Introduction
We no longer live in a world where you can create a single ad for all people to engage you on your terms without regards to demographics, preference, or buyer intent. Now, with information zipping between computers in microseconds, every potential customer can click-off your store and never hear from you again.
That’s why the marketing strategy for your ecommerce business has to be fine-tuned to appeal to a variety of potential customers in order to keep business. In this guide, I’ll highlight the key points that can make or break your marketing strategy.
What is Ecommerce Marketing?
Ecommerce (or e-commerce) marketing is the promotion of a business through various digital channels that attract, convert, and reengage customers to purchase and repurchase from you—the business owner.
It is the online version of the coupons, sales ads, and radio promotions from businesses that we all used to receive (often against our will.)
The key difference here is that the sustainability of your business depends on gaining enough voluntary leads that consent to your marketing efforts to form a long term and mutually beneficial relationship.
Importance for Small Businesses
It’s no longer a one size fits all advertising world where you can pay some radio station to carry a broad based, generic promotion that annoys listeners throughout the day—they have to be personalized, exact, and consensual—otherwise you won’t survive as a business.
No worries, I have put together a detailed 10-point guide to walk you through the basics in launching an effective marketing strategy for your e-commerce business.
Let’s get into it.
1. Understanding Your Audience
Rule number one: Know your audience. Brands who have tapped into their audience adequately speak an entirely different language unique to their customer base.
Like politics, these brands speak in code words and buzz words that are popular with and understood specifically by their audience.
This is the key difference between being an outsider and alienating your audience, or being an insider and fortifying the confidence of your audience.
It is from the inside where long term relationships are established, and your customer bypasses similar or even superior products to do business just with you.
I can attest to the power of this phenomenon during those days when I used to drive 20 miles a week just to get my haircut a specific way by “my barber”, rather than dive into the unknown and get an inferior (or even superior!) haircut from someone half a mile away from where I lived.
But it was never about the service itself, it was the trust—even if he did a poor job on some days.
My barber remembered our previous conversations, my interests, my fears, my goals. He remembered how close I wanted the crop, as I was one of his most meticulous and pickiest clients.
That said, if all else fails, know the demographics and psychographics of your audience as well as you know a close family member—it may well mean the difference between business success or failure.
Identifying Your Target Audience
First of all, taking the time to know the people you’re selling to sets you apart from many others in your industry, especially in the age of A.I. How do you get to know your audience when you’re interfacing with your customers primarily online? Well, take a look at what you’re selling.
It sounds quite “remedial” but you have to remember that there are countless people in industries trying to turn a profit without knowing what they’re selling.
Second, see what your customers are saying.
Sites such as Reddit, Quora, and Amazon are informational goldmines where your audience is posting reviews and highlighting problems that can be an easy fix that you can offer.
Personalization and Segmentation
After you’ve done your research, you should categorize your customers into segments of interests so that you don’t alienate them and make them think you’re a bot.
A customer at your e-commerce site spending all their time on a product page for an outdoor stove should only receive marketing emails for similar products or accessories.
Amazon does a great job at this by displaying a “customers also buy” or an upsell bundle complete with a special emissions-free lighter at the end of the customer’s purchase (which means they’re aware of their customer’s climate consciousness).
Customers appreciate this acknowledgement of their interests, so don’t feel that your are being too intrusive of their interests. They want it. They expect it.
And if you can’t relate to them, they’re out the door. Invest time to personalize and segment your audience.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Now that you’ve taken the time to understand your audience, it’s time for a little SEO. SEO is key for the world’s largest search engine, Google, to get your brand found by your customers.
