WooCommerce is the most popular and the most downloaded WordPress plugin, with 5+ million active installations.
With WooCommerce, creating your online store, uploading products in an organized manner, and customizing the look of your online store, etc. has become easy and simple without requiring any programming geeks.
But setting up an online store is only the beginning of generating revenue. A well-designed online store requires an extensive marketing effort to generate sales.
Making sales is a broad concept and requires an extended effort ranging from understanding the customer’s needs, reaching out to the prospects, then managing, converting, retaining, etc. These efforts need to be smooth and bump-free to easily and effectively slide your possible customers towards our product and services.
In fact, the majority of the businesses stumble at the marketing stages, instead of the website development stage.
Inbound marketing can prove to be game-changing in customer acquisition, lead generation, nurturing, converting, retaining, etc. The concept of inbound marketing is growing with the rising trends of digital methods and platforms. It is turning popular for its high return on investment (ROI) and a high degree of customer satisfaction.
Inbound marketing is a way of firstly attracting audiences towards your services and products by “getting found” by them with valuable articles, resources, optimizing your website for search engines, and social media posts.
Then, converting those possible opportunities into “leads” with various delighting moments or interactions until they become customers.
We are targeting this article to bring the core concept of inbound marketing directly to your WooCommerce stores through a powerful integration.
Let’s first understand how and why inbound marketing matters for your WooCommerce store.
Why is Inbound More Promising than Outbound Marketing?
The foremost reason is; outbound marketing such as telemarketing, TV advertising, radio advertising, direct mails, print advertising are traditional marketing methods that are turning incompetent with modern needs.
Selling in the modern era with overfocused traditional marketing ways may yield insignificant returns.
Whereas, with inbound marketing, possibilities are turning more feasible, and practical.
Inbound marketing values customer’s interest, rather than cold and direct approaches. It is more targeted, unlike outbound marketing, which is predominantly generalized targeting.
Because of better targeting, personalization, and interest-driven selling approach of inbound, the return on investment (ROI) might turn out higher than outbound marketing methods.
According to a HubSpot study, the average cost per lead for inbound was 61% less than that for outbound marketing efforts. The stat may be a bit old but it doesn’t diminish the importance of outbound marketing today and the numbers have been growing in favor of inbound methods ever since.
In addition, prospects are more welcoming to the content or methods that add value to them instead of those advertisements that pop up at times when the audience is not expecting it.
Outbound marketing generally depends on the mere-exposure effect; in which the prospect is played psychologically by showing up the products repeatedly until they develop preferences for it. Whereas, inbound marketing is an exposure-to-choice approach where the prospects themselves move forward based on their choice of product and services by knowing more about it through various valuable exposures.
The majority of traditional marketing methods generally are business-centric whereas inbound marketing is customer-centric.
People are shutting the doors on salespeople, marking unidentified direct email as spam, blocking ads on YouTube and Google search engines through ads-free software. All this clearly reveals the changing choice of possible customers.
Inbound Marketing Stages
Inbound marketing is a three-step process: attract, engage, and delight.
Together these three steps make the whole of inbound marketing. Each of these steps is equipped with multiple strategies.
Here is a simple and exciting way to perceive the true meaning of these stages.
In the first step, you target the audience to recognize the value of your product and services to a level that they show interest in it. This can be done in many ways such as creating and distributing great content in the form of blogs, e-books, videos, etc. All content must present some kind of solution to related pain points or problems of your audience.
The second step is more about interaction and generating engagement to a level that your possible customer feels consulting you for solving their business issues.
Finally, in the third step, the conversion is expected to take place. The customer is delighted with the product or the services they receive while the brand is delighted for offering its product and services to its customers.
Getting the Whole of Inbound Marketing Ready for Your WooCommerce Store
Inbound marketing includes a bunch of strategies covering each stage of the sales funnel. These strategies include content marketing, social media marketing, email nurturing, workflow automation, segmentation, personalization, retention, and referral program, etc., ranging from those required for attracting customers to those needed after the conversion.
Understanding your audience is a must for the successful implementation of inbound marketing. Therefore, before jumping into the core step, create a persona for your target audience, and set the goals.
After that, get started with the core steps.
Strategies to Attract:
This marks the entry point of your audience into your sales funnel.
Here, the attention of prospects is drawn towards the products and services your brand is offering to them.
It involves producing valuable content such as blogs and articles that are SEO optimized to get ranked in the SERPs. Quality of content, on the other hand, plays another important role in setting the level of attraction.
For content, Yoast SEO is the best WordPress plugin to optimize all SEO-related aspects such as meta description, focused keywords, word count, slug, alt attributes, readability, etc.
Social media posting is another way of attracting audiences. The possibilities are enormous, as a high volume of people is present on these platforms.
Strategies to Engage:
There are several inbound strategies to keep your audiences engaged with what you are offering.
