Ecommerce Marketing: Your Ultimate Guide
Every marketing operation is finding itself or its relatives online. Consumers pull out their phones for almost everything. However, it can be difficult to distinguish between the usage of consumers on different platforms. Ecommerce marketing can allow marketers to understand that? E-commerce marketing and digital marketing are not mutually exclusive. Ecommerce websites can use all of the above digital channels to promote a product and grow their business.
E-commerce Advertising?
E-commerce marketing is the act of driving awareness and action toward a business that sells its product or service electronically. E-commerce marketers can use social media, digital content, search engines, and email campaigns to attract visitors and facilitate purchases online.
E-commerce advertising includes the methods through which you can promote your product. In terms of online or e-commerce marketing and selling, these ads may come in the form of display ads, banner ads, or rich media ads. Meanwhile, e-commerce advertising includes the methods through which you promote your product. In terms of online or e-commerce marketing and selling, these ads may come in the form of display ads, banner ads, or rich media ads.
The main takeaway here is that e-commerce advertising is a highly effective method to implement while developing your e-commerce marketing strategy to focus your product or service promotion.
Types of Ecommerce Marketing
E-commerce marketing is a simpler way to create sales and promote your business. To give you a sense of what an e-commerce marketing strategy looks like, here are some common marketing channels and how you'd use them to build an online store.
Ecommerce websites are highly visual — you have to show off the product, after all — so your success on social media depends on your use of imagery to drive attention and traffic to your product pages. Instagram is an appropriate platform for e-commerce businesses because it enables you to post sharp product photography and expand your product's reach beyond its purchase page.?
You can take your social media posts a step further by creating shoppable content, which is content that enables visitors to buy right away. That can include anything from strategically placed display ads within a social feed to additional tags that take users directly to a shopping cart. These methods help you eliminate friction from the buying process. An e-commerce business is no stranger to product reviews, either. Using a Facebook Business Page to share product praise is a perfect fit for businesses that already solicit customer reviews across their online store.
Blogging and video marketing — content that is meant to improve your website's ranking in search engines and answer questions related to your industry. But if you're selling a product online, do you need articles and videos to generate transactions? You sure do. Here are some ways to use content to market your e-commerce store.
Optimize your product pages for short, product-driven keywords that include the name of the product. If you sell wedding dresses, for example, a Google search for "brown bridesmaid dress" is more likely to produce product pages like yours if you’ve included that term on the page.
If you manage an online wedding dress store, writing blog posts about "how to plan a wedding" can attract everyone involved in wedding preparations no matter where they are in the planning process. As visitors become more engaged, you can create posts that will move them into consideration
Guest posts can get you and your products in front of relevant audiences (oftentimes for free). Submitting guest posts will also help you get more domain authority for your e-commerce site, thereby telling search engines that you have a reliable site.
If your audience is asking questions related to your product, then you need to be the one to answer them. Create an FAQ page on your website with responses to high volume, long-tail keyword searches to get users to your site. You’ll be building both authority and traffic — two crucial components of a successful e-commerce store.
Search engine marketing (SEM) includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and paid advertising. While SEO relies on your knowledge of Google's ranking algorithm to optimize content, SEM can involve pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, display campaigns, or product-specific ad campaigns (think Google Shopping), which allow you to pay for top spots on search engine results pages.?
On Google, PPC campaigns guarantee that potential buyers will see a link to your page when they enter search terms that match the terms of your campaign. But because you're paying Google each time a person clicks on your result, the payoff to you should be high.? This is why e-commerce marketers often register with Google AdWords and promote their product pages through PPC campaigns.?
Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, and believe it or not, it holds specific value in the world of e-commerce marketing. The best part about email marketing? It can be automated. Automation means that you can set up a successful drip campaign for subscribers that are segmented by interest or stage in the buyer’s journey and let your email campaign do its magic. It’s one less marketing tactic that you need to worry about on your long list of tasks. Ecommerce marketers need to be careful when and how they add website visitors to their mailing list. Here are two ways an e-commerce marketer might use email marketing.
