eCommerce Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide

No comments
Last Reviewed:

Are you ready to take your online business to the next level? Ecommerce marketing is the key to driving sales, standing out from the crowd, and building a loyal customer base. But it’s not just about advertising your products anymore. You must create an unparalleled shopping experience that leaves a lasting impression on your audience.

Compare Top eCommerce Platform Leaders

Ecommerce Marketing Handbook

In this article, we’ll uncover the most effective eCommerce marketing strategies that can give your business the edge it needs. From using social media to tinkering with email marketing, we’ll show you how to build a results-driven marketing plan that’ll help your business reach new heights.

This Article Will Cover:

What Is Ecommerce Marketing?

Ecommerce marketing is an umbrella term for every strategy an online business uses to improve its visibility, drive traffic, convert prospects and retain customers. It’s a set of underlying tactics that define how a store plans to reach its target audience and entice them to buy its products or services.

Today, there’s an abundance of ways in which you can reach your customers online. Not all are the same, and using just one tactic or too many different ones can provide your customers with a muddled view of your business.

A holistic strategy includes marketing tactics both on and off your website. For example, you may want to advertise your best-selling products on your website’s banner while using third-party SEO to improve Google rankings. On top of that, you must determine your target audience and the best ways to reach them.

Not sure how to do all that? You’re in the right place. Read on.

Strategies

To better understand what an eCommerce marketing strategy looks like, let’s look at the most common techniques and how you can use them to grow your business.

Best Ecommerce Marketing Strategies

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engines are our guiding light while traversing the vast and mysterious land of the internet. Websites that don’t appear on the first page of our favorite search engine are irrelevant, and we’ll probably never know of their existence.

Therefore, it’s crucial for online businesses to optimize their websites for search engines. SEO as a marketing strategy doesn’t cost a penny (unless you hire external SEO experts) and aims at making your website search-engine-friendly, helping generate massive amounts of organic traffic.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of identifying relevant keywords and phrases potential customers use to search for products related to your business.

The point is to create bespoke product pages, blogs and articles targeting those keywords to bag the number one spot on search engine results page (SERP). This means whenever a customer searches for that phrase or keyword, your website will be sitting at the top of their screen.

Prospects who organically reach your website through search engines are more likely to convert into customers. It is because they were already interested in the product or service, which led them to search for it on Google or Bing.

Google's Related Search and People Also Ask Sections for Keyword Research

Google’s “related search” and “people also ask” sections are a great source for finding similar long-tail keywords.

On-page Optimization

On-page optimization involves the next step in the customer’s journey after they find your website on SERP. It isn’t enough to rank higher on search engines. You need to entice customers to click on your website and not the other nine suggestions.

You must also ensure they stay on your website. Most of us will exit a page that’s only offering gibberish content stuffed with keywords, even if it ranks high on Google.

Make sure your pages offer top-notch, relevant content and a smooth user experience. That’s the main difference between the first and last page on the SERP. Other than that, a few more on-page optimization techniques are:

  • Use title tags to write headlines. It makes it easier for search engine spiders to understand what your page has to offer.
  • Write engaging meta descriptions that pique customers’ curiosity to click on your website.
  • Use short and concise URLs that signify what to expect from the webpage.
  • Create hyperlinks to high-performing internal web pages to build a reputation for new pages.
  • Use descriptive image alt text.

Off-page Optimization

As the name suggests, this technique involves everything you must do off-page to convince search engines of your website’s and domain’s credibility.

For example, if you wrote an awesome blog on the recent soccer world cup, it’s unlikely to rank higher than a post from FIFA targeting the same keyword. That’s because search engines recognize the credibility and history of FIFA related to soccer and would give it precedence over a new website.

So the question is, how can you build such trust and authority?

It isn’t easy, and there are no shortcuts. The primary off-page optimization strategies are:

  • Collaborate with other reputable websites and domains from similar industries to share your webpage and hyperlink it, a strategy called backlinking.
  • Get backlinks from both high and low-authority websites.
  • Expand the number of web pages on your domain.
  • Encourage customers to share your website link on social media.