While seemingly complex and technical, SEO can be learned by anyone willing to put in the time to do it right. Here’s two of the major metrics that get your e-commerce store ranked in search:
- On-Page SEO Best Practices: While SEO sounds technical, it doesn’t have to be. There are things that you can do right now that’s going to rank the pages in your store and make them more discoverable by people searching for products like yours. First, if you’re blogging, optimize your title tag. This should be a relevant keyword for someone searching for products in your industry. Second, organize your content with sub headers that answer questions that searchers fixate on your topic. These questions can be found in Google’s “people also ask”. Now that your content is more search-engine friendly, link your content to some of your product pages or other content that you have on your website. Just these few basic fundamentals can make a world of difference in how potential customers engage your brand.
- Off-Page SEO Strategies: Now, if you’re more familiar with the word of SEO, you would have heard of the importance of backlinks in getting your content found. Backlinks tell search engines like Google that your content is trustworthy and helpful. Your content may be great, but you have to promote your content and make people aware and interested enough that they reference your material the same way you link to other resourceful websites in your how-to guides and instructional content. One good avenue to promote your material is to use HARO. Double down on your promotional campaign by requesting testimonials from customers who have purchased your products and feature their experiences on your ecommerce site as social proof (with their permission, of course.)
Technical SEO for Small Ecommerce Stores
Make sure your store loads quickly and isn’t bogged down with large, unoptimized images. Fix broken links, eliminate duplicate content, and make sure you have a site map for your store which makes it easy to navigate.
3. Content Marketing for Ecommerce
I have to shamelessly admit that content marketing is my favorite strategy for building new leads and generating traffic for ecommerce stores.
Why? It’s organic, it’s effective, it grows over time while ranking your site higher in search.
And most of all, it’s 100% free–unless you pay someone to do it for you. This might be a better option if you don’t have time to write content with keyword-heavy SEO.
Content marketing for your business may be just what you need to build that cult-like following behind your products. Done right, this strategy can build a community of loyal customers who trust your brand to inform, educate, and update them on the best products in terms of quality and usefulness.
And if that isn’t convincing enough, the top 0.5% of websites who publish daily get over 10 million visitors per month.
That said, the more your ecommerce store puts out content, the more traffic and visitors your store gets–which is exactly why we’re in this game in the first place. The more content, the more visitors, the more conversions, and the more revenue.
Here’s how:
- Blogging and Product Guides: Creating a blog for your business with informative and engaging content can be a great boon to your business. Producing how-to guides and tutorials as content will communicate with search engines that your ecommerce store matches search intent–a key metric Google’s algorithm uses in matching websites to keywords. When you populate your store with content that meets demand across the sales funnel, you invite a broad range of visitors that engage your content and who may eventually buy from you. All you need to do is optimize your content and product descriptions to tap into Google’s 8.5 billion daily searches.
- User-Generated Content: With social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook, customers are uploading their reviews and testimonials for others to see. If you’ve ever heard of a product going “viral” and selling out after a TikToker posted a raving review online, then you know how important user-generated content can be. Combined with your email marketing campaign, you should be actively encouraging your customers to “like us on Facebook” or sending you a customer satisfaction video review of how happy your product made them. Adding this type of content to your product pages can significantly increase conversion. I’ll expand on this in the social media marketing section below.
- Video Marketing: Along with your blog posts and how-to guides, you should also aim to produce videos with instructional and unboxing content. You’d be surprised how many people purchase your products and head straight to YouTube to learn how to use it–which means you’ve lost user engagement to another company. Video content helps with a customer’s time-on-page, which means people are finding value and quality in your brand beyond just purchasing. Also, video marketing also tells Google and other search engines that your content is resourceful, which means ranking higher in a searcher inquiry–another metric that helps you compete against larger retailers.
4. Social Media Marketing
Marketing on social media is one of the most effective tools in establishing a brand presence in the eyes of your customer base. It is also a profit-generating behemoth for both the business and the platform. Choosing to forego social media marketing for your ecommerce store means you’re missing out on all of the billions of users that click on paid ads every single day.
The butterfly effect of a TikTok influencer raving about your product should never be underestimated. Just back in 2018 when Kylie Jenner tweeted about Snapchat’s redesign, the company lost $1.8 billion.
