Tips & Guides — 06 May 2022
eCommerce Marketing
Guide
eCommerce store applies an arsenal of different tactics, tools, and strategies in pursuit of potential customers and sales. It never hurts to get a little bit of refreshing eСommerce marketing knowledge.
With the progress of internet technologies and communications, eCommerce prosperity keeps growing. More and more online stores and small businesses are appearing, making the competition even harder each day. Therefore, it’s essential to find ways to distinguish yourself from your competitors and find unique methods to attract and retain customers.
Let’s define what eCommerce marketing is and highlight its main strategies with some marketing tips along the way. We’ll then pick out the tools and technologies you must-have to rapidly grow your eCommerce business.
eCommerce marketing is an activity directed towards spreading awareness of the eCommerce website and increasing sales of its products or services. eCommerce marketers use various traffic channels to attract visitors and induce them to make a purchase.
Marketing strategies directly depend on the channels used for promotion and lead generation. Let’s take a closer look at the main areas of eСommerce marketing.
Search engine optimization (SEO) aims to achieve high organic ranking in the search engine results pages (SERP). There are many different techniques to help your online store rank higher up on search engines and attract more website visitors. Anyway, mostly SEO relies on Google’s ranking algorithm to optimize content.
In addition to the technical eCommerce site settings such as pages load time and structure, SEO relies quite heavily on content management. When you are selling products online, you surely need product reviews and videos to attract buyers. But you need to use particular keywords to make your content work and bring organic traffic to your website. At the same time, do not forget about content marketing so that your product pages indeed inform about your eCommerce business and generate product sales.
Besides SEO, you can get potential buyers to see your store at the top of search engines with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. PPC ensures that the person who entered the search term corresponding to your campaign will see your ad. Efficiency is evident because you make payments only if the user clicks on the ad link.
In addition to search engines, the paid advertisement for eCommerce marketing must include advertising campaigns at online shopping services such as Google Shopping, different social media platforms, and target each stage of the customer’s journey. All the paid marketing costs will ultimately benefit in the long term if you did proper keyword research.
One of the biggest benefits of social media marketing (SMM) for eСommerce is the ability to present products visually and very catchy. The target audience already receives content that suits them when they are scrolling through the feeds, so product ads aren’t usually perceived as something inappropriate.
Not all social media are ideal for eCommerce, because the main task here is usually to show products in all their glory. Social media platforms that deal with photography and video are better suited for eCommerce marketing than, for instance, blogging. Plus, the rise of services like Instagram Shopping will have a positive effect on your marketing efforts in the future.
Email marketing has always played an important role in eCommerce marketing, but this channel retains its significance in modern times thanks to marketing automation. It is noteworthy that you can stimulate both new buyers and loyal customers who have already made purchases before by using email campaigns wisely.
eCommerce marketer can use a system of discounts for new users who register in an online store. Then, if the customer abandons a shopping cart with the product, he can be politely reminded about the abandoned cart. During the seasonal holidays, an email list with discounts is in good demand. The open rate and conversion rate from promotional emails are pretty high. And this is far from the whole list of marketing tactics and funnels available for eCommerce businesses using email channel.
Behind the curtain of digital marketing, there is a hidden layer of partnerships and marketing collaborations. More precisely, everyone knows about this direction in marketing, but in general, this subject isn’t highlighted in articles and other materials like affiliate marketing or influencer marketing. However, all referral programs and any kind of partnership within marketing campaigns are just parts of a larger picture – partner marketing.
Partner marketing can suit different eCommerce business directions and appear in such forms as customer referrals and joint marketing. To create a continuously evolving customer base, you can use customer referrals. It’s easy when the buyer refers his friends to the shop, and a one-time specific code can be generated for that client.
Of course, affiliate marketing still remains a fundamental tool for eCommerce promotional campaigns. It’s like having an army of marketers working to promote your eCommerce business and the products you supply. All you have to do is create a fair affiliate program and attract professional affiliates and publishers.
The sufficient work of partnership marketing, for its part, is ensured by the automation and compatibility of different technologies. The partnership marketing software of your choice should be accountable for these tasks.
Even if you have one partner in your affiliate program, you need to track clicks and conversions that this partner generates. But what if you have hundreds or thousands of affiliates? You would need a proven technology to track and manage this data flow so you can analyze and improve marketing performance.
The central part of the affiliate software work is definitely tracking all the event-level data that leads to sales. But this is far from the full activity range that a good partner marketing solution for eCommerce should accomplish. Thus, while choosing a partner marketing platform, make sure it provides you with the following features and services:
As a last resort, it’s absolutely imperative that the platform has an open API to implement any integrations you need to keep the workflow. Affise partner marketing platform has just that and many more.
As we said, it’s crucial for eCommerce that the marketing solution allows quick integration with the tools vital for the industry. This section will discuss in detail what essential technologies are included and already available in the Affise Marketplace.
As you can see, the eCommerce vertical is immense. Unlike other industries, there are many marketing channels to conquer to move your brand awareness forward, attract new customers, and grow your revenue. The key to successful execution is to build a marketing strategy that automates routine tasks so that online store owners and eCommerce marketers can focus on growing their business.
We give partner marketing a particular preference because it has so much potential for eCommerce business expansion, and we provide the universal tech solution for these purposes.
Written by
Affise Academy
Affise is a partner marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to scale via all possible performance marketing channels. Synergy of technology and our long standing experience lets you expand your partnerships, automate every step of the campaign lifecycle and make data-driven decisions.
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