TYPES OF ECOMMERCE MARKETING

Your business is unique, so the ecommerce marketing strategy you use should be unique as well. Your funnel might be relatively simple, using just one or two strategies, or it might be complex, with lots of strategies at once and multiple streams of prospects channeling together into one large mega-funnel.

Here’s a few popular ecommerce marketing strategies you can use to build your funnel:

Blogging

Written blogs and video blogs are two types of content marketing great at getting your brand on your prospects’ radar. Create the kind of content your prospects want, and if you’re not sure what they want, take a look at what kinds of content other brands like yours are publishing.

If you’re a clothing brand, blog posts about styling the garments you carry could be helpful. If you’re a brand for pet products, your followers might enjoy a video roundup of the most unique cat breeds or a compilation of dogs doing hilarious things.

Think outside the box when you’re planning your content calendar and give your prospects something that grabs their attention. Blogs and videos, like emails, fit into a few different funnel segments.

Beyond grabbing prospects’ attention, they share information that makes your brand appealing to prospective buyers (the interest stage). They can also showcase social proof and, if you’re publishing guest blogs, be the social proof.

Social media

If you use social media, you’ve seen social media ads. In fact, you’ve seen lots and lots of social media ads… and you’ve probably even bought things through them. Social media ads, and your entire social media presence for that matter, tell the world about your brand and give your followers a direct path to your online store.

Not all social media ads are the same—you can run ads that directly advertise your products and services and you can run ads that amplify your brand’s social media presence. Ads in the first category typically showcase specific products or services and have calls to action like “buy now,” “call now” and “book an appointment.” The second kind of ad, ads that spread awareness, usually showcase your brand as a whole or offer up a lead magnet. These ads usually have calls to action for liking, following or subscribing to your page.

The other way to market your brand on social media is to simply be on social media. Answering customer questions, addressing their complaints, sharing news and simply engaging in conversations with your followers all humanize your brand, building awareness and sparking interest from the people who follow you. Luckily, this ecommerce marketing strategy costs you nothing but time.

Email marketing

Email marketing is one of the oldest and most widely used types of ecommerce marketing because, simply put, it works. According to OptinMonster, email clickthrough rates are six times higher than Facebook, Instagram and Twitter engagement rates combined.

Email marketing is more than just sending email newsletters to the addresses on your list. It also includes strategic emails to achieve certain goals, like abandoned cart reminders. Basically, email covers all your bases. You can tell your followers about discounts and promotions, you can let them know you’ve posted new content on the blog, you can offer them lead magnets and you can have close conversations that make your brand feel more like a close friend.

Email marketing fits into different stages of your sales funnel, specifically interest, decision and action. Different emails achieve different goals and as you build email campaigns you’ll see your funnel taking shape with them.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is the art and science of making your pages rank higher on search engines. Most people think of keywords when they think of SEO, but there’s actually more to it than that. SEO also involves publishing high quality, relevant content, having a website that loads quickly, links to other websites and, yes, effective design.

SEO sits at the top of your funnel. By optimizing your ads and website for search engines, you’re helping to connect with more people who are searching for the products or services you offer—even if they’re not yet aware you exist.

Search engine advertising (SEA)

Search engine advertising (SEA) refers to getting your products to appear high in search engine results by paying for ad spaces. One of the ways to do this is pay-per-click campaigns, also known as PPC campaigns, which are tantalizing ads placed on search engine results pages that you only pay for when users click them. Another is Google Shopping campaigns, which is where you pay to place listings for your products at the top of any Google Shopping search results for your keywords.

Just like SEO, SEA sits at the top of your funnel, getting eyes on your ads and ideally clicks on your links from people who want to get to know your brand better.

Finding the type of ecommerce marketing that works best for you

You don’t have to do every type of ecommerce marketing to be successful. In fact, you’ll probably be more successful if you do one or two strategies really well than if you try to do them all and end up spreading your marketing budget thin.

For your first campaigns, grab “low-hanging fruit”—i.e., ecommerce marketing strategies that won’t suck up all your time and money, like posting to social media every day and researching which hashtags connect best with your audience. Another way to determine which strategies are best for your brand is to look at how brands like yours are marketing themselves and draw inspiration from them. That doesn’t mean copying them directly, but studying their strategies to understand why these strategies work and how you can use the same strategies to reach your target audience.

Ecommerce marketing also isn’t the place to stay stuck in the past. As you map out which approaches to try, pay close attention to the latest trends and why they’re working so well. Today, brands are using strategies like live chat and artificial intelligence to give site visitors personalized experiences with their stores, not unlike speaking with a live employee.

Analyzing your strategies’ results

As you make use of different ecommerce marketing strategies, analyze your results. By doing this, you’ll be able to fine-tune future marketing campaigns to target and convert your prospects more effectively.

With strategies like email marketing and social media ads, analytics tools are built into the software you use. You’re able to collect data on everything relevant to your campaigns, like where in the world your website’s traffic is coming from, how many people saw your ad versus how many clicked on it, how many people opened your email and, of them, how many actually followed the links inside. Other relevant information is whether your traffic’s coming primarily from desktop or mobile, which browsers your prospects are using most and information about their demographics.

The data you collect helps you reformat your funnel to make it more efficient. For starters, you can more accurately target your ads and tweak your branding to appeal to your top demographics in particular. Even more important, you can locate any blockages in the funnel. You might determine that a lot of people are seeing your ads, but very few are actually clicking them. If that’s the case, you’ve got to focus on the top of your funnel and really amp up your efforts in building awareness and interest.

If, instead, you’ve got plenty of followers and subscribers, but far too few buyers by comparison, you’ve got a block in the bottom of your funnel. In that case, your focus needs to be getting your followers confident enough in your product to click “buy,” which could mean adding an abandoned cart email to your store’s system or offering a limited time discount.

Creating your ecommerce marketing strategy

Ready to start developing your unique ecommerce marketing strategy?

Before you can start doing any sort of effective ecommerce marketing, you need a clearly defined brand and once you’ve fleshed out what kind of brand you want, use that as design cues for your:

• Logo
• Website
• Email templates
• Copy voice
• Graphics and other imagery
• Social media profiles
• Advertising
• Product packaging
• Product design

Your logo should sum up your whole brand

After your brand’s ready to hit the web, it’s time to create a responsive, on-brand website and matching social media pages. After that, it’s time to test out ecommerce marketing strategies like paid ads and lead magnets. Start small and work your way up—connecting with influencers and collaborating with other brands are strategies that work better when you’ve got some industry clout, so put them on the back burner for now.

As you try different strategies, zero in on what works for your brand and focus your resources on that. You might even want to hire a marketing consultant to guide you or even a full-scale marketing agency to handle marketing on your behalf, but remember this can get pricey. Whether you do it yourself or hire a consultant/agency depends on your budget and how comfortable you feel doing your own ecommerce marketing.

Get the most out of your ecommerce marketing with great design

No matter which platforms and campaign types your ecommerce marketing strategy involves, it’s got to include great design. Even a perfectly executed email campaign or social media presence falls apart if it doesn’t look good. And looking good is only part of great design—your design’s also got to work, which means it’s got to show followers not only what you’re offering, but also why it’s so amazing.

Don’t doom your ecommerce store with less-than-stellar design. Connect with an experienced designer to create an unstoppable sales-generating ecommerce marketing machine.