What is Ecommerce Marketing?
Ecommerce marketing is the process of making a marketing effort to publicize your online store and generate sales. It applies both to customer acquisition and customer retention.
What does Ecommerce Marketing do?
- It drives traffic to your website.
- It advertises your website in front of your target customers.
- It makes it easy for the customers to discover your eCommerce website who wants to purchase the kind of products you sell.
- It transforms website visitors into customers.
- It ensures continued growth and sales by engaging the customers again and again.
- It works on the after purchase customer satisfaction to ensure loyalty.
- Stimulates sale regularity for bulk orders.
- It ensures that relevant offers & codes reach your customer base on time to make them purchase again.
Best Ecommerce Marketing Strategies
Let’s look at the most demanding and popular marketing strategies to work upon:
1. Content Originality:
The very first and most important step for your eCommerce marketing strategy is to create content that is very new, easy to understand & creative at the same time, and original to the core. For this, you need to optimize your whole website, your category pages, and your product pages.
To start with this you need to neatly write on your home page about your company, about the products you are selling, and why one should purchase the product from your site. A few things to look into are:
- Build a logical website architecture that should be three clicks deep.
- Improve page load time.
- Do keyword research and align content with search intent.
- Do check for the redundant content.
- Implement structured data.
- Ensure all pages are mobile-friendly.
- Fixing of broken links.
Category pages are also important to look for in terms of displaying neat and clean content. Your category pages are a chance to target broad search items with a high search volume and should be rigorously optimized for these items.
After the home page and category pages, you need to take care of the overall content you are displaying regarding the product like the features, benefits, etc. with your best selling products, high-demand products.
2. SEO for your Ecommerce Website:
Search engine optimization is making your website more visible and easily discoverable on search engines (Google, Bing, Firefox, etc.). It is about adding keywords to your website copy that your prospect would use when searching for products like yours so that the search engine recognizes you have what they want and shows you high in the results in their browser.
SEO is the most low-cost, easy to maintain & high ROI eCommerce marketing tool which ensures that people land on your website to purchase the product from your online store. For SEO your website must get regularly updated with neat and clean content with user-friendly keywords.
3. Email Marketing:
Email marketing is an old, cost-effective, and reliable marketing tool to ensure the maximum customer acquisition rate by sending emails to your probable customers. All you have to do is to choose an email marketing service that has features like:
- Transactional emails
- Automated emails
- Segmented emails
In Email marketing, you can add abandoned cart sequences which are a very popular marketing strategy nowadays. In this you remind the customer they have added something to their shopping cart but haven’t purchased in a sequential way.
4. Social Media Marketing:
Social media has a huge impact on an individual to purchase a certain product due to smartphones and feasible internet connections all around the world. The key to success with social media marketing is to create authentic connections with your contact list, respond to their comments, help them with their queries, be entertaining, be appealing, etc. Don’t just release content without engaging. For this, you can use two types of social media marketing strategy such as:
- Organic social media marketing: You can use your unpaid presence on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest whichever your target audience uses more. It is the best way to mark your presence in people and to show that you are in the business and ensure a certain chance that they visit your eCommerce website.
- Inorganic or paid social media marketing: Paid marketing means you need to pay to play in the market i.e. via ads and influencers. Ad formats vary depending upon the social media platform. The ad includes images, videos, animations and you have to choose what works best according to your product and target audience.
Influencer marketing is about paying popular people to promote your product and these influencers will help you reach your difficult target customers.
5. Conversion Rate Optimization for your Website:
CRO is the best investment strategy to convert your prospects into customers because there will be no sense in investing in traffic on your website if you don’t get any sales or revenue. This revenue can be invested in acquiring more traffic, which then converts at a higher rate, which generates more revenue. So basically CRO is a flywheel for your marketing efforts.
Various ways of doing CRO are:
- Live Chats
- Push Notifications
- UGC(user-generated content)
6. Content Marketing:
Another technique that ensures long-term results for any eCommerce business is content marketing.
