16 Essential Ecommerce Marketing Strategies

This article discusses some of best proven ecommerce marketing strategies. In this suggestive list of different strategies, you can find something that fits your business perfectly. These strategies can vary from the tools you use to what you communicate to your customers. We give you several examples of how top brands market their business and how to model your marketing strategy.

We are all trying to create as much traffic for our ecommerce business as possible. But if the customer lands on a website and it looks terrible, then everything that you’ve done to get them there goes to waste. That could mean your advertising budget simply vanishes. Not only will you fail to convince anyone to shop at your store, but Google will treat you based on your website and reduce the amount of people that visit your website with a lower ranking on SERPs.

There is a real possibility that your ecommerce business could be jeopardized because of bad turnover rates. That's why it's so important to understand your order of priorities. Creating traffic and actually turning those visitors into sales are completely different tasks. The first step before you create a flow of visitors, you need to understand that your website is what keeps them on page. If your website is prepared when your customer arrives, then your advertising will be more productive and less expensive.

Breaking down our duties into strategies can be affordable and can helps us build a trustworthy website. Regardless of what your product or strategy may be, all ecommerce businesses should follow these fundamental digital marketing objectives.

Knowing Your Priorities

Everything begins with a central website which can route customers to and from your other social and paid marketing channels. The modern digital marketing approach for ecommerce stores is almost always omni-channel. This omni-channel approach requires you to spread your market outreach across multiple social platforms and drive traffic to your core website for conversion. These social platforms can be very cheap, if not free to use and generate traffic to your store as a free marketing source. These social platforms are cumulative and allow for direct communication to interested customers. A mixed approach is always recommended because it allows you to test several options and scale them simultaneously. Remember that these platforms are considered assets and considered permanent because they accumulate followers.

Regardless of what sort of e-commerce strategy you employ, or what channel you use to market your store. You will need to include these 6 basic and totally free “core” objectives to optimize your websites performance.

1. Ensure your product descriptions and copy use known keywords
2. Use engaging images and ensure you use alt descriptions
3. Verify your sitemap, pages and navigation
4. Leverage social media to scale your reach
5. Consider apps that can help you meet your goals
6. Look for strategic partnerships and affiliates

The digital marketing process is always incremental, where you search and integrate new channels, slowly adding value to each channel. Whatever strategy you employ you need to have quality as a primary guiding objective. Quality is always restricted by cost and available funds for investment, and quality can always be improved. Depending on what stage your business is in, you may be required to vary your approach for optimal performance. The first true milestone is free cash flow which can be reinvested and counts like a breath of fresh air. Making measured decisions is part of the growth process because we cannot have it all.

1. Know you Competition

You can build a strong marketing strategy just by knowing where your competitors are lacking. There is no marketing strategy without knowing your competition first and foremost. Observe their website carefully, mark their strengths and weaknesses. By doing so, you will understand how companies and products vary from one another. Note the way they communicate their core message, the pages they've built and the design of their website. By searching long enough you can surely find a way or two adapt your own page for an advantage.

2. Copy and Descriptions

When you're handling your Copy and Descriptions, you need to know that most people do not even bother reading the whole page. Have you ever seen a heat map of a web page, people skim over long tiresome text. Simplicity is the only way to carry a message across when the average attention span is only a few seconds. Good copy is a combination of correct keywords selection, persuasiveness and simplicity. That means you need to be both creating clear copy and targeting the correct keywords with brevity. Ask yourself what the customer must know and how to relay that message. Good copy writing is something that keeps on selling 24/7. To be a good copy writer there is no need to major in English, all you need is a lot of practice and a paraphrase tool.

3. Images and Videos Centric

Your images and videos are what people pay the most attention to, its eye catching and a great way to tell a story. Not every website uses this and that's an opportunity to capture the interest of your customers. You can build your entire strategy around visuals and create highly persuasive content. Clever visual representation is can be a dynamic way of relaying brand ideology and refining your overall strategy. Any website that uses this format for communication has a leg up on the competition. Facebook is an excellent platform, especially when you spend less money on ads monthly, focusing on visual ads and showcasing products.

4. Paid Adverts

Paid Ads are a highly effective means of generating traffic to your website. They undercut the competition by placing your business directly into the customers data feed with "priority". They work by targeting specific search intent according to your target demographic which makes them precise. This gives them very unique properties in comparison to other marketing tools which generally work organically. They are normally highly competitive and are subject to active bidding wars. This is the blunt traffic generating option under most circumstances and can become expensive. A paid ad expert will generally be skilled in ROI analysis and understanding keyword targeting and building campaigns for maximum effectiveness. These sort of ads are most applicable to business who are still starting off, but have built enough of a core website to retain customers.

5. Prestige Branding

Marketing in its purest form is about the story you tell your customers. You can position your brand in the high price - high quality - low supply category and create this aura of exclusivity. This strategy involves investing on your brand image to create this high value image with a sharp markup on unit prices. A successfully executed prestige strategy sells exclusivity and sophistication. Although there is a point of no return, there is always discussion after sale. So remember that the impression your customers have after using the product is very important, if news breaks about any negative reviews then you invite risk. Exclusivity is highly impressionable but must be justified by quality.

