Ecommerce Marketing Guide

What Is E-commerce Marketing?

If you want to promote a business selling a specific product or service online, you may try eCommerce marketing. The targets of eCommerce marketing are driving traffic to your online store, boosting the conversion rate, and retaining new customers after a purchase. It implies various marketing approaches for leveraging these targets.

Also, eCommerce marketing comprises numerous actions targeted at boosting ROI (return on investment) and profits of your online store while eliminating investments in promoting your eCommerce brand. Some of these actions work better for drawing the attention of new clients, while others are good at retaining the current ones or motivating them to make a purchase. Therefore, your eCommerce business would better try various types of eCommerce marketing strategies. Before you implement a specific strategy, you should create a marketing plan.

4 Steps to Document an E-Commerce Marketing Plan

You must go through several steps to create a successful e-commerce marketing campaign. Check them out:

Step 1: Define Goals and Objectives for Your Store

The first thing you need to do to promote your eCommerce website is to clarify the results you expect to have in the aftermath. You should remain accurate when calculating it to have an efficient marketing campaign.

Step 2: Assess Your Target Audience and Competition

The next step in doing an eCommerce marketing plan is to have a clear idea about your competitors. So you can better assess your target audience and learn their interests and needs so that you can apply the most appropriate marketing efforts. Mind your competitors, too, and learn how they stand out or what makes them so popular.

Step 3: Determine the Marketing Strategies and Tactics

There is a wide variety of marketing strategies for your eCommerce store. You would better choose one or combine a few for the best results. For instance, you might utilize marketing channels like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc., to promote your e-commerce business online.

Step 4: Build Your Martech Stack

Marketing technology or martech is specific software that is utilized by marketers to optimize, plan, and execute their marketing activities. You need to build the right marketing tech stack to reap the rewards for a long time. If you do it, you will save time, budget, and energy and will not have to redo it repeatedly.

Creating Your E-Commerce Marketing Strategy

With an efficient e-commerce marketing strategy, you will build strong relationships. Your potential customers are searching for relevant data, so they would love to read exciting & engaging content. With clear advertising strategies, you will boost organic traffic, build client trust, convert more page visitors to your eCommerce website, retain clients, encourage them to make more purchases, and eliminate operational costs.

Getting leads is the first step but converting those leads into satisfied customers is one of the most important and most challenging tasks of a business.

Pooja Agnihotri, author of 17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail: Unscrew Yourself From Business
Failure.

Affiliate Marketing

Generally, affiliate marketing is a collaboration between a business and a content producer or affiliate to promote a company’s products or services. The affiliate creates and circulates content, and the company pays the affiliate a commission for each sale they generate. To track the traffic and sales made by each affiliate partner, the brand assigns a unique link that takes customers to a distinct sales page. The affiliate is then paid a specific proportion of purchases by redirecting people with these links. By collaborating with affiliates, an e-commerce business can rely on customers’ trust in the influencer’s opinion to drive online sales, as consumers are more inclined to buy things recommended by someone they trust than products that are simply marketed.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This digital marketing strategy supposes optimization of your eCommerce website to promote it in search engine ratings. With SEO, you will boost your traffic, clicks & eCommerce sales. SEO is considered a more efficient & successful eCommerce advertising strategy than PPC ads by 70% of marketers. SEO includes such things as the creation & promotion of relevant content, link building, content updates, adding reviews and mentions, the improvement of HTML code, and more.

Keyword Research

With keyword research, you might find which keywords and phrases are ideal to target. Also, it provides valuable insight into the requests of your target audience in Google. To find SEO keywords and phrases, you need to identify their business value, analyze the competition for the keyword, find its search volume, analyze traffic potential, and determine the search intent. To use SEO keywords correctly, include several semantically related key phrases and words in the header tags and body of your blog post on your online shopping store website. If you do it, the search engines will easily recognize the keyword context & search intent.

Structured Data

Each business needs structured data because it is the most significant source of information about its processes, customers, and staff. Such information includes stock flow, financial data, Tweets, customer feedback, etc. Structured data is essential because you can quickly draw information and inferences from it compared to unstructured data like feelings, reasons for behavior, etc. It is required if you plan to grow or move into a new product segment. Also, the structured data is helpful to staff because it gives accessible day-to-day data, sales data, stock levels, customer details, etc. Besides, this data is efficiently utilized in AI and machine learning and might forecast which product will sell the best or what will provoke the most significant increase in business size.

