Today, we are going to give the top 15 marketing strategies for eCommerce businesses.
These are the exact strategies we used to increase some of our eCommerce clients’ revenue by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So if you want to do the same for your eCommerce store, stick around and read this full post.
Top 15 eCommerce Marketing Strategies to Increase Sales in 2022
1. Use a Website Design that’s Built to Convert
We did a study of some of the fastest growing eCommerce stores in the world, and we found that their websites had a whole lot in common.
For the most part, they all had engaging headlines, customer testimonials, featured products, helpful product information, and most importantly, made their unique selling proposition very clear.
So if you want to increase your eCommerce sales, the very first thing you need to do is make sure that your website is set up in a way that is conducive for growth.
We recommend that you build your eCommerce website on a platform like Shopify.
It will offer you a great design and great features to build your SEO and paid advertising campaigns off of in the future.
If you don’t have this and you don’t want to spend $5000 on building a new website, then check-out some of our predesigned websites at lyfewebsites.com/ecommerce.
We have pre-built Shopify websites that you can use to get up and running quickly without spending an arm and a leg.
2. Email Opt-in Forms
Email marketing accounts for ⅓ of all revenue from top eCommerce sites. That’s how powerful eCommerce email marketing is.
So once you have an effective website design, you need to make sure you start collecting email addresses from your website visitors.
Most eCommerce sites do this with pop-up opt-in forms with some type of call-to-action. This might be:
- a 10% discount,
- free guide,
- loyalty program,
…or anything else that your audience might find valuable.
You can use a tool like ConvertPlus or Powr to install on your Shopify website to begin capturing email addresses.
3. Product Photography
Let’s face it, people buy what they see.
Which means if they don’t like what they see, you probably won’t have a good chance at increasing your revenue.
So in doing product photography for eCommerce, make sure that you capture high-resolution images of your products to use in your marketing. Avoid blurry, grainy, and distorted images at all costs.
Make sure that your images have proper lighting. Avoid dark and dull images if you want to see the best possible conversion rates.
And lastly, make sure that you have clean and professional backgrounds in your images. Avoid using images with busy backgrounds.
4. Product Videos
If you want to take it a step further, including product videos in your marketing can dramatically help you increase revenue.
Top eCommerce brands are using video on their product pages to demonstrate how their products work and the value they bring to their customers.
These same product videos will also work great in other parts of your marketing, especially social media.
5. Optimize Shopping Pages for SEO
The last thing you should do on your website is optimize your shopping pages for SEO.
Specifically, you need to carefully write your product titles and product descriptions. Don’t just write about your product.
Write to include words that people are searching for on search engines to find products like yours. This is one of the major elements in creating the best product description.
The better you optimize your product pages and overall website for SEO, the better chances you will have at earning top Google rankings and ultimately, FREE organic traffic to your site.
Alright, enough website marketing for now. Let’s get into some advertising.
6. Google Shopping Ads
Google shopping ads are one the most effective ways to advertise your eCommerce store.
Google shopping ads are the product ads you see when searching for products on Google. For example, this is what shows up when you search “hair extensions”.
Shopping ads are different from text ads, both in format and cost.
Shopping ads allow you to show an image of your product in the search results, including the shopping tab, whereas text ads do not.
And most importantly, shopping ads are generally much cheaper than text ads.
We’ve seen eCommerce campaigns that used text ads with costs around $5 per click and shopping ads with similar targeting have costs around $0.50 cents per click.
7. Facebook Ads
Facebook ads is another must for eCommerce businesses.
Like shopping ads, Facebook ads are very cheap in comparison to other forms of advertising.
Check out these Facebook ad results where we spent $7,900 and made $92,000 in revenue for one of our clients.
Facebook ads are so powerful because they allow you to reach a very broad audience and use extensive targeting features to hone-in on your target audience.
Some of the most advanced targeting features include things like targeting:
- frequent online shoppers
- retargeting audiences
- and lookalike audiences
To learn more about Facebook ads for eCommerce, check out this post that tackles how to effectively use Facebook ads for eCommerce businesses.
8. Instagram Ads
Instagram is another major player for eCommerce businesses.
Because Instagram is such a visual platform, it has become the perfect place for eCommerce stores to showcase their top products.
And since it’s owned by Facebook, you get to use some of the same advanced targeting features that are available on Facebook.
In addition, you can run story ads on Instagram, which might be less competitive than advertising on the news feed.
If so, this might lower your overall average advertising costs and increase your returns.
9. Dynamic Retargeting Ads
Dynamic retargeting ads are an advanced trick to advertising your eCommerce store.
First, you need to understand what retargeting means.
Retargeting is a feature that allows you to advertise to people who previously interacted with your business.
If you have ever visited a business website, and have consequently seen ads from the same business in the future, then you’ve probably been retargeted to before.
Now, dynamic retargeting is an advanced form of retargeting made for eCommerce businesses.
