Editor's Note: This post was originally published in March 2016 and has been updated with additional content on April 2024.
For those seeking advice on the evolving landscape of retail, here are some of the best eCommerce tips to help you create or develop your eCommerce brand. What was initially a secondary option for businesses to increase sales, eCommerce has disrupted traditional retail and taken over as the primary option for many shoppers. As consumers continue to show brands love by buying their products online, the percentage of total retail dollars spent will continue to slide toward the eCommerce industry.
The realities of the eCommerce world and the new direction they have paved for the shopping industry mean businesses need to at least start thinking about an effective eCommerce marketing strategy to increase traffic and sales of their products and services in the future. In fact, we believe this so strongly that we recently published a 3-part blog series all about getting your eCommerce website up and running (catch up on parts one, two, and three here). Plus, a recent webinar on Expert Tips to Improve Your Ecommerce Website Experience is also chock-full of eCommerce marketing tips to take your eCommerce product website to the next level.
What is eCommerce Marketing?
eCommerce marketing is nothing more than the act of producing traffic, generating sales, and growing a brand online through various methods and platforms. Once considered a specialized tactic for selling products, it has now become a multi-billion-dollar industry, shaping the way we shop and do business.
It's about carefully building your online presence across multiple channels, from social media and search engines to email and paid advertising. It's about connecting with your customers, fostering relationships, and turning website visits into profits.
If you're not already investing in eCommerce marketing, you could be missing out on key opportunities for business growth. But don’t worry – you’re not alone! We’ve seen many businesses take the leap and dramatically enhance their digital presence. Our recent blog series covers the best practices for creating a strong eCommerce marketing strategy, ensuring that your online store thrives in today’s competitive marketplace.
eCommerce Marketing Examples
From social media campaigns to personalized email marketing, there are countless ways to engage and convert your audience. Here are a few eCommerce marketing examples that have taken the industry by storm:
Social Media Campaigns
Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok are goldmines for eCommerce marketing. Brands use these platforms not just to showcase products but to build a loyal community. For instance, Glossier, a popular beauty brand, uses Instagram to promote user-generated content, engage with customers, and drive traffic to their website. Their campaigns often feature real customers sharing their experiences, making their brand feel more authentic and relatable.
Influencer Partnerships
Collaborating with influencers to promote products has become a staple in eCommerce marketing. Fashion Nova, a popular online clothing store, taps into influencer power by partnering with micro-influencers and celebrities alike. These influencers wear their clothes in posts, showcasing the product to their followers and increasing brand visibility.
Email Marketing
eCommerce brands use email marketing to directly reach potential customers and keep existing ones coming back. Take Amazon, for example—they use personalized email campaigns based on user behavior. If a customer adds an item to their cart but doesn’t purchase it, they’ll often receive an email reminder with product recommendations or limited-time offers to encourage conversion.
SEO & Content Marketing
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and content marketing are crucial for driving organic traffic. Lush, a cosmetics brand, excels in using SEO and blog content to attract potential customers. By creating engaging content like skincare tips and eco-friendly initiatives, they increase visibility on search engines and connect with their target audience, driving more people to their online store.
Paid Search Ads
Paid search ads allow brands to target customers actively searching for products online. Home Depot leverages Google Ads to target search terms related to home improvement, ensuring that customers searching for specific tools or materials find their online store. These ads are highly targeted and drive high-intent traffic to their website, increasing conversions.
Referral Programs
Referral marketing is another powerful eCommerce marketing tool. Dropbox revolutionized the referral program by offering users extra storage space for referring friends. This incentivized sharing and helped the company grow rapidly, increasing brand awareness and customer acquisition in the process.
Retargeting Ads
Retargeting ads are an eCommerce marketing strategy that allows brands to reconnect with potential customers who have visited their website but didn’t make a purchase. Adidas, for instance, uses retargeting ads to show ads for shoes or apparel that customers previously viewed, reminding them of products they showed interest in and nudging them towards a purchase.
Limited-Time Offers & Flash Sales
Flash sales and limited-time offers create urgency and encourage impulse buying. Best Buy frequently runs flash sales for electronics, using email notifications and website banners to alert customers of time-sensitive deals. This tactic helps generate buzz and incentivizes customers to act quickly, resulting in increased conversions.
Product Recommendations
Personalizing the shopping experience is key for eCommerce marketing success. Netflix is an example of how personalized product recommendations (in their case, movies and shows) can significantly improve engagement. On a similar note, eCommerce stores like Shopify use product recommendation algorithms to suggest complementary or popular items based on a customer's browsing history.
