Ecommerce marketing is the process of using advertising to get people to visit your online store, turning those people into paying customers, and keeping those customers after they’ve bought something.
A complete ecommerce marketing strategy includes both online and offline marketing methods. A good marketing plan can help you build brand awareness, keep customers coming back, and, in the end, sell more online.
You can use ecommerce marketing tools to promote your online store for your business as a whole or to sell more of certain products. Here’s a quick look at a few useful ideas to try.
Ecommerce Marketing ideas to increase online sales
Invest in SEO
Ecommerce SEO means optimising an online store for search engines. The goal is to have your product pages show up in the top 10 results on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. This brings more natural, unpaid visitors to your website. Backlinko found that people are 10 times more likely to click on the #1 organic result than on the #10 result.
· Doing keyword research and putting keywords in your page URLs, product descriptions, and
blog posts can help you rank higher in search engines.
· Getting your website’s structure right and making sure users have a good time are important.
· Getting backlinks from other sites that people trust
If you do it right, you can show up when people search for terms that are related to your products. The screenshot below shows that Shopify merchant Everyday Yoga ranks on page 1 of Google search results for the term “women’s yoga pants,” which gets more than 49,500 searches per month.
Run an influencer marketing campaign
Influencer marketing is a smart way to speed up your online business for selling things (ecommerce). It helps you find new customers, spread the word about your brand, and work with people who can sell your products for you. Influencers are like famous people on the internet who promote your brand. You pay them in cash, free products, or discounts to tell people about your products.
According to a recent study 80% of marketers think that influencer marketing works. 67% of brands use Instagram, making it the most popular channel. Some other ways to market are:
You Tube
Facebook
Snapchat
Twitch
Instagram
Influencer marketing is a great way to find customers who are a good fit. How often have you seen an Instagram post from an influencer and liked what they were wearing and wanted to buy it? The sales cycle is shortened when influencers are used to promote products. With more shopping options on Instagram , users can buy right from the app.
Sell on marketplaces
People shop online at marketplaces, which is not a secret. In 2021, the top online marketplaces sold $3.32 trillion worth of goods, which was about two-thirds of all ecommerce sales around the world.
Marketplaces like Amazon and eBay can make it easier for people to find your brand and reach millions of people all over the world. Some customers only shop on marketplaces, so they are more likely to buy something from you on a channel they already know. But they come with high fees to sell and other things to think about.
Because of this, it’s best for ecommerce brands to use marketplaces in addition to their own stores. You don’t have to put all of your products on a marketplace. Just put some of your best-selling items there. Make listings that are interesting and show off your brand, and add branded packaging inserts to marketplace orders to get people to shop on your website instead.
Create a Instagram marketing strategy
Every ecommerce business owner should have a plan for marketing that includes using Instagram for business. Instagram is just as powerful as other social media marketing platforms because it has more than one billion monthly active users and more than 173 million first-time installs across app stores in the last quarter of 2021 alone.
Businesses do well on Instagram when they post real content. Videos that are real and not heavily edited, like what you see on Instagram, tend to get more views and comments. That’s what makes Instagram stand out when it comes to getting closer to a group of people. Instagram is also different in a few ways, such as:
Run PPC campaigns
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertisingis the most common way for businesses of all sizes to advertise online. It’s based on data, easy to scale up, and gives a good return on investment. PPC ads often show up on websites, social media platforms, or search engines. These ads are good for ecommerce brands because they reach shoppers who are ready to buy and can lead to more sales than organic marketing.
Facebook and Google are the two most popular places to run PPC ads. Ecommerce brands are often seen in Google Shopping ads. You’ve already seen these ads. When you look for “men’s boots,” you’ll see an ad that gives you a lot of information about different products that are related to your search.
Run PPC campaigns
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is the most common way for businesses of all sizes to advertise online. It’s based on data, easy to scale up, and gives a good return on investment. PPC ads often show up on websites, social media platforms, or search engines. These ads are good for ecommerce brands because they reach shoppers who are ready to buy and can lead to more sales than organic marketing.
Facebook and Google are the two most popular places to run PPC ads. Ecommerce brands are often seen in Google Shopping ads. You’ve already seen these ads. When you look for “men’s boots,” you’ll see an ad that gives you a lot of information about different products that are related to your search.
Upsell your products
“Would you like to supersize your order?” is a famous phrase that most of us have heard in some form. It’s an example of upselling, which means selling a product that’s a little bit better than the one the customer was looking at first.