First and foremost is to choose the right theme. WordPress has varieties of free and premium themes. Choose the best theme for your online store that fits with your niche and products, with the right color combination, font size, and formatting. All mark the first impression on your site visitors.
Email marketing and nurturing are one of the best ways to stay in regular touch with your audience. Creating well-crafted, personalized, and targeted emails that have a high open and reply rate is the best practice.
Behavioral targeting is another intelligent way of engaging customers based on their varying behavior predicted by data collected from several tracking tools, surveys, social media monitoring, and browsing history.
Strategies to Delight
Don’t limit yourself and your customers just to the extent of conversion. Take them one step ahead and delight them with strategies to a level where they are confident in approaching you with their next needs and problems.
Build authority in their opinion. Help them to grow their business, solve their problems with support and interaction, and answer their questions. Let them knock on your door at the time of their needs.
Sending follow-up emails is a well-practiced strategy in delighting. It is a series of emails sent in response to the interest and engagement your audience has shown with you. Such emails are well crafted for upselling products, cross-selling, thanking for making purchases, or sometimes offering guides and information on the products or services.
Connecting Your WooCommerce Store with Inbound Marketing Hub
Relying on individual tools and software for carrying out each of the inbound marketing strategies demands a great deal of management effort.
Whereas, getting the majority of them at one central base allows us to strategically manage them all with a single-centric plan. It is possible by integrating WooCommerce with the inbound marketing hub.
This integration is done with the HubSpot WooCommerce Integration plugin and it is absolutely FREE.
The integration process is simple and quick.
First, install HubSpot and connect WooCommerce with the HubSpot through the integration plugin. (as shown below).
The integration allows you to transfer all the WooCommerce data to one central inbound marketing hub, where strategies are planned from the top of the funnel until generating sales and revenue.
It automatically syncs the real-time WooCommerce users, products, and orders with the central inbound base. Syncing past data of customers is possible with a single click, which helps in predicting the behavior of the visitors for various levels of personalization.
Apart from that, the HubSpot for WooCommerce integration automatically creates groups, properties, active lists, and workflows to save time and leverage customization and personalized targeting.
Overall, HubSpot WooCommerce integration helps in connecting the WooCommerce store with the features of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), abandonment cart tracking and recovery, email marketing, segmentation, workflow automation, recency frequency monetary (RFM) analysis, etc.
All at one hub.
Let’s go through these, one by one:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Having a healthy and professional relationship with your customers is a sign of every flourishing business.
The central hub provides collected contact management and deal management features. The integration also gives access to varieties of email templates that can be used for different types of interaction with the customers.
Abandoned Cart Tracking and Recovery
Cart abandonment is a serious eCommerce issue. The majority (about 70%) of shoppers add products to their carts and then abandon them without completing the purchase. Not making the follow-up effort to get them back could be a huge loss of potential revenue.
With abandoned cart recovery strategies, we can recover a portion of it and add to our revenue.
The integration connects WooCommerce with the cart abandonment tracking feature, by which cart abandoners can be marked and sorted out separately. Further, with recovery campaigns, such as email marketing and pop-up alerts, some of those abandoners are re-engaged and motivated to complete the purchase.
Workflows Automation
Your WooCommerce customer flows long through a series of steps, starting from the moment they are attracted towards your offering till they convert.
This flow is not fixed and varies with behavior, situation, and other factors on the customer’s side. Hence, it becomes a daunting task to manually manage the flow. It’s better to automate the workflow and manage it from your store.
With all the WooCommerce data at one central hub, sellers can create, customize, and automate the workflow. The workflow is highly targeted in nature based on the customer properties, groups, and segmentation and therefore incorporates all possibilities and situations a customer can face in the buying journey.
Recency Frequency Monetary (RFM) Analysis
With this feature, it is possible to segment the WooCommerce customers based on how recent they have purchased, how frequent the purchases are, and the total amount by each customer.
This valuable segmentation makes the targeting easy and more probable to the most profitable customer. Those customers further can be given leverages through various offers, coupon codes, and other resources.
Analytics
Having eyes on your customers’ moves and trends at a regular interval helps in setting goals, molding the strategies. Reading analytics in a manner that benefits business growth is not that easy.
But with this integration, it is possible to see the changing trends with the help of visuals graphs, and figures.
Wrapping Up
Marketing your WooCommerce store is crucial for making sales and generating revenue.
Relying more on outbound marketing and its methods such as cold calling, paid ads, television and radio ads, direct reach, doorstep sales, etc. are getting less promising for your WooCommerce store.
Whereas inbound marketing offers a more targeted approach, personalization, value to the audience, etc., and hence, it’s more promising than outbound marketing, particularly for online businesses.
Implementing an inbound approach with HubSpot for WooCommerce stores isn’t too hard but demands strategic efforts. The right choice of strategies and tools would get you started, and regular efforts will set the pace.
What are your thoughts on integrating your WooCommerce store with CRM software? Are you already implementing inbound marketing strategies on your online store? Why not? Do you plan to use it in the near future?
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