Marketing is an essential part of every business. It helps you improve brand visibility, create a position in the market, attract more customers, and most importantly, increase sales.
The problem with most eCommerce companies is either they don’t know how to execute marketing strategies or they lack effective marketing strategies altogether. In this article, I’ll be sharing with you the 11 most powerful and effective eCommerce marketing strategies to grow your online business.
Topics Covered
- 11 Best eCommerce Marketing Strategies
- 1. Determine your target audience
- 2. Leverage social media
- 3. Build flawless email marketing campaigns
- 4. Take care of abandoned cart customers
- 5. Offer Personalization
- 6. Create FOMO
- 7. Optime your website
- 8. Take feedback
- 9. Offer excellent customer service
- 10. Keep up with trends
- 11. Focus on your product photos
- Bonus Read
11 Best eCommerce Marketing Strategies
1. Determine your target audience
Before you start selling your product online, it’s important to know who you are selling them to. Determining your target audience will help you form targeted marketing strategies in a better way.
The best way to determine your target audience is by creating buyers’ personas. Buyers’ personas’ include the information about your target customers like their:
- Age
- Income
- Interests
- Location
- Gender
Once you know this information about your customers, you can better understand which marketing strategies will work for them and which won’t.
For example, if you’re an eCommerce selling beauty products for women in the USA, you may want to first target women between the age of 20 to 50 living in America. Thus, you now know that targeting kids or men may not bring you any remarkable results.
Based on this information, you can decide the tone of your content, pick the correct social platforms to reach these women, and target them in a way that will entice them to choose you.
Since you are an eCommerce business owner dealing in the B2C industry, you can even determine where to engage with them. The best social platforms for you must be Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.
Now, since you know what platforms your customers are most interested in, you do not need to spend hours managing each and every social platform like LinkedIn and Twitter too.
Social media marketing is one of the best marketing strategies for your eCommerce business. You can easily find millions of customers in one place that might be interested in your products.
As explained above, being an eCommerce business, the best platforms for you could be Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. Make sure to stay active by sharing posts, reels, Pins, and stories about your products and services.
Use such social platforms to put your brand and product out there in front of your customers. This will help you gain visibility as well as credibility in the eyes of your customers.
When trying to be active on social platforms, it’s also important to reply to the comments and chats and engage with other posts too. It’s healthy to connect with the audiences and even other brands that belong to your niche.
Instead of just sharing your products, you can also share the stories about your history and journey or some useful tips and tricks related to your industry.
You can also choose to run ads to attract more customers and increase sales.
3. Build flawless email marketing campaigns
The email has always been the best way to communicate with your customers without bothering them. Most customers who subscribe to your newsletter prefer getting email updates.
Customers feel more comfortable being professionally approached through email rather than continuously getting pings on their personal WhatsApp numbers or text messages.
So, make sure that your email marketing is engaging and effective. Here are the types of emails you should be sharing:
- Share a welcome email on their sign-up
- Email them about new arrivals
- Discounts, offers, and sales
- Back-in-stock products
- Abandoned cart emails
- Exciting news about upcoming products
Sharing a welcome email builds trust and credibility while helping you start building a healthy relationship with your customers. Additionally, sharing other informative emails helps you attract buyers to get involved and make a purchase.
Make sure that you always add a Call To Action to your email newsletter to bring the customers to your site. Also, make sure that your emails are not too frequent. The daily notifications can irritate your customers and force them to unsubscribe. Usually, 2-3 emails per month are more than enough.
4. Take care of abandoned cart customers
Your abandoned cart customers are your prime prospects. These customers are already familiar with your products and website. Now all you have to do is give them a reason to complete the purchase.
Reminding them to complete their purchase, offering an additional discount, or free delivery can entice them to complete the process.
5. Offer Personalization
Today, every customer is looking for exclusive attention and a personal touch with brands. Most customers today prioritize customer experience over price or the product.
So, it’s essential to offer personalization to your customers. The best and most common way to offer personalization is by addressing your customers with their names. In emails, push notifications, and every other marketing campaign.
The next is to collect information about their important dates and interest. Based on this information, you can offer them exclusive prices or offers on their birthdays and anniversaries.
You can create segments of your customers and offer them personalized discounts or even personalized packaging. For example, you can divide your customers into new sign-ups, and the customers who have purchased products with $n from you – these will be your loyal customers. Your new customers and your loyal customers can be entitled to additional benefits.
Similarly, it’s also important to optimize your campaigns according to your customers’ location, gender, or interests too.
6. Create FOMO
FOMO means Fear Of Missing Out. It is one of the best marketing strategies for eCommerce businesses. People are likely to buy products that they feel they might lose.
It is a common marketing strategy used by a number of popular eCommerce brands like Amazon and eBay. You can create FOMO by introducing limited period deals and sharing this news across all the marketing channels like social media and email.
Use the words like “hurry”, “limited” or “only” to fill the buyer with the compulsion to think fast and take action faster. This is one of the best practices especially when you’re offering discounts during holidays and other occasions.
7. Optime your website
Your website is your 24/7 employee so ensure that you keep it well-optimized. Make sure that your website speed is fast, your website and product images are high-quality and engaging, and your website is mobile-friendly.
A slow and poor-looking website can frustrate your buyers and push them to leave. It is also important that your website has an easy-to-use user interface. The common icons like the search bar, filters, prices, and the cart option must be easily visible. Also, check that all other important pages like the checkout page and contact page are working perfectly.
8. Take feedback
Feedback is important to reveal the things in your business that needs improvement. It also makes your customers feel that their opinions are heard and being valued.
Taking customer feedback – good or bad – also helps you gain trust in the eyes of the customers. Most new customers would resist buying if they do not see any reviews on your website. So, make sure that you take regular feedback and also display them on your website.
9. Offer excellent customer service
The customers who shop online look for one thing – does this eCommerce offer good customer service? The assurance of having good support encourages the customers to make the purchase.
Keep flexible and helpful return and refund policies and offer excellent customer service to attract more customers and create more loyal customers.
10. Keep up with trends
Your eCommerce business deals in products and all products have a trend period. Once the trend is gone, the customers lose interest in the products too. So, it’s crucial to keep your inventory up-to-date.
If you’re selling outdated products, there are high chances that you’ll lose your traffic along with sales. Fill your product pages with a mix of timeless and trendy products to generate a consistent amount of revenue.
11. Focus on your product photos
Your product photos play an important role in forming the buyer’s purchasing decision. If your product photos look dull and attractive, the buyers will not be enticed to click on them.
Use high-quality, professional-looking product images to make your product pages look clean, consistent, and professional. To save yourself from struggling with photo editing software and meet deadlines on time, you can always outsource eCommerce post-production with professional photo editing services like PixelPhant.
Outsourcing product image editing can help you save a lot of time to focus on more creative things. It also ensures that your product photos look professional and engaging. This is one of the best practices to grow your eCommerce business and increase sales.
Bonus Read
Powerful marketing strategies are the common reasons behind the success of every business. Following these 10 eCommerce marketing strategies can help your gain credibility, boost your traffic, and convert more sales.