Ecommerce marketing is the process of guiding online shoppers to an ecommerce website and persuading them to purchase the products, brands, and services over the Internet.
The goal is to get people who are interested in your products to visit your store and buy from you.
Ecommerce marketing is fundamental if you want your business to thrive online. With an ecommerce marketing plan in place, you’ll attract more leads and earn more sales for your company.
Ecommerce marketing enables the following:
• Creating awareness about your ecommerce store.
• Driving traffic to the store.
• Converting visitors into paying customers.
6 Top Ecommerce Platforms:
An ecommerce platform is a software application that enables businesses to set up and manage an online store.
It also enables business owners to review the store performance, manage inventory, define product pricing, and run promotions.
Now, Let’s look at six of the most commonly used ecommerce platforms.
1. Shopify:
Shopify offers a SaaS ecommerce platform for small businesses, boutique stores, or artisans.
Shopify enables you to build an online store and offers features such as social commerce, Facebook ads, a POS system, etc.
Shopify also allows enterprises to set up their store through Shopify Gold.
Shopify is now the leading commerce platform designed for businesses of all sizes. Whether you sell online, on social media, in-store, or out of the trunk of your car, Shopify has you covered.
2. BigCommerce:
BigCommerce has been providing ecommerce solutions for the last decade. During that time, they’ve processed more than $17 billion in merchant sales.
BigCommerce offers a wide array of features like Shopify and WooCommerce. BigCommerce offers its product in two categories viz. Enterprise and Essentials.
The platform has an extraordinary significance in terms of uptime, loading speed, security, and other performance metrics. They offer unique solutions for B2B stores, wholesale shops, and WordPress users.
BigCommerce has distinct options for ecommerce stores in different industries as well.
The platform can be incorporated with social media platforms (Facebook and Instagram), Amazon, Google Shopping, Square, and eBay. This complexity yields a steep learning curve for beginners.
3. Squarespace:
Squarespace is another popular ecommerce platform.
Squarespace enables you to develop aesthetically pleasing websites, but a major shortcoming of the platform is its limited payment gateways (it currently only supports Apple Pay and Stripe) and shipping options.
With Squarespace, building a beautiful website is easy. The templates are modern and fully customizable. You can even install multiple templates to one website and switch between them at any time.
The ecommerce compatible plan starts from $18/month, but to get the full range of features, they recommended you subscribe to its Commerce plan priced at $26/month.
Squarespace has dozens and dozens of ecommerce benefits. Here are some of the top highlights to give you an idea of what you’re getting:
• Unlimited products
• Flexible product varients
• Sell physical and digital products
• Manage subscriptions
• Multiple payment methods
• Mobile-optimized checkouts
• Gift cards
• Abandoned cart recovery
4. WooCommerce:
WooCommerce is a bit unique from the other platforms we’ve seen so far. It’s an ecommerce plugin made for WordPress, as opposed to an all-in-one ecommerce platform.
Although the plugin is used by different types of businesses, you need to work with developers who are comfortable with WordPress and WooCommerce to scale its functionality.
With WooCommerce, any website running on WordPress can be turned into an ecommerce store.
With almost 80 million downloads, WooCommerce is the world’s most popular ecommerce solution. Approximately 30% of all online stores across the globe are powered by WooCommerce.
5. Magento:
Magento is another ecommerce platform designed for enterprise-level online stores. It’s used by global giants like Nike, HP, Jack Daniel’s, and Canon.
Magento has strong and robust ecommerce capabilities for any type of website across all industries. It has specific solutions for businesses that operate as a B2C, B2B, or both.
Magento has an easy to use page builder with drag-and-drop capabilities. It offers content staging and previews, instant purchases, and merchandising.
Use Magento to sell your products through any online marketplace or sales channel. You can customize your Magento store by choosing from 1,000+ extensions and themes.
6. Wix:
Wix is a website building tool that enables you to set up online stores.
Wix has an easy-to-use dashboard, and then drag and drop interface works well for beginners. It has an app market for including add-ons and other cool things like contact forms and receipts.
Although Wix enables you to manage the store, set up product pages, coupons, discounts, and payment methods, keep in mind that it’s not a full-fledged ecommerce platform.
Wix offers a free plan and you can upgrade to the premium plan at $29/month.
Strategies For Ecommerce Marketing:
As you continue to grow your business, you’ll need a list of go-to strategies you can test to get new traffic, leads, and customers.
If you’re serious about growing, your business needs direction and a clear strategy.
