To connect online with customers, merchants must adopt ecommerce marketing strategies. For example, rather than focusing on volume of traffic, merchants should pursue market share. However, there are several practical ecommerce marketing techniques to set a company apart from the rest in a sea of competition.
Did you know that 80.59 million people are shopping online today? That is why more and more businesses are looking to expand their reach online. And with online sales growing by 15% year after year, ecommerce retailers are finding it tough to optimize site traffic and attract new customers.
Ecommerce Marketing 101: Personas, Traffic Drivers, Advertising Channels & More
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Ecommerce marketing is the practice of driving top-of-funnel traffic to convert into sales and customers. And there are hundreds of ways to go about it.
From focusing on organic traffic and SEO to using Facebook or Google ads to drive targeted traffic, you can mix and match paid strategies with non-paid strategies all in an effort to figure out which mix converts the most people.
But not marketing strategy is even static. As marketing tactics and marketplace algorithms evolve, so too must your strategy in order to win the highest return on ad spend – as well as return on operating costs associated with non-paid growth strategies like SEO.
You may have once heard: “If you build it, they will come.”
It’s a great quote, from a great movie.
Unfortunately, when it comes to ecommerce marketing, this notion is completely false. When you build it, they don’t necessarily come.
In a constantly changing and increasingly competitive environment, you need to make more effort to grow your online sales.
For many businesses, this is the biggest reason why revenue goals aren’t met.
With US ecommerce revenue slated to hit $4.9 trillion in 2023, you don’t want to miss the boat.
On one hand, simply building a modern, feature-rich, and user-friendly website may seem like a daunting task (hint, hint: it doesn’t have to be with the right resources).
But even doing only that, you’re only halfway there.
Unless you’re pounding the pavement to build awareness, your ecommerce website will exist in a vacuum.
And that’s not good for anybody – the business owner, the employees, and the people who want to buy your products.
In order to effectively grow an ecommerce business – whether or not you have a retail presence – you need a well-thought-out ecommerce marketing plan to drive brand awareness and increase sales. And there’s no way around it.
But don’t worry, we’re here to help. Within this blog, we’re covering the following topics:
- Creating and Executing an Ecommerce Marketing Plan.
- Marketing Channels, Tactics & Tools to Consider.
- Building a Marketing Team: In-House vs Agency.
Based on this article, you’ll have the information you need to confidently build an ecommerce marketing plan that can effectively scale your business and accomplish your goals.
Remember, there’s no “magic bullet” when it comes to building brand awareness and driving ecommerce sales.
The principles we’ve outlined should be defined as “best practices” but your team’s ability to think critically and get creative will be the “special sauce” your brand needs expedite sales growth.
Creating and Executing an Ecommerce Marketing Plan
“A failure to plan is a plan to fail.”
Another valid quote. This time, by Benjamin Franklin.
To be clear, there’s no shortage of literature around “how to develop a marketing plan.”
In fact, that topic keeps many authors, teachers and high-priced public speakers employed. And justifiably so.
Many tried and true principles remain relevant today, but with the continued evolution of ecommerce, this isn’t the time to get complacent.
Without a well-thought-out plan of attack, the chances of accomplishing your marketing goals will be slim to none.
And without an understanding of the ecommerce marketing landscape, you’re at a severe disadvantage.
We’ve applied the foundational elements of crafting a marketing plan, injected some time-savings tips and applied our backlog of ecommerce-specific advice to ultimately create this 12-step plan that is perfect for building your online store.
With the information provided, you can confidently create an ecommerce marketing plan from scratch by yourself, with your team, or alongside a more experienced agency partner. Here are some time-saving tips and advice for before you start.
1. Seek out mentors and advice.
Find companies or individuals who have already built and scaled a successful ecommerce business, ideally within the same industry. Then, ask for their advice.
- How did they get started?
- What marketing channels produced the biggest ROI in the short term?
- Did they use an agency? If so, which agency?
- What technology did they use to track data?
- What SaaS products were most helpful and effective?
There are tons of online groups where you can ask these questions. BigCommerce’s own community group is only one.