Pay-per-Click Advertising (PPC)

PPC is a paid marketing option for both small and large firms. It’s an arrangement where you pay a fee to the advertising platform every time a prospect clicks on the ad or visits your site using the ad link.

But there’s a drawback. If a customer has an ad-blocker installed, they can bypass the PPC campaign completely. This has led to many questioning the effectiveness of PPC marketing in modern society.

In an interesting survey, a group of marketers compared SEO and PPC to determine which channel generates more sales. 70% of them agreed SEO is a better strategy in the long run. But 30% that chose PPC had interesting reasons. According to them, PPC gives you granular control over who you want to show ads to based on demographics, age and location. You get to design highly-targeted campaigns that convert customers easily.

On top of that, PPC is a quick way to get in front of your audience compared to SEO, which can take awhile to rank for all target keywords.

That said, there are two primary PPC options for online businesses based on the advertising platform:

Google Ads

Google ads help create and display advertisements on top of the SERP and other websites in the Google network. It allows businesses to build highly targeted campaigns by choosing keywords, setting budgets and defining demographics.

It’s an efficient and effective way to reach potential customers and drive website traffic. With Google ads, businesses can track and measure their campaigns in real time, making it easy to optimize and adjust their strategy.

Google Ads Appearing on Top of the Google SERP

Running PPC campaigns on Google allows your website to appear on top of the search results page for target keywords. Source

Social Media Advertising

PPC marketing using social media advertisements is like a treasure hunt for your ideal customers. People who are most likely interested in your product or service (based on social media preferences and characteristics) will have your ads right in front of them on their social feeds.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn are a vast ocean of potential customers, and PPC advertising can help you attract the right ones with visually appealing and interactive ads and reels. You get modules to track a campaign’s performance and adjust strategies that help maximize your ROI.

LaLiga Academy Social Media Advertising

Social media campaigns allow you to reach a niche audience who already has a taste for your products!

Compare Top eCommerce Platform Leaders

Content Marketing

This strategy involves publishing high-quality blogs, articles and videos related to your products. It attempts to improve your website’s authority over a subject or topic.

The goal of such content is not only to entertain audiences, but to answer questions, educate them and expand the company narrative.

For example, American Express creates daily videos, blogs and podcasts to discuss the state of the economy and other unique topics. Similarly, we at SelectHub use our content to educate our audiences about the intricacies of various software categories. As a matter of fact, this post is itself a part of our content marketing plan for eCommerce platforms! Neat, right?

A few of the top content types you can use to market your business are:

Product Page

Designing unique pages for each product your business sells is a great strategy to capture top searches for product-driven keywords. For instance, if you sell pet accessories, a Google search for “red dog collar” should lead to one of your product pages and introduce new customers to your business.

To do that, you must ensure the product page’s headers, titles, image alt text and content focus on the right keywords, making it easier for search engines to know what your page is all about.

Ecommerce Website Product Page

A great product page tells you everything you need to know to make an informed decision.

Blog Posts

Gone are the days of shoving a flier or an ad down a customer’s throat and expecting them to purchase your goods. Today, the best marketing techniques aim to add value in some form to the customer’s life before asking them to engage with your business. And, blogs are the best way to do that.

For example, when managing an online pet accessories store, writing blogs such as “how to remove dog ticks” is a great way to present your business in front of ideal customers, i.e., dog owners.

It not only solves a problem in the reader’s life but also earns your business credibility and trust. The visitor can then move onto shopping for dog shampoos and other related products from your store.

Guest Posts

Writing blogs for an external business can be a unique way to expand your audience base. Guest posts are also an effective technique to build your website’s authority. You can write posts for external sites and include links to your website, which increases your business’s backlinks and domain authority in the eyes of a search engine.
Product Videos

YouTube is the most popular website across the internet with 5.3 billion organic search traffic, and is the second largest search engine, just behind Google. Chances are your target customers are also present in YouTube’s sea of audience.

How to reach them? It’s simple, through videos.

