Effective Marketing Tools for Your E-Commerce Website.

If you have an E-Commerce website, then the little social media icons (present next to your products or else in the shopping cart) may be ruining your business. It is found that as your website includes more of these social features, visitors are more unlikely to purchase products or services.

Senior shoppers and boomers will find the features more disgusting and are likely to leave your site. Here are some tips to make your website more appealing:

1) Social media icons are distracting.

Shoppers would like to focus only on one thing - making them hit the "buy" button. Not let them move on to social media features. Once the purchase of an item is made, they may be asked to follow the business on social media. However, this step should be done only after the purchase is made.

Instead of shopping cart gadgets, you could bring in cues for a powerful purchase inducement. These are:

· How fast the item will be delivered.

· Remaining quantity of the item.

· When the sale is ending.

2) Social media is a turn off to new customers.

One thing you should be careful about is not to ask the visitor to your site to "like" it or ask them to follow on social media. It is not possible for a visitor to validate your product or service from the very beginning.

3) Negative social proof is a sales killer.

The placing of social sharing icons next to items is similar to playing with fire, especially if the items do not get social engagement.

4) Twitter is the weakest shopping tool.

Use Twitter to engage visitors, who are loyal customers, in making conversations and share news, but it should not be an inbound channel. As Twitter does not lead to a site for any purchase, hence it is just tweeting from your website that takes place. Hence it should not be used as inbound channel.

5) Social media is not all that bad.

The effective use of paid social media to bring in more traffic to a brand site generally results in good outcome of your online marketing campaign, especially on LinkedIn for B2B and Facebook for B2C. This is because with a combination of right audience and right message, the result is surely going to be a success.

Hence, you need to consider two important things: drive traffic to your website using strong channels and helping to maximize conversations. To go about it, use paid search, email, paid Facebook ads as well as direct mail to bring in the right visitors to your website. Test regularly and treat new visitors differently from your loyal customers.

So ensure to make changes to your home page as well as product pages by removing those annoying icons. Bring in features that users would like to do. Highlight the latest deal, the best seller or the newest inventory.