As a pharmaceutical manufacturer or distributor growing your brand online is vital. In fact, eCommerce has never been more popular or more important for a business. But why is e-commerce so necessary, how do you make sure that it’s effective and how do you get started? In this article, we’ll explore all of this and more.

Why do you need eCommerce for your pharma brand?

eCommerce is growing in popularity every day for all industries—and for the pharmaceutical industry, this couldn’t be more true. The current size of the online pharmacy market is valued around $50 million, and it’s projected to reach upwards of $170 million in the next few years. Currently, online prescription orders account for about 25% of pharmaceuticals sold in the United States—and that number grows every day.

What’s the benefit of eCommerce for consumers?

The age group that’s most likely to purchase medication online is 35 to 44-year-olds. This demographic is busy with spouses, kids, pets, jobs, friends, family and recreational activities. As a result, they choose to purchase many products, including medication online. In addition, older demographics are increasingly more comfortable with technology and thus more interested in buying medication online too. This popularity is increasing for the following reasons.

Convenience: For many people, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to get to a local pharmacy. That’s why they rely on the quick push of a button on their phone or computer to order their medication. It’s quick and simple.

Less exposure: Older demographics are more likely to seek out ways to reduce their exposure to sickness, especially now during the COVID-19 outbreak. Ordering their medication online—instead of going to the store—is a much safer option for them.

Auto-ship: Having medications on auto-ship takes having to remember out of the equation. It’s automatic, it’s one less thing to worry about and people are way less likely to miss their important meds.

Privacy: Buying medication online eliminates the embarrassment that can come from purchasing certain meds in person.

What’s the benefit of eCommerce for you?

When selling pharmaceuticals, there are countless benefits of having everything available online for your business. Here are just a few.

Data, analytics and metrics: When customers purchase medication online, you now have access to some of their personal information. Over time, this data can be compiled so that you can learn more about each customer and your overall customer base. For example, analytics can show each customer’s purchasing behaviors, demographics and more. Companies can then use this digital data to improve their marketing, stock their shelves more effectively and better engage with customers.

Less competition: When people visit a pharmacy, there are lots of options on the shelf—and many of them may have the same active ingredient as your product but can  also be less expensive. This can cause your brand to lose market share. However, by selling online, there’s less blatant competition at the time of purchase.

Lower shipping costs: When companies can produce medication in one single location and then send it directly to consumers—instead of paying for multiple regional warehouses to stock the products—the shipping costs become exponentially lower.

Build Relationship with the Customer: For manufacturers and distributors, having an eCommerce presence allows you to eliminate steps in the distribution process, each of which carries a cost.

How can you ensure that your company is ready for e-commerce?

As a pharmaceutical manufacturer, distributor or retailer, it’s important to jump on the eCommerce bandwagon sooner rather than later. If you’re only selling vitamins and supplements, this is a relatively simple process. Just list your products online and allow people to buy them directly from your website.

However, if you sell prescription products, things are more involved. You’ll need to be sure that you’ve built a verification functionality into your site and have a process for authenticating all purchases.

No matter what type of pharmaceuticals you’re selling, it’s crucial that you have all product information readily available on your website. Nutrition facts, labels and any other pertinent information need to be obvious and easy to follow. This will help keep you out of hot water in terms of the many legalities of pharma.

How should you get started in the e-commerce world?

You might be reading this and now know about the importance of eCommerce—but what if you have no online webstore? Don’t panic.

The first step to take is to develop a website that’s eCommerce friendly. There are many platforms from which to choose (and we can help you with this). Once you have your e-commerce website up and running, you have to figure out how to get people there! This is done by focusing on solid SEO practices and creating social media pages (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), as well as ongoing  email campaigns. These tactics will make people more aware of your brand and get them more engaged with what you offer.

Conclusion

With more and more people needing the convenience, safety and privacy that online pharma can provide, it’s no wonder that e-commerce sales increase every day. And when pharma companies know how to effectively sell online, they’ll reap the benefits for years to come.

To learn more about how InteractOne can help implement and grow your pharmaceutical eCommerce initiatives, contact us today.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a huge role in how a website ranks on search engines and how well existing and potential customers can find your webstore and its products. There are three types of SEO categories that companies need to focus on: technical, on-page and external. Each one of these types has multiple steps and related suggestions for creating an optimized website.  If you follow the steps in this checklist you’ll be on your way to improved SEO, better search rankings and more traffic to your site.

Structure Your Content

Since content is the main communication between a brand and a customer, it is crucial to create valuable content whether it is copy, videos, graphics or call to actions that are concise, memorable and impactful. On average, consumers leave a page within ten seconds unless the website includes a clear value proposition. Your content needs to focus on value by understanding who your customer is, where they are coming from and what their interests are.  Valuable content isn’t the only aspect your brand should focus on. Google analyzes all content on your website whether it is copy, images and videos. If structured correctly, search engines can easily understand your site content. For effective on-page SEO, you need to keep your site content skim-friendly by using headlines, subheadings, graphics and images. Users should be able to find the information they are looking for fast and efficiently.