The idea of content marketing is to answer questions (FAQ’s), educate, expand the company portrayal, help people choose a product and buy it from your site by telling your story, share your expertise and values, overcome potential objections, and reassure potential or existing customers you are a good business to shop from.
The best part about content is that once created, it’s out there working for you when optimized for search and easily found on site. It can also be reused for other eCommerce marketing campaigns such as newsletters, testimonials.
You can use different types of content marketing as per your business and product:
- Blogs
- Videos
- Newsletters
- Testimonials
7. Search Advertisement Marketing:
It is a paid advertisement marketing tactic in which you pay to search engines for more exposure.
The most popular one is PPC (Pay per Click) in which a search engine advertises you using the best keywords and then gets paid if someone clicks on the advertisement. PPC technique must involve an excellent Ad, offer, and then the main page. Other search advertisement marketing techniques are Google Ad Words, Display Campaigns, or banners on sites.
8. Marketing through PR and Brand Awareness:
PR and branding are beneficial especially at the launch of your site, you will get featured in media publications both offline and online. It can be a founder interview, getting your headlines featured in a photo shoot. Whatever is the best fit for your product, the goal is to increase brand awareness and create demand for your product.
Using events and sponsorships you can promote your website in your possible prospects group.
9. Partnerships:
You can join hands with other companies/websites in the form of a partnership to expand your circle to their customers as well.
For example, you can agree on swapping the email lists so each brand connects with more potential customers. Just label the email campaign properly so subscribers understand their details have not been sold. Another way is to create a special cross-brand offer for both the brands and their clients.
10. Affiliate Marketing:
Affiliate marketing involves referring to a product or service by sharing it on a blog, social media platform, or website. The affiliate earns a commission each time someone purchases through the unique link associated with their recommendation.
Affiliates are kinds of referrers who drive traffic to your online store and they get commission on each sale via them. Affiliate marketing is also called performance-based marketing. It can be done in various ways such as blogs, influencers with your website’s link.
11. Mobile Optimization:
In today’s time, it is very important to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly because of the vast usage of smartphones especially when it comes to eCommerce. You need to make sure that your website is fully responsive and user-friendly because a probable customer does not want to be redirected anywhere to shop from your website. There are certain ways to ensure mobile optimization:
- Responsive, Eye-Catching Website Design.
- Optimized Images and Videos.
- User-Friendly Navigation.
- Fast Website Load Times.
- Inbuilt Checkout Process.
- Eliminate presumptuous Pop-Ups and Ads.
12. VR fittings and placement tools:
Virtual reality technology is an investment that is good for some of your customers who are willing to stay up to date and who are technology freaks. It is a trending technique that is used by only some of your customers so you need to think about the smart investment before you make one for this one.
Before using this technique you can survey to make sure that your target audience is most likely to use the VR and wearable as people are still getting used to the technology.
13. Personalized Marketing:
While we do all sorts of marketing for customers to buy the product from our website, the main and very important ecommerce marketing tool is to do personalized marketing. Some reports suggest that people are more likely to buy any product from a company that communicates personally with them via mediums like email and calls.
The simple truth is that customers want to feel a special connection with the companies they are dealing with. They don’t want to be called just as a metric. Personalization strengthens your connection with customers. Ways to personalize marketing are:
- Recommendation of products based on past behavior.
- An email with the person’s name.
- Giving birthday and anniversary gift cards.
- Offering a loyalty program.
Conclusion
To make sure your eCommerce marketing strategies stay superlative, you have a list of trending strategies. You need to make sure that the marketing strategy you are applying should be according to the type of your eCommerce business so that you can generate sales regularly and get the ROI.
Of course, it goes without saying that finding the time to test and optimize your marketing strategy is supreme to your success and continued growth.
While we cannot tell you which marketing tactic to use for your brand, we can say that these ideas have contributed to some very successful marketing for eCommerce owners in many different fields. So start using these marketing strategies to boost sales of your business and become a name in the eCommerce business.