any market brimming with opportunities, threats also rear their ugly head.

Threats like the very high competition in the sector, the presence of large stores that monopolize the market (and against which it is impossible to compete in terms of prices), and the emergence of manufacturers that are beginning to sell to the end consumer.

For consumer electronics eCommerce sites that want to remain competitive, the path includes:

• Specializing in a specific sector: to be able to compete with wholesalers.
• Providing more added value to the customer: this is why new technologies like artificial intelligence and augmented reality have become popular in this sector.
• Adapting sales strategies: the need for an online marketing plan is more important than ever.

In this whitepaper, you will find different formulas to put these ideas into practice.

But first, let’s take a closer look at the obstacles your eCommerce site is facing.

✅ Challenges for electronics eCommerce sites

• High competition: Including large general electronics stores like PcComponentes, Media Markt, and even Amazon. It is impossible to compete in terms of prices with these giants.
• Low profit margins: A consequence of high competition: you are forced to reduce your prices to maintain your sales, and that strategy eats away at your profitability.
• Stock gets out of date fast: Electronics products go out of date fast, and the risk of having stockpile up is high.
• Manufacturers who sell retail: The conditions offered by a manufacturer directly to the end customer are difficult to match for an average eCommerce site.

👉 The importance of e-commerce for consumer electronics

First, let’s explain what we’re talking about:

Consumer electronics refer to all those electronic devices that we use each day for entertainment, communication, or office work.

Therefore, we’re talking about everything from your personal computer, smartphone, and TV to extractor hoods, digital cameras, fridges, and even vacuum cleaners.

That’s to say, basically, every single electronic device that we use on a daily basis.

What are the advantages of selling in a sector like this one?

The numbers:

• According to Global B2C E-commerce, (an organization that analyzes the profiles and behaviors of online buyers globally), the consumer electronics sector is the most mature e-commerce sector in Europe, North America, and Asia and is growing at an average rate of 21.5%.
• Sales in this sector continue to be unstoppable throughout the whole world. The income generated so far this year is $340.194 billion dollars.

However, not everything about the sector screams perfection, so what are the problems?

The market is dominated by giants such as Amazon, Media Markt, and other department stores that can compete on price.

As we have already mentioned, with giants controlling everything in such a large sector, there’s a big problem for the smaller e-commerce shops: how can we get clients to choose us instead of Amazon?

Here you have 5 actions that you can carry out.

👉 Essential parts of an electronics eCommerce strategy

Find a sector within your sector: specialize

The general electronics market is already covered by big stores such as Amazon, PCComponentes, Fnac, and Media Markt.One way to find a little space among these giants is to specialize in a specific niche.

This allows you to better understand the needs of your audience and offer your customers a more personalized service.

Choose your niche

The world of consumer electronics keeps growing. This gives you almost endless options for finding a profitable niche market.

Broadly speaking, you can specialize by:

• Product category: home appliances, telephony, photography, items for gamers, etc.
• Customer profile: depending on whether you target the final consumer (B2C) or if your customers are other businesses (B2B).
• Price range: Some stores specialize in low-end tech products, while others take the opposite path and focus only on high ticket items.

These three methods can be combined, in which case we would be speaking of hyper-specialization.

Define the profile of your ideal customer

Once you’ve found a profitable niche, the next step is to analyze the specific needs of your target audience.

And to do that, we have the buyer persona.

The buyer persona is an “invented individual” who represents your ideal customer, and from whom we can gather information such as:

• Demographic profile (age, socioeconomic level, studies, etc.).
• What the buyers’ needs are (the reason they want to buy your product).
• What aspects of your products could be most interesting to them.
• What their daily life is like.
• What types of media they consume.

This buyer persona is a tool that helps you put yourself into the shoes of your customers, better understand their concerns and, thus, adapt your sales strategy.

For example, let’s say that you sell air conditioners on your eCommerce site and you know that most of your customers are quite worried that their electricity bill will skyrocket if they install one.

With that in mind, you could give more visibility to low-consumption models (whether in your promotions, among the featured products on your homepage, etc.).

This fictitious person should even have a name and a photo taken from Google.

Every time you communicate with your audience (when you write the text of a product page, a post, a publication on the social networks, etc.), imagine that you are talking to that person.

