You may have an excellent eCommerce website in place, but you won’t be able to drive sales without an effective marketing strategy for online business. The main focus of your eCommerce marketing strategy should be to drive qualified traffic to your site, ensuring more conversions, and thus a fluffy profit margin.
Sounds great right? Well, we all know that it isn’t so easy.
Don’t worry, we’ve got your back! The Fully Accountable eCommerce and digital finance experts collaborated to bring you our TOP eCommerce Marketing Tips that will help you grow your business.
eCommerce Marketing Tips
Work on SEO
When you manage a store online, you just can’t neglect SEO. You want the maximum amount of relevant traffic on your website to increase your sales, and for that, you need to master both on-page SEO and off-page SEO so that your website ranks high on Google and other search engines.
On-Page SEO
While there are numerous things you can do to improve your website’s SEO performance, a critical on-page task is to optimize your eCommerce website to ensure more visits. Since Google keeps on introducing changes to its search engine algorithm, you need to stay informed of the updates so that you can do things right.
For instance, while the traditional technique of stuffing keywords into website content was once useful, it’s no longer helpful today. Nowadays, you need to include keywords that you want your website to rank on Google.
So, start by conducting keyword selection. Choosing the right keyword is extremely important: If your website ranks for a wrong or irrelevant keyword, you will struggle to convert the online traffic into sales.
This is because you’ll be driving irrelevant traffic to your website, with visitors who were never interested in your products in the first place. The result is a high bounce rate and low CTR, both of which will in turn hurt your SEO performance.
To identify relevant keywords, consider using tools such as Ahrefs, Google, or even Amazon search. Once you have identified the right keywords, incorporate them into the titles, headings, descriptions, and content so that they fit in naturally.
If your eCommerce website was designed on WordPress, the best approach is to use the SEO Yoast plugin, which allows you to optimize all these elements, helps you identify and resolve any issues on your website, and even create an XML sitemap, which is critical if you want to be detected by Google’s search engine crawlers that rank your website.
The content you post on your website, such as product descriptions, blog posts, etc., should all be fresh and original. Using simple wordings and phrases with relevant keywords allows Google to quickly recognize answers to specific queries. Be sure to keep users’ search intent in mind, and provide clear answers to what your target audience might ask on Google. Also, in the URLs, include the keywords for the respective web pages.
Seek technical help from web developers to optimize the page-loading speeds and mobile-friendliness of your eCommerce website. Since these are important aspects of user experience, Google attaches significant importance to each of these when ranking websites. Thus, do not neglect them.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is all about link-building. This entails having links to your website on other web pages. Whether you create backlinks on your own or ask other website owners to add your website links on their site, there are a few things to keep in mind:
Firstly, your link-building task should only focus on high-authority websites that are high-ranking, reliable websites and attract a lot of traffic, such as government or state websites. Based on the latest Google algorithm updates, your website rank can actually drop if your website links are present on low-ranking, unreliable websites.
Also, consider using relevant words for anchor text, which is the text for the links you create. Furthermore, be sure to link to the right landing pages on your website. The websites you link to must contain clear CTAs, and other elements that are sure to drive conversions.
Finally, don’t forget to track and monitor the SEO performance of your website using Google Analytics. In its Channels report of the Acquisition section, you should be able to discover keywords that drive the highest traffic, and generate the most sales.
Leverage Social Media
When it comes to marketing online, no channel is more powerful than social media. As opposed to traditional media, social media allows for a tremendous level of targeting so you can market to a specific audience and relevant markets. On top of that, social media offers two-way interaction with your target audience.
You interact with them with content, and they engage with your content in different ways, such as likes, comments, shares, retweets, etc., that help you analyze the success of your marketing efforts. Based on how your audience reacts to your posts, you can refine and tailor the content to meet their needs.
You’ll be amazed to know that users that engage with your brand on social media and visit your website from there not only have a higher chance to convert, but they are also three times more likely to recommend your brand to others than the rest of the visitors!
All the views, recommendations, and shares, however, will only drive traffic to your website if your content is engaging enough. Consider using images, videos, GIFs, and similar graphic content with interactive captions that include links to your website.
Follow these tips about the content you share on social media:
- When sharing blog posts on social media feeds, make sure they have engaging headings and striking images.
- Share blog posts that are between 2,000 and 2,500 words in length since articles of this length are more often shared than others.
- When sharing promotional content, such as that related to an upcoming sale or advertising your product, be sure to add clear CTR buttons, such as “Shop Now”, “Register Now”, “Buy Now”, etc., that will take visitors to your website.
- While short advertising videos tend to work well, those that last 4 minutes or 4 minutes 20 seconds foster the highest number of shares.
- When adding website links in your posts, such as your tweets, shorten the links using link cutters to eliminate clutter.
- Use Live videos such as Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Instagram Live, Twitter, Periscope, Snapchat, depending on where your target market is present as live streaming has taken the world by storm these days.
No matter which social media platforms you use, make sure you utilize their respective analytics tools to track and monitor the effectiveness of your social media marketing performance.
