Your Guide to Ecommerce Marketing

Consumer behavior has changed dramatically in recent years. Online shopping is more prevalent than ever – the pandemic significantly increased the frequency of online purchases, and the growth of the ecommerce industry is expected to continue moving forward. With annual retail ecommerce sales exceeding $5.8 trillion worldwide and 82% of Americans shopping online with their mobile devices, the opportunities to leverage online sales in your business model are robust.

If your business sells products and services online, ecommerce marketing should be a critical component of your digital marketing strategy to ensure you’re able to maximize the revenue generated by online purchases. The following guide will break down the basics of ecommerce marketing for you, helping you to understand how you can use this strategy to grow your business.

What Is Ecommerce Marketing?

Ecommerce marketing involves the use of digital strategies and channels to promote products and services being sold online. Your efforts will help raise awareness of your online products among your target audience and compel them to make a purchase. Ecommerce marketing is also used to encourage repeat purchases from previous customers.

As with other types of marketing campaigns, ecommerce marketing leverages a variety of tools and activities that will help guide your target audience through the entire online shopping customer journey – from initial awareness of your product or service through any post-purchase engagement used to elevate the customer experience and cultivate brand loyalty.

The ecommerce marketing landscape is constantly changing, and the tactics used to maximize the ROI of your efforts today may be completely different from the best practice strategies that will emerge in the next year or two, as new ecommerce marketing tools and technologies are developed and implemented. Working with an experienced digital marketing agency will help ensure you’re continuously leveraging the latest ecommerce marketing best practices with your campaign.

Key Goals of an Ecommerce Marketing Strategy

An effective ecommerce marketing strategy should accomplish the following goals:

Drive Awareness and Traffic – The first goal of ecommerce marketing is to make potential customers aware of the products and services sold through your online store. This is accomplished through content marketing and SEO efforts intended to drive organic traffic to your website, as well as by promoting your online offerings via social media platforms, paid ads and email marketing campaigns.
Convert Shoppers into Customers – The next goal involves getting website visitors to make a purchase. Tactics such as personal product recommendations, targeted promotions and a streamlined checkout process can help boost conversions and maximize online sales.
Retain and Engage Existing Customers – Once an online purchase is made, your ecommerce marketing efforts will help you build loyalty and encourage people to become repeat customers. Tactics such as loyalty programs, post-purchase follow-ups and ongoing engagement on social media and email are used to cultivate brand loyalty and increase repeat business.

Common Ecommerce Marketing Channels

There are a variety of channels you can use with your ecommerce marketing campaign. Different channels are typically leveraged for each of the three goals discussed above. In addition, the right channels for your business will depend on the ways your specific target audience consumes information. The most effective ecommerce marketing strategies will leverage the channels most frequently used by your potential customers.

The most common channels used in ecommerce marketing campaigns include:

Search engine optimization (SEO)
Content marketing
Social media marketing
Email marketing
Paid advertising (PPC)
Influencer marketing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is used to drive organic traffic to your ecommerce website. The following SEO tactics will help improve your visibility on search engines and increase click-through rates:

Optimize product pages so that they include relevant keywords, high-quality images and detailed, engaging product descriptions
Regularly post new content providing valuable information regarding the products you offer
Optimize your page load speed to provide a better user experience
Build a mobile-friendly, responsive website that provides an exceptional user experience on mobile devices
Use keyword rich meta tags that help search engines recognize your pages to rank for searches related to the products and services you offer

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a critical component to any ecommerce marketing strategy. It supports your SEO efforts by providing the valuable content your audience is seeking when researching their purchase. Content marketing accomplishes several important goals, including raising awareness for your offering, answering your audience’s most pressing questions, establishing your business as a trusted industry leader, conveying your brand messaging, and explaining the ways in which your offering will address your audience’s needs.

