Gurpreet Singh on
Dec 27, 2019
Whether you have a small fashion boutique still or a large online apparel store that does millions in revenue every month, getting your Ecommerce Marketing strategy right is going to be crucial to your online success.
Whatever be the size, shape, or nature of your e-commerce store, you are sure to face challenges in starting an eCommerce business when it comes to attracting and retaining customers online for your store. With so much clutter online, increased competition, and high social media and search engine advertising costs, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to turn a profit on your eCommerce store.
In spite of all this, plenty of eCommerce websites have cracked the eCommerce marketing puzzle and are successful in drawing in potential customers and converting them.
What are the winners doing, right? And how can you form an actionable marketing strategy that you can use to increase the online sales of your eCommerce website?
What is Ecommerce Marketing?
Simply put, eCommerce Marketing is a set of marketing ideas and strategies that, when collective implemented, can draw in more targeted traffic to your eCommerce store, increase conversion rate, and also boost repeat purchases. The successful implementation of eCommerce Marketing is key to running a profitable online store. In case you're looking for inspiration, here's our list of best eCommerce websites for photographers and creatives.
This guide will cover the core marketing ideas and strategies that every eCommerce website owner must implement to increase traffic, improve conversion rate, and repeat purchases, hence paving the way for running a successful online business. This guide will provide you a better understanding of ecommerce web design. Here is an example of ecommerce website templates you can check.
Here are our top 23 eCommerce marketing strategies for your online store:
1. Focus on your brand
Creating a brand around your product offerings can be extremely rewarding in the long term. Online shoppers have a plethora of options to shop from. Building a brand that they can relate to, admire, and talk about can increase your online sales manifold.
Creating your brand would include:
- Your visual identity (logo, colors, fonts, current design trend)
- Positioning (high end, luxury, eco-friendly, animal-friendly, vegan, natural - there are a ton of choices that you can pick from as your brand positioning)
- Packaging design
- Website copy (friendly, aspirations, funny?)
2. Create a great, mobile-friendly, eCommerce website
Your eCommerce website design and the way it functions is a huge factor in enabling and converting visitors to customers. A clean, well-designed website gives the customers the confidence to shop in your store. A tacky interface, spelling mistakes, and bugs in your site will make the customers leave in no time.
Make sure that your eCommerce website looks professional and inspires confidence.
Highrise - An eCommerce theme from Pixpa
Choose the eCommerce platform to build your website wisely. There are a ton of eCommerce platforms out there offering solutions of all kinds. Your choice should be guided by what type of eCommerce store you are trying to build. For example, for a boutique store, it doesn’t make sense to pick an eCommerce website builder that offers advanced features that add complexity.
Pixpa Stores are the best eCommerce platform for boutiques and small, creative businesses. With several beautiful eCommerce themes and easy eCommerce management, Pixpa makes it easy for you to start selling online within minutes.
Learn more about creating your eCommerce store on Pixpa.
Check out some of the best eCommerce websites built on Pixpa.
3. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
Make sure your eCommerce store theme is mobile friendly. As more and more people switch to mobile devices for browsing and shopping online, it’s essential that your eCommerce store’s theme is responsive and works well on all mobile devices.
Online sales on mobile devices in 2017 were almost 40% of total online sales and expected to cross 50% by 2021.
4. Easy navigation and search
Tech-savvy shoppers are always looking for advanced search and easy navigation to find the products they are looking for quickly. Make your products easy to find through intuitive and simple navigation and search function.
Making it easy for shoppers to reach their goal of product purchase can make you can win them forever.
If you have a large store, offering suggestive search, autocomplete search, faceted or filtered search, and other advanced search features can help customers find what they are looking for.
5. Showcase products with large images
I am sure you have heard the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” On your eCommerce website, a great product picture can make the difference between sale or no-sale.
Product presentation is the most crucial step to engaging visitors in an e-commerce store. High-quality product images that can reveal all product details help users see all facets of the product and make up their minds. Images taken from different angles of the product can give a ‘product-in-hands” experience.
Great product images enable shoppers to ensure that the product they are purchasing will match expectations, hence reducing the chance of returns and increasing overall customer satisfaction. Great looking product images also go a long way in building your brand and create customer trust in your brand.
6. Add detailed product descriptions
Apart from the excellent product images, detailed product descriptions help shoppers to make buying decisions faster. In the case of incomplete or no product description, you run the risk of losing customers. An e-commerce study reported that 20% of shoppers couldn’t complete their purchase due to incomplete and unclear product descriptions.
