The A-Z Marketing Guide for eCommerce Brands

Social Media Marketing

Before we get into the insights of social media marketing, let’s have a look at some of the stats:

• 71% of adults with internet access use social media.
• The average adult spends 2.5 hours a day on social media.
• 44.8% of global internet users use social media to search for brand-related information.
• More than half of the global internet users between the ages of 16-24 use social media to research brands.
• Over 70% of people who have a positive experience with a business on social media will recommend that business to their networks.
• A report from Accenture predicts that social commerce will be doubling from $492 billion in 2021 to $1.2 trillion in 2025.

The above numbers show that social media marketing is clearly the need of the hour for eCommerce business owners if they do not wish to miss out on growing their customer base. That being said, business owners first need to determine which social media platform fits into their marketing strategy and then plan accordingly.

A few popular social media platforms for eCommerce marketing are:

Content Marketing

Content marketing is publishing relevant content consistently that the audience wants to consume. It is one of the most valuable eCommerce marketing strategies as it helps you boost relevant traffic to your website. The concept is often misunderstood as people think that blogging and video marketing are not really required to generate transactions on an eCommerce marketplace.

Also Read: Essential of Content Marketing for eCommerce Marketplace

However, content marketing goes beyond its conventional meaning and includes optimizing product page copies, writing guest posts for external websites, including keyword-driven content on the website, writing relevant blog posts, and posting product-related videos on YouTube. Let’s see some popular ways of how eCommerce businesses can leverage content marketing to improve their online presence and convert qualified traffic.

Blog Posts

A blog can be used to share stories of your business, notify potential customers about your latest products, and answer the queries of your customers. This is a powerful eCommerce strategy that can help you build appeal. It additionally helps you dominate search by ranking for an entire keyword vertical with several pieces of hyper-targeted long-form content.

One of the great examples of content marketing using the blog is Au Lit Fine Linens. With a mission to ensure a good night’s sleep and improve the quality of life of people across the world, the company manufactures and sells the world’s finest linens.

In coalition with that, the company runs a blog that includes helpful articles telling their consumers about great tips and tactics for improving their sleep quality.

Source: https://www.aulitfinelinens.com/

User-Generated Content

This approach is especially effective as it often shows real people actually using your products. This acts as social proof in the form of reviews and ratings from your customer base which is an important trust signal. It simultaneously works as word-of-mouth marketing as people are more likely to believe what actual customers have to say.

Customers’ feedback on product quality, delivery times, returns, refunds, etc. can add to the authenticity of your website and products. There are a number of ways to produce UGC:

• Create a contest that involves customers submitting content (videos, photos, etc.)
• Create a social media hashtag around your brand or specific products and then encourage customers to use that hashtag.
• Encourage people to leave reviews after a purchase is made.

Here is an example from Glossier. Instead of plowing its marketing budget into ads, Glossier focuses on user reviews. At every turn, Glossier is encouraging its customers to share their feedback with the brand online.

Source: https://www.glossier.com/

How-to Videos and Buying Guides

A common problem that comes around people when shopping online is that they cannot ask real-time questions about the product, features, and usage. Creating buying guides is an incredible content marketing strategy to solve that problem to a great extent. Guides in the form of videos are even more engaging than text which allows customers to learn more about the product.

Make sure you use these guides as a place to educate customers and not a place to sell. Guides should be used to show your audience that you care about educating them and helping them make the best decisions. A brand that is utilizing this strategy to improve sales is Wayfair.

Source: https://www.wayfair.com/

The ideas they offer for designing every room in the house which includes home decor products from their website is a great idea to educate customers while also marketing their products. This helps them connect better with the audience as they answer their questions even when they are not asking, making it easier for them to purchase.

Also Read: Strategy to Use Product Videos for eCommerce Marketing

Glossary

Every industry has its own terms, jargon, and acronyms. If your products involve terms that are not familiar to people, creating a glossary can be an effective form of eCommerce content marketing. People will get to know your product category better this way, so they can shop with confidence.

It is also an effective strategy to attract visitors who are searching for a specific term. Your website will rank better for related searches and start showing to more people looking for the same things.