6. Maximum LTV

Maximizing life time value of every customer is all about prioritizing subscriptions, employing email campaigns and capturing contact details. This is the practice of establishing a low cost strategy of retaining customers beyond the first encounter by acquiring contact details. Creating traffic can be very expensive and time consuming, but email and sms can be very cheap. Once the contact details are acquired, you can then proceed to send customers special offers and news updates to re-engage them with your store. With personalized emails you can increase the average order value of each customer over a longer period of time. There are multiple ways you can acquire their contact details such as; free content or courses, free points, discounts, free products or even free shipping. Emails and sms delivers your message directly to the customer without keyword manipulation or extensive marketing efforts or even paid functions. Remember also, that emails can be automated, created with templates and sent to thousands in a matter of seconds. There are also apps and integrations that can handle all your communication needs with one affordable subscription.

7. Perceived Value

In a highly competitive industry, where it an be difficult to see any difference between the many companies, you can win over customers with perceived value. Similar in practice to prestige branding, you can create differentiable qualities to competitors by taking extra steps to create a more impressionable website. By investing your time and capital into improved site function you can capture your every valuable leads with additive time and investment in perceived value. Using custom professionally shot images, videos, UX & UI designers or freelancers is a great way to start this process. This could successfully build the impression of a high performance brand.

8. Balancing Expectations

Just like there are strategies that could give your brand the impression of having high quality, you can use modest marketing to give your products that all important wow factor.  The impressions that you gather will be reflective in discussion amongst customers after purchase or use. You can begin building a reputation of providing excellent results that is seen only after using the product or service.

9. Trust and Authenticity

Whenever shopping online there is always have some extra bit of risk because you can be sure who your dealing with. One of the most assuring steps you can take to faze out this uncertainty is including customer comments into your website. Leveraging reviews and user generated content to build reputation and reliability is a very commonly used strategy. Many business also use partnerships to build their reputation. Once you've accumulated enough of a social presence you can proceed to focus on qualitative factors to drive trust and authenticity.

10. Popularity and Social Awareness

Once in a while we see huge waves of demand for products and other social icons. One of these events like spinners took the world by storm. Being well aware of your target demographics preferences can be a strong foothold on market demand. We recommend you use popular trends and public appeal to influence purchasing decisions. This is similar to riding the wave and can be a major advantage if targeted early on for massive growth.

11. High Social Media Engagement

Social Media has always been a popular topic on the internet with some platforms having billions of users like Facebook. Keeping active and producing high engaging content on these platforms can be a path to stellar performance. Nowadays, TikTok has been an amazing social media platform for exposure and great content. Social media in general can be a great to get a message across quickly and effectively. By observing competitor videos and format you can create high impact videos that could potentially bring in alot of interested parties. If you manage to go viral, this could be a great deal for your brand. Its important to focus on numbers and keeping out put high. In many cases its possible to sell your product directly in the social media or integrate and app that does it for you. Regardless of how well your business sells over social media, many customers check out social media for verification purposes and can help you build your reputation.

12. Price Modification

A classic marketing strategy is price modification. Competing for the lowest prices can be a legitimate option for a volume based business. If you have strong enough inventory controls and if you target a large enough demographic, then you also would be able to attract the bargain hunter and keep them for the long term with active promotional marketing.

13. Apps and Integrations

When it comes to functionality, there is no beating the countless apps and integrations available on the internet. There are countless options in high impact categories that can give you an edge over your competition. Loyalty and Rewards programs are excellent examples of apps that can drive long term purchase intent through progressive rewards for loyalty. There are also countless marketing automation apps, web page builders and even financial apps that can give your business and extra edge against the market.

14. Customization

Many customers are searching for a sense of personalization or customization when shopping online. Since the massive trends like build a bear or custom nike shoes, the market has fallen in love with these sort of business models. By giving customers the option to personalize items, you can build a strong reputation around the highly lucrative market segment.

15. Content Centric w/ Product Promotion

Influencers and content creators often leverage their platform to merchandise their products. They have been known to accept partnerships to help other business use their platform to market their products. It is possible to build your brand around your content or use influencers to help market your business. The type of followers that follow influencers are usually very specific with a vested interest in that product or theme. These leads are generally considered high valued and great for marketing a new product. It is commonly known that influencer marketing is more effective then organic marketing because of the specific targeting.

16. Product Uniqueness

The ecommerce industry is known to face saturation for some niches. A novel product can be the way to massive success and possibly market disruption. Developing your product to outperform or change the way people think can make your brand go viral over night. By understanding what makes your product unique in comparison to the market and communicating those qualities to your customers can be a solid way of accumulating market share.

Conclusion

What ever strategy best fits your business model, its best to take an incremental and multi-channel approach. Ecommerce strategies all rely on a few core digital marketing principles so at the end of the day, there is alot of similarities between approaches. The best thing you can do is understand your segment and explore the best channels and strategies for your business.