Your product descriptions do need to be factual but should go beyond and persuade the customers to purchase the product.
7. Create awesome content
Great content always wins over the target audience and leads to high conversion for e-commerce.
The starting point of writing great content is to identify, research and pinpoint the demographics of your target audience. For instance, if you sell handbags, it’s safe to assume that your e-commerce store would be visited mostly by young women. To attract these women to the store, you can write a post like “5 Handbags for that perfect Prom Dress”. So how does this help? Women putting together their prom dress would look up ‘handbags for prom night’ on Google. She sees your article and clicks through to read more, there she sees a few handbags and goes on to discover more.
Adding videos and infographics adds an extra edge to your content.
8. Optimize your eCommerce website for search engines
Search engine optimization should be a crucial pillar of your eCommerce marketing plan. After all, organic search traffic coming in through search engines delivers the highest ROI as an e-commerce marketing channel.
Search Engine Optimisation is all about:
On-site optimization: Optimising your website content, metadata, and alt-tags based on keyword research.
Off-page optimization: This is all about building backlinks to your website by publishing your content on their websites, blogs, and social media networks. Articles, blogs, guest blogs, how-to infographics work as the best form of content to build backlinks to drive traffic.
According to Stellar SEO, you should reserve more time on building backlinks over on-page SEO. As on-page SEO is the easy part. It’s all under your control. You chiefly research keywords and add them to your webpages.
But with backlinks, it is a hit and miss. This is because of all the sites you reach out to, only a small number will link back. So, while planning out your eCommerce SEO strategy, schedule most of your time for off-page optimization.
It is best to follow an 80/20 plan here. 80% of the time should be spent on building backlinks and 20% on on-page SEO.
What is keyword research?
Keyword research is to find out the most relevant keywords to target by doing competition research and using tools like Google Keyword Planner and others to analyze the search volume data of your niche.
9. Start a blog to promote your online store
I bet you would give anything to just have your online store on the first page of Google. Having a blog can help immensely in promoting your online store.
To make the most of your blog, you would need to publish original, engaging content on your blog regularly. However, merely writing blog posts and relying on Google to index your blog might not be helpful. The possibility that your blog post ranks on the first page of Google as soon as you publish it is very low. Sadly, it also means that you would get zero to negligible traffic on your store. Relying on this isn’t a practical thing to do. What you can do instead is promote your blog that sends direct traffic to your store.
How to promote a blog to increase traffic to your online store:
Tag the people you have referred to in your blog while you share your blog on social media. The odds of people sharing an article in which they are tagged are notably high.
Share your blog in online communities specific to your industry: For instance, if you sell personal care and beauty products, you can share your blogs in beauty forums or Reddit’s relevant threads. This helps to grow your influence as well as drive sales for your store.
Email your existing customers about it: The number of people who engage in your blog gives Google a signal that strengthens the blog rank in SERPs.
Write guest posts on popular websites in your industry: There are two benefits to it. First, you get a link to your store that bolsters its rank on search engines, and second, you get to reach a broader audience.
10. Leverage social media
Social media networks can act as a golden corridor for your eCommerce store to acquire targeted customers. The big question is - Where to invest your effort and how to target your audience.
More and more shoppers are using social media platforms to discover products and to get and share honest feedback, creating these platforms an ideal platform to reach out to your potential customers.
However, different social media networks offer different opportunities and need specific marketing strategies to get your marketing message across and generate traffic to your store.
For instance, Facebook is great to tell stories, seed quirky, and fun content that gets shared and liked by people and leverage viral marketing techniques. For a brand with highly visual, premium products (for example, in fashion, decor, or design), Instagram and Pinterest provide a better platform for engaging users with visually stunning imagery. For DIY products, make product videos viral or train customers to use the product, YouTube is a great platform to earn money. You can also use video makers and editors available like Lumen5. With Lumen5, you can create any sort of video within minutes.
For tapping into current trends and reaching out to an actively engaged audience, Twitter scores highly. Reddit and StumbleUpon are platforms to brainstorm content regarding your products/services and your marketing messages without getting overtly sales-driven.
Therefore, learning how to use different channels for organic marketing, as well as paid marketing campaigns, are required to develop appropriate strategies for SMO and SMM for your e-commerce storefront.