Source: https://www.geico.com/information/insurance-terms/

GEICO includes a glossary of insurance terms on its website, to help site visitors understand all the industry terms, which can be confusing to many.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing is nothing new, but the eCommerce landscape has become so competitive over the years that it is vital for online retailers to adopt a strategic approach to marketing. This marketing strategy promotes a website’s visibility on a search engine’s result page. For eCommerce businesses, this is an important method of attracting new visitors and valuable clicks to the website.

This approach involves the use of paid search campaigns to display the website’s offerings, usually above organic results. Relying on organic search results without working for that top-paid spot on search engines means losing out on major traffic volumes and conversions. As a matter of fact, these paid clicks have become so popular, that they have started to outpace organic search results.

Web Push Marketing

Web push marketing is an advertising strategy that implies sending short notifications to the target audience in a browser or mobile app. It includes sending both promotional and transactional messages via this channel and its goals include advertising the products, notifying customers about the order status, communicating updates, and much more.

Implementing web push marketing allows to do better outreach, get higher engagement, and collect useful statistics regarding open rate and CTR to improve marketing strategies. Another advantage of web push marketing is its affordable price.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most useful tools today, especially for eCommerce businesses since it lets you connect with customers in a personalized way at a much lesser cost. It is a marketing channel that enables businesses to send marketing messages to current and prospective customers.

Without an efficient email marketing strategy, it becomes impossible to build the meaningful relationships you need to grow with your customers. It allows for developing brand awareness, building credibility, and establishing trustworthy relationships with the customer. The strategies you use can be simple, like sending a weekly email blast with featured products, or complicated like multiple automated email series for cart abandonment, customer re-engagement, and exclusive membership deals.

The ultimate goal, either way, is to increase customer engagement and drive conversions. However, if not done properly, can lead a user to opt out of emails and even seek a competitor. Email marketing is about sending the right email campaigns at the right time to keep them engaged.

Below we have compiled a list of different types of email campaigns eCommerce businesses can use in chronological order to gain maximum benefits.

• Welcome emails
• Engagement emails
• Referral emails
• Discount emails
• Flash sale campaigns
• Cart abandonment emails
• Order confirmation emails
• Upsell emails
• Win back emails
• Survey emails
• Thank you emails

Influencer Marketing

Social approval matters, and that’s why getting approval from an influencer on a social medial channel is one of the best ways to build brand awareness and drive profits. In fact, 49% of users say they rely on recommendations from influencers on Twitter to make purchase decisions.

The influencer marketing approach has earned its place as a key marketing channel for eCommerce brands due to its impressive ROI, high engagement rates, and strategic targeting of online audiences. If done right, influencer marketing can launch eCommerce brands into success, and working with the correct influencer to promote your products can bring an audience of highly engaged fans to your brand.

Lately, it has been noticed that influencers with a big number of followers do not necessarily have an authentic and engaged audience. Influencers with smaller audiences tend to have a more engaged and focused audience, and this is what brands want.

No eCommerce business wants to pay big bucks to an influencer and get no clicks or sales, which is why it is important to identify the type of influencer you want to reach out to.

• Nano Influencers - 1k-10k
• Micro Influencers - 10k-50k
• Macro Influencers - 100k-500K
• Celebrity Influencers - 5M-10M

Affiliate Marketing

Another relatively untapped digital marketing channel at your disposal is affiliate marketing. This is the practice of using other brands, businesses, or bloggers to promote your products on their sites. This increasingly popular tactic being used to drive additional sales and generate online revenue is beneficial to both brands and their affiliate marketers.

This has led more and more businesses to leverage the power of affiliate marketing, and around 81% of businesses have joined affiliate programs. The concept can be worked in a number of ways where businesses provide affiliate partners with a unique trackable code to be shared with customers.

Every time the code is used to make a purchase, the affiliate partner is rewarded with an amount decided beforehand. Three common commission structures for affiliate programs are:

• Purchase-Based Commission Structures:Affiliate gets paid when a customer uses their code to make a purchase on the merchant’s website.
• Traffic-Based Commission Structures:Affiliate gets paid on the basis of the number of people they refer to the company’s website, regardless of whether those visitors make a purchase or perform any other action.
• Customer Acquisition-Based Commission Structures:Affiliate gets paid when their promotion helps the business close a new deal or bring in a new customer.

Personalization

Catering to individuals within the marketing materials you already have can be referred to as personalization. Ranging from including a prospect’s name in the subject line of an email, product/service/content recommendation based on visitor’s behavior, and showing relevant content on a webpage for a repeated user can come under personalization.

