eCcommerce stores are only successful if they are acquiring traffic to their website and making sales. It’s as simple as that. But acquiring traffic and implementing a marketing strategy is not always straightforward.
While there are many marketing tactics that you can use to acquire new customers and market to existing customers, you need to choose what is right and what works best for your business. But one thing is for certain, without a marketing strategy, your eCommerce store is sure to fall flat.
If you want a successful eCommerce store that is capable of standing the test of time, then you’ll need to hop on the marketing bandwagon. Here’s why you need to start marketing your business.
Why Marketing is Important For eCommerce
Many people are averse to ‘selling’ themselves or their product because they are afraid of being too ‘salesy’, but the reality is that if nobody knows who you are or what product you are selling, you are ultimately not going to make any sales.
Marketing is important because it creates buyer awareness, and puts you at the forefront of peoples’ minds. So when they are looking for the product you offer, you are present and ready to satisfy their needs.
20 Marketing Tactics To Increase Revenue For eCommerce
It’s usually best to take a multi-faceted approach to your marketing strategy by implementing a handful of these tactics. You can always refine the strategy later on to make use of the marketing tactics that are providing the best ROI.
1. Make Use Of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a wonderful thing because it offers you the chance to have other people market your eCommerce website with no initial cost to your business. Affiliate marketing usually works via a unique link given to content creators that allows them to direct traffic to your website using the trackable link provided.
When a customer makes a purchase on your website after clicking on their link, they receive a small commission off the sale. This means that if the marketing is unsuccessful, your business will not have wasted any of its marketing budget. If however, it successfully leads to a sale, it’s a win-win situation. Your business wins by making the sale, and the content creator earns a small commission, encouraging them to keep marketing your eCommerce store.
This is a great way to gain popularity in the circles you are hoping to sell to and is a very cost-effective way to do just that.
2. Have An SEO Strategy
Having an SEO strategy is very important for eCommerce businesses, because it provides a long-term payoff. If you are optimizing your products and website correctly, you could rank in Google SERPs (search engine results pages) organically.
This means that you don’t have to pay for your products to be visible to those who are looking for them. The better your SEO strategy, the higher up in the SERPs your products will rank, and the higher the better. If you have a product in the first position, you are ten times more likely to get a click than those in position ten.
Here’s exactly how you should be investing in your SEO strategy:
- Do keyword research – you need to find what keywords people are searching for when they are looking for your products. Optimize your landing pages, product pages, and blog posts to reflect the keywords you are wanting to rank for.
- Invest in content – create blog content regularly so that Google can see your website is continuously improving and being updated. These blog posts should be relevant to the products you sell, and interest your target audience. These give you the potential to rank for thousands of related keywords, bringing your site targeted traffic.
- Invest in a website audit – if you haven’t dabbled in SEO before, then it’s best to get a professional to audit your website and ensure your site is in the best shape possible. A technical SEO specialist will ensure no technical blockages are causing your content to be overlooked by Google crawlers.
SEO is a long game as it may take a while to get your products to rank on the first page of Google, but once they do, your marketing strategy gets a whole lot cheaper as your products will start marketing themselves.
3. Optimize Your eCommerce Store For Mobile
As of June 2022, 58.99% of web traffic is originating from mobile devices. This number has increased by 8% over the last five years and is projected to continue increasing over the next couple of years.
This means that you need to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. And that doesn’t mean just making sure that it works on a mobile phone, it needs to actually be user-friendly and easy to navigate on mobile.
These are a couple of things you could do to make sure mobile users are getting the best experience possible on your eCommerce website:
- Serve images in a different format for mobile users to speed up load times.
- Make buttons bigger so that mobile users don’t need to zoom in to navigate the website.
- Add clear calls to action that can be seen on a mobile screen.
- Streamline the checkout process – do not ask users to log in to make a purchase because filling in long forms on mobile is not fun and could cause users to bounce.
4. Offer Discounts To Returning Customers
Returning customers should be an important part of your marketing strategy because returning customers spend 67% more than new customers. If returning customers are treated well, they are a hugely valuable asset to your business, so why not reward them for the value they bring to your eCommerce website?
There are a couple of ways you can show returning customers that they add true value:
Discounts
Offering returning customers discounts on their next purchase is another great way to keep them coming back and reward them for doing so. It creates a sense of loyalty and makes it harder for them to go somewhere else.
Exclusivity
Your customer loyalty program could be aimed at getting points that can offer the customer a discount on a certain amount of purchases, or you can get creative and offer exclusivity to your loyal customers.
For instance, if someone is part of your loyalty program you could offer them access to special sales not open to everyone, or you could offer a certain collection of products only for sale to loyalty members. Not only does this encourage people to become a part of your loyalty program, but it will keep them returning to your site.
