Effective Marketing Strategies To Promote An eCommerce Business
TechsPlace | After you list products, add high-quality images and unique, catchy descriptions, it is time to promote your eCommerce business. Setting up the payment gateways and shipping information are only necessary steps, and basically, everything you do is useless if you do not get quality traffic.
Launching a new eCommerce business makes it very easy to reach prospective customers. You control the entire shopping experience, but people do not come simply because you offer a great shopping experience.
After you launch your online store, it is time to drive traffic.
Your eCommerce site should be marketed based on three major audiences. These are:
- Those who shopped with you in the past or are aware of the store.
- Those who look for the products that you are selling.
- Those who are interested in your product and would buy it but do not know about it.
This is a straightforward way to look at your target audience, but it highlights the different marketing strategies you need to set up. Your time and money have to be divided so you can reach the audiences. You cannot use just one strategy and expect success.
The marketing strategies you use vary from those effective at gaining new customers to those that entice existing customers to make another purchase. With this in mind, here are the most effective marketing strategies you can use right now to promote an eCommerce store.
Build And Use An Email List
As an eCommerce site owner, you need to use email marketing. This is even true for brick-and-mortar stores.
Try to collect as many email addresses as possible. This includes emails from:
- Customers
- People interested in events
- Prospective customers
Preferably, collect email addresses before the launch of the eCommerce website. This allows you to quickly send an email message to tell them that you are living. If you can do this, it is an excellent idea to offer some promotion, like a discount, so customers are encouraged. The referral discount is particularly effective since it encourages people to promote your business for you.
Regardless of what some may tell you, email marketing is still really effective and particularly good for eCommerce stores that use discounts, coupon codes, and referral systems. Most top brands out there use pop-up boxes to record email addresses. Usually, this is gained by offering free shipping or a discount on the first purchase.
As you build the email list, you need to communicate with those who voluntarily shared their address with you. Develop an email cadence and regularly send upgrades.
Use your email list to deliver new content, news, information about product launches, promotions, discounts, and other things that could encourage a site visit.
Boost Organic Social Media Presence
Digital engagement is important for any online business. The easiest way to get this and one of the most effective methods to use right now is to start an organic social media campaign. Basically, this means you need to set up social media channels and fill them with engaging videos and vibrant images.
Building a strong social media presence takes time. If yours is limited, it is well worth investing in ads, like Facebook Ads.
After the social media presence is solid, it is time to build on it by engaging with the core audience. Post frequency can be increased, and you can invest a part of the budget into creating short videos and rich visual content. When you boost social media engagement, you also increase brand awareness.
Try to encourage post sharing and do include user-generated content. Your best brand ambassadors are your customers, and they surely have an online presence on social media.
If you do not have a large social media presence, work on it. Eventually, this will become a powerful promotional tool that will increase sales and make your brand more popular.
Optimise The Website For SEO
SEO (search engine optimisation) is so important for eCommerce business that a specialization appeared, eCommerce SEO. To put it as simple as possible; in this case, SEO refers to optimising the content on the entire website so that it has a higher chance of ranking high in search engine results.
There are many different things that you can do to optimise an eCommerce site for SEO purposes. Most of them relate to on-page modifications. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Modifying image descriptions and ALT tags
- Modifying product titles and product descriptions
- Writing blog posts
- Adding content to category pages
The two most important modifications are the title tags and the meta descriptions. The title tag is the headline that appears in search engines. Meta descriptions are short summaries, and they appear under the title. These two work in tandem to entice the user to click on search results.
Whenever possible, it is a good idea to perform A/B tests to see what titles and descriptions work best. This does take time, but once a converting formula is found, traffic can be naturally increased.
Create Useful, Compelling Content
One of the best ways to bring traffic to an eCommerce website is to create content that is very useful for all the target audiences we highlighted. You want to offer beneficial information and position the brand as an authority figure in the industry.
The preferred way to publish the content is through a well-structured blog. The articles published here can be shared on social media and bring in traffic from search engines. Inside every blog post published, you can add CTAs to get people to product pages or categories.
Creating a solid content strategy is rarely used by eCommerce websites. By simply setting up a blog and publishing informative articles, you can stand out in front of your competition. However, this also means you need to promote extra content, not just your products. You will need to invest only in the best possible content to bring in the audience you need to generate sales.
Use Google Ads
Organic promotion strategies like using social media and SEO take time to be effective. This is why, especially when you initially launch an eCommerce business, you should allocate a part of your budget towards buying ads. We already mentioned social media marketing options like Facebook Ads, but Google Ads should also be considered.
Google Ads are particularly effective because you can get the top spot in search engine results. Your ad can be seen first by people that use keywords with very high buying intent. As a result, these ads can be extremely effective in bringing in sales.
Search engine marketing also has a relatively underestimated advantage. You can use it without having to use professional designs. Simultaneously, results are offered in real-time, allowing you to quickly adapt campaign strategies so they are as effective as possible.
Partner With Other Brands
Partnerships can be very effective because they open the door to a new customer set from another brand. Those that work together can cross-promote services and products.
The trick is to locate businesses that have a very similar target audience to yours. At the same time, they should sell complementary products. When you find such a partner, the collaboration can lead to more sales for both parties involved.
As a simple example, when you sell hiking shoes, it is a good idea to partner with another eCommerce website that sells outdoor gear.
The methods you use to cross-promote products vary. However, there are always different options available, regardless of the sales funnel used. Some examples of partnership opportunities are:
- Co-sponsoring events, blogs, or podcasts
- Creating guides with cross-promoted products
- Offering discounts when clients buy from the partners
- You can find affiliate marketing publishers for your products here are a detailed guide about wealthy affiliate review
Use Influencer Marketing
An influencer is a person that has a large online audience. As a result, the individual can influence the purchasing behaviour of the followers. When you work with a really good, appropriate influencer, your products can be seen by numerous potential customers. Brand awareness is increased, and you can get a good profit, even if you pay the influencer.
To perfectly use influencer marketing to promote eCommerce stores, the secret is to find the best possible influencers. Their following needs to perfectly align with the store’s target audience. Also, the influencer’s values need to align with the brand’s values.
Some of the most common tactics used in influencer marketing are:
- Writing blog posts about a product
- Reviewing products
- Demonstrating how to use products
- Posting content on social media
- Talking about the product at events
Must Read: eCommerce Business Tips and Tricks To Tweak your Website
Final Thoughts
Launching an eCommerce business is daunting because the competition is higher than it ever was. This is true for every single possible niche. However, when you are consistent, patient, and create effective marketing strategies, more and more sales appear.
When your marketing budget is limited, use only a few tactics. It is better to create a very good campaign using one promotional channel than to try to use several ones but do a bad job. Regardless of what marketing strategy you use, make sure to make the necessary tweaks and adjustments as results appear to optimise your work better.
Marketer by day, gamer by night, human always. Content marketing and SEO professional with over 15 years of experience at SEO Company Canberra.
