Whether you’re new to selling online or looking for fresh ways to market your products, a solid eCommerce marketing strategy is imperative to beat your competition, encourage growth, and achieve long-term success.
Every eCommerce business has unique needs, products, and audiences, and their strategy needs to reflect that individuality. Developing the perfect plan for your brand requires in-depth research, reliable data, and some trial and error. By staying up to date with the most effective eCommerce marketing strategies and techniques though, you’ll ensure your products are the first to fly off the virtual shelves.
I’m breaking down 12 eCommerce building blocks you can use to craft a strong marketing strategy for your online store. These tried-and-tested tactics are popular among the most successful brands, and they can give your store the competitive edge it deserves.
Why you need a robust eCommerce marketing strategy
Experimenting with different schemes to see what sticks can waste time and resources on channels and efforts that yield unimpressive returns.
A well-rounded eCommerce marketing strategy equips you with strong tactics to employ on your online store and other channels. It also helps you identify what is and isn’t working early on so you can act quickly either to trim the fat or double down.
It brings many other perks as well, including:
- Eliminating the guesswork from your marketing efforts
- Ensuring marketing activity aligns with your wider business goals
- Creating a faster and smoother buying funnel for your customers
- Nurturing and strengthening customer relationships
- Improving brand credibility
- Increasing conversions
- Boosting customer lifetime value
With the right foundation, you can refine your eCommerce business to offer your customers an unparalleled shopping experience and keep them coming back for more.
12 Essential building blocks for your eCommerce marketing strategy
As mentioned at the start, crafting the perfect strategy for your store entails some trial and error, as there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. You have to find the marketing tactics that support your store, product types, customers, and goals.
Here are some of the best foundational steps to build your eCommerce marketing strategy. I encourage testing more than one until you find the right balance of investment and reward.
1) Understand your target audience
You need to know who your potential buyers are and what they’re looking for before you publish content, optimize your website, or spend money on ads.
Identify your target segment by conducting audience research, such as examining the visitor and customer data you already have on your website, CRM system, social media sites, and email marketing platforms. Analyze these groups and look for patterns of behavior, interests, and goals. You can also employ other techniques like surveys and customer interviews.
Take into account demographics as well, including age, gender, locality, and income level. This allows you to hone in on a smaller group of potential clients. However, I don’t recommend solely targeting people based on this type of information. While demographics aren’t the most effective way to segregate audiences, they can be a helpful starting point.
The most effective way to understand your audience is to dig into their interests, behaviors, and needs. This enables you to craft messaging that’s on point and develop content that addresses your consumer’s pain points, provides value, and fosters trust.
Additionally, use the information gathered from your audience research to develop a buyer persona for your ideal customer. You can then refer to this schema whenever you work on new marketing campaigns, ideas, or messaging.
2) Maximize your online presence through your website
Owning the customer relationship is vital for maintaining a competitive advantage and staying resilient. If you sell on marketplaces in particular, you’re up against thousands of direct competitors on the same platform.
When shoppers find you through your website, you take ownership of the entire shopping experience, with no interruptions between you and the customer. You can deploy incentives to convince visitors to sign up for your newsletter, join your loyalty program, or take some other action to keep the relationship ongoing.
To create a website that draws traffic, wins conversions, and leaves a lasting, positive impression, you need well-honed content marketing.
Tip: Hire a dedicated website marketing manager to test and optimize your conversion rates per page continually.
3) Publish compelling content consistently
An effective content marketing strategy helps establish your brand as an authority in your sector and wins over potential buyers by offering valuable material. It also enriches search engine optimization (SEO) to boost website traffic and conversion rates.
Studying your buyer persona will give you an idea of your target audience’s interests, goals, and pain points. You can then leverage that information to create content that’s relevant to your audience and draws them to your website.
Tip: Look into content creation tools to bolster the impact of your content marketing strategy. Headline tools, for example, help you generate eye-catching titles.
For an SEO approach, you can employ keyword research tools to identify popular search terms. Pair this with competitor analysis to see what words your competitors rank for and determine how you can craft richer content for your store.
Combine all of this data to produce a content calendar for publishing high-quality pieces that covers those topics and appeals to your audience. To succeed, your material must be unique, relevant, and interesting.