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions & title tags are essential elements of SEO. With them, you might directly influence the searcher’s decision on whether to click via your website. They store information on the content of your pages. They share that data with people and search engines when correct. Title tags enable search engine robots to be aware of what your page is all about and assist them in understanding how relevant it is to the user’s search query. With correctly optimized title tags, you can improve your rankings.

A meta description is an HTML tag that gives brief data about the page. The main target of it is to enable users to be aware of what the page is all about & motivate them to click via from the SERP to your website. The proper description might boost the click-through rate of the SERP snippet.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is publishing visual and written material online to draw leads’ attention to your online business. It might include videos, infographics, ebooks, pages, blog posts, etc. Nevertheless, proper content marketing also requires tailoring your posts, videos, pages, and ebooks to your intended audience to find you faster. Boosting brand awareness, loyalty, engagement, and e-commerce sales are essential. You might build strong relationships between your business and clients by correctly creating, planning, sharing, distributing, and publishing the content. Statistics say that 30% of marketers generate content that reflects the brand’s values. Also, proper eCommerce SEO content might create a sense of community around your brand & boost conversions.

Social Media Marketing

SMM or social media marketing utilizes platforms as potential channels to promote your brand, grow your target audience, drive more website traffic, and boost sales. There are 3.8 billion social media users worldwide. About half of its users are expected to make a purchase. SMM is suitable for each business, including B2B. This eCommerce marketing strategy targets boosting brand awareness, increasing website traffic, regular interaction with the target audience, mastering content distribution, and more. To start SMM, you should generate various content and marketing strategies for each social media platform you utilize to promote your brand. To get the most out of it, you should vary the frequency of post formats, themes, etc. You might promote your products on various platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, YouTube, etc., considering that different platforms attract different people. For instance, 81% of people utilize Instagram research services and products. Also, more than 70% of people with positive experiences using particular services or buying products will likely recommend it to others.

Paid Advertising

This is an online advertising model in which the advertisers bid to take part in real-time auctions targeting to display their advertisements within slots on a specific network or platform. For instance, you can see both text ads and shopping ads in the following search on patio furniture:

Sometimes, it is called PPC advertising or pay-per-click advertising because you should pay every time someone clicks on your ad. Ads come in many shapes and formats, like videos, images, text, etc. On many platforms, you may automatically favor advertisements that perform well based on your targets. With PPC advertising, you might boost your traffic tremendously. It is the best option for businesses that are only starting online. Thanks to PPC advertising, you might retarget existing visitors & expand your reach. Contrary to traditional advertising like billboards or TV, you can measure everything online using PPC advertising. You might reach the right people on advertising platforms at the right time. However, you should research to find the best platform where your potential customers like to hang out before you start your PPC advertising campaign.

Engage Potential Customers with Retargeting

Retargeting is one of the eCommerce marketing strategies that utilizes online advertisements to target those users who have already interacted with or visited your social media presence or website. It gives the chance to convert those users who made initial interactions but have yet to become customers. Retargeting advertisements motivate visitors to go to the specific website and complete actions such as signing up for a free trial, booking a demo, making a purchase, etc. Retargeting is advantageous because it lets you reach out to prospective customers who already know about your brand. Typically, retargeting advertisements generate much better returns than ads that do not leverage retargeting. Also, it may help with eCommerce brand recall because it gives multiple touchpoints with your potential customers. If you serve a relevant advertisement based on the actions of the users, you might gently remind them about your offer or business. Besides, you might promote new products efficiently as long as they target those people who showed interest in your brand. Therefore, such visitors will be more likely to purchase from you. Hence, it will positively affect your ROI.

Abandoned Cart Alerts

If you set up abandoned cart alerts, you will capture and re-engage anonymous shoppers. However, more than switching on such notifications is required. You should also optimize your abandoned cart reminders for better conversions and clicks. To maximize these reminders, make your copy relevant to your brand and products. You might make your notifications sound like you by tailoring the notification to solve a specific issue and utilizing your brand tone. For instance, you may personalize your cart by using such words as ¨you¨ and ¨we¨ like in the following images:

Ensure your message is short and under 20 characters to optimize abandoned cart notifications efficiently. Utilize emojis because they are likely to lead to an 85% increase in open rates if compared to those notifications that are free from them. You may also use urgency words like ¨expires soon¨ to nudge your potential shoppers to take the desired action. Add a discount to the abandoned cart notification to motivate shoppers to take action. Plus, you might utilize non-discount promotions like loyalty points, a gift card, or free shipping. Make sure your text notification is formatted in italics or bold.