Of course you don’t want that to be your company, and neither do I–that’s why it’s better to master some social media marketing rather than ignore or dismiss it as a waste of time.
Choosing the Right Platforms
By far, the largest social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, each with over 2 billion active users. If you’ve ever wanted to know why you keep getting shown annoying ads in the middle of your favorite YouTube video, now you know why.
But instead of hitting that refresh button, how about setting up your own advertising account with your product’s brand in front of hundreds of millions of eyes that can translate into some solid revenue for your business?
Personally, I recommend these top three platforms in addition to TikTok, as they are extremely popular.
Influencer Marketing for Small Businesses
Getting your products in front of social media influencers can come with a hefty price tag and perhaps some unrealistic demands (“make me your official brand ambassador!”)
That’s why you have to set aside a budget for the influencer market and know when it’s time to revert your efforts elsewhere.
Getting an influencer like Mr. Beast, whose YouTube channel has the largest following in the world at 317 million subscribers, might break your wallet if you can get through to his management team.
But if an influencer in your industry has more followers than customers subscribed to your ecommerce store’s newsletter, you may just have a workable strategy.
5. Email Marketing Strategies
As you may know already, here at AmarWriter, much emphasis is placed on the “gospel” of effective email marketing and building email lists. Good email marketing has the potential to generate incredible profit for your business even with a modest number of addresses.
For example, Gary Thuerk was able to generate $13 M in sales with an email list of only 400 addresses in 1978. And since then, this form of direct marketing has grown worldwide to over $11 B in revenue as of 2023.
And if you’re thinking that an effective email marketing campaign can work for you, you’re absolutely right.
But what do you need for your business, and where do you start?
Here’s some pointers:
- Building an Email List: First things first, you’ve got to capture email addresses. In order to do this effectively, you have to diversify your efforts with a variety of channels, such as placing a pop-up form on your website that allows visitors to subscribe to receive emails from you. While visitors may not be interested in allowing you into their sacred inbox, they’ll be more than happy to do so if you offer some sort of incentive such as a first purchase discount. Once you get their email, show your appreciation by offering a loyalty or rewards program that encourages them to continue purchasing from you, while also building trust in your brand.
Email Campaign Types
If you’re wondering what all of this email campaign stuff is about, just remember the bare bones basics of this form of digital marketing.
- The welcome series: The welcome series is what your customers receive when they first sign up to receive marketing, newsletters, or promotional emails from you.
- The abandoned cart email: This is what you send when a customer leaves your site without finishing their purchase.
- The promotional email: The sales promotion type of email is what you send to inform your customers about your new products or sales
Of course, most of this process will be automated so you don’t have to worry about every finite detail, which is what we’ll discuss below.
Automation and Segmentation
Getting an ESP (email service provider) for your ecommerce store is one of the most important things to establish in your email marketing campaigns.
Services such as ConvertKit, Klaviyo, and MailChimp allow you to automate your emails and also segment your customers into their own categories which gives them a more personalized experience when dealing with your brand.
A visitor signing up for your newsletter shouldn’t also be notified when you’ve restocked on product X. Segmenting your customers into various fields of interest and sending them a lightning-fast response can make your brand stand out.
6. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
PPC advertising is a popular form of digital marketing that allows you to advertise your products on social media and search engines. If you’ve ever seen the top of a Google search result that says “sponsored” next to it, then you’ve seen what PPC advertising looks like.
PPC (pay-per-click) advertising is exactly what it suggests: you (the marketer) pay per click. Every time someone clicks on your ad in the search result, or on your ad in their social media feed, you pay a small fee. This low-cost form of digital marketing makes it one of the most effective tools in drawing visitors to your ecommerce store.
It is also an essential part of nearly every digital store’s marketing budget. Allocating a percentage of your marketing efforts to an effective PPC strategy should be a priority for your business.
