Arguably, not so long ago, building full-scale eCommerce stores was unheard of and unknown to many.At Dynamologic we know that eCommerce sales around the world make over 4.9 trillion US dollars. As the numbers show, the eCommerce market has grown so much that facing the competition is no joke, even if you have a great product.
That’s why at Dynamologic we specialize in developing stores for Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, and OpenCart. Explore our portfolio to get to know our work and request a quote for free.
If you are an eCommerce store owner or a marketing specialist who has not interacted with the eCommerce market much, here you will get an in-depth understanding of eCommerce marketing before entering this industry.
Considering that some of the largest enterprises have become part of the eCommerce ecosystem, there is so much opportunity to learn on the go.
In this guide, we will help you better understand how things work in eCommerce marketing and what you need to do to see success while selling your products online.
What is eCommerce Marketing?
Marketing eCommerce aims at omnichannel promotion of online stores to drive the company’s sales. Whether your store uses Shopify, Squarespace or a custom WordPress development or an adaptation of widely used builders like Elementor, putting the resources and effort into marketing is absolutely essential.
If you’re new to this industry, here are some of the basic eCommerce notes for you to get a glimpse of what we’re getting into.
First, it covers some of the primary functions that drive traffic to eCommerce websites and put the product in front of your target buyers.
Then it strives with great copy to convert website visitors into buyers and re-engage with them to return to shop more. But, on the other hand, it helps shoppers quickly find what they want and have high satisfaction, which eventually drives loyalty.
Finally, eCommerce marketing is the ultimate method for eCommerce businesses to remind people about their brand to drive awareness, recognition, and growth.
Eventually, eCommerce digital marketing is often not only a tool for a company to increase sales but a win-win both for businesses and shoppers. Customers find what they want and are served with the best process possible, while businesses boost their sales and keep increasing the numbers of active clients.
The practice of eCommerce marketing uses all promotional tactics in the digital realm to bring targeted traffic to online stores and products. However, just getting traffic is not enough.
imaIt is the job of marketers to convert that traffic into paying customers and, in the long run, make sure that customers not only return but also keep increasing the amount of money they spend while shopping with the given online store.
One of the most popular methods of working with and analyzing traffic is through tracking incoming calls. For a more professional approach, consider using call tracking software to improve ROI in the long term, think of a better customer support approach, and use this data to boost website visits.
The set of tools that are used for covering these cycles varies a lot from industry to industry. So read on to learn some of the most effective approaches that are widely used today, to some extent, essential for you to keep your market share in the fiercely competitive market consistently.
Channels for eCommerce Marketing
This process of driving traffic and transforming it into loyal customers can be handled in hundreds of ways.
Search Engine Optimization, SEO
The most popular channel of eCommerce marketing is search engine optimization.
This tactic is discussed in more detail further in the article, but it is a means that helps people find your business first when searching specific keywords on popular search engines. In the long term, it also helps improve processes such as selling in-demand products, boosting brand awareness, etc.
The benefit of a similar marketing approach is that it looks organic and natural to the customer. It is not a pushy advertisement shouting that your business is the best. Instead, it ends up being a result that people find from their own independent research.
Social Media
Social media ads are the next popular channel for eCommerce marketing.
People who spend a lot of time on social media are more likely to be shopping online. A recent study showed that 72% of people had used social media to find a new product. Ads can be a push or a little help for people to learn about your business and if you did your targeting right, hopefully also shop with you.
Influencers
A different marketing tactic that is widely used in eCommerce marketing is influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is when you, as a business, find someone who can promote your business. The collaborations may vary from influencer to influencer and from business to business.
In some cases, it would be a detailed advertisement. In other cases, it can be a product placement, or you can ask the influencer to do unbox therapy. Considering that influencer marketing is an extremely effective tactic, its popularity keeps growing every other year.
According to popular stats, it is worth over 10 billion dollars as of 2021. Interestingly, 50.7% of the brands that have some collaboration with influencers are eCommerce stores.
This, in itself, is yet another indicator of the increasing popularity of eCommerce businesses. The great thing about influencer marketing is that there are so many influencers out there that you can always find one friendly and acceptable for your budget.
