What Is E-Commerce Marketing?

Ecommerce marketing is the act of driving awareness and action toward a business that sells its product or service electronically.

Ecommerce marketers can use social media, digital content, search engines, and email campaigns to draw in visitors and facilitate purchases online.

Before we dive into more detail about what e-commerce marketing is and the way to implement a technique of your own, let's review the definition of e-commerce advertising and advertising parity with marketing for an e-commerce business.

Ecommerce Advertising

In similar fashion to the way advertising falls beneath the umbrella of selling, e-commerce advertising falls beneath e-commerce marketing — and when utilized in tandem, you've got the power to more effectively reach your audience members to spice up conversions and improve brand awareness.

As mentioned in our definition above, e-commerce marketing is about driving awareness and action towards your product or service.

Meanwhile, e-commerce advertising includes the methods through which you really promote your product. In terms of online or e-commerce marketing and selling, these ads may be available in the shape of display ads, banner ads, or rich media ads.

The main takeaway here is that e-commerce advertising may be a highly effective method to implement while developing your e-commerce marketing strategy to focus your product or service promotion.

Now, let's revisit our in-depth discussion about e-commerce marketing.

Types of Ecommerce Marketing

To give you a way of what an e-commerce marketing strategy seems like, here are some common marketing channels and the way you'd use them to create a web store.

Social Media Marketing

Brands, publishers, contractors, and growing businesses all launch pages on today's hottest social networks to attach with their audience and post content that the audience is curious about.

As an e-commerce marketer, you'll do an equivalent thing, but the campaigns you run might look a touch different, and not every social network may be a good fit for your needs.

Ecommerce websites are highly visual — you've got to point out of the merchandise, in any case — so your success on social media depends on your use of images to drive attention and traffic to your product pages.

Instagram is an appropriate platform for e-commerce businesses because it enables you to post sharp product photography and expand your product's reach beyond its purchase page.

You can take your social media posts a step further by creating shoppable content, which is content that permits visitors to shop directly. Which will include anything from strategically placed display ads within a social feed to additional tags that take users on to a handcart. These methods assist you eliminate friction from the buying process.

An e-commerce business is not any stranger to product reviews, either. Employing a Facebook Business Page to share product praise may be a perfect fit business that already solicits customer reviews across their online store. We’ll dive deeper into product reviews below.

Content Marketing

When you hear "content marketing" you would possibly consider blogging and video marketing — content that's meant to enhance your website's ranking in search engines and answer questions associated with your industry. But if you're selling a product online, does one actually need articles and videos to get transactions? You sure do.

Here are some ways to use content to plug your e-commerce store.

Optimize your product page copy.

Optimize your product pages for brief, product-driven keywords that include the name of the merchandise. If you sell wedding dresses, for instance, a Google look for "brown bridesmaid dress" is more likely to supply product pages like yours if you’ve included that term on the page.

Also, confirm that your page titles, headers, and image alt text specialize in the proper keywords so search engines know to return your e-commerce store for the proper query.

Write relevant blog posts.

If you manage a web bridal gown store, writing blog posts about "how to plan a wedding" can attract everyone involved in wedding preparations regardless of where they're within the planning process.

As visitors become more engaged, you'll create posts which will move them into consideration, like “how to pick the proper wedding dress", and switch them into leads, sort of a downloadable “wedding planning checklist”.

Create guest posts for external websites.

Guest posts can get you and your products ahead of relevant audiences (oftentimes for free). Submitting guests' posts also will assist you to get more domain authority for your e-commerce site, thereby telling search engines that you simply have a reliable site.

You’ll get to look for sites that rank for keywords associated with your product. Sometimes you won’t even have got to create a whole post. If a site already features a relatable post, offer to expand thereon by providing additional context, sort of a video or infographic with a link to your site.

Put product-related videos on YouTube.

YouTube has over a billion active users … the likelihood is that your audience is somewhere in there. It’s also the second-largest program behind Google. If you’re trying to find a huge, captive audience, YouTube is where you’ll find it. Use highly searched keyword terms to work out your topics, then share videos that are associated with your product and helpful to your audience.

