Marketing for ecommerce businesses: strategies and tips for success

Competing for customers in the digital space can be a Herculean task – pitting you against hundreds of other online retailers all trying to put their products and services on the screens of buyers.

Whether it’s on Instagram or through landing pages on Google, finding an ecommerce marketing strategy to help you thrive is crucial. With the post-pandemic boom in online sales, ecommerce is gradually becoming the primary channel that customers use to make purchases. Therefore, to help your products pop, we’ve done the research for you and compiled a set of strategies and tips to help strengthen your ecommerce marketing strategy.

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What is ecommerce marketing?

Ecommerce marketing refers to all the steps you take to drive awareness and action to your online business. You can use social media, digital content, search engines, email campaigns, and more to attract visitors to purchase your goods and services.

In addition to creating a golden virtual path that leads to your business, ecommerce marketing also serves a handful of other beneficial purposes: it helps you retain customers, makes it easy for people to discover your products, facilitates conversions, enhances the post-purchase experience, and stimulates regular and bigger orders. In short, ecommerce is absolutely paramount to your business’s success, so it’s important to get it right.

Why is ecommerce marketing so important?

Throwing your brand out there into the void of the internet is simply not enough. You need to have a strong ecommerce marketing foundation to make sure that your brand lands upright and attracts customers that are willing to convert. Good ecommerce marketing can help customers discover your brand and re-engage existing customers.

If you’re still unsure about the importance of ecommerce marketing, 78% of consumers say they have shopped more online since the pandemic, and 86% say they will continue to do so now in the post-pandemic landscape. With ecommerce marketing, you’ll also gain data to improve your offering and optimise the customer journey and drive conversions. Analytical tools can provide a wealth of insight into patterns and trends, revealing common pain points and areas where you can optimise your campaigns. The last point should be obvious – a good ecommerce marketing strategy will help you grow your revenue.

Without a solid ecommerce marketing plan, you run the risk of entering the market blindfolded. You need to leverage customer data and put yourself out there to ensure your business is doing what any business should aim to do – make sales.

Types of ecommerce marketing

📧 Email

You can use your email list to make your audience aware of new products, discounts, and other items relating to your business. You can easily make it an essential ingredient of your marketing strategy, helping with lead generation, brand awareness, and keeping customers engaged between purchases. Email marketing is also great for collecting data, allowing you to test which messages and call to actions (CTAs) perform best. However, be wary of spamming your customers as you don’t want to end up in an email blacklist.

💬 SMS

Just like email, this is a form of opt-in marketing that needs customers to agree to subscribe to correspondence. SMS marketing is great for personalised promotions, offers and discounts, surveys, and re-engagement of existing customers. Make sure you keep your communications tight (usually around 160 characters) – and include an option to opt-out to ensure you’re not annoying customers.

📲 Social media

This is an absolute must in your ecommerce marketing arsenal. Places like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook are great to market products and services because you have so many ways of creating channels for engagement. Users can share posts and videos with their network, repost, and interact with your content, making it a great way to reach people that would originally be out of your reach. It’s also a great platform to leverage user data and share user-generated content (UGC), all of which allows you to build trust in your brand and optimise your campaigns.

🖥️ Content/SEO

With SEO marketing, your aim is to naturally cultivate organic traffic to your website. You can do this by tweaking your target keywords as well as improve your pages so they meet Google’s helpfulness algorithm. You should also aim to do link building to and from your pages, which will lower your page’s bounce rate and keep readers engaged. Whether you have an in-house SEO team or you’re resorting to an agency, it’s key to check the health of your SEO practices

🤝 Affiliate

With affiliate marketing, a publisher earns a commission by promoting a product or service made by a retailer (you) through an affiliate link. Affiliates create helpful content for potential customers, reaching a wider audience that is now ready to buy.

💸 PPC/Paid search

With this medium, you can pay search engines to place your ads higher on relevant SERPs so that it’s easier to drive traffic to your site. The great part about pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is that you only pay if people click on your ad. As long as you target your keywords well and understand what your audience can gain from your products and services, this method is an affordable and effective way of driving traffic to your site.

💁‍♀️ Influencer

This is a fantastic way of leveraging the power of UGC and social media all in one. 93% of marketers have used influencer marketing, which attests to how popular and powerful it can be. Influencer marketing can be a great way to build trust in your brand and give users genuinely useful information about your product that can be the make or break in their decision to buy. This strategy can be particularly useful if you’re targeting younger audiences who frequently interact with influencers on social media.

Ecommerce marketing strategies

Leverage social proof

Make sure you flex reviews from satisfied customers as this can significantly influence new visitors to trust your brand and want to invest in your products and services. 62% of consumers say reviews play a big or moderate role in finding out more about a business, so they definitely matter!

