With thousands of eCommerce stores opening each day, the competition for online businesses is amplifying. In such a situation, setting your business apart becomes the utmost priority for you as an eCommerce store owner.
According to the latest research by OptinMonster, 93.5% of global internet users have at least purchased products via any online platform once. So, despite the increasing competition, following the right eCommerce marketing strategies can multiply your eCommerce business scope.
So, to help you out, we have compiled a list of 8 different eCommerce marketing strategies and tactics along with detailed tips to implement them. And the best part is, most of the listed techniques are easy on pockets.
Why wait anymore!
Let’s start with some of the low-cost e-commerce strategies.
These are some of the foundational low cost and high impact marketing strategies for any e-commerce website in the digital space.
1. Optimizing your website with the best SEO tactics
Every business online is only successful when it is easily discoverable for exact keywords searched by the users. Everybody has indeed become much busier in life that mostly nobody bothers moving to the second and third search results page on any of the search engines.
Also, a search by Imforza states that out of all the links users click on, 70% of the clicks are organic. Hence, it is one of the foremost strategies to invest in your website’s search engine optimization.
Remember Google upgrades their algorithm every now and then to offer relevant and quality rich search results for users. Hence, never forsake SEO and keep updating keywords, content, etc., as these can yield excellent results in the years to come.
Here’s how you can do it:
a. Conduct Ecommerce Keyword Research:
Keyword research is a building block in any eCommerce SEO strategy. You need to carefully determine the keywords for which you want your business to rank. For that, start with Keyword Research Tools like Ahrefs, Moz, etc., along with competitor’s keyword analysis.
Doing this will help you understand which search keywords your competitors’ business is ranking high with good search volume. You can also do better keyword research using the following two methods:
• Amazon Keyword Research tool
• Competitor’s keyword research
b. Define Ecommerce Site Architecture
Through this step, you put your keyword research data into action. Here, you need to define the architecture of your eCommerce website and set-up category and product pages. Just ensure that:
• Your site set-up is Simple and scalable
• Your categories and product pages are aligned according to keywords research
• Your users should not take more than three clicks to reach on any other page from one page
• Your home page should link to all significant category pages
c. Work on On-page and off-page SEO
Once your category page ranks on a search engine platform and users click on this, it will be easy for them to discover them. This is only possible if both your on-page and off-pages are optimized. For this, the below measures can help:
• Ensure that your URL is easy, simple, readable, and includes the target keyword
• Make sure that the Title tag, aka H1, has a primary keyword.
• Your primary keyword must at least appear once or twice in the first 300 words in the body.
• Include LSI keywords on the product page, Meta description, and Alt text
2. Online review matters, so do make a practice of having them
Did you know?
• Research shows that 87% of the customers read online reviews regularly or occasionally for local business. (Source: BrightLocal)
• More shocking is the fact that 79% of the customers trust online reviews.
With the above statistics, it is significant that reviews can make or break any e-commerce business reputation.
Online reviews are pivotal for potential customers, and it helps them make their buying decision and eventually, turn into a customer. Hence, you must encourage your past customers to submit reviews on your products and services.
Positive reviews add trustworthiness to your brand value, while negative reviews help you identify the gaps - they provide an opportunity to understand customer expectations better. A report by Genesys suggest the following three importance of online reviews:
• Maximizes customer retention
• Improves customer satisfaction
• Helps in cross-selling and up-selling
For an easy review collection process, use free plugins on your product pages such as WordPress and Shopify apps, etc.
Here’s how you can get online reviews
• Ask your customers to submit an online review by assuring security to them.
• Make use of incentives. Plan different reward points for sharing a genuine review
• Run contests.
• Plan email campaigns and send easy to fill survey forms to collect reviews.
• Appreciate your users on social media platforms for sharing reviews.
3. Because Content is the King so develop quality rich content
It is funny how e-commerce space tends to go heavy on paid activities more than exploring growth based on organic content. Content marketing for any e-commerce business is to write content about their niche, whether to educate, aware, or highlight upcoming trends.
For eCommerce sellers, content is not just limited to blogging and once a blue moon update. You need to encourage your audience to sign up or send lead magnets to qualify them as prospects with engaging content.
A thorough and frequent reach out with the means to add value can help you develop a loyal fan base in your niche, and with proper product placement, you can win over to profit from your loyal fan base as well.
In today’s digital space, the most critical form of content is video. Video marketing amp up your content engagement significantly.
Here are different content marketing strategies to drive ROI:
• Write content that helps your users in making easy purchase decisions and, in a way, solves their problems.
• Ask your audience via social media polls which kind of content will engage them more.
• Scan your competitor’s blog section and follow skyscraping to deliver something advanced and better than their content
• Reuse content in the form of social media posts, eBooks, downloadable pdfs, audio podcasts, video content, etc.
• Share your content via Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
• Use PPC platforms to promote content that can deliver conversions.
