From chatting with friends, to attending work meetings, catching up on hit TV shows and even doing our shopping, many people are living more and more of their lives online. Ecommerce businesses are thriving. The convenience of browsing thousands of products without leaving the house hasn’t lost its appeal. In fact, shopping online became a habit for many during the pandemic when in-person shopping was restricted. The shift to digital has been a permanent one for many.
So how can ecommerce businesses leverage the digital world and maximize the opportunity of online stores? Read this complete guide to growing your ecommerce business with improved marketing strategies to find out.
What Is Ecommerce Marketing?
Ecommerce businesses are online stores where customers can buy physical or digital products. These brands may only operate online or have a hybrid approach with in-person stores as well.
Ecommerce marketing is how these businesses attract and convert potential customers. Most of the marketing tactics ecommerce businesses use rely on digital marketing, leveraging online marketing channels to drive traffic to their ecommerce site. Through consistent marketing efforts, a customer journey can be crafted, attracting new leads and nurturing them to the point of conversion.
There are multiple benefits of ecommerce marketing including:
- Increasing brand awareness and creating a strong online reputation
- Lead generation that brings new customers to the business
- Retargeting previous customers to make repeat purchases and become loyal customers
- Boosting conversion rates and getting more ecommerce sales
There is more than one way to gain these business-boosting benefits from ecommerce marketing.
5 Types of Ecommerce Marketing
Digital marketing covers a plethora of strategies and techniques across multiple platforms. At its core, it is the practice of using the internet to attract and convert customers. Discover your perfect digital marketing approach by taking a look at the options below, making sure to consider which ones would best fit your business type, size and budget, and target audience. The most popular types of ecommerce marketing include:
1. Search Engine Marketing
Does your customer base turn to Google or other search engines to find products like yours? If so, your ecommerce site should be showing up at the top of the search engine results. This can be done in two ways. First is search engine adverts. Businesses can pay to appear at the top of the results page for certain keywords (this is called pay-per-click). However, as these placements are labeled as adverts, some users scroll past them to the organic results.
Alternatively, use search engine optimization strategies to organically rank at the top of search results for keywords your customers will be searching. The ranking of your ecommerce store depends on the algorithm of the search engine. Google’s algorithm is complicated and changes frequently. However, we know that key factors include keywords, quality content, internal links, and backlinks.
2. Social Media Marketing
Social media is a great marketing channel to get in front of your customer base. There are multiple social media platforms to choose from. Research the demographics of each to find the ones that best match your customer profile. Then as with search engine marketing, you can run both organic and paid marketing campaigns.
Organic content refers to photos, videos, and text posted to the company profile (no ad spend necessary). It then appears on the feeds of the account followers and other accounts’ feeds the platform algorithm believes will be interested in it. Paid social media advertising can speed up success on social media as the content is shown to more people in your target audience.
3. Email Marketing
This is a great way to stay in touch with potential customers and loyal customers because updates, insights, and announcements will be sent straight to the inboxes of leads who have chosen to be on the company email list.
From informational newsletters to exclusive discounts, email content can get subscribers onto your ecommerce website and buy products. The main advantage of email marketing is the ability to set up marketing automations. This streamlines and systemizes the customer journey for maximum efficiency. An example of a popular automation is the abandoned cart email. This is when customers who have started putting items in their shopping cart but didn’t check out receive an email encouraging them to complete the transaction. It has a relatively high conversion rate.
4. SMS Marketing
Like email marketing, SMS marketing sends messages straight to the inbox of leads and customers. This time their text inbox. It’s a less saturated marketing channel with a good engagement. These marketing messages tend to be on the shorter side. There is a key point that is being delivered. For example, announcing new products or sending notifications about the shipping process. It’s a quick and concise touchpoint in the customer journey that keeps customers in the know and feeling like they are being looked after.
5. Content Marketing
Taking the form of blogs, videos, podcasts, and other helpful content, content marketing shares information and advice the customer base would be interested in to attract them to the brand and eventually onto the ecommerce website. Popular content includes how-to materials, guides, listicles, and user-generated content which includes customer testimonials, photos, videos, and questions shared on the company’s platforms.
4 Ecommerce Marketing Tips
While more and more businesses are becoming aware of the power of digital marketing, not all are aware of how to leverage digital marketing effectively. There are some best practices that should be followed by ecommerce brands to get the best possible results. If nothing else, keep in mind the following 4 steps.
1. Personalize Your Campaigns
Writing marketing materials to the general public is nowhere near as effective as writing marketing materials with your specific customer profile at the forefront. Personalize your campaigns not only to their wants and needs but also the likes, interests, and other descriptors that they identify with like busy mom, working professional, or eco-conscious consumer. It makes the content easier to identify with. When a lead sees themselves in your brand, they are much more likely to click through on your Google ads or follow the call to action on your landing page.
