Implementing ecommerce marketing strategies is great to build connections with your brand's audience and drive traffic to your online store.
Implementing ecommerce marketing strategies is great to build connections with your brand's audience and drive traffic to your online store.
If you’re managing an ecommerce store, you know how hard it is to get creative with your marketing strategies to increase your website’s traffic and conversion rate. Acquiring and maintaining loyal customers takes effort — every day is a battle for their attention.
Even if your customers aren’t actively shopping, there are ways to keep your brand at the forefront of their minds so you’re their first choice when a need arises.
You must foster a relationship with your audience that’s more than transactional to earn their trust and build brand loyalty. And our list of ecommerce marketing strategies aims to do just that.
Ecommerce marketing uses promotional tactics aimed at driving traffic to an online store to increase revenue. This type of marketing is sales-focused, but ecommerce strategies focus on the entire customer journey, from fostering brand awareness to building trusting relationships and maintaining excellent connections post-purchase.
Ecommerce marketing strategies are often comprehensive, encouraging visitors to purchase products and trying to refine brand reputation. Here are six ecommerce marketing tools and tactics you might use to accomplish these tasks.
An ecommerce email marketing strategy uses promotional emails to share product information and deals with current and potential buyers, pointing recipients toward their online store.
Effective email marketing tailors tone and content to match the audience, ensuring messaging is relevant to each recipient. You can send general messages to everyone on your email list or personalized content targeting specific audience segments based on their interests, location and shopping habits.
Here are several types of email marketing you can implement for your online business:
SEO enhances your website’s visibility on Google and other search engines by creating content that’s valuable, authoritative and keyword-related. Include search terms your buyers use in content across your website to increase your search engine results page (SERP) ranking and achieve better visibility to an interested audience.
Ecommerce sites use content across platforms — from website blogs to social posts to TikTok videos — to encourage viewers to purchase. Ensure the content is visually appealing and relevant to your target audience, then promote it through all marketing channels and measure its success.
That might look like helpful infographics about sustainability practices in your industry that you can circulate on social media, on your blog and in newsletters. Content that’s informative, entertaining and engaging will reach more users and increase brand awareness. And creating a content calendar encourages consistency in posting across channels to keep your brand top-of-mind for any followers or frequent viewers of yours.
PPC campaigns involve creating ads on platforms like Google and Facebook and paying per clicks gained from said ads. These are effective when promoting time-sensitive content, such as new product announcements and seasonal promotions, because you can start and stop them on demand.
Affiliate marketing involves sharing links to specific products that are affiliated with a specific creator, and then gaining a commission each time someone clicks or buys through the link.
This is a two-way street, encouraging affiliates to promote your products and services on their channels to bolster brand awareness while you both increase your earnings.
Most ecommerce sites have social platform accounts for promoting their offering. You might use your socials for:
Here are 12 common — and effective — marketing strategies, plus how to put them into practice to increase your site’s traffic and boost sales.
If you’re working in the same niche as a particular influencer, they can instantly introduce your brand to a fresh yet relevant audience. That might be partnering with a creator who is vocal about cruelty-free beauty products so they can use and review your products in front of their following.
Each influencer brings their own creativity to content creation, allowing for new and potentially more engaging product promotion. Just remember: Influencers are compensated based on their follower count and engagement, so research these details before contacting them to ensure you stay within budget.
Try using a PPC campaign on Google, Facebook or Instagram to direct attention to time-sensitive promotions and products. Make sure these ads use engaging imagery and attention-grabbing text to gain as many clicks as possible. This means you pay the platform more but the cost typically pays off, as PPC prices are relatively low, and a new website visitor might result in a sale.
On-page, off-page and technical SEO all affect your site’s search engine ranking. These optimizations involve keyword research, strategic linking practices and quick site loading speeds to encourage search engines like Google to rank you higher — and the higher you rank, the more likely someone clicks on your site.
Considering doing some or all of the following best practices to improve your website’s ranking:
Nurture customer relationships by sending engaging newsletters with sneak peeks, promotions and behind-the-scenes snapshots. If you’re an Iceland-based wool sweater company, you might showcase interviews with wool providers and offer deals for the first 10 customers who use a promo code. And if you’re a potter, perhaps you send weekly blasts that include fun videos of you showing in-person clients how to use a pottery wheel.
It’s easy to click “Add to cart” — harder to commit to the purchase. But you can sway customers to make the move by sending gentle email reminders and offering discounts on items they’ve added to their cart but abandoned before purchasing.
Content creation is time-consuming — especially because the best practice is to send consistent social and blog posts. To take this load off and increase your audience, you can leverage UGC. This is content others share regarding your products and services. You might ask permission to re-post this content or outright offer UGC contracts for users to create and share brand-relevant posts.
Provide a seamless cross-platform shopping experience by optimizing your website for mobile users. This involves checking that all buttons work, you’ve formatted images correctly and the item-to-checkout journey is seamless.
Unlike Instagram and Pinterest, where edited content thrives, you can climb the ladder to fame on TikTok through candid, raw and authentic videos. And having a TikTok presence may even lead to an influx in sales. According to an Adweek survey, 15% of all adults and 36% of Gen Z buyers have made TikTok-led purchases.
If you have an Insta shop, you can create shoppable posts that direct followers to your site to make purchases. Say you’re running a jewelry company. You’d use this feature by posting a photo of earrings and adding a shop tag. Users can then visit your website to complete the purchase through the tag, making it easier for them to buy and you to sell.
Like email campaigns, SMS marketing lets you communicate with an audience — be it current or potential buyers — via texts to offer exclusive deals, send abandoned cart reminders and prompt reviews.
A quick-response website chat service reduces service tickets you need to directly address and offers visitors helpful responses that might encourage them to make a purchase. This service tells customers you care about their time, questions and concerns and are willing to provide convenient and quick assistance.
Creating a subscription-based business or enabling the option to subscribe to something specific like new product updates or newsletters is a great way to create connections and glean customer information, such as email addresses.
Effective ecommerce marketing helps you build a loyal customer base while continually targeting those interested in your offering. There are countless ways to monetize your site — try experimenting with various strategies, including enhancing your content marketing through engaging blogs or podcasts, improving your SEO efforts and making your socials shoppable.
Of course, there’s always more to learn about effective marketing. Turn to our blog to brush up on social platform best practices and explore a range of certificates to boost your career.
