Top 10 Best Ecommerce Marketing Strategies for Your Online Business

The online business industry is facing cutthroat competition, and by the year 2040, 95% of the total purchases are expected to be through ecommerce websites.

Without effective online promotion, an ecommerce business may struggle to attract and retain customers, which can make it difficult to grow and succeed.

Therefore, a combination of the right tactics and a robust growth strategy is needed to engage and keep customers and increase revenue.

This article lists the top 10 marketing strategies for online businesses that will help you increase the sales of your online store regardless of the products or services you sell.

Let’s begin!

 

What is Ecommerce Marketing?

Ecommerce marketing refers to the set of strategies used to sell products or services online using commerce platforms such as websites and mobile apps.

The top online store promotion tactics are search engine optimization, social media advertising, email marketing, and content marketing. The goal of e-web-store promotion is to drive traffic to a website and convert that traffic into sales.

An effective promotional strategy for your virtual store helps you reach your target audience, escalate your sales margin, and, at the same time, improve your brand awareness globally

The Main Types of Ecommerce Marketing

Here are the main types of online store promotion:

1. Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the act of improving and optimizing various aspects of your online store website to help it rank higher on search engines for keywords related to your niche.

This practice involves getting organic traffic by optimizing site elements like product pages, metadata, internal linking structure, backlink, and user experience.

Significant ecommerce search engine optimization types are on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO, and local SEO.

2. Social Media Marketing

Social media advertising uses platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn to promote a product or service. It aims to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, and boost sales.

Some of the top activities in social media promotion include:

• Developing a custom strategy that aligns with business goals
• Publishing and sharing high-quality and engaging content with your followers
• Building and engaging a loyal community on relevant social media platforms
• Running social media advertising campaigns
• Measuring the ROI of your efforts

3. Content Marketing

Content promotion is an excellent strategy that attracts a valuable customer base through stories and facts. It involves offering newsletters, podcasts, blogs, videos, and research to audiences to establish your brand authority, promote your business, and stay on top of search engine result pages.

The whole purpose of offering these forms of content is to provide your target audience with valuable and relevant information that touches their pain points and solves their queries when they search for a particular product using keywords.

4. Paid Advertising

Paid advertising is the process of digital placement of ads on relevant platforms for which the advertiser pays for each click they get through these ads.

It helps broadcast and convey your message to the target audience using various channels, including search engines, marketplaces, and social media platforms.

Various types of paid ads that deliver immediate results include search ads, display ads, social media ads, email-sponsored ads, and Google shopping ads.

5. Video Production

Video production is a digital advertising technique where you combine and capture audio and video elements to engage, inspire and educate your target audience excitingly and creatively.

Your virtual store video production may involve creating and promoting a short film, full-length movie, television commercial, music video, or social media reels.

6. Email Marketing

One of the most effective promotional strategies is email advertising. It helps you reach out and stay in touch with your customers.

Sending out relevant emails to the audience who have subscribed to your newsletters and updates gives you the advantage of adding a personalized touch to your brand-audience communication.

For your online business, you can send out events and launch invites, links to your new blogs, guides, promotional codes and offers, subscription reminders, and abandoned cart reminders.

7. Website Development & Web Design

Ecommerce website development and web design is an effective online marketing tactic that involves executing a strategic plan to improve all aspects of your virtual store website for a smooth customer experience.

It includes frontend and backend development of your website that involves checkout systems, payment processing, and site security.

Website development helps users seamlessly navigate your web pages and makes your website stand out from your competitors.

8. Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of improving your website’s conversion rate by converting your traffic into valuable leads and customers by making small yet incremental improvements.

The whole purpose of improving your CRO is to make it easy for buyers to find your brand easily on digital platforms, complete their transactions seamlessly, and return to buy to your website more frequently.

9. Amazon Marketing

Amazon marketing is the process of promoting and selling your products on Amazon. Effective Amazon marketing helps you reach and rank high on search engine results pages and increase your global digital visibility.

Advertising on Amazon includes sponsored ad campaigns, search engine optimization, review monitoring, and answering audiences’ questions.

10. Influencer Marketing

Influencer advertising is a form of social media advertising that involves aligning your brand with social media influencers to grow your brand exponentially.

