5 ways eCommerce marketing can promote your business’s sustainability

So let’s say your eCommerce business has already done some of these things or is well on it’s way to figuring it out, what can the team then do to talk about and promote what it has achieved?

- Start with your social media and the community

- Deliver content in your blog/website & nail your ethical SEO

- Write Newsletters & promote the work on social

- Talk about what you are doing with your affiliates and partners

- Find partners exclusively engaged in climate action

73% of millennials and Gen-Z consumers are willing to pay more for such products. Not only will businesses be able to cover the costs of being ethical, and gain additional profits off the back of these, but they’ll also see improvements in the costs to acquire, gain interest and ecommerce conversion rates, with a higher retention rate vs. typical customers secured.

Once your team has got a handle on its sustainability objectives, it’s time to focus on how your team can deliver ecommerce marketing. We’ll talk you through 5 ways you can deliver ecommerce marketing to promote your sustainable credentials, whilst generating some additional sales. 

So, let’s say your ecommerce business is on it’s way to sustainability. What next . . ? 

In a previous story, we talked to ecommerce business owners and managers about the ‘6 things an ecommerce business can do to be sustainable.’ From reviewing energy suppliers, supply chains, packaging suppliers used to support the business and using partnerships with existing brands doing good, any ecommerce business can do a lot of environmental good. So let’s say your ecommerce business has already done some of these things or is well on it’s way to figuring it out, what can the team then do to talk about and promote what it has achieved? 

Here are 5 ways you can deliver ecommerce marketing to promote your business’s sustainability?

1) Start with your social media and the community: 

Share with your community each of the areas you have succeeded in. Better, consult them and survey them whilst the team is figuring out its options. For example, ask your customers how important each of these steps are to know which one to deliver first or ask them what they are willing to pay extra for, like packaging for example, when you are weighing up renewable/recycling-based packaging suppliers. 

Being ethical and caring costs, but if customers feel a part of the conversation, and that they can choose to buy ethically from you, they’ll help support your steps and buy more frequently. Also, find out what your partners and affiliates are doing and take advice from them on how they are working ethically. 

2) Deliver content in your blog/website – Nail your ethical ecommerce SEO:

You probably already know that blogs are a great tool for organic ecommerce SEO growth, and you’ll soon find things to talk about. Document the team’s chats on each of the steps it is taking to be ethical and use it to inform other potential customers who might visit the site. Think about keywords that relate to that story, those organisations you can link to who are tackling the issue and link all your stories together as part of an ethical series. 

It is also a great touch to place banners and directory links to those blog stories on the homepage, with a great headline explaining that the brand is ethical. You can adjust and alter this as the team achieves milestones.

3) Write Newsletters & promote the work on social:

You may already have promoted your achievements or consulted your community. Semi-regular follow-ups are important though to keep the community aware and inform those likely to have missed some of these posts. Use the blog stories to help you put together posts quickly, re-using some of the copy and generating relevant tags, either putting a link in the comments or asking them to find the latest story on the website (If on Instagram without 10K of followers). 

Re-purpose your blog’s stories into sections of the newsletter you send out to your customers, regularly giving 1-2 sections to the blog, re-using a snippet of the copy and a hero image from the blog article, with a link to the blog area. This is not only saving you time by re-purposing but also improves your SEO per blog post, traffic regularly being sent to recent articles. 

4) Talk about what you are doing with your affiliates and partners: 

Some of your affiliates and partners are going to keep on eye on what you’re doing, and are probably already on their own newsletter list. And hopefully, they chipped in ideas and were supportive when your team was figuring stuff out. However, you can go further with them, following up with more direct conversations. Ask them to support you, talking about the relationship and supporting your ethical achievements. Better, if they helped and advised you or are doing the same thing as you, then cross-promote, jointly sharing blog stories and promoting stuff you are doing together. 

These relationships are just as crucial as your outbound work to customers, offering backlinks from associated industry sites related to yours. And if you can go further, securing the support of industry publications or those working in the environmental news space, you’ll start gaining some great support online, and lots of new potential customers looking to buy ethically.

5) Find partners exclusively engaged in climate action 

There are numerous ‘climate action platforms’, marketing agencies and consultancies which are all engaged in supporting the business community to be ethical. They can directly provide physical assistance to put together content to support these steps and many more (LIke PPC, PR and digital campaigns). Or they will have the knowledge and content available to help marketers and creative professionals to develop their campaigns. 

Each offers a choice based on how well your team understands climate action. An agency can advise but will often need to be directed to deliver sustainability marketing, developing for you the content and campaigns you need. A business consultancy will be able to advise you on many of the decisions you want to make, giving you options to solve all of your steps, but won’t get involved in the actual promotion of the work. And climate action platforms, though still a new type of business, will have a lot of knowledge on sustainable business practises, with usable assets and content. But it’ll be down to your team to take the advice and what is offered, tailoring them to your needs.

We really hope you nail your ecommerce marketing and your business achieves sustainability 

Taking the steps you are taking and seeing all of these things through is not only going to do enormous good but will also get you results, generating ecommerce sales. A study by Nielson shows even as far back as 2015 shows that brands that communicate well and promote sustainable marketed products will outperform those that don’t. 73% of millennials and Gen-Z consumers are willing to pay more for such products. Not only will businesses be able to cover the costs of being ethical, and gain additional profits off the back of these, but they’ll also see improvements in the costs to acquire, gain interest and ecommerce conversion rates, with a higher retention rate vs. typical customers secured. 

That picture has already played out multiple times with the community of partners at One Tribe has, even the very first partners able to reduce acquisition costs by 10%, and increase sales on promoted products by over 20%. Goose Studios then over doubled those rates within a year, reducing acquisition costs by 21% and conversion rates by 42%. 

Take time and find a partner/s that bring your strategy to life 

You have options on the table and we advise you to take the time to find a partner that not only can fulfil your needs, but share the same values and understanding of the sector you are in. Depending on the size of the business it is common for ecommerce marketing teams to have one or two types of partners working with them at any one time, either as an extension of the team or feeding in expert knowledge and support into an established marketing team. 

At One Tribe, we are a climate action platform, focused on providing knowledge and usable content and tools to help businesses get directly involved in climate action. Most of our partners are referred to us via existing partners, consultancies or agencies, who typically offer us an additional resource to businesses taking these steps.

Thank you for reading and taking the steps to use your marketing strategy to do good in the world. If you feel One Tribe can be one of those options, give us a shout when you are ready, and check out our climate action tools for businesses, developed especially for ecommerce partners.

I hope you find this article interesting, if I can be of any help to you and your business please drop me a DM.

Thanks

Ric