2. Craft Retention and Loyalty Programs
It’s undeniable that increasing customer loyalty increases a business’ profitability because it’s easier to win a sale from a previous customer compared to a new customer. That being said, a good customer retention rate is built from investing time, money, and effort in encouraging repeat sales. As well as upselling through email marketing, consider introducing a loyalty program that rewards repeat sales and referrals with bonuses and special offers. Customer rewards are beneficial to the customer experience too. It’s a win-win.
3. Do Your Research
The more you know about your customer base and your industry trends, the more effective your ecommerce marketing plan will be. For example, if you want to increase your click-through rates, you need to understand what motivates your customers to follow links in your emails. Is it by highlighting a special offer or is it by focusing on the amazing results you’ll help them achieve? Learn from others’ experiences with digital marketing. What are other businesses in your industry finding success with? Are they missing something and there’s a gap you can fill, creating a competitive advantage?
4. Align Your Strategies with Your Goals
When you have decided on the strategies you’ll utilize such as the types of campaigns you’ll send and the platforms you’ll use, set specific goals by detailing outcomes and deadlines. How will you tell if your marketing efforts are going well? Set goals according to the metrics available for the channels you’ll be using and how each one fits into the rest of the customer journey. For example, if social media marketing is at the top of your funnel, you’ll focus on reach not conversion.
What strategies should you be using to leverage digital marketing for your ecommerce business?
1. Invest in SEO
While SEO takes effort to implement and time to achieve results, it can be a very powerful component of an ecommerce marketing strategy. Sales are made directly through your website so it’s essential that traffic is driven to it. There’s no better way to do that than for the site to appear in search results for relevant keywords and queries. Optimizing website copy, updating an SEO-friendly blog, and establishing backlinks all helps to improve your ranking.
2. Consider Partnering with Influencers
Affiliate marketing is growing in popularity. It involves getting public figures with loyal audiences to promote your products in exchange for a commission for each sale that comes from their marketing efforts. It makes it easier for new customers to trust you because they already trust the person who is promoting your product. Partnering with influencers who have a similar target audience to you can be very profitable.
3. Run PPC Ads Campaigns
Pay-per-click gets faster results than SEO because you pay to appear in the search results for certain terms instead of relying on the algorithm. So it’s a good route to take as you start implementing SEO principles and building a strong reputation on Google and other search engines. It ensures your business is showing up when your customer searches for relevant queries.
4. Consider Social Media Advertising
To get in front of your customers, especially new customers, your marketing needs to appear wherever your customers naturally hang out. Depending on the demographics of your customers, they will spend time on at least one social media platform. As they’re scrolling through content, you can make it more likely that they will come across your business by paying for advertising. Meeting your customers where they’re at is a good start to building a strong relationship. Social media advertising is an effective way to do this because you can specify your target audience.
5. Add Your Business to Local Listings
Your local customer base could be an untapped goldmine. A significant amount of Google searches include phrases like ‘near me’. So even if they end up ordering online, consumers want to support local businesses. Also, it supports your SEO efforts to show up on a variety of business listings from Google Business Profile to local listings.
6. Make Your Website User-Friendly
You want website visitors to stay on your site long enough to be convinced to make a purchase, right? Well, you need to work on the usability of your website then. It should be easy to navigate from page to page and find key information customers will want to know before committing to buying a product. With so many other things vying for the attention of your customers online, you want to keep them engaged, not frustrated.
7. Optimize Your Product Pages
No one buys a product they don’t think they need or they just don’t want. It’s a waste of money. So you have to make your products appealing to your customer base at all stages of the customer journey, from social media posts to the product description. Is it clear what the product is, who it is for, how it helps, and what makes it unique? If not, work on your sales page copy, especially as not all potential customers will be familiar with your brand when coming from Google Shopping and the like.
8. Optimize Your Site for Mobile Devices
Increasingly consumers are shopping on the go (or when scrolling on their phones while watching Netflix!) so don’t assume your customers are viewing your website on a desktop. Make your site easy to browse and purchase from on a mobile device, whether a cell phone or a tablet. This is particularly important if you invest in social media ads because it increases the likelihood that they’ll visit your website on a mobile device. Lack of usability leads to lost sales.
9. Get Customer Reviews
Social proof is great for conversion rate optimization. So work on collecting positive customer reviews on popular review websites like Google Reviews in addition to adding testimonials to your own marketing such as landing pages. This improves your SEO ranking and has the potential to win over new customers who are looking for trusted businesses like yours. An easy way to boost your reviews is to ask for them by sending over a link through text or email.
10. Install a Web Chat Tool
After putting work into getting social media followers, Google searchers, and more to visit your website, ensure your website fulfills their needs. It’s a key part of the customer experience. Website visitors can really benefit from having a web chat available where they can ask questions and get a response in a timely and convenient manner. You don’t want to lose potential customers at the last hurdle—purchasing from your ecommerce website.
