Ecommerce Marketing Strategies
Every online store wants to attract customers daily by driving traffic to make sales. It’s challenging when you’ve tried out many different strategies to drive sales, but they don’t seem to strike the chord.
We have put together a few simple and basic ecommerce marketing strategies to walk you through successful online marketing campaigns. Implement these strategies into your ecommerce business and watch your online store drive engagement and sales.
What is E-commerce marketing?
E-commerce marketing promotes a business using e-commerce marketing tactics and tools to drive traffic to your website, convert visitors to buyers, and retain them after purchase.
Every step of converting visitors to buyers and making them continuous patronizers need strategies and logic. Attracting and retaining customers involves critical procedures.
Therefore, let's delve into E-commerce marketing strategies that boost businesses' visibility, patronage, and retention.
E-commerce Marketing strategies
E-commerce email marketing strategy
For your e-commerce site or e-commerce business to constantly drive traffic or online sales, you need to always be in your customers' faces. It would help if you knew of at least one progressive e-commerce marketing strategy. Email marketing is an e-commerce marketing strategy. Email marketing is the ideal means to connect with your customers seamlessly. Successful e-commerce businesses can attest to this fact.
It provides you with the opportunity to update your customers on new products and offers.
It is the best way to retain customers. It provides a more personalized message to customers.
And with one click, you can send multitudes of emails to many different customers simultaneously.
However, for successful email marketing, you need to follow a few basic steps:
In email marketing, competent ecommerce marketers know cost-effectiveness is vital; a dollar goes for a dollar. It is an E-commerce strategy looking to maximize profit and generate a lucrative ROI.
Another trick in your email marketing strategy is how well you attract email subscribers. Two popular means to attract them include:
- Signup forms
- Pop-Ups
Signup forms provide the conventional way of collecting email subscribers. Here, you list out the pieces of information you will send to your email subscribers.
For instance, the big folks at H&M use signup forms to collect customers' details with the customer's permission. As you can see in the image below, they list what the newsletters will contain.
On the other hand, you make web visitors and potential customers subscribe to your emails through pop-ups asking their permission to receive promotional emails. It’s a pretty “catchy” way to make customers subscribe.
Now, you have assembled a lump sum of email subscribers. The next step is engaging them with your content, newsletters, promo ads, etc.
But you just don’t begin by spamming them with new products, links, images, etc.
It kills their interest. Therefore, it recommends starting by sending welcome emails.
Welcome emails comprise personalized messages to your subscribers. In this context, you have to let them know how amazing it is to have them join the "family."
The promise is always to update them on the important events of discounts and always give them the option to unsubscribe to your emails.
Some customers abandon carts while shopping or don't complete the CTAs on your webpage. It might be because of a poorly structured website or an unclear CTA.
How can you fix this?
Email marketing saves the day when you send an email recovery campaign that subtly reminds and convinces your visitors to revisit and complete their purchase (could be newly added discounted products to include in their carts).
As your client base multiplies, Sender provides automated email tools to help handle your Email marketing campaigns to your target market. It's a user-friendly platform with many templates to help you create powerful personalized emails for your customers.
Ecommerce SEO strategy
Companies use SEO to drive traffic to their web pages. Search engines crawl your website, focusing on keywords to rank your page high.
Be careful to create meaningful content because they are bright and can differentiate between well-executed web content and spammed ones.
Therefore, consistently stringing together target keywords in your web content will put your pages on top searches and welcome a flood of visitors.
If you find it challenging to build keywords around your content, one easy trick that can aid you is carrying out your keyword research on Google suggest.
Google-suggest helps you research popularly searched keywords around your products or services.
However, creating a good-to-go page with a carefully infused key isn't enough. Off-page SEO activities help build a credible search engine optimization SEO presence for your company.
Here's how it is:
your marketing team would have to let other websites "blow your trumpet." If a hundred reputable websites have backlinks to different topics on your blog, it shows how good your content is. It attracts trust from visitors and search engines.
Asides from creating value for your customers through informative blog posts, optimizing your product pages has to be done to put your products out there.
By strategically writing product descriptions with precise keywords, you can build credibility and rank top on search engines.
Here are a few other knacks to help you optimize your product page:
- Optimize title and meta descriptions
The title tag and meta descriptions are the first two things your site visitors see. Hence, the crucial details that your visitors should gather include:
- The product's name
- The product models
- The name of your brand
- The product description and its uniqueness
- Always include a FAQ section
Your product description doesn't automatically persuade visitors to go ahead and purchase. There will be questions that will require answers. Hence, it is ideal to have a section where you can answer all these questions, or else your visitors will be left confused about your products.