It is all about finding the right match in terms of budget and potential reach of the target audience that the influencer can bring as an outcome of your collaboration.
Content Marketing
Finally, consider content marketing if it is relevant to your business model. Make your business resourceful and assist people even if they are not there to shop from you. If you manage to give people value through your content, for example, in the form of blog posts, guides, and so on, they will trust your products more.
For example, if your eCommerce store sells fitness equipment, consider starting a blog on healthy food lists to provide value to your website visitors.
Planning is key, so make sure you have a Content Marketing Calendar entirely set up before you start implementing the first steps from your strategy.
To increase your target audience’s reach, you should post your content across all fit social media channels and websites.
The great thing when it comes to content marketing is that it is still the cheapest of all. Factually speaking, content marketing costs 62% less and converts six times more frequently than other marketing methods, mainly traditional marketing.
How to Build a Killer eCommerce Marketing Strategy?
If you want to truly succeed and have a reasonable return on the money you invest for marketing efforts, you need a good and tested marketing strategy.
There are way too many factors that may influence your strategy.
- Size of your business.
- Your financial situation.
- The stage that your business is in.
- Milestones you want to achieve through specific campaigns.
- Potential you believe your company has.
- The list goes on.
Set Clear Goals & Objectives
It doesn’t matter if you work from home, remote, freelance, or office-based, the success of your work and business lies behind clearly setting goals and objectives.
Often, goals and objectives are used interchangeably.
- Goals are usually generic ideas that indicate what you want to achieve.
- Objectives are strategic steps, ideally identified by specific goals.
How both differ:
- In contrast to goals, objectives are measured in numbers, are more specific, and are easier to measure.
- Additionally, objectives may have deadlines for making the measurement process more objective and precise.
Goal example:
- Generating more revenue.
Objective:
- Double your revenues within six months through marketing campaigns worth a certain amount of money.
- Increasing the number of new customers by XX%.
- Increase your brand awareness by XX% of penetration in your target buyers segment.
Research Your Market & Create Buyer Personas
Once you clearly define your company goals, it is the perfect time for understanding who the people are, or buyers, in this case, that can become your ideal buyers-your buyer persona. Without clearly defining your buyer persona, most of your eCommerce marketing plan is going to be skewed and inefficient.
By definition, a buyer persona represents or combines the qualifications that the “dream” customer for your business would have. This is a necessary process that should be thoroughly thought through.
To some extent, buyer personas reflect your goals, ideals, and business philosophy, so this is something you will need to figure out even beyond marketing efforts.
A big step for defining the right buyer persona is researching the market you are in and, in some cases, analyzing the buyer personas of your competitor businesses. You can also consider separate competitor analysis for more defined results.
Creating a buyer persona requires surveys, interviewing customers, prospects, people who you think would be interested in your product collect as much market info from people as possible. Incentivize people to participate in your surveys with gifts and giveaways. Use open-ended questions to give enough room for people to express their feelings and ideas, which can eventually guide you in the right direction. The more info you acquire, the more precise your conclusions will be.
Use information collected to map, break down observations and connect the dots to drive useful buyer information. The idea behind connecting the dots is to create a fictional person who would be the perfect customer for your product.
For example, let’s say you have an online store of luxury purses. An example of a buyer persona can be a woman in her forties who works at a corporation with a higher than average income (ideally, you would mention the numbers).
This woman does not have young children. That is why her go-to is a purse rather than a large bag with all necessary items for children. The list can go on and on…
The list should include even details such as their demographics, personal traits, goals, ideals about self-image, and so forth.
To test the buyer persona you come up with, it is the right time to ask some questions to yourself.
- What types of social media do your buyer persona use if any?
- Do they know your product, and if so, then how well?
- How big of a solution is your product in their lives?
- How much does your product impact their life?
The more questions you ask and the more objective and data-driven answers you give to those questions, the better the results you will achieve through your buyer persona.
Keep in mind that this will become the core around which you are going to develop your product, eCommerce marketing strategy, customer retention strategy, and some other big business decisions.
