Traffic is the key to sales. The more relevant traffic you get on your site, the more sales you’ll make.
In this article, you’ll learn 12 ecommerce marketing strategies that always work. The marketing strategies you’re about to discover will help you win the trust of customers and make more sales.
When you combine two or more of these strategies, there’s absolutely no limit to what you can achieve with your ecommerce business.
So, what are these 12 marketing strategies?
1. Start a blog
Blogging is a form of content marketing.
And content marketing is by far the most powerful and effective marketing strategy online. It works every time. And it never fails.
Content marketing can help you build solid relationships with customers. And the cool thing about it is that both small and big-sized businesses can use content marketing to achieve great results.
Blogging is one of the most effective forms of content marketing. When you blog consistently, you’ll receive traffic from various platforms on the web.
Blogs get traffic from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. It’s easier to get traffic from these platforms when you have a blog than when you don’t.
The more high-quality blog posts you publish on your blog, the more targeted traffic your ecommerce website will get.
Whether your business is B2B or B2C, maintaining an active blog will help you increase awareness for your business. For example, Earth Class Mail, which is both a B2B and B2C company has a blog where they publish new content regularly.
Businesses that blog are 13x more likely to see a positive ROI than those that don’t.
Blog about topics that are related to your products and services. As your blog becomes popular, you could decide to expand into related topics. That would grow your business too.
Circle Surrogacy is one of the top surrogacy agencies in the United States. They drive massive traffic to the website through the blog.
2. Create Videos
Blogging alone isn’t enough. By blogging, you’ll create a lot of text content that will attract visitors from search engines and social media.
However, that’ll limit the growth of your ecommerce business. Some customers don’t consume text content like a blog post. They like videos more.
Videos are HOT on every platform right now. You can publish the same video on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Ecommerce businesses that use video drive more customers than those that rely on blogging alone. So, combining both blogging and video will help your business.
Publishing high-quality blog posts and videos consistently would generate massive awareness for your products and services.
For example, including videos in email messages could increase your click-through rates, decrease unsubscribes, and increase subscribe-to-lead conversion rates.
But you should also ensure that each content you publish is related to what you sell. Your audience should find the content helpful.
3. Create content around your audience’s problems and goals.
Don’t create any content. The content you publish should solve the problems your audience has. It should help your prospect achieve their goals.
For example, if your prospects are digital marketers. You know what their problems and goals are. Digital marketers want to get more traffic and customers.
Show them the exact step-by-step process on how they can achieve that. Show them your results and what you’re getting for clients.
Create buyer personas that represent your customers. Think about content that’ll excite them and create it.
That’s how you get customers to become aware of your business. By creating a lot of content around their problems and goals, you’ll be able to get their attention and use it to drive massive traffic to your site.
4. Grow your email list
Consumers check their emails daily. Some check their emails many times a day. With the rise of smartphones and tablets, consumers are always online and could check their emails if they want to.
I receive a notification on my smartphone when I get a new email. I can check the email message immediately to see what it’s about. My email is one of the very few notifications I get on my iPhone.
Email remains the number one communication channel. Yes, it’s been around for a long time and remains the best way to communicate online.
Consumers prefer brands to communicate with them through email than any other channel.
Despite the rise of platforms like Slack, Facebook, and Skype, email remains the most used communication channel. That should tell you the importance of email.
Collect emails on your site. When prospects visit your blog to read an article or watch a video, you should ask for their email addresses.
You can use a tool like OmniKick to collect emails on your site. OmniKick integrates nicely with software like MailChimp, Active Campaign, Convertkit, and others.
5. Segment Your Email List
Collecting emails on your site isn’t enough. You need to segment them.
Customers who gave you their emails aren’t the same. Some are interested in some products than others and vice versa.
Email segmentation means splitting your email list based on any number of conditions.
For example, if you run an ecommerce site that sells clothes, you can’t send the same message and offer to everyone on your email list.
You must segment subscribers based on their gender and interests.
For example, men shouldn’t receive offers to buy women’s shoes. If you don’t segment your list, you won’t know the gender.
You could go further by segmenting based on interests someone has shown on your site. For example, if a subscriber has shown interest in buying handbags, you don’t want to send them an offer to buy sneakers.
By segmenting your email list, you’ll increase your open and click rates, and reduce your unsubscribes rate too.
Email segmentation helps you send the right traffic from your email to your sales pages.
6. Automate Your Email Marketing Campaigns
By automating your email campaigns, you make email marketing work harder for your business. You ensure every subscriber is recognized on your email list.
Email automation enables you to send out targeted, planned, and automated email marketing sequences.
When someone joins your email list, you send them a planned email series. The goal of the series is to develop a rock-solid relationship with subscribers.
