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The eCommerce business gains traction every day. New business owners decide to start selling services and products online. They believe that the online world will bring more customers.
And it is for a good reason.
Nevertheless, businesses have no idea how to drive traffic to their online stores and acquire customers.
In this post, you will get familiar with five eCommerce marketing strategies that will help you out.
Let’s come to the point!
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SEO (search engine optimization)
Did you know that 43% of eCommerce traffic comes from organic searches on Google?
The stats are pretty impressive, isn’t it?
For eCommerce businesses it should be a signal – if you’re not shown up on Google for your target keywords, you will miss traffic and sales (as a result.)
That is when SEO comes into play.
Search engine optimization is a set of strategies that help optimize your eCommerce site to rank across search engines.
Justbats generates 527K of organic traffic monthly thanks to SEO activities.
It won’t be hard to guess that organic search is a crucially important channel for eCommerce business.
So, how to optimize your eCommerce site for ranking your search engines?
You should focus on ranking individual product and category pages. And here are four steps that you should take:
- Run keyword research. Think about a few search requests that your potential customers may use to find your product online. Afterwards, you can use Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer tool to review the search volume of your target keywords. Choose the most promising keywords and move to the next step.
- Identify search intent. Search intent helps you figure out why people type certain requests on Google. Therefore, you need to find out whether your potential customers are in a “buying” mode. To understand this, type your target keyword on Google and check if the top results are product/category pages.
- On-page SEO. Optimize your pages that would help them match search intent. Don’t forget to optimize the title tag, description, H1, and URL.
- Link building. Build backlinks to boost your pages on the SERP.
This is a brief step-by-step process for your eCommerce site SEO.
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Content marketing
Content marketing is the first-to-go process that you must apply in your eCommerce activity. It helps teach your potential customers to solve problems they have by using your product.
People may visit various online eCommerce marketplaces to buy anything. Likely, you can solicit clients with the help of content marketing.
For example, Philips has a step-by-step guide on how to shape a beard.
They recommend using their Beardtrimmer series 5000 to make the beard shaped perfectly. Besides, you can create a product demo video and link back to it from your piece of content.
How to start with content marketing?
You should cover topics with traffic potential.
Keep in mind that you can’t cover topics randomly. Your content must be a hundred percent focused on your target needs. Otherwise, you may get a spike of hope that will turn into a flatline of nope eventually.
To conclude, you need to cover topics that people search for.
How to find these topics?
You can use a tool from Ahrefs called Keywords Explorer. Type one of your target business-related keywords first. Click the “Matching terms” and the “Phrase match” tab:
As you can see, the tool suggests over 3M keywords. You should filter down the results by applying a few filters – Search Volume and Keyword Difficulty.
Search volume stands for the number of searchers of the keyword monthly. Keyword difficulty estimates how hard it will be to rank for the keyword on the SERP.
These filters help narrow down the results and provide the most promising ones. To explore keywords with business potential you should apply the “Include” filter and type modifiers like “best”:
Now, there are 40 keywords with high business potential that can drive tons of traffic to your eCommerce website.
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Affiliate marketing
Many eCommerce sites don’t shy away from launching affiliate marketing programs. To put it simply, you pay a commission for selling your product.
If you have no idea how to run your affiliate program, you can read affiliate marketing books that explain the details.
Anyway, here is a brief explanation of how this process works:
- This program promotes your products
- A potential customer clicks an “affiliate” link and makes a purchase
- This purchase is getting tracked
- You pay a commission per your agreement (e.g 15% of the price)
Assume that you have just decided to launch your affiliate program. You need two things to do – find affiliates and persuade them to work with you.
Let’s see how to meet these two conditions.
a) Find affiliates
Go to Google and use this search request “top [niche] influencers/bloggers”, and you will be able to review many lists to pick from:
b) Persuade affiliates to work with you
This is the main challenge that you will face. The problem is that your online store might be unpopular and niche-related influencers/bloggers might have never heard of this.
To attract their attention you need to offer something that would be interesting for influencers.
What does it mean?
You must have:
- High-quality product (influencers build their authority with the help of their audience; thus, they won’t suggest some low-quality product to their fans)
- Easy way of promoting (help affiliates with email copy and landing page design)
- Solid commission (affiliates promote your products because they want to make money; therefore, offer a good commission in return)
Remember that affiliate marketing is about building strong business relationships. Hence, make sure your affiliate partners love to work with you.
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Email marketing
Email marketing is another powerful tool for your eCommerce marketing efforts.
The very first thing that you need to take care of is building an email list. But people won’t sign up just because you want them to do so.
You should convince them to sign up. And the best way is to offer something valuable – an exclusive deal, a free eBook, discounts, etc.
Let’s say that you have already built a solid email list. Now, you
r next step is to create an onboarding sequence. Send an introduction email first. Then, present a few informational resources where your audience might have an opportunity to know your eCommerce online store better. Finally, send direct links to product pages.
You shouldn’t forget that the goal of email marketing is to build warm relationships with your customers. When your customers feel your positive attitude towards them, they will return to your store again and again. And buy more and more.
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Google ads
Google ads allow you to list your products in the search results.
Google ads are divided into three types:
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Search ads
To make search ads work you need to figure out keywords to target. And the most straightforward way to explore these keywords is by reviewing keywords your competitors are bidding on.
Competitors won’t pay for keywords that don’t bring any benefit. Thus, you can target them as well.
To find these keywords – use Site Explorer tool. Analyze your competitor’s domain and review the “PPC keywords”:
The report lists all keywords your competitor is bidding on.
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Display retargeting
Retargeting helps you target potential customers who visited your online store but left it for some reason. Retargeting persuades visitors to get back to your site and buy from you.
Here is how it works:
- Install a pixel on your site
- It tells Google when someone visits your site
- When these users start visiting other sites shown by Google ads, Google retargets them by showing your ads
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Google shopping ads
This type of ad allows you to include visual elements within the ad.
To Conclude:
The eCommerce business is competitive enough. You can never know if your online eCommerce store will succeed.
Likely, you can apply suggested eCommerce marketing strategies and boost product sales.
If you know other eCommerce marketing strategies, don’t hesitate to share them in the comments.