Tip: Make sure that you integrate social media sharing tools on your website to enable your site visitors to share content. Also, have prominent links to your social media profiles on your website so that people can follow you.
Embedding your Instagram feed on your website / using Instagram posts by other users who are using your products on that specific product page to provide social validation are great ideas.
Pixpa lets to embed your Instagram feed on your website easily.
11. Use emails to promote your online store
Email marketing forms the backbone of customer communications for most online stores and is one of the best online store promotion ideas. In addition to informing customers about their placed orders, they can be used creatively to market your online store. Marketing and eCommerce go hand-in-hand, so how to use email marketing tools for your online store? You can check out this great guide on Moosend about email marketing tools to know more.
According to GFK’s global retail report, one of the many reasons that people shop online is because they get cheap pricing. Promotional emails are an easy way to engage and keep customers coming back to your store.
Some common promotional messages that capture subscriber’s attention are: ‘X% flat off,’ free shipping, and more.
Festivals are an important time when people like to shop, throwing in discounts and special festival offers for your customers encourages them to shop more. Christmas, St. Patrick’s day, Cyber Monday are some of the few occasions when you can send these emails.
Check out this guide on how to automate the process of sending email newsletters to your customers.
12. Win back the abandoned cart customers
Not all the traffic that your online store gets goes on to make a purchase. There are a number of reasons that can lead a visitor to abandon their cart. The cart abandonment rate form most online eCommerce stores varies between 60% to 80%. That’s a tremendous opportunity waiting to capitalize.
Reach out to these potential customers proactively using personalized emails that nudge them to complete their abandoned sale as part of eCommerce marketing. Provide their abandoned cart contents to them in thermal to establish context and throw in a discount offer to persuade them to return and complete the purchase. You can also retarget these customers using Facebook retargeting and other such tools.
13. Personalise everything
Personalize your customers’ experience and all the communications that you send to them to have an effective eCommerce marketing. Include customer names in all your store emails. Add a human touch to your communications by sending emails as a real person would. If you are a small boutique store, personalization can even mean sending a handwritten thank you card with every order. Or sending a personalized email on your customers’ birthday or anniversary and including a discount coupon in that. Coupon promotion can help foster a strong connection between the brand and consumers.
14. Enable easy checkout
Checkout makes or breaks e-commerce, so be careful while designing your eCommerce store checkout flow.
Checkout processes can get complicated and involve several steps such as collecting mailing addresses, shipping or delivery address, payment related vital info including bank information or card info, invoice preparation, incentive deductions, newsletter delivery info, and finally, account creation for loyalty programs.
Ideally, you should aim to have the simplest checkout possible to your customers. Offering a one-step/guest checkout by eliminating account creation with the minimum required information will make more customers checkout successfully.
If you do have a multi-step checkout process, displaying checkout progress with visual clues can inform shoppers on how many steps remain to accomplish the entire process.
15. Offer referral discounts
Referral discounts are the classic marketing tactics to promote your online store, especially to reach new customers. Remember Uber’s free rides? When a friend invited you to use Uber to book a ride, they got discounted rides as soon as you booked a ride on Uber.
You can offer similar discounts to your customers on their purchase as soon as their referrals purchase on your store. Emails are a great way to put this to work, just use any tool to send your customers an email asking them to refer their friends and the reward they would get in return.
16. Offer free shipping
There are plenty of studies that prove that online shoppers are four times more likely to buy if the online store offers free shipping. Conversely, a big number of shoppers go to checkout pages, and when they find shipping charges added at the last stage at the time of payment, they abandon the cart and go to competitors’ sites where everything is defined.
If you cannot offer free shipping, make sure that there is no ambiguity in how you are calculating the shipping charges. If possible, subsidize the shipping costs from your product pricing. Offering flat rates or discounts on shipping on higher-order values are also good ideas that you should consider.
17. Make it easy for your customers to track their orders
Customers are always eager to know when they would receive their ordered items.
Once a customer pays for the product on an e-commerce store, she is eagerly waiting for her shipment to arrive. However, shipping times may vary, and delays may happen based on the distance, shipping modes, and shipping provider’s services.
Enabling your customers to track their orders easily by sending proactive notifications about the status of their order is an excellent way of reducing the order delivery anxieties. And, doing this will give you good results in your eCommerce marketing efforts. Most shipping providers now have automated platforms that can inform your customers of their order status. Pick a shipping provider after reviewing how they handle order shipping and delivery updates.
