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With plenty of channels and platforms available for digital marketing in the global digital village, it is getting tougher to pick the right strategy among the variety of digital marketing strategies and tactics you can deploy in your ecommerce marketing to maximize engagement and ROI. For instance, consider eCommerce marketing — How it involves platforms like social media, content, SEO, and email marketing?
eCommerce marketing and digital marketing are not entirely the same areas. But eCommerce stores can integrate all digital mediums to promote a product online and boost RoI.
eCommerce Marketing Techniques for eCommerce Store
This eCommerce marketing blog post will allow you to dive deep into the ocean of the digital world to extract mediums and strategies that enable you to reach new summits of the eCommerce domain. Now, let's discuss the platforms and channels that allow you to grow your online business, attract more traffic, and boost engagement.
Social Media If you think handling your social media effectively is as easy as posting content once a day, you underestimate the liabilities and responsibilities. When it comes to social media, your ecommerce marketing strategy needs you to develop a proper strategy.
Every social media platform has a certain target audience. For instance, if you’re selling cosmetic products, you certainly won’t be able to drive your sales from LinkedIn. Instead, you have your attention and efforts on visual platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. Instagram will be more likely to improve your engagement. For best-performing ads, Facebook is the answer. And you might attract a lot of customers from Pinterest, which you can re-engage with Facebook ads later. After analyzing and evaluating which platform best serves your purpose as per your market segment and target audience, it’s now time to gear up for your marketing strategies. Such as the type of content you post, the tactics you can execute to accelerate your growth game, and how frequently you should post.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Is there anything else that can prove to be more powerful at driving traffic to a website than social media? You must not underestimate the power of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It won’t bring you desired results in a single click. Keep in mind; marketing strategies aren’t about short-term goals. All these techniques demand utter patience, a long-term mindset, and consistency. Most immature retailers focus on immediate gratification when it comes to setting up their eCommerce websites. But if you want to keep your budget as low as possible and have fruitful outcomes, in the long run, SEO is the key. The fact about SEO is that it’s not necessarily meant for selecting keywords for a specific niche but expanding your process and impact a little bit. For instance, if you have a store related to fitness products, you wouldn’t only focus on keywords related to fitness and training. You’d also focus on keywords related to a balanced diet, keto diet, health, etc.
The reason is SEO is all about attracting new customers, not just sticking to the existing ones. By generating content like weight loss programs, diet plans, food supplements, you can still introduce the concept of fitness as a combined result of exercise, diet, and a healthy routine. It allows you to expand your domain and attract a diverse audience who could still be interested in buying from you. Add SEO tools like Plug-In SEO or SEO Manager so you can regularly perform quality and plagiarism checks on your online store’s SEO. These tools reveal the performance of your content and notify you of any SEO blunders you make unconsciously. For instance, duplicate content can result in penalization by Google, which results in your elimination from visibility in search engines and hence reducing your traffic.
Content Marketing
One of the most renowned marketing strategies used for ecommerce marketing in today’s time is content marketing. Your content can be of any type, from blog posts to ebooks, videos, short clips, surveys, and podcasts, etc. Content marketing allows you to engage more audiences while keeping your budget low. But it serves as a trigger factor for a much broader chain reaction; no sudden serving will be offered here. It means that not everyone will be convinced to purchase from your store the first time they visit your website. However, your content can serve as a relationship builder. The more content someone comes into contact with, the more attached the likely customer becomes with your brand and online presence.
In the long run, that familiarity will serve as a law of attraction. Like SEO, it’s like test cricket, not a one-day inning. Content marketing has more to offer rather than just acquisition. It can also educate your customers so that they can adjust their mindset and presence within the niche. For example, if your store is related to cosmetic products, you can create makeup tutorials and beauty hacks kind of videos. This will help your customers look more beautiful using your products and keep them on board to use your product. In the future, whenever customers want to buy a similar product, they’ll be more likely to purchase from you as content marketing boosts customer retention too. Stick to the bottom-to-top approach as the most successful blogs and websites started for a very specific market and became broader as their audience grew. Doing the opposite won’t produce promising results.