This will help you speak more naturally, as if you were talking with a close friend.

Ok, so… where can you get all the information you need to create this profile?

The first step is to analyze the behavior of your customers.

That is:

• The types of products they typically buy.
• The questions they ask you most frequently.
• How much they spend on average per purchase.
• The reviews they leave on your product pages (what aspects stand out).

If you want to go even further, you can also check pages that your audience frequents (forums, specialized blogs, social media groups, influencer profiles, etc.).

✅ Extra: How to find a viable niche and better understand your audience by studying the competition

The websites of other shops in your sector are a very valuable source of information for finding product lines in high demand, and to better understand the needs of your customers.

For example, you could take a look at:

• The products they have in their product catalog.
• Their most sold items.
• The model or brands they promote most.
• The topics they speak about in their blog.
• The aspects of their products that their customers highlight most.

This information can even be useful for you to help you find things to write about in your own blog.

As an example, these could be two potential customers of a consumer electronics eCommerce site:

Profile 1: Marta, the purchasing manager of a private clinic

Marta is a 41-year-old woman who works as a sales manager at a private health center. Her company has started using wearable health technologies to improve patient follow-up, and Marta is in charge of selecting suppliers and finding interesting new products.

When making a decision, Marta values different things, but first and foremost for her is the quality of the item, as well as the after-sales service.

She usually looks at content from specialized media to keep up to date with the news in her sector.

On my eCommerce site, I can offer Marta an extended warranty service for all her purchases. In addition, on my blog I can publish news about the sector and use guides, comparisons, and reviews of my products to help Marta find the most suitable products for the patients of her clinic.

Profile 2: Julián, the son of a person dependent upon others for care

Julián is 53 years old and has a high level of studies and middle-to-high income. He has an older mother he can’t visit her regularly, so he is looking for special gadgets for the elderly that allow him to stay in touch with her and assist her with everyday tasks (such as special phones for older people).

Although the end user of the products is Julián’s mother, he is the one who makes the decision to buy.

For Julián, I can write articles with reviews of technological gadgets for seniors. In addition, I can invite geriatricians and specialists to write on my blog so as to offer Julián specific advice on caring for an elderly person.

Fill your eCommerce site with visitors

To sell, you need traffic.

Users who visit your website, browse your product pages, and end up buying.

There are two major types of traffic: organic and paid.

Paid traffic

Paid traffic is what we get through online advertising, either through:

• Google Ads (including Google Shopping and ads on YouTube).
• Social networks (Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and the rest).

The main advantage of this model over traditional advertising is that we can pay for the clicks we receive (what is known as CPC, or Cost per Click).

If a person doesn’t click on your ad and doesn’t enter your site, you don’t have to pay anything.

Advertising is a very interesting tool to get traffic quickly and to strengthen your sales during specific campaigns (such as sales periods).

The problem is that if you stop paying, you stop selling.

Therefore, in the long term the most profitable strategy is to combine online advertising with organic traffic.

Organic traffic

When we talk about organic traffic, we mean those visits for which we do not have to pay.There are different ways to get organic traffic, but here are the three main ones.

SEO

This is basically when you attract users from Google’s search results.

For example, let’s say that you have optimized the “HP Laptops” category so that when a person searches for a computer by HP on Google, your online store appears.

That’s what SEO is.

The process to optimize your website in terms of SEO consists of several steps:

• Find out what terms your target audience is looking for on Google: what we know as  keywords. To accomplish this, you can brainstorm terms related to your business (brands, product categories, topics of interest) and then use an SEO tool to see which of those terms have the most monthly searches.
• Design your shop’s structure: once you are clear on which keywords have searches, the next thing is to create several levels of categories in order to position them. It is important for there not to be two pages focusing on the same keyword (SEO cannibalization), nor can there be the same product page in two different categories (duplicate content).
• Optimize each page in terms of SEO: to rank on Google, both your categories and your product pages must be written from an SEO standpoint.

This is just a little glimpse of everything that comes with a positioning strategy. To dig deeper into this topic, we recommend you take a look at this SEO mega-guide for online stores.

Content marketing

For many users, traditional electronics stores act as a kind of showroom.

A place where they go to try the latest products that have come out on the market.

