Many individuals are switching to digital platforms for shopping, especially amidst the pandemic and lockdowns. The U.S. retail E-commerce sales are expected to soar over $908.73 billion in 2021, while 32.6% of U.S. E-commerce sales grew in the first three quarters of 2020.
The competition is fierce. Driving growth for your E-commerce business needs you to walk that additional mile for consumers. One way to ensure improving reach and driving more sales is via digital marketing.
A marketer may choose from a variety of tactics depending on their products and target demographic. Before exploring the top five tips to drive E-commerce through digital marketing, let us begin with the basics.
What is Digital Marketing for E-commerce?
Digital marketing for E-commerce is also referred to as E-commerce marketing. It is a practice of getting visitors to your website, persuading them to make the initial purchase, and then retaining them to continue doing business.
You may wonder how to get your first sales on your E-commerce store and doubt whether digital marketing is the answer. But before answering that, you will need to consider other aspects of E-commerce marketing that attract targeted visitors (who have a high intent to buy your products) to your website and generate sales.
Comprehensive digital marketing for E-commerce involves the usage of social media platforms and SEO techniques to raise awareness about your brand online and help grow the consumer base. Your ultimate objective is to provide a seamless digital experience to prospective consumers regardless of how they find you or where they make their transactions.
Let us find out the top ways to implement digital marketing for increasing E-commerce sales.
E-commerce marketing strategy tips for 2021
The intent behind any E-commerce marketing is to unlock RACE to its full potential. RACE is a mnemonic for Reach > Act > Convert > Engage. You can start implementing the tips mentioned below to launch a successful E-commerce marketing campaign.
#1. Create a blog to rank and convert better
Blogging and content marketing are critical to building a successful E-commerce marketing plan. Content marketing involves creating valuable materials like blogs, infographics, articles, interviews, expert tips, etc., and then disseminating them to a larger audience.
The larger content framework outside the written text includes podcasts, videos, webinars, look-books, and social media. You will need to weave all the multimedia content as a part of a cohesive content marketing strategy.
Blogging activities are a must as they enable you to target critical keywords as a part of an E-commerce link-building strategy. It helps improve SERP features of content that may not naturally appear on product or category pages. It will have long pieces of content that rank quite high in organic search.
According to SEMrush research of 700,000+ articles, content with 3,000+ words produces three times the traffic, four times the shares, and 3.5 times the backlinks compared to short-form content.
With E-commerce content marketing, you will open up channels to speak directly to your prospective and current set of consumers that help answer their queries. Ultimately, you reap the rewards of better client connections and conversion rates that are amplified. The appropriate content may result in increased brand affinity and consumer loyalty in the longer run.
#2. Use video marketing
Not all products would need video, but show it in action rather than speaking about it if you have anything to demonstrate. A HubSpot report suggests that 84% of shoppers feel confident about buying after watching a relevant video. This is because video helps establish trust when making purchases.
Brick and mortar retail stores have the leverage to let customers touch and feel the products. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for an E-commerce business and it might create ambiguity in the shopping process.
Therefore, shoot high-quality videos to show how effectively your product works and demonstrate its features to have customers better understand what it does and why they need it. If possible, show your products in action by actual consumers.
When it comes to diversifying the sorts of content your organization may offer, video is no longer limited to a specialized category. Costs and skills associated with video production have decreased dramatically in recent years, making it an extremely effective method of communicating detailed information about your company.
Fitbit, for example, embeds movies into its product description pages to keep consumers interested and increase sales. Using video components in web design is also a popular method as internet videos offer an efficient approach to elicit strong emotions in viewers.
#3. Focus on driving social media engagement
For a novice, digital marketing is synonymous with social media. With 3.78 billion people on various social media platforms, marketers need to work to identify their key audience while broadening the reach. For your E-commerce business, advertising on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest offers effective results.
You can also put the items on sale on the Facebook marketplace. Even Instagram is offering a ‘checkout’ option to display your products. If possible, try opening your shop on Instagram to provide quick buying options. Establishing a social media presence for business may also help guarantee that your goods and services are accessible on these platforms.
Let us check out the three most popular social media platforms for your E-commerce marketing:
- Instagram: Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms with around 1 billion users. You may promote your items in a post by including the ‘shop now’ option. This tag may take your consumers straight to the webpage where they can purchase your items. Also, you can run Instagram campaigns around stories and posts to drive more visitors.
- Facebook: It is the most popular social networking site, with around 2 billion users. Facebook advertisements help your business to reach out to a targeted audience based on demographics and region.
- YouTube: As people watch humorous dog videos, they may come across your advertisements on this video site. YouTube has over 1.5 billion subscribers, which you may cater to by uploading videos regarding your product’s reviews, how-to tutorials, and other similar snippets. It is the third most often visited website and one of the most effective methods for growing your e-commerce company.
There is a slew of different tools available for e-commerce digital marketing which you can use to improve the efficacy of your campaigns.
#4. Create personalized content and emails
Personalized content is a great way to increase online sales in a competitive market by leveraging consumer data. Collecting and evaluating this data can help build stronger brand initiatives, meaningful content, and design experiences that connect with your consumers.
It is best to use a conversational tone with your consumers for E-commerce marketing since conversational commerce is gaining popularity. This is because users react better to human-like messages than soulless spiels. Consider adding live chat or an interactive quiz to your website to customize the user journey.
Content personalization will require you to pick out the USP that matches your target audience and accordingly craft a piece of communication around it.
As part of your E-commerce marketing plan, creating an email marketing strategy can significantly help sway consumers into making a purchase decision. A personalized email involves writing the user name instead of a generic greeting, and this can increase the open rate by 26%. Individuals are more inclined to buy from companies that connect with them through tailored emails.
Here are several ways to customize email campaigns:
- Provide product recommendations based on previous purchasing activity.
- Use the recipient’s name wherever relevant, including the subject line.
- Use behavioral triggers, such as when a client has not purchased from you in a long period, products in their wishlist are on a discount, etc.
- Sending a special discount on a birthday, anniversary, or another important day.
- Classify your email list users based on common characteristics such as age, gender, geography, or interest.
#5. Consider affiliate and influencer marketing
Affiliate marketing is a technique that involves enabling affiliates (companies or people) to sell your items in return for a commission through a custom URL (with tracking code). This technique consists in using a campaign URL builder to distinguish a generic sale from an affiliate sale.
It would help if you considered this technique as affiliate marketing is used by 81% of companies to increase revenue. You can also blend in affiliate marketing with influencer marketing by providing affiliate links to influencers and content producers to promote your product.
You may doubt the credibility of influencer marketing, but it does provide a great return on investment (ROI). A report suggests that 89% of marketers believe influencer marketing delivers a comparable or better ROI. Include affiliate marketing with the influencers on social media channels to strategize a cohesive marketing strategy for your E-commerce business.
Such techniques are particularly effective when launching a purpose-led marketing campaign for Gen Z and millennials who place a high premium on the views of their generational contemporaries. In such a case, you would want to identify the influencer that your target audience most associates itself with. And then, you can leverage that influencer’s reach to drive more targeted visibility.
Conclusion
E-commerce digital marketing is a dynamic process, and therefore you must keep yourself updated with modern trends and tricks. A successful digital marketing campaign for your E-commerce business will not rely on a single technique, but a combination of ways that may go beyond the five tips mentioned above.
In the digital age, digital marketing techniques are a must to unlock sustainable growth. We hope this piece provided you with useful information on equipping the right methods for digital marketing. Step up and get started with the right techniques to discover what’s in store for your business.