I remember 12 years back the first time I heard about eCommerce. The way it blew my mind was unbelievable. My friend’s brother is telling me this, and I was like wow, meanwhile bombarded with tons of questions.
Something I heard was, “there is a website. You can browse 100s of products from different categories. If you like or want any of the products listed over there, you can simply buy them by placing an order for your address. You can just pay when the product is delivered to you.”
I was not at all convinced. Numerous questions are running out in my head, what if they are not delivered genuine products? What if I did not receive the order during delivery? What if someone steals my parcel on the way of logistics? and many more.
That was the time when eCommerce started accelerating its growth in consequence of the concept of digital marketing for eCommerce araises.
But today eCommerce turned out to be the first choice of every shopper that saves money with great deals and bigger discounts. The major giants in the eCommerce industry are Amazon, eBay, Flipkart, Alibaba, Walmart, etc.
Not only them there are a large number of other eCommerce websites not less than a million across the globe. Few of them are very successful, and they are directly competing with the giants and few are in a mid-way generating good sales and revenue. Meanwhile, many eCommerce startups are failing and are not getting proper sales.
There are so many factors found while evaluating the reasons for eCommerce failure. The most common reason found from the owners of eCommerce stores is “online ads are not working”
In this article, I will be discussing how to do digital marketing for eCommerce websites?
What is digital marketing for e-commerce?
Digital marketing that is also called online marketing is the process of promoting a product or service online using the internet and connecting with the potential customer using a digital medium of communications like social media, emails, etc.
Digital marketing for eCommerce is implementing the digital marketing strategies for eCommerce business which helps in increasing the sales and revenue of the store.
How can I grow my eCommerce business with digital marketing?
There are various techniques to grow an eCommerce business with digital marketing. You can set up ad campaigns on different channels to reach a potential customer. You can easily interact with the customers via social media channels, build a continuous relationship through email marketing by sending them personalized cold emails. And you can create content around your product and publish them.
Content can be in any form creating videos, infographics, blog articles, user reviews, etc. Making your website or blog optimized for search engines by creating high-quality genuine content that helps to rank higher on the search engine result page is also one of the best techniques of digital marketing for eCommerce sites.
What are the eCommerce marketing strategies?
As technology evolves continuously, there are so many methods and techniques that we need to implement following it. Out of which, these are the 10 strategies that every eCommerce website should focus on. These are the proven strategies of digital marketing for eCommerce businesses.
1- Optimize for search engines
Optimize your store for search engines. Most of the users bind to the first page of search engines results. They never check out the next pages. So being on the first page of search engine results is one of the essential efforts for every eCommerce store. This is quite not possible in the initial days but the continuous effort for ranking for the particular keywords makes it happen. Optimizing the website for the search engine includes blog content, product descriptions, high-quality images, meta descriptions, etc. This is one of the best techniques of digital marketing for eCommerce startups as this is the free traffic.
2- Create Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns
PPC campaigns are the ads where advertisers need to pay only when their ads are being clicked. Most PPC campaigns are usually banner ads that are found to be in text or image format. This can be in video format as like ads on Youtube. Depending upon the platform, PPC leverages accordingly.
PPC is the most employed digital marketing strategy for eCommerce. PPC is the core for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Social Media Marketing (SMM). Google Ads is the best example for SEM ads and Facebook ads for SMM.
Creating PPC ads for the products and services and running those ads on various platforms gives a better conversion rate. Buying the products involves more visual medium. So it is always recommended to use high-quality images and videos which are visually impressive to get more sales.
3- Create high-quality content
An eCommerce site can create the content around the products and services and can publish in their blogs or Youtube, or other social media channels to get more traction among the web users. Creating high-value genuine content always drives good traffic towards their channels which helps to get more conversions. This is also the SEO strategy of digital marketing for eCommerce.
4- Write customer-friendly ad copy
Ad copy is the first noticeable element for any product or service. Always create a customer-friendly ad copy that explains all the benefits in detail. A winning ad copy is always resolving customer doubts. Your ad copy must clear the questions the customer had in their mind related to the product that makes him proceed to the checkout page. Creating amazing ad copy is one of the important factors of digital marketing for an eCommerce website.
5- Build social media followers
Always build your social media followers around your business. People love spending time on social media. Today social media is the sweetest place for all advertisers and marketers as the engagement rate is very high.
Create social media posts about your products. Always be active and respond to the customer queries over comments and dm that acts as a vital role in developing trust over the brand. The better you handle your social profiles, the better the followers and customers engage with you. Social media impacts hugely on digital marketing for eCommerce industry.
6- Don’t neglect email marketing
Email marketing is the cheapest method of marketing where the Return On Investment (ROI) is also high. eCommerce companies can make use of email marketing campaigns in many ways. eCommerce companies can send personalized emails to their customers about new product launches or personalized promo codes, and much more. A good cold email sequence helps companies to stay in connect with the customer always. Email marketing is powerful, the cheapest and simple strategy of digital marketing for eCommerce company.
7- Create personalization
Customer personalization comes in many forms depending upon customer behavior and his journey throughout the funnel. It is always about the relevant products to the relevant customer. It is very important to create customer personalization and if fail, the marketing efforts might get wrecked.
8- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
When you are bringing traffic to the site but fail in conversion, you should seriously look upon and analyze the reason. There might be issues in the website where the customer is not happy.
A few examples are, issues on the user interface of the site or might be facing technical issues on the payment page or some navigational buttons that might not work properly, and many more.
Analyzing the website thoroughly helps rectify the issues which reduce the bounce rate and help to achieve higher CRO.
9- Discounts, deals, and promo codes
Always offer discounts and promo codes on the site where the customer might feel like buying it. You can also provide deals like combo offers or attach another product in the store in relevance with the main product at a more discounted price or you can also provide free shipping for the next few hours only, likewise. This is one of the good techniques to make the customer purchase on the go.
10- Mobile-friendly website
Nowadays most traffic is coming from the mobiles itself. If the website is not optimized for mobiles, it is going to be a big drawback, especially for eCommerce websites as it involves sales and payments. If a user faces any issue with his mobile browser while on the product check-out page or cart page, or while making payment, definitely he will leave the website that ruins all your marketing effort. It is very difficult to bring back such customers again back to the site. So optimizing the website for mobiles is an important task of digital marketing for eCommerce website.
Conclusion:
Digital marketing for eCommerce is very essential these days as most people love to shop online because of companies’ huge discounts. Digital marketing is the core part of the eCommerce business.
If someone asks, how to do digital marketing for an eCommerce website? Above discussed digital marketing techniques are the best eCommerce marketing strategies that anyone can implement easily and can make their eCommerce website a successful one.
And also leveraging the above tips varies from one eCommerce store to another depending upon the type of products.
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