Ad Retargeting

Ad retargeting is the marketing process that targets advertisements to users who previously engaged with your social media platform or website but have yet to convert to a sale. Retargeting might be helpful if someone visits your site and browses various pages but does not leave their contact data or make a purchase. Because you do not have their contact info or email, retargeting will work via cookies and pixels. With ad retargeting, you will save your money to get new visitors. Still, consider retargeting those people who have already visited your site with personalized messages or ads. Ad retargeting has impressive advantages. First, it boosts your chances of converting site traffic by 70%. With it, you will have 147% average conversion rates. Ad retargeting might significantly master brand awareness in search results (by 500%). Thanks to ad retargeting, your website traffic will skyrocket by 700% by bringing back previous visitors. Ad retargeting is perfect for creating personalized ads, getting more conversions, and building successful eCommerce brand awareness. You might retarget ads on such platforms as Google Ads, AdRoll, Perfect Audience, Retargeter, and social media platforms.

Optimize for Mobile Shopping

In today´s digital world, it is vital to have a mobile-friendly website. To stay competitive & provide a good user experience, mobile optimization is critical because more and more people are shopping online using their smartphones. According to the survey, 44% of eCommerce retail sales are expected through mobile devices. So, it is essential to realize this to capture a remarkable share of the growing mobile market. Mobile optimization is a process of developing & designing your website and its content to run properly on mobile tools, just like on desktop devices. For instance, ensure your website is easy to use and responsive on a small screen, simplify website navigation, and optimize page load speed. To add more, you might also ensure that your website´s functionality and content are usable and accessible on various mobile tools like tablets and smartphones. You might create mobile-specific features like mobile-friendly forms or click-to-call buttons to do it. So it will be easy for your users to engage with your site or complete actions like filling out a form or purchasing. Since 2015, consumer behavior has changed, so search engines now tend to favor mobile-friendly websites. Therefore, every website owner must adapt to these changes.

Invest in Influencers

Influencer marketing is an eCommerce marketing method that supposes collaboration between a brand or business and a person of influence. The art of influencer marketing is all about harnessing the impact of influencers in the most efficient ways & associated with creators and social media. Brands might collaborate with influencers on various platforms to tap into their followers with appropriate content. Usually, these followers are highly engaged, making this method one of the most efficient tactics to drive engagement, awareness, and consideration. According to the survey in 2023, 89% of marketers collaborating with influencers claimed they were planning to maintain or boost their investments in it. Nowadays, it is one of the most efficient eCommerce marketing strategies because it delivers tangible business outcomes for various brands across numerous markets, from fashion & fast food to B2B and hardware. It is beneficial to try it because people hate ads but love the influencer’s content. Also, it will drive dramatic results across the funnel & you might integrate with other digital channels. Besides, creators can provide a unique voice for your brand, plus you might reach previously untapped audiences.

Create a Loyalty Program

The main target of loyalty programs is to suggest clients access to loyalty discounts & exclusive prices. It will help with customer retention and purchasing behavior. Businesses offer their clients a wide variety of recognition programs and rewards. However, it might be challenging to meet the loyalty program objectives. Ideally, loyalty programs must transform a business into a client-centric profit machine. Such programs must be a part of your digital marketing campaign because they provide an innate level of client service & give insights into customer purchasing patterns. You should fully establish your loyalty programs because customers will purchase more to remain loyal to your brand. With it, you might also retain existing customers because they will feel important and valued. Besides, you will get more traffic to your online store without a boost in marketing spending. Building genuine relationships and connecting with clients emotionally, you will increase profits & loyalty. With this eCommerce marketing tactic, you will create brand advocates who will bring more clients plus master overall business practices by discovering areas that need to be improved.