Find high-performing keywords and make videos that are related to your products and useful to your audience. You can create tutorial videos on how to interact with your products and derive maximum value out of them. These videos increase customer satisfaction and help build a user community.

Adobe Commerce Home Page

Adobe Commerce not only tells but shows how to use their platform through videos and product tours.

Compare Top eCommerce Platform Leaders

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the first digital marketing strategies that is still effective in the modern landscape.

The advantage of email marketing is that it doesn’t require an external platform and you can run the entire campaign in-house. You don’t need to pay fees or commissions to third-party platforms like Google or Facebook. All you need is a business email account and a list of subscribers, and you’re good to go.

On top of that, it’s the only marketing technique that supports automation. It means you can design templates and set up automated drip campaigns based on customers’ interests or stages in the buyer’s journey. Just sit back and let your emails do the magic.

But be careful about not spamming your leads’ inboxes. Concerns about data privacy are high across countries and generations, and eCommerce marketers should not misuse their customers’ and leads’ personal information.

That said, some of the best ways to use email marketing are:

  • Mass Campaigns: Send emails to your subscriber list for upcoming sales, seasonal discounts, product launches and other special events.
  • Abandoned Cart Recovery: Some customers add products to their shopping cart and leave without completing checkout. You can send recovery emails with personalized suggestions, discounts and coupon codes to convince them to complete the purchase.
  • Post-purchase Follow-ups: Follow-up emails can be a great way to keep the conversation rolling with customers. It helps build goodwill by showing that you care about your customers even beyond a successful sale. You can ask them to write reviews or send tutorial content on how to use your product (the blogs and YouTube videos we mentioned earlier would be perfect here).
Ecommerce Email Marketing Example

Give that extra push and show your customers they matter to you! Source

Influencer Marketing

This strategy involves partnering with popular online content creators to promote your products or services. It helps improve your brand’s outreach, build awareness, and enable collaborations with celebrities and communities relevant to your industry.

The global influencer marketing industry has more than doubled since 2019, and data shows that businesses are making $6.50 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing.

Enterprises can partner with big celebs or Instagram accounts with multi-million followers. Smaller brands can consider micro-influencers who have a niche (and often more dedicated) fanbase.

Here are a few additional tips to get started with influencer marketing:

  • Research popular hashtags in your industry on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter.
  • Find creators who post relevant content in your industry.
  • We advise laying the foundation of your business’s social accounts before trying out influencer marketing.
  • Try to partner with influencers who match your brand’s tone and style.
  • Pay attention to an influencer’s engagement rate (i.e., likes and comments on daily posts) as some creators buy followers or create bot followers. In either case, partnering with them isn’t a good or profitable idea.
  • Consider using influencer marketing platforms to track the performance and engagement of such campaigns.
Chess.com Collaboration with GothamChess

Chess.com has a marketing partnership with the biggest chess YouTuber, GothamChess. Source

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based strategy in which you pay affiliates for each visitor, customer or sale they bring in. This strategy’s effectiveness often depends on affiliate marketing tools that streamline tracking and optimize campaign performance.
Affiliates promote a business through their own networks, websites or social media channels and earn a commission for every sale or lead they generate.

This technique can be beneficial for both parties. Businesses can focus on their operations and affiliates can promote products or services they know and believe in.

Ecommerce Marketing Affiliate Website - Wirecutter

WireCutter is an affiliate review website with 3.6 million monthly visits, and it partners with Amazon, Apple, The Home Depot, Best Buy and more.

Compare Top eCommerce Platform Leaders

Tools

It isn’t enough to know the best and latest eCommerce marketing strategies if you aren’t well versed with the tools required to implement them. Let’s look at some of the best software options that can make your eCommerce marketing feel like a breeze on a Sunday morning.

Analytics and Tracking

Ecommerce businesses generate large chunks of data. You can use analytics software to get data-driven insights on consumer behavior, market trends, website performance, engagement, conversion rates and much more.

These tools take the guesswork out of your marketing campaigns and help you streamline them. Here are some of the best tools to enhance your decision-making process:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the perfect solution for businesses looking to gain insights into their eCommerce marketing performance without having to pay a fortune for a software subscription. All you need is a Google account and you’re good to go. It offers website tracking and search engine optimization tools that help get the most out of your marketing efforts.

