9 Essential eCommerce Marketing Strategies Your Business Should Be Using

Creating a marketing strategy can at times be difficult, especially if you’re running an eCommerce business. In this heavily competitive market, brands need to know and understand user experience throughout the customer journey, but a part of the journey is getting to know the brand. While there are a large number of different eCommerce marketing strategies out there, in this post we’ll look over the most essential strategies that you need for your eCommerce business if you want to set yourself apart, make sales, and thrive.

Choosing the Best Platform

The right platform will be the solid foundation you need for your eCommerce business and its marketing strategy.

When deciding, you’ll want to pick one that’s easy, functional, but also what’s right for you and your brand. Not all eCommerce platforms are the same and each one will offer something different, from different features to styles.

When choosing a platform, look into the ease of use for the customer, and how the platform affects the customer experience. You will also need to also decide whether or not you want to have your website or if you prefer to use a platform such as Etsy. While there are pros and cons to each, think about which one will help your brand flourish.

Content Marketing

Content is king, which is why content marketing is essential for any eCommerce business.

Content can be anything from videos, blogs, to even eBooks. This is an excellent way to create traffic while building a name for your brand.

There are unlimited options on what the content could be about and what it could bring to the table.

What’s most important is that your content is creative and original.

The content should also entertain and bring meaningful insight to your customers. While producing content can require significant effort, depending on which approach you choose to take, reusing content is always fine and will make it less stressful on your brand as well.

What many brands do is combine both their products and their content to market to users. Shoppable content helps the consumers gain more information over a product, while also staying entertained in the content that they consume. While this sort of content is slightly more difficult to produce, the end result and the immediate customer engagement are huge advantages.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing involves hiring a high or low-profile person to promote your brand or products. This is a marketing strategy that has been very popular over the last few years.

It works great for those who choose a good influencer within a specific niche. While this may not be the option for all marketers, another excellent option is to ask customers to promote your product or business.

User-Generated Content

User-generated content and influencer marketing often go hand-in-hand. You want normal people, specifically your customers to help promote your eCommerce business. Leveraging content produced by your customers such as reviews, social media, and blog posts is all excellent and helps you.

The most common form are reviews, whether these are posted on your website or another platform, these have the potential in bringing in another perspective for potential customers. These reviews and other generated content are often very sincere and transparent which in turn gains more trust in the potential customer.

 While eCommerce sites should encourage reviews and even integrate them onto the website, you should strategically handle and respond to negative reviews as well. These should not be hidden, as potential buyers also want to read these when researching your product and brand.

Social Media Marketing

Creating and maintaining a brand presence is so easy thanks to social media platforms. Most social media platforms are visual-focused meaning your posts and promotions must be visually stimulating to gain the attention of your targeted audience. These visually stimulating formats can come in a variety of forms such as videos, photos, gifs, and infographics. Each social media platform has its method of showcasing content, Instagram is a more image-based platform while TikTok is for videos.

The two big platforms, Facebook and Instagram are excellent for eCommerce businesses due to their catalogue feature, this allows the brand to upload their items and prices for potential customers to look through. The brand also has the option to optimize it further to where they can target certain products or a specific audience. 

While it may seem overwhelming to handle multiple platforms all at once, it’s much easier when having cross channel marketing tools at your fingertips. This way, you can track and analyze your performance from multiple platforms.

Email Marketing

Emails reach your audience directly through the inbox. This effective marketing tactic is a low operation effort, and low cost as well. You simply need to entice customers to subscribe to your newsletter, and nurture leads by encouraging them to make a purchase.

While it is easy enough to get into your audience’s inbox, the different part is having to compete with other vendor emails. Overall, it can be a bit challenging to convince users that your messages are worth space in their inbox and their time reading them.

So when crafting your emails, be bold when creating the perfect email, and don’t create too many emails on a daily or weekly basis, or else you’ll lose a subscriber.  While your email list is important, it’s crucial to create engaging content within the email and reward your email list with special perks such as a freebie, coupons, or even a contest just for them.

Chatbots

Chatbots are a solid way of giving the user information such as answers to their questions, all with a personalized touch. These handy bots can reduce abandoned carts, increase engagement, and in general drastically help with user experience. How? By assisting customers with finding what they’re looking for on your website, promote products, and even give coupons and other promotions to the potential customer.

While chatbots were once considered difficult to implement, today they’re readily available across many eCommerce platforms. These make it easy for any marketer to embed it into their website, and it’s essential if you want to compete in the world of eCommerce.

SEO

Any business trying to market themselves online must know about search engine optimization or SEO for short.

SEO can at times be a little difficult to achieve because search engines such as Google are always making updates and changes to their algorithm.

Due to this, it’s crucial to always stay on top of the most up-to-date and best SEO practices if you want to stay ahead of your competitors.

Thankfully eCommerce platforms will often have built-in SEO features that help with the process of finding the best keywords to target different audiences. These built-in tools will often analyse search results as well which will be assisting in the most optimal keywords to use and which overs to try.

Use the ToFU Strategy

Top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) Strategy is a method to show engagement within your brand to potential customers. There are multiple methods for this funnel that will often convert the target audience into customers.

One of the more popular methods for eCommerce platforms is quizzes, this entertains the potential buyer while also getting personal details during signup of the quiz. Another popular method that’s widely available through eCommerce platforms would be the Abandoned Cart feature, sometimes a customer abandons their cart for whatever reason. When this happens, you often will have their email address, which then can be used to offer a coupon to get a percentage off so they can finish up the order.