23 Jun 5 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies For eCommerce
Despite living in the digital age, eCommerce websites face many challenges while setting their mark in the highly competitive industry. With millions of shopping options available on the digital landscape, users have become extremely picky about what they buy. Your online store might have the highest quality product but still not be able to procure sales due to one factor: lack of an effective digital marketing strategies.
Whether you are a start-up retail company or one with a well-established customer base, you need to stay up to date with the most current eCommerce marketing trends and techniques for your business. However, you can not take a one-size-fits-all approach to digital marketing. In order to achieve maximum ROI, you have to be very specific about the strategies you deploy in your digital marketing campaign.
Not sure which digital marketing strategies are worth your time and resources? Worry not. We have curated an overview of 5 digital marketing strategies that prove effective for an array of businesses and niches.
1. Invest in SEO
Optimizing your online store with SEO is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies for boosting eCommerce websites. To bring more organic traffic and clicks to your online store, you must structure your website correctly and maximize its search engine value so that your product pages are among the top 10 results on search engines like Yahoo, Google, and Bing.
With today’s SEO standards, achieving this goal is only possible by constantly updating your website with rich and relevant content, strengthening it with backlinks, and creating a good user experience. Here are some ways you can invest in SEO:
- Performing keyword research
The content on your website should be reliable and packed with information that is useful and relevant to what users are looking for. Performing keyword research and using those keywords in your content (in page URLs, product descriptions, and meta descriptions) will flag your website as a matching result in search engines when users search for a product relevant to your online store.
Different paid and free tools are available on the web for keyword research: Semrush, Moz, and Google Keyword Planner are amongst the most popular ones.
For Keyword Planner, you just need to enter products related to your business in the search bar and it will suggest a range of related keywords. Let’s say you sell leather accessories, you can type ‘leather wallets’ in the search bar.
When selecting keywords, you need to take into account two factors: search volume and competition. Keywords with high search volume (>1k) and low competition are most likely to rank your website at the top of search results.
Once you have found the right keywords for your eCommerce brand, you need to optimize the product URL with those keywords. An SEO-friendly URL does not only accurately describe the product but is also short.
Optimizing your meta description is perhaps the most crucial SEO technique as it gives a brief summary of your page/product to the viewer. A meta description is a snippet displayed to viewers on the search engine results page, so it must be precise and contain information relevant to the user’s search query.
- Promoting a good user experience
User experience (UX) and SEO go hand-in-hand to create a high-ranking website. A good UX design enhances user engagement and boosts site traffic, which, in turn, improves site ranking on SERPs.
Google’s algorithm consistently takes the user experience into account when ranking websites. All high-ranking websites follow best SEO practices together with a user-centric and mobile-responsive UX design.
For user-centric website designs, you can take inspiration from Apple. Not only does Apple instantly catch the attention of its viewers through its website’s innovative website design but also engages the user by displaying its latest product, the iPad air in this case, in an appealing way.
Focusing on user experience to meet the needs of searchers can help with SEO because resultant strategies tend to align with how Google ranks websites.
- Earning backlinks
Backlinks are imperative for SEO because they signal to search engines like Google that others vouch for your content and find it valuable. In fact, Google confirmed a few years ago that backlinks are one of the three most important factors it takes into account when rankings websites.
Earning backlinks from other reputable websites helps search engines infer that your website possesses valuable content worth ranking on the top of SERPs. A study conducted by Backlinko also confirmed that Google rankings and backlinks are directly correlated.
Therefore, earning backlinks can leave a massive positive effect on your website’s search visibility and ranking position.
Search engine optimization is one of the highest ROI digital marketing strategies you can deploy to boost your eCommerce website. If executed well, the above-mentioned SEO practices will ensure search engines understand what you sell and let you rank more favorably for relevant searches.
2. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is another effective digital marketing strategy to accelerate the growth of your eCommerce business. Influencers are modern-day celebrities that work as ambassadors to promote your brand on social media forums and make sales for you. In return, you give them free products, cash, or discounts.
Influencer marketing can help you create brand awareness and reach out to a wider audience in your niche. People often see an Instagram post from an influencer, like what they are wearing or eating, and get the impulse to immediately buy the same thing.
Moreover, Instagram recently extended the in-app shopping feature to top influencer accounts, which is prompting more shoppers to buy directly from the platform.
As a result, products promoted through influencers have a shorter sales cycle compared to products advertised through conventional techniques like billboards.
With the industry’s worth soaring to $13.8 billion in 2021, influencer marketing has become critical in the world of eCommerce. According to a study by Mediakix, 80% of marketers experience boosted sales and achieve a wider customer base after implementing influencer marketing strategies. While Instagram is the most popular channel, with over 68% of brands using it, you can also use other marketing channels to promote your brand, as well.
If your eCommerce business lacks an influencer marketing strategy, you are missing out on a significant opportunity to procure new customers.
3. Optimize your email marketing campaign
Even in 2022, email marketing continues to be not only one of the most effective digital marketing strategies but also a critical one. With the highest click-through and conversion rates of any eCommerce marketing form, email marketing is imperative for your sales funnel.