It helps understand customer behavior and identify trends so you can make smarter decisions to optimize your marketing strategies. You get rich training courses and a knowledge library to get started and become comfortable with the interface.

Tracking Key Metrics in Google Analytics

You get real-time stats and analytical tools to optimize your search engine marketing strategy. Source

Conversion Rate Optimization Tools

A conversion rate optimization (CRO) tool helps businesses improve the performance of their website or landing pages. It tracks a visitor’s journey across your website using heatmaps and unearths intricate details that you can enhance to increase visitor conversion rates.

Some of the popular CRO tools available today are Optimizely, Unbounce, Omnisend and VWO.

Marketing Automation

We spend a lot of time doing mundane administrative tasks that distract us from focusing on the primary aspect of our businesses — growth. Thankfully, with the advancement of technology, there are marketing automation tools that help us cover the ground using ad, email, workflow and task automation.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an email marketing platform for businesses of all sizes to create, send and track HTML email campaigns. It helps marketing teams design, test and send emails as well as monitor campaign performance.

You can design mobile-responsive templates, schedule emails, segment contacts, create automated email workflows and automate performance reporting. The platform can integrate with CMS and eCommerce platforms, helping you centralize your management and marketing workflows.

Mailchimp Home Page

Personalize customer journeys in each stage of the sales funnel. Source

HubSpot

HubSpot can help you automate a bunch of repetitive tasks. The platform connects marketing, sales, content management and customer service teams under one roof, helping you optimize your inbound marketing strategy to generate qualified leads.

HubSpot Drag and Drop Tool to Nurture New Leads and MQls

Customize automations throughout the sales funnel using drag-and-drop tools. Source

Our analysts at SelectHub continually dive into the market to compare and rank top products based on features, user reviews, ease of use and scalability. For a detailed breakdown of marketing automation tools, you can check out our free comparison report that lets you compare products based on personalized criteria.

Social Media Management

Social media connects people across the globe and is a potent platform for businesses to market and advertise their products. But each platform has a different tone. A successful post on Instagram might not generate the same response on LinkedIn.

It pays to build a unique voice for your business for each social media platform, even though it’s a labor-intensive task. Social media management software can simplify the process by centralizing all your campaigns for the digital networking space.

It offers several features to help you:

  • Manage various types of campaigns from a unified hub.
  • Assimilate data into an aggregated view and design visualizations to improve campaigns and generate more leads.
  • Create a single source of social media marketing information for your teams.
  • Use engagement tracking and behavioral analytics to improve customer experiences.
  • Schedule posts and define rules to automate publishing on multiple channels.

Compare Top eCommerce Platform Leaders

Best Practices

Beyond traditional marketing methods and tools, there are a few best practices in the modern digital marketing landscape that can drive visitors to your store and ensure customers have a good experience.

Ecommerce Marketing Best Practices

Mobile Optimization

Mobile users are dominating the internet, especially in eCommerce, with reports showing that mobile commerce accounted for 65.7% of global eCommerce retail sales in 2022. It’s crucial to optimize your website to accommodate this increasing section of mobile traffic.

You can consider designing progressive web apps (PWA), which are mobile-optimized websites that behave and offer an interface similar to mobile apps. You should ensure the mobile experience is seamless. Data shows that one in two visitors abandon the site when it takes longer than three seconds to load.

You can also use hybrid technologies like React Native, Flutter or Phone Gap to design cross-platform apps that can run on Android, iOS, tablets, PCs and other IoT-enabled devices. The primary advantage of having designated apps for your brand is that you can send push notifications to get your audiences’ attention on new campaigns, products or services.

Mobile apps also allow you to geo-target your marketing campaigns. You can reach customers within a specific distance and offer unique incentives to visit the store.

HTML code to implement various types of Buttons

Use hundreds of pre-built UI components to play around with features and build new interfaces from scratch. Source

Personalization

Customers no longer want to consume irrelevant content or product recommendations. Salesforce found that 66% of consumers prefer businesses that know their expectations and 54% want companies to predict their needs.