Boost Product Visualization
Consumers want to acquire as much information as they can before making a purchase. Not only that, but they like to use a visual approach. Using some unique product visualization techniques can effectively and easily show off your products to the consumers to look at the details without reading descriptions and specifications. Leverage tools that enable customers to zoom in get a 360° spin view of your product, and add roll-over, pop-up info tools are very helpful in improving user experience. Keep in mind the customer’s perspective; give as many utilities and interaction ease as possible to boost engagement and enhance the shopping experience.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can cast a notable shadow on your eCommerce business plan. It can collect data, extract useful patterns from it, and precisely predict customer behavior based on past experiences. Statistical approaches in AI such as Predictive analysis and association rules modeling provide valuable insight and intelligent solutions to manage your eCommerce business effectively and improve customer’s experience. You can collect data to predict unforeseen future events and hidden insights to divert your attention and operations as per the plausible challenges and meet customer’s demands. The better the experience for your customers, the more likely they will be to buy from you in the future, recommend your products, and provide positive reviews. You can also use the AI model to improve your logistics and supply chain process to satisfy customer experience from purchase to delivery. Competitive-edge Product Filtering With more products comes more management. You require advanced product filtering tools with increasing product items and categories in your store. No one has time to search your entire website based on a world full of hustle and alternatives. To provide ease, you have to provide your customers with the options to shop on their terms and find what they need in as few clicks as possible.
A fact is 42% of e-commerce sites are not using advanced filtering tools, and you can gain a competitive edge over the rivals by having a desirable site for customers to find what they need without wasting much of their time and effort. The more categorized and filtered store layout you offer, the easier it is for them to shop and improve customer engagement.
Automate using Chatbots
Again, this is AI in action, but it needs to be discussed as a separate methodology. Chatbots may be the first point of contact that can improve the customer experience. Being readily available to answer queries brings so much ease on the customer's end. You can readily resolve issues and clear your way to the shopping cart. Chatbots make it easy to interact with customers in a very human manner without being involved all the time and, in turn, offer a customized experience that can notably cast an impact on sales. Chatbots not only serve as excellent customer service providers but provide up-selling options on the spot while notifying customers about a discount or deal if available.
Reduce Cart Abandonment
You will most likely encounter cart abandonment if a customer gets to check out and finds the delivery options do not suit their needs. More than 70% of the time, it happens due to additional shipping fees. Other reasons for abandonment involve bitter user experience due to complex checkout processes, a requirement to sign up, and substandard website performance such as slow loading and crashes. One of the most effective ways to address this issue is to introduce an email recovery strategy. When someone abandons a cart, you can send emails to encourage customers to complete their orders. According to Sales Cycle, almost 50 percent of recovery emails are opened, and around 30 to 40 percent result in a completed purchase.
Personalization
Predicting what customers are likely to buy is a step towards success. Understanding your customers’ behavior and buying habits can predict what they are more likely to buy. All of this information improves their shopping experience. A big part of personalization involves local approaches that make people feel connected. This is also a strategy that can help you improve delivery services based on the demographics of your customers and their proximity to your warehouses. Personalization or customization can also help you sell items as per the climatic conditions. You can show customers in the south a different set of products than those in the colder north as per their current climatic conditions. Moreover, you can showcase different products to different customers based on their culture and traditions in cross-border sales.
Collaborations and Partnerships
Brand collaborations or partnerships can allow you to lift your business to new summits. Marketing strategies like collaboration enable you to lift your business by stepping into the domain of other brands. Most perceive brands in similar market segments as rivals, but they can be considered the necessary alliances. For instance, if two brands target the same audience but offer different product categories, they grow together by co-creating content or launching a joint product. By targeting another brand’s existing customers, you can expand the domain of your market campaign; you can target a bigger audience and turn this opportunity into success. Another aspect of collaboration is Influencer marketing, as it allows you to capitalize by making a deal with influencers to grow your business. This strategy serves well if you have a small audience and want a sudden surge in engagement. Choosing an influencer is not about choosing a random attractive person with a maximum number of followers. Before choosing an influencer, dig deeper into the data and keep in mind that:
- They have the right audience
- They are uncontroversial
- They are politically unbiased
- They represent your brand positively
Conclusion
You can find various eCommerce marketing strategies out there, but the methodologies mentioned above and strategies effectively boost RoI, improve customer experience, and improve engagement. anging from budget-friendly and instantaneous to those that will let you outperform in months and require thousands of dollars to implement, these all strategies are effective in their way. Keep in mind; your eCommerce marketing strategy should not rely on a single source but involve various methodologies that allow you to capitalize by targeting the right market and audience effectively.
