5 Essential Ecommerce Marketing Strategies in 2019
Ecommerce websites come with their own share of responsibilities and competition. To rise above your competitors and establish your brand as a leader in your market, it is crucial that you have optimised your ecommerce marketing strategy and your website reaches its full potential. A well-optimised website means a well-optimised ecommerce business and will help you run smoothly and drive more traffic and sales.
There are five essential marketing strategies for optimising your ecommerce business:
1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is the process of using specific keywords that are appropriate for your website and will ensure a higher ranking in search engine results. For ecommerce websites, the most effective way to do this is to write detailed product descriptions alongside visually appealing product photography. Also, make sure that you have plenty of product reviews to help visitors make purchase decisions.
Ecommerce businesses must conduct thorough keyword research and find out which keywords your potential customers are using the most when they search. The SEO keywords on the homepage of your website should be as refined as possible because this is the page that generates the most traffic.
The overall structure of the website should be easy to navigate and kept as simple as possible. The more complicated the website is, the less the search engine bots will be able to discover your page. As a general rule, your visitors should only have to click a maximum of three times to get from the homepage to any product on the website.
2. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation allows you to take control of your ecommerce marketing strategy without putting in too much manual effort. Combining your ecommerce business and marketing automation provides a more streamlined online shopping experience and will enable you to create customer specific campaigns for your audience.
Marketing automation can include abandoned cart emails which remind the customer of the products they were about to buy and redirects them back to your website. By making sure that your loyal customers receive special and personalised treatment, as well as targeted reward-based marketing through emails and coupons, you can ensure their continued loyalty.
A great example of this is HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing. HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing will help convert your website’s traffic into sales. It personalises your ecommerce marketing strategy through email campaigns and webpages for abandoned carts, as well as using your customer’s purchase and website behaviour and customising their online shopping experience.
3. Remarketing
Ecommerce websites use remarketing to retain customers who have previously visited their website by redirecting them back to it via ads on other webpages. This is the most common method of remarketing but it is not the only method.
Sending follow-up and cart abandonment emails are also effective remarketing methods to use in your ecommerce business plan. These all influence the customer’s buying patterns and direct them right back to your website.
Social media is also a very useful remarketing tool to consider in your business plan. Social remarketing makes sure to reintroduce your products on social media once a customer leaves your website. It can even offer promotions to encourage the customer to return to the website and make a purchase. The frequency of social remarketing is very important because there should be just enough to ensure brand visibility but not too much that it becomes annoying for the customer.
4. Google Shopping Ads
A popular way of advertising and building traffic, especially for an online business, is through Google Ads. The basic idea of Google Ads is to use the best keywords for your product to make it show up during Google searches.
However, for ecommerce business specifically, Google Shopping Ads might be the best option. Google Shopping Ads are a branch of Google Ads and they are the ones that show up at the top of your search with a high-quality image and visible price. In 2015, retailers spent 47% more on Google Shopping Ads than the previous year and it has only grown since. They are highly visible at the top of the search results page and they redirect a high stream of traffic directly to your business.
5. Smooth Checkout Process
The checkout process is one of the most important components of an ecommerce website. A complicated checkout process can lead to cart abandonment and a loss in sales and therefore it must be simple, clear and effective.
An ideal online checkout process does not waste the customer’s time by asking for too much information and overwhelming them. It must integrate seamlessly with the rest of your website and you should avoid redirecting the customer to a third-party website.
It is important to remember that customers can change their minds pretty quickly when it comes to making purchase decisions, especially online. Your website should offer clear and simple solutions to potential issues and it will lead to smoother overall customer experience.
Summary
While there is no one universal ecommerce strategy that works for all websites and businesses, these five ecommerce marketing strategy tips come pretty close. They are tried and tested marketing strategies that have played and continue to play a vital role in the success of many ecommerce businesses.
At Digital8, we use various CMS platforms including WordPress, Neto and Kentico to seamlessly integrate all components of your ecommerce website strategy.
If understood properly and used correctly, you too can transform your ecommerce website and reach its maximum potential!