Ecommerce Marketing Strategies: A Comprehensive Guide For Growth

Growing an eCommerce business can be challenging considering the competition for any online market. Emerging as a leader in your industry requires that you have good relationships with your customers and a thorough understanding of who your customers are.

Here are 6 marketing strategies for growing your eCommerce business and better understanding who your customers are. Not all of them will be as effective as the other for your target audience, but when trying out different marketing mediums over time, your engagement will surely grow.

Marketing with Cookie Profiles

First and foremost, cookie data is the key to marketing success in every single fathomable way. Cookies provide you with every bit of information you need to understand your audience holistically. Before deciding which other strategies are best for your eCommerce business, it’s important to identify who your target audience is and what methods are best for reaching them. Different audiences will all require different approaches. 

The types of data they collect are: 

• Browsing habits when navigating a website, social media, and search engines
• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Personal interests like political affiliation
• Marital status

All this information also helps you to figure out where your pitfalls are in your website design or social media content. 

Content Marketing

Create content to tell the story of your brand and help people understand what your brand is all about. Creating a narrative and building an experience around your brand is how to keep customers engaged and aware of what you’re up to.

This could be in the form of blog posts (like this one), creating videos, creating shareable social media content, eBooks, webinars, podcasts, etc.. Right now, eBooks are a popular trend in niche specific markets like online personal training. This industry had to adapt to a world in quarantine, so eBook guides for trainers looking to sell their services online are a way to market with helpful content to personal trainers.

Use keyword research to find out what content will drive the most traffic to your site.

In all content, you must optimize it for search engines. This is considered SEO. SEO is important to making your content and website findable on the internet. This will affect your site’s ranking in searches. 

SEO optimizing is simple on the surface, but for it to be effective, it takes a tedious approach to singling out keywords that apply to your site and brand and building content around them. Include keywords that people might search to find your particular product or service in your webpages as well.

Utilize Social Commerce

Nowadays, people are making purchases on social media at an increasing rate. 72% of adults use social media in the U.S. alone. On top of that, users spend a quarter of their time on the internet specifically on social media. This is significant area of opportunity for social commerce marketing.

Streamline advertising and branding that your business employs on social media to get users to make purchases with fewer clicks. The fewer the clicks, the less time they have to rethink their decision. This can be beneficial for selling products and increasing sign-ups for services on eCommerce sites.

Refer back to the niche market of online personal training. FitSW has an ad campaign specified at getting users to download their guide on how to become and online personal trainer. By pressing download, you are taken right to the page to download a copy of the eBook.

Webpage Branding

This is not a new necessity for eCommerce but it is always an important one to note. Branding your website well can increase your traffic and clicks. Consistent branding can increase your revenue by 23%.

A website with poor design and a lack of branding can have high bounce rates because it lacks a sense of credibility and a poor sense of brand experience. If your website takes too long to load, then statistically 39% of users will bounce. 

Bounce rate is the amount of people who get to your page but leave without going any further than the landing page. A average bounce rate should be anywhere between 30-40%. This means that over half of users are actually engaging with your site.

Email Marketing

Email marketing can be a powerhouse for your emcommerce business in many different ways. Email campaigns provide a 3,800% return on investment. Do I need to say more? No, but I’m going to.

This form of marketing is effective because of its ability to be uniquely personalized to each customer and keeps them updated on anything you wish about your business. Essentially, it forms relationships between your business and your customers more than any other marketing strategy. 

Use email marketing for retargeting campaigns, for sales, for coupons, for personalized messages, for events, for social media updates, and many more. For emails to be effective, you have to make them valuable to the customer. This is where knowing your audience is extremely important.

Here is a series of questions to ask yourself to pinpoint how to employ email marketing:

How far are my customers getting in the purchasing process? Do they have items in their cart? What are my customers purchasing and what do I want them to purchase more of? What feedback am I getting from customers? What is most valuable to them and what  do you want to build value on? What demographic information am I receiving from customer sign ups and purchases? 

Conversational Commerce

83% of consumers use messaging apps to get in touch with a business about a product or service.This strategy is important to building those personal relationships with customers, therefore improving your brand experience. Through messaging apps, customers can stay in much better contact with the business rather than shooting an email in the dark to the support team. 

With society moving at a faster pace each day, being able to respond quickly to inquiries sets your business far apart from others. Through messaging apps like Facebook messenger, you can set up automated responses with chatbots so the customer feels acknowledged right off the bat. 

Using messenger apps can also take less steps out of the purchasing process. For example, you can order an Uber right there in the Facebook messenger app!