An effective content marketing strategy leverages a variety of content types to achieve these goals:

Product Pages – Your product pages should clearly explain the value of the products being sold on your ecommerce website. A well-optimized product page includes keyword rich page titles, headers, image alt text and product descriptions.
Blog Posts – Blog posts provide supporting content that gives your target audience valuable information related to your offering. These posts can answer your audience’s most pressing questions, help educate them on strategies to solve their problems, and explain the products and services that will address their needs. Blog posts play a critical role in establishing your business as a trusted industry leader and building your brand.
Guest Posts – Guest posts are submitted for publishing on external websites to help you gain additional exposure for your brand and build backlinks that will improve your SEO results. To maximize the effectiveness of guest posts, you need to identify websites that rank well for the keywords associated with your product.
Product-Related Videos – YouTube is one of the most effective places to reach your target audience, as the platform has over 1 billion active users and is the second largest search engine (Google remains the largest). Posting informational videos that are both related to your products and provide valuable information to your audience will help you build trust among your audience and raise awareness for your offering. Product tutorial videos are also an effective way to provide a better customer experience and cultivate a long-term relationship that results in repeat business.
FAQ Content – Including a keyword-driven FAQ section on your website is an effective way to answer the most common questions your audience has related to the products you offer. The best FAQ pages build comprehensive responses to long-tail keyword questions that generate high search volume. This will help you show up for the most relevant searches associated with your offering, and it will help establish your business as a trusted industry expert.

Social Media Marketing

Leveraging social media platforms as part of your ecommerce marketing strategy can be an effective way to raise awareness for your offerings and boost sales. Approximately 43% of shoppers research products on social media as part of their purchase decision-making process. In addition, ecommerce businesses with at least one social media account generate approximately 32% more sales than online retailers that don’t leverage social media as part of their marketing strategy.

The most common social media platforms used with ecommerce marketing are Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. Each of these platforms have different audience demographics and are ideal for different purposes. The right social platforms to use with your campaign will depend on your specific goals and target audience. For example, TikTok users are generally younger (age 18-24) than Facebook users (age 25-54). Instagram is highly visual, making it a great platform to show off your products, while Facebook is a great platform if you’re looking to generate customer reviews for your online store.

You can use social media marketing to boost your ecommerce marketing efforts in a variety of ways. It’s an effective place to highlight product announcements or discounts. You can also share customer testimonials and generate social proof of the quality of your products. Sharing your educational content on social media can help you raise awareness of your brand, generate interest in your product and establish your business as a trusted industry leader.

Some ecommerce marketing social media best practices to keep in mind include:

Choose the Right Social Media Platforms – It’s important to identify the social media platforms that will deliver the best ROI for your ecommerce marketing efforts. Targeting every platform will spread your resources thin, so it’s best to focus on the channels your audience uses most.
Display Your Brand Personality – Social media provides an excellent opportunity to show off your brand’s personality. This will help improve audience engagement with your business and build brand loyalty.
Interact with Your Audience – Social media is an interactive community. Use your social media marketing efforts to solicit feedback from your audience, ask them questions to learn more about their needs and preferences, and to build a stronger online community.
Include Strong Visuals – Ecommerce marketing is highly visual. The most successful social media campaigns include sharp product imagery and compelling videos that generate interest in your offering.
Create Shoppable Content – Generating social media posts that include shoppable content can help remove friction from the buying process by allowing users to buy right away. This can be accomplished using strategically placed display ads in social feeds or creating tags that take users directly to a shopping cart.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is an effective way to engage with users at every stage of the buyer’s journey to generate additional online sales. This marketing channel is especially effective because it can be automated. You have the ability to set up highly customized email marketing campaigns segmented by an individual’s level of interest and their stage in the sales lifecycle. Then you can schedule these emails to be sent out automatically at your designated time and date. You’ll also have access to a wealth of data that will help you evaluate the success of each campaign so that you can make any adjustments needed to improve your results.

