E-Commerce Marketing: Strategies & Tips for Online Sales.
The World Wide Web became publicly available after 1993. After that online selling flourished for physical shop owners as an opportunity. Online shopping has grown to become an invaluable industry over the past 3 decades. There are 2.14 billion digital shoppers throughout the globe in 2021.
We will explore e-commerce marketing and discuss how you can develop e-commerce marketing strategies and tactics to improve online customer experience.
What is e-commerce marketing?
The journey of driving awareness and traffic to an online shop and converting website/app visitors to loyal customers is e-commerce marketing. E-commerce marketing can realize considerable ROI for online store owners and reach business goals correctly and continuously.
Different types of e-commerce marketing
Various advertising channels, from the web to social to email and search, could be leveraged by e-commerce marketing to encourage visitors and guide their buying decisions. Below, we introduce some of the most lucrative channels:
- Mobile Marketing
Mobile traffic has represented the lion’s share of global web traffic since 2018. Online buyers make more purchases via smartphones, and around 51% of all shoppers buy items using their mobile devices.
Mobile marketing is about your app and optimizing:
1. Website for mobile users
2. Connecting SMS, emails, and social media
- Content Marketing
Content marketing, the most basic form of inbound marketing, helps with lead generation, driving more customers to your website, and building your brand. Online businesses can prove value to their customers through written articles, videos, and visual content. User engagement and building trust are the keys to returning customers to repeat purchases.
- Social Media Marketing
Social purchasing is on the rise. Social platforms like Instagram and Facebook are chosen by smart e-commerce marketers to advertise products and services, gather customer feedback, and even sell. 43% of buyers research products on social media before making a purchase. Most online shoppers think that social platforms benefit their purchasing decisions. Social marketing should be a no-brainer for modern e-commerce businesses.
- Email Marketing
A great way to generate sales for your online shop is email marketing. Email works to build relationships with customers, from abandoned cart emails to personalized campaigns.
E-commerce Marketing Challenges
Customer expectations are always growing these days. There are many choices in the e-commerce space, which creates high-level competition. Also, buyers expect more personalization and individual treatment.
So what should we do? Here, we offer some solutions to overcome the most pressing e-commerce marketing issues:
- One-Time Buyers
The cost of retaining an existing customer is five times cheaper than acquiring a new one. So, you always face customers purchasing just one time, and they are a major source of monetary losses.
As an e-commerce marketer, you need to make retention a core e-commerce marketing strategy and must focus on turning first-time buyers into repeat, loyal customers. Marketers should have a plan to win back defecting customers or those with abandoned carts by running some retention campaigns. Plus, it offers incentives for making multiple purchases through some loyalty programs.
E-commerce Conversion Rates
The age-old pastime of window shopping has evolved into e-commerce browsing for many online buyers. Most online stores just focus a huge amount of spend on boosting the traffic of their websites, unfortunately, they sometimes forget to push toward the main goal — conversions.
The average conversion rate for online shopping sites is just 2.86%. There is certainly room for improvement. In some ways, like focusing on customization and personalization, offering incentives, and omnichannel campaigns could increase conversions.
- Disjointed, Muddled, and Lost Data
Data is everywhere, and online shop marketers are inundated with data that, frankly, they don’t know what to do with. Marketers may invest in some technologies that end up siloing data. So, this matter just creates more work.
The road to success is to leverage a single, comprehensive customer data solution that provides a holistic 360-degree view, uniting data and technology. To focus on strategy, creativity, and content, you need to reveal the clearest picture of customers with unified data.
Tips and tactics for e-commerce marketing
Marketers can effectively reach audience members, improve brand awareness, and increase online sales through the use of e-commerce marketing strategies that include the following elements:
- Develop a Customer Loyalty Program
Why not reward loyal customers with a stellar loyalty program? They add value to and grow your business through word-of-mouth marketing. They are your asset due to spending 67% more on products and services when compared to new ones.
The loyalty program could be points-based, spend-based, subscription-based, or so on. Offer your buyers a unique, mobile-friendly complement to their shopping experience with a customer loyalty program.
Make sure to combine your current marketing initiatives and customer data insights with your loyalty program to customize the online e-commerce experience and retain loyal buyers truly.
- User-Generated Content — Your True Friend
Whether you realize it or not, your customers are online and talking about you. This sort of raw, authentic content is invaluable in building trust amongst potential buyers.
You must take advantage of this content in your e-commerce marketing campaigns and strategies by leveraging customer reviews, social posts, etc. Don’t forget this type of content is free. So, you may need to ask for posting rights first.
- Use Marketing Data
By taking a data-driven approach to e-commerce marketing, digital commerce teams can accurately personalize content, target audiences appropriately, and benchmark e-commerce data to improve strategies over time.
One of the most significant responsibilities of a marketer is using data-driven marketing.
Data is a fundamental part of advertising and lets your online business connect with customers at the right time, in the right place, with the right offering.
- Monitor Metrics and Analytics
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” This old adage is absolutely true for e-commerce marketing. However, to effectively measure results, you need a customer engagement solution that consolidates customer, product, and sales data, or your data will be siloed at best… and unusable at worst.
The used solution should have the ability to enrich your data with AI and PI (predictive intelligence). In this way, you have the superpower of being able to predict what to do next based on past performance.
- Personalize The Customer Experience
To boost customer retention, improve customer loyalty, and elevate revenue, you must focus on personalized offers and content. Product recommendations, optimized send times, and buying predictions are valuable goals that can be achieved by a good personalization engine.
The e-commerce marketing team will enhance the likelihood of purchases and drive revenue by reaching customers at the right time with the right content.
E-Commerce Marketing Strategy
The e-commerce marketing team can rest assured by using different e-commerce marketing types, plus tips and tactics. So they will be prepared to build a successful marketing strategy for the business goals. To get started, you can follow these steps:
- Align Your Business Goals with Your Marketing Strategy
Every effort you make should be on the way to achieving your business goals. You can determine benchmarking criteria by which to measure the impact of your marketing based on various variables such as your industry or the size of your business.
There are industry standards found in many resources to gain insights. You can observe how your business stacks up against the competition when you’ve acquired and analyzed these standards.
- Execute Your Strategy Step-By-Step
Batch-and-blast emails don’t always work, and neither does an overwhelming marketing blitz. If you try to throw every e-commerce marketing tactic at your audience all at once, you will not gain success.
Start by testing out a few core strategies that you believe will have the most ROI — a social media marketing campaign targeting key audience members and demographics, a UGC push asking customers to share how they enjoy your cash-cow product, or even a simple email marketing campaign offering personalized incentives would likely do the trick. Once you see success stemming from your initial e-commerce marketing strategies, work to continually improve those and test out a few new strategies, and see how they go (don’t forget to benchmark!).
- Keep Going
E-commerce marketing is a cyclical process. It does not stop after you acquire a new customer or an existing customer makes a purchase. So keep going.
Evaluate and revitalize your e-commerce marketing strategies to stay ahead. Every day, there are innovations, new trends, and new ideas that can be leveraged to entice and delight new and existing customers. Always be on the lookout for the next big idea in e-commerce marketing.
E-commerce is booming and will only continue to grow as the world becomes more and more connected. Online retailers and service providers have a multitude of e-commerce channels, strategies, and tactics they can leverage to drive website traffic and conversions and develop a loyal customer base.
Remember to personalize your content, focus on retention, and offer a top-notch customer experience. That way, your e-marketing strategy will be unbeatable.