Take your content marketing strategy a step further by repurposing your pieces into different content types to cater to various learning preferences and styles. This includes blog posts, videos, social media updates, infographics, quizzes, product demos, and more.
As a rule of thumb, your content should be 80% informational and 20% promotional. This comes from the 80/20 rule of marketing and can be applied in multiple tactics.
To determine the effectiveness of your strategy, set goals and track your progress throughout your campaigns. Track website traffic, engagement, and conversion rates using analytics tools, then adapt your plans and content where needed.
4) Attract relevant website traffic with SEO
SEO does more than fuel your content marketing efforts — it also helps ensure the right prospects find your website and content at the right time, thus earning more purchases and beating the competition.
Strong SEO increases the chances of your brand appearing at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) for the keywords and phrases most beneficial to it. Nailing this can increase your brand’s discoverability and drive organic traffic to your website.
However, eCommerce SEO requires a deep understanding of your products and the intent behind consumer searches. You need to optimize your website content for both search engine algorithms and the customer experience. In this regard, you can leverage your brand’s existing knowledge base to produce content that’s of interest to buyers and sets your business apart from competitors.
Start by researching keywords to identify relevant and high-volume targets for your niche. Incorporating the right keywords into your website’s content ensures search engine algorithms accurately identify your content.
Delve into customer intent as well to determine what people are looking for when they search for your products. Adopt SEO tools like Google Keyword Planner (pictured below), Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz to execute your SEO strategy seamlessly.
Additionally, take advantage of schema markup to guarantee search engines properly index and crawl your website. Schema markup uses microdata to help your website rank higher for all kinds of content types. This form of optimization is powerful, but many businesses overlook it.
SEO is one of the least expensive and most impact building blocks of your marketing strategy. Its goal is to push your product pages to the top SERP positions.
5) Optimize your product listing pages for fast discovery
Product listing pages (PLPs) show items according to a chosen category. They include filtered searches, such as color, size, or price.
Shoppers expect to see product pages with clear and simple navigation. Take a look at Runners Need’s PLP above, for instance: They display quality product photos and reviews, show the various colorways, feature “New In” badges, and share relevant banners, articles, and filters.
A well-crafted PLP can boost your SEO, user engagement, and conversion rate. The faster a visitor can find what they’re looking for, the faster they’ll complete checkout.
Besides PLPs, you should optimize every product listing, whether on your website or a marketplace, for easy discoverability — particularly for searchers with high purchase intent. Add reviews, detailed descriptions, easy-to-read item information, and relevant product recommendations.
To maximize their effectiveness, tailor your product listings to appeal to the right people. This means having accurate and explanatory titles, targeting the right keywords, and providing helpful images and videos.
Great photos are also a must, as they give shoppers a better understanding of what they’re buying. So, include high-quality images, lifestyle shots, and UGC. Organizing products in a grid view is another popular formatting choice because it lets users easily browse and compare products.
Continually monitor your product listings and keep them up to date. A/B test different page elements to find out which ones win the most conversions.
6) Leverage email marketing to nurture relationships
Email marketing helps you reach your target audience directly. It remains one of the most impactful and cost-effective channels for building relationships with customers and increasing sales; every $1 spent on email marketing can result in a $36 return on investment (ROI).
Gain the most from this channel by sending different types of communications:
- Craft targeted, personalized emails to keep your audience engaged, promote your products, and encourage customers to buy.
- Transactional emails, meanwhile, include order confirmations, shipping notifications, and other automated emails triggered by shoppers’ actions. These communications keep buyers informed and significantly contribute to strengthening trust and enriching the overall customer experience.
Email marketing requires a subscriber list to be effective. Encourage sign-ups by offering incentives through your website and social media channels. These could be discounts or freebies in exchange for an email address.
You can keep subscribers engaged with attention-grabbing subject lines, clear calls to action (CTAs), and personalized content.
For a tailored experience, consider incorporating dynamic content into your email marketing campaigns to display product recommendations based on a customer’s browsing or purchase history.
You can also use email automation tools to send targeted messages based on buyer behavior, such as abandoned cart reminders or win-back communications for lapsed customers.
Many email marketing platforms are designed to boost customer retention and sales. Email providers like Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or Campaign Monitor can assist you in designing, building, and optimizing a top-notch email marketing strategy.
