90% of e-commerce businesses fail within the first 120 days.
If you don’t want yours to be among them, you need to learn to market the right way.
Keep reading to learn why these five e-commerce marketing strategies are vital to the success of your business.
The Role of E-commerce Marketing
E-commerce marketing is crucial for the growth and survival of your business.
Done right, your marketing plan will increase your brand visibility, enhance your online reputation, and help you to reach a wider audience. Ultimately, effective e-commerce marketing strategies convert potential leads into loyal customers and drive sales.
As you deploy and improve your marketing campaigns, you’ll be able to monitor and analyze your efforts in real-time. Doing so enables you to make data-driven decisions and improve continuously. By staying on top of trends as the digital marketplace evolves, you can ensure your e-commerce business stays competitive.
Different E-commerce Marketing Strategies
All e-commerce marketing is some form of digital marketing.
Yet e-commerce marketing strategies come in various flavors, and all of them are essential marketing tactics that perform best when used together:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
- Content
- Social media
SEO
The goal of SEO is to improve your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). Successful SEO ranks you higher, which in turn means that potential customers find your website, store, and services faster.
It’s important for one simple reason: Most users spend a long time searching for what they want.
On average, more than 25% of users click on the first result in a Google search. Only a tiny fraction of them ever land on the second page of a search. Ranking high in the SERPs drives organic traffic to your website that you’re otherwise missing out on.
PPC
Pay-per-click involves plastering the internet with ads that link to your website. Every time a user clicks an ad, you pay a fee.
Those ads appear on social media platforms, other websites, and in search engines and they’re embedded naturally into page layouts. PPC is a quick and effective way of driving targeted traffic to your online store to increase sales.
That’s because whoever clicks on an ad is already interested in your product.
Content Marketing
Content marketing involves creating and sharing valuable and engaging content to attract, grow, and retain an audience. It’s a form of lateral marketing where you’re encouraging people to visit your website for the content – and then stick around because they enjoy it.
The content in question can be blog posts, articles, infographics, videos, and more. As your content catalog grows, it helps to establish your business as an industry expert and build trust with your target audience.
Social Media Marketing
Promoting products and services on social media platforms helps build personal relationships with your customers. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok help you to reach wider audiences and boost brand awareness.
The ability of followers to interact with your business directly builds trust and boosts engagement.
Email Marketing
Email marketing involves sending targeted, personalized emails to your email subscribers. Often employed as a slow drip strategy, these emails promote your products, and limited-time offers, and inform your audience about updates to your business.
It’s an effective way to nurture leads over time and engage with customers and drive traffic to your online store.
Essential Marketing Tricks for E-commerce
Unfortunately, it’s never enough to run ads and generate content.
You need something extra to keep customers coming back. And you’ve seen these tricks employed by your favorite brands already (which is why they’re your favorites).
- Offer promo deals and discounts
- Create a loyalty program
- Optimize your web presence for mobile and tablet
- Provide great customer service
Promotions and discounts boost sales by creating a fear of missing out and a perceived saving if a customer acts immediately. This can convert on-the-fence customers while motivating existing customers to come back for more.
Flash sales, seasonal discounts, and exclusive deals are great when offered to email subscribers. They’ll keep checking their inboxes for the latest hot deals.
Similarly, loyalty programs encourage repeat purchases.
Customers feel rewarded by exclusive discounts, free products, and point-based reward programs. A well-designed loyalty program can help increase customer retention and lifetime value.
Designing a Winning Marketing Plan
A successful marketing plan isn’t created in a vacuum.
It must be well-structured and flexible enough to adapt to unexpected needs. Yet it needn’t be too complicated to handle. To get started, follow these simple steps:
- Identify your goals
- Define your target audience
- Choose your marketing channels
- Plan your marketing calendar
- Monitor results and adapt
- Market your business successfully!
Start by outlining your marketing objectives. As yourself whether you want to increase website traffic, boost sales, or improve customer engagement. That will tell you where to put your focus.
Identify Your Target Audience
Understanding their demographics and organizing by age, gender, disposable income, interests, and location, will help you to tailor your strategy. For instance, if your business markets to millennials looking to buy customized jewelry, then your content and social media feeds should reflect that and appeal to them.
Then, based on your goals and audience, you’ll need to select suitable marketing tactics. PPC advertising boosts web traffic and sales, while SEO boosts visibility. Content marketing is vital for creating repeat traffic, while email marketing can convert leads into customers over time.
The ideal campaign to market your business involves some combination of all of these tactics – but your goals and audience tell you where to put your focus.
You should plan and schedule your marketing activities and deliver on a strict calendar. Blog posts, social media updates, and emails should be posted on a predetermined day of the week. This consistency creates loyalty because your audience will know when there’s new content available to check out.
Finally, you must regularly monitor performance.
Identify areas for improvement and optimize your strategy constantly. You will make mistakes and bad calls early on. That’s fine.
Continue to learn, adapt, and improve.
Boost Your Brand
These e-commerce marketing strategies increase your brand’s visibility and boost customer loyalty. By combining the power of SEO and PPC advertising with email and social media, your business can truly thrive.
Remember to monitor and analyze results and stay up-to-date with the latest trends and you’ll be on your way to success in no time.
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