It is a word-of-mouth advertising tactic where social influencers with significant followers endorse your products and services to improve your brand’s engagement rate through videos, posts, and blogs.

Influencers act as a mediator and help build valuable relationships between your brand and audience. They are differentiated based on their follower count. Here are the top categories of influencers:

• Micro: 5000-100000 followers
• Mid-Tier: 100000-500000 followers
• Macro: 500000-1 million
• Mega: 1 million+

10 Best Ecommerce Marketing Strategies for 2023

Here are the top 10 online store advertising tips that you can adopt in 2023 and ahead:

1. Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

An effective SEO strategy will polish your website to get it in front of the target audience more effectively and drive significant traffic and conversions.

Here are the different methods to get your rankings up on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing:

• Perform keyword research: Keyword research is essential to your ecommerce strategy. Consider the users’ search intent and find the keywords your buyer persona would enter to look for your product niche on search engines.
• Optimize product pages: Include complete product descriptions with real high-quality images on your product pages. To attract customers, write compelling and engaging lines in your description and title.
• Get valuable backlinks: Getting backlinks from highly authoritative sites helps search engines’ crawlers find and prioritize the websites relevant to the users. You can acquire valuable backlinks by creating evergreen, relevant content. Make sure your content touches the pain points of your website visitors.
• Add a sitemap: Ensure adding an XML sitemap to your website to organize all the essential pages for the crawlers to move through your website efficiently.
• Use schema markup: Use schema markup code to help search engines understand the contents of your page.

2. Run PPC Campaigns

Search ads offer an 80% lift in top-of-mind brand recognition among consumers. The brands must pay to display the website for every click they get. This makes pay-per-click advertising one of the most robust traffic-driving promotional strategies where your advertisements or ad banners are displayed on various channels, including search engines and social media.

You don’t have to dedicate a massive budget to run your pay-per-click ads, and often you invest in running the ads only after seeing measurable results.

As an online brand, it is up to you what products you want to focus on while advertising and what kind of audience you want to target.

Here are the actionable steps to run effective pay-per-click advertising campaigns:

• Produce compelling and attractive ads with catchy headlines, authentic images, and appealing ad copy lines. Make sure you link your ad to the relevant landing page and place a compelling CTA for users to take action.
• Once you have successfully created your ads with keywords, you need to decide how much you can pay to secure your ad placements on top of search results. Your bidding might vary depending on the keywords you are selecting for your niche.
• After placing a bid, you need to evaluate the performance of your ads and make necessary changes to improve the ROI. If any element of your ad is not performing well, you can modify it easily as and when required. It also helps you save money by not spending on less-effective ads.

3. Improve Your Website Content

Your website is a crucial asset if you run an online store.

About 48% of internet users say that website design is one of the top factors in determining a business’s credibility. The content you put on your website speaks for your brand’s mission, vision, and professionalism. It helps build trust and surety among prospective buyers.

Here are the internet shop promotion ideas to organize and improve your website content to attract more and more customers:

• Decide your content goals: Determine what benefits you want to reap from your site content, which areas to focus more on, and what steps to take to reach the content goals. This way, you can clearly measure your brand’s success.
• Be precise and transparent in your tone: Your customers want to know more about what you do and how your product solves their problems. Use short phrases with action verbs to describe your products and services to your potential customers.
• Give personal touch: Make sure your customers feel they are engaging with real people, not robots. Ask and deal with their questions and pain points in a friendlier way to build trust among them. Encourage a conversational tone in your content. Use first-person references to share your experiences and a second-person narrative for the customers.
• Create evergreen content: Other than offering valuable insights on your products and services, you can also create evergreen content in the form of guides, research papers, blogs, videos, and tutorials to touch users’ pain points and answer their queries in an interactive and comprehensive manner.
• Include images and optimize them: Include images, infographics, and charts in your content to make it look more attractive and engaging. The images you add should be compressed with the right balance between size and quality. Also, ensure you include good-quality actual product images on product pages.
• Include a compelling CTA: Add a captivating CTA for your audience to take action on your website. Have clean and clear navigation with relevant search filters. Based on your audience’s previous interaction, you can also personalize their content experience.
• Add testimonials and customer quotes: Honest reviews and feedback are perfect options to build trust among your audience and increase your sales. Encourage your customers to write reviews and feedback on your product pages.
• Update your content regularly: Customers don’t want to read or go through stale information. Ensure re-evaluating your site’s content regularly to update different elements of your content, like the statistics or your business data.

