E-commerce Marketing Guide: Strategies & Plan

Understanding marketing strategies to enhance your overall sales is crucial.

• Build Your E-Mail List
• Write Helpful Blog Content
• Give Bonuses For Referrals
• Competition analysis
• Personalize Customer Communication
• Set Up Cart Recovery Campaigns and more

The strategy helps you enhance your site’s visibility in search engines and send automatic advertisement e-mails to customers.

One of the best examples of e-commerce marketing is Amazon, which leverages customer data extensively to send highly personalized emails. Moreover, the company regularly checks the data of regular customers to send them discounts and offers.

A survey conducted by Adobe found that e-commerce businesses that customize the buying experience saw a 10% boost in sales.

What is E-commerce Marketing?

• E-commerce marketing is an online strategy that helps e-commerce business owners to sell their products quickly.
• In short, the marketing strategy helps the sellers promote their products or services, attract customers, and drive sales through digital channels.
• The primary function of e-commerce marketing is to increase brand awareness, attract potential customers, and convert them into regular customers.

Related: 6 Unique Strategies To Increase ROI For Your Ecommerce Business

A report by social media advertisement stated that online businesses using e-commerce marketing saw a 78% hike in their sales in 2023. 

For example- Walmart saw a hike in its sales in 2023 by utilizing various marketing strategies to drive better online sales. These include email, social media, content, and influencer marketing.

Top E-commerce Marketing Strategies

Build Your E-Mail List

Email listing is the strategy by which you can collect the email addresses of your customers who have visited your site to check for a product or service.

Here’s how you can build your e-mail list:

• Integrate Email Marketing Software: To get ahead in the journey of listing e-mail, integrate with email marketing software like Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or HubSpot.
• Set Up Opt-in Forms: Customize the design and fields of the forms to match your branding and collect relevant information from subscribers.

Write Helpful Blog Content

Keeping your page content precise and informative can attract many potential customers to your site.

• Content Planning and Organization: To structure your content in a proper format, use tools like Trello, Asana, or CoSchedule. These can help you make a better product description and company profile.
• SEO Optimization: To improve visibility and attract organic traffic, embrace SEO concepts and utilize tools like Yoast SEO. This can help you write content with better SEO strategies, enhancing traffic on the page.

Give Bonuses For Referrals

• Automated Reward Distribution: This can help you distribute automated rewards to customers, such as discounts, store credits, or free products. To do so, use tools like ReferralCandy or Smile.io.
• Personalized Referral Messaging: Create personalized referral messaging to encourage customers to share their unique referral links with their network.

Look At What Your Competition Is Doing

• SEO Analysis: To understand the organic visibility and keyword targeting for the competitor, make sure to analyze the SEO tactics. This can be done with tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz
• Customer Reviews and Feedback: Monitor customer reviews and feedback about your competitors’ products or services to identify areas for improvement and customer pain points.

Personalize Customer Communication

• Behavioral Tracking and Analysis: To track your customers’ behavior on your site,  use tools like Mixpanel, or Kissmetrics. The tools can let you know the exact situation of the customer’s purchasing journey.
• Dynamic Content Personalization: To customize website content, product recommendations, and marketing messages for individual customers. For example,  e-commerce sites like Shopify, Magento, or WooCommerce offer built-in personalization to their customers.

Set Up Cart Recovery Campaigns

• Triggered Email Automation: Email automation for cart abandonment helps you send customized e-mails to your customers who have abandoned their carts. Campaign Monitor reports that bulk emails have an average CTR of just 2.62%, while triggered emails have an average CTR of 11.14%.
• Optimize Email Timing and Frequency: Determine the optimal timing and frequency for sending cart recovery emails to maximize effectiveness and minimize annoyance to recipients.

What Is an E-Commerce Marketing Plan?

An e-commerce marketing plan accommodates a complete virtual method geared toward augmenting sales and fostering enterprise expansion. In this plan, you can deploy various tools and methodologies to enhance website visitors, drive conversions, and increase sales for online retail ventures.

Spanning from e-mail marketing and search engine optimization to pay-per-click advertising and social media merchandising, an e-commerce marketing plan is designed to craft focused campaigns addressing clients across various ranges of the sales funnel.

How To Build An E-Commerce Marketing Plan

Conduct A Complete Marketing Audit

Make sure to question yourself

• Which channels are most effective
• What was the rate of growth of your site in the previous year?
• Where can you improve your business?
• Which chances did you leave?