Types of eCommerce Marketing
When it comes to eCommerce marketing, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Different strategies are used depending on your target audience, business model, and goals. Below are some of the most effective types of eCommerce marketing that can help you drive traffic, engage your audience, and boost sales.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the backbone of organic digital marketing for eCommerce businesses. By optimizing your product pages, category pages, and blog content with relevant keywords, your store can rank higher in search engine results, driving organic traffic. SEO involves on-page optimization (like meta tags, image alt-text, and keyword-rich content) and off-page tactics (such as backlinks and social signals). This long-term strategy helps increase visibility and attract potential customers actively searching for your products. - Email Marketing
Email marketing remains one of the most powerful ways to nurture leads and keep existing customers engaged. Brands use email campaigns to send promotions, product recommendations, abandoned cart reminders, and personalized offers. With segmented lists and personalized content, you can make sure the right message reaches the right audience, helping to drive conversions. For example, Amazon uses personalized product suggestions based on browsing history to encourage purchases. - Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
PPC advertising allows eCommerce businesses to target potential customers with highly specific ads on search engines or social media platforms. Through Google Ads or Facebook Ads, businesses bid on keywords related to their products, placing their ads in front of users who have expressed interest in similar items. PPC can be a great way to generate immediate traffic, though it requires careful management to ensure a high ROI. - Content Marketing
Content marketing is about providing value to your customers through blogs, videos, and infographics that educate, entertain, or inform. By creating high-quality content around your product offerings, you can engage potential buyers while boosting SEO. Brands like Lush Cosmetics excel in content marketing by producing eco-friendly lifestyle guides, how-to videos, and product tutorials that speak directly to their audience’s values. - Social Media Marketing
Social media is an indispensable tool for promoting eCommerce products. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok allow brands to connect with customers, showcase products, and share content that drives engagement. Social media marketing also involves influencer collaborations, paid social ads, and organic content strategies. A perfect example is Glossier, which leverages user-generated content and influencer partnerships to build a loyal following. - Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing involves collaborating with individuals who have a significant online presence to promote your products. Whether through sponsored posts, product placements, or brand ambassadorships, influencers help brands increase their reach and credibility. For example, Fashion Nova partners with both macro and micro-influencers to showcase their clothing line on social media, helping them grow a massive customer base. - Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based strategy where businesses reward affiliates (partners) for driving traffic or sales to their website. This can include bloggers, influencers, or content creators who promote your products and earn a commission for each sale they generate. Amazon Associates is one of the largest affiliate programs, where affiliates earn a commission for promoting Amazon products on their blogs or social media. - Retargeting & Remarketing
Retargeting and remarketing are strategies that involve targeting people who have already visited your website but haven’t made a purchase. By showing ads to these users as they browse other sites or social media, you increase the chances of bringing them back to your site. For example, Adidas uses retargeting ads to show customers running shoes they previously looked at, encouraging them to finalize their purchase. - Referral Marketing
Referral marketing encourages customers to share your products with their friends or family in exchange for rewards or discounts. This form of eCommerce marketing capitalizes on the power of word-of-mouth to expand your customer base. A classic example is Dropbox’s referral program, where users received extra storage space for referring new customers. - Mobile Marketing
With mobile commerce on the rise, mobile marketing is crucial for capturing sales through smartphones and tablets. Optimizing your website for mobile devices, sending SMS promotions, and creating a seamless mobile shopping experience can help you engage customers on the go. Brands like Uber and Domino's Pizza excel at mobile marketing, providing a user-friendly mobile app that facilitates easy purchases. - Video Marketing
Video marketing is becoming increasingly important, as videos help brands visually demonstrate products, share tutorials, or highlight customer testimonials. With the rise of platforms like YouTube and TikTok, eCommerce businesses are turning to video content to showcase their products and drive sales. Nike is a prime example, using emotionally charged storytelling through videos to promote its brand. - Subscription-Based Marketing
Subscription models have become increasingly popular, especially in industries like beauty, food, and fashion. With a subscription-based eCommerce marketing strategy, businesses offer recurring deliveries of their products, often at a discounted rate. Birchbox, for instance, offers a monthly subscription box of beauty products, providing a steady stream of revenue while building customer loyalty.
By implementing a mix of these eCommerce marketing strategies, brands can effectively reach and engage their target audience, turning casual visitors into loyal customers and driving long-term success.
eCommerce Tips and Tricks
For most brands, eCommerce is a necessity. So, with this in mind, we focused our latest digital marketing video on Achieving Excellence with eCommerce Tips and Tricks:
1. Choose the Right eCommerce Platform
As eCommerce marketing strategies have grown, so too have the platforms on which brands can build and launch their Ecommerce site. On one hand, eCommerce platforms have made incredible advancements in an extremely short period of time, which bodes well for companies looking to get started. The flip side is that there can be a lot of information to process, making it difficult for companies to choose the eCommerce technology that best suits their needs.
