Ecommerce marketing strategies to explode your sales

It’s important to stay up to date with the most current ecommerce marketing trends and techniques for your business. Structuring and finally launching an ecommerce website is a milestone achievement for your brand. Therefore, it’s crucial to invest in an effective website structure and ecommerce marketing strategy.

Digital marketing can be one of the toughest aspects of running an online business. But the good news is that once you master the marketing strategies in this post, everything gets infinitely easier.

Let’s walk through ecommerce marketing strategies that actually work.

What is ecommerce marketing?

Ecommerce marketing is the act of driving awareness and action toward a business that sells its product or service electronically. The ecommerce marketers can use social media, digital content, search engines, and email campaigns to attract visitors and facilitate purchases online.

Develop an ecommerce marketing plan

If you want your marketing to succeed, you should have a well-defined plan. Without one, you’ll end up wasting money and missing out on potential customers. Follow these five steps to create a digital marketing plan for your ecommerce business.

1. Set goals and objectives

To start, you need to clearly define your goals and objectives. If you don’t, you won’t know whether your marketing efforts are actually working. 

Obviously, your ultimate goal is to increase revenue and profits, but when setting your goals, think more specifically. After all, there are numerous ways to increase ecommerce sales. Consider goals like:

• Getting more organic search traffic
• Improving your conversion rate
• Increasing Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
• Lowering Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
• Acquiring customers through new marketing channels

Define specific targets within specific timeframes (e.g., a 25% increase in winter apparel sales in Q1).

Take the time to look at your analytics and see where there are opportunities for organic growth. Look at key metrics like organic search traffic, conversion rates, average order value, and repeat purchase frequency to identify where you’re underperforming, and then set specific goals to improve those metrics.

2. Identify your target audience

For your ecommerce marketing to succeed, know your target audience. You need a clear understanding of who your ideal customer is so that you can use the most effective marketing strategies and channels accordingly. 

Describe your target audience in a single sentence. For example, if you sell organic baby food, you could say, “Our target audience is affluent, health-minded young moms in the U.S. who want to feel good about what their babies eat.”

This exercise forces you to get crystal clear about who you’re serving and how you’re serving them. 

Depending on what you sell, it is likely that you have several target audience segments. For example, if you are a coffee roaster, you might sell directly to consumers as well as to coffee shops. Try to narrow down your target audience as much as possible without excluding any key customer types.

3. Create buyer personas

After you identify the target audience for your ecommerce marketing strategy, you need to create a buyer persona for each segment. Buyer personas help you put flesh and bones on the people in your target audiences. They help you more clearly understand your ideal customers so that you can more effectively market to them.

4. Map the customer journey

The customer journey is all the brand touchpoints and interactions an individual has with your company from start to finish. It includes their initial awareness of a problem, informational research, visits to your site, and engagement with your social profiles. It also encompasses their first purchase as well as ongoing interactions and repeated purchases.

Mapping the customer journey helps you see things through the eyes of your audience. You discover what motivates them to take action in the first place and what challenges they encounter during the buying experience. You learn where they turn for information and what questions they have along the way. 

And perhaps most importantly, you identify all the customer touchpoints where you interact with your audience, such as your ecommerce website, social media, organic search, advertising, events, etc. You can then optimize each touchpoint, giving customers exactly what they need to move on to the next touchpoint in the journey.

5. Calculate your customer lifetime value

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is the amount of revenue a customer brings in over the lifetime of your relationship with them. It includes both the initial purchase and any subsequent purchases they make from you. LTV is a critical metric in ecommerce marketing for several reasons:

• It determines how much you can spend on customer acquisition. The higher your LTV, the more you can afford to spend getting new customers.
• It helps you identify your most profitable customer segments. By calculating the LTV of your different customer segments, you can find the most profitable ones and then focus on acquiring and retaining more of those types of customers.
• It helps you evaluate your customer retention efforts. If your LTV is low, it means your retention strategy is ineffective and needs to be revamped.
• It allows you to measure marketing ROI. If you want to see exactly how well you’re marketing is working, simply compare your LTV to your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). The lower the ratio, the more ineffective your marketing.

Types of ecommerce marketing

To give you a sense of what an ecommerce marketing strategy looks like, here are some common marketing channels and how you’d use them to build an online store.