Personalization, in simple terms, means tailoring your ads, messages, product suggestions and recommendations according to an individual’s taste and preference.

It could mean small things like mentioning a prospect’s name in a marketing email’s subject line. Or large scale operations like collecting first-party cookies to determine customer preferences and suggesting relevant recommendations, discounts and coupon codes according to their navigation history.

User-Generated Content

Content on your products and services created by your audience is called user-generated content (UGC). It can be product reviews, unboxing videos, use cases, blogs, videos and other types of content that give your brand free publicity.

UGC is a great opportunity for businesses to reach customers organically through the eyes of fellow consumers. A report found that 41% of consumers prefer watching UGC over TV shows and movies. Another report found that nearly 90% of consumers trusted word-of-mouth recommendations.

You can consider dedicating a section of your product pages to showcase product reviews and other UGC aggregated from multiple sources. Take inspiration from Amazon, and allow users to vote on the most relevant content so that it creates a mini FAQ list on the top of each UGC section.

We witnessed another great application of UGC in Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign. They offered customers to create custom bottle caps and Coca-Cola tags with their names on them. Customers shared this unique personalized content on social media, which served as a great organic marketing strategy.

Coca Cola Share a Coke Campaign

Coca-Cola’s impressive “Share a Coke” campaign.

Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs provide incentives with the aim of building a customer base that drives repeat business. There are diverse ways in which customers can show loyalty to your brand — repeat purchases, mentions on social media, sharing your brand’s content or referring other customers.

But building a loyalty program takes planning and work. You must decide on adequate incentives for rewarding a customer. It could be through points, exclusive perks or discount codes. Consider your options carefully while deciding on incentives for your loyalty program.

Big incentives will take a toll on your revenue structure, while small ones will not win over a customer’s enthusiasm to go the extra mile. You need to identify your audience and carefully assess what makes them tick.

A few unique loyalty building techniques are:

  • Word-of-Mouth Marketing (WOM): This is a great way to win over new customers who’re skeptical of a company’s marketing tactics. Although it’s more of an organic approach, you can encourage customers to fill out forms as an effective way to start the process.
  • Reviews: Reviews are extremely trustworthy sources of information about a business in the customer’s eyes. It is because they come from a source who’s not invested in the company’s success and are authentic users without any agenda. People more often than not think, “if it works for them, might work for me” before making a purchasing decision.
  • Referral Marketing: When a customer convinces their friend, family or co-worker to buy your product, that’s a referral. It’s mostly because of a stellar experience that makes customers refer. But you can also offer a discount, coupon or additional perks in exchange for a referral. A great example is Dropbox, which offers additional cloud storage space every time you get a friend to download their app using your link.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is a marketer’s tool to determine which version of a product, website, advertisement or email performs better.

It creates two versions of a product and splits the audience into two groups, with each group seeing one version. The tool lets you compare and analyze the performance of each to determine the more effective option.

Ecommerce Marketing AB Testing

Compare multiple versions of a product to find the best option. Source

A/B testing can also compare the design, layout, content and features of a website or product. But it’s important to have a clear goal in mind while running the test.

You must be clear about the version you’re testing and the factors you’re comparing. Make sure that you have a large enough sample size; otherwise results might not be useful or meaningful.

Compare Top eCommerce Platform Leaders

Cost and Budgeting

A fatal mistake most newcomers make is not considering the eCommerce marketing cost before starting operations.

Spending on marketing without a budget or plan is like going on a road trip without calculating gas money. You might end up stranded on a highway or paying more than you should have. It may sound adventurous for a road trip, but not so much when it comes to eCommerce marketing.

The average cost to hire an external digital marketing agency ranges from $400 to more than $25,000 a month, depending on the type of agency, expertise, services and company size.