Building loyalty programs

Ecommerce marketing can help you acquire new customers and help you retain your existing ones. You can offer exclusive coupons, vouchers, and create rewards programs to create incentives for customers to stick around and keep on coming back to your brand. It will also make them feel valued and important (which is something that every customer likes to feel!).

Increase ecommerce search usability

Customers who know exactly what they’re after want to find the right information as quickly as possible. Therefore, designing a high-performing search experience is key. As a customer who can’t find what you’re looking for, it’s likely you’ll instantly switch over to a competitor. With a highly functional and usable site, you’ll be able to prevent this outcome.

Personalise your homepage

Personalisation is a technique that keeps in mind what customers viewed in your ecommerce site recently, adapting the page to target what they’re after. This can be done by taking into account previous purchases and real-time interactions with your site. This will make your brand more user-friendly and will help customers feel like they’re being catered for.

Focus on consistent and unique content

With so many brands competing to populate the digital space, you want to make sure that your content pops. Create content that is eye-catching and that caters to your audience, ensuring that you provide them with valuable information. It’s essential that you know how to target your audience, only sharing the necessary information when you need to.

Marketing for ecommerce: top tips

✔️ Choose an ecommerce platform with powerful marketing functionality: choose a platform that integrates well with social media platforms, has several market-leading marketing apps available, and offers built-in social media feeds as a feature. Our top choice is Shopify because it integrates well with all of the major social media platforms, has a wealthy selection of third-party marketing apps, like MailChimp, Emma, and Klaviyo, and comes equipped with a campaign monitor. It’s also one of the best ecommerce web builders out there and can be affordable, depending on the plan you choose.

✔️ Add a live chat to help provide reliable customer support: live chat is a streamlined way to help your potential customers ask any lingering questions, or clear up any concerns they may have before clicking ‘pay’. It’s a great opportunity for your agents to provide more information about the product so potential buyers can make informed decisions. This is a boon for visitors to your site as it demonstrates that you have responsive and reliable customer support, which is always reassuring if someone is on the fence about converting.

✔️ Leverage real-time personalisation:  the modern customer wants a tailored buying experience that answers their needs. Therefore, the more relevant the offers you promote, the higher the chances they’ll buy. Make use of customers’ browsing history, interests, and preferences to send them personalised marketing messages. This is crucial as 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience.

✔️ Make your website mobile-friendly : statistics show that mobile has raced ahead of desktop worldwide, which means that the likelihood of someone discovering your brand on their smartphone is high. A responsive, mobile-optimised website is therefore an absolute must for your business. You can nail this down by making your site responsive, ensuring your site loads quickly, improving site search, simplifying the checkout process, and using large clear buttons.

✔️ Stick to best SEO practices : ensure that your pages are targeting the correct keywords and that you’re creating useful content so that Google bestows some of its goodwill upon your website. This will help you rank higher on the SERPs and allow customers to find your brand easily.

How to achieve ecommerce marketing success

It’s important to plan your marketing strategy around methods that already are robust and around incoming digital marketing trends. The marketing game is going through constant ebbs and flows, so it’s key that you have enough room and flexibility to adapt. Here are some of the trends we’re keeping an eye on.

Increased efficiency of data labelling for machine learning

Machine learning is already being used to enhance customer experience through improved search, tailored recommendations, and more. Marketers are currently working on manually labelling high-quality data to train machine learning models, and we’ll see this method gradually get better over the course of this year.

The dominance of social commerce

More and more users are turning to social media to learn more about a product they’re interested in, almost as though social media was the new Google. As social commerce continues to grow, it’s crucial for you to have a strong social media strategy.

Prioritising omnichannel capabilities

Currently, about 52% of ecommerce sites have omnichannel capabilities, and companies with robust omnichannel strategies can retain almost 89% of their customers. Therefore, building your omnichannel muscle is important to make sure you can reach out to customers through multiple avenues and boost sales.

New payment options

New and emerging payment options are gaining traction this year, with traditional payments being offset by digital solutions. AI personalisation technologies are becoming more popular among ecommerce stores looking to provide personalised customer experiences. With AI, algorithms can be created so that businesses can tailor their offerings based on customer preferences and purchase histories. Cryptocurrencies are also pushing their way into the landscape as more people try to pay with flexible currencies.

Conclusion

Whether you’re relying more on email marketing or on social media, having a robust ecommerce marketing strategy is key to your business’ success. After all, you want to make sure you’re doing what you can to make sure you eventually make it onto someone’s screen. This crucial first impression has the possibility of being converted into a sale. The most important point is to make sure you design your marketing strategy with a flexible mind. Be open to using data that changes the course of your campaigns, which will allow you to keep optimising them in order to reach more customers.

We know that getting an ecommerce marketing strategy just right is a tough task. For that, it’s key to have a reliable digital marketing platform that can help you manage it all under one roof. You can use our quick and free quote comparison tool to find a provider that will fit your needs.