Many e-commerce businesses can make more money by upselling and cross-selling than by getting a new customer. Sometimes your customers don’t know that a premium product is available, or they may need more proof to see why an upgrade (or package) is better for them.
For instance, is one of your product models made of slightly better leather? Or does one have a handmade part that is special? Make sure to point out the difference and ask the customer if they might want to upgrade at the right times.
When using upselling to boost sales, there are two main things to keep in mind:
Make sure your add-ons are related to what you’re selling.
Pay attention to the price range your customers expect.
Your product has to meet the customer’s original needs, and once they have an anchor price in mind, they might not want to pay more. An anchor price is usually the first price a customer sees, and they use it to compare other prices. For the extra money to be worth it, the new product must fit better than the old one.
Anyone who has ever bought a computer knows what the screen below looks like. Once you choose a model, companies will usually show you performance upgrades (called “upselling”) or other accessories (called “cross-selling”) to think about.
Send text message campaigns
SMS marketing is the practise of sending promotional text messages to customers and people who might become customers. Messages are meant to tell shoppers about special deals, sales, updates, alerts, and information about products.
At the moment, SMS marketing works best in the ecommerce industry. About 70% of customers say that businesses can get their attention through SMS. research shows that texts with multimedia have a 15% higher click-through rate (CTR) and a 20% higher number of campaign opt-ins.
Capture more email subscribers
Email marketing is one of the best ways to make sales and get people to buy from you again and again, dollar for dollar. The most recent statistics show that email marketing is used by 87% of marketers to get their content out there.
We can’t keep up with all the Instagram posts , but email is a more personal way to talk. People still care more about the messages that come to their personal inboxes than the ones that come to their social feeds. Plus, you can say more in an email than you can in a social media post.
To start email marketing, get as many people to sign up for your newsletter, blog, and any other ways you collect email addresses. When you go to its site, the most important thing to do is sign up for its email list.
Make it easy for your customers to get what they want
If your store looks bad, you’re probably losing customers. But what does a store with bad design look like?
The store might not seem trustworthy because it doesn’t have a clear value proposition, the font is hard to read, or the navigation is hard to figure out.
Even if you’ve changed the sizes above, you could still be making a few mistakes with the design. Are you putting the right number of products on each page, or do you have too many products on one page? Have you found a good balance between words and pictures? These are only a few things you should think about.
Engage online store visitors with live chat
Email isn’t the only way to connect with site visitors and customers in a powerful way. For example, you could talk to people who are shopping on your site through live chat.
With many live chat tools, you can target people who are on certain pages, have been on your site for a certain amount of time, or came there from an email newsletter. Live chat also lets you talk to your customers directly, so you can answer their questions and address their concerns right when they’re about to buy.
Optimize your product pages
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of making changes to your website to increase the number of sales and conversions that happen on your site. CRO helps you figure out where problems are on your site.
Where do you not make enough money? Who is leaving, and why? What can you do to make up for those chances you missed? This is done through both qualitative and quantitative research, so you can get a full and unbiased picture of how well your site is set up to convert visitors into customers.
Once you’ve done your research to find challenges and opportunities, you can make hypotheses and run tests to see which approaches bring in the most sales.
Optimize for mobile
Having a responsive design isn’t the only thing you need to do to make your store mobile-friendly. It means that you build your site from the start with mobile users in mind.
You might make the “Add to Cart” button on all mobile product pages bigger, making it easier for visitors to do things like add to cart without having to zoom in. You could also change the way your images are shown so that they load faster and are easier to zoom in on on mobile devices.
Reward loyal customers
Focusing on keeping customers is a cheap way to get more online sales. Stitch Labs says that return customers bring in 22% of a store’s income, even though they only make up 11% of all customers. Over the course of a year, they also spend 15% more.
A customer loyalty programme is one way to thank repeat customers and people who spend a lot of money. A loyalty programme can help both you and your customers in a lot of ways. They give customers more reason to buy and tell their friends about your business, and automated reminders keep your brand in mind.
Start marketing your ecommerce store today
There’s no doubt that the right marketing strategy can help reach potential customers, raise the average order value, and boost sales. All of these are things you need to get better at. By using the tips above for ecommerce marketing, you can build a successful store that gives customers a good shopping experience and is also fun and rewarding for you to run.
