Everything you need to know about eCommerce marketing – Complete Guide

Everything you need to know about eCommerce marketing – Complete Guide

eCommerce business marketing has been gaining a lot of popularity in recent years. It’s a great way to connect with potential customers and drive sales. As per reports, over 50% of online shoppers start their search for a product on the web before ever stepping into a physical store, so having the right marketing strategy is essential if you want to get your products in front of the right people.

In this article, we will discuss the different aspects of eCommerce marketing and tell you everything you need to know to get started. Let’s dive right in!

What is eCommerce Marketing:

An eCommerce marketing strategy is a set of activities designed to help businesses sell products and services online. Now these days, people use the internet to search for products they want to buy instead of going to a store physically. 

Many businesses are now shifting their business to online platforms to take advantage of the e-commerce trend. As a result, it is important for businesses need to have an eCommerce marketing strategy in place to help them reach more customers and drive more sales.

How to Plan eCommerce Marketing Growth Plan

When planning an eCommerce marketing strategy, it is important to plan your growth goals and have a clear path to achieving them. Once you have a clear goal, you can start formulating your strategy so that you can achieve your goals. 

Here are some tips to help you come up with an effective eCommerce marketing strategy for your business:

1. Get to know the customers you want to target – You need to identify your target audience so that you can tailor your marketing campaigns to their needs and preferences.
2. Set your goals – Having clear and manageable goals, you can more effectively direct your resources and most importantly, you can measure the success of your eCommerce marketing strategy.
3. Set your marketing strategy – Once you have your goals set, you can then create your marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy will be guided by your goals and will determine which tactics you will use to reach those goals.
4. Choose marketing Channels – Once you have your strategy set, you can then choose your marketing channels.
5. Marketing Budget: Allocate a sufficient budget for your marketing campaign. Allocate a percentage of your overall marketing budget to each channel
6. Timeframe: Set your timeframe. e.g. Want to increase social media followers by 50% in 6 months.
7. Measure your marketing efforts – Having measurable goals allows you to track the success of your marketing efforts. You can then adjust your tactics and strategies as needed to improve your results.

What are the main e-commerce marketing goals?

Increase Conversion Rate: Increasing the number of conversions is one of the main goals of most eCommerce companies. To do this, it is important to focus on user experience, personalization, and accessibility.

Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment: Reducing shopping cart abandonment is another goal of most eCommerce companies. You can achieve this goal by optimizing your website and your checkout process.

Increase Search Engine Traffic: Improving your SEO ranking will increase your search engine traffic. To achieve this goal, you need to optimize your content for search engines and create backlinks to your site.

Increase Brand Awareness: Improving your brand awareness is another goal of most eCommerce companies. This can be done through content marketing, social media, influencer,  and email marketing.

Increase Engagement: Increasing engagement can be done through creating and sharing content on social media, sending emails to customers, and promoting your brand.

Types of eCommerce Marketing Channels:

Choosing the right marketing channels is essential to achieving your business goals. Although all marketing channels are equally important but choose the most relevant channel where you find your target audience easily. 

Here is a list of all major marketing channels:

Website Personalization:

Website personalization is one of the best ways to increase engagement on your website. It can improve the user experience and drive more sales to your business.

How to use website personalization:

1. Display dynamic content such as product recommendations based on the user’s behavior.
2. Personalize the website offers based on the user’s location.
3. Personalized emails to customers.
4. Segment your customer list based on demographics, interests, and past purchase history.
5. Use responsive design to improve the user experience on mobile devices.

Check our guide on the top 25 AI-powered website personalization recommendations for eCommerce websites.

Search Engine Optimization:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best methods to increase traffic to your e-commerce website. SEO work is vital for e-commerce websites, as most people use search engines to find products. This means that if you have a good SEO strategy in place, you have a higher chance of gaining new customers for your business.