7) Stay social with your shoppers
Social media is another essential eCommerce marketing tool for connecting with your audience and promoting your products. It’s a chance to show off your brand’s personality and give your shoppers more chances to interact with you publicly.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok provide rich opportunities to showcase your products, engage with your customers, and build brand awareness.
Considering over half of the planet is active on social media, and almost 40% of Gen Z uses TikTok and Instagram as their preferred search engine, this is a mandatory marketing strategy for eCommerce businesses.
To leverage social media effectively for your online store, start by identifying the platforms where your target audience is most active (having an ideal customer profile will help you with this).
Then, create accounts for your brand and post regular updates that spotlight your products and provide value for your audience. Consistency and staying true to your brand values will make you appear authentic and attract like-minded people to your brand.
Craft a social strategy to dictate what content you’ll share on social media, and remember to incorporate organic social media marketing campaigns strategically, with each one focused on achieving specific goals.
Besides sharing regular updates, a high-yielding social media strategy also lets you engage with your followers and respond to comments and messages. Employing tactics such as user-generated content (UGC) will strengthen your relationships with and relatability to your target audience. Emphasize the social aspect of social media to improve customer engagement and trust.
Social media management tools like Hootsuite are lifesavers when it comes to scheduling and publishing posts across all your social media platforms. Plus, you’ll receive reports on how your various social campaigns perform.
8) Build and engage with your community
Purchases are more than simple transactions; the best brands build experiences around their ethos. By creating and nurturing a community of users and buyers, you can connect people with shared interests through your brand.
In addition to strengthening your brand’s position in the market, an active community also provides an organic and trustworthy place for users to find customer support among fellow buyers. This, in turn, produces social proof and other user-generated content you can use in your marketing materials. Having a helpful support community can even relieve some of your internal customer support’s ticket volume.
Although there are various tools for building online communities, such as Slack, social media platforms are one of the best places to cultivate your groups.
Don’t be afraid to take your community from digital to physical, either. Consider running in-person events and meet-ups for your loyal shoppers, or open a forum where they can swap stores and arrange in-person events.
9) Test paid advertising on search and social
Paid advertising is a powerful method for generating immediate, high-value traffic to your eCommerce site while you work on building organic traffic. It broadens your audience so a fresh group of targeted consumers discovers your brand.
With pay-per-click advertising (PPC) options like Google search ads, you can strategically position yourself in front of people looking for the products or services you offer. Your ad will display on the results page for specific keywords people search, and, if they don’t click on your ad, you pay nothing.
Consider investing in Google shopping ads too. If Google thinks the applied search query has transactional intent — meaning the user is looking to buy — it’ll display your ad at the top of the SERPs. So, when someone types “blue dress” into Google, they’ll see Google shopping ads for that query. Focus on optimizing paid ad campaigns to increase your position in the sponsored section of search results.
You can also retarget ads to attract people who’ve visited your website or previously engaged with your brand. This strategy increases your chances of converting those browsers into buyers because they’re far more likely to purchase than random internet surfers.
Social media is one of the most effective platforms for paid advertising due to its vast range of options. For example:
- YouTube provides six video ad formats, including in-stream and feed ads. With over two billion active users, your potential reach is massive.
- Meta Ads run across Facebook and Instagram, making them a powerful way to land in front of your target audience. Meta offers several ad types, including photo, video, story, messenger, carousel, and collection ads. This platform has an enormous reach, so it’s easier for you to position your products in front of primed, well-targeted audiences.
To encourage people to shop on your site, build relevant and attractive landing pages for your paid advertising campaigns. Your landing page should be a continuation of the ad and deliver what was promised in the original messaging. Keep PPC landing pages free of distractions so your customer stays focused on making a purchase; this improves their experience and boosts their chances of converting.
Proper keyword research is crucial before running paid ads for your eCommerce site. Find relevant keywords that your target market is looking for. To earn the highest ROI, your ads should also concentrate on specific products.
10) Invest in retention for higher customer lifetime value
In general, retaining a customer is more lucrative than acquiring a new one. It allows businesses to focus on keeping their existing consumers engaged, satisfied, and loyal, which is both easier and five times cheaper than constantly seeking out new ones.
Retaining customers (who already understand and appreciate your brand) also increases their customer lifetime value (CLV). The more loyal your buyers are to your business, the higher their CLV, which earns you a greater return on your acquisition spend. As a result, you can generate more revenue while keeping costs low.
