THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO ECOMMERCE MARKETING

What’s the difference between ecommerce and brick-and-mortar retail? With brick-and-mortar stores, it’s possible to make sales without doing any marketing yourself. It’s hard, and you’ll make way less than if you did have a marketing strategy, but people driving by your shop might stop in if it piques their interest. With ecommerce marketing, there’s no random popping in—you’ve got to drive customers there yourself!

No one’s going to pass by your online store by accident. There’s no sidewalk where you can plop a fold-up chalkboard with a cheeky slogan that entices people through the door. You need to proactively tell people your shop exists and show them what you’re offering, and the best way to do that is ecommerce marketing using sales funnels, an interconnected series of marketing campaigns that each nudge shoppers a step closer to a purchase.

Trust us, becoming a pro at ecommerce marketing and setting up effective sales funnels isn’t as difficult as it sounds. You’ve encountered them loads of times before and, once you understand the components that make up the funnel (and by extension the larger ecommerce marketing strategy), you’ll be able to emulate them perfectly for your own brand.

The ecommerce marketing funnel explained

You’re probably familiar with the term “sales funnel,” but can you thoroughly explain how it works? If you can’t, that’s okay; we’re going to break it down for you right now. The easiest way to understand the sales funnel is to use the AIDA model: Awareness, Interest, Decision and Action.

Imagine all the people out there on the internet, whether they’re people who connect with your brand or not. Billions of people around the world use the internet every day, but not all of them—in fact, not even most of them—are the same people your brand is targeting.

A funnel is how you sift through those billions and billions of people to connect with the subset who will actually buy from your online store. You start by making your audience aware of your brand—if they don’t know about your store or the products you’re offering, they won’t buy from you.

As the first step in your ecommerce marketing strategy, the awareness stage, is where you cast the widest “net.” (That’s why it’s called a “funnel;” you start with more general and far-reaching aims, and then gradually get narrower and more focused as your move on.)

Your goal at the beginning is to make your audience aware of your brand in a bunch of different ways: using hashtags they use, running ads where they’ll see them, maintaining an active social media presence and publishing content relevant to them, like blog posts and videos about topics they enjoy.

Another favorite strategy is using what’s called a lead magnet to spark awareness and turn that awareness into interest. A lead magnet is a giveaway you offer up in exchange for your audience’s contact information, usually their email addresses. If you’ve ever taken a personality quiz online that required your email address to get the results, you’ve interacted with a lead magnet. Other popular kinds of lead magnets include:

• Exclusive content
• Short trainings
• Ebooks
• Checklists and cheat sheets
• Templates
• Toolkits

When you offer a lead magnet, not everybody who sees it will want it and opt in. Those who do want it and opt in are now considered “in the funnel,” where they begin moving along toward making a purchase.

After the awareness stage, you’ve got the interest stage, where interested prospects have their interest piqued further. It’s where you leverage those emails you collected earlier and deliver on the lead magnet, and also where you strengthen your relationship with potential customers through even more relevant content or directly into why your products are so great. If you’ve collected emails for a newsletter, you can use those regular correspondence to highlight certain products and share company news like sales events and discounts.

To make a decision, prospects needs to know all about your offer and what makes it unique.

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Outside of email, your social media and content marketing campaigns come in handy during this stage. The more people are reading about you and your products, whether on blogs or social media feeds, the more interested they become.

The next step down the funnel is called the decision stage, where your prospects literally decide whether to buy from you or not. Usually, they need some convincing, and some of the most effective approaches include:

• Social proof. This means seeing other people enjoying your brand to verify it’s worthwhile, like testimonials from past clients (preferably well-known ones), or positive reviews and social media posts about you from friends and family.
• Thoughtful posts proving your unique value proposition—it’s not enough to just say your product is the best in its category, you’ve got to show your prospects it’s the best choice for them
• Free trials or samples, depending on your offer.

Although prospects decide whether they’ll buy in the decision stage, that’s not the end of the funnel. It’s one thing to decide you want to buy, but it’s another to actually click that “buy now” button.

This brings us to the final stage in your sales funnel, the action stage—the crux of your entire ecommerce marketing strategy. You’ve opened the door for your prospects, but now they need to walk through it. The ones who truly want what you’re offering will buy it, but it doesn’t hurt to sweeten the deal a little for those who are still apprehensive. Here’s a few ways you can do that:

• Offering free shipping
• Offering a discount on the buyer’s first order
• Offering a raffle entry with purchase or another opportunity to win something

The right offer depends on your product or service. For SaaS products, your action stage clincher might be free or discounted migration for new customers. For plush toys, it might be a BOGO offer (buy one, get one free).

As you’ve probably realized, the journey from awareness to action isn’t always neat and linear. Somebody might find your brand through their Explore page on Instagram, check out your profile, then make a purchase without getting on your email list or reading testimonials. The important thing is that you have all these options in place for the people who need them—otherwise, you’re just limiting yourself and your sales.

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