Introduction 

In 2020, more than 80% of consumers shopped online. That’s a huge amount of people and it’s only increasing day by day. This is the reason why most businesses are opting to go online and start selling digitally. But eCommerce is nothing new, it is the new normal for many since the pandemic and thus online businesses are using every trick up their sleeve to stand out from their competitors, be unique, and increase conversions. 

If you are looking to create the best online marketplace for your business, you need cutting-edge solutions. This means that there should be an attempt to focus on improving the user experience, as well as building a fast, efficient and secure e-commerce platform. You need to make sure that the platform that you build will be able to help you appeal to your core target audiences.

With the eCommerce industry growing 23% each year, you can’t go into it blindly. To succeed, you need a proper eCommerce marketing strategy to grow your business and remain consistent. A marketing strategy should not entail the tactics but the path you are going to take when utilizing platforms or reaching out to your target audience. 

According to HubSpot, Ecommerce marketing is the act of driving awareness and action toward a business that sells its product or service electronically. In this guide, we will guide you on how to develop an eCommerce strategy and which channels to utilize it on.

Let’s get started!

How to Develop an eCommerce Marketing Strategy

If you want your tactics to work, you need to devise a strategy to make sure your whole team is on the same page and that your goals are defined. Check out the strategies that can give you a competitive advantage in eCommerce marketing.

• Define your Goals

The first step to create any strategy is to define your goals and what you would like to achieve by the quarter or half of a year. This is important so your team has an end-point to achieve or make up to and you can determine if the particular marketing channel was successful or not.

Some common eCommerce marketing goals are:

• Increase site traffic each month
• Increase overall revenue
• Grow email list

Etc.

And that’s where you are wrong. Your goals are not properly defined, they are not measurable, and thus not achievable. It is important to add a value to your goal, a limit, which can be measured by the end of the term. For example, increase “relevant” market traffic, increase traffic “10%” each month, etc.

• Choose a Target Market

Another crucial aspect of any marketing plan is defining its target market. This will help you create buyer personas, people that you want to sell to, and those that are your ideal buyers. For this, you need to gather relevant information like:

• Age
• Gender
• Income
• Interests
• Location
• Job type
• Shopping behavior

This information will help you in customer segmentation and finding out the type of buyers that your website is attracting and how differently each needs to be approached and enticed, also known as buyer modalities. Here you can consider different values for each customer segmentation and how the product is helpful for them. With this data, you can find out the correct content type for every customer and increase the chances of conversions.

• Research Competitors and Pricing

It’s always beneficial to see what your competitors are up to and consider their efforts and marketing techniques when developing your own. You can see how your competitors are promoting their products, what products they are selling, and how are they getting customers to their website, all by signing up for their newsletter. Moreover, there are many tools available that can give you insight into your competitors, analyze their SEO traffic, etc.

Similarly, to stay relevant to your target market, you need to keep your prices relevant. Your competition is a big help here. Analyze their prices and keep your products priced the same or lower. 

• Choose a Platform

There are multiple marketing platforms and channels available that you can benefit from, but not all are fit for your target market. Thus, you first need to choose platforms where your audience is most active. Once chosen, you need to create content according to that platform type, such as type, visuals, etc. 

• Create a Content Calendar

A content calendar is where you can list down all your posts and engagements throughout the week/month. This will help you keep a track of all upcoming events and special holidays that you might want to acknowledge and create content for. Moreover, you can automate the publishing process, choose a time and write the content for your posts, thus enabling you to stay on schedule.

ECommerce Marketing Strategies

Once you have developed an eCommerce marketing strategy, it’s time to choose the right channels or techniques where you can implement the above strategies and achieve your goals. We have listed and discussed some of the most effective strategies to help you get started.

1. Attractive Web Design

The place to start is how you present yourself. Your website design will have a huge impact on your conversions because when a customer enters your site, the first thing they will notice is its design, layout, navigation, and content. The way you place the content will entice customers to explore more.

The best way to create an attractive landing page is to keep it to a minimum. Choose a style that represents your brand, minimalize it, and add content accordingly. There is no need to clutter your landing pages with unnecessary text, pop-ups, and links that can easily scare off your customers. 

Moreover, with mobile eCommerce holding a 72.9% market share, your website should be responsive and easy to navigate on handheld devices.