2. When possible, hire experts.
Quite simply, the breadth of knowledge and experience that a talented marketer can bring to your business can’t be understated.
The time and effort you’ll spend learning about and slapping together digital marketing campaigns can be spent on more meaningful work.
If you’re a startup, consider hiring a freelancer to help with more nuanced parts of your business like branding, paid advertising, or website maintenance.
If you’re an established business, consider hiring an experienced agency.
They’ll bring a new energy, fresh perspective, and skills that complement your in-house capabilities.
3. Be honest with yourself.
Without quality products, the appropriate funding and a capable team, a path to success does NOT exist. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule.
But don’t bank on one social influencer’s Instagram post to compensate for these shortcomings. It just doesn’t happen that way.
There’s no shame is starting small and DIY-ing your digital marketing in the short term. But it’s important to set realistic expectations and outline a roadmap for growth.
How to Build an Ecommerce Marketing Plan
As you’re laying the groundwork to your ecommerce future, it’s important to go through these exercises while writing your business plan to ensure that your methods and strategy are well thought out and will pass the test of time.
It can’t be overstated: these are the prerequisites to creating an effective marketing plan and building a successful business.
1. Executive summary.
Now that you’ve gathered substantive advice from knowledgeable mentors, the big picture overview will come into focus.
By writing an Executive Summary, you’ll be taking the first steps to crafting your ecommerce marketing plan.
2. Goals & objectives.
Make your goals and objectives VERY clear and specific.
Once you begin to execute, there’s no shame in amending your goals if they turned out to be too low or too high.
Eventually, your primary focus should be creating realistic, attainable goals. And then, layering in “stretch goals” to really excite the team.
That being said, make sure to include specific goals and metrics, such as:
- Increase sales by X% during the slow season.
- Increase AOV by X% on Black Friday & Cyber Monday.
- Increase email marketing conversion rates by X%.
3. Mission statement & value proposition.
- What’s the purpose of this company?
- What do you do?
- What don’t you do?
You (or the company leadership) must be able to answer these basic questions.
Not all companies need a philanthropic element to the business (which would be nice) but there needs to be a clear mission and value proposition.
4. Target customers, personas & markets.
Know your audience.
If you don’t have a clear understanding of who you’re targeting, what characteristics define them and where they’re located — you’re bound to run inefficient campaigns that waste money targeting low-converting, unqualified individuals.
Make sure you know the following:
- Age ranges.
- Gender breakdown.
- Geographic location.
- Purchasing power.
5. Situation analysis.
“You can only know where you’re going if you know where you’ve been.”
Therefore, perform a thorough assessment of the current state of the company, the competition and the overall marketing plan.
Leave no stone unturned. A better understanding of your current situation will lead to better decision-making, and eventually, better results.
6. Pricing & positioning strategy.
Ensure your pricing and positioning provides real value to your target audience.
Forcing products upon your target customers that they deem to be overpriced is a losing proposition, especially when price comparing is SO easy these days.
Therefore, do your research!
Of course, there are opportunities for testing and refinement throughout your product’s lifecycle, but by doing a little more work up front, you’ll be better off in the long run.
7. Distribution & fulfillment plan.
Even if you’re starting small, you should have a clear understanding of the distribution and order fulfillment requirements that will evolve as you grow.
Whether you are packing and shipping yourself, overseeing a small team, or leveraging a third party fulfillment shop, you need to know whether your fulfillment processes can meet the demand of your upcoming marketing push.
After you’ve written your plans, be sure to spend a good chunk of time tweaking, refining, and evolving them over time.
6 Essential Ecommerce Marketing Strategies
1. Produce original content
The first step in setting up an ecommerce website is creating the content for it. Creating high-quality and original content will set you up for success because it will resonate with your customers in a way that makes them want to interact with you, purchase from you, and maintain a following.
Be creative. Be original.
Promoting original content is a great way to make a statement, strike a compelling idea, and make a mark on the user’s mind. There is a fine line between content that engages users and content that deters them.
Why not take an extra step, put in a little effort, and create something that will be genuinely compelling? It’s an ecommerce marketing strategy with lasting effect. One or two well-written pages can drive revenue for years to come.