Hyper-Personalize Emails

Hyper-personalization is a proficient email marketing strategy that leverages advanced data analytics and AI to analyze historical and real-time client information to deliver highly personalized products and services, offers, and advertising to individual users. Hyper-personalized email marketing has better results if compared to customized email marketing. There are several reasons to consider hyper-personalized email marketing for your business. First, it is supposed to collect vast amounts of client-specific information and analyze it to understand individual clients more deeply. Therefore, marketers and brands might better understand their clients’ interests, preferences, likes, and dislikes. Secondly, you can concentrate on more specific components and develop better strategies for those parts. Thirdly, the clients will find more value in the email content, leading to a better customer experience. Fourthly, you will have better chances of success and can forecast which content will be valuable and relevant at a specific time.

Create a Strong Presence on Marketplaces

If you want your business to be successful, you should establish its presence in the marketplace. There are numerous methods to do it, but make sure you stand out from the competition and are creative. A solid online presence supposes having a website that is easy to navigate & well-designed and gives valuable data to prospective clients. Also, you should be active on social media, connect with potential clients, and build relationships with them. Additionally, you may participate in trade shows and other famous events relevant to your industry. This is an excellent method to meet prospective partners and clients and learn about what is happening in your specific industry. You might also utilize this opportunity to showcase your services or products. Keep in mind that it is essential to remember that creating a strong presence on marketplaces takes a lot of time and effort. The success will take time to happen. You should remain persistent and concentrate on giving value to your prospective clients to see results.

Use Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality combines the virtual world and the real world. To be more specific, AR takes the natural world and enhances it via virtual overlays or computer-generated perceptual data. For instance, if AR is utilized in the tourism and traveling industry, it gives travelers a taste of their experience via interactive AR elements. So guests may use smartphones to capture a physical map in their hotel room & then explore their places of interest. To overlay digital content to a real-world environment, augmented reality needs a tool with a camera and AR software like smart glasses, tablets, or smartphones. The AR software utilizes computer vision to process specific video streams captured by a camera and recognize objects within a particular environment. So, the AR system can project the virtual content to the relevant place. Also, AR displays digital content in the natural environment via the display tool in a realistic way. Augmented reality might be applied in various fields like retail, education, manufacturing, logistics, etc.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

CRO, or conversion rate optimization, is a specific process of boosting the conversion percentage from a mobile application or a website. Typically, it includes generating ideas for components of your application or website that might be mastered and validating those hypotheses via multivariate and A/B testing. CRO is essential because it enables you to lower client acquisition costs by getting more value from the users and visitors you already have. Optimizing your conversion rate will boost revenue per visitor, grow your business, and acquire more clients. If it comes to boosting conversions, there is always room for improvement. The most successful companies constantly master and iterate their applications and websites for better user experience and increased conversions. The first step in CRO is identifying the conversion targets for any app screen or web page. The success metrics of your mobile application or website will depend on your business type and your targets. For instance, if you sell products online, the conversion for you might be purchases or the overall number of website visitors that added the product to their shopping carts. If you sell services or products to businesses, you may measure the number of leads your site collects or the number of white paper downloads. The second step in the CRO is identifying which part of your conversion funnel you wish to optimize. You are expected to start maximizing the part of the conversion funnel that generates the most significant number of conversions or receives the most outstanding amount of traffic. If you concentrate on these pages, you are likely to view the results of your changes quicker and have more influence on your business.

Marketing Analytics

Marketing analytics is a specific process of utilizing information to assess the success and effectiveness of marketing activities. With it, you might collect deeper client insights, get a better ROI, and optimize your marketing objectives. It is beneficial for marketers because they might reach higher ROI on marketing investments if they understand what is the most successful in driving brand awareness and conversions. Also, it ensures that clients view more personalized, targeted advertisements that speak to their specific interests and needs instead of mass communications that might be annoying. Analyzing marketing data using various models and methods depending on the KPIs is possible. In the modern marketing landscape, consumers are becoming more and more selective when choosing branded media, so accurate information is essential. If your business wants to draw the attention of a perfect buyer, you would better know the precise information to generate targeted personal advertisements based on individual interests. With them, marketing teams might serve the fitting advertisements on the right channel and at the right time to move clients down the sales funnel. Summing up, various digital marketing strategies are essential for your business to stand out. However, you might need help with your video marketing, local marketing, SMM, or any other type of campaign. Fortunately, you may ask Elit-Web specialists to promote your eCommerce business efficiently to have outstanding results, boost conversions, increase brand awareness, and drive dramatic sales. With Elit-Web, you will reach whatever business target you have!