Marketing Channels

The Ultimate Guide To E-commerce Marketing Strategies

CopyPress

March 19, 2022

Looking for ways to boost your e-commerce site’s performance? Using an effective strategy can help you increase your brand awareness and company’s sales. Depending on your goals and target audience, you can even create your own e-commerce marketing strategy to match your business’s budget and resources. The first step is to understand exactly what you want your marketing strategy to accomplish and the most efficient way to get there. In this article, we discuss:

• What Is an E-commerce Marketing Strategy?
• 11 Types of E-commerce Marketing Strategies
• How To Build Your Own E-commerce Marketing Strategy

What Is an E-commerce Marketing Strategy?

Image via Unsplash by @rupixen

An e-commerce marketing strategy is a plan that helps to increase your brand’s awareness, drive traffic to your site, and increase your sales and revenue. There are many types of marketing strategies you can use to develop your online business and attract your target audience. You can pick one, or combine multiple strategies to deliver the best results. But each e-commerce company is different. So, a strategy that works for one business might not work for yours.

As you research and understand popular marketing strategies, it’s important to find one that best fits your brand’s major goals and objectives. It’s also helpful to keep in mind your target audience. Certain marketing strategies might be more effective for your target consumers versus other strategies. Sometimes, it might even take a little trial and error before you know the best marketing plan to use.

11 Types of E-commerce Marketing Strategies

Here are some of the most effective styles of e-commerce marketing you can use with your business:

1. Content Marketing

Content marketing involves the creation of content to help drive traffic to your site and build a relationship with your audience. That can include things like blogs, resource articles, podcasts, and videos. Each piece of content that a business creates focuses on relevant industry subjects and helps its audience with their pain points or problems. For example, a clothing e-commerce store might write a blog on “new fashion styles and trends.” The content then directs its audience to the business’s products and services by adding conversion points throughout the content in the form of calls-to-action (CTA).

Calls-to-action encourage readers to interact with a company further by signing up for an email newsletter, downloading an exclusive eBook, or even making a purchase. Content marketing is definitely a long-term strategy, but it helps to build audience loyalty and generate more organic traffic. This can help you generate quality leads and boost your sales and revenue.

Looking to start a content marketing campaign? CopyPress has a team of expert writers, editors, and quality assurance specialists who know how to target an e-commerce audience. Schedule a free call with us today to see how we help our clients build an effective and long-lasting relationship with their customers.

2. Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of strategies you can perform to help increase your visibility on search engines. Some of those strategies include targeting specific keywords, generating backlinks, and improving readability. Performing SEO can help search engines understand what your content is about and determine its overall quality. This can help to increase its ranking and generate more organic traffic for your site.

Though most businesses pair SEO with their content marketing, it’s helpful to use it in every area of your business. That includes your website copy. Ensuring that your main webpages target the right keywords and are easily readable to your audience can improve metrics such as bounce rate and time on page. Improving those metrics can tell search engines that your website is high quality, which can help improve its ranking for relevant search queries.

Read more: A Beginner’s Guide to SEO

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing involves developing an email list and sending content straight to your audience’s inbox. That content can include things like email newsletters that talk about trending industry topics to promotional events, like upcoming sales and discounts. This style of marketing can feel more personal to your consumers, which can help increase their loyalty to your brand. You can even add different personalizations to the email’s subject line, or the email itself.

For example, you can thank customers after they make a purchase, give them a discount if they left something in their cart, or ask for a review about a recent product they tried. Email marketing is an extremely effective tool, but it can help to pair it with other strategies, like content marketing. That’s because content marketing can include calls-to-action on its blogs and articles to encourage people to give you their email. This can help you build a large contact list to make your email marketing more successful.

4. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a great way to boost your brand awareness. Using posts and other exciting content, you can develop a following and tell people more about the products and services you offer. You can also use the platform to boost your content marketing campaign by sharing the blogs, podcasts, and videos you create with your followers.

Social media marketing is also fairly business-friendly as most platforms now offer ways to see your account’s analytics. This provides your business with helpful data, like the number of likes, comments, and shares your posts receive, to see who’s engaging with your platform and how your content is performing.

5. Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows your company to display ads on search engines, websites, and social media platforms. These ads market your products and services and direct people to your website. You can also set up your PPC ad campaign to stop once it reaches a certain limit. That can help you manage your finances more effectively and ensure your advertising doesn’t exceed your budget.

PPC ads are an effective way to increase your brand awareness and possibly generate sales. That’s because you can use the ads to target specific audiences or search queries that people use. One way to accomplish this is by looking at different keywords your competitors target. Then, you can place ads for those keywords to try to attract a similar audience. Trying to conduct thorough competitor research? CopyPress has a new content marketing analysis tool that compares your website’s content with your top three competitors. Request your content analysis today to see what keywords your competitors rank for.

“CopyPress gives us the ability to work with more dealership groups. We are able to provide unique and fresh content for an ever growing customer base. We know that when we need an influx of content to keep our clients ahead of the game in the automotive landscape, CopyPress can handle these requests with ease.”

Kevin Doory

Director of SEO at Auto Revo

6. Remarketing Campaigns

Remarketing campaigns work by showing advertisements to people who recently visited your website. When someone visits your site, the remarketing campaign tracks their behavior online. This can show you things like what webpages they visit, if they add things to their cart, and if or when they leave your site. You can use that information to display remarketing ads to them. This can help entice them to come back to your website and make a purchase.

Remarketing allows you to target quality leads who you know have a higher chance of buying something from your business. It also works similarly to PPC ads because you can set your remarketing ads to stop once it reaches a certain price limit.