Bonus Tip
Include Guest Blogging in your content marketing plan. Extend your blog’s reach and publications by submitting only high quality and relevant posts by guest bloggers/writers. This will help you generate high-quality content and get backlinks, thereby enhancing your website’s SEO.
4. The Art of Social Media Marketing
In the new normal world post-COVID-19, social media marketing has taken the world by storm. Every other user is active on either of the most popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. It has now become the ultimate tool to connect with your audience. Of course, you can opt for both organic and paid reach on social media as well.
Check out how to do it:
› Build Online Presence
Maintain your social presence and social media handles by posting consistent and relevant content in terms of stories, high-quality images, GIFs, videos, etc. Set up a business account on all the social media platforms of your liking. In the initial phase, we suggest starting with Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. You can even make a social media posting plan.
You can nurture your relationship with existing customers and build new connections with potential customers at the same time. Engage with comments, private messages for better two-way communication. As exciting as it seems, never go on promoting your products solely. Focus on building a niche and creating relationships with your customers.
› Prepare for In-app Shopping because it is here to stay.
Facebook and Instagram launched Shops for both the platforms in 2020, allowing users to shop on their platforms themselves, thereby reducing the drop-offs directly. Turn this into an opportunity for boosting your eCommerce store online presence and scaling up the overall sales numbers.
Set up a product catalog on your business account along with individual product pages with product descriptions. Streamline the Checkout Process to reduce friction from product to final purchase.
› Find influencer - Because it fetches better ROIs
Influencer marketing remains one of the most followed tactics of eCommerce businesses in 2020. A report by Mediakix states that around 89% of the marketers found that they get better ROI from practicing influencer marketing than any other marketing tactics.
Pick out some of the influencers your target audience follows on social media and reach out to them to build a relationship. This strategy could be a barter or nominal fee-based approach, depending upon the number of followers the influencer has and the type of brand promotion you require.
Even micro-influencers can help you gain a significant number of potential customers since their word of mouth seems more legitimate and trust-worthy. It can be an investment worth for your business with their active audience.
› Paid Advertisements
Most of the social media platforms provide paid advertisements as well — for example, Facebook/Instagram Advertising, Promoted Pins, etc. On Facebook Advertising, if you want to reach a targeted audience and generate leads within a limited amount of time, you can opt-in for paid advertisements. This requires a thorough understanding of your audience.
You need to ask specific questions to discover the exact audience’s interests and demographics. For example:
• What kind of audience might be interested in buying your product?
• What would their personas look like?
• What would be their annual income?
• What are their interests?
These are some of the fundamental questions that can help you circle out the best audience you should target your ads. You can opt for different types of ads: Image, Video, Carousel ads, etc. With a hit and trial method, discover which audience and type of ads work well for your products. Always keep on optimizing to determine the right fit for your audience.
Similarly, Pinterest’s Promoted Pins, the PPC system of Pinterest, works as a combination of Facebook and Google Adwords. The ads pop up in the relevant users' feeds as well as in searches.
› Affiliate Marketing
In the decade, Word of Mouth marketing was a great way of getting more business via free advertising from your loyal customers. They advocate for your business’s products/services. But in current days, it has derived a new meaning wherein any customer/user who brings in new customers keeps a cut of the sale made via their links.
Today, these links are called affiliate links. The cut can be pre-determined as per the business policy. The user/customer shares their unique affiliate link with tracking parameters, and any purchase made from that link allows the user to take commission rate. Using these benefits the whole e-commerce ecosystem. Hence, one should use affiliate marketing, which provides low cost and high impact on business growth.
Affiliate marketing can be done in the following ways:
• Pay-per-click ads placed on the merchant’s behalf
• Placing digital banner ads on various content sites
• Planning video ads on prominent YouTube channels
• Social media posts
• Deploying advertorial content
Here’s how you can make affiliate marketing work for your eCommerce store:
› Conduct competitor research
Find all the affiliate marketing agents of your competitors and make a list of them. Dig out more about their payouts, cost-per-action, cost-per-lead, and bonus. Enroll in their email newsletter to get an idea about the kind of lucrative offers they hire.
› Research and finalize the affiliate marketers
Set your KPIs and determine the affiliate programs according to your objectives. You can develop goals like:
• Increase month-on-month traffic by 15%
• Generate $ 15,000 revenue each quarter
• Boost order value up to $8 in the next three months
Accordingly, you can list affiliate marketing programs that you want to run and hire affiliate marketers.
› Plan commission strategy and define rules.
To measure and get the desired ROI, you must find a sweet spot between defined affiliate marketing payouts and goals. For this, you must measure the following parameters:
• Cost per acquisition (overall)
• The conversion rate of customers generated via affiliates
• Customer lifetime value
Accordingly, you can set the commission rate for your affiliate marketers. Along with this, you must also set some rules to maintain transparency and your website’s safety.