This is also an excellent option for tutorial videos that show current customers the way to use your product — these videos can show people how best to use your product, increasing customer satisfaction and building long-term relationships with website visitors.

Include a keyword-driven FAQ section on your website.

If your audience is asking questions associated with your product, then you would like to be the one to answer them. Create an FAQ page on your website with responses to high volume, long-tail keyword searches to urge users to your site. You’ll be building both authority and traffic — two crucial components of a successful e-commerce store.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) includes both program optimization (SEO) and paid advertising. While SEO relies on your knowledge of Google's ranking algorithm to optimize content, SEM can involve pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, display campaigns, or product-specific ad campaigns (think Google Shopping), which permit you to buy top spots on program results pages.

On Google, PPC campaigns guarantee that potential buyers will see a link to your page once they enter search terms that match the terms of your campaign. But because you're paying Google whenever an individual clicks on your result, the payoff to you ought to be high.

This is why e-commerce marketers often register with Google AdWords and promote their product pages through PPC campaigns. The campaign puts searchers right ahead of the business's product once they click on a paid result, increasing the likelihood that the searcher will make a sale before leaving the business's website.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the oldest sorts of digital marketing, and believe it or not, it holds specific value within the world of e-commerce marketing.

The best part about email marketing is it is often automated. Automation means you'll find out a successful drip campaign to subscribers that are segmented by interest or stage within the buyer’s journey and let your email campaign do its magic. It’s one less marketing tactic that you simply got to worry about on your long list of tasks.

Even so, it’s imperative that you’re meticulous about your email list so you maintain trust among your leads. During a time when data privacy runs high on an online user's priority list, not every commercial email is welcome therein the user's inbox. E-commerce marketers got to take care of when and the way they add website visitors to their list.

Here are two ways an e-commerce marketer might use email marketing.

1. Post-Purchase Follow Up

If a user has already purchased a product from your website — and agreed to receive emails from you during the checkout process — sending a follow-up email a couple of days after the merchandise is delivered keeps the conversation going and gauges their future interest in your line.

A post-purchase follow up also shows that you simply care about them beyond a purchase which your company has an interest in their success using your product. It gives you a chance to urge feedback on their purchase experience, which, in turn, helps you reduce friction for future customers.

Some best practices for this sort of email are to ask them to write down a review of your product and/or read original content on the way to use your product (those YouTube videos you created would be perfect here).

2. The Abandoned cart

Users abandon their shopping carts for a variety of reasons, and emails to diagnose the matter and retain their business can make the difference between a sale and a lost customer. We’ll cover ways to scale back cart abandonment below.

If an internet site visitor fails to finish a transaction while they’re in your handcart, consider sending a polite email to remind them to finish the checkout process, offer assistance, or recommend other related products to urge their mind back on you and their browser back to your e-commerce store.

Learn more about why users are abandoning your handcart and the way to repair it.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing focuses on people or brands that influence your target market. The term is usually to denote Instagram accounts with several thousand followers, but it could also mean a star or community that your audience follows or belongs to.

Influencers build communities of individuals that know, like and trust them. It is, therefore, easy for them to garner attention around your online product through a recommendation, or “sponsored post.”

Affiliate Marketing

81% of brands employ affiliate marketing, and e-commerce sites are particularly good candidates. Affiliates are people or businesses that help sell your product online for a commission.

Unlike most social media influencers, affiliates generate interest in products via quaint (yet effective) marketing tactics. They often use paid advertising, content marketing, and other means to drive traffic to their pages on your product — it’s like having a team marketplace for you.

Local Marketing

This is an often-overlooked tactic for e-commerce businesses, but local marketing allows you to double down on the areas where most of your prospects are (if you've got an outsized population of them in one area) and allows you to supply incentives to your potential customer base.

Here’s how: use tracking cookies to work out where your prospects are located. Then, offer discounted (or free) shipping to potential customers within the areas where you've got warehouses or shipping facilities. The motivation could be just what you would like to gain a new customer.

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