It is no longer a secret to anyone that the internet is dominating everything, especially in sales. Nowadays, it is customary for users to make purchases over the internet, both for the convenience of purchase and as a way to buy without leaving home. According to Statista, retail e-commerce sales worldwide reached 3.5 trillion US dollars last year, and it is expected to represent more than 20% of total global retail sales in 2023.
Online business works the same as a physical business. You need to be present, separate inventory, have a good service, understand and relate to your audience, and, especially, plan strategies to sell and promote your brand.
That’s when the first question arises: what to do to achieve successful e-commerce? We can answer that question with a simple and straightforward answer: Digital Marketing.
Ecommerce SEO marketing services will bring many solutions, covering various digital marketing strategies that fit into different kinds of businesses and provide different types of results, depending, of course, on each strategy.
In this article, we outline the most common challenges of e-commerce and the main Digital Marketing strategies so that you can have a base of which best tactics and channels for your virtual store and, thus, reach your audience and have the long-awaited success online.
How to start an e-commerce marketing strategy
1. Design your marketing mix
We couldn’t start talking about marketing without presenting one of the most classic concepts in the field. The 4 Ps of Marketing is composed of four elements that need to be considered in every approach of your brand: place, product, price, and promotion.
The first refers to its distribution channels. You chose the virtual store, but you can consider integrating it with marketplaces like Amazon, for example, to expand your reach and win over other types of users.
Developing the right product is critical to success. It is essential to do a market analysis, analyze the demand for the goods in your industry, and think about what your characteristics could be a differential. To do this, consider your company’s mission and vision. If it proposes making life easier for busy people, for example, it needs an equally suitable product with simplified packaging.
Price is another crucial issue for your sales volume. Ensure that you have a good pricing strategy that has a viable and fair profit margin and does not differ too much from the competition. According to your priorities, you can choose differentiation (high quality, high price), penetration (high quality, low price), or excessive collection (low quality, high initial price, and lowest price later).
Finally, the promotion considers the benefits that you will offer your consumers to choose your business and all your communication to persuade them. It is worth combining it with some sales techniques to intensify the results. Some simple suggestions:
- Cross-selling: offering products related to what the customer is looking for;
- Upselling: offering a lower-priced product similar to what the customer is looking for, to move items with lower output;
- Scarcity: set deadlines for promotions and notify about low-stock products;
2. Target your target audience
The second step in defining your e-commerce digital marketing strategy is identifying your potential customers and prioritizing the most interesting clusters. Who are the people who might be interested in your service? And where are they?
You can use different types of targeting:
- Geographic: by region, state and location in general;
- Demographic: by age, gender, marital status, etc .;
- Psychographic: according to lifestyle;
- For benefit: considering what the person will value in your product;
- Behavioral: prioritizing convenience and the occasion of purchase.
Choose one of the options and make hypotheses about what needs and motivations will move your future customers and how they can get to know your business.
3. Define your brand tone of voice
With the previous answers in mind, you can start to structure your tone of voice. For this, it is essential to know the concept of branding and everything it can do for your company.
Analyze your role in the general market and consider what is worth adding to your value proposition. You can use such questions:
- Who is your brand?
- What does it offer?
- What are its most striking features?
With the answers, define your brand statement, that is, the “statement of your brand,” creating a final idea of who your brand is, what it offers, and what are its most striking characteristics. Then, turn that into your pitch.
Digital Marketing strategies for e-commerce
Certainly, you have faced challenges every day to win new customers and even sell again to those who have already bought.
After registering the products and assembling all the necessary structures to get the first sales, it is normal for e-commerce owners to ask themselves what the next step is. After all, what is the fastest way to get results?
Paid vs. organic traffic
The fastest way to get traffic and get your first customers is to invest in paid media. With these investments, you will get the first Google results for specific searches or attract people’s attention on social media. Developing a good paid media campaign can quickly increase your e-commerce traffic, helping you get your first sales.
Although this type of investment is very effective, your Customer Acquisition Cost can become high in the long run. Thus, working with organic traffic becomes essential because it reduces the dependence on high investments in paid media that e-commerce usually does to acquire customers.
Some marketing strategies for obtaining visits through organic traffic are working on your website’s SEO, generating content and rich materials on a blog or Landing Pages, and increasing these reach through social networks.
If you’ll be outsourcing your digital marketing efforts, make sure you get digital marketing experts like Radiant Elephant to work on the job. Doing this will make sure that you are getting the results that you will be paying for.
Email segmentation for e-commerce
One of the primary weapons available for e-commerce is based on the segmentation of Leads and customers. The more customized the shopping experience, the greater the chance that you will increase your sales and retain your customers.
In addition to creating segmentations based on interest in a particular product category, you can separate your customers into unresponsive contacts, recent buyers, buyers with abandoned shopping carts, regular customers, etc.
You must offer, through your email marketing campaigns, solutions instead of products. It is much more worthwhile to send an email about a single product, explaining its functions, advantages, and problems it solves for a small list of interested customers than an email-showcase for your entire base of contacts.
Feeding leads only through product emails will result in high unsubscribe rates in the short term. People do not want to receive messages in their emails with things irrelevant to them. Try to address stories, photos, videos with instructions, style tips, or ways to use a product. More than interested in what you have to sell, customers want to buy what meets their wants and needs.
Suppose you saw that a Lead passed through the page for a particular product. In that case, you can create personalized email flows explaining more about that item or sending a specific discount coupon for the customer to close the purchase.
Also, instead of always offering the cheapest, offer the best option. Try to communicate the real value of the product effectively. Samples, comparisons, and reviews are just some of the choices you can send to a future customer in a customized way. Reviews even have great persuasiveness because, according to research, more than 80% of consumers trust online opinions and recommendations from other buyers. Therefore, you must encourage your customers to write reviews of your products.
Next steps
Now that we’ve discussed Digital Marketing for e-commerce, electronic commerce’s main dates are distributed between October, November, and December. How about starting strategies to close more sales this year?
Author Bio:
Gabriela Damaceno is a journalist and head of online content for Media Shark, a mobile app development agency based on the Gold Coast, Australia. You can connect with her via LinkedIn.