This helps them make the decision to buy, because by physically testing the product they can get an idea of:

• Its features.
• Its size.
• If it is easy to use.
• Etc.

How can you offer the customer an “equivalent” experience on your eCommerce site?

There are different ways, but a very interesting one is with blog content.

Content like:

• Comparisons.
• Product reviews and analyses.
• Buying guides.

This content, in addition to being useful for your audience, will also allow you to gain positioning through a large volume of keywords and thus boost the traffic that reaches your shop.

However, not all the content on your blog should talk about your products.

To give you an idea, a photography eCommerce site could offer its customers content such as:

• Guides to taking better pictures.
• Editing tips.
• Useful tools.
• Etc.

In this way, you will become a shop that is recognized in your sector and you’ll create a community of loyal users around your brand.

⏺ FOR MORE INFORMATION:

>> Boost your sales with content marketing.

>> How to create an eCommerce editorial calendar that will boost your visits and subscribers.

>> [SEO writing tutorial] Get more visits by writing posts optimized for Google.

Social networks

Social networks are the third piece of the organic recruitment strategy puzzle.

Through the publications you launch in your profiles, you can arouse the interest of your followers and direct them to your website.

But social networks are much more than just a source of traffic.

They also allow you to get a closer connection with your audience and help enhance your brand image.

They even work as a customer service channel.

The content strategy to follow will vary greatly depending on the type of products you sell and the audience profile you target. However, in practice it’s all about generating content that adds value and entertains.

⏺ FOR MORE INFORMATION:

>> Everything you need to know about marketing on social networks to gain visibility and engagement, even if you don’t have a Facebook profile.

>> 9 ideas for social media content (to boost visibility and engagement).

A customer experience that turns visits into sales

Competing by price is no longer an option.

For your small eCommerce site, it is impossible to match the promotional offers launched by the giants of the sector and the manufacturers themselves.

If you want to stay competitive and stand out, you need to give your customers more than just low prices.

You need to deliver a superior shopping experience at all levels.

An HD user experience

Imagine you go into two different online stores.

The first one is chaotic. The design is overloaded with bright colors, the navigation menu is confusing, and each page takes four or five seconds to load. In addition, while browsing you keep seeing one pop-up after another.

The second one is totally the opposite.

A clean and trustworthy visual look. The navigation menu is designed so that you can find the category you are looking for in two seconds, and the website loads like lightning.

Which one do you think you’re more likely to end up buying from?

Of course, the second one. The fact of the matter is that, in order for visitors that come to your eCommerce site to stay on it and buy something from you, the user experience (the perception they have of your website after browsing it) must be excellent.

This implies:

• Categories and product pages that are organized intuitively.
• A clear navigation menu.
• A simple design which highlights important elements without cluttering up the view.
• Legible text fonts.
• A high load speed.
• Non-intrusive pop-ups (on the mobile site, you should remove them directly).

In addition, a good user experience also favors SEO a lot.

Turn your site-specific search engine into a “product GPS”

We said before that one of the trends in electronics eCommerce is artificial intelligence.

And although it seems like something straight out of a science fiction book, this technology is widespread.

One ever-present example is that of the Doofinder smart search engine.

A search engine that uses artificial intelligence to guide your customers to the products they are looking for (and prevent them from getting lost amongst your categories).

Let’s see how it works.

It knows what your customers want (better than they do themselves).

A smart search engine is able to offer personalized results to each user based on their previous actions.

For example, let’s say that you sell smartphones on your eCommerce site.

One of your customers (we’ll call her Laura) is a big fan of the Xiaomi brand.

She was recently connected to your store comparing the latest smartphone models by the brand, and she ended up buying one.

A few days later she returns to your store, this time with the intention of ordering a case for her new cell phone.

She goes right to the search engine and types “Xiaomi Case.”

And among the hundreds of cases that you have in your product catalog, the search engine shows first those that are compatible with her mobile.

Coincidence?

No. The search engine remembered Laura… in fact, it remembered the exact model she bought, and it assumed that compatible cases were what would interest her most.

Result: in just a couple of clicks Laura is able to complete her order.

In fact, as the search engine suggested that she also get a tempered glass screen protector for her new phone, she ended up buying more than she thought.

