5 Digital Marketing Channels to Increase Sales on your eCommerce Website in Egypt

So, you have built your online store, and now it’s time to drive traffic of people to shop and buy.

In this post, I am going to list five digital marketing channels, I have practically experienced with eCommerce brands in Egypt, and I believe you should leverage these digital marketing channels to send people straight to your eCommerce website. There are around 58 million Internet users in Egypt (Statista), surfing the web, most of them on Social Media platforms; the question is, which audience should be your target? You don’t have to reach all Egyptians, right? Hoping that all of them will fall in love with your brand and your products, it will cost tons of money, and it will consume useless efforts. Targeting the right audience and executing remarking tactics is one of the fundamental parts of the process of developing a successful online store and digital marketing strategy in any market.

Once you figure out the magic behind digital marketing and advertising, you will think, why didn’t I start selling online three or five years ago?

Channel #1: Google

Google is an extremely powerful digital marketing channel. People search on Google when they have a problem that needs to be solved, especially young audiences, they tend to trust search engines and online reviews more than people who never met before, and they are more likely will ask Google. Your potential customers search for a keyword that is related to your products or your competition. In this case, your brand has to pop up and state that you have a product that can solve their problems and make them a happier version of themselves.

Two things you should know about Google Search, first; they are a business looking for a profit from other companies like yours, they sell ads to brands who want to sell products or services to their customers, that’s their core business. Second, they own the best data algorithm on the planet about your potential consumers.

So what?

When you launch your online store, you should guarantee that your online store is in the top 5 results on the first page of Google using the power of digital marketing.
Well, if this is the case, you need to think in two directions, first, the prompt direction, in sort of text ads, which will cost you once the user clicks on them. Second, the long term direction, to rank organically (without ads) on the first page, to attract more people that wouldn’t cost you paid clicks, this called SEO, Search Engine Optimization.

Optimizing your eCommerce website for Googe search engine is a long process, that needs an investment with time and money to get better ranking results in the future. Good news, Egypt is still in the beginning with SEO, so there is a considerable room to rank fast with related keywords for your online business.

Don’t ignore SEO after your store launch event, dedicate some money from your yearly digital marketing budget for SEO, because organic traffic could easily count more than 50% of your total traffic in the future, especially that Google ads are getting more and more expensive, yet you need them at the beginning.

Channel #2: Social Media

We all know the power of social media in digital marketing; there are around 40 million people on Facebook in Egypt, and some of them are moving to Instagram, enjoying watching stories, photos, and videos on IGTV.

Some of the brands may think; we already have an outstanding presence on social media platform, we have thousands of fans and followers engaging with the daily post we are feeding them. Well, when you have an online store, your perspective on social media will take a different approach. How?

Facebook, which owns Instagram as well, sell catalog adverts to businesses like yours, so you can reach your targeted audiences who match specific interests and demographics or audience who digitally behave in a certain way that makes them suitable to consume your product.

You need to split your social media advertising budget into four stages, in a funnel shape from top to bottom:
1- Awareness campaigns: reaching a new targeted audience, telling them a story about your brand and your new products.
2- Engagement campaigns: reaching your fans, and their friends, with more specialized content.
3- Catalog campaigns: reaching people who are willing to consider your products catalog, usually people who previously engaged from the previous stages.
4- Remarketing campaigns: reaching people who visited your online store but didn’t add the products to their cart or not purchased yet.

I know it sounds spooky when you visit a website and leave, five minutes later, you will find an advert from this website, trying to sell you the product that you have visited or added to your cart. We all got this ad. It is called Remarketing, and it works.

Smart Social Media Campaigns guarantee sustainable traffic of potential engaged shoppers to your online store. My advice is to apply a fixed daily budget for three months in advance and keep your eyes close on numbers, learn how people engage with your ads, then optimize and enhance your advertising plans to increase the conversions/purchases rate.

Channel #3: Direct Traffic

I know how it feels when direct traffic becomes a large part of your total traffic pie; you will feel good when your brand is popular and when people write the URL of your eCommerce website without Googling it or clicking on an ad from Social Media.

The more happy customers you will have, the more word-of-mouth will spread between your audience, then the more direct traffic you will get.

To increase your business’s direct traffic and overall digital marketing:
1- Offer outstanding customer service for your actual shoppers.
2- You need always generate good content, especially videos.
3- Choose domain names that people can easily remember and write it intuitively.
4- Execute retention digital marketing tactics. More about that in a future blog post.

We at MitchDesigns manage brands that have 25% direct traffic. Guess what! Orders rate is pretty high from direct traffic than any other channels; why? Because people remembered your brand and wrote your domain name themselves to shop online, instead of clicking an ad that is trying to convince them to buy.

Channel #4: Email Marketing

Do people open their promotional emails? Yes, they do; they also click on featured deals items or new arrival products. Especially if those people are your former customers who have already bought before. Email marketing is a tremendous opportunity in digital marketing if you master how to use them, how to attract people to open an email from reading an attractive subject, furthermore how to engage with them in a few seconds when they scan your email promotional content.

It only works if you send it to your actual customers’ database. Otherwise, you spam people who don’t know you, and at that time, it will fire back in your face.

Channel #5: Referrals Traffic & Digital Marketing

Where do your potential customers spend time on the web when they are not on Social Media?
They are browsing other websites, reading about Mohamed Salah on a sports website, following up with the local news, or reading a blog post on an interesting trend or topic.

There is a chance to drive their attention to your brand and products with digital marketing by doing two things:

A- Publishing blog posts on other websites educating your audience about a specific topic related to your products while attaching links that lead to a category of products or a particular product that matches the context of your blog post.

B- Publishing advertising banners on other websites, Google Display Network (GDN) is a good way of doing that.
You should do quick research to figure out what type of websites your targeted potential customers are spending time on and publish advertising banners on these websites. It works well if you have a YouTube video campaign running at the same time.

Well, those were the five main digital marketing channels you must consider to sustain a decent amount of traffic to your online store. Some of this traffic will bounce once they arrive at your landing page, but some will take a more in-depth look at your product catalog, some will add products to the cart to save them for later decision, and some will go to the checkout page but won’t purchase yet, and some will purchase.

And here comes another advantage of digital marketing. You can always execute remarking campaigns on Social Media, YouTube, or other websites for people who spend time on your eCommerce website but didn’t purchase. These people are highly interested in your products and shopping around, but for some reason, they didn’t buy yet; you need to figure out why and work on convincing them to join the digital marketing funnel until they land on the confirmation order thanks page.

I wish my post were helpful enough. Good luck with your planning your online store and digital marketing strategy in Egypt.