6 Best and Most Effective eCommerce Marketing Strategies, Experts’ Tips

To grow your eCommerce business, you need effective advertising. That’s about the only way your business can get to reach more customers. It takes many marketing strategies and tactics to effectively advertise online. Some of these strategies can be deployed either singly or in combination depending on the type of products you are marketing and the marketing channels you choose to use.

Based on expert recommendations, below are 6 best and most effective eCommerce marketing strategies to help you reach more customers and achieve your marketing goals.

1. Optimizing Your Website

If you run eCommerce business, your website is the first impression a shopper gets to have about your business. Well, that shopper had better be impressed or else you may lose his business. You cannot expect to directly impress a shopper on your website if your website design and aesthetics are poor and unimpressive. What helps to keep shoppers a bit longer on your website is optimization. If your website is optimized, shoppers stay a bit longer on the website to notice the wonderful products you are selling. If they notice these products, chances are higher that they may get to purchase some of the products. You can therefore optimize your website through a simple site structure that is easy to navigate. The right shopping information should be easily noticeable and CTAs very obvious to get shoppers to take desirable actions. If the website is optimized for mobile devices, better still because Google now attributes a very high percentage of search data to mobile devices.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a simple business model that thrives on synergy. Since the eCommerce business owner cannot afford to reach all prospects all by himself, he needs to combine the efforts of affiliates to do so. Business owners can therefore partner with publishers/affiliates that can help promote products for them on their blog posts, emails, social media, and videos. In the bargain, these publishers/affiliates earn a percentage of the sales made through their promotional efforts as commissions. That is affiliate marketing. Some product merchants can decide to work directly with reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI who can directly assist them with training, customer care, marketing tools, analytics and easy attribution and payment of commissions.

3. eCommerce SEO

It is expected that many customers research products well online before they even decide to buy. For this reason, if you want to give your eCommerce business the best chance of converting prospects, you must connect with them during the research stage. That is where eCommerce SEO becomes very handy. This is the process of optimizing your web pages to rank high for essential business keywords related to the products you are selling. To improve your eCommerce SEO, you must take deliberate steps to improve your Content Marketing, technical SEO, On-Page and Off-Page SEO. These improvements will help you to engage better in your eCommerce SEO campaigns. Doing so is one great way to acquire more leads and customers from the organic traffic coming from search engines.

4. Pay-Per-Click, PPC Advertising

With pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, eCommerce business owners can reach their audience with targeted ads on Google. What makes PPC ads particularly effective is that eCommerce business owners can take specific steps and actions to improve the chances of the ads reaching their targets. Such steps/actions include conducting diligent keywords research, adjusting ads bids in line with set goals, building relevant landing pages, using Google shopping ads and using retargeting ads. After taking all necessary steps and executing these techniques, you can improve performance through A/B testing. Since you can’t expect a single ad to effectively work for every business, experts recommend that business owners must carefully test various ad campaign elements if they want to improve performance.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing may be old school but it is still a very effective marketing technique popular with eCommerce business owners. It is highly cost-effective too. Marketing with email has very many advantages for eCommerce business owners when compared to other marketing channels. Aside the cost-effectiveness, business owners can personalize email messages, segment the messages and even use email automation software to automate email messages to reach a wider audience reliably. All these help business owners to save time, money, and other resources and still be able to get impressive results from email campaigns. When business owners send relevant emails to their numerous subscribers, it helps to increase the open and click-through rates of the emails. In addition, because the emails are directing the recipients to a relevant web page, there’s a higher chance of converting such visitors. Therefore, if you want your eCommerce business to grow, email marketing is a must rather than a convenient option.