1. Social Media Marketing

Brands, publishers, contractors, and growing businesses all launch pages on today’s most popular social networks to connect with their audience and post content that the audience is interested in.

As an ecommerce marketer, you can do the same thing, but the campaigns you run might look a bit different, and not every social network is a good fit for your needs.

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 ecommerce 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 ecommerce 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. We’ll dive deeper into product reviews below.

2. Content Marketing

When you hear “content marketing” you might think of 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 really need articles and videos to generate transactions? You sure do.

3. Search Engine Marketing

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 ecommerce marketers often register with Google AdWords and promote their product pages through PPC campaigns. The campaign puts searchers right in front of the business’s product when they click on a paid result, increasing the likelihood that the searcher will make a purchase before leaving the business’s website.

4. Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, and believe it or not, it holds specific value in the world of ecommerce marketing.

The best part about email marketing? It can be automated. Automation means that you can set up a successful drip campaign to 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.

Even so, it’s imperative that you’re meticulous about your email list so you maintain trust among your leads. In a time when data privacy runs high on an internet user’s priority list, not every commercial email is welcome in that user’s inbox. Ecommerce marketers need to be careful when and how they add website visitors to their mailing list.

5. Influencer Marketing

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.”

6. Affiliate Marketing

81% of brands employ affiliate marketing, and ecommerce 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.

7. Local Marketing

This is an often-overlooked tactic for ecommerce 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.

Here’s how: 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.

Ecommerce marketing strategies

1. Grow your email list

Before you do anything else, you should focus on growing your email list. That’s because this is part of the process that can take the longest, but it’s also one of your company’s most valuable assets.

The more robust your list is, the more traffic and sales you can generate to your online shop. But what’s the best way to grow your list? The most proven method is using a variety methods, such as:

• Popups
• Floating bars
• Fullscreen welcome mats
• Gamified spin wheels
• And much more

When you present special offers, discounts, or any kind of lead magnet in these campaigns, you’ll be able to grow your list fast.

2. Automate your email marketing

Sending out a newsletter is great, and you should definitely do that. But sending out targeted, planned, and automated email sequences that build to a common call to action are email marketing gold.

One great example of an effective email marketing sequence that works to boost revenues is a sequence for abandoned cart emails.

3. Load your store with social proof

It’s no secret that social proof can INSTANTLY boost sales. That’s because most online consumers experience FOMO (fear of missing out) on a regular basis.

In the simplest terms, FOMO is what happens when we see other people having positive experiences that we want, too. You can add social proof to your site to instill FOMO in your visitors. They’ll see the people love your products or services and take action.

As a result, each of your visitors will be more likely to take the same action as well. That means MORE sales for your online store with LESS effort.

4. Boost sales with push notifications

Push notifications aren’t new, but they’re quickly becoming a popular eCommerce marketing strategy. Why? Because they give you direct access to your audience regardless of who is currently on your website.

Plus, subscription rates are typically higher because you don’t need to ask for any contact information. Instead, users simply need to click Allow to receive notifications on their browser. Push notifications are an excellent and affordable solution for:

• Promoting blog posts
• Showcasing new promotions
• Announcing special offers (like free shipping, buy one get one deals, etc.)
• Redirecting people to product landing pages
• And much more.

When you send these messages, a notification will rest on your subscriber’s browser until they interact with it in some way (they’ll either click to view or click to close). But you’re probably wondering whether or not it’s a feasible option for you.

5. Run an online contest

If you’re trying to drive more traffic or boost engagement with your brand, there’s no substitute for an online giveaway. You can choose a prize that’s perfect for your target audience. Otherwise, you’ll get a lot of “dead-end leads” who like your prize but don’t want your products. But when you do find that perfect incentive, you can see MAJOR results in email list growth and sales.

6. Add social media to your site

One thing you should start considering is linking your social strategy with your website’s traffic. Lots of marketers approach these two channels in a generic way: they add a few social links to their site.

But you can take things a step further to get even more engagement from your audience. How? By adding a social media feed to your website. This has a few major advantages, including:

• Increase Social Followers: Drive more of your sites organic traffic to your social media accounts.
• Boost Time on Page: Keep users engaged on your posts and pages longer by displaying your social feeds.
• Improve UX: Give the user more ways to interact with your brand so you can help solve their problems faster.