› Track the performance
Tracking the right metrics is very important to ensure that you get maximized ROIs. You can check the following parameters:
• Referral clicks
• Referral sales
• Referral conversion rate
• Return on ad spend
6. Emails Emails Everywhere
Email is the most common way to reach out to any user on your e-commerce website. Whether you want to share tracking details or discount coupons, or new product launch information, email is the way to go.
You can send bulk emails via free platforms at a penny of the cost. Integrate a sign-up and subscription form for email listing building on your e-commerce website. Just remember, never indulge in buying out email lists because these are generally vague email ids that are not interested in your business, thus running your email campaigns’ impact.
Here’s are a few tips to do it effectively:
› Plan creative welcome email series
When a subscriber sign-ups for your website’s email notifications, send the user a welcome email because they are waiting to hear from you. Welcome emails have around 86% higher open rates. It is also observed that and when welcome emails are planned rightly, the results can be better by 320% and the returns in terms of revenue are must better than any other promotional email.
› Tailor emails according to different segments:
Sending newborn baby products to a 20-year old user will make no sense and affect open-rates. Thus, you must be very careful while designing your emails. Plan the segment list based on age, gender, income, education, location, etc. This will not only boost open-rates and CTRs but also help in maximizing ROIs.
Bonus Tip
If you already have email campaigns in place, consider taking a one step further with drip email marketing. Drip Email Marketing is the process of sending automatic emails based on triggers. Triggers could be any actions or inactions taken by the user.
For Example, any user who left the cart in between - a cart abandonment mail will be dropped within the next day or two, any user who visited a product page but didn’t buy - a special discount code mail will be dropped in the next three days. The frequency and type of email template can be pre-decided.
Drip email marketing helps reduce manual interventions and increase customer engagement.
7. Optimize for Voice Search
“About 22% of users use voice search by Google to get details of local businesses”. (Source: Incrementors.com)
Voice Search is a rising trend in 2021. It is essential to optimize your eCommerce website with most users searching on search engines with voice-enabled devices. This provides the opportunity to capitalize on the long-tail keywords and medium volume keyword as well.
Here’s how you can do it:
› Most voice searches are question-based
Which is the best mobile under $1000, or where the store delivers online shoes near me? Yes, a majority of voice searches are in the form of questions. Thus, you must optimize your eCommerce website according to voice search. Find the trigger words that most users use related to your offerings, and try to include LSI, conversational keywords, and long-phrase keywords to rank your store in the first position. Some of the trigger words are:
• How
• What
• Best
• Where
• Top
• Free
• New
• Who
• When
• Why
• Types
› List your products on Google Shopping.
The products listed on Google Shopping are more searchable when users search products via Voice search. You can try out various extensions available that will help you to sync your product data, product content, and variations. Further, it will save the cost of resources and time.
› Include FAQs
Recently, Google searches show a lot of frequently asked questions on search result pages. Just ensure that you don’t miss adding a FAQ section for each product page and the best part is, you can stuff your targeted keywords, which will allow Google to rank your product page in the search results.
Bonus Tip:
If you are a local business, try to incorporate dialects and other vernacular languages in SEO keywords to help your users better discover via voice search.
8. Page Speed and Mobile-First Design
One of the most critical considerations in marketing is website page speed and mobile-first design. Both of these play an essential role in search engines rankings as it provides excellent user experience in terms of speed and convenience. For any user who is shopping online, a good user experience is of utmost importance. Further, it is nowadays one of the topmost priority in the list of Google’s ranking algorithms.
Here’s why mobile-first design is helpful for an eCommerce store:
› Let visuals work for you
In mobile-first design, you can take the help of visuals to make it more user-friendly and eye-catchy. The best results can be seen when your visuals are more powerful, and the design has less content. Ensure to display high-priority content like:
• Featured products
• Sale items
• New collections
• Discount codes
• Forms
• Call to action buttons.
› Plan a lot of clickable content
Make your users flow in your website by offering them easy to navigate options. No image and CTA buttons should be clattered and unisolated. In short, your mobile-first eCommerce design should not be messy but easy to move around because the idea is to make the life of users easy on your website or app.
› Test and Retest
You must plan your website design by walking in the shoes of your customers. Think about the user journey, test new design options, and add the latest features to make your website design more user-friendly.
The Parting Note:
These are some of the latest eCommerce marketing strategies which every eCommerce store business must try to incorporate.
Every business must indeed apply these latest eCommerce marketing strategies right from PPC to voice searches. However, each strategy might have a different impact on your eCommerce store. Some may work well, while others may require more A/B testing.
All that matters is that you will need to try out many things to promote your eCommerce store. Though there are several other eCommerce marketing strategies, a lot of store owners find the most effective and extremely reliable for generating maximum ROIs.
Let us know which latest eCommerce strategy you prefer the most or has worked well for your eCommerce website in the below comment box!