4. Get Started with Social Media Marketing

Social media offers an interactive and engaging way to research a brand or product. About 54% of internet users choose social media platforms to research a product over any other medium.

Social media advertising elevates your brand awareness, customers’ interest in your products, and your sales margins, as the reach of these social media platforms is massive.

Here is a look at the reach of users on top social media platforms:

• 17 billion on Facebook Ads
• 44 billion on Instagram Ads
• 1.02 billion on TikTok Ads
• 6 million on LinkedIn Ads

Here are the ways to get started with social media advertising to boost your overall sales funnel:

• Go live: Besides posting videos and static posts, you must also build a credible brand image. You should connect with your audience on various personal levels. Going live with your audience on product launching events or special occasions will help you increase your brand awareness and connect with the audience better. You can offer insights into your industries, educate them on your product’s benefits or answer their questions through a live Q&A event.
• Sell directly through social media: Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest offer native shopping solutions for businesses through integrated shops on your accounts. You can leverage that option by creating a business account for your website.
• Connect with influencers: Associate with influencers who have a stronghold in your niche and have the potential to reach the masses. Give them the freedom to promote your brand globally by offering giveaways or organizing contests. Connecting your brand with influencers is a win-win situation for you and the influencer, as it will improve your social media growth, thereby increasing your engagement rate.
• Offer omnichannel customer service: You can solve the queries and concerns of your customers by offering omnichannel customer service across a network of devices and channels. Make sure you appreciate the positive comments and find solutions to the negative ones as soon as possible. You can drastically improve customer retention and decrease churn rates by offering omnichannel customer support.
• Pay attention to social listening: Around 67% of marketers believe that social listening is a valuable method to track and understand your buyer persona. Monitoring social media mentions, messages, comments, hashtags, and trends related to your industry is a crucial part of social media advertising. This also involves monitoring your competitor’s social performance to better analyze your company’s position. Tools like Ad View, Brand Mentions, Hootsuite, and Reviewtrackers can be used to understand your social media audience better.
• Come up with offers and discounts: You can create exciting offers and discounts that attract customers to your website. Create a sense of urgency with your posts and stories among your audience, leading to quicker action and faster purchases.
• Use relevant hashtags: Ensure all your social media posts have relevant hashtags. When looking for content and products related to your brand, hashtags play a vital role in helping them discover your company. The chances of increasing your conversion rates are higher if you target the right hashtags for your posts.

5. Start Working with Influencers

Influencer advertising has proved to be one of the most vital promotional strategies for digital brands because of the high ROI and impressive engagement rates it offers.

Here are the top influencer advertising tips for your brand:

• Research and find the right influencer: When choosing an influencer to collaborate with, you must check their follower count. Evaluate whether the influencers you select have organic or inorganic followers. Check whether the price they are asking for posts and engagements matches your budget. It is also essential for the selected influencers to reach your target audience and create content that engages them.
• Create a foolproof influencer advertising strategy: Before you begin campaigning with influencers, you should be clear about your target group, the goal of the campaign, and the proper channels for your brand promotions. Create a buyer persona of your social media audience and understand their pain points. Run campaigns on channels where your target audience spends the most time.
• Track and optimize your campaign performance: You need to constantly track your influencer advertising performance to work on the weaker areas to get the maximum ROI. You can use online influencer engagement measurement tools like BuzzSumo, Fame Pick, Grin, Brand Snob, and Knear to get a clearer picture of your influencer campaign performance.

6. Increase Your Conversion Rate

It is essential to offer your users a smooth shopping experience. The point of creating an online store is not just to increase traffic but to convert that traffic into valuable customers. A 3%+ conversion rate should be the baseline for your digital store.