Nobody can help you pick the correct eCommerce platform because you know your business best. But some things to consider are responsiveness, scalability, usability, and, most importantly, how much you'll be able to customize and mold the technology to do what you need it to.
2. Know Your Customer Base
It's difficult to build anything without knowing who it's for, so rule #1 for effective eCommerce is not to build an online store if you don't know your target audience. Look into your buyer's personas. Dive into your website analytics. Once you've figured out your audience, now you need to put in more work to understand them; their likes, dislikes, and tendencies are just as important as who they are. Once you've defined your audience and spent time getting to know them, the rest of the eCommerce process will become much easier, and you'll be on a path destined for success. You can dive deeper into the science of buyer persona development by checking out our infographic on the topic.
3. Optimize for Conversion
The great thing about eCommerce platforms and the speed at which they've grown and improved is that they're conversion-oriented out of the box. Most eCommerce platforms were built by super smart teams, many of them with marketing backgrounds, so they're already optimized to sell, sell, and sell some more - you just have to tweak the settings.
Popular eCommerce sites offer built-in search engine optimization (SEO) tools and integrations that help improve conversion rates by improving visibility in search engine results. By optimizing product descriptions, meta tags, and URLs, businesses can improve their online presence and attract more organic traffic. Additionally, integration with various marketing and analytics tools allows businesses to track customer behavior, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to improve their online store's performance.
Ultimately, the goal of an eCommerce platform is to provide businesses with the tools and resources they need to create a seamless and enjoyable shopping experience for customers. By streamlining the checkout process, offering multiple payment options, offering free shipping on orders, live chat, and providing personalized recommendations, these platforms make it easy for customers to find what they're looking for and make a purchase, ultimately driving sales and revenue to grow your eCommerce business.
4. Offer An Outstanding Customer Experience
The customer experience you deliver is a vital component of your business's success, and that's the case whether your interactions are in-person or online. The good news is that there are many ways to ensure your online store offers an outstanding customer experience; it's just a question of implementing standards and sticking to them. If you're not sure where to start, make sure to contact our team for help to get started.
5. Grow Your Brand
One of the biggest opportunities for businesses to differentiate themselves from the eCommerce competition is to constantly analyze and review their eCommerce store. You don't have to make huge changes either; it's about making small, incremental improvements that have a meaningful impact. Something as simple as adding search functionality to your website can have a huge impact on your conversions and online sales.
The average rate of shopping cart abandonment is nearly a whopping 70% in 2023 - and that's across multiple industries and sectors. What's the average abandonment rate in your industry?
Around the world, many consumers buy products and services online. E-commerce accounts for an estimated fifth of retail sales globally, a share expected to expand in the coming years. Whether shoppers buy on major e-commerce platforms or visit retailers’ websites directly, many obstacles can stand in the way of a completed purchase or transaction, for instance, frustrating website layouts, long delivery delays, or a lack of a preferred payment option. Issues related to the checkout process can profoundly influence e-commerce conversion rates.
6. Leverage Social Proof
Social proof is a powerful tool in eCommerce. Customers trust reviews, ratings, and testimonials from other shoppers as they reassure them before making a purchase. Positive reviews can significantly influence buying decisions, and adding user-generated content (UGC) like photos or videos of customers using your products can enhance credibility. Encourage reviews and ratings on your site or integrate with platforms like Trustpilot to boost trustworthiness.
7. Implement Retargeting Campaigns
Retargeting is a crucial tactic for bringing back visitors who didn’t convert the first time they visited your store. Through retargeting ads, you can show ads to people who have visited your website but didn’t complete their purchase, keeping your products top of mind. Using platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads, you can create personalized retargeting campaigns that encourage previous visitors to come back and finish their checkout.
8. Optimize for Mobile Shopping
With more customers shopping from their mobile devices, mobile optimization has become non-negotiable. Your eCommerce website should be fully responsive, meaning it adjusts smoothly to fit smaller screens. Simplifying the mobile checkout process and optimizing images and text for mobile use can improve user experience and, in turn, conversion rates.
9. Utilize Data Analytics
Data is your friend when it comes to eCommerce marketing. By tracking metrics such as customer behavior, cart abandonment, and traffic sources, you can gain insights that help you make informed decisions about your website and marketing campaigns. Tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, and your eCommerce platform's native analytics features help identify where visitors are dropping off and what elements of your website need improvement.
10. Focus on Content Marketing
Content marketing is essential for building long-term brand authority and driving organic traffic. Create valuable content that speaks to your target audience’s pain points, questions, and interests. Blogging, how-to guides, product reviews, and instructional videos can boost your site's SEO and provide extra value to your visitors, encouraging them to make a purchase. SEO-optimized content can also improve your site’s visibility on search engines.
We Can Help with Your Marketing Strategy!
If you would like more information on the best eCommerce tips or professional help setting up a store, speak to an expert today.
