UnRolling the Warriors Brand: How an Obscure Team Became a Global Brand
You may not root for the Golden State Warriors, but if you’re hoping to score some branding wins, they’re the team to watch out for.
Read More
From blogs to Instagram to Google ads, ecommerce marketing can be a tough beast to conquer, especially for small businesses. How do you know which tactic can best help you boost traffic? Increase conversions? Grab more market share?
This comprehensive guide will introduce you to different ecommerce marketing channels, tactics, and tools for every brand at every business stage. Whether you’re just starting out, looking to grow, or aiming to become a brand leader, you can use these ecommerce marketing tips to drive brand awareness and delight your audience.
Different aspects of ecommerce marketing.
In this guide:
Starting Brands: Build Your Brand and Traffic
Growing Brands: Drive Sales
Leading Brands: Delight Your Customers
Congratulations on starting your ecommerce marketing journey — as a starting brand, you’re probably trying to figure out how to best promote your products to as many people as possible. Fortunately, there are many marketing strategies out there to help you promote your brand and generate sales. Plus, organic marketing strategies are free in the sense that they don’t require an outside person or tool for you to use them, which makes them an excellent choice for new ecommerce businesses just starting to grow their brand. Here are some ideas you can start implementing today:
Content marketing is a valuable marketing strategy that enables ecommerce businesses to attract, engage, and convert potential customers using content, such as articles, podcasts, e-books, videos, webinars, and more. Not only does content marketing increase brand awareness, which is vital for businesses just starting out, but it drives traffic to your ecommerce site and establishes you as an industry expert too. The best part is that content marketing is a relatively inexpensive form of marketing because you can create content on your own. However, there is definitely a time and a place to hire expert content creators to help you produce even more great content.
If you haven’t noticed, most branded websites now have “blog” or “resource” sections. That’s because content marketing works — it’s a great way to target different audiences throughout your marketing funnel and improve your site’s ranking in search engines.
Here are some content ideas to share with your audience via posts on your blog:
For many, blog posts may come to mind when they hear the term “content marketing.” But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Some other popular content formats include:
Pro tips for content creation:
For a list of must-have content marketing resources:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the science of making your brand, stories, and products discoverable on search engine result pages (SERP), like Google. And unless you have a strong SEO strategy, amazing content might go to waste. (Gasp!)
SEO utilizes keywords and phrases to understand what content is about and place it in front of the right audience at the right time via search engine results. The SEO keywords you choose should be relevant to your brand, product, and target audience and highly searched online.
Here are some steps every ecommerce marketer should take to ensure their SEO is updated:
For more on how to build an SEO strategy:
Email marketing is as old as digital marketing itself, yet it’s still a handy marketing tool in 2021. Plus, there are so many ways to use email to reach, engage, and convert your target audience. The best email marketing strategies use a variety of approaches to build trust with your audience and sell to them eventually. If you haven’t started building an email list yet, here are the many benefits of email marketing that will encourage you to start::
Email capture example from Payton Jewelry.
For budding brands, prioritize building your email list early. To capture new email subscribers, you can:
Pro Tip: As digital users become more aware of data privacy, you’ll want to be meticulous about how you handle your email list. Make sure you request and receive consent before adding anyone to your list. Maintaining trust is the key to all ecommerce marketing.
For more on ways to capturing email addresses:
Once you’ve captured customer email addresses, there are a variety of email types you can send.
Here’s some inspiration:
And this goes without saying, but, as an online store, you’ll also want to send transactional emails to provide shoppers with updates regarding their purchase, such as order confirmations, delivery confirmations, receipts, and shipment updates.
For more email marketing strategies:
For growing ecommerce businesses, the challenge is sustaining the momentum and capturing even more attention, shoppers, and market share. Fortunately, there are many ways you can reach and engage your target customers. To get started, You’ll want to consider these ecommerce marketing channels:
Here’s the unfortunate truth: In today’s noisy digital landscape, brands can find themselves quickly peaking their organic reach. That’s why digital ads — search ads, social media ads, native ads — play a heavy presence in ecommerce retailers’ marketing budgets.
Here are some examples of digital ads to consider incorporating into your paid marketing strategy:
Creating a Facebook page or Instagram account is a must for every ecommerce business. Social media platforms provide a way for ecommerce businesses to put their brand and product in front of a large audience for free. Plus, with new features like Instagram Shopping, there are even more ways to use social media to promote your online store. But no matter what industry you’re in, the days of posting an image, adding some hashtags, and calling it a day are over. Now, to stand out on social media platforms, you must keep up with the trends and post content in line with user expectations. Consider these tactics to jazz up your social media strategy:
There are many different social media platforms available for you to use. However, you don’t need to be on every single one to increase brand awareness, engagement, and sales for your online store. You only need to be where your target audience is. So, before you begin posting content, do a bit of research to learn where your audience spends time online and what type of content they enjoy engaging with the most.