But many entrepreneurs like to manage marketing on their own. If you’re one of them, here are six steps to prepare a holistic marketing budget for your eCommerce business:

Ecommerce Marketing Budgeting

Step 1: Identify Goals

A typical eCommerce business spends around 5-12% of its revenue on marketing. A young and ambitious company will spend more to fuel aggressive growth, while an established one may want to grow incrementally and spend around 5% of its annual revenue.

You need to know what you want to achieve in order to prepare a budget that lays the foundation for those achievements.

Step 2: Know Your Unit Economics

Unit economics refers to a business’s revenue and cost measured on a per-unit basis. It involves calculating the profit and loss from producing and selling each unit of a product or service.

It’s important to understand how much your customers are paying and how much it costs you to deliver a product from the factory to a customer’s doorstep. That’s the first step in identifying the amount you’ve left to acquire new customers via marketing.

Here are a few KPIs that can help you identify your unit economics:

  • Average Order Value (AOV): It tracks the average amount of dollars a customer spends while placing an order on your website. You can check your business’s AOV on Google Analytics, Shopify or your eCommerce platform. But make sure to get it from the same place every time to maintain consistency. This is a crucial metric and every business should ultimately aim at increasing AOV.
  • Average Order Quantity (AOQ): AOV tracks the average amount a customer spends on your online store. It tracks the average quantity of products purchased and the amount a typical customer spends per order.
  • Cost of Goods Sold (COGS): You know the average amount people are spending and buying from you. Now it’s time to figure out the cost of manufacturing and shipping your products. You can calculate COGS in percentages and average it across all products. The metric includes credit card fees, merchant fees, shipping charges and the cost of fulfillment. For instance, you might find that you’ve spent 20% of your AOV on producing and delivering your products.
  • Fuel Profit: You can calculate fuel profit by subtracting COGS from your AOV. Fuel profit is the main metric that helps you determine how much you can afford to spend on acquiring new customers. But this isn’t the final decision, and you need to go through a few more steps to make this metric truly useful for your marketing budget.

Step 3: Set Target Margin

Once you know your unit economics, you need to decide on a target margin. It’s the amount of money you have left after producing/acquiring your products and fulfilling orders.

It mainly depends on your growth goals. New companies will have low target margins as they’d want to spend the majority of their revenue on getting new customers and scaling operations. It’ll be vice versa for larger and more established players.

Another factor influencing your target margin is the average customer lifetime value (LTV). LTV represents the average revenue generated throughout a customer’s association with your business.

If you’ve longer customer LTVs, you may want to spend more on retaining existing customers instead of aggressively attracting new ones. In such cases, your target margin could be low and your main marketing strategy would be to offer a stellar experience and rely on word-of-mouth marketing.

Another easy way to determine target margin is to ask yourself “how much cash do I need to reorder/produce a product?” You can subtract the answer from your AOV to arrive at a suitable target margin.

Step 4: Calculate CPA and ROAS

After calculating your unit economics and target margin, start thinking about how much you’ve left to spend on marketing. Two important metrics can aid you in the process:

  • Costs Per Acquisition (CPA): Simply put, this metric tracks the cost of acquiring a new customer. All you need to do is subtract your fuel profit from the target margin you’ve set to find your business’s CPA.
  • Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS): The best way to determine the ideal ROAS is to divide your company’s AOV with its CPA. For example, suppose you have a ROAS of 2.5. In that case, every $1 spent on a marketing tactic should generate $2.5 in revenue in order to deem that tactic a success.

Step 5: Understand Your Sales Cycle

Now that you’ve figured out the amount you can afford to spend on marketing, it’s time to think about its allocation across various marketing techniques. To do that, you must know your sales funnel.

Broadly, customers go through four stages of a sales funnel:

  • Awareness: Customers are aware of problems in their lives and they’re actively looking for solutions.
  • Consideration: Your audience starts considering the options available. At this stage, they look at you and your competitors for the range of solutions offered.
  • Decision: Then, customers start to narrow their options to a handful of businesses offering ideal solutions or products.
  • Action: They identify your business as the perfect solution. They pay the money and become your customers.

As we discussed, there are various marketing techniques for an online store and some are more suited for a particular sales funnel stage than others. You must select a combination of different techniques and determine the exact mix by your marketing data and bottlenecks in your sales funnel.