6. Social Media Marketing

Most people worldwide use social media platforms for fun and to connect with friends but many users also follow businesses and check out information and product offers on some of the platforms. eCommerce business owners usually provide value to their audience on social media through the type of content that can solve their problems. That is why many eCommerce businesses tend to focus on social media platforms credible locations where they can reach their ideal customers. In many business niches, there are experts and celebrities who have gained a big following on social media as a result of their excellent performance and prominence in their vocations or industries. As a result, these experts and influencers tend to have loyal audiences who trust their product recommendations. eCommerce businesses do take advantage of this relationship to promote their products. This is influencer marketing which directly compliments social media marketing. Presently, some social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram because of their unique in-house marketing tools allow business owners to sell products directly on their platforms. On social media therefore, there are many excellent opportunities for eCommerce business owners to promote and sell their products to a very wide and diverse audience.

Wrapping Up

Effective marketing is one of the best ways to give your eCommerce business the right exposure online. Having an excellent product is just not enough to do good business out there. Nobody will buy your product if they’ve never heard of it and they don’t know anything about it. By deploying the right marketing strategies as discussed above, it is possible to attract more shoppers to your eCommerce store and sell more products to them. If you need to boost your marketing results therefore, your best bet is to deploy these here strategies in the right way.

Effective Marketing Elements of eCommerce Pay-Per-Click and Social Media Advertising

It is difficult to grow your eCommerce business without effective advertising. Effective advertising helps eCommerce businesses to deepen their online presence and to reach more customers. It takes many marketing strategies and tactics to get good advertising results. You can use some of these strategies singly or in combination depending on the type of products you are marketing. If however you are able to effectively combine some of these strategies, you can achieve many of your marketing goals. Among these strategies, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising and Social Media Marketing are really quite popular with eCommerce business owners. Here is why.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one great way eCommerce business owners can deliberately and directly reach their audience. They can succeed to directly reach their audience through PPC advertising on Google, You can only do that through specific strategies that can help to boost your chances of success. Some of these strategies include:

Diligent keywords research: By using Google Keyword planner and other research tools, you can find out what keywords your potential buyers are using to search on Google for the type of products you are marketing. When you use these keywords in your marketing content, Google adds your products in the search results of such searchers.
Using Google shopping ads: Such ads are usually created for transactional keywords. The ads will display your products and their prices on the SERPs of search engines.
Using retargeting ads: Retargeting ads are very technical and effective ads. If for instance a visitor has visited some pages on your website, you can send them ads related to those pages. You can directly target a shopper who has visited a product page with the right ads for that product. Doing so makes the shoppers more receptive to your ads.
Adjusting bidding according to your goals: You can achieve better success with your bidding if you increase your ads quality score through high-relevant ads and better click-through rates. That way, your ads can show up more for your preferred keywords.
Building relevant landing pages: For best ads results, your ad copy must align with your landing page copy. That helps to improve your chances of getting more leads and conversions.

By the time you are through with executing these tactics, you can best improve your performance through A/B testing knowing fully well that there is no single ad that works for every business the same way. For this reason, you must test various ad campaign elements to know what works and how. That’s one credible way to improve your marketing performance.

Social Media Marketing

Worldwide, many people are on social media to connect with friends and to have fun. However, many social media users also follow businesses and check out information and product offers on the platforms. On social media, many eCommerce brands do provide value to their audience through content that can solve their problems. This is why eCommerce businesses focus on social media platforms where they can easily reach their ideal customers. Specifically, eCommerce businesses can effectively use social media for:

Customer care
Posting product tips
Sharing products breaking news
Displaying product use cases
Providing industry information
Featuring influencer content
Making promo/discount announcements
Directly selling products
Making new products announcements
Featuring User-Generated Content (UGC)

These days and in many business niches, you can locate influencers, experts and celebrities who have gained tremendous following on social media due to their years of excellent and outstanding performance in their chosen business niches/professions. As a result, such influencers and experts do have audiences who trust their product recommendations. Many eCommerce businesses usually take good advantage of this relationship to promote their products. What matters most for an eCommerce business owner however is to make sure the influencers they choose to market with are in their niche and they have the right audience of followers, without which marketing with such influencers will not be very effective.
 
In addition, eCommerce businesses can sell products directly out of the sites of some social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest by taking advantage of their in-house marketing tools. On social media, there are many opportunities for eCommerce business owners to promote and sell their products. Experienced online marketers never fail to take full advantage of these opportunities.