It makes things as easy as possible for your customers

A smart search engine knows that a customer only wants one thing: to quickly and easily find the product they need.

And that’s why it offers them:

• Autofill: as soon as you put a couple of letters in, it starts to show results. In addition, the results include product images so that users can find what they’re interested in quickly.
• Search filters: by brand, by model, by price, etc.
• Image search: has your customer seen a photo of a product on social media but doesn’t know which model it is exactly? No problem. Customers can upload the image to the search engine and it yields the product that is most similar visually.
• Voice search: perfect for those who do their searching from mobile devices and do not feel like typing everything into the search bar.

The easier you make the purchase for the customer, the more likely they will go through with it (and the more likely it is for that person to continue to buy from you in the future).

“Filips”? Ok, I think you mean “Philips.”

Typos happen.

And in the consumer electronics sector, where foreign brands abound, typos are very common.

The problem is that a basic search engine is not able to handle them. In fact, most have trouble understanding even synonyms.

Because of that, 15% of searches on eCommerce sites yield the dreaded “No results found” message.

We’ll give you an example.

Imagine that a person wants to buy a refrigerator by Bosch.

But instead of writing “Bosch,” that person writes “Blosh refrigerator.”

Or, instead of using the word “refrigerator,” that person writes “fridge” or “icebox” or “freezer.”

A basic search engine would tell your customer that you do not have any related products (even if you were indeed up to your ears in Bosch refrigerators).

A smart search engine, on the other hand, would understand what the customer is referring to without a problem and would show the corresponding product pages.This prevents you from losing (a lot of) sales due to a simple misunderstanding.

Searchandising: the site-specific search engine as a salesperson

A good site-specific search engine does much more than just guide customers around your store.

What’s more, it helps you to sell the products that interest you most.

To give you an idea, let’s say that you have launched a very juicy offer for a blender that has become obsolete and you want to get rid of.

You can create a banner that displays next to the search results whenever someone searches for “blenders” or “mixers,” for example.

What about if you want to promote a specific product?

For example, a model of air fryer that sells like hotcakes (and that leaves you with an enticing profit margin).

You can tell the search engine that every time someone asks about air fryers, it should first show the product page for that specific model.

It alerts you of products not found (so you stop losing customers)

Imagine that every day there are at least 3 people who go into your shop and search for “gamer keyboards.”

But they leave empty-handed because you don’t sell those kinds of products.

And you have no idea that you are losing so many customers until one day you decide to review the search statistics offered by your site-specific search engine.

Specifically, you look at the “Searches without results” section of the stats.

What do you do then?

You call your supplier and ask them to send you a shipment of gamer keyboards as soon as possible, because it is clear that your target audience wants them.This keeps your customers happy and lets you expand the catalog of your shop without a fear of being stuck with extra stock.

Did you know that…?

With Doofinder, it is easy to discover that the most searched for products in the electronics eCommerce sector right now are:

1. iPhone.

2. PS5.

3. Robot vacuums.

4. Air conditioners.

5. Refrigerators.

6. Microwaves.

7. Washing machines.

8. Freezers.

9. Webcams.

10. Printers.

This information can help you decide what products to promote on your shop. Or it can even help you find new, interesting market niches. 😉

Product pages that sell like hotcakes

Product pages are a key part of the sales process.

They are responsible for “convincing” the user to buy a certain product.

Specifically, a good product page should:

• Translate features into benefits: because a customer who is buying a blender is not interested in having “2 liters of capacity…” instead, it’s better to say that he/she “can make vegetable puree for all the week in a single batch.”
• Answer questions: any question that a customer may have regarding the product is a possible obstacle to the sale. That is why the most common questions regarding the product must be taken care of on the product page.
• Provide information on the conditions of the sale: shipping costs, return policy, etc.
• Show the opinions of other customers: this is known as social proof. Almost 90% of users look at these comments when making a decision.
• Offer quality images and/or videos: to make it easier for the user to get an idea of what the product is like. Some electronics eCommerce sites are even starting to use augmented reality.

Likewise, it is important to offer different ways for customers to contact you in case they still have questions after reading the product page. Remember that just a single question left unanswered can kill your sales.

Extra tip: if you offer an extended warranty or any other extra service, be sure to tell the customer on the product page. This could make a customer decide to buy from you.

