In this digital age, it’s easy to get lost in a flurry of advertisements floating around on the internet. But a savvy consumer knows that the best brands pay close attention to who their audience is and where they engage with their communities most often – that’s the magic of eCommerce marketing.
Businesses rely on eCommerce marketing to boost their brands’ visibility, generate buzz around their goods or services, and use multiple platforms to connect with people throughout their customer journey. Ecommerce success goes beyond selling – it’s about building a community of loyal followers by providing the best eCommerce customer service.
What is the Ecommerce marketing strategy?
Ecommerce marketing strategy is the process of developing an advertising, promotion, and public relations plan for a company’s online business. It includes customer acquisition, retention, and referral strategies, as well as conversion rate optimization and website design.
The best marketing strategy for ecommerce is to ensure that you have a strong value proposition. This means that your products are unique, and the quality of what you offer is far superior to anything else on the market.
Best eCommerce marketing strategies
If you’re ready to break new ground in your online business, here are the 11 Smart Ways To Level Up Your Ecommerce Marketing In Today’s Digital Age to ensure your success:
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1. Establish an order management system
The lifeblood of eCommerce businesses is sales orders. Whenever an order comes in, it’s an opportunity to make money. At the same time, it’s a great way to make an excellent impression on customers on how quickly and accurately you can process their orders. This is where a guide to order management comes in handy.
The concept of order management is to organize the various activities that will allow you and your staff to deliver what’s been ordered through your online store. At least seven processes go into e-commerce: order placement, payment processing, order fulfillment, warehouse management, shipping or delivery, order tracking, and returns or refunds.
An order management platform not only enables you to see all placed orders and monitor their status from one stage to another, but it also lets you pull up customer information easily and complete the entire process quickly.
Plus, order management is helpful in data-driven marketing, allowing you to identify and optimize the channels that consumers employ to find your business. In short, the more effective your order management is, the greater it contributes to the overall e-commerce customer service.
2. Make your website SEO-friendly
Ecommerce trends come and go, but search engine optimization (SEO) will always be the foundation of an easily accessible commercial website.
SEO basics include researching the right keywords that your target customers are using, improving site architecture so that search engine crawlers or spiders find your pages and index them, highlighting on-page keywords in the right spots (e.g., banner, sidebar, native content), and expanding off-page influence with backlinks from other reputable sites.
The heart of SEO is all about building your website’s structure and content around the search queries and habits of online shoppers so that your brand becomes visible to them.
Once you’ve nailed the basics, you’ll be able to build upon the searchability and visibility of your website – whether you decide to expand into content marketing or focus on polishing the user interface (UI) of your product pages next. The important thing is to use the relevant keywords that draw organic traffic (real people searching for real solutions) to your website.
3. Invest in great editorial and product photos
Humans are visual creatures! This is the reason Instagram and Pinterest are among the favorite sites of people looking for inspiration. Investing in excellent editorial and product photos is essential since images are the not-so-secret sauce of the most popular brands today.
Great eCommerce photos show a product from different angles (or in different color and size options) and enable customers to zoom in to see the finer details. And when it comes to convincing visitors to convert, the more photos you upload, the greater the chances of that product selling online.
PRO TIP: Be sure to populate your images with detailed and accurate meta descriptions. Use your target keywords when doing so to ensure consistency in your SEO strategy.
4. Find savvy influencers on Instagram
Because of this love for great photos, Instagram has become the social media powerhouse today. The site has seen storytellers and influencers work their magic on some brands by promoting them in everyday life (think: cosmetics and clothing brands or new food finds and vacation spots).
The images, videos, and shout-outs of IG influencers give brands the launchpad to attract an even larger customer base. This alone makes the platform an essential part of every e-commerce strategy. If you’re looking to capture a younger, techier, more fashion-savvy, and more adventurous crowd online, you can partner with an IG influencer to generate buzz around your brand.
The criteria you may consider in selecting a partner include their reputation and whether it matches your brand identity, size of their following, frequency and type of engagement they have with brands and followers, and the tendency of their posts to be shared and go viral.
5. Partner with video creators on YouTube
YouTube is another excellent resource for businesses that want to collaborate with influencers and reach a new market segment – those who enjoy unpacking hot trending topics in explanatory or experiential videos.
You don’t need to produce the actual video yourself if you want to raise brand awareness – you only have to find a video creator who resonates with your vibe and is passionate about a topic related to your brand, then sponsor an episode discussing the topic. The YouTube influencer will introduce your business to their followers through a shout-out at various points in the video.
YouTube video partnerships are useful when you’re establishing connections with an online community. Some subscribers have remained loyal to their favorite YouTubers for years.
6. Tell your brand story with short video clips
If you prefer to retain control of your video content and love the excitement of posting short clips on Facebook, IG, and YouTube, then producing Stories on these platforms may be the perfect strategy for you.
The sky’s the limit when it comes to the content you can post, whether you want to share behind-the-scenes footage of you baking your goodies for sale or you want to upload a string of photos of your new products. It’s an easy way to stay visible to your audience.
7. Develop better content (blogs, white papers, and ebooks)
An integral part of a great website is its content. Whereas SEO focuses on the nitty-gritty of keyword selection and placement, content marketing takes useful information about a product or service and packages it into blog posts, white papers, and ebooks that aim to add value to the customers’ lives.
One example is building content around a common everyday problem (for example: acne) and providing readers with information about a possible cause and their solution – perhaps including your own skincare brand or anti-acne products. A long-form blog post, for instance, can dive into why it is essential to have healthy skin, what experts recommend, and which products are trusted by consumers.
PRO TIP: Offering unique, downloadable content, such as free white papers and ebooks, can also be used to get people to sign up for your marketing mailing list.
8. Speak to your customers through email
Your inbox might be flooded with dozens and dozens of unopened sales emails. Marketers should rein in their promotional spam! For email marketing to be successful, brands need to speak the way their customers do – in casual everyday language – when they introduce their unique selling point.
Go beyond commercial content and offer helpful information in the same way your blog posts and white papers do. It’s one way of letting customers know you care.
PRO TIP: Always personalize your emails no matter how many thousand messages you need to send. You’re more likely to attract attention when you address people by their names.
9. Highlight reviews on product pages
You can raise your credibility as an online seller when you include customer reviews in your product pages. There are plugins built for that! Flashing a five-star rating can do wonders for your conversion rates since customers want assurance that a brand can be trusted.
10. Invest in Google Ads
SEO techniques are designed to rake in organic traffic by incorporating high-value keywords into your website content and structure, but these can take months to yield returns.
Digital marketing experts recommend enhancing your searchability more quickly by advertising through Google Ads. This entails bidding on a keyword you would like to rank for. The amount of money you pitch as cost-per-click will determine where your ad shows up in Google Search results (whenever a buyer types in a query).
11. Retarget visitors
An even more focused eCommerce strategy is retargeting, which is the process of showing specific ads to people who have recently visited your page, purchased from your business, or joined your mailing list. Marketers do this to interact with visitors and customers again.
Retargeting tracks them with cookies and uses data to tailor the kind of ad content they see when they continue surfing the web. Some brands that have used this method of persuading customers to return have reported ROIs as high as 1300% within just six months.
Conclusion
Smart eCommerce marketing doesn’t just randomly apply the latest SEO tactic or launch a Google Ad campaign to sell a brand. It requires a thoughtful approach to targeting audiences across different platforms and deploys a suite of solutions that help online communities connect with your business.
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