How to Build Your ECommerce Marketing Strategy

These 5 Innovative Marketing Tips Will Help Shape Your ECommerce Marketing Strategy and Your Online Business.

How to Build Your ECommerce Marketing Strategy

The next step after establishing your eCommerce business is to develop and implement an effective Ecommerce marketing strategy. The rate at which your business grows largely depends on your marketing strategies. Your target customers have so many options to choose from online. You need to develop a strategy that will attract and keep online buyers in your online store. If you are not achieving the desired results in your online business, here are some innovative marketing tactics to boost your Ecommerce business.

1. Start with a Clear Plan

You must define your marketing strategy clearly from the beginning. Do you intend to run an email campaign, market content on social media, or start a new blog? Each strategy must be clearly defined including the measures of determining its effectiveness. Hence, each strategy must be realistic, time-framed, and measurable. You will adjust the strategies based on the results that you achieve in different phases of the marketing campaign.

2. Automate Email Marketing

email marketing automation

Email marketing remains one of the most effective methods of reaching potential and existing customers. Composing new emails every day is time-consuming and repetitive. Instead, you can set up your email messages automatically and have them sent to a particular individual when that person meets a certain trigger. A good example of this might be when a new user signs up for an account on your site, this would trigger an automated welcome email introducing the new user to your brand and show them how to get started. This is a great opportunity to incentivize a purchase by offering a discount code for a first purchase or some other type of welcome gift.

Limit the number of emails that your customers receive to one or two emails. Your customers may unsubscribe to your emails if the emails are too many to read in a day or week. Remember to keep the content engaging, useful, and relevant to your audience.

Unlike one-off campaigns, email automations can be left running in the background, taking repetitive tasks off your plate. You can welcome your new subscribers, reach out to people who abandon their online shopping carts, and win back customers you haven’t seen for a while. It’s like providing your customers their very own personal concierge.

There are a ton of great email marketing automation platforms out there. One that I highly recommend is MailChimp It’s easy to use, very flexible and free to start.

 

3. Diversify Social Media Marketing

Many businesses struggle with social media marketing because they do not know the best platform to use. Train your marketing team to advertise and share useful content on different social media platforms. Enrolling your team in online classes improves their effectiveness in implementing different marketing strategies. Leading institutions such as New England College offer online courses that will sharpen your team’s skills in social media marketing and help them identify which platforms are ideal for a specific industry.

Many businesses simply begin posting to the social platforms that they are familiar with. Don’t forget, your ECommerce Marketing Strategy requires that element of ‘strategy’.

For example; if your target demographic happens to be millennials, then Facebook probably isn’t going to be your best platform.

American women and men between the ages of 25 – 54 make up 32% and 29% of Facebook users, respectively. And only 9% of users are between the ages of 18 – 24.

However, if your audience is a little older Facebook would be the perfect platform, especially since 44% of users check Facebook several times per day.

Understanding which platform your audience is using will be essential in creating an effective social media marketing strategy. Hopefully, some of the statistics provided by Forbes, shown below will help steer you in the right direction.

Pinterest – 42% of online women are Pinterest users. 34% of users are between the ages of 18 – 29 and 28% are between 30 – 49, which creates a wide demographic of women who can be reached on this platform.

Instagram – With 500 million users on the app and 59% of those users checking the app every single day, it’s no doubt that Instagram has great reach. There are no clickable links with Instagram posts, making it more of a brand building tool.

LinkedIn – About 45% of LinkedIn article readers are in upper-level positions (managers, VPs, Directors, C-level)

This makes LinkedIn a B2B marketers dream. Of a group of B2B marketers surveyed, 59% were able to confidently say LinkedIn is generating leads for them. That number would quite likely be even higher if not for the 33% who were unsure on where their leads were coming from.

4. Personalize the Marketing Strategy

We talked about sending automated emails as an innovative ECommerce Marketing Strategy. While the strategy has proved itself in many companies, your customers want to interact with real people and not just an institution.

In a study by Janrain, it was found that 73% of consumers were fed up with being presented with irrelevant content.

500 different people go to Amazon.com. Each one sees a different version of the home page. Why? It’s personalized! Amazon is the leader in online content personalization for one simple reason – it makes money.

Behavioral targeting will play a critical role in effectively creating a personalized marketing strategy. Behavioral targeting is based on context, and when it comes to personalization, context is everything.

As BigCommerce states; Behavioral targeting goes beyond traditional demographic targeting data (i.e. segmenting customers based on their age, sex, location, income, etc). Rather, behavioral targeting layers in more specific actions customers take to get to your site and their ‘on-site behavior patterns’ for the purpose of segmentation.

These include:

  • the number of previous visits a shopper has made to your online store
  • their most frequented category pages
  • guest v. registered members
  • number of visits registered members have made to your website
  • their purchase history
  • their referral traffic source (to enable cohort targeting)
  • their geo-location
  • device used and more behavioral data variables
  • typical purchasing habits (full price, discount, etc.)

As you can imagine, this is a LOT of analytic data to sort through. Don’t despair, there are tools that can help ‘automate’ the process of behavioral targeting a bit.

BigCommerce, the eCommerce platform mentioned above, comes equipped with analytic breakdowns segmented by this type of visitor data to help you streamline the process.

Then there is Personyze, a behavioral targeting tool that collects and analyzes information on the user and makes real time recommendations. It can display targeted banner ads from a range of data like the keywords used for search, click behavior, etc.

And, if you’re using Google Adwords, then you will definitely want to check out the dynamic remarketing option that will allow you to deliver targeted products to visitors who have already shown interest.

5. Involve Your Audience

The most common strategy in online marketing is to generate original content that is relevant to your target audience. This strategy is effective, especially with a trained team. Some of the best New England College online courses focus on communication skills including content creation. A complementary strategy is to allow the audience to participate in content creation. For instance, your audience can add new posts, pictures, or videos to your blog.

loyalty app

Setting up a customer loyalty program is another great way to engage your customers and get them involved.

Gilt does an amazing job encouraging their customers to engage with their loyalty program by offering an effective tiered program. By providing great rewards for moving to the next tier, Gilt is motivating customers to spend more and be more active within their program. Some rewards include early access to sales, an exclusive first look at new products, and preferred customer service – all of which are highly valuable for customers looking to be on the inside edge of fashion.

 

 

You can achieve better results from your online business by improving your marketing strategy. Start with a well-defined plan, measure the results at each phase and involve your audience in content creation and train your team on the most effective marketing strategies.