You can boost customer retention and loyalty (and thus repeat purchases) using a variety of tactics, such as:
- Reward programs, which incentivize customers to purchase more
- Subscriptions, which provide consistent revenue and build trust between you and your customers
- Personalized promotions, engaging content, and discount offers, all of which tailor the buyer experience to keep them coming back (83% of consumers say personalization encourages engagement with brands)
11) Boost your average order values with upsells and cross-sells
A high average order value (AOV) helps maximize profits by increasing the revenue generated from each sale. You can do this through two main tactics:
- Upselling – Convince shoppers to upgrade their purchase in some way; for example, signing up for a subscription instead of a one-off purchase, or buying a more expensive version of the product they were considering.
- Cross-selling – Sell shoppers related, usually complimentary items alongside their main purchase; for example, recommending a belt to go with the jeans in their shopping cart.
One of the best ways to encourage higher AOV is to have a free shipping threshold. Say you offer free shipping on all orders over $49, like this eCommerce seller:
Customers with items in their cart for less than this amount are encouraged to add more to surpass the threshold. This also increases the likelihood they’ll spend over $49 in a single transaction.
Another effective way to increase AOV is to create kits and bundles to sell products together at a discounted rate. Giving your clients access to more products at a lower price can improve customer satisfaction as well as your AOV.
This is also a key marketing ploy for obtaining a larger acquisition budget for your marketing efforts. By boosting AOV, you increase the return on investment for your marketing campaigns and demonstrate to stakeholders that your efforts are successful. Happy stakeholders are more likely to expand your budget for future campaigns, allowing you to invest in activities that drive even greater profits.
12) Track and measure your eCommerce marketing strategy
Measuring the efficacy of your eCommerce marketing strategy is essential for driving the results you want. By analyzing your online performance, you’re able to refine your strategies and gain more for your efforts.
Many tools and platforms are available to measure your eCommerce performance, such as Google Analytics, which you can use to track website visitors, conversion rates, and AOV. You can also adopt a CRM system to follow CLV and customer behavior, along with an ad management platform to measure the return on ad spend (ROAS) for your campaigns.
Determine which KPIs are most important to your online store and monitor them frequently. By measuring the success of your eCommerce marketing strategy, you can make informed changes to it to drive the results you want.
Bonus: Build experiments and flexibility into your marketing strategy
While you must have a well-defined and structured strategy, it’s also important to incorporate experimentation and flexibility. Continuously test and refine your tactics based on data and customer feedback to prepare your brand for the future and adapt to market changes.
Best practices for eCommerce marketing
While the strategies mentioned above are foundational to a strong eCommerce marketing plan, there are a few best practices you should keep in mind:
- Analyze your competitors – Keep an eye on your rivals to stay ahead of the game and ensure your strategies remain competitive.
- Reward loyal customers – Repeat customers are invaluable to your business, so show them some appreciation through reward programs or exclusive offers.
- Test everything – Testing your marketing campaigns and strategies is crucial for refining them so they’re as effective as possible.
- Improve the user experience – A seamless user experience contributes to higher conversion rates, so make sure to improve your website’s design and functionality continually.
- Cross-sell and upsell products – Encourage customers to purchase additional products to increase their lifetime value and boost your revenue.
- Be helpful – Providing helpful content and resources builds trust and credibility with your customers.
- Personalize communication – Personalized communication makes consumers feel valued and encourages them to engage with your brand.
Employ these best practices at every stage of your online store’s marketing strategy to realize impressive results for your business.
Wrapping up — Find the perfect eCommerce marketing strategy for continuous and defensible success
Develop a comprehensive eCommerce marketing strategy by understanding your target audience, creating a content marketing plan, and leveraging distribution channels such as email and social media. On a more detailed level, tap into SEO, optimize your product listings, invest in retention and paid advertising, and improve your average order value to contribute to more conversions.
Throughout your strategy, give attention to external factors, such as analyzing competitors, rewarding repeat customers, and improving the user experience. Lean into personalization in your communications, and cross-sell and upsell your products as well to help customers commit to purchasing.
Armed with these eCommerce marketing strategies, you can craft the perfect strategy for your online store and achieve success in the evolving world of online selling.