Instead of searching for the products they need, personalization puts them right in front of them making it easy for them to make the purchase.

Building Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs provide incentives for customers for continued shopping with you through relevant offers and discounts. Indeed the loyalty programs take a while to be deployed, but they pay off very well in generating repeat businesses, UGC, referrals, and retention. However, there are a couple of things to take into consideration at the time of building loyalty programs.

Consider diversifying how customers can show their loyalty, including repeat purchases, social media mentions, content sharing, etc. Make sure you do enough to pay off their loyalty in terms of points, discounts, and perks. Different loyalty programs include:

• Word of Mouth Marketing
• Reviews
• Referral Marketing
• Testimonials
• Case Studies

Implementing Responsive Website Design

Irrespective of the aspect of the Commerce marketing strategy you are working on, your website design should be responsive. The eCommerce tactics you are investing your time and money into should be easily accessible and maneuverable via any device i.e. laptop, smartphone, iPad, or tablet.

In a world, where people are always on-the-go and browsing the internet using a variety of devices, your content should be easy to read and navigate for all users.

Optimizing Website Speed

A website that loads for ages is the last thing an eCommerce customer would want. More than two-thirds of the customers confessed that website speed affects their purchasing decisions. The ideal time for a website to load is 5 seconds and after that, every extra second leads to a 7% drop in conversions.

The slow speed of website loading also affects the website’s search results ranking. To speed up the website, below given are a few hacks.

• reduce the amount of hypertext used
• transfer protocol requests
• optimize and compress your files
• reduce the number of redirects on your page
• utilize browser caching
• choose a reliable web host
• use a content delivery network

It is recommended to keep in mind that the eCommerce website will probably slow down with time, so it is required to monitor and make adjustments regularly.

Retargeting

Surveys show that visitors who have already shown interest in your website and products are more likely to get converted. Retargeting includes tracking customers who have visited your website and displaying ads to them while they are browsing the internet. The intent is to get them back on the website as when they again visit the website, they are more likely to make a purchase.

The retargeting ads should be as specific as possible to get the maximum output from the campaign. Make sure the ads displayed are of the same product and also link to the page of that product.

Launching Podcast Ads

Since podcast ads are typically geared toward specific groups, they are also a great way to reach your target audience. Many reputed brands including Dollar Shave Club and Blue Apron have used podcast ads in the past to reach and engage buyers. Make sure you reach out to the podcasts of your industry.

Podcasts explaining your brand’s value and messaging about your business will benefit from a strong understanding of why your products are worth buying. It is also important to consider the content of your ad while picking up the podcast time ad placement. If your ad requires a few lines, it is better to place it at the beginning or end of the podcast.

For a lengthy ad, a place in the middle of the podcast when listeners are more engaged and settled in is recommended.

Upselling/Cross-Selling

The approach of selling a slightly more premium than the one customer was originally considering is referred to as upselling. For many businesses this approach is more effective than acquiring a net new customer. Two main considerations when using upselling to increase sales are:

• Make sure the upsells are related to the original product.
• Consider the anticipated price range of the customer.

Another thing to consider while upselling is that the customer might feel a bit overwhelmed about a higher price point once they have an anchor price in mind. An anchor price is the first number a customer sees and compares the other price point against it.

Adding Voice Search

To stay ahead of the curve, it is recommended for eCommerce websites to have voice search which may also encourage you to re-approach your SEO in general. It is required to bear in mind that voice search is not the same as type search. The queries of voice search are longer and more conversational which requires your website’s content to be conversational in tone.

You can include articles and content to answer popular questions of the visitors.

Partnering with Complementary Brands

eCommerce businesses can search for a business with a similar target audience, but a complementary product range, and create partnerships to cross-promote. This allows both businesses to reach a whole new yet relevant audience. The methods of cross-promotion vary and one can do it at every level of the funnel.

Participate in Online Events & Discussions

There are opportunities to increase brand awareness with target communities as online events and discussions are surging in popularity. eCommerce businesses can participate in webinars or virtual conferences to get the word out about their business. Businesses can also find opportunities for virtual malls and marketplaces to leverage their expertise.

Also Read: 25 Strategies to Boost Sales of Your eCommerce Marketplace