Abandoned cart emails are another example of email automation. When a customer forgets to complete their purchase, you automatically send them an email message asking them to complete the checkout process.
You don’t send this type of email manually. Email automation takes care of everything for you. You set it up once, and it’ll continue to work forever.
Email automation lets email marketing make sales for you even when you’re sleeping. It’s one of my favorite ecommerce marketing strategies.
7. Share User-Generated Content on Social Media
Social media is a great place to get in front of potential customers.
Create a hashtag and ask your fans to share content using that hashtag. For example, if you’re a fashion store, you can ask fans to share images where they wear your clothing.
Share some of those images on your main business account, and you’ll make those users feel special. When you do this, customers are more likely to stay with your brand and tell their friends and family about it. That means more customers for your business.
Instagram is one of the best places to do this. But I also like Twitter and Facebook. The more user-generated content you get and share, the more awareness your business will enjoy on social media.
8. Create original content
Search engines, especially Google, remain the biggest traffic driver on the web. By ranking for the right keywords, your ecommerce website would receive thousands of visitors regularly.
If you want to get massive traffic from Google, you need to publish original content on your site.
What do I mean by original content?
Original content is an exciting piece of information that can’t be found elsewhere. Don’t copy content from another site and call that original content.
Write in your own words. Make your personality shine through the content.
For example, if you’re a drop shipper, you may think that you can copy the product description from the pages of the manufacturer. That’s not original content. You’ll be shooting yourself in the foot when you do that.
Google and other search engines recognize copied content when they see one. So, you need to create your content.
This extends to every content on your site and blog.
When you create original content, you increase your chances of ranking for valuable keywords your prospects are typing into search engines.
So, if you’re hiring a writer to create content for your ecommerce website, make sure that they aren’t copying content elsewhere on the web and putting it on your site.
There are amazing tools for checking plagiarism. Grammarly is my favorite tool because it helps me do more. I use it to also look for grammar and spelling mistakes.
9. Collaborate with influencers in your industry
There’re influencers in almost every industry you can think of right now. An influencer is a content creator who has active and engaged followers. The influencer’s following could be on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter.
The influencer could also be a blogger who has a vast readership.
The influencers in your industry have probably spent years building their audience.
By collaborating with influencers in your industry, you’ll be tapping into their power to sell your products.
Recognize the influencers in your industry or niche and approach them. Negotiate with them to share your product with their followers.
Amazing tools like BuzzStream, FollowerWonk, and PeerReach could help you find the influencers in your niche.
Influencer marketing is one of the best ecommerce marketing strategies for making quick sales.
10. Get repeat visitors
No matter the price of what you sell on your ecommerce site, I want you to know that people don’t buy the first time they visit a website. It takes several visits before a consumer decides to buy your product.
Don’t even expect to convert first-time visitors. It’s nearly impossible.
So, what do you do?
Make first-time visitors come back to your blog.
And how do you do that?
By creating retargeting ads, you can increase the number of repeat visitors your ecommerce website gets.
Platforms like Google and Facebook lets you retarget people who have visited your site with ads. They’ll give you some code called pixel you put into your website.
That enables them to detect when their users visit your site.
Google and Facebook alone have billions of web users who visit their properties daily. You’ll be tapping into the immense power these platforms have when you use retargeting ads.
You can retarget users based on the actions they took while on your website, or the pages they visited.
11. Become an industry expert
Being an industry expert is similar to an influencer, but different.
An industry expert has specialized knowledge. For example, digital marketing experts like Neil Patel and Rand Fishkin have deep-knowledge of online marketing. They’re well respected in the industry for their expertise.
When you’re an industry expert, you could receive requests from reporters who want to interview you for stories. Some of them may also want to learn one thing or two about what you do.
Sometimes an industry expert is also an influencer. But it’s hard to get them to recommend any products or services they don’t know. Most times, they recommend products or services created by themselves or friends.
12. Give free gifts
Giving free gifts is one of the best ways to gain new customers online.
You could do something like give one free for every two the customers buy. Some people would jump on the opportunity to have more for less.
If your product is amazing, customers will continue to buy, even when the offer has ended.
Some SaaS businesses offer customers free trial for the first 30 days. I’ve tried some services during those free trial periods and couldn’t stop after the trial ended. I had to continue to pay, and I was happy to do that.
Free is one of the most-used marketing words. It works most of the time because people like free things.
But if customers can afford to pay for your product and they like it, they wouldn’t mind buying it.
So, ensure that people need your product and can afford it before giving it away for free. That way, you won’t lose.
You can use a lead generation tool like OmniKick to offer your customers free gifts.
OmniKick is a popup creator you can use to build amazing popups that collect your customers’ email addresses before they get their free gits.
OmniKick is free for the first 14 days. Sign up to try it today.
