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We often talk about e-commerce marketing, but do we really know what it is? We are here to dig deep into everything e-commerce marketing.
But before we begin, let us see where we stand in the world of e-commerce.
What is e-commerce?
Ecommerce refers to a business that sells other brands’ products through an online store. These products can range from physical things like shoes, books, groceries, etc, or they can be online courses, ready meal subscriptions, renting fashion items, and so on.
In recent years and as a result of COVID-19 there has been an unprecedented increase in e-commerce and many businesses have been forced to go digital. Without a doubt, therefore, this is the best time to discuss the concept of e-commerce marketing.
What is e-commerce marketing and why is it needed?
Launching your e-commerce store is simply not enough. In order for people to start spending money with you, they need to get to know you. This is where e-commerce marketing comes in.
E-commerce marketing consists of any promotional activities that guide online shoppers to your online store and through the conversion funnel. In a nutshell, e-commerce marketing helps online retailers, do the following:
- Build awareness about your ecommerce store
- Drive traffic to the store
- Convert visitors into paying customers
- Stimulate and reactivate current customers with the right offers, at the right time and on the right channel, enhancing the shopping experience for more regular orders while increasing customer satisfaction and driving loyalty.
Developing your e-commerce marketing plan
Before you go about developing your ecommerce marketing strategy, it is important to document your e-commerce marketing plan as a guide when executing your strategy.
- Step 1: Define Goals and Objectives: You should always start by setting goals for your e-commerce store by reviewing the industry’s conversion benchmarks and setting goals and objectives accordingly.
- Step 2: Assess your target audience and competition: Understand who your ideal buyers are, and their characteristics, interests, purchasing power, and other demographic, geographic, psychographic characteristics. Collect this information and create multiple buyer personas.
- Step 3: Determine the marketing strategies and tactics: Set out the activities that will help you achieve your marketing goals and objectives, so you can choose the marketing channels and appropriate strategies and tactics, to ensure you succeed in your sales targets.
- Step 4: Build Your martech stack: Identify the marketing channels you should be on and find the tools and applications that make it easy to automate and manage marketing activities on different channels.
So, without further ado and after looking at the steps towards developing your e-commerce marketing strategy, let’s see the various marketing channels and recommended e-commerce tools you can use to achieve your goals and objectives.
Building your e-commerce marketing strategy
E-commerce marketers can leverage a number of digital channels from social media platforms to search engines, and email campaigns to website content.
To better understand what an e-commerce marketing strategy looks like, here are some common marketing channels and how you can use them in order to build a successful online store.
Social Media Platforms
E-commerce can benefit tremendously from social media platforms and there are four reasons for that:
- They are visual media, thus making it easy to persuade people through images and videos.
- Product ads are not always perceived as being intrusive.
- The rise of social commerce, such as Facebook Shops and Instagram Shopping, facilitates e-commerce marketing efforts.
It is essential therefore for an e-business to establish a presence on today’s most popular social networks to connect with its audience and post content that the audience is interested in.
However, take note, not every social network is a good fit for your needs.
For example, Instagram is a great platform for an e-commerce business because it enables you to post sharp product photography and expand your product’s reach beyond your purchase page. Taking your social media presence a step further, you can also create shoppable content, meaning content that visitors can buy right away.
Another way social media can assist your e-commerce efforts is through product reviews, which are also a great way to up your conversion game. With a Facebook Business Page, you can share product praise through user-generated content, helping you build trust and loyalty in your product and brand.
Content Marketing
Content writing is an essential component of e-commerce marketing, effectively increasing conversions. That is why you can implement content marketing in a range of different areas in e-commerce marketing.
Here are some tips on how you can use content marketing to help your e-commerce marketing strategy:
- Product pages: From headlines to product descriptions you can optimize your product pages for short, product-driven keywords that will return your e-commerce store for the right query.
- Blog Posts: Create valuable content for your prospects and customers, like infographics, checklists, or how-tos. As visitors become engaged with your content, you can create posts that will move them into consideration and eventually turn them into leads.
- Rich Media: When we say content, we don’t only mean written content. Try out videos, podcasts, or other interactive media related to your product and helpful to your audience.
