outbound marketing

Turn Your E-commerce Businesses into a Profit Engine with International Outsourcing

Sabine Wolf · June 27, 2019 ·

How does Leelinesourcing Turn Your E-commerce Businesses into a Profit Engine?

International outsourcing is as hot as marketing outsourcing.

Your ecommerce stores (online stores) are a lifeblood of your organization and you want the profit engine humming to support your business goals.

Marketing is significantly important, especially for a new business, because it promotes the existence of the new business to the marketplace. Marketing a new sourcing business to overseas customers is challenging.

Like outsourcing marketing services you can outsource many of your company’s functions.

You started your ecommerce business and your online business is ready to sell products and increase your online transactions. Your product pages are getting web traffic the shopping online experience is great, users love it. Sales start pouring in. More than you thought.

When you created your business model, you passed on traditional marketing, the brick and mortar stores, but never thought your micro-brand would take off. Now you have sourcing and delivery problem — ecommerce logistic problem.

Do you want to know how to market a sourcing related e-commerce program?

If so, this article will explore this topic using Leelinesourcing as a case study of a B2B China-based sourcing platform.

We will break down it down from its foundation and marketing efforts to the results. Our experiences should provide some useful tips and give you some insights into starting an e-commerce program.

Let’s get started.

What is International Outsourcing?

The practice of having certain job functions done outside a company instead of having an in-house department or employee handle them; functions can be outsourced to either a company or an individual.

International outsourcing is a practice usually undertaken by companies as a cost-cutting measure. As such, it can affect a wide range of jobs, ranging from customer support to manufacturing to the back office tasks.

1. Why Did We Start Leelinesourcing?

Leelinesourcing was born in 2017 when our founder saw an opportunity within the Chinese sourcing market.

The research was conducted to verify the concept; we conducted market research, evaluated demand and looked at sourcing needs for small-and-medium-sized businesses internationally, especially the ones who wanted to source from China.

We saw the e-commerce industry was booming and could see that there was a huge opportunity particularly driven by the e-commerce giant – Amazon.

Millions of Amazon startups are likely to source from China. Chinese production can meet their sales demands and deliver huge profit margins because the cost of labor and raw materials is low. The market environment is good.

The advantage of our program is that there is a surging international demand for Chinese goods. This demand is underpinned by a booming manufacturing industry caused by the recent policy of reform and opening up.

The disadvantage lies in the competition. We are not the first company to try to capitalize on the Chinese sourcing market.

There are established sourcing companies in China that already have loyal customers and relatively mature sourcing business. While there are other players in the market, their service is not so good, and the market demand is greater than they can supply.

These are the key points from our study of the market and our competitors. In summary, there is still some room for us in the market to launch and expand our business.

Sharline Shaw, the founder of our program, is an expert in sourcing. She has a decade of sourcing experience, understands customer needs and knows how to find the right products.

Taking both the internal and external factors into account, we decided to move to the next stage, and make our business idea come true.

Our idea delivered success; we entered the market by capitalizing on a need and offering a better sourcing service than our competitors. Our business plan ensures everything is on the right track.

2. What’s the Major Aim of International Sourcing Leelinesourcing?

What’s the aim of Leelinesourcing? Our founder explained that it should be providing a professional service for an increasing number of customers.

Through the service we offer, we would like to encourage more customers to benefit from this developing market supply.

We designed the service scope to meet the exact needs of our potential customers. We created a one-stop sourcing service which includes inspection, Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) prep-service, and FBA shipping service.

Apart from defining our service scope, we built our ecommerce website to showcase our services, worked out processes, and gained knowledge of the relevant regulations to ensure smooth cooperation with our customers.

3. What Did We Do to Increase Our Sales with and International Outsourcing?

As we all know, the sales for e-commerce programs are delivered by traffic, conversion rate, unit price, and the repeat purchases from loyal customers. These are the key factors impacting your sales and business. We have to focus on them to figure out the best way to get traffic that results in conversions.

These factors are what can be influenced to achieve our goal to offer a professional sourcing service for more people. They are the cornerstone of a successful e-commerce program.

As a result, we started to work on these key factors to boost our sales. We adopted various measures to drive traffic to our website, boost conversion, increase the unit price, and improve the repetitive purchase rate.

Over the last two years, we have consistently focused on these factors in our strategy, and we will continue to do so to strive for more sales.

Drive More Web Traffic

We created our website, but we have to drive traffic to it. As a new business, this is a big job, but we created a plan to drive traffic and improve the website’s credibility among customers.

Check to see if your website has any SEO problems.

SEO and Design

From the beginning of your website redesign, we optimized for Google SEO. We created an appealing website to attract our customers and utilized stunning images to present ourselves well.