A simple checkout process = fewer abandoned shopping carts

On average, 3 out of every 4 users give up on the purchase process halfway through.

And often the culprit is a checkout process that is too complex or that has too few options.

To avoid this, you can:

• Offer different payment gateways (like PayPal, Stripe, and Bizum).
• Activate guest checkout and social login.
• Include a chat to answer last minute questions (and a FAQs section).
• Show shipping costs on the product page instead of adding them in the last step of the checkout process.
• Cut down on the number of steps required and ask for minimal data from the customer.

The simpler and more transparent this process is, the more chances a customer will finish their purchase.

⏺ How to recover abandoned shopping carts

Because it’s one thing to just reduce the abandonment rate and quite another to get it down to zero.

Therefore, it is important for you to have a strategy to recover these abandoned shopping carts.

There are three main ways:

• Send reminder emails (which allow you to recover up to 2% of all abandoned shopping carts).
• Activate push notifications.
• Launch remarketing ads.

Remember that just by reducing this abandonment rate, you’ll be getting more sales with the same volume of traffic as you have now.

Cross-selling to boost your average ticket

Cross-selling is one of the classic ways to increase the average ticket on an eCommerce site (and this means more profits on each sale).

To cross sell, you can show the customer:

• Complementary products (cross selling): if the customer is going to buy a camera, you can also offer him or her the lens, the UV filter to protect the product, and the case (you can even put all these products together as a bundle).
• More expensive products (up selling): show your customer a newer model or one with more features than the one they had planned to buy.

These recommendations can be offered both on the product page itself (through the typical “Other customers bought these products together” section) and during the checkout process.

Some shops even send a post-sale email offering a complementary product.

Make your customers loyal regulars

Attracting a new customer costs up to 5 times more than getting a person who has already bought something from you to make another purchase.

Therefore, in the long term, what interests you is to retain as many customers as possible.

Let’s see how to do that.

Discounts and loyalty programs

There are different ways to get the same person to make purchases from you again and again.

For example, you can:

• Offer benefits to customers who exceed a certain purchase threshold.
• Send a coupon to customers for their birthday.
• Establish a points program.
• Give a discount for every new customer they bring to you.

These practices, combined with other strategies that help you strengthen users’ connection to your brand (such as email marketing), can cause your shop’s profitability to skyrocket.

The last step: measure your results and optimize your strategy

Developing the strategy is just the first step.

Once you have put different mechanisms to gain customers into place and when you are attracting customers to your site, you have to continue making improvements to be able to sell even more.

And for that the first thing you should do is to look at the right metrics.

⏺ Basic KPIs to optimize your online sales strategy

The specific indicators that you should take into account will vary depending on how old your eCommerce site is, but among the main ones are the following:

• Conversion rate
• Average ticket
• Shopping cart abandonment rate
• CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and CLV (Customer Lifetime Value).
• Bounce rate (and other related metrics like dwell time and pogo sticking).
• ROI (Return on Investment).

To measure some of these KPIs, you’ll need specific tools like Google Analytics or Google Search Console.

👉 What if you had a tool that…?

• Takes care of your customers 24/7 and helps them to find the products they need
• Shows customers personalized results to increase conversion and average ticket size
• Improves the user experience on your website (and SEO positioning)
• Reduces “no results found” searches (from 15% to 1.3%)
• Ensures that everyone sees promotions
• Offers you key data to optimize your sales strategy

Doofinder is the smart search engine that helps you to increase your sales by up to 20%

And it does that thanks to:

• Smart search: autofill function, synonym and typo management, search filters, etc.
• Results personalization: Doofinder’s AI analyzes the behavior of each user to offer more relevant results.
• Searchandising: this shows the products you are most interested in selling first and makes your promotions more visible.
• Mobile Search: the mobile device layer adapts to any device. In addition, it allows for voice searches.
• Real-time statistics: to know what type of searches are being made by users on your online shop and how to optimize your strategy.

Would you like to discover all this for yourself?

It’s easy, because you can try Doofinder for free for 30 days (and we won’t even ask for your bank account details).

Just click on this link, download it, and in 5 minutes you’ll have it up and running without touching any code or programming anything.