For example, if you notice a large number of customers getting stuck in the consideration stage, you can create educational content, PPC ads and social media posts to convince them that your product is better than your competitors.

Step 6: Decide the Right Mix

This step is a continuation of the previous one where you decide the right mix of marketing techniques suited for your business, audience and sales funnel. You must understand that there isn’t a perfect mix that can suit every type and size of business.

You need to assess your unique situation to identify the perfect strategy. For your reference, here’s a range of how much you should spend out of your monthly CPA on different digital marketing techniques:

  • SEO: 15-25%
  • PPC: 15-20%
  • Content Marketing: 20-30%
  • Email Marketing: 5-10%
  • Social Media Marketing: 5-7%

Compare Top eCommerce Platform Leaders

Building an Ecommerce Marketing Plan

Now that you know different marketing strategies and how much you might want to spend on them, let’s create a comprehensive eCommerce marketing plan for your business. Here’s a basic outline of the plan:

Ecommerce Marketing Plan

Executive Summary

Write down a broad overview summarizing key points of your marketing strategy, overall purpose, desired results and new opportunities. It helps quickly disseminate the project to leaders and decision-makers within your business.

Goals and Objectives

Be specific and clear while defining your goals and objectives. For example, the goal should not be to increase revenue but to increase leads and subscriptions or reduce churn rates as a revenue-boosting strategy.

The aim is to create realistic, attainable goals, followed by stretch goals to motivate the entire team. You can always go back to amending goals if they turn out to be too tough or too easy.

Value Proposition

Define the problem you’re trying to solve and the value you bring to the table. Not every business needs a philanthropic angle, but it pays to have a clear mission and value proposition. Start by asking yourself:

  • What’s the purpose of our business?
  • What problems are we solving?
  • How are we doing it?
  • What are we NOT doing?

Target Audience and Market

You must know the people you’re selling to. It’s crucial to know your target audience, their characteristics and geographical locations. Otherwise, you’ll be creating inefficient campaigns that waste money targeting the wrong customers.

You must learn the following things about your customers to define your target audience:

  • Age ranges
  • Gender
  • Location
  • Purchasing power
  • Disposable income
  • Purchasing habits

Pricing and Positional Strategy

Research the market to find an ideal pricing position for your products and services. Customers won’t choose your business if they are getting a better deal with a better value somewhere else.

You must ensure your solutions are better and cheaper than your competitors. That will be the main foundation, also known as the unique selling proposition (USP) around which you can launch your marketing campaigns.

Distribution and Fulfillment

You need to have a well-defined eCommerce fulfillment strategy before launching a marketing campaign. Today, an efficient fulfillment process that guarantees one-day or same day delivery is a marketable proposition that helps beat competition.

Additional Tips

  • Assess your options and build a comprehensive marketing tech stack for your business.
  • Having reporting software that can track performance and business-specific KPIs and help you determine ROI of marketing actions is crucial.
  • New brands in the eCommerce landscape should use industry benchmarks before accumulating historical data.
  • Allocate a part of your marketing budget to testing new strategies. You’ll never know what works until you try it.
  • Consider getting into joint ventures and marketing partnerships with complementary brands to co-create content that exposes both to each others’ subscriber lists. For example, Red Bull and GoPro’s partnership to market an action-packed and fearless lifestyle.
  • Focus on profitability and not just sales. Acquiring a new customer is costlier than driving repeat business because of ad expenditure and a higher chance of returns and exchanges.

Compare Top eCommerce Platform Leaders

Wrap Up

Ecommerce marketing is not just about making sales; it’s about creating a seamless brand experience for customers. By combining art and science, you can craft compelling marketing campaigns that pique the interest and desire of your target audience. From social media storytelling to personalizing email campaigns, the possibilities are endless.

To take your marketing game to the next level, you can check out our free comparison report to assess the top eCommerce platforms.

What’s the perfect marketing mix for your business? Do you know any other unique strategies to advertise? Let’s start a conversation below!

Riddhiman RoyeCommerce Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *