Online shopping shows no sign of slowing down. According to research carried out by CapitalOne, ecommerce sales are estimated to hit $6.91 trillion in 2024, up a whopping 9.56% from 2023.
This rise has led to a huge amount of choice for consumers, giving them spending power and the opportunity to buy whatever they want or need at the simple click of a button. However, for ecommerce businesses, competition has never been more fierce.
If you own or work for an ecommerce business, you have to stand out from a saturated market to ensure your products are in front of your target audience. To do this, you must use effective marketing strategies to grow your products, popularity, and profit.
In this blog, we’ll outline some essential ecommerce marketing strategies that your business must do to optimise its success.
Invest in SEO (search engine optimisation)
Ecommerce SEO is the practice of optimising your online store for the search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. When done well, your website should sit in a prominent position in the search engine results pages, bringing more organic traffic (rather than paid traffic) to your site.
This is an essential marketing practice, especially because Backlinko found that the highest-ranking organic search result is ten times more likely to be clicked than the one which sits at tenth place on the list. Invest in SEO and you drive sales.
Some ways to effectively use SEO for your ecommerce store include:
- Keyword research: Identify the keywords your target audience uses to search for products like yours, and use these keywords naturally throughout your product pages in titles, meta descriptions, product descriptions, and alt tags.
- Internal linking: Connect your pages so that search engines understand your site structure when they crawl it.
- Technical SEO: Use a tool such as Ahrefs or Semrush to audit your technical SEO for a fast, mobile-friendly ecommerce site with a good user experience.
Put time into a content marketing strategy
A content-led digital marketing strategy often feeds into the overall SEO strategy, as you can create content clusters using popular keywords to strengthen your authority over them. Do this by creating high quality blogs which are educational and link to your product pages.
Within a content strategy, you can also spend time putting together videos and podcasts to spread your net wider, ultimately giving you brand awareness in multiple corners of the internet.
You can tailor a content marketing strategy to different parts of the marketing funnel. At the top of the funnel, people want to be given educational content which introduces them to your brand or products. At the middle of the funnel, potential customers may be aware of you so need incentives on why to choose you – give them case studies. At the bottom of the funnel, customers are ready to purchase and need a nudge over the finish line, so use promotions and strong calls to action to encourage them.
Use social media marketing
There are multiple social media platforms to choose from now, including Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. While creating social media posts for all of these channels would take a lot of time, if you don’t have that kind of capacity, do your research to find which platforms your audience are on and focus your marketing efforts on creating strategies for those.
Some tips for using social media effectively include:
- Post regularly to keep your customer base engaged
- Attract new followers by sharing special offers, discounts, referral codes, and giveaways
- Create viral content by engaging with trends
- Encourage testimonials and user-generated content (UCG) to build trust with new customers
- Build a community of loyal customers who are interested in new products
- Create interactive content like videos and infographics to break up text
You can also use the paid functions on some social media platforms to get your message in front of a wider audience, for example through Facebook ads or Instagram ads.
Some ecommerce businesses also use social media for influencer marketing, giving free products to influencers who will post about them to their social media audiences in exchange.
Create email marketing campaigns
Email marketing is vital for all businesses, especially as 60% of consumers say that marketing emails have influenced their purchases. It can be a profitable marketing tactic, with the average return on investment (ROI) of email marketing being $36 to $40 for every dollar spent.
What’s more, email campaigns are an easy win, as much of it can happen through automation, giving you more time to focus on more time-intensive tasks while it works away in the background.
You can use emails to deliver targeted messages at various stages of the customer journey, including welcome emails, abandoned shopping cart notifications which prompt them to checkout, and promotions. You can also use a tool which will segment your customer data into email lists, enabling you to more effectively target certain demographics based on their interests.
This marketing strategy can also be frequently reviewed and refined, as platforms will allow you to measure key metrics such as open rates, click-through-rates, and conversion rates.
Targeted pay-per-click (PPC) adverts
If you have the budget for it, investing in PPC campaigns can give you a good ROI, as research suggests PPC converts 50% higher than organic traffic.
These clickable ads vary in price depending on what platform they’re being hosted on (usually Google ads or Amazon ads), and what keywords you’re targeting. Every time someone clicks on an ad, you pay a fee, though a budget is put behind the campaign before you start and it will run until that budget runs out.
If you have a specific product or service you want to get in front of people immediately, a PPC advert linked to a landing page for that particular item is ideal. Unlike organic strategies which build over time, these promotional campaigns are put in front of your target audience immediately and drive traffic right where you want them.
If someone views a product and doesn’t buy it, you can also carry out retargeting PPC campaigns which show up on the ad space of other websites to prompt them to return and buy.
Learn how to create an effective ecommerce marketing plan
If you work in marketing for an ecommerce website, learn how to create customer loyalty and pick the most effective marketing channels by studying Wrexham University’s 100% online MBA Marketing.
This degree will teach you how to develop a foul-proof customer experience which encourages repeat purchases from an engaged audience, and will give you the tools you need to manage an effective ecommerce strategy.
Taught part-time, you can fit this degree around current commitments and access all course materials through a tailored online learning environment whenever and wherever suits you.