- Leave a comment section for reviews:
Letting customers who have previously used your product leave reviews on your product page is often the last push some visitors need to become buyers. Customers give genuine reviews. So, what's not to believe?
- Make sure to fasten the loading speed of your landing page:
Internet users and website visitors aren't fans of time-wasting. They expect a quick page load when they click on your link.
- Use high-quality videos and images.
You have to compensate visitors for the lack of a physical store with clear images of your products on your product pages.
Uniqlo provides adept product images incorporating slides of different views of their products.
Fitting all these e-commerce marketing tactics into a box might be overwhelming, but essential tools like the Google search console can help you figure out SEO. It’s free, easy to navigate, and will let you monitor and report your website's presence on SERPs.
E-commerce PPC
Pay-per-click advertising is a form of e-commerce marketing in which you pay when users click on your ad. It doesn't solely apply to search engines but to other social media platforms.
Now look at this;
75% of search engine visitors never scroll past the top Page of search engine results pages. If your website doesn't appear at the top, there's little/no tendency for visitors to notice your brand. This way, you lose essential leads and sales.
But if you want to succeed in PPC marketing, it is ideal that you follow these few basic steps;
- Create a unique ad:
Creating ads for PPC campaigns is pretty straightforward. The ads are smaller, and most are headlines. Images use seldom. Moreover, the Google ads platform makes it more accessible. You need a landing page link, a captivating headline, and two lines of descriptions.
- Keyword selection
Choosing a keyword determines what keywords will trigger your ads when searched for on, for example, the Google search platform.
For instance, the successful e-commerce store Asos clothing line pops up on the first Page where "cheap clothes" are searched.
- Bidding
it is the phase where you have to "bid" to display your ad. Bidding involves, first, the more competitive a keyword is, the higher the bid price.
It implies that if it's a high-volume profitable keyword that many other companies desire, you have to pay more than you would pay for a lower volume keyword.
You need to measure your paid advertising e-commerce success rate at the end of the day. One great tool to help you do this is SEMrush. It offers comprehensive insights into your keyword searches and website interaction.
E-commerce social media marketing
Over 4.62 billion people worldwide use social media, welcoming about 424 million new users yearly. A good percentage of these users come from Facebook, which boasts about a 2.9billion users.
The efficiency of the Facebook community on online advertising has prompted Ecommerce marketers and experts to recommend that brands target more audiences on Facebook.
Instore, an online clothing store, took up the initiative and had a strong presence on Facebook.
Therefore, as a brand trying to win at Facebook marketing, here are simple tips to follow:
- Know your target audience:
Identify the users you intend to sell to. Knowing their age, location, occupation, etc., will determine the concept of the banner ads, their content, and the message you want to convey.
- Create a Facebook page
You will need to create your presence on Facebook. A face. An identity. https://business.facebook.com/ is a user-friendly tool for you to create and manage a business page conveniently.
- Create quality visual posts
You must churn out quality photos, videos, and content to stay competitive. Moreover, Facebook live sessions exist. Jump on it and instantly engage with your customers.
- Schedule your post
What time will people see your post? How often do you intend to post: multiple times a day? Once a day? Your choice.
You know your target audience. You know how schedules look; you know when they can engage with your post. Scheduling your post on social media isn't a herculean task because Hootsuite is the perfect tool to help you do so. It enables you to plan future posts at an allotted time.
- Monitor your Ads
Paid Facebook ad campaigns are available. You have to ascertain that they are doing their jobs in customer conversion. You gain insight into their success or failure by monitoring your ad campaigns and retargeting to retain clients.
E-commerce Content Strategy
Every inch of these e-commerce websites contains content; blog posts, photos, and videos. Providing quality content on your website is a catalyst for influencing visitors' buying decisions.
But providing quality content isn't enough. You need to do extra to earn a successful content marketing campaign:
- What is your buyer persona?
Your content won’t attract the correct audience without pinpointing your buyer persona.
With the help of behavioral data and marketing insights, you can create user-generated content refined for them.
However, If you find it difficult to know your buyer's persona, simply figure out or gather the following information:
Demographic: This reveals your intended buyer's age, location, and gender.
Occupation: Figuring out how busy your clients help you define your content for them.
Trouble: what is your customer's pain point? So you can help them solve their problems.
Preferred Social Media platform: You can't have many of your customers on Instagram and go-ahead to create content on Facebook. Realizing their favorite channel ensures that they see your ad campaigns.