Some of the most common ways you can leverage email marketing with your ecommerce marketing strategy include:

Welcome Series – When someone signs up for your email list, you can send them a welcome email series that helps them get to know your brand, showcases the products you sell online, and encourages them to engage with your business on a deeper level.
Purchase and Shipping Updates – Send buyers a series of emails confirming their purchase, explaining the returns process, and updating them on shipping progress. If a customer’s purchase is eligible for loyalty points, you can also include this information as part of this email series.
Post-Purchase Follow-Up – Sending an email following up with customers after they receive their purchase is an effective way to build an ongoing relationship and show them that you value their business. You can also use this email to ask them to leave a review, offer feedback on the purchase process, highlight other products they might find useful, or inform them of a special offer they can redeem with their next purchase.
Abandoned Shopping Cart – Abandoned cart emails can often be an important tool to turn a lost sale into a new customer. There are many reasons why people may fail to complete the buying process after adding a product to their shopping cart. You can send an email to re-engage with them and remind them to complete the checkout process or offer any assistance they need to finalize the purchase. This email is also a great opportunity to recommend related products they might find interesting.

Paid Advertising (PPC)

SEO is a long-range strategy to boost your online visibility and generate sales for your ecommerce website. Paid ads (PPC) can be an effective way to quickly boost traffic to your product pages and generate conversions while your SEO efforts are taking hold.

To get the most out of your PPC efforts, make sure to adhere to these best practices:

Target Specific Locations – PPC ads can specify a physical location you want to target. This allows you to craft highly targeted paid ad content that will resonate with your audience living in that area. This is especially effective if large portions of your target audience are all living within a specific location or going to a specific event.
Leverage Social Media Paid Ads – Google isn’t the only place you can use paid ads to boost online sales. Most social media platforms allow you to set up paid campaigns to target specific audience segments.
Raise Your Quality Score – Google gives each paid ad a quality score. You can use relevant keywords and take users to optimized landing pages that will raise your click-through rate. This will raise your quality score, which can reduce your cost per click.
Leverage Google Shopping PPC Campaigns – You can create shopping PPC campaigns on Google that will help you show up in ads at the top of search results when users conduct a search for a specific product. This will increase the likelihood that these users will click on your product and generate a sale.

Influencer Marketing

Influencers are individuals with large numbers of followers on social media who have cultivated a community of people that like them and trust their recommendations. You can partner with these influencers to promote your products to their audience. Leveraging the large audience reach and established credibility of influencers can help you raise your brand awareness and generate large numbers of online sales.

For influencer marketing to be effective, it’s important to choose the right influencers. Make sure their audience overlaps with your target audience. In addition, the influencer’s values should resonate with your brand. You should also give your influencer partners the creative freedom to promote your products in a way that is authentic to their brand and their followers.

Make sure to track the performance of each influencer you work with by having them share unique discount codes or affiliate links with their audience. This will allow you to measure the engagement and conversions generated by each influencer so that you can devote these resources to the influencers that generate the best ROI.

Webolutions Can Help You Maximize Your Ecommerce Marketing ROI

If your business is looking to generate online sales, it’s critical to develop an effective ecommerce marketing strategy that will boost the visibility of your products and services among the people most likely to make a purchase. At Webolutions, we can ensure you maximize the ROI on your ecommerce marketing efforts.

As Denver’s leading digital marketing agency since 1994, we’ve helped hundreds of clients grow their online sales through ecommerce marketing. The first step in the process involves ensuring your website is properly equipped to handle your ecommerce needs, both now and as your business grows in the future. Our team specializes in enterprise-level website design and development, and we can build you a website that will contain the robust ecommerce functionality you need to manage your online sales.

We’ll then work with your team to develop a comprehensive ecommerce marketing strategy that nurtures all three pillars of the process – you’ll increase audience awareness of your offering and drive traffic to your website, convert more shoppers into customers, and build brand loyalty that helps you retain existing customers in the future. Our team will leverage the best channels to reach your audience where they consume information in order to make the best use of your ecommerce marketing resources.

You’ll benefit from a data driven approach that provides your team with real-time performance intelligence dashboards which make it easy to visualize your results. This data will allow us to identify any emerging trends and make actionable recommendations to continuously improve your results over time.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

Author
Recent Posts

Andrew Martin

Andrew Martin is the content strategist at Webolutions. He develops tactical content strategy recommendations and creates all content for clients to achieve their goals and elevate their success. With over 13 years of experience in content marketing, Andrew has the experience to write engaging content that conveys a client's brand story, builds trust and establishes thought leadership.Learn more about Andrew Martin.