In this section, 9 ecommerce strategies are shared that are proven to help businesses increase their sales and revenues — and what’s even better, any ecommerce business can use these strategies.
Let’s dive right in.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
Ranking organically on the search engine result pages (SERP) needs you to have a sound SEO strategy. Here are a few considerations to boost your store rank higher up on search engines:
• Make your website mobile-friendly.
• Strengthen your local SEO game by creating your Google My Business profile.
• Fix technical SEO errors such as duplicate pages. Seek help from an SEO expert if necessary.
• Setup your website on Google Search Console.
• Optimize page load time (Google PageSpeed Insights).
• Run an SEO audit (Ubersuggest).
Other Recommended SEO Tools:
• SEMrush
• Moz Keyword Explorer
• Site Explorer by Ahrefs
2. Email Marketing:
For a good reason, Email marketing has been around forever. It’s the most direct and effective way of connecting with your leads, nurturing them, and turning them into customers, consistently winning out over all other marketing channels.
If you use email marketing wisely, you can significantly ramp up your conversion rates. No matter how many ‘Email is dead’ articles surface occasionally, email is not losing its prominence in e-commerce marketing.
With the help of smart marketing tactics, You can boost your list building efforts. For example, get your website visitors to sign-up for your email list by enticing them with downloadable content or by strategically placing lead generation tools (header bars, pop-ups, etc.).
Once they provide their email address during checkout or sign-up to your list, you can initiate the appropriate email sequence. Here are a few examples of emails that you can send:
• A welcome sequence (drip email campaign) to new subscribers
• Transactional emails to keep buyers updated on their purchase (including an order confirmation, receipts/invoices, shipment, delivery confirmation, and returns/exchange emails)
• Promotional emails occasionally to promote upselling or cross-selling opportunities.
Top Email Marketing Tools:
• Mailchimp
• ConvertKit
• ActiveCampaign
• GetResponse
3. Content Marketing:
Content Marketing for ecommerce websites goes beyond its conventional meaning and includes the product, category, and cart pages. Copywriting is an important component of ecommerce marketing as it contributes to effectively driving conversions.
Let’s look at the different areas where you can implement content marketing:
1. Product pages: Headline, product description, high-res images, and demo videos.
2. Blog Section: Create content around your niche that is valuable and informative to your prospects and customers. Example: blog posts, downloadable content, infographics, checklists, etc.
3. Rich Media: There is a lot of space for storytelling for e-commerce stories. Try out videos, podcasts, or other interactive media to create content.
Top Content Marketing Tools:
Feedly
Buzzsumo
Google Trends
Grammarly
Uberflip
4. Social Media Marketing:
Social media is ideal for ecommerce also because it is a visual medium and thus makes it is easy to convince people through images and videos.
Ecommerce is one of the industries that benefit tremendously from social media. The reason is the user intent while scrolling social media, plus the product ads are not always perceived as an intrusion.
Apart from the extensive use of social ads to reach your target audience, the rise of social commerce such as Instagram Shopping is going to facilitate your e-commerce marketing efforts in the future.
Top Social Media Tools:
1. HootSuite
2. Sprout Social
3. AdEspresso
4. Buffer
5. Influencer Marketing:
People are influenced by people they trust. Users would rather trust a celebrity or an expert in their niche than a brand, that’s why ecommerce stores are now investing in influencer marketing.
In influencer marketing, you collaborate with celebrities or users with a substantial fan following to act as brand ambassadors. You deliver them with the content guidelines as the goal is not to sound too pushy about your products. Once they share the content on their social media accounts, you evaluate the performance.
Top Influencer Marketing Tools:
1. Followerwonk
2. Kred
3. HypeAuditor
6. Paid Advertising:
Once you have peaked your reach through organic ways, your ecommerce store revenue becomes a function of the money you spend on ads. That’s why almost every successful online store invests heavily in paid ads (search ads, social media ads, native ads, etc.) that target each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Here is how you can begin with your paid advertising efforts:
1. Invest in search ads and Google Shopping ads to target the awareness stage.
2. Target people who visited your site but didn’t complete the purchase through remarketing ads.
3. Expand your target audience through lookalike audience ads.
7. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO):
The conversion rate is perhaps the most significant metric for any ecommerce store.
Conversion rate optimization allows online retailers to make the most of the site traffic that they all have and effect making more money without having to spend much more on optimization or customer acquisition.