2. Search Engine Optimization

Google rules the search engine market with the highest share of 91.54%. Thus, we don’t need to state the obvious, how SEO is extremely important to rank your site on Google and increase traffic because you all must have heard it a thousand times before. What you need to focus on is how you can optimize SEO on your website.

• Research keywords that are relevant to your niche. Make sure they have a higher search volume but not too high as you won’t have any chances to rank higher on them.
• Add focus keywords to your landing page, blogs, product pages, and URLs.
• Enable pay-per-click marketing technique.

3. Email Marketing

Kath Pay, the CEO and founder of Holistic Email Marketing says, “The bigger your list, the more conversions you can achieve”. Despite being around for 40 years, email marketing is still one of the most effective eCommerce marketing channels that can help you achieve your goals easily. 

Email marketing enables you to engage with your customers throughout each stage of the sales funnel process. For example:

• Collect emails by placing sign-up forms at the beginning of landing pages.
• Provide educational and relevant content to your audience through emails to nurture them towards a sale.
• Send scheduled cart abandonment emails to customers as about 30% of them lead to a conversion.
• Send promotional emails after the purchase with discounts and coupons to entice customers for future purchases.
• Send emails asking for feedback, reviews, queries, etc.

Moreover, personalizing your emails will have a higher chance that your customers might open and read through them. 

4. Content Marketing

If you want to gather traffic through organic search, then content marketing is the one for you. Content marketing, although considered slow in terms of progress is still an effective way to publish relevant content, reach your target customers, and gain brand awareness. 

There are many content types available, such as blog posts, guides, etc. Both of these work great for optimizing SEO and converting customers that are still in the decisive phase. You can create how-to guides, best-seller guides, and much more. 

Now, not all people are keen on reading a 1000+ words blog to find out the solution to their problem. Here is where videos come in. Videos are a highly engaging content type through which you can relay information in a short time and an engaging manner. Thus, use content marketing to provide value to your customers and claim your expertise in your niche. 

5. Social Media Marketing

Every $1 spent in social selling, results in $5 ROI. With more than 90% of B2B buyers active on social media, it has become increasingly important for businesses to utilize platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc to promote their products and reach out to their audience. 

To start social selling, you first need to choose a platform that resonates with your target market and where they are most active, then post content suitable for each platform, engage your customers with queries, quizzes, and giveaways. Social media helps in building a loyal community where you can provide valuable content to your customers and keep in contact with them. 

6. Paid Advertising

If you have the budget, then paid advertising is a great way to market your products. The best platforms for paid advertising are Facebook Ads and Google Ads. As stated above, many businesses are using social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, to reach a larger audience and build a loyal community. 

Facebook Ads provides you the option to target paid ads based on customers’ interests and behavior. Here is where your buyer’s persona will help, as you can target customers who are ideal for your product. Similarly, Google Ads enable you to list your products on Google using specific keywords, thus people searching for a specific product will be viewed the sponsored ads, thus increasing chances of conversions.

7. Optimize Checkout

Many guides will tell you to focus on the landing page of your website to attract customers, and while that’s not false, there is one more page that requires even more attention, the checkout page. With an average of 69.80% cart abandonment rate, it becomes evident that there are areas that need to be optimized and the checkout process is one of them.

Research shows that reasons for cart abandonment can vary from high shipping costs, limited delivery and payment options, poor return policy, to complicated checkout processes. Thus, focus on your checkout page, provide multiple options, offer customer support, etc to provide convenience to your customers.

8. Personalize

Whichever marketing channel you use, make sure to personalize your promotions and content to make your customer feel special and exclusive. Even something as little as mentioning the customer’s name in an email increases the chances of customers opening it. 

Personalization can be in the form of recommended products based on previous orders or interests, it could also be by providing your customers discounts on items from their wishlist, etc.

Conclusion 

Devising an eCommerce marketing strategy might not be as simple as it seems, but it’s necessary to test out different channels and platforms and see which works best for you. You can also do A/B testing for different marketing campaigns and website optimization and see which results in increased conversions, sales, and engagement. Continuous testing and improvisation are better than entering the eCommerce market without any strategy. We hope this helped!

Author’s Bio

Xaviera Khalid is the content writer at WooKeeper.com. She is an avid reader and uses her creativity to write interesting articles about eCommerce and its related topics. She focuses on SEO-optimized content and provides factual writing.