Marketing for ecommerce businesses: strategies and tips for success

Types of ecommerce marketing

📧 Email

You can use your email list to make your audience aware of new products, discounts, and other items relating to your business. You can easily make it an essential ingredient of your marketing strategy, helping with lead generation, brand awareness, and keeping customers engaged between purchases. Email marketing is also great for collecting data, allowing you to test which messages and call to actions (CTAs) perform best. However, be wary of spamming your customers as you don’t want to end up in an email blacklist.

💬 SMS

Just like email, this is a form of opt-in marketing that needs customers to agree to subscribe to correspondence. SMS marketing is great for personalised promotions, offers and discounts, surveys, and re-engagement of existing customers. Make sure you keep your communications tight (usually around 160 characters) – and include an option to opt-out to ensure you’re not annoying customers.

📲 Social media

This is an absolute must in your ecommerce marketing arsenal. Places like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook are great to market products and services because you have so many ways of creating channels for engagement. Users can share posts and videos with their network, repost, and interact with your content, making it a great way to reach people that would originally be out of your reach. It’s also a great platform to leverage user data and share user-generated content (UGC), all of which allows you to build trust in your brand and optimise your campaigns.

🖥️ Content/SEO

With SEO marketing, your aim is to naturally cultivate organic traffic to your website. You can do this by tweaking your target keywords as well as improve your pages so they meet Google’s helpfulness algorithm. You should also aim to do link building to and from your pages, which will lower your page’s bounce rate and keep readers engaged. Whether you have an in-house SEO team or you’re resorting to an agency, it’s key to check the health of your SEO practices

🤝 Affiliate

With affiliate marketing, a publisher earns a commission by promoting a product or service made by a retailer (you) through an affiliate link. Affiliates create helpful content for potential customers, reaching a wider audience that is now ready to buy.

💸 PPC/Paid search

With this medium, you can pay search engines to place your ads higher on relevant SERPs so that it’s easier to drive traffic to your site. The great part about pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is that you only pay if people click on your ad. As long as you target your keywords well and understand what your audience can gain from your products and services, this method is an affordable and effective way of driving traffic to your site.

💁‍♀️ Influencer

This is a fantastic way of leveraging the power of UGC and social media all in one. 93% of marketers have used influencer marketing, which attests to how popular and powerful it can be. Influencer marketing can be a great way to build trust in your brand and give users genuinely useful information about your product that can be the make or break in their decision to buy. This strategy can be particularly useful if you’re targeting younger audiences who frequently interact with influencers on social media.