Post-purchase follow up also shows that you care about them beyond a sale and that your company has an interest in their success using your product. It allows you to get feedback on their purchase experience, which, in turn, helps you reduce friction for future customers. Some best practices for this type of email are to ask them to write a review of your product and/or read original content on how to use your product
Users abandon their shopping carts for several reasons, and emails to diagnose the problem and retain their business can make the difference between a purchase and a lost customer. If a website visitor fails to complete a transaction while they’re in your shopping cart, consider sending a polite email to remind them to complete the checkout process, offer assistance, or recommend other related products to get their mind back on you and their browser back to your e-commerce store.
81% of brands employ affiliate marketing, and e-commerce sites are particularly good candidates. Affiliates are people or businesses that help sell your product online for a commission. Unlike most social media influencers, affiliates generate interest in products via old fashioned (yet effective) marketing tactics.?
They often use paid advertising, content marketing, and other means to drive traffic to their pages on your product — it’s like having a team market for you.
This is an often-overlooked tactic for e-commerce businesses, but local marketing allows you to double down on the areas where most of your prospects are (if you have a large population of them in one area) and allows you to offer incentives to your potential customer base.
Use tracking cookies to determine where your prospects are located. Then, offer discounted (or free) shipping to potential customers in the areas where you have warehouses or shipping facilities. The incentive might be just what you need to gain a new customer.
Influencer marketing focuses on people or brands that influence your target market. The term is commonly used to denote Instagram accounts with several thousand followers, but it could also mean a celebrity or community that your target audience follows or belongs to.
Influencers build communities of people that know, like and trust them. It is, therefore, easy for them to garner attention around your online product through a recommendation, or “sponsored post.”
Ecommerce Marketing Tips?
There are countless e-commerce marketing tactics that you can employ to drive visitors to your online store beyond the traditional methods you must have already explored. Let’s get into more creative ways you can market your e-commerce business.
Personalization is finding ways to cater to individuals within the marketing materials that you already have; it is tailoring your outputs to reflect the unique needs of your consumer. Personalization can move people along their buyer’s journey faster — instead of searching for what they need, you put it right in front of them, making it easy for them to take your desired action, that is, make a purchase.
User-Generated Content (UGC) is about finding ways for your customers to promote and share your business. This helps in a couple of ways: 1) It drives traffic to your e-commerce store, and 2) it builds an authentic following of people who are interested in what you offer. Here are some effective ways to drive UGC: (i)Competitions, where customers enter to win by displaying your product in some way. (ii) Review platforms, where customers share feedback about your product. (iii) Social media hashtags, where users submit content using a branded hashtag
A loyal customer is a long-term customer, and who doesn’t want repeat business? A loyalty program provides an incentive for a customer to continue doing business with you through relevant offers and discounts. While building a customer loyalty program takes some planning and work, it pays off in repeat business, UGC, referrals, and retention. consider diversifying how customers can show loyalty, whether it be through repeat purchases, mentions on social media, or sharing your content. Also, think about how you will pay off their loyalty, be it through points, discount codes, or exclusive perks.
Depending on your business size, you can have a live person available to chat with potential customers who visit your store. Whether you decide to go the bot or human route, live chat will prove especially effective while people are browsing your store so they can get answers right away and when they’re in the checkout process to mitigate any objections just before buying.
On discussing the reasons why people abandon their shopping cart above, and a lot of it has to do with trust in your business, in the product, or the delivery system. You want to give customers every reason to want to buy from you without hesitation by confronting their objections head-on. Some ways to mitigate shopping cart abandonment are: Money-back guarantees A clear and simple return policy Superior delivery options Immediate access to customer support
No matter which aspect of your e-commerce strategy you're working on, it should include a responsive design. Your e-commerce marketing tactics will be viewable and easily manoeuvrable via any device. Meaning, in a world where people are always on go and visiting websites and viewing e-commerce marketing materials via a variety of devices from an array of locations, your content will be easy to read and simple to navigate for all users.
Final Thoughts
Ecommerce businesses have several marketing tools at their disposal. Using digital and inbound marketing just the right way, you can create campaigns that are designed to help your online store attract customers and grow better.