SEO can be difficult to implement on your own, so consider hiring a professional digital marketing company. SEO optimization work category consists of keyword analysis, competitor research, content creation, link building, and more. The ultimate goal of SEO is to drive quality traffic to your website so that you can drive more sales and revenue for your business. Here are some steps you need to take to optimize an eCommerce website for SEO:

1. Optimize your website’s layout:

Your eCommerce website should have a clean layout that makes it easy for customers to navigate and find what they want.

2. Add Quality Content:

Add informative content to your category pages. Your eCommerce website should have informative content on your category pages, which answers common questions about specific product types. Not only will this drive SEO performance, but it will also increase engagement, conversions, and order value.

3. Keywords Research:

Conduct keyword research to find out what keywords potential customers are searching for when they are looking to buy your product. For example, if your product is running shoes, you may want to include words like “running shoes” or “sports shoes” in your meta title and meta description.

4. Meta Description:

Add meta descriptions to your product pages. A meta description is a short blurb that summarizes what your page is about and appears in the search results. It should include relevant keywords and target search keywords so that customers can learn more about the page and click on it.

5. URL Structure:

Your website’s URL structure is also important for SEO. Keep your URLs short and descriptive. 

Other Useful SEO Techniques are:

• Use high-quality images
• Optimize your mobile website
• Optimize your Product & Category pages
• Improve page load speed
• Add a blog to your website
• Use schema markup
• Use canonical & no-index tags for handling duplicate pages
• Use robots.txt file
• Build quality backlinks

Social Media Marketing:

Social media marketing especially for eCommerce is all about creating engagement and promoting your products to a larger audience. Using social media effectively can help increase your website traffic and generate new leads and sales for your business.

Here are some tips you can follow to leverage social media for your e-commerce website:

Choose the Right social media platform. Each social media platform has its unique strengths and user base that will help you reach your target audience. For example, Facebook is best for engaging your audience, while Instagram can help boost product awareness. Identify the right platform where your potential customers spend most of their time and create profiles for your business on those platforms.

List of eCommerce marketing techniques to grow your social presence and engage customers:

1. Content Strategy: When you create your content for social media, make it visually appealing to attract the attention of your customers. Create content that is tailored to the specific social platform you are using.
2. Hashtags: Using hashtags help you to reach a wider audience and increase your content visibility.
3. Social Listening: It’s important to know what people are saying about your brand on social media and to respond to both positive and negative feedback on time.
4. Product explainer videos: 84% of customers say that watching a video about a product helps make a decision. Use explainer videos to explain your products.
5. Customer Advocacy: 93% of customers say user-generated content helps make a decision. Encourage your customers to share images of your products on social media to help increase sales.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a form of online advertising in which a business rewards publishers for each sale brought by its efforts. It’s an effective way to build brand awareness, generate traffic to your online store and increase sales.

How to setup Affiliate marketing to promote your e-commerce business:

Join affiliate aggregator sites such as ShareASale, Affiliate Window, Commission Junction, Rakuten Marketing, and others that provide affiliate programs for retailers. Choose high-margin products that you want to promote through your affiliate program. Recruit the right affiliates to promote your products.

Advantages of joining an affiliate network:

1. No charge to join affiliate networks.
2. Opportunity to connect affiliate programs that are a good fit for your e-commerce business.
3. Ability to find affiliate programs that target your targeted customer.
4. Opportunity to partner with bloggers, publishers, and influential people.
5. You can use the same affiliate tools to manage loyalty programs for loyal customers or referral programs for influencers

Content Marketing:

Content marketing refers to the process of creating and publishing content that attracts, retains, and converts prospects into customers for your business. It also includes online PR activities that promote your business, and exposure and help you engage with your target audience. Content marketing can be done using social media, blogs, press releases, articles, videos, and other forms of content. It’s a great way to build trust with your audience and establish your business as a thought leader in your industry.

What type of content increase sales of your eCommerce store?

Infographics: You can use infographics to promote your products and services and educate your customers about your brand while building trust and loyalty at the same time.

