E-commerce marketing has become one of the most rapidly growing segments of the economic world, increasing up to 15% in the past seven years. While two or three huge companies are controlling the most significant portion of the e-commerce pie globally, many small e-commerce businesses are also finding brisk business by taking advantage of e-commerce marketing.
Today, industries that want to stay one step ahead of their competitors, and increase their ROIs rapidly, require a robust command over the fundamentals of e-commerce marketing techniques.
Before we dive into more details about e-commerce marketing, let us tell you what e-commerce marketing does.
What does e-commerce marketing mean?
First things first, what is e-commerce marketing? What does it do? E-commerce marketing is simply a method of marketing techniques into marketing an e-commerce store. It is a way of driving sales by promoting your brand and creating awareness about it among your target audience by using different e-commerce marketing strategies. Ecommerce marketers use digital marketing, social media, email marketing, and search engines for attracting visitors and facilitating online sales.
An online e-commerce store is a bustling place. Since online stores are increasing in popularity day by day, e-commerce marketing can prove the best way for businesses to tap into that growing space. By implementing the right e-commerce marketing strategy, you can guide your audience seamlessly to your online store, thus increasing your brand visibility and sales.
What are the types of e-commerce marketing?
Coming back to our main discussion, let us tell you the most common types of e-commerce marketing channels to give you a basic idea for planning your next e-commerce marketing strategy.
Content Marketing
Whenever you hear this word, the first thing that comes to your mind is blogs or vlogs contents that help improve the website ranking on the search engine. But for marketing an e-commerce store online, do you think you need blogs and videos to generate purchases? Yes, you do.
Here is how to use e-commerce content marketing.
- Write relevant articles and blogs about the products available for sale on your website.
- Create a few guest posts, targeting on the products you sell on your website.
- Optimize your product page by focusing on the right keywords that are product-driven.
- Make the most of YouTube, creating short videos that link directly to the products available on your online store.
Social Media Marketing
All popular brands globally have created their pages across every social media channel to raise their brand awareness, create a brand image and connect with their target audience by posting content that might interest them. For your e-commerce marketing strategy, you need to do the same. However, not every social media channel would be suitable for marketing an e-commerce store. Therefore, Social media channels like Instagram and Facebook are appropriate platforms for e-commerce marketing that enables you to post sharp pictures of your products, expanding their reach among the masses.
Email Marketing
One of the oldest forms of e-commerce digital marketing strategy is e-commerce email marketing. Though it is an old method, it holds immense importance in the e-commerce marketing world. You can send automated emails, which is hands down the best part of e-commerce email marketing. Automation means automatically sending a promotional email to all of your subscribers or potential customers, marketing about your product, following up on an abandoned shopping cart, or just for post-purchase feedback.
Five things you need to know about e-commerce marketing
Now that we have told you about some essential types of e-commerce marketing, here are a few facts that every e-commerce marketer should know about. Have a look.
The game is all about the content!
- It is evident that customers are flooded with a plethora of options to choose their desired products since there are thousands of e-commerce stores on the internet.
- To be successful in marketing an e-commerce store, having a website and an SEO strategy is just not enough.
- Today, the most successful e-commerce businesses include content marketing among their top e-commerce marketing strategies to stay ahead of their competitors.
- By implementing a relevant content marketing strategy, you build a trustworthy relationship with your consumers and create your brand awareness, just the right way!
Mobile app-based e-commerce marketing has taken the world by storm
- It is no surprise that mobile marketing has become indispensable in today’s world. People today spend most of their time surfing the internet on their smartphones instead of desktop computers.
- While e-commerce marketing has seen massive growth overall, the growth of mobile e-commerce has also exploded to around 50% from the past six years until today.
- Therefore, for all e-commerce businesses, either big or small, it is essential to keep a significant part of their e-commerce marketing budget for focusing on marketing strategy for their target mobile audience.
- Developing e-commerce websites with a mobile app or a responsive design enables the users to view your website on their smartphones any time of the day.
- If you focus on creating a seamless mobile commerce user experience, this directly affects your sale rate.
- Hence, switching to a “mobile-first” e-commerce marketing strategy has been a significant feature for many brands investing in their e-commerce marketing.
- It is almost impossible to connect and engage with your customers online without a mobile presence.
E-commerce marketing enables more audience engagement if done across multiple marketing channels
- E-commerce marketing does not rely on a single marketing channel.
- A multi-channel approach is key to developing a successful e-commerce marketing strategy. It should be supported and integrated with a supply chain management system.
- Generally, the marketing channels for e-commerce marketing include email, website, text messages, search engine optimization, GPS integration via mobile app, alerts, and social media. Thus, you need to ensure that your e-commerce business promotes your products and services via all the above-mentioned channels to gain a maximum number of customers globally.
- However, E-commerce businesses need to tailor their products to their clients, considering the global nature of their market and the evolving requirements of existing and potential customers, in addition to multi-channel marketing strategies.
Real-time access to performance metrics
- If you are an e-commerce marketing professional, a storm of helpful data is waiting for you. From this data, which includes the statistics of the visitors on your website with their bounce or conversion rates, exits, and referrals, along with performance metrics, the e-commerce marketing experts can identify high-performance marketing campaigns and do the readjustments within no time.
- The access to performance metrics offers you more flexibility and control over creating new e-commerce marketing strategies and website features.
- This access would also help the marketing experts to follow their customers’ buying personas and typical customer behavior.
- You can also categorize your customers into a different list based on the performance metrics and create e-commerce marketing campaigns accordingly.
Digital Marketing has a high impact on e-commerce marketing
Here are a few reasons why e-commerce businesses must invest in an e-commerce digital marketing strategy.
- Digital marketing is hands down the most efficient yet cost-effective e-commerce marketing among all marketing media.
- More and more e-commerce businesses are integrating digital marketing to increase their brand awareness, get a greater return of investment, and build a loyal customer base in less time and money compared to other traditional marketing methods.
- Search engine optimization and email marketing need a much smaller investment initially.
- Also, changing the format or the content of digital marketing campaigns is much more convenient than others.
Quick E-commerce marketing tips
There are hundreds of marketing tactics that you can apply to your e-commerce business to drive customers to your online store and increase sales. Let’s dive into a few essential ones.
Personalization
Personalizing your online store means looking for ways to cater to customers within the marketing materials you already possess. In simpler words, it is tailoring your products and services to reflect the unique requirements according to the global buying nature of your consumer.
Create a loyalty campaign
What does a loyal customer mean? It means that customers keep coming back to buy from your e-commerce store. Therefore, building a loyalty program for your repeat customers is essential. It provides certain benefits for repetitive customers like discounts and other promotional offers.
Integrate a Live Chat option
We are sure you have heard about chatbots, haven’t you? There are two ways to integrate a live chat option for your e-commerce store. Either you can hire a live chat customer service representative or a robot to live chat with your customers. It all depends on your business and your e-commerce marketing budget.
Get, set, grow!
Ecommerce businesses should imply several e-commerce marketing tools to create brand awareness and a desired brand image among the masses. You can achieve your goals if you use both inbound and digital e-commerce marketing strategy just the right way. Planning the right e-commerce marketing strategy means that you must create e-commerce marketing campaigns specifically designed to help your online store grow and attract customers, leading to more and more sales.