5 eCommerce Marketing Strategies You Could Implement (Right Now)

The global eCommerce industry is pegged at a whopping $4.89 trillion in 2021, according to Shopify. If you get it right, it’s a profitable and borderless industry that you could take advantage of. 

Using the right eCommerce marketing strategies, set yourself up on the right path to take advantage of the rising popularity of eCommerce, a way to sell products worldwide (selling locally and nationwide is just as good, thanks to local eCommerce). 

Here are at least solid eCommerce marketing strategies you could use: 

Move Away from the “Thin Content Syndrome”

Most eCommerce stores suffer from what we call the “Thin Content Syndrome” -- the anemic lack of content (at content at all) on many of your eCommerce pages (from utility pages to the eCommerce product pages. 

Most product pages have product descriptions that are not even 100 - 250 words long. Most eCommerce utility pages (such as “About”, “Why Us?”, and others) have much less content than what’s expected. 

When content is the currency for contemporary profits, we only ask you this: How do you think you’ll ever compete with any other website that has more content than your site has? What are the chances of doing justice to your potential customers when they come to visit your website but barely have anything to read about your products, your brand, or your business? 

Make an effort to move away from the endemic that’s hurting your business without you even knowing about it. 

Content Strategy + SEO + Social Media 

Google receives over 360 billion search requests per year and more than 53% of all traffic is led by Google organic search.

Let that sink in for a moment. 

If your eCommerce product niche allows for an expansive content strategy (most product classes have room for this), use content marketing which is a mix of regular blog posts, other content assets (such as eBooks, reports, and infographics), videos, and even podcasts to make gains with search engine optimization. 

You can’t do search optimization without content. Having said that, there’s no point in producing content without trying to optimize for search as well. 

That’s why content marketing or SEO or social media are not isolated; they relate to each other and work together to get the results that you seek. 

Search optimization, when you do it the right way and for long enough, leads to substantial gains in relevant traffic, leads, and ultimate sales. 

While you are out and about working on a comprehensive content strategy (including SEO), take advantage of the social media reach, distribution, and interaction that it’s built for in the first place. 

The Ads > Product Page Visit > Retargeting Funnel 

Currently, there are two sources of high-intent, on-demand, intent-based, and profitable traffic sources built specifically for eCommerce: 

1. Google Shopping Ads and 
2. Facebook Ads for eCommerce (such as Facebook Dynamic Ads, Carousel Ads, Offer Ads, Video Ads, Instant experience ads, and more). 
3. Instagram Ads: Instagram Shopping ads (these come with the ability to add product tags or product tags with checkout). This is in addition to Instagram feed ads for eCommerce, Instagram Stories, Instagram Reels, and more. 
   

These ad types (and you could formulate your sales funnels based on what works best for your brand) are flexible, easy to use, and send direct traffic to your eCommerce product pages. 

Just sending traffic to eCommerce sites won’t help. You’d need a funnel in place to maximize your ad campaigns (this is where most businesses fall through the cracks). 

This is how your funnel should like (without getting into specifics): 

Your ads > Product Page Visit > Special Retargeting campaigns for those who don’t take action on your store. 

You also have the option of really digging deep with your retargeting strategies such as to: 

• Target all visitors
• Target only those visitors who checked out your product page but didn’t take any action at all. 
• Target only specific visitors who add items to their shopping cart but didn’t complete their transactions. 
  

As a direct result of your ad campaigns, your funnel isn’t going to be complete without setting off email marketing campaigns following through with the resultant traffic with targeted ads. This leads us to… 

Embrace Advanced email marketing Strategies

With 4.03 billion people worldwide raring to open their emails every day, it’s a user base that can shame anything else known to mankind (including social media giants like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and so on). 

Email marketing also returns an unbelievable 4300% (and more if you do it right) on the marketing dollar. 

Here’s how you can make email marketing work for your business -- from basics to advanced: 

• Start with the basics in place for your business: Use pop-ups, quizzes, slide-ins, exit-intent pop-ups, and landing pages (or a combination of some of those) to generate leads and then nurture your new potential customer base (subscribers) with well-crafted email marketing campaigns. 
• Part of your email marketing messages could be automated (such as automated nurturing campaigns, transaction emails, reminder emails, order notification emails, shipping update emails, and so on). Others could be ad hoc and sent regularly as situations demand. 
• Embrace advanced email marketing campaigns such as focusing on email design, using email marketing segmentation, deploying A/B testing to your advantage, using emails to regain lost sales opportunities with shopping cart abandonment emails, and more. 
  

Check out our post on 5 Advanced Email Marketing Strategies for eCommerce: Do it or Lose it.‍

You can also get smart by knowing what your competition is up to, how they run their email marketing campaigns, spy on your competition, and get a comprehensive analysis of some best-performing email marketing campaigns by using Panoramata. 

Optimize (& Continue to Optimize) Your eCommerce Store 

Once your eCommerce store is designed, the story only starts here. There are several things you’d need to factor in to ensure that you are on the path to success. Apart from how your eCommerce store is designed, the platform it’s on, and the static content on your eCommerce pages, here’s what you’d also need to consider: 

• Ensure that your eCommerce store displays just as well on mobile devices (all types of screens) as it does on desktop. 
• The average page takes 15.3 seconds to load. Each second delay in page load causes at least a 20% loss in conversions, according to Google. Your eCommerce store should load fast. Pages that take longer to load (more than 2-3 seconds) are a recipe for disaster. 
• Launch A/B testing for everything: Deploy A/B testing for your eCommerce home page, landing pages, and especially eCommerce product pages to see what’s working and what’s not. The best results come in when you have a decent sample size but take time to test out one element at a time (headlines, subheadings, call to action button copy, product descriptions, product images, and more). 
  

Which of these eCommerce strategies are you working on? What kind of bottlenecks do you usually face? What’s stopping you from tapping into the multi-billion dollar industry (and a global opportunity that eCommerce is?