18. User-Generated Content is Gold
Shoppers tend to trust the feedback and reviews of existing customers and their experiences, so ratings and reviews matter more for any e-commerce business.
For eCommerce stores, user-generated content such as product reviews, ratings, and comments can generate trust and increase sales. Make sure you integrate tools for ratings, reviews, and comments on your eCommerce website with a valid authentication system for the real users. Word of mouth and referral marketing can take your eCommerce marketing to the next level.
Using automated emails to get feedback after a product has been delivered to a customer should be an essential part of your communications strategy.
19. Using affiliate marketing
The first thing you might want to know is who are affiliates, and how can they help you in eCommerce marketing? Here’s an answer:
Affiliates are promoters of your product who earn commission on every sale that you make from the customers referred by them. These can be influential bloggers with a huge readership or just a regular person with a large social media following (like most Instagram influencers). Some of the largest e-commerce companies derive as much as 40% of their revenue through affiliate marketing, and Amazon is the largest of them.
For online stores, affiliate marketing can prove to be just as much profit as these retail giants. So go ahead and find a few affiliates that would promote your online store.
How to find affiliates for your online store?
You need to find bloggers/influencers who write about the products related to your industry. For example, if you sell handbags, you should approach a fashion blogger or influencer. Find out what they mostly write about and how much of an impact does it have. This can be done by checking the level of engagement the blogger has. For example, the number of comments on a blog post or an Instagram post can give you a fair idea of the level of engagement the blogger/influencer has.
Read More: Here's a great guide from Affilorama where you can learn some more affiliate marketing tips.
List your eCommerce store on affiliate marketplaces
Another way to build an affiliate network for your online store is to list your offering on affiliate marketplaces. Some of the popular affiliate marketplaces are:
Use social media to promote your affiliate program
Lastly, utilize your social media network to promote your affiliate program. This might result in your customers becoming your affiliates too. Instagram is a popular platform where you can find users with a huge following that can help you in eCommerce marketing. Since it’s a visuals driven platform, this makes it suitable for apparel, décor, and other lifestyle products to be promoted.
20. Get a loyalty program up and running
Statistics show that happy and loyal existing customers outspend new customers by 2:1. Goes without saying, it makes a lot of sense to encourage existing customers to make repeat purchases on your eCommerce storefront. Loyalty programs are a great way of achieving this goal. By offering customers credits or bonus points or discounts on future purchases, you can incentivize them to come back to your website for repeat purchases.
21. Always be communicating with your customers
“Communication with customers keep relationships alive and make them stronger.”
Offering support, particularly post-sale support is vital for eCommerce success. Keeping communication channels open such as live chat, phone, and email support and responding to queries on social media demonstrates that you are responsive to what your customers are saying.
Collecting feedback and reviews from your customers can help you gain valuable insights about your products and also generate social validation for other potential customers.
Today most of the eCommerce stores integrate live chat to offer real-time support for shoppers who are stuck on any stage of the e-commerce funnel. Most of the time, customers use live chats during the checkout process to clear any doubts that they may have. There are different stages of an eCommerce marketing funnel, check out the following resource - Sales Funnel Stages: A Simple Guide to know more.
22. Using marketplaces and other channels
Selling your products on marketplaces and channels such as Google Shopping, Amazon, Easy, etc. is a great way to generate exposure for your product and augment your online sales. These platforms would help you reach out to a broader audience and get exposure for your brand. Just make sure that you keep your brand positioning and product promotion tactics (such as discounting, free shipping, etc.) consistent across all online channels.
23. Measure traffic and analyse the data
Conversion is always a final goal of eCommerce marketing.
You need to continually measure and analyze your eCommerce website’s conversion metrics using analytics tools like Google Analytics to analyze which strategies are working and where things are going wrong / can improve.
Using data from this traffic analysis can help you focus on improving user experiences, usability, performance, prices, design, and many such factors to optimize and improve your eCommerce conversion.
Conclusion:
We have explored several eCommerce marketing strategies to make online ventures a success saga. However, the selection of appropriate strategies and implementations depend on the nature and the target audience of an e-commerce business.
Now that you many ideas on how to promote your online store, apply the above tips to drive success for your eCommerce store.
Pixpa is the best eCommerce website builder for small, creative businesses. Start selling in minutes. Start your free trial now.
Anisha Singh