Read more: What To Know About Google Remarketing

7. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing involves using social media influencers to promote your brand and its products or services. Influencers often have a lot of followers, which can help your business reach a wider audience. This can help you build brand awareness and audience loyalty. That’s because influencers build trust with their followers. When they recommend a product or service, their followers are often more inclined to take the recommendation or, at the very least, look into the business the influencer is promoting.

Influencers can market a business in several ways, including:

• Developing social media posts to advertise the business
• Offering the business’s products or services as a gift or contest prize
• Demonstrating how to use the business’s product or service
• Collaborating with a business to develop a new product or service

8. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is when people advertise a business and receive a commission for helping them make a sale. This type of marketing is similar to influencer marketing, but instead of a popular social media account, these marketers often run a popular blog or website. How it works is that a business gives a blogger a special link they can include in a blog article or on their website. When a customer clicks on the link, it takes them to the business’s e-commerce store.

If a customer makes a purchase after clicking the link, the business knows it was the blogger who sent them there, and they receive part of the revenue. But companies can also pay affiliate marketers in other ways. For instance, if a business wants to increase its traffic, it might pay the marketer for every click their link receives. However, receiving a commission for the sale is often the most common way for affiliate marketers to be paid, which allows businesses to pay for the marketing, but only when it works.

Read more: How To Perform Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

9. Local Marketing

Though e-commerce companies don’t often use it, some businesses can conduct effective local marketing strategies for their online brand. For example, let’s say you notice a lot of your business comes from a specific area of the country or world. You can send out physical promotional materials to attract people in that geographic location. That can help boost your sales and entice quality leads to your website and business. You can find out where shoppers are located through browser cookies and other analytical data that tracks where they are and when they make a purchase.

10. Personalization Marketing

Using the same cookies and analytics mentioned in the previous strategy, you can create a more personalized experience for your shoppers. Making their shopping experience more personal can help your audience feel understood and increase their satisfaction with your brand. For example, if you know your audience’s demographic or general interests, you can recommend certain products to them when they visit your site.

11. User Experience Focus

One major strategy that some companies overlook is the improvement of their website’s and business’s user experience. Once people land on your website, it’s important that they understand how to navigate it. That can help increase their satisfaction and help them find the products and services that interest them most. Improving your website and its user experience can help ensure people stay on your site and increase their chances of making a purchase. It can also help you improve your SEO, which can increase your search engine ranking and organic traffic.

How To Build Your Own E-commerce Marketing Strategy

Here is a list of steps to help you build a custom e-commerce marketing strategy that works best for your business:

1. Set Goals

When setting goals for your company’s marketing, it’s helpful to follow the SMART method. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Essentially, you want to make sure that your goal is realistic. For example, one of your goals might be to increase your website’s traffic. Great! But that’s a fairly broad objective. Adding the SMART method to the goal can help you understand exactly what you need to achieve and start making a powerful marketing plan.

For example, a better goal might be to increase your site’s traffic by 40% in six months. Now, the goal has a measurable objective with a deadline that you and your marketing team can work towards.

2. Develop Customer Personas

Customer personas are fictional representations of your target customer base. They clearly define who your customers are and the reason they might have an interest in your products or services. For instance, if your company sells toys and games, the age of your customer personas might range from children to young adults, even the adults who may purchase your products for the kids in their lives. But personas also include other information, such as interests and hobbies, location, and occupation.

These fictional representations allow you to understand the target audience of your marketing efforts and the most effective ways to reach them. Does your audience watch videos more than they read blogs? Would they find remarketing ads helpful or intrusive? Use market analysis and competitor research to understand who your customers are and what type of marketing they prefer to receive.

3. Create a Step-by-Step Plan

Using your goals and your customer personas, it’s time to make a step-by-step plan to help you achieve your marketing objectives. For instance, let’s say your goal is to increase your website’s traffic by 40% in six months. Start by looking at the different strategies you can use to work towards it. Maybe you want to write blogs that can attract your target audience? Perhaps you want to focus on your social media marketing to increase your followers? Maybe you want to try both strategies?

Using multiple e-commerce marketing strategies can help you find the best ones that work for you and your marketing campaign. From there, putting the strategies into a step-by-step plan can help you create a timeline for the goal. It can also help you allocate your resources and budget efficiently.

4. Know How To Measure Metrics

No matter what strategies you choose or the plan you create, it’s important to know how to monitor it. That often includes knowing how to collect and measure different metrics. For example, let’s say you conduct a content marketing strategy to boost your website traffic. Using tools like Google Analytics can help you uncover and analyze different metrics. Those metrics include pageviews, bounce rate, and the demographics of your audience.

If you’re using alternative strategies, like social media marketing, there are other ways to find the metrics you need. Social media platforms generally offer ways for companies to measure the reception of their posts. That includes metrics like the number of comments, likes, shares, and clicks. As you develop a marketing strategy, be sure to know how you can monitor it and where to find the metrics you need.

5. Talk with Experts

Talking with marketing experts can help you find new ways to accomplish your marketing strategy and attract your target consumers. Marketing companies, like CopyPress, have the knowledge and expertise to help you fulfill your goals and find gaps in your marketing plan. For example, let’s say you’re attempting a content marketing strategy. CopyPress has a team of expert writers, editors, and quality assurance specialists who can help you develop content that will increase your website’s traffic so you have quality leads.

We also offer other services for e-commerce businesses, such as developing product descriptions that can attract your target audience. Schedule a free call with us today to learn how we help our clients boost their marketing strategy and fulfill their business’s goals.

It’s important to understand the different types of marketing strategies you can use or create for your e-commerce site. That’s because it can help you fulfill your marketing goals and increase your brand’s online presence. Start attracting your target audience and improving your sales today with a powerful e-commerce marketing strategy.

Ed Pronley

CopyPress writer

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