COVID-19 has a serious impact on the Grocery retail business. The uncertainty of coronavirus caused a massive influx of grocery sales. Before COVID-19 consumers used to visit their nearby grocery stores once in two days. All grocery items were moving normally and the store owners will be maintaining their stocks.
After COVID-19, the interpersonal contact between people has drastically reduced and social distancing was strictly followed everywhere to gain control over this contagious disease. This has shattered the growth of the grocery retail industry. The only solution to secure the grocery market is to transfer the grocery store online.
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The Future Depends on Digital Transformation.
A recent survey reveals that consumers show a greater response to online grocery stores. The growth in the market was 150% compared to 2019. The reason behind this tremendous growth is that consumers find shopping in an online grocery store more convenient and it has many more advantages as listed below.
- Contactless shopping – in this pandemic period, people need to avoid crowd and should maintain social distance and this is quite challenging one when one visits any physical grocery store. But the key online grocery strategy is to support contactless shopping and delivery. This has gained massive response from consumers.
- Endless shopping – with lockdown restrictions, consumers are not allowed to shop anytime they want. There are time restrictions and they should finish their shopping within the given time. But this is not so when they shop with any online grocery store. They can shop 24/7.
These facts clearly show that every grocery store should think about developing a grocery eCommerce solution. But entrepreneurs should have a clear idea of how to build and how to promote online grocery stores. Let us find out the ways involved in building and promoting the online grocery store.
How to Build an Online Grocery Store?
If you are a beginner then this is going to help you in developing your own online store. Building an online grocery store has two ways.
Develop from Scratch – this is a traditional method where you need to find a perfect developer who is skilled enough to build an online grocery store from scratch. The user needs to explain his requirement and the developer will start building the online store. In each phase, the developer will show a demo on his development and users will give necessary corrections or feedback.
This is a long process and a high budget is required to complete the project successfully. The main advantage of selecting this way is that users can get complete customization of the platform. Users can have all features they want to have in their online grocery store. But more patience is needed as users need to wait for the project to get completed.
Go for Readymade Grocery eCommerce Solutions – many eCommerce companies have ready-to-use grocery software that will have default features. You can buy the software by paying once and can instantly launch your online grocery store and get your orders. This method is very cost-effective and recommended for an online grocery start-up.
Effective Online Grocery Marketing Strategy
To deliver a perfect grocery eCommerce solution you need to have a perfect grocery marketing strategy. Using the right strategy will get you perfect outcomes. Check out the effective ways of promoting your online grocery store.
Segment your Target Audience
Once you are ready with your online grocery store, you need to segment your audience so that you can have a perfect marketing strategy for your grocery store that will effectively let you reach your audience and get you a better conversion.
Organize your audience by location-based, interest-based, gender and age-based and plan to give more personalization to your customers’ preferences. This will delight them and will make them visit your online grocery store again and again.
Search Engine Optimization
Google is the leading search engine and consumers before they buy any product will definitely visit this search engine to know more about it. So getting listed on the top pages of Google is very crucial for any online grocery store. Using SEO grocery marketing strategy one can make his grocery ecommerce store to be in the top of the search.
When you are listed on top then you will get more traffic and this will get you more leads. With effective content marketing you can convince your visitors and convert them into your consumers. You can even run SEM (search engine marketing) and PPC (Pay per click) campaigns that will get you more visitors.
Social Media Promotion
When we talk about digital marketing, how can we ignore social media? Around 85% of our target audiences will be active in any of the social media platforms. The effective segment of digital marketing is promoting in social media. Your online grocery marketing strategy should have unique content and banner posting done in social media.
Since our audiences are available, you can easily reach your brand to them and can get instant customer engagement to your online grocery store. You can run paid campaigns and can filter your audience and make your product and brand easily visible and create a demand in their mind that will make them visit your online grocery store.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is getting trendy these days. People follow celebrities who are too active on social platforms. They keep admiring what these celebrities use and would like to follow the same. By utilizing this aspect, you can have an influencer to promote your brand and the influencer can post ads on your behalf and make his followers reach your online grocery store.
While selecting an influencer you need to check his follower’s count and make sure they are your target audience. This online grocery marketing strategy will get you more reputation among people and they will start trusting your brand easily. This will lead to better conversion.
Powerful Email Marketing
Email marketing is the best marketing strategy for the online grocery businesses. This will get you better customer engagement to your online grocery store or your grocery app easily. You can effectively reach your audience at the right time and make your brand visible to them through your personalized emails.
You can keep updating your customers about offers, discounts, and new arrivals through emails and customers will definitely come to know how active your online grocery store is. Though it is a very old marketing strategy for online grocery stores, still the result is guaranteed.
Build Better Referral Programs
Word-of-mouth is still considered to be a perfect marketing strategy that will get you customers without any investment. Your existing customers will become your brand ambassadors and will refer others to visit your online grocery store. To make them refer, a quality service alone may not be enough. You need to have better customer loyalty programs that will motivate them to refer more.
You need to come up with a perfect referral plan that will benefit your customers. You can introduce some credit points for referring their friends and relatives and let them use those points at the time of purchase. This marketing strategy for the online grocery business can bring brighter changes and get you better returns.
Conclusion
By simply following the above-mentioned online grocery marketing strategies, increase your conversion rate by 60%. Additionally, you may need to focus on features your online grocery store possesses. Make sure your grocery platform is more user-friendly and device responsive. Only then all your marketing strategies for your online grocery business will work out.
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