Timing for Your eCommerce Marketing Strategy
Make sure that it is neither too short term nor too long term. The issue with a short-term plan is that it may become a challenge to use company resources efficiently.
At some point, marketing expenses exceed or may end up being much less than the accounting team has projected and, as a result, create some inefficiencies and shortcomings.
Usually, marketing trends, especially for a fast-growing industry such as eCommerce, change way too often. Therefore, the likeliness of your plan becoming outdated halfway through the implementation is very high.
On the flip side, you never know what stage your business will be in, in a few years, let alone ten years. However, this information is crucial because marketing plans vastly change based on what stage your business is.
Finally, it is always essential to ensure that the marketing department is never too ahead or behind the company’s other departments, especially the development and production teams. To keep all the teams connected and aware of each other, you can consider using robust task management software to avoid unwanted miscommunications. This way, you can always make sure that marketing is moving forward in line with other parts of the business.
Also, make sure that you don’t overwhelm or underwhelm the rest of the teams through your marketing messaging.
If, for example, you announce a new product feature that is still not ready, it can become a source of stress and demotivation for your development team, as they are far from being prepared.
To avoid similar misunderstandings, ensure that you involve specialists from the project management department and are up to date about the overall business situation.
For this, consider creating your workplace ethics & etiquette playbook and always stay up to date with other team members about recent changes in your business.
Business Success Comes From Building A Great Website
As a company that specializes in eCommerce development, at Dynamologic we know the value and power of well-built technology just as we know why you should trust professionals for responsive design and the right web hosting for your needs. Do not forget to take this into account when setting up the goals and objectives.
Optimize your eCommerce Website
If you want to succeed in your marketing strategy for an eCommerce business, you should never forget about the importance of optimizing your website and ensuring overall website protection. This is a core step that should be done to support, and sometimes, drive the marketing strategy.
There are many methods for optimizing your eCommerce store website for both sales and data safety. To list a few, you should improve your product pages with better product photos and descriptions. Alternatively, you can revisit your product pricing or deliver more personalized content to your target audience.
So, for the sake of this guide, we will touch upon three primary methods that you should pay attention to when optimizing your eCommerce website-user interface and user experience design, search engine optimization, and a mobile-friendly website.
UI/UX Design
User interface and user experience design, also known as UI and UX design, should make your website as easy to navigate through as possible. Better navigation would make user experience better and, therefore, make your brand stand out more for the website visitors.
Distinctive brand design is as important as the user-friendliness of the website. At Dynamologic we design professionals logos, both from scratch or on top of ideas you drafted with a logo maker, but the branding you build on top must be coherent and balanced so visitors convert
Search Engine Optimization, SEO
As SEO professionals, we know that a recent study shows that 75% of people who search for something on search engines never look for information past the first page of the results. They don’t even look into the results with as much attention when they appear on the bottom of the first page.
Read: Topic Clusters The Next Evolution of SEO
That’s why increasing your brand awareness and traffic to your website has a significant potential of later converting into sales. The higher your website ranks, the more likely it is to attract people’s attention.
As simple as that.
Mobile-friendliness
The role of mobile devices became predominant.
Read: How To Create A Successful Mobile Application
There are over three billion people worldwide who own smartphones and only just a little more than one billion who have a computer. This is a significant indicator of how much more people use smartphones and, therefore, how important it is to have a mobile-friendly store.
If you have a website for your eCommerce store, you can use different tools to analyze and see how mobile-friendly your website is and adjust accordingly. Even people who use computers are used to one-page websites that have the logic of a mobile website.
To ensure that your website is on the right track, gather feedback or talk to your buyer persona to collect opinions, which should help you understand how to restructure your website to better fit their mobile lifestyle.
Email Marketing
An email marketing campaign is something you should highly consider as part of your marketing strategy for an eCommerce business.
Conversations are going on and off about email marketing not being efficient enough due to low open rates and other factors.
Read: How Does Personalization in Email Marketing Increase Customer Engagement
However, if you do everything right and always keep up with email marketing trends, your campaign’s inefficiency chances are meager.