Use Content Marketing
When you talk about eCommerce marketing tips, you can’t ignore content marketing. One of the most recent trends in digital marketing is content marketing, which is as simple as creating and uploading content in different formats on your eCommerce website. These might include written blog posts, infographics, and tutorial videos that prove valuable for your target audience.
While the content is more informational than promotional, the ultimate goal remains the same– to generate more leads and maximize conversions. For instance, keep providing valuable industry-related information to your target audience so that you can establish your expertise in the field and your customers come to trust you. Like us writing this blog post about eCommerce marketing right now. (wink)
However, given the tough competition nowadays, its more challenging than ever to stand out from the rest of the players. Posting a 500-word article on a topic your followers are interested in won’t be very effective. Yet, it’s possible to outplay your competition in a difficult industry in a short period.
Let’s take the example of a recent blog on ‘How to Start a Blog’ by Ryan Robinson, a content marketer, and blogger. Despite having millions of competitors and billions of search results on the same topic, his blog was able to rank on the first page in only a few months. This happened because he was able to provide more valuable content than other pages.
Consisting of more than 20,000 words, his post comprised of interviews, infographics, tutorial videos, screenshots of processes and results, templates, and more resources to help readers learn more about building a blog. In other words, he focused on providing content that’s more in-depth and valuable than any other free article written on the same topic.
However, it’s not just length that matters. Your free content should immediately help the readers solve their problems so that when the time comes to finally make a purchase, they are much more confident to choose you and make an investment.
To offer valuable content to your target audience, you must identify their pain points and most pressing issues and challenges, and then address them through high-quality, transformational content. Simply interview your target audience, asking them about the challenge they face. You may also look into what questions your competitors might be answering through their content. If you’ve been in the industry for a while now, you should have possessed unique insights and experiences to share. Share those experiences with your followers and fans.
You should not just upload content on your website’s blog section, but as discussed earlier, you should also post their links on social media platforms that your target audience spends the most time on, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and YouTube. This should ensure that your content is not just posted but also sufficiently consumed.
Market Via Email
Have you ever come across a subscription form that pops up when you are about to leave a visited webpage? Even though the pop up may seem annoying to you, it can help an ecommerce business. These pop us help gather information, like your email address, so that companies can send emails to you afterward.
Your visit to the website is enough to convey that you’re interested in buying a product or service, making you a potential target customer. Once they have your email, companies can forward special deals and promotions to you, keeping you engaged all the time.
Email marketing remains one of the top eCommerce marketing tips. It has proven to be highly effective in generating and converting leads for small, growing eCommerce businesses. Just because you never subscribe to marketing emails doesn’t mean that others don’t.
It’s true that a majority of users don’t share their email addresses, but out of millions of people who visit your site, a few thousand do subscribe. When you send out emails to those thousands, a hundred might convert. That’s a good number considering that it cost you zero dollars to market to them.
Of course, you don’t send emails one by one. Many email marketing software and CRMs (Customer Relationship Management) solutions are available that help automate the email marketing process. Some of the best CRMs or email marketing software include MailChimp, Zoho Campaigns, SendPulse, etc. They offer numerous templates and incredible features such as A/B testing to send out the best marketing emails to your target audiences.
But what about the content of your emails? Email marketing is not about spamming your recipients’ inbox with promotional emails. You need to view it as a buyer journey and segment your prospects, depending on where they stand in the buyer journey. Based on that, you can send emails to each segment.
For instance, if someone actually viewed product pages on your website, added a product to the shopping cart but left without making a purchase, then you can send them a discount for the product (with the item image) in the email.
However, to your returning or loyal customers, you can send reminders about the upcoming sale because they’re already fans of your brand and would love to know about upcoming deals.
The results you obtain by tracking recipients’ interactions with emails through available tools should help you understand which campaigns drive traffic and which don’t. Use these insights to refine your email campaigns and improve your email marketing practices.
Final Word
Marketing an eCommerce business can be pretty exciting if you’re aware of the best, result-driven practices. Since you have to focus on SEO, social media marketing, content marketing and email marketing, eCommerce marketing may appear intimidating. However, when you see positive results, such as more lead generation and higher conversions, you’ll be motivated to invest more time and effort.
While there are countless things that go into marketing your business online, the above-explained eCommerce marketing tipshappen to be the most effective ones trending across the eCommerce industry these days. We truly hope that these techniques will take your business to the next level.
Maureen Greany's experience in sales allows her to provide a high level of service. She has many years under her belt and can handle any business situation with ease, like the time when she saved an account by providing superior customer service or achieving success selling products that were once considered non-sellable. Her dedication is apparent as well through things such as completing projects before deadlines or helping out colleagues during crunch times so they don't feel overwhelmed either!
Maureen grew up in Virginia but now calls New Orleans home where she lives with her husband and dog Rooney who are both major sources of support for Maureen throughout all aspects of life from work to playtime at the park (which happens often).
