eCommerce marketing is a crucial aspect for any business that is looking to increase its digital visibility and online conversions in the form of purchases and sales.
Now, there are many types of marketing avenues that eCommerce marketers make use of to reach their goals – which includes the use of social media, digital content, search engine optimizations, and various campaigns including email marketing to drive online sales.
Before we dig into the main course concerning the types of eCommerce marketing and effective strategies you can apply to boost your online store conversions, visibility, and recognition – let us go through the basics first.
What is eCommerce?
In the simplest of ways, eCommerce can be defined as digital commerce where the goods and items are sold and bought using the internet. Unlike traditional commerce with brick and mortar stores selling and goods, the stores are completely online existing in the form of a website or a mobile app like Amazon or Alibaba.
There are four main types of eCommerce models that you can observe existing at large:
- B2C (Business to Consumer): Business selling to an individual consumer.
- B2B (Business to Business): One business selling service to another business(s).
- C2C (Consumer to Consumer): Consumer selling to another consumer, like eBay.
- C2B (Consumer to Business): Consumer selling products or services to business or organization.
Now that you are aware of the definition of eCommerce and are aware of the main types of eCommerce models existing currently. Let’s get to the real deal and discuss the types of eCommerce marketing.
What does eCommerce statistics say?
Speaking of eCommerce marketing, there are a certain statistics regarding consumer behavior that every marketer should be aware of.
- Majority of online customers prefer to pay with credit card.
- Nearly 51% of online shoppers make their purchases through their smartphones.
- Nearly 9% of the consumers use voice technology to shop online at least once a week or more frequently.
- Research shows that nearly 61% of the participants interviewed don’t compare other shops once they find the product they like.
Source: eCommerce Guide
Types of eCommerce Marketing
There are a few main eCommerce marketing channels that you can utilize to the fullest and reap desired results with a proper strategy and campaigns.
1) Social Media Marketing
Social media has the power to bring your online business to the forefront and into the notice of the right audience. All businesses of today from the giants to the youngest ones do not miss out on the social platforms for maximum business exposure.
However, you need to understand that not every social media platform will work for your business. For this, you need to identify where your target audience largely resides. Is it Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or all of them? Either way, once the platforms have been identified, you need to strategize accordingly. As one marketing strategy might not work on every platform.
Word of Caution: One of the main goal of using social media is to divert the customers to your eCommerce website. Now, if your website isn’t in the best of health and shape, your marketing efforts will be a complete waste. For this, first consult a software development company near me and make sure you get an optimized and mobile responsive website that has the right user interface along with an impeccably built user experience.
With well-built product pages, you can easily promote them on social media – as you require a highly visual eCommerce website to attract and divert traffic to it.
Other than this, Instagram has proven to be a visual catalogue for online businesses with product tag option allowing visitors to buy immediately – that is, those tags directly taking users to a shopping cart.
2) Content Marketing
Content marketing is often only considered as a mean to improve website’s ranking in search engines and answering your industry relation questions including relevant content that adds knowledge. When you talk about selling online products to generate sales and revenue, we necessarily don’t consider content as the best choice.
However, content marketing helps your online business in various ways. Let’s discuss those ways in detail below.
- Write blog posts: The art of writing blog post first and foremost is to make them relevant. For example, if you are selling gym gear then you can write about fitness routines, healthy eating, and helpful topics as to “How each gym gear works” or “The do’s and don’ts at the gym”. The idea is to get creative as well as keeping your content informational and useful.
- Optimize product page copy: This is where you target the search engine and make sure to include short and product related keywords in the name of the product. With such copy, when the user searches on Google, your relevant product pages are more likely to show in the search results. Provided that you included that search term keywords in your product copy.
- Submit guest posts: Guest posts are the blogs that you publish on other websites to increase your website’s domain authority including getting your products in front of potential audience. All you have to do is search for sites that rank for similar keywords related to your product and write a blog post with your site’s link inside. Search on google using Submit a guest post technology.
3) Email Marketing
Contrary to how you read that email marketing may be dying a slow death, it is actually the opposite. Email marketing actually holds a significant value within the eCommerce marketing realm. However, email marketing much like push notifications within mobile apps need to be done carefully. Otherwise there are chances for it to appear spammy.
So, stay meticulous about how you plan on running your bulk email campaigns and nurture your leads. If you ask us, there are two ways you can use email marketing for your eCommerce website.
- For taking follow-ups: One of the best things you can do to instill trust within your customers is send post-purchase follow-up email. Not only this gives them a sense of importance but also gives them the impression that your store cares about their purchasing feedback and experience. This way you are improving the relation with your customers and encouraging them to continue shopping from your website.
- Targeting cart abandoners: One of the biggest issue faced by an eCommerce website is cart abandonment that places their business in a tough spot. However, there are great ways to fix shopping cart abandonment among which one is targeting the abandoners with a friendly email as a reminder. One of the best ways to entice them to complete their purchase is to give them a coupon or a discount on their next purchase.