It’s important to back up the page text with quality images as these convey meaning too. Keep a simple, clear and beautiful website with logical organization, and it leaves an excellent impression among customers and viewers.

Content and Engagement

We included quality content that is helpful and specifically written for the needs of our target customers. We have professional bloggers to write blogs that relate to our industry and our customers.

These blogs include global sourcing strategies, sourcing tips for Amazon sellers and shipping tips for importers. We try to provide everything that may interest our target customers.

We identify possible topics that our customers would want to read about and via our blog; we share solutions to their problems and insightful ideas. According to research, 60% of businesses with documented content marketing benefit from quality content.

In our blogs, we use compelling headlines and beautiful pictures to draw customers’ attention. We update our blogs regularly and post to Facebook to keep our subscribers informed.

Our Facebook followers can read our blogs and engage with us via comments. Our blogs provide useful and informative content underpinning our brand position as a professional sourcing service.

Partnerships and International Outsourcing

We also employ a marketer to do outreach marketing. He finds relevant parties to cooperate with to expand our influence and increase our credibility in the sourcing field.

We send emails to our partners to increase traffic and make sure our content has a better reach. We follow up to understand if these partners would like to initiate a long-term partnership and be represented on our partner page. This is a great way to expand our program, increase our rankings on Google, and win more sales and conversions.

Customer Feedback and Reviews

Customer feedback is another tactic we utilize to increase our credibility. Feedback is the social proof our website viewers look for. They trust user-generated content and start a partnership because it exists.

We list our customers’ feedback and reviews on our website to present our service as it gives potential buyers the confidence to work with us.

Customers like to share their experience with our service, and this provides insight and help for potential customers, plus it’s a great way to gain customers’ trust.

Metrics, Analytics, and Analysis

We use tools to monitor our website performance. Daily we use tools such as Google Analytics to check our traffic, conversions, and subscribers. We analyze this data to look for insights to help us define improvements to our marketing tactics.

Google Analytics and other similar tools are helpful to record all the data related to our sales performance. Analysis of this data helps us figure out the best way to improve our website performance and our marketing activities.

We look at our website traffic, conversion rate leads inquiries and the sales of a given period.

Goals and International Outsourcing

We set a monthly goal and track against this using the data analysis to determine success. Did we reach our monthly goal or not?

It’s important to spend time looking at the tracking so we can make sure everything about our marketing is on track for our goal.

Advertise

We advertise our business to increase traffic. We create ad campaigns on Google to try to increase our rankings and drive traffic to our website.

Advertising is another tool to drive traffic and boost our sales. We have advertised on Google, and our campaign provided us with more traffic and clicks through to our website than usual. Targeted advertising is an easy way for us to reach the right customers.

Boost Conversion

international ecommerce logistics — Canva

This section is about how to boost conversion. Increasing your conversion rate is one of the key targets to achieve huge profit margin.

Optimization

We optimized our website design and utilized A/B testing to reach our goal.

Optimization of our website’s design was an important first step. Your website structure matters to your conversion rate because it delivers your customers’ shopping experience.

We designed our website in a clear, simple and logical way to provide an optimum conversion process. Try to make yours clear and easy for the customer to understand. Make it easy for your customers to buy.

Testing and International Outsourcing

It can be hard to decide what is right, but an A/B test will help you to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Let the customer/audience decide which one they would prefer. The result of this comparison test will help you make the right decision. Testing will help you minimize the risk in decision making when making changes in your marketing.

As an example, you have two possible headlines for your page, and you want to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

This choice is not something you can determine by yourself, but an A/B test can determine which will create higher conversion over the same period. Test both ideas, look at the performance data and analyze each of the two headlines performance to get your answer.

Increase Unit Price

Unit price is another key factor that matters to your conversion rate. As we know, price plays a significant role in people’s buying decisions. Comparing to our competitors, we tried to increase our unit price and optimize our service.

Instead of providing a basic sourcing service, we decided to offer value-added services such as FBA Prep service and quality inspection service for sellers.

These services are optional, and customers can choose according to their requirements but, by including these, we have ensured that the price is worthy of the service.

Increase Repetitive Purchase Rate

Outbound Marketing - Matrix Marketing Group — Canva

Let’s talk about the repeat purchase rate. Loyal customers place repeat purchases. We maintain excellent relations with previous customers and contact them regularly.

Regular contact is one of the keys to maintaining our relationship with our customer. We send updates, follow up on their sales, and forecast their sourcing needs based on their business performance.

We focus on their business so that if they have future sourcing needs from China, they would gladly contact us for help again.

We update our website regularly with relevant blogs, news, etc. Maintaining our blogs and providing targeted updates keeps us at the front of mind and maintains our relevance to their business.