Think about these numbers to give you an idea about how big of an opportunity email marketing can be.
- For example, 99% of consumers check their email daily. This is equal to approximately six billion active email addresses around the world.
- On the other hand, 80% of the retailers find email marketing one of the most effective ways for customer retention.
Email marketing is something that you can use as part of your eCommerce marketing strategy during different stages of your business. The key is to follow email marketing trends and adjust them with your business developments. An example of a recent email marketing trend is using subject lines that start with lowercase. Thanks to such catchy email subject lines, your emails stand out from the rest of the emails.
Another tactic is to mention their name in the email so that the content gets more of a personal touch and does not seem too automated. Your business would definitely benefit if you have the best marketing emails.
Nowadays, even the tone of emails has changed. Instead of formal and professional welcome emails, friendly and cheerful messages have become the way to go. These trends do not casually fall from the sky and are outcomes of an array of different factors. Companies in different industries need to keep up with them as much as possible.
For example, creating easy-to-recognize email templates with popular visual graphics will help convert more prospects. You should also try out some of the free email automation tools to jump-start on what’s out there and what is it that you need.
However, your templates should sound as natural and personal as possible. People usually do not react to bot-like emails. It’s also important to maintain high email deliverability by the actions you take in your email marketing strategies.
So, be sure you are always following these, and in some cases, you can become the one dictating the market trends.
Tips for efficient email marketing:
- Follow the “4-second test” which is about capturing people’s attention within four seconds.
- Do not write overused sales keywords and terms.
- Make your emails as personalized as possible. If you value quality over quantity, you can even consider sending fewer emails but make sure that you have a personalized message for each receiver rather than sending emails in bulk.
- The shorter your messages, the better. No one has time for reading long emails, especially if they are for promotional purposes.
- Use urgency but do not overuse it. For example, you can say that there is a limited time or a limited stock for buying your product but avoid overusing it and stressing people out.
- Make sure your emails use design elements relevant to your branding.
- Mobile-friendly emails are a must. If you are using a particular font, image or chart, make sure they work well for mobile devices, too, as many people read their emails on their mobile phones. Skipping this point will make you look unprofessional.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing and eCommerce go hand in hand.
It is all about creating an online community, expanding, and, eventually, monetizing it. To help you picture the bond between eCommerce and social media platforms, think about this.
- More than 50% of internet users worldwide use social media platforms as a tool for searching and learning about different brands.
Read: How to Create an Effective Facebook Ad
Additionally, you can set up a chatbot for Messenger and get in touch with your potential clients, saving time and resources.
Examples of the benefits that social media can bring to an eCommerce business include:
- Increasing overall traffic and the number of visitors to your store.
- Increasing sales by turning visitors into buyers.
- Building brand awareness for your eCommerce store.
- Engaging with your customers and making sure you are always in touch with them.
- Expanding connections and networks to prospects and leads. This can be done through answering questions, organizing challenges, campaigns, and so on.
- Boosting your customer support and making it accessible across different channels.
As a first step, consider setting goals you want to achieve with the help of social media platforms.
At this stage, the more measurable your goals are, the better.
Then after you set your goals, make sure there are no gaps in your data about your target audience.
- Do you know where they are from, what is their age?
- What time do they start using social media platforms?
- How often do they shop online and so on?
The more detailed information you have about your target audience, the better. This will help you do better targeting while implementing your marketing strategy and spend less money. In the meantime, you should, of course, conduct social media analysis from time to time to adjust any nuances for better results.
Podcasts
A fun way to share content and engage your audience is through niche podcasts. You can write podcast episodes spanning a variety of fields, yet stick to your core niche and graphic branding. Influencers, business owners, market gurus, or journalists would sit down and talk about your eCommerce store products, features, pros, and cons, customer stories, and emerging trends.
This works simply because it’s a natural conversation and, at the same time, it is fun to listen to for different purposes (i.e., fun, curious, market research, and so on).
Finally, social media platforms are an excellent tool for eCommerce businesses to drive traffic and gain partnerships. Whether you sell vehicle parts or are in the fashion eCommerce industry, it can be a great way of finding partner companies, influencers, or other parties who would be interested in a collaboration with your eCommerce store.