Product Guides: If you have a large catalog of products, you can use product guides to educate your customers about the benefits of your products and help them make better buying decisions.

Product Videos: Videos are an effective medium for promoting your products and helping you build stronger relationships with your customers.

Customer Testimonials: Customer testimonials are one of the most effective ways to establish trust with your customers and show them that other people trust you and love your products. You can use them on your website, on social media, and in other marketing channels to attract more customers and increase sales.

Company News: Keep your customers updated with the latest news from your company to help them stay engaged and prevent them from leaving your online store.

Public Relation: Use PR activities to promote your upcoming sales, offers or product launch and build excitement around your business and brand.

Paid Advertising:

Advertising is a great way to get your products and brand in front of potential customers and get more traffic to your website. You can use a variety of advertising platforms to reach a wider audience and drive more sales to your online store. Data shows that more than 50% of consumers find new products and services through advertisements online.

Here is the list of Top paid ads channels for e-commerce businesses:

Google shopping ads: Google Shopping Ads (previously known as Google Product Listing Ads) are ads that appear on Google’s search engine results pages and the Google Display Network. Google Shopping Ads allow you to promote your products and reach new customers by showing your ad next to relevant search results or on websites that feature similar products or services.

2. Facebook advertisements: FB ads are a great way to advertise your products and get noticed on social media. Facebook advertisements give you the ability to target a specific audience based on their interests, location, age, and behavior.
3. Pinterest Promoted Pins: Promoted pins let you drive even more traffic to your pinboard by displaying sponsored pins at the top of Pinterest search results. Promoted pins are a great way to showcase your brand on Pinterest.
4. Google search ads: Search ads can help you target customers right when they’re searching for the products and services you offer. Display ads and banner ads are also available.
5. Amazon advertising: For eCommerce companies, Amazon is one of the best ways to advertise online — it’s also the third most popular ad platform, behind Google and Facebook. With Amazon Advertising, your business can promote your products and brand in Amazon search results, product categories, product pages, and the Amazon homepage.
6. Video Advertising: YouTube lets you reach millions of potential customers through targeted ads, helping your business grow. Along with YouTube, TikTok, and other video platforms, you can promote your business to a highly engaged audience.

There are various paid advertising platforms to promote but Amazon advertising, Google ads, FB & Insta ads are the most commonly used. These all run individual strategies to attract more people to their platform and stay on top.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing puts your product or service in front of an entirely new audience of potential customers. Ecommerce companies have used this strategy to great effect by partnering with social media influencers who have a large following on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.

How to find the right influencer for your eCommerce business promotion?

An influencer is a person with a huge social following that can influence or persuade others to try a new product, service, or business. To find influencers, use an influencer marketing platform. It allows you to search for relevant influencers who fit the criteria of your campaign by filtering based on price, location, and engagement rate. It also allows you to monitor the success of your campaign and to keep track of the influencers you’ve worked with in the past.

Influencer marketing search tool also allows you to search for influencers based on keywords, hashtags, and URLs. These search results will include detailed information about each influencer including their follower count, number of sponsored posts they’ve completed, and total earnings earned from their sponsored posts. Once you find a relevant influencer to work with, you can create custom outreach messages you can send to them directly through the dashboard.

To find micro-influencers, search hashtags related to your product and monitor the engagement their posts receive on social media platforms. Try reaching out to the most active users who seem to have the most influence over their followers and invite them to promote your brand & products in return for payment or other incentives. Micro-influencers are less expensive than traditional influencers because they don’t have as large of a following, but they still tend to have more engaged followers than users who aren’t influencers.

Best tools to use for influencers marketing:

1. SocialBlade
2. trendHERO
3. Klear
4. TapInfluence
5. Upfluence

Chatbot Support

Chatbot support is becoming more and more popular as shoppers turn to chatbots for more information about products that they are interested in before purchasing them. Chatbots can answer customer questions in real-time and help increase sales for e-commerce businesses.