7. Start a blog

Blogging is a great way to build a loyal and long-term audience, but there’s a method you’re going to need to follow to get there. Starting a blog is just like starting a business.

When you first start out, you’re going to offer a narrow selection of products or topics. As your audience grows, your niche will also expand to include related items. This will naturally increase your audience, which is exactly what you want.

And over time, you can grow that blog to bring more organic traffic to your website. It’s a long-term strategy that safeguards you against getting locked into expensive pay-per-click campaigns month after month. While paid ads are valuable to your sales funnel, starting a blog can add new leads for free.

8. Leverage referral marketing

One of the most powerful (and underrated) ecommerce marketing strategies is referral marketing (also known as word-of-mouth marketing).

The reason is simple: we’re all social creatures, and we love sharing our experiences with our family and friends. We help each other avoid bad experiences and encourage each other to support places that provide an excellent experience.

That also means, whether you like it or not, people are going to share about you with their friends. Wouldn’t you prefer that sharing be something positive about your brand and product? That’s referral marketing.

Referral marketing is when you deliberately influence the process of word-of-mouth, whether it is encouraging more sharing or positioning the sharing to be positive.

9. Master retargeting strategies

Customers don’t buy on their first visit to an ecommerce site. Well, they do, but rarely, so it’s best to focus retargeting ads on return visitors to your store by adding some code called a “pixel” to your site. Pixels are a small snippet of code that helps you track user activity. And it’s GREAT at retargeting your paid ads specifically to users who have already visited your website.

10. Optimize your ecommerce website’s layout

After launching or redesigning your ecommerce site, it’s important to test your website’s layout, language, and placement of conversion elements. When customers visit your website, you want to make sure it’s easy and simple to check out, that they feel naturally inclined to purchase your products, and that it’s abundantly clear how to do so.

You should test the language displayed on your landing and product pages, the language in your conversion elements, and even the strategic placement of icons and elements. You can use various usability testing methods for this.

Tool is Mouseflow’s heatmap software that reveals valuable patterns in customer behavior on your website. One of their most popular heatmaps, the movement heatmap, reveals the most attractive parts of your website based on visitor movement data to your website.

11. Search engine optimization (SEO) for ecommerce

One of the most important and manual methods of improving an ecommerce website is making sure it’s optimized for search engines. With today’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) standards, it’s now more important than ever to make sure your website is constantly updated with rich and relevant content, promotes a good user experience (UX), and is optimized to be as error-free as possible.

The content within your website should be rich, reliable, and provide information to the public that is useful and relevant to what they’re looking for. For example, if you have an ecommerce store selling camping supplies, it’s wise to provide detailed product information and possibly even host sections of your website that offer generous amounts of content that elaborates on the topics of camping, supplies, or related subjects.

Using keywords within your content in a genuine way will also flag your website as a matching result in search engines when users are looking for something specific. Search engine optimization is one of the lowest-cost, highest ROI ecommerce marketing strategies you can deploy.

11. Optimize for mobile

It is absolutely crucial to make sure your website is responsive to any user layout. Mobile users are starting to dominate the sea of internet use, especially in ecommerce, and it’s important to accommodate their needs to provide a good user experience (UX) for everyone.

You can also use mobile marketing techniques to target mobile users specifically. One of the most popular marketing trends is called geo-targeting, which advertises to mobile users based on their location. This technique enables you to reach out to customers who are within a specific distance of your business, and provide them with an incentive to stop by or make a purchase.

12. Target wearable and VR

Targeting wearable and Virtual Reality (VR) technology is a trending technique that grabs users in a new and exciting way. People are still getting used to this technology, and are not yet overwhelmed by or habituated to advertisements.

Your target audience for these mediums will be very refined, as these users are the part of the population that carries the latest technology at the palm of their hands at all times, keeps up to date with trends, and doesn’t mind dropping some extra cash for items they desire.

Although creating campaigns that are designed for these technologies can be expensive, the right approach can be worth the initial investment because a filtered audience is more likely to convert.

This isn’t one of those ecommerce marketing strategies that will work for every business, either. Be sure wearable and VR tech are familiar to your audience before making the investment. enter , another opportunity to gauge customer reception by using a survey tool.

Conclusion

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.

In other words, this adds a whole new layer of personalization to your ecommerce marketing strategy. When people visit your store, you can send them follow-up messages and campaigns to encourage them to complete a purchase.