• Review Current Marketing Efforts: Gather all relevant data and information related to your market activity. This should include website analytics, social media metrics, email marketing performance, advertising campaigns, etc.
• Assess Website Performance: Analyze key website metrics such as traffic sources, bounce rates, conversion rates, average order value, and overall sales performance.

Create Compelling Content

• Social Media Presence: Use tools like Hootsuite or Buffer with their respective APIs. This can help you know the engagement metrics, audience demographics, and social media reach.
• Paid Advertising Campaigns: Make sure to integrate with the advertising platform, which allows you to automate data extraction and analysis of ad performance. This includes impressions, clicks, conversions, and CPA.

Pick The Right E-Commerce Marketing Strategies

• Utilize a Mix of Paid and Organic Strategies: To maximize your reach and effectiveness for customers, make sure to integrate paid advertising and organic marketing tactics.
• This includes PPC ads, social media ads, and influencer partnerships and can complement organic efforts like SEO, content marketing, and social media engagement.
• Measure and Iterate: Make sure to analyze the performance regularly. This can help you identify what’s working well and what needs improvement.

Identify Your Target Customers

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems: Implement CRM to track and manage customer interactions.
• Purchase History Analysis: To identify patterns and trends in customer buying behavior analyze the customer’s previous purchase history.

Level Up Your Brand Photos

• Camera Equipment and Settings: To level up your brand photos, you should invest in high-quality cameras such as DSLRs and others. Also, understand camera settings like aperture, shutter speed, and ISO to capture sharp, well-exposed images.
• Product Styling and Props: Style your products thoughtfully by arranging them visually pleasingly. In addition, consider incorporating lifestyle elements or contextual cues to create a narrative around your products and evoke emotion in viewers.

Build A Social Media Presence On Your Target Market’s Top Platforms

• User-Generated Content (UGC) Management: Encourage and manage user-generated content using platforms like TINT, Yotpo, or Pixlee. This can showcase authentic customer experiences and build social proof.
• Social Media Listening and Trend Monitoring: Monitor social media trends and conversations using tools like Trendspottr, Talkwalker, or Sprout Social’s Listening. Also, track industry trends, hashtags, and relevant topics to stay informed and capitalize on trending content opportunities.

Tackle Your Non-Branded Keyword Strategy

Website Structure and Navigation: Ensure that your website’s structure and navigation are optimized for user experience and search engine crawling. This helps you to guide users and search engines to relevant pages optimized for non-branded keywords.

Pricing And Positioning Strategy

• Value Proposition Development: Define your unique value proposition and identify the key benefits and features that set your products or services apart from competitors. Moreover, use customer feedback, surveys, and focus groups to understand the perceived value of your offerings and prioritize features accordingly.
• Pricing Strategy Selection: Choose a pricing strategy that aligns with your business objectives, target market, and value proposition. This includes cost-based, value-based, competitive, and penetration pricing.

Build Authority With Backlinks

• Link Quality Analysis: Utilize backlink analysis tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz to analyze your current backlink profile and identify areas for improvement. Also, monitor your competitors’ backlinks to identify potential opportunities for acquiring similar links.
• Canonicalization and Redirect Management: To consolidate link equity and avoid duplicate content issues, ensure proper canonicalization of URLs. Also, preserve link equity and maintain a seamless user experience.

Target Customers, Personas, And Markets

Geotargeting and Localization: Implement geotargeting strategies to tailor marketing messages and promotions to specific geographic regions or local markets.

However, to get better results, location-based advertising platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads should be used to target customers based on their geographical location.

Create Campaigns And Goals

• Marketing Automation Platforms: These platforms allow for automated email marketing, lead nurturing, campaign tracking, and reporting, saving time and improving efficiency.
• A/B Testing and Optimization: Use A/B testing tools like Optimizely, VWO, or Google Optimize to experiment with variations and identify the most effective approaches.
• Multichannel Campaign Integration: Use marketing automation platforms or customer data platforms (CDPs) to orchestrate multichannel campaigns across email, social media, paid advertising, and other channels.

Conclusion

Mastering e-commerce marketing is indispensable for modern sellers aiming to maximize sales and brand visibility. Strategies like personalized email campaigns, content optimization, and referral incentives exemplify effective approaches to engaging customers and driving conversions.

Ready to take your e-commerce marketing to the next level? ResultFirst can help you master the art of selling online and boost your sales like never before. Get started today and watch your brand’s visibility soar!