Ecommerce marketing example of an Instagram product post
You’re probably familiar with the shopper who browses your products, adds a few things to their cart, and never checks out. Harsh truth: You’re losing money with every abandoned cart, but it will continue to happen, whether you like it or not.
In fact, a whopping 69.23% of shopping carts are abandoned, according to the Baymard Institute. Luckily, we have tools to reduce cart abandonment rates, namely retargeting ads.
Retargeting ads can exist in many forms, from social media ads to email recovery campaigns that remind people to return and check out. It may offer an additional incentive, such as a small discount or free shipping, or it may include enticing copy that induces FOMO, like “These products are selling out fast!”
If you are looking for ways to increase sales and improve your ROI, it’s time to implement a retargeting strategy that brings people back to your ecommerce site.
For more on using retargeting ads to target abandoned carts:
Your online store conversion rate is the number of people who visit your site divided by the number of people who complete a sale. There are ways to increase your conversion rate by optimizing the user experience on your website to increase the likelihood of a purchase. Here are some strategies to increase conversions and sales:
For most ecommerce brands, upselling and cross-selling to your existing customers can be more cost-efficient than continually chasing after new customers and new sales. Here are some ways you can make the most out of every customer visit:
Nowadays, we’re so inundated with ads, so the ones that catch our attention are frequently the most relevant to our lives. That’s where personalization comes in, a marketing tactic of catering to specific customers based on their behaviors, interests, and desires. Some surveys have found that companies using personalized marketing see their revenues increase 6-10%.
Personalization can come in many forms, including:
If your customer journey is a lengthy one, consider using personalization to move shoppers down the funnel quicker since they’ll be spending less time searching for the products they need. Two of the best ways to get personalized content in front of your audience are email marketing and targeted ad campaigns.
Ad personalization example for ecommerce fashion products. Source: https://help.adroll.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040258991-What-are-Product-Recommendations-
For more on personalized marketing:
With success comes great pressure. When you become a leading brand, you need to continuously engage your existing customers and attract new ones while striving for more revenue. Use these tactics to achieve more growth:
To make sure your customers are satisfied, you’ll want your customer service and support to be a well-oiled machine that answers every question and solves every problem. But beyond adding a FAQ page and help desk email address, you can also add a live chat widget to engage directly with shoppers on your site. Whether you decide to use human customer support agents or a bot, live chat is a great way to provide answers ASAP, making customers more likely to follow through with their purchase rather than exit to find solutions themselves.
For more on social media customer service:
Ah, user-generated content (UGC), also sometimes affectionately known as free marketing. Launch a UGC marketing campaign to give your existing customers a way to share and showcase your products to prospective customers. Doing this offers multiple benefits to your online store because it:
There are many forms of UGC campaigns, including:
With 54% of shoppers trusting information from online reviews and peer recommendations (compared to 20% who trust the brand’s content), UGC is one marketing tactic you don’t want to ignore. Plus, it gives you free marketing, as well as new content you can use on your social pages and ecommerce website.
Example of user-generated content by Lush Cosmetics on Instagram.
For more examples of great UGC:
Customer marketing is the art of developing customer relationships. This may sound surprising, but marketing doesn’t end when a customer clicks the checkout button. Instead, when someone buys from you, your goal is to turn them into a repeat customer by engaging, nurturing, and delighting them. In fact, returning customers account for 22% of a brand’s revenue, even though they’re just 11% of the customer base.
With customer loyalty as the key to long-term success, you can:
For more on customer marketing:
The possibilities for ecommerce marketing are endless. With so many tools, platforms, and tactics at your disposal, it’s all a matter of strategizing, budgeting, optimizing, and thinking creatively to attract more customers and generate more growth.
Make a plan to use a variety of marketing strategies, including organic marketing, like blogging, email marketing, and social media marketing, as well as paid marketing, including display ads and retargeting ads. You can also test various strategies to find what works best to reach and engage your target audience. Always track your efforts and analyze the results to make informed marketing decisions moving forward. Put more time and effort toward the strategies that work to drive traffic to your ecommerce website and increase your sales and conversion rate.
If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed, consider choosing a martech solution that offers comprehensive features to help you manage it all. With AdRoll’s ecommerce marketing solution, you can supercharge your growth through ads, emails, and targeting — all in one platform.
Originally published on February 25th, 2021, last updated on December 11th, 2021.