You can also try out tutorial videos that show current customers how to use your product, increasing customer satisfaction and building long-term relationships with website visitors. - FAQ section on your website: If your audience is asking questions related to your product, then you need to step up and answer them. By creating an FAQ page on your website with responses to high volume, popular keyword searches to get users to your site, you can increase site traffic, crucial for your e-commerce store’s success.
Search Engine Optimization
In order to break through the clutter and capture people with high purchase intent, you need to have a good enough SEO strategy.
Search engine optimization (SEO) makes your website more visible and easily discoverable on search engine result pages, organically.
Here are some tips to use in order to make your e-commerce rank higher up:
- Make it mobile-friendly.
- Optimize page load time
- Run an SEO audit
- Perform thorough keyword research and identify keywords that potential customers would use when searching for products like yours
- List all product, category, and blog posts and pages
- Create a Google My Business profile to strengthen local presence
E-commerce SEO should be performed on product page copy, your home page and your meta description, as well as your FAQ page, while a blog can also greatly help your SEO efforts.
Search Engine Marketing
While SEO is all about knowing Google’s algorithm to optimize content, SEM allows you to pay for top spots on search engine results pages. The most popular options for search engine marketing involve:
- Pay-per-click (PPC, Google AdWords): They guarantee that you wil appear on top of search results when potential buyers enter search terms that match the terms of your campaign.
- Google Shopping: a free service where you can list your entire product range with images and prices, capturing high-intent shoppers
- Display campaigns: Banner ads on sites appearing based on searches and browsing behavior
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing and a key strategy for e-commerce marketing.
Here are some ways an e-commerce marketer might use email marketing to engage and convert subscribers:
- Welcome email: To be sent during a subscriber’s onboarding to your website and brand
- Drip nurture email: A series of emails with content informing and educating about the product, sent until the person is ready to convert
- Abandoned cart email: To be sent as a reminder to the customer to complete the checkout, offer assistance, or show them other related products, in order to get back to your online shop.
- Post-purchase email: To be sent after a user has purchased something from your site, in order to continue building a relationship with them, to stimulate more orders.
- Upsells and cross-sells: To be sent when there are new offers with products related to past purchases
- Win back email: To be sent in order to reactivate an idle customer who is dormant for a long time
- Loyalty reward email: To be sent as a thank you to loyal customers with a next-level discount, or a freebie
- Ecommerce newsletter: To be sent as a regular update on your brand and products so you stay top-of-mind
In order to do all of the above, it is important to choose the right email marketing service for your business needs. It needs to be able to send transactional emails, such as order confirmations, tracking updates, and password resets, automated emails, triggered automatically by a certain condition being met or a customer’s action, and segmented emails, tailored to specific customer segments.
SMS Marketing
SMS marketing is another essential tool for your e-commerce marketing toolkit.
Sending text messages for promotional purposes can help your e-commerce business drive conversions, especially when used for alerts, updates, and time-limited offers that need to be read immediately. So, use them to support your e-mail marketing strategy and drive urgency and online traffic, to get your customers in-store.
Shipping updates are another tool used by e-commerce businesses to keep their customers informed on their orders and purchases.
Customer Service and Support
Online stores occasionally face different problems in their logistics, which can lead to frustrated customers. To solve this issue, it is important for e-commerce stores to have a prompt customer service department in place. This way shoppers can communicate with them through the phone, email, live chat, or even AI chatbots so that they can communicate with shoppers in real-time.
Get on with your e-commerce marketing strategy
With all that being said, developing an e-commerce marketing strategy may seem a bit complicated. However, the key to success lies in building a marketing stack that can bring all these channels together and automate tedious daily tasks, so you can focus on what’s important, like growing your business. For an eCommerce business, benefits include reduced staff costs, improved accountability, and more consistent marketing of creative content.
Creating automated campaigns might seem daunting at first, yet if you choose the right partner it can be a breeze.
The key to a successful e-commerce marketing strategy lies in building a marketing stack that can automate tedious daily tasks, so you can focus on what’s important, like growing your business.
WayMore provides everything you need in order to take control of your e-commerce marketing actions. It can bring together all the right tools for your communication needs. Track all customer information to provide a holistic view of your customers and orchestrate your e-commerce marketing campaigns, with an intuitive system and an automation strategy in place. Through our advanced analytics you will be able to see whether or not you’re getting your e-commerce marketing right so you can forecast activity and predict possible outcomes.
Get ready to do way more with your e-commerce marketing strategy.
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