Posting to social platforms provides an opportunity for ongoing engagement, entwining us in their day-to-day business practice.

We make sure our posts are relevant and offer insightful ideas about their business and our service. We aim to make these updates something our customers don’t want to miss.

4. What have we achieved with international outsourcing so far?

Our consistent marketing efforts have paid off. The performance of our website is much better than in the beginning period.

The daily traffic has greatly increased and gained over 100 views per day.
In terms of sales, it has gained millions per year. The sales of the first quarter of 2019 equal the total sales of last year.
The website DA has reached up to 33.
The ranking of our keyword on Google has improved and is at the top of the search result page.

Each measure has reached the goals we set, and we have gained status in the sourcing market.

Wrap Up on International Outsourcing

The above is just about the growth of Leelinesourcing. Over the past two years, it has successfully advanced into the sourcing market in China and gained a good reputation among its customers.

We still face challenges, but we have the confidence and experience to overcome them and continue to grow market presence.

We hope you can find useful tips to incorporate in your business through the experience we have listed above.

Thanks for reading!

We’re listening.

Have something to say about turning your e-commerce businesses into a profit engine with international outsourcing? Share it with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Sharline Shaw, the founder of a leelinesourcing.com, is an expert on Chinese export trade. With 10 years of experience in the field of sourcing in China, she is familiar with all relevant regulations and laws about China’s exporting. She’d love to share her experience with people and has written many helpful articles.

Inbound Isn’t Enough: Blending Outbound and Inbound Marketing

George · December 14, 2017 ·

Inbound marketing has countless advantages and is an effective way to reach the wary consumer today. But, all too often, companies devote all their talent to tackling the market from that one single-angle. Inbound is great, but sometimes a broader approach might be more useful.

This got me wondering: is inbound really enough? Does it provide enough support for small and medium-sized companies that want to grow quickly and efficiently? I came to the conclusion that it’s not enough.

I look at inbound marketing as a marketing foundation to be built upon, rather than a stand-alone, independent strategy.

Instead of relying on inbound marketing as an exclusive marketing strategy, my experience has taught me that taking a holistic approach to marketing and integrating multiple strategies and methods is more effective in achieving revenue growth. So, what all should we include in our marketing plan?

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is the process of helping potential customers find your company. Inbound marketing frequently happens before the customer is ready to make a purchase. If you make a contact early in the buying journey and you create brand preference, more leads, and better sales conversion.

Inbound marketing is a strategy that utilizes many forms of pull marketing. For example, digital marketing like content marketing, blogging, events, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, website design, and more.

Outbound marketing seeks out customers, inbound marketing focuses on visibility, so potential buyers come to you. Instead of “renting attention,” through advertising only.

Small businesses are employing inbound marketing focus on new methods geared toward building awareness, developing relationships, and generating leads.

Inbound Marketing – Hey, It Does Work.

Nobody is saying that inbound marketing isn’t effective – especially in today’s world where the consumer has limitless content options and full control over what they choose to consume.

According to HubSpot, 86 percent of consumers skip through television ads and 91 percent of email users unsubscribe from a company email. The old interruptive forms of marketing where advertisements are forced in consumers’ faces isn’t always the best option anymore.

Marketing is becoming less about disruptive one-way communication and more about having a conversation. Inbound marketing helps to build the path for consumers to find you through content creation.

Try this quick quiz to gage your knowledge.

When you decide to tackle inbound marketing, keep in mind that it can take time to get right and start seeing results. Content creation is an intensive and often times intensive process that requires research, planning, and SEO strategy (to ensure your content actually gets read).

You’ll need to refine a technique for content creation in order to reach your audience on a more personal and effective level.

When you put a content engine in place and create awesome blogs with an abundance of helpful information, conversion-designed CTAS, and beautiful landing pages with enticing offers, then you’ve got the inbound machine rolling.

But, what if your company is freshly established with a brand-new website and a limited database? If no one knows who you are, it’s going to take a while to get people to your site through pure SEO and email marketing – and a lot of us don’t have the time or the money to wait for the traffic to slowly build.

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing is a form of marketing that aims to push out your company’s message rather than trying to bring in new customers through content.

Below, I’ve included a sample of some highly effective outbound marketing strategies that you can integrate with your inbound marketing to create better connect with your ideal customers.

Public Relations

Having a solid relationship with the media boosts your credibility and drives visitors to your site. Not to mention, when you get a press pickup, it often includes a link back to your site which can help to boost your domain authority and help you achieve your SEO goal of getting to the number one spot on the Google SERPs.

Digital PR

Digital PR is another great way to help you build your online presence and gain backlinks for your website. Digital PR is essentially the same as traditional PR in that you build relationships with online writers to get media hits or backlinks. Some specific tactics include distributing traditional press releases, guest blogging for other sites, and conducting outreach to offer up your current content as a resource for other blogs.

A key component of digital PR is that, before you do any outreach, you should make sure the website you are contacting has a strong domain authority (DA)– we recommend a DA of at least 30. Domain authority shows the site’s credibility, and it’s best to get backlinks from highly credible sources. Google may actually penalize you if you receive backlinks from untrustworthy websites.

Influencer Marketing

With the rising popularity of social media, bloggers and influencers have become a valuable source for additional outside marketing in the B2C world. Social media influencers bring the benefit of a large, devoted base to engage with your content.

Influencers also strengthen user loyalty to your brand. When users engage with a relatable blogger/influencer who has personal experience with your product, they are much more likely to trust and appreciate the interaction.

Social Media

A strong social media presence can be incredibly powerful. But, making the most of your social media presence doesn’t just mean pumping out content three to five times a day. There are a couple of steps you need to consider before you start creating social media content.

Set Your Goals.

First of all, determine what your company’s goals are for the account. Brand awareness? New leads? Who are you trying to reach? You should have a solid understanding of who your target audience is before you set up any social media accounts. This requires careful thought. You should consider the demographics, psychographics, and emotional desires of your target customer, but you should also know how and when they like to consumer information.

Define Your Audience.

By understanding who you’re trying to reach, you’ll be able to design a more effective social media strategy, because not all social media channels are the same! You need to be able to tweak your messages to fit the form culture of each individual channel that you are active on. In fact, you may not need to be on some social media channels at all.

For example, if you are a B2B manufacturing company, there’s no need for you to spend time developing a presence on Instagram – use those resources to build up an incredible LinkedIn profile.

Stay Organized.

Once you’ve established the basics, you need plan and organize your content for each channel to ensure you’re distributing timely, relevant content consistently. Luckily, there are tons of free templates online to help you organize your content in a schedule and post to the appropriate channels. Check out our social media content calendar here if you need some help with organization.

Measure and Analyze.

Careful attention to detail and planning will help to get your social media machine up and running, but that’s only part of the equation. You need to make sure that you are collecting your social media data in order to analyze the effectiveness of your practices and develop methods to revise results if needed.

There are tons of free apps online available to help you review your social media data. For example, Buzzsumo and Keyhole can help measure user engagement with your various social channels.

Now it can be argued that inbound marketing and social media are connected, but everything you actively push out to bring people in constitutes outbound marketing.

Events

Sometimes called experiential marketing, marketing based around designed events can be an effective way to reach out to your customer base on a personal level and create a more intimate connection.

Entrepreneur defines experiential marketing as, “Work done with retailers and brands to connect directly with shoppers – usually through an event that happens inside a store or externally in the community… Experiential marketing can range from anything from us handing out samples in a store, to staffing grand opening celebrations, to being behind the truck of a mobile tour.”

There’s something to be said about the human connection and being able to meet face to face with a person. If your company visits trade shows and conferences, those locations would be the perfect place to design a cool and engaging event to draw in your audience and engage them on a different level.

For example, years ago, I worked for an IT services firm, and we’d sponsor and exhibit at a particular event that resulted in 75 percent of the practice’s revenue. Sure this is atypical, but it means you can’t rule out the value of some industry events that target your customers.

PPC Advertising

My last outbound marketing tactic is a bit newer in the marketing world, but it’s proving to be highly effective. PPC advertising, or pay per click advertising, is a digital marketing tactic in which you advertise within a search engine’s sponsored results by bidding for the keywords connected to your product.

If you win the bid for your word, then your product or service will be advertised at the top of Google’s first page of results (as seen in the picture below).

One great thing about PPC ads is that you’re able to hone in on your target audience through geo-targeting and by bidding on keywords that your ideal customer uses to search for your product or service.

You also only have to pay if someone clicks on your ad, which means the majority of your ad spend is only going toward people who are actually interested in your company.

For more information on PPC ads and to see if they’re right for your company, check out our previous blog: Intro to PPC: A Beginner’s Guide to Pay Per Click Advertising.

Don’t Sell Your Company Short

Inbound marketing is a great foundation, but to accelerate your performance, you need to consider other ways to drive and engage your audience.

By diversifying your marketing methods with inbound and outbound marketing, you can reach a greater audience by connecting with them through different channels and presenting your products or services during opportune moments.

Use tactics that are tailored to your specific audience, and you’ll see that your integrated marketing efforts help you generate quality leads and close sales most efficiently.

This article was originally published in September 2015 but has been republished for new understanding and clarity. Update 2021.