5. Implement Multichannel Or Omnichannel Marketing
Multichannel and omnichannel marketing means coming to terms with the fact that simply having an eCommerce website is not enough. Consumers are now interacting with brands across multiple different platforms, and they want each of those touchpoints to be a good experience.
Customers want the same look, feel, tone, and voice across all channels of interaction. Each interaction that you have with the customer should work towards your sales funnel and lead to a purchase at the end.
An omnichannel strategy can be a lot of work and it means having a marketing team that can implement automation and work together seamlessly. Once this process has been fleshed out completely, it can run like a well-oiled machine that drives sales while you sleep.
6. Partner With Other Companies
Partnering with other companies can be a great way to get your name out there and sell more products. There are a multitude of ways you can do this, but you want to make sure that the store you are partnering with has a similar target audience and sells complimentary products.
This could mean becoming affiliate partners and listing their products on your website. You could create a co-sponsored blog post or run a discount together e.g. if you purchase one of their products, a customer gets your product at a discount, and vice versa.
Partnering with like-minded companies helps create brand awareness, but it also drives more sales and creates shared marketing costs (rather than sponsoring all of your own marketing). We see these types of partnerships in Instagram giveaways quite frequently, but partnering doesn’t only have to happen on social platforms.
7. Run An Influencer Marketing Campaign
Influencer marketing is using content creators with a large and targeted audience to promote your brand or product. It’s a great way to build brand awareness, grow your audience, and drive sales.
It’s such a tried and trusted type of marketing that 80% of marketers find that influencer marketing proves to be effective. It’s best to use a marketing team for this, as they will be able to assess whether or not an influencer is the right fit for your brand and set up communications.
Generally, brands offer influencers free products, discounts, or cash. It depends on the influencers following as to their remuneration. Influencer marketing can be done on many channels including:
- Youtube
- TikTok
- Twitch
- Snapchat
Influencer marketing is ideal for those hoping to shorten their sales cycle because all the hard work of getting the customer to trust you is done by the influencer. Their followers generally trust that the product is sound because it was recommended to them by someone they trust.
8. Implement A TikTok Marketing Strategy
TikTok has taken the world by storm in recent years, but very few people anticipated it staying around the way it has. It now has a cult-like following that is very engaged and brands are making the most of it, so you should be too.
TikTok audiences value genuine content over the highly curated content that we are seeing on Instagram. This means that content is easier to create while still being just as effective. The platform’s algorithm favors those that have a small audience and helps videos go viral even if the account doesn’t have a large follower count. This is great news for businesses!
But the great news doesn’t end there. Reports are saying that 51% of TikTokers purchase products that they’ve seen being promoted on TikTok. This means that those watching TikTok content are highly susceptible to influence and open to hearing what you have to say about your products.
If you combine your TikTok marketing strategy with your influencer marketing strategy, it could have amazing results.
9. Run PPC Campaigns
Pay-per-click advertising is one of the most popular ways brands choose to advertise online. One of its many benefits is that it is extremely targeted. You can choose the exact demographic of the person you want to advertise to, and find only the people that are currently looking for the product you are trying to sell.
You can even re-target people that have visited a specific landing page or have looked at a certain product in order to push them further down the sales funnel and encourage them to take the leap and make the purchase.
This means you don’t waste your budget on anyone who is not interested in what you have to offer. It is a very affordable way to advertise and can work in conjunction with SEO, actually improving your site’s organic rankings in time (if implemented correctly).
PPC is used on both Google (these ads appear above organic rankings), and on Facebook which also allows you to advertise on Instagram.
10. Upsell Your Existing Products
Upselling is an important marketing strategy, after all, selling a more premium product to the same customer is easier than getting a new customer to your website. How you upsell will depend on the type of product you are selling but here are a few examples:
- If you are selling a handbag, you could upsell your customer on one that is made from higher quality leather, but looks the same.
- If you are selling software, you could upsell your customer to a bigger package that allows for a larger number of people to use it all at once.
It’s important to only upsell products that are related to the one they are already wanting to buy and make sure that the price jump is one that is mentioned and anticipated by the customer. If the customer feels they are being ambushed on the checkout page with a price they didn’t sign up for, they are likely to abandon their cart.
Cross-selling is also a great option to increase the revenue of a purchase. A good example of this is when an eCommerce store has a section at the bottom of a product page called “often purchased with” where they list items often bought together with the item that was added to the cart.
If your business is using Sage 300, Sage X3 or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central ERPs, commercebuild can build a ERP-driven B2B and B2C eCommerce webstore or Customer Portal.
Part 2 Coming Soon…
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