Advantages of Chatbot Support Implementation:

1. 24/7 Support
2. Reduces Human Errors
3. Reduces abandoned Carts
4. Helps with Product Discovery
5. Provides better Customer Support & Customer Satisfaction

Product Listing on Online Marketplaces

Online marketplaces (such as Amazon, eBay, Walmart, etc.) help businesses sell their products to a wider audience. These online marketplaces provide free listings to consumers and allow sellers to market their products and charge a commission on the sale.

Why You should sell/list your product on Marketplaces?

1. More visibility for your Products
2. Inbuilt Paid Advertising Features
3. Large audience base
4. Reduces Customer Acquisition Cost
5. Improved customer service
6. Low Operational Cost
7. No Investment is needed to start selling

Push Notification

In e-commerce marketing, a push notification is a notification message that is sent to the user’s mobile device. A push notification is similar to a text message. However, a push notification is delivered through the mobile app store instead of through a text message. In general, push notifications are used to alert app users about new messages, promotions, and other activities within their apps.

A push notification can be sent via a mobile app, or on the desktop through a web browser.

Popups Display on Website & Apps:

Displaying popups on your websites and apps is an effective way to capture leads and increase conversions. It has become an integral part of any marketing strategy. Today, almost every website uses pop-ups to capture visitor information and generate leads for their products or services.

Here is a list of 6 ways you can use popups in your website and apps:

1. Gather leads by showing offers or discounts
2. Invite users to sign up for your newsletter lists
3. Retarget your customers with product recommendations
4. Popups using exit intent
5. Checkout boost popups
6. Giveaway s & Contests

Website User Experience:

For e-commerce marketing performance, the ultimate user experience has to be optimized as every single aspect contributes to the success of the business.

The best way to improve user experience is by using personalized product recommendations. With personalization based on user behavior and preferences, retailers can target the right customers with the right products at the right time to increase their sales and revenue.

Here is a list of ways to improve the user experience on your e-commerce website:

1. Personalization
2. Product recommendations
3. Product browsing
4. Checkout process
5. Conversion rate optimization
6. Reduce Cart Abandonment
7. AB Testing

How do you measure your eCommerce marketing results?

ECommerce marketers need to track the performance of their marketing campaigns to understand what works and what doesn’t. Here are a few metrics that are critical for understanding how your marketing efforts are performing:

Conversion rate: the percentage of people who take the desired action on your site.

Bounce rate: the percentage of people who leave your site after viewing only one page.

Average order value: the average amount that your customers spend when they complete a purchase.

Visits per order: the average number of visits it takes before a customer completes a purchase.

New Shoppers Acquisition: the number of new customers you add to your email list or database per week.

Traffic Growth: How much traffic (visitors) are you getting?

Recap

Ecommerce marketing is all about making your products known to the world by promoting them on various channels such as social media, search engines, email, and other advertising platforms. By implementing the right strategies, you can easily promote your products and increase sales for your business.

E-commerce business owners always should focus on customer service, testimonials, social proof, and positive word of mouth (WOM). User-generated content (UGC) is another way to promote your business. If people like your products and share their experiences with others on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter, it can help your brand reach a wider audience and generate sales.

Listing products on online marketplaces (such as Amazon) is also an effective way to promote products. Millions of people use marketplaces to search for products and user reviews can help you determine which products are popular and profitable.

Using AI-powered marketing such as popups and personalized product recommendations will help you engage customers and increase conversions. You can also create targeted emails to be sent to customers who abandoned the shopping cart or browse your products without making a purchase.

Last but not least, use paid ads to advertise your e-commerce products to drive more traffic and sales to your online store. Influencer marketing, affiliate network, retargeting paid ads, and Video streaming platforms such as YouTube, and TikTok are some best e-commerce marketing business channels that will help you drive more sales.

We at Sage Titans provide best-in-class service to help online stores drive higher sales and generate more revenue through our powerful e-commerce marketing tools & services. Book your free one-to-one consultation with our digital marketing experts to learn how you can grow your business online.