Here are some fundamental optimizations you can deploy to reach out to your customer base through email marketing:
Send welcome emails
A welcome email helps set out the foundation of a relationship between your brand and potential customers. View it as an opportunity to open up about your business and pique the interest of potential customers.
In order to gauge the interest of your customers and keep them engaged, follow these three themes:
1. Tell your business story
You need to give customers a reason to rally behind your behind. By letting them in on why you are doing what you are doing, you can make the email personal and let viewers connect with you emotionally.
2. Showcase your products
Selling products is the ultimate goal of every eCommerce brand. One way to achieve that goal is to feature your brand’s most popular products in the email. Since first-time customers won’t know your entire line of products, try to include one product from each category
3. Make unique offers
Mention discounts and special offers in the welcome email to incentivize customers for a return visit. Welcome emails often increase the chance of future targeted offers and upsells.
- Keep in touch
Seize the opportunity to keep your prospects interested and updated by sending promotional emails.
Send regular newsletters to alert subscribers about new features or products, offer exclusive promo codes and coupons, and share relevant content to help customers get the most out of their online shopping experience. Promotional emails can help increase conversions and improve customer loyalty. You can also create your personalized promotional email ads with tons of design elements using this free ad creator.
- Solicit feedback
Email marketing proves effective in soliciting customer feedback. Carry out email surveys to learn about the customer experience on your site and use that knowledge to improve your practices.
Email surveys can help you identify the reasons behind cart abandonment and thus reduce the chances of incomplete transactions. For instance, this one particular email by MCM, an eCommerce company, is a great example of a cart abandonment email. It not only reminds the customer about the products they left in their shopping cart but also notifies them about similar products to engage them.
The application of perfectly timed and scheduled e-mails that succeed in delighting users and engaging them at the right time result in increased average order values and overall sales.
4. Retargeting
Not all users convert the first time they visit your eCommerce website. Customers have the habit of searching around, reading reviews, and comparing prices with products from alternative brands before making a purchase. However, users who have shown interest in your brand once are more likely to make a purchase later.
One effective way to remind users about your website is to run retargeting campaigns on social media sites, especially Facebook.
Retargeting is a technique used to track users who have visited your eCommerce website and display ads to them to get them back on your online store. Customers who revisit your website have a higher chance of buying something from your store.
Here are two ways to effectively run a retargeting campaign:
- Understand the buyer’s journey
Just like with SEO and PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing, it is imperative to configure ads that display the specific information the user was looking at while visiting your website
For example, was the customer looking at some specific pants on your website? Make sure the ads directed to the customer have that specific pants and link to the page of those pants.
Targeting potential customers with specific ads based on their online behavior creates a connection between them and your brands, increasing brand awareness and conversions at a lower cost.
- Utilize dynamic creative ads on Facebook
Facebook is among the most widely used sales channels for eCommerce websites. You would have probably experimented with Facebook ads using the traditional image and video ads, but have you tried promoting your products through dynamic creative ads?
Dynamic creative ads are an innovative advertising tool as they take multiple ad components to create personalized creative variations for every user viewing your ad.
Facebook dynamic ads are extremely easy to set up: all you need to do is upload your product feed to Facebook and configure the ad templates. You can upload multiple videos and images, CTA button texts, headlines, and descriptive variations and add special features like discounts.
Here’s an easy guide for setting up a Facebook dynamic ad:
Facebook will automatically test and optimize for the best combinations and show them to users who have expressed interest in your website.
4. Leverage UGC Product Reviews
Do you know who a prospective customer trusts the most when it comes to online shopping? A fellow consumer. Product reviews from happy customers prove more effective at encouraging potential customers to shop from your eCommerce website than any other form of advertising.
To fully optimize your eCommerce website, you need to boost your conversion optimization, and generating social proof with customer reviews is a step in the right direction.
Adding customer reviews to your product listings results in an immediate boost in sales. When potential customers see that other people are purchasing and using your products, they will feel more confident in doing the same. Almost nine out of ten customers worldwide read reviews before buying products from eCommerce websites.
Here are two ways you can easily leverage user-generated content reviews to boost your conversion optimization:
- Provide an easy way for customers to submit reviews
Perhaps one of the easiest ways to gather customer reviews is to use your email marketing software and create an email automation campaign.
Make the review submitting process as simple as possible for the users: ask a few straightforward questions with multiple choices to rate the product quality and user experience and add an optional section for a textual review. This form by Adidas perfectly captures encapsulates what a review link should lead to:
Do not forget to send a reminder to those who have not submitted a response to the automated questionnaire.
- Creations your store’s accounts on public review websites
Customers might have doubts that the reviews posted on your website are fake and so, become less likely to purchase from your online store. The most effective way to eliminate such doubts is to create accounts on public review websites.
Amazon Reviews, Google Reviews, Quora, Trustpilot, and Angi’s List are among some renowned websites that collect reviews on an array of products and niches and are trusted by customers around the world.