Combined with your organic content marketing strategy, you should be able to bring in a larger number of visitors to your store while broadening your conversion rates.
Google Ads for Ecommerce
While there are several different campaign types in running Google ads for your store, two of the most important (and cost-effective) are search and shopping ads.
With a Google shopping ad campaign, potential customers will be able to see your products before they even click, which means you should some good copywriting optimized to motivate them to buy.
Similarly, Google search ads allow your products to pop up in search results where customers can see the pricing, images, and titles of your products.
Facebook and Instagram Ads
With over 3 billion and 2.5 billion users, respectively, Facebook and Instagram cannot be overlooked if your aim is to get your brand out in front of as many people as possible.
These two social media platforms should be a part of your overall marketing strategy, even if you aren’t a big social media user (like myself). Whenever someone clicks through on your ad, they can be brought over to one of your product pages (which is exactly what you want).
And the more you engage users, the higher your conversions–just remember to set aside a realistic budget when you prepare to advertise on these platforms, because they can get costly.
Budgeting for PPC
If you’re as excited as I am about getting an effective PPC ad strategy started for your business, you eventually begin to wonder how much all of this can cost you.
You might even wonder if paid advertising will even be profitable or worth the effort–this is where budgeting comes in.
Also, you’ll have to conduct thorough research on your products’ keywords, search volume rate, and cost-per-click. Other factors that can determine the necessary budget for your PPC campaign include your store’s area of operations, regional business hours, and the industry you’re doing business in.
Thus, your budget can vary widely, but if you can optimize these factors to make PPC profitable for your business, along with an organic marketing campaign, then you can win on multiple fronts.
7. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Now that you have an idea for an effective marketing strategy, how do you increase your margins without stretching yourself too thin and breaking the bank?
The answer is conversion rate optimization and making more of those visitors and prospects turn into paying customers. CRO is the art of doing more with less by optimizing and simplifying many of the strategies that you already have in place.
The process of CRO begins with some very simple and everyday questions:
- Why are people bouncing from my store?
- Why are people abandoning their carts without making a purchase?
- Why does my store appear in the Google search results for high-volume keywords, but nobody clicks through?
Here are some of the things you can do right now to fix that:
- Improving Product Pages: You’re going have to revisit some of the copywriting you’ve put for your products. Is your copy compelling, touches the pain points of the customer, or makes them feel that the product was made specifically for them? Do your rich images and meta descriptions communicate with Google and other search engines so that your products appear at the top of a searcher’s inquiry? Make sure your keywords are placed well in your product descriptions, and that you cut out all of the unnecessary fluff that make it a pain to read. I recommend that you use a bulleted list that highlights your product’s benefits, so that a customer can skim with ease.
- Simplifying the Checkout Process: Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and try buying your products from yourself. If you’re encountering too much friction from the checkout experience, you may want to abandon your own shopping cart! Are there too many pages between the product page and the checkout page? Are you asking for too much unnecessary information on the way out? Given the lightning speed of information on the internet, the customer has very little patience for slow pages and an annoying newsletter pop-up when they’re just trying to finish their purchase. Reduce friction and increase user experience.
- A/B Testing: You should also A/B test the elements of your store to see what converts more. For example, I had greater success in using multiple CTAs after a service pitch rather than forcing the reader to have to scroll down to the bottom to get in contact with me.
8. Leveraging Analytics and Tracking
Now that you’ve put together a content and email marketing strategy, optimized product copy and the checkout process, it’s time to watch and see what actually works and how to leverage what you already have.
This is where analytics kicks in.
Analytics track customer activity, identify trends, and show you what keywords your store ranks for. And as a business owner, you need these data to make informed decisions so that you can break even and succeed in your industry.
Once you begin to tweak your ecommerce marketing strategy based on your strengths while minimizing (or eliminating) weaknesses, you will see a steady growth as a result of your efforts.