What should you write?
First, add informative content to your primary site pages – your homepage, about, policies (warranties, shipping, etc.) at the bare minimum.
Then it’s important to populate your online store’s product content. Start with individual products, prioritizing by your best sellers or highest earners, and write unique descriptions. Don’t just drop in the manufacturer’s boilerplate language. Explain what it is, why it’s better, and its key features.
Look also to category pages. These also pose great SEO opportunity (more on that below). Here’s where you can explain a type of product (e.g., men’s athletic shoes) and provide paths to other products, to help the user find what they’re looking for. FAQs are often handy on category pages to answer questions related to the segment (e.g., “how to choose men’s athletic shoes”).
Now, it’s time to get proactive.
Spawning from your ecommerce company’s authority (e.g., shoes), publish blog posts that will attract new audiences while informing and engaging existing fans.
Add rich content to your website, too – in ecommerce, product demo or explainer videos are a supreme fit.
If you’re coming up short of ideas, ask your customers. Use a user feedback tool offering pop-up chat interactions to ask, for example…
- What are you looking for?
- What do you want to learn more about?
- What questions do you have?
- What brought you here today?
Your goal is to zero in on content topics that your audience cares about – because they tell you so. More on content beyond core “money pages” below as we talk content marketing.
This online fireworks company added informative content to their category pages that answers common questions about specific types. Not only did this drive SEO performance, it increased engagement, conversions, and order value.
2. Optimize your ecommerce website’s layout
After launching or redesigning your ecommerce site, it’s important to test your website’s layout, language, and placement of conversion elements. When customers visit your website, you want to make sure it’s easy and simple to check out, that they feel naturally inclined to purchase your products, and that it’s abundantly clear how to do so.
You should test the language displayed on your landing and product pages, the language in your conversion elements, and even the strategic placement of icons and elements. You can use various usability testing methods for this.
One really nifty tool is Mouseflow’s heatmap software that reveals valuable patterns in customer behavior on your website. One of their most popular heatmaps, the movement heatmap, reveals the most attractive parts of your website — based on visitor movement data to your website.
With a color guide, Mouseflow will tell you where your customers spend the most time, and the least amount of time! If a specific area of your page receives more attention (in white), you should consider moving your conversion elements to those more attractive areas to increase click-through rates (CTR).
You’ll also want to set up a conversion funnel analysis and optimization tool. With this, you can assign pages on your site to a funnel and analyze how users move through the journey.
You’ll find that certain pages and funnel journeys perform better than others. You can also watch session recordings of users that dropped and converted, to better empathize with their experiences.
Test it for a week and see how your conversions change. Take your ecommerce marketing strategy to the next level with an ecommerce conversion rate optimization strategy using these methods.
Mouseflow’s affordable, scalable pricing plans gets you started for free and grow with you as you become an ecommerce power player.
3. Content marketing
Proper ecommerce content marketing can attract more positive attention, interaction, and sustainable conversions in a way no other marketing method can. By creating and promoting original content, you are ensuring that your audience is receiving new information that matters to them on a continual basis.
Content for your website, like mentioned above, includes home page, category pages, product pages, and the like. Content marketing on the other hand is content specifically geared to attract customers and is promoted to get their attention.
Brainstorm with your team to create a list of the different types of content you wish to create. This can be blog posts, videos, and newsletters. Also, make sure you are utilizing your marketing budget by consulting with experts, outsourcing work when necessary. Invest in high-quality software, subscriptions, employees, and training for your team.
You will also find that if you work with the right people, many of the things you’ve paid for in the past can be done internally. Create diversity within your team and listen to everyone’s ideas.
And in the spirit of listening to everyone’s ideas, deploy a user feedback tool to collect questions, thoughts, and topics from your audience. Or, “listen” to their behavior – use heatmap tools to identify the parts of your website, and even parts of specific pieces of content, that get the most interest. then expand on these topics, and link them within the content’s “hot spot”.
We also suggest that you create content based on Pareto’s 80/20 rule, which means that your promotions should comprise of 80% informational content, and 20% promotional content. All of the content you publish should be relevant, interesting, and unique.