It allows you to automatically show the most relevant ads to your retargeting list.
For example, if you have 100 products and someone only looked at one of them, then that person will be shown the exact product that he looked at as an ad if dynamic retargeting is set-up correctly.
Dynamic retargeting is available on all of the advertising platforms we’ve listed so far, which includes Google, Facebook, and Instagram.
Dynamic retargeting is so important because it allows you to capitalize on your hottest opportunities, which are the people who are visiting your website and looking at your products.
Earlier, we talked about the importance of having an email list and that ⅓ of eCommerce revenue is derived from email marketing.
Now it’s time to actually start sending emails.
As you advertise your products, people will begin to opt-in to your email list from popups you installed on your website.
It is very important that you send emails to this group of people.
If you don’t, you could be missing out on thousands of dollars in revenue.
Use an email platform like MailChimp or Active Campaign and start sending emails out to your list.
And if you don’t have time to do this, consider hiring someone to make your emails for you. We have email newsletter service to help you out.
Email marketing is one of the most inexpensive ways to grow your sales, so you don’t want to miss out on this.
But here’s another option for you.
11. Automate Email Marketing
Many of the top eCommerce stores use email automation to increase their revenue without lifting a finger.
This means that they have premade emails that are sent out based on triggers that occur.
For example, one of the most popular automated eCommerce emails is the abandon-cart email.
The abandon-cart email is sent to people who add products to their cart, but do not finish completing their purchase.
These emails are very important, since the average cart abandonment rate is 70%.
But this is just one type of email. There’s also the:
- welcome sequences to introduce new subscribers to your brand,
- product sequences to educate people on your top products, and
- promotional sequences to incentivize your audience to act.
It is imperative that every eCommerce store have these types of emails set up to maximize their revenue.
12. SMS Marketing
Here’s a newer strategy that is already working for major eCommerce brands – SMS marketing.
The average open-rate for emails is about 15-20%, while the average open-rate for text messages is 80-90%.
This means that text messages are 4x more effective than email marketing if we’re just looking at this statistic alone.
Now here’s how you can use text-messaging.
Just like with email, you can send abandoned-cart text messages to people who add your products to their cart, but fail to purchase.
You can also send text-messages for “flash sales” where you offer a big discount for a limited amount of time.
13. Content Marketing
Content marketing is among the most effective ways to organically grow your eCommerce store.
The simplest way to start using content marketing is to start creating content. This might consist of creating blogs, videos, or photos to engage your audience.
You should create content that is both useful to the reader and unique from what’s already available.
And also be sure to write content around keywords that your audience is searching for.
Do some keyword research and find the hot topics in your industry, then create the best content for those words.
To learn more about content marketing, check out this post on “What is Content Marketing?”
Utilizing organic social media, like Instagram for example, can be very effective for eCommerce Marketing.
Some of the largest eCommerce companies grew through organic social media marketing tactics. However, it does require effort.
Here are the keys to growing your store through organic social media.
- First, you have to create valuable content. This might be informative content, entertaining content, or inspirational content.
- The second thing you need to do is make sure people see your content. You can do this by promoting your content or doing organic things like using hashtags.
- And the third thing you must do is be consistent. By posting consistent content, you can remain top-of-mind in your audience’s mind.
But you also gain points in the algorithm. Both, Facebook and Instagram, tend to rewards brands that post consistently with more news-feed attention than companies that do not.
15. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is another great way to market your eCommerce store.
Brands like Fashionova rely heavily on influencer marketing to grow their business.
To use influencer marketing for your business, here are some tips:
- First, you should target micro-influencers.
These are influencers with anywhere from 5,000 to 50,000 followers.
These influencers will have the lowest rates and may even promote your business in exchange for products.
- The second thing you should do is target relevant audiences.
Select micro-influencers with audiences that closely resemble your target audience.
- And lastly, make sure the influencers you select have an engaged audience. Check their pages for comments and some sense of community.
The more community they have, the more trust they likely have amongst their audience.
And the more trust an influencer has, the more effective their posts will be to promote your business.
Quick Recap
Alright our eCommerce friends, that pretty much wraps up today’s post on how to market your eCommerce store.
Again, the 15 things you need to consider are:
- Use a website that is designed to convert
- Setup email opt-in forms on your site
- Use clean, high resolution images on your product pages
- Use product demo videos on your product pages
- Optimize your product pages and website for SEO
- Use Google shopping ads to get traffic from Google
- Use Facebook ads to target a broad audience
- Use Instagram ads to target a visual audience
- Use dynamic retargeting ads to automate retargeting
- Use email newsletters to boost revenue
- Automate email marketing through email drips
- Use SMS marketing to reach more people
- Use content marketing to build your brand
- Use organic social to build your brand
- Use influencer marketing to promote your business
So there you have it!
If you need more help with growing your eCommerce business, please don’t hesitate to contact us today. Our amazing marketing team is always ready to help!