But what do you look for, and how do you use it?
Let’s take a dive:
Using Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the most fundamental tools to help you increase conversions, track customer activity, and improve your return on investment.
It also generates reports using customer data which you’ll need to adjust your marketing strategy and capitalize on market trends in the long run.
And the great thing about it is that it’s completely free to use.
Customer Feedback and Surveys
The customer journey doesn’t stop after they purchase–you should be following up with a customer satisfaction survey and requesting feedback on their experience with your brand.
This communicates to the customer that you’re not just some profit-hungry machine that only wants their money, and that actually care about how you can satisfy their needs.
Do this by creating and automating customer feedback emails using your ESP–both you and the customer will be happy in the long run.
- KPIs to Monitor: If your analytics are telling you that your PPC ads aren’t being engaged, then you’re probably spending too much money on the wrong marketing channels. Take a look and see how the organic side of your marketing efforts are doing, and if your content is getting likes and shares by customers, you’d want to triple down on that strategy. Remember–use analytics to stick to what works for your brand in your industry and minimize what doesn’t.
9. Local SEO for Small Ecommerce Businesses
Whether or not you do business nationwide, it’s important that you develop a good ground game in the area in which you live. Knowing how to tap into local searches and have your business show up at the top of search is excellent for your e-commerce marketing strategy.
Also, appearing locally in a large city such as Miami or Los Angeles can get you a ton of business and great referrals, even if your area is much smaller.
Importance of Local SEO
In your area there’s thousands of people making local searches each day using region specific keywords. According to SEMrush, ranking locally can “help Google perceive your business as more popular and trustworthy.” Even if you only do business online, you can benefit from being listed as a local business.
Start off by researching local keywords and also the keywords that similar businesses are ranking for. If your competitors are bigger than you, target long-tailed keywords with low keyword difficulty with decent search volume.
Use these data to optimize your Google Business profile (it’s free) along with your contact info, opening hours, and product availability. You’ll reap the benefits of both local and national conversions—more on this below.
- Google My Business Optimization: When setting up your Google My Business profile, Wordstream recommends 13 optimizations that can get your ecommerce business ranked in your area. Make sure you fill out every section of your profile and let customers know exactly how they can get in touch with you.
- Local Listings and Reviews: Also, look for any local business directories so people can find you any and everywhere. Encourage people to leave reviews on Yelp and Google about how outstanding and satisfying your service and product were. I, myself, use Google reviews before trying out new restaurants in my area, and have went after places with strong reviews. Others may hesitate if they do not see your business with any reviews, so implement this into your overall marketing strategy.
10. Case Studies and Success Stories
If implementing an effective, guerilla-like marketing campaign for your ecommerce business can work for others, then it can definitely work for you.
Just look at how the marketing team at Lider used Google Ads/Analytics to boost conversions for their company:
“To re-engage with these potential customers, the team at Líder decided to reach its Android app users with App Campaigns for Engagement in Google Ads. This fully automated campaign solution re-engages users who have installed an app, and across multiple Google properties, encourages them to take specific, in-app actions…”
“Líder saw a decrease in the CPA of its app campaign by 85% compared to its previous efforts. The conversion rate for the “Likely 7-day Purchasers” audience also increased to 5.4%, a drastic improvement compared to a 0.3% conversion rate for the company’s other, standard audience lists used in App Campaigns.”
And it’s all about cooking up a solid marketing strategy…
Conclusion
If you’ve made it to the end of this article, then I must congratulate you—you’re serious about building a strong ecommerce marketing strategy to attract, convert, and reengage new and sustainable leads.
These were ten essential key points that covered most of the fundamentals of digital marketing for your ecommerce store, with some advanced elements that can be explored in depth later in your journey.
By capitalizing on these tools, you’ll have a complete campaign that can compete against some of the juggernauts in your industry while building a reputable and trustworthy brand.
Don’t delay—start implementing these strategies in your marketing now.