It is the number of visitors converted per hundred visitors. Here are four ways that can improve the conversion rate of ecommerce stores:
1.Recommendation Engine: Recommendation engines personalize the shopping experience by suggesting products to visitors based on their purchase and website browsing history.
2. Cart Abandonment: Cart abandonment software sends reminder emails to shoppers who left the website without completing the purchase. Ecommerce platforms such as BigCommerce offer this feature as a part of their product.
3.Lead Generation: These tools help you guide shoppers through the conversion funnel via exit intent pop-ups, opt-in forms, and social proof notifications.
Top CRO Tools:
Sumo
OptinMonster
TrustPulse
8. Customer Service and Support:
Online stores face occasional hiccups in the logistics, inviting angry customers concerned about their orders. To tackle this effectively, ecommerce stores need to have a prompt customer service department in place.
Shoppers should be able to communicate with you through the phone, emails, or live chat. In addition to traditional mediums, ecommerce stores need to experiment with conversational AI so that they can communicate with shoppers in real-time via digital assistants, messenger apps, and chatbots.
Top Customer Service and Support Tools:
1. Zendesk
2. Freshdesk
3. Intercom
9. Marketing Analytics:
One of the significant aspects of CRO is testing several elements of your website. Additionally, tracking store performance enables you to evaluate the impact of these changes.
Having analytics tools in place will help you track all these aspects. Quantitative analytics tools measure quantitative data, such as visits, conversions, page views, bounce rate, etc.
Top Marketing Analytics Tools:
1. Google Analytics
2. Hotjar
3. Optimizely
4. Crazy Egg
5. Kissmetrics
Tools For Ecommerce Marketing:
There are about 62 email marketing automation tools you can choose from, about a trillion different advertising tools, and at least as many upselling/cross-selling tools.
We’ve researched the top ecommerce tools on the market. We found the 6 best by looking at the most reviewed apps on the Shopify store. Here’s the list we found, what each tool does, and why we think you should use it:
1. KIT:
KIT enables you to manage your Instagram/Facebook ads, email marketing, and social posts for your Shopify store. It’s pretty much a virtual marketing manager.
You can even manage Kit straight from Facebook Messenger.
WHY YOU SHOULD USE IT:
The kit has a lot of incredible characteristics that will boost you greatly by automating your marketing.
2. PushOwl:
Pushowl enables you to send customers to push notifications.
You can automatically send a notification when certain items are back in stock or when there’s a price drop for an item.
WHY YOU SHOULD USE IT:
PushOwl has great reviews on the Shopify store, and the reviews mention a boost in sales and great customer service.
With PushOwl, you can also learn valuable information about your customers:
Where they’re coming from
• Their preferences
• The devices they use
•The time of day they’re most likely to visit your store, and more.
3. GOBOT:
Gobot is a conversational chatbot that answers your customers’ questions, converts visitors into customers, collects feedback, and grows your email list.
WHY YOU SHOULD USE IT:
GOBOT increases engagement with your store by allowing customers to interact with your store by chatting.
4. SUMO:
Sumo enables you to use “Shortcuts” to solve sales and marketing challenges in your ecommerce business — in three minutes or less.
WHY YOU SHOULD USE IT:
Sumo is dead-simple to set up.
Let’s say that you want to reduce cart abandonment on your ecommerce store.
You just have to install Sumo, click the Reduce Cart Abandonment Shortcut on the Sumo Dashboard, and go through a simple four-step process.
5. FOMO:
Fomo shows a notification to every visitor on your website every time someone takes an action of your choosing, like placing an order.
WHY YOU SHOULD USE IT:
Fomo enables you to boost your sales by harnessing the power of social proof.
6. COUNTDOWN CART:
Countdown Cart enables you to put urgency-inducing counters on your product pages.
WHY YOU SHOULD USE IT:
Creating a sense of scarcity is one of the most significant ways to increase your sales. Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a very real thing.
With Countdown Cart, you can do this in three different ways.
• Show a countdown timer on your product page, informing people when a sale will end.
• Show a stock counter on your product page.
• Show how many people are viewing an item, how many have it in their carts, and how many have already bought it.
Conclusion
I hope you find these tools and strategies helpful and have success growing your ecommerce store with them.
Ecommerce marketing may seem complicated with all these procedures stacked on top of each other. But the key to successful execution is to build a martech stack that automates mundane tasks so that store owners and marketers can focus on growing their business.
Remember to personalize your content, focus on retention, and offer a top-notch customer experience – that way, your ecommerce marketing strategy will be unbeatable.