Optimize your eCommerce Marketing Budget
An efficient eCommerce marketing budget is what for succeeding in your marketing campaigns. This is also a significant point for getting an expected amount of return on investment and not wasting any money.
Sometimes, the return on investments from marketing can be as high as total startup funding. To acquire such results, you first need to set clear objectives and make sure they are realistic enough for you to meet in the given time frames.
A recent study found that 47% of chief marketing officers use the previous year’s budget and decrease or increase the budget for the new year by a certain percentage. They do not calculate how much money they should allocate for the year’s marketing plans and activities. As you might have already guessed, this is not an optimal approach.
The ideal approach for coming up with a reasonable eCommerce marketing budget requires the definition of key performance indicators (KPIs) that align well with your marketing objectives. Then the sum of money needed for handling the processes for achieving the listed KPIs should be calculated.
Another essential point you should consider for optimizing your marketing budget is ensuring that your product matches the brand image your marketing strategy is creating.
Otherwise, you will disappoint your leads and the money you spent for bringing them to your eCommerce business will go to waste.
You can try to find B2B leads by scraping Google to avoid wasting financial resources. Sometimes, it may even hurt your brand image. To avoid similar situations, make sure you are in touch with your different departments, and everyone agrees.
As an eCommerce store, you can also consider using cryptocurrencies for covering business spending. You can even start accepting payments with cryptocurrencies and use it as a marketing point too.
Considering how popular cryptocurrencies have become and how their popularity keeps growing, you will encounter many opportunities through such approaches. This will also improve user experiences as the payment times and fees will be drastically cut off, especially if you compare it with traditional payment methods such as credit or debit cards, bank transfers, etc.
For example, the average confirmation time for Etherium is just 16 seconds to 5 minutes if your customer sends it from their wallet to yours. Crypto has become really popular recently among individuals and businesses for a couple of reasons such as safety. As more and more businesses are accepting them, it’s essential to not stay behind.
Moreover, cryptocurrencies are safe and secure options for business transactions and transfers. If you are new, keep up with small business payment options, such as using credit or debit cards, mobile payments, or so on.
Bonus Tips for a Killer eCommerce Marketing
Finally, to market your online store and improve your online sales promotion strategies, you should consider some additional tasks.
- Focus on integrating remarketing and re-targeting in your marketing strategy. Businesses often think of people who have not turned into customers as lost causes. This, however, should not be the case even in dropshipping marketing, let alone if you have a small segment you want to reach. Re-targeting is always great for reminding people about your brand, and, sometimes, even encouraging them to reconsider their opinions about your business.
- Pay more attention to the organic growth of your social media accounts. Social media ads can be very effective if you do them properly. However, it would help if you did not focus and entirely rely on them. Make sure your social media content is good enough for your target audience in the long run. This is one of the promotional tactics that should drive new people to your page without spending additional money on advertising your eCommerce business.
- Invest in SMS marketing. Nowadays, phones have become an inseparable part of people’s lives. Sending marketing messages through SMS can be an effective way to reach people who dislike using social media platforms or those who do not check their email accounts often enough.
- Human touch is a must. With the development of technologies and increased startup marketing automation opportunities, personalization and human touch in business-customer interactions keep decreasing. If you have the resources of hiring a customer care team instead of automating those processes, do so. If you have the resources for sending postcards with your customers’ names while sending them their products, do so. If you can congratulate your customers on their birthdays, anniversaries, or on holidays, do so. The list can go on, but you get the point. Arguably, this is also a selling point while acquiring new customers.
Final Words
We hope this guide helped you find the best way to market your eCommerce website. The most significant part here is to have a sound eCommerce marketing plan that will guide you throughout the process.
So, take advantage of the no-office age of COVID, take advantage of remote skills, put together a great team and make sure you plan everything ahead of time, avoid overestimations, and set unrealistic goals to achieve.
Next, track everything you can once you implement your marketing plan and see what pieces are missing or improved. Finally, make changes and make sure you are always on top of the market trends.