Identify how your target audience consumes content: Know what kind of content your visitors love: It could be a clear shot video or a catchy headline with a descriptive photo.
- Take your time, research, and create content: It's no news that content creation is challenging, so you need to brainstorm to generate adept content with other minds.
There is also no crime in observing what other top brands do, how they create their content, how they make trends for their products, etc.
- Let your content guide your visitor's journey: A bounce occurs if your visitor feels lost or confused on your web page.
Therefore, carefully craft your user-generated content to walk your visitor through your website, create an understandable landing page, carefully segment your product into categories, and create precise, catchy, and concise descriptions.
Tesco exemplifies product segmentation. Because they are multi-grocery online stores, they segment their products into product pages, making it easier to direct customers and website visitors to the right products.
Instore uses product segmentation in directing their customers too.
- Results show your progress:
Is your content attracting visitors? Is it converting them to buyers? How much retargeting does it need? Results help you decide whether to go ahead or revisit a strategy.
While trying to measure your results for a successful business, look out for the following;
- Conversion rate;
- ROI;
- Social shares;
- Organic traffic;
- Time spent on your website;
- Engagement.
- Customer feedback is always the ultimate response.
The truth about your products or services lies with previous customers.
Always try to reach out to clients and ask for reviews. Or better still, leave a comment section on your website where they can vent about your products.
In content marketing, you can consistently dish out content through automation. And Shopify offers rich content management services for consistency.
E-commerce SMS marketing
SMS marketing simply refers to sending promotional details through text messages.
With this, you are “up-close and personal" with your customers because they have permitted you to send promotional texts.
Why use SMS marketing?
Mobile device designation:
Mobile devices are part of your customer’s time. Hence, through this marketing tactic, e-commerce businesses can reach customers on their mobile devices.
Ultimately, SMS marketing guarantees an increased open rate and engagement.
Best SMS marketing practices
- Keep your messages short, enticing, and straight to the point:
Try to be concise. Each letter should carry different meaningful information.
- Connect with your customers in a personalized manner:
Be sure to win customers’ attention through personalized message offers.
On a large scale, handling SMS marketing campaigns gets tedious because your clients begin to multiply.
At this point, it recommends outsourcing SMS campaign managers. An example is the Sender SMS managers, who are great at letting you compose texts and schedule a delivery time for the readers.
Inbound marketing for E-commerce
Inbound marketing for E-commerce is a strategy where brands try to attract customers through valuable and informative content like; blogging, social media, webinars, podcasts, and downloadable content.
Inbound marketing differs from outbound marketing because inbound marketing looks to attract customers by gradually creating brand awareness through reliable information.
It's always a gradual process, but it produces a higher ROI if done correctly.
In contrast, outbound marketing uses “push advertising” to make sales (TV, email, radio, print advertising). Outbound marketing aims to make sales quickly but generates lower ROIs.
Sephora's social media accounts show how they make their customers’ lives easier through live chats and engagement.
How do you build effective inbound marketing for E-commerce?
The only way this can yield excellent results is when done correctly. So, you have to take your time to strategize and use the right tools to captivate your audience.
You have to;
- Position your brand as an expert in your industry or niche.
Instead of trying to be forward and directly sell to customers, it is ideal you create content for customers to always look up to you as an expert. For example, if you sell skincare products, creating content on “daily skincare routines” for your customers positions you as an expert at your job.
- Strive to provide valuable information.
If you help customers solve their problems, they may decide whether to purchase your product based on your information.
Your customers have questions that need answers. Why don't you engage them on a social media platform like Quora? Cost of use? Free.
E-commerce Marketing Management
We could go on and on about E-commerce marketing strategies, but it all turns sour and unsuccessful without proper management.
Managing all the aforementioned e-commerce marketing strategies comes with techniques. If adequately adhered to will result in a high ROI.
- Create an online presence through your E-commerce website and social media platforms.
- Pay attention to your SEO strategies to rank high on Search Engines. Choose simple and precise keywords.
- Stay in your customer's faces through Emails and SMS
- Consistently create value for your customers through your content.
- Always try to know your customers’ reviews.
- Measure your ROI.
E-commerce Service Summary
Businesses run the economy of the world. The business world is a competitive one. And with the advent of E-commerce, it’s a race to the finish. One brand is trying to outdo the other.
As a business new to the E-commerce world, collaborating with great E-commerce platforms like Sender, Shopify, woo commerce, Magento, and Amazon will walk you through the diverse world of E-commerce marketing and make your journey easier.
Moreover, it is essential to keep an open mind and try new strategies because the internet is ever-evolving.