4. Social media marketing
Social media ecommerce marketing is a very powerful tool. It allows you to communicate with your industry, customers, and market in a personal, public way. You can utilize social media to generate engagement and interaction, boost traffic to your website, and develop a larger base of customers.
Utilizing different social media platforms for different purposes also creates a rich presence for your company that diversifies your abilities and efforts. This will ultimately help you cater to your customers’ needs in a way that grows your business over time.
Maintaining a solid tone and personality of your company through social media is very important because consistency is what will create trust within your audience. In order to develop and maintain brand recognition and authority, make sure your outreach efforts are unified by ensuring your team is on the same page with your company’s communication style.
Just as important as being present and engaged on social is monitoring this channel’s performance. To do so, you’ll want to use your web analytics tool to…
- Monitor the performance of the social referral journey on-site with a funnel optimization tool.
- Review user session recordings to understand why customers abandoned the journey, what compelled them to convert, and what caught their interest along the way.
- Bonus tip: look at the full on-site journeys of your converted customers and consider how to adjust your pre-defined funnel to better meet these needs. You may have forgotten to consider a customer’s affinity for visiting your reviews page, and can identify this as a key conversion-journey touchpoint.
- Analyze the behavior of the distinct social segment via heatmaps. How deep do they scroll? What sections get the most interest? where are they compelled to click? Use this to inform campaign and strategy tweaks.
- Ask the audience for user feedback via pop-up chat tools at key moments in their journey, such as when they stay on a page for long enough or have exit intent.
- Run through your forms with a fine-toothed comb via form analysis tool. You may find that social audiences are more or less inclined to give up information, and can adjust your form fields to suit them.
5. Email marketing
One of the most effective forms of reaching out to your customer base is through email marketing. Although you have to be very careful about the content within your emails and who is included in your outreach, the reason email marketing has been around for so long is because it works.
In order to reach your audience most effectively, provide useful content within your emails. Make them as personal as you can, offer valuable promotions, and use it as an opportunity to socialize.
Open up about what your business is doing, any events you are attending, new features or products, and be transparent about your company. You want to relate to your customers on a level that gauges their interest and keeps them engaging with your emails.
As always, make sure you are monitoring the analytics of your email marketing efforts, and any ecommerce marketing strategy elements, for that matter. Remember to follow email design best practices to serve up a satisfying message and experience.
You can also track users who entered your website from your email campaigns with Mouseflow. All you have to do is set a custom URL that users “visit” when entering your site, and their entry page will contain that unique URL. A great way of doing this is to append UTM variables to your URL.
You can use Mouseflow filters or the search feature to find users whose sessions contained your custom URL. From here, you can save and export the list, perform analytics, and watch how they interacted on their site.
You can also filter your heatmaps for this data to analyze how they engage with each page of your site, which elements they find most attractive, and more!
For Level Two of email marketing, consider how triggered emails can be leveraged to recover lost conversions, such as abandoned carts.
6. Search engine optimization (SEO) for ecommerce
One of the most important and manual methods of improving an ecommerce website is making sure it’s optimized for search engines. With today’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) standards, it’s now more important than ever to make sure your website is constantly updated with rich and relevant content, promotes a good user experience (UX), and is optimized to be as error-free as possible.
The content within your website should be rich, reliable, and provide information to the public that is useful and relevant to what they’re looking for. For example, if you have an ecommerce store selling camping supplies, it’s wise to provide detailed product information and possibly even host sections of your website that offer generous amounts of content that elaborates on the topics of camping, supplies, or related subjects.
Using keywords within your content in a genuine way will also flag your website as a matching result in search engines when users are looking for something specific. Search engine optimization is one of the lowest-cost, highest ROI ecommerce marketing strategies you can deploy.
Want more? Here’s how to leverage your web analytics tool to get better results form SEO.
Conclusion
Ecommerce marketing can be hard at times. The most successful ecommerce brands build strong and trustworthy marketing strategies with custom and unique techniques. Each and every one of them has a specific goal they want to achieve and we’re going to learn how they did it.