Use and Strategically Place Keywords

Keywords play a huge rule for your on-page SEO. These keywords help your existing and potential customers find your site and your products organically on search engines. Don’t just go placing random keywords all over your content pages. It’s important to do keyword research on your targeted audience. While doing this research, keep in mind their demographics, geological location and what their interests are. There are many keyword search extensions and tools that can narrow down your search like Spyfu, Google Analytics and SEMRush. (If you’re lacking the resources or know-how to do this sort of research we recommend working with a marketing agency.) Once you know your keywords,  you can begin to strategically place them throughout your webstore.

Titles 

Using your main keyword in your titles on blogs, product pages, landing pages and homepages is a must. It is one of the first places your customer will find your site, page or even product. You will want to place your top keyword in front of your title. While working on the title of your page, you will also want to add title tag modifiers. Title tag modifiers are words or phrases that help your page rank for loads of long-tail keywords.

First 150 Words

Search engines like Google heavily focus on the first 150 words of your web page. The first 150 words need to include your main keyword at least once. You can also include a few of your other minor keywords. However, remember to not overuse your main or minor keywords in the first 150 words or the rest of your piece. If you’re attempting to shoehorn your keyword(s) as much as possible into the body of your content it will be obvious to your readers (and to the search engines) and make the content less readable. Distribute them sparselessly throughout the page and site..

H1, H2 and H3 Tags

Heading tags are the tags you use to size your title and subheadings. This allows your readers or shoppers to know the layout of the web page or article. While using heading tags, you will want to keep them as organized as possible and use relevant keywords. Even though these tags don’t make a huge contribution to your search engine rankings, every element helps.

Include a Meta Description

Meta descriptions describe or summarize the contents on your page for search engine ranking benefits. Here’s an example of what a meta description looks like from Fawn Shoppe, a brand that InteractOne worked with:

You want your meta description to be helpful to your customers by using your keywords to help build the context of your content. Each page on your webstore must have a unique meta description that ranges from 50 to 300 words.

Use Synonyms and LSI Keywords

While doing your keyword research, you will have one main keyword and multiple minor keywords. Instead of oversaturating your main keyword, you are going to want to use synonyms of that keyword or latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords. LSI keywords are terms related to the main keyword that help search engines like Google to more deeply understand your webstore’s content. There are many extensions that your company can use to find the proper LSI keywords to use like LSIGraph. For ranking purposes, you will want to use your main keyword a couple of times and then add synonyms throughout the content. For better help on finding synonyms or LSI keywords that work best for your eCommerce, work with a knowledgeable marketing firm who knows the ins and outs of SEO marketing.

Optimize All Images to Include Alt Attributes

Any webstore’s images play a role in on-page search engine optimization. Since your website will prominently feature images, it is important to optimize all the site’s images to include alt attributes. Alt attributes help search engines identify the content on a web page. It is also the perfect opportunity to include your keywords. Optimizing your company’s images doesn’t just end with the image itself but also includes the image’s file name. When you are saving an image, name it with words and keywords that describe the image. Alt texts and file names further explain to search engines what it is and what your website is about.

Customize Your URLs

The first element of your webstore is the URL. It is that address that customers access your website from. Even though search engines can index non-customized URLs, customizing your URL is the perfect opportunity to include keywords and context of what the page is about. Including keywords in your URL can improve your organic click-through-rate (CTR). As you already know, organic CTR is the percentage of users that click on the search results. The CTR also influences a brand’s ranking on search engines. Also, keep in mind that recent studies show that URLs that are short rank the best on search engines. These shorter URLs are normally rich in keywords that help search engines evaluate what it is about.

Include External and Internal Links

To help gain a higher ranking on Google and other search engines, your brand needs to build a trusted site. You can build a trust-worthy webstore by linking trusted, well-referenced websites to your company’s site. These outbound well-referenced website links are known as external links. External links can display on blogs, social media, about pages, frequently asked questions pages and more. Search engine optimization experts recommend linking five to eight authoritative sources on your blogs. To drive more traffic to different pages on your webstore, your site must include internal links as well. Internal links are links that take a user to other pages on your website. You can use internal links (also known as cross-links) on blogs, social media and other pages throughout your site. If you are posting on a blog, SEO experts recommend linking two to five different pages on your site. It is also important to use keyword-rich anchor text when you use external and internal links.

Kabayare Fashion provides an excellent example of including multiple internal links on their Returns and Exchanges page:

Conclusion

For a successful on-page SEO strategy, you must implement each of these tactics. Each one of these steps, when working in tandem, will create a stronger, more desirable site in the eyes of search engines. Each one of these elements on their own won’t necessarily increase your webstore’s ranking; however, marrying all the aspects will create a business that will organically increase traffic. You have to figure out the best SEO tactics alone. Contact us today to learn how we can help increase  your traffic through search engine optimization.

