With so many different marketing strategies out there, it can be hard to pinpoint what will work best for your business. Whether you’re looking to elevate your existing marketing efforts or just start promoting your online store, choosing from the best options can make all the difference.
Engaging copy, social media presence and email marketing for eCommerce each present ample opportunities for growth. Let’s consider each of these, along with looking at the best approach to tweaking individual campaigns in order to give your business the best possible shot at success.
Essential eCommerce Marketing Strategies
Sustainable eCommerce growth can be driven by smaller, individual promotional strategies executed through different marketing avenues. When these are all pointing in the same direction — without copying and pasting the same content across the board — an opportunity to drive traffic, generate new leads and ultimately convert more sales presents itself.
Investment in high-quality, original content
In the eCommerce marketing space, content is king. Investing in high-quality, original content is an excellent way to grab the attention of online customers and retain it over time. No matter which marketing platforms you use, a content strategy should always be well timed and sensitive to the needs and desires of the person you’re speaking to. If it does this while being optimized for SEO, the business is all the better for it.
If you’re unsure about how to go about this, start by evaluating your website copy. Is it as punchy and polished as it can be? Check your product pages too. If not, it’s easier than ever to hire a freelance writer to help rectify this, especially if your marketing team doesn’t have capacity to take this on anytime soon. From there, it’s a building process.
Tap into the full potential of email marketing
The onset of COVID-19 and the subsequent mass shift to online selling has meant that many businesses have been forced to start using email marketing for the first time. Some have simply ticked the boxes, signing up for the first provider they stumble across and sending out bulk mailers once a month. The key to tapping into the full potential of email marketing in eCommerce is simple: personalization.
Pulling this off means creating campaigns based on individual audience segments that have been branched out from the master list. Email campaigns will now be able to tap into specific interests, which is likely to result in a spike in engagement. If your provider automates much of the process (Sendlane is a good example of this), even better.
Engage with organic and paid social media
Social media marketing is crucial to any eCommerce marketing strategy, as it is a powerful tool for gaining organic traction. Communicating through any of the available platforms not only allows your business to reach customers, but the rest of the industry too. As long as you stick to a consistent tone while optimizing for the different formatting required from platform to platform, you should be able to get good value out of it.
Paid per click (PPC) campaigns can take this value even further. Your business should be budgeting for this alongside the creation of a formal strategy, with a commitment to keep tweaking campaigns in order to reduce spend and increase performance over time.
Adopt data-driven decision making
Getting to know what your audience likes and dislikes is relatively easy when you have actual data to back up your theories. A marketing strategy that embraces data-driven decision making (or DDDM) offers key insights based on practical data that can be used to analyze performance from campaign to campaign. This thinking can be applied across all marketing platforms, linking directly into the broader growth strategy of the business.
On top of being able to tap into analytics reports and gaining a true understanding of who your audience is, DDDM also increases accountability from within the marketing team. This facilitates long-term growth and perhaps even foregoes the need to invest in market research every year.
The eCommerce marketing strategies we’ve mentioned today are ideal to incorporate into your operations if you’re hoping to achieve sustainable growth. Each one can contribute to generating new leads for the business. As a collective, they may result in higher sales conversions and better ROI. This is increasingly important now, as businesses continue working to stay competitive in a challenging post-pandemic global economic landscape.