Here are the steps to boost your conversion rate performance:

• You can improve your site’s appearance by using high-quality original images and videos on your product pages that help users better visualize the products they are interested in buying.
• Offer free shipping to your customers. Around 79% of online shoppers tend to buy a particular product if the website offers free shipping. You can increase the product price moderately to cover your shipping cost.
• Send abandoned cart reminders to every engaged customer. All you need to do is create a compelling, personalized email that persuades the customer to buy the product.
• Write accurate and detailed product descriptions. Ensure your product description has essential keywords and answers the customers’ queries.
• Many online shoppers read and trust reviews before making a purchase. Encourage your customers to leave their reviews with photos after purchasing from your online store. This will help build trust among your potential customers and boost your conversion rates.

7. Optimize Your Site for Mobile Devices

A significant part of the total population owns a smartphone. Mobile devices hold great potential to convert customers and generate considerable revenues.

Here are the top ecommerce marketing tips to make your website mobile-friendly to boost your online sales:

• Get a mobile-responsive design for your website that works for all devices and screen sizes. A responsive website design ensures a smooth and flawless shopping experience for your customers across devices.
• Provide an excellent navigation menu. Easy navigation on your mobile website helps your customer find what they are looking for in a better and more organized way. Providing your customers with smooth navigation like a breadcrumb, menu bars, or filters will help you reduce the challenges they face along their way to checkout.
• Partner with leading mobile payment gateways. It is convenient for customers to complete their payment on your page using various wallets or payment apps. Offering your buyers a wide range of payment options such as credit cards, debit cards, net banking, and COD is essential for optimizing your website for mobile devices.
• Create eye-catching, easy-to-close pop-up messages that cover a small fraction of users’ screens and do not annoy the website users.

8. Improve Your Email Campaigns

Email advertising is still one of the most effective promotional techniques, as it offers a high ROI and mass reach. This highly profitable strategy is also in demand due to the privacy and safety it offers to the users.

Here are the top ways by which you can improve your email campaigns:

• Send appealing welcome emails that introduce your brand and product line when users subscribe to your email list and newsletters.
• Send personalized emails regularly containing product recommendations, cart reminders, and recent brand updates.
• Drive more customers with your referral emailing program customized for new and existing customers. Focus on establishing loyalty points, referral bonuses, or joining incentives to build audience trust and loyalty.
• Brag your best-selling products with promotional emails by hooking customers with discounts and deals. Start scheduling these emails before events, festivals, or holidays to grab their attention.
• Leverage email advertising by upselling your high-end niche products and cross-selling complementary products. On average, about 70-95% of total sales are driven by upsells and renewals.

9. Increase Engagement with Video

Video advertising is an excellent opportunity to increase conversion and engagement rates on leading video promotion platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram.

Here are the steps to boost your video engagement rate:

• Frame your videos keeping your mobile and small screen audience in mind. Avoid wide-angle shots as they are difficult to watch on mobiles.
• Use your best content first and include your products and brand’s most essential aspects in the first few shots to instantly catch the user’s attention.
• Videos of 30 seconds to 1-minute work best with the audience. Make sure you keep your video short, crisp, and informative. If creating longer videos, ensure structuring it systematically.
• Most of the viewers watch videos without sound. Make sure the visuals are on point. Use high-quality, less pixelated graphics.
• Add instant, eye-catching thumbnails to your video.
• Incorporate a compelling call to action in your video.
• Create videos that are not just eye appealing but also answer viewers’ questions.
• Encourage sharing and promoting your video on multiple channels.

10. Sell Your Products on Marketplaces

Leveraging top marketplaces to sell your products increases your chances of improving your sales generation. The top marketplaces where you can sell your products and reach out to a larger audience are Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Etsy, Shopify, and Facebook.

Here are the best strategies to sell your products on marketplaces:

• Optimize your product pages. Keep your product description, titles, and categories on point as you compete with top brands on these platforms.
• Invest in sponsored ads to reach the right audience in your niche.
• Conduct a competitive analysis of all the marketplaces’ fees, commissions, and other business running costs to understand your profitability better before selecting these platforms.
• Diversify your shipping strategy and abide by the particular marketplace’s shipping conditions. Consider and process all aspects of your product cost before deciding the shipping price for your products.

Conclusion

An effective ecommerce marketing strategy increases your business awareness, attracts customers, and drives sales.

Leverage the ecommerce promotion tips discussed in this article to build a robust ecommerce marketing plan for your online store to stay ahead of your competitors and be more visible online.