The use of direct mail marketing decreases every year with brick-and-mortar retailers, as well as  eCommerce stores. Businesses are increasingly opting for the more affordable, faster, and more effective route — email marketing. As an apparel and accessories webstore, email marketing is one of the main ways you promote your brand. As you know, email marketing involves sending out commercial emails to existing and potential customers as a means to communicate important details about your products, webstore, social media and any other relevant information. It’s the most direct way to keep in touch with your prospects and customer base. 

No matter how many fans or followers you have on social media, you don’t ‘own’ those contacts. The average social media post will organically reach less than 1% of your followers. Whereas with email marketing, you ‘own’ those contacts. Assuming their email address is still active, you can be assured that your eblast will reach their inbox, giving you the opportunity to make a connection and a sale. In this guide, you will learn how to make the most of your email communications. Read on for the four best practices when using email marketing for your apparel and accessories eCommerce business.

Personalize Emails for Targeted Audiences

Your apparel webstore needs to have personalized emails to target specific audiences. When we say personalized emails, we don’t mean to send out individual emails, hand written to each customer. Instead, these personalized emails in most cases include welcome emails, standard promotional emails, seasonal emails, newsletters, post-purchase emails, cart abandonment emails and re-engagement emails. Each one of these email types has a specific layout and purpose. For example, cart abandonment emails target customers who placed items into a cart, but never completed the purchase. By sending out a cart abandonment email, you are reminding customers of your site and the products they wanted. Plus if you add an offer, they are more inclined to finish purchasing. 

Personalized emails also work as a means of developing a deeper connection with your customers. Customers prefer personalized emails based on their demographic, geographical location and items they prefer. By skipping out on sending a mass email to every subscriber, your customers most likely will open more of your emails which then leads to more conversions, instead of them throwing it away or unsubscribing. You can customize emails to your customers by checking out your CRM data to learn what your customers are looking at and what they are possibly interested in. 

Keeping up with all the different types of personalized emails can be confusing and time-consuming, especially when working with a large customer database and a CRM like Salesforce. That’s why we recommend working with a marketing firm that understands the different types of emails and when to send them.

Review Your Mail Schedule

Timing is everything and that is particularly true for  email. You have to reach your customers at the right time or you risk losing them forever. Cart abandonment emails work well to drive traffic because it prompts the customers to complete an action they already began. The popular clothing company, ASOS, provides an excellent, straight-to-the-point cart abandonment email:

Another example is scheduling emails around specific holidays like the Christmas season, Cyber Monday, back to school and more. Also, remember that customers unsubscribe from brands that send out too many emails. Most companies send out about two to eight emails a month to their subscribers, depending on the brand and testing. Testing is crucial to this process as well. You don’t want to scare off subscribers with too many eblasts but you also want to stay top-of-mind for them. We’ve spoken at length about the benefits of AB testing your website (here and here) but these same principles apply to your email schedule as well. Test different release schedules on random portions of your contact list to see what frequency solicites the best response.

Monitor Email Performance

What’s the point of having email marketing if you don’t know how well your emails are  performing? An email performance report will show you what sections have the highest and lowest conversion rates. From there, you can then decide what needs to stay and what needs to change.. 

Many email providers can view your open and click rates. If they notice your emails are not being opened and engaged with, your reputation as a mailer can plummet, which could result in being kicked off the platform. To avoid this from happening, here are three approaches that you should keep in mind:

1. Use special messaging to reactivate customers.
2. Reduce the number of emails you send to these customers.
3. If recipients aren’t opening or clicking on your email, remove them from your list. 

Dropping subscribers from your email list maybe concerning, but it will actually  boost your mailer reputation. If you notice that you are unsubscribing many users, make sure to have a marketing plan to find new potential customers. Monitoring email performance is a tedious task that can be confusing and frustrating, especially if you’re also evaluating any A/B tests you’re currently running. There are many Magento extensions that help monitor your emails as well as do A/B testing. Email tools like Mailchimp, Klaviyo, dotDigital and Listrak are a few places where you can monitor and A/B test your email marketing. 

Revise Future Emails

Email marketing involves a ton of testing and trial and error. When you first start sending emails, it may be hard to know what will and won’t work for your customers. Throughout any email marketing campaign, you will learn what customers click on. From there, you grow and adapt to what they want to see. You also need to remember that customers’ interests are constantly changing. So, a Call To Action or content (video, images or written copy) that worked before doesn’t guarantee that your customers will continue to show interest months down the line. 

As mentioned before, A/B testing your email performance is key to understanding what works for your company. While reviewing your results, you need to take note of every feature that isn’t working and replace it with a new element that may better connect with your audience. This applies to every element of your emails including CTAs, graphics, promotions, copy, images, layout, subject lines and preheaders. By constantly revising and building upon improvements, you should have an email design and release schedule that fits your brand and connects with your customer base in a real and measurable way.

The potential of gaining new customers through email marketing is limitless, but there are a number of steps and requirements every company must go through to send out any emails. The best way to stay on top of your email marketing is to use one of these recommended extensions or work with a knowledgeable marketing team. To learn more about how to implement these strategies and increase online sales, contact us today.