8 Ecommerce Marketing Strategies – Stand out from the Competition

⏱ Reading Time: 8 minutes

Since ecommerce is one of the most competitive industries on the Internet, you will surely want to stand out from your competition. Especially because every online store wants to increase traffic and conversions. That is where ecommerce marketing and its strategies steps in. 

It is not enough to have an easy to use website or an eye-catching website. You need to learn how to promote your online store, convert web traffic into buyers and drive repeat purchases. So, marketing strategies like SEO, PPC, email marketing, and many others can help your ecommerce website to attract and keep customers. We will further explain each of these strategies.

But first, let’s define what ecommerce marketing actually is.

🚀Read Ecommerce Guide – Introduction & How to Start an Ecommerce Business? 🚀

What is Ecommerce Marketing?

As SUMO defined: „Ecommerce marketing is promoting your store to potential customers through a variety of marketing channels. The goal is to get people who are interested in your products to visit your store and buy from you.“

In other words, we can define it as a bigger Internet marketing strategy to help you drive traffic to your online store. And that marketing strategy can help you build brand awareness, drive customer loyalty, and ultimately increase online sales.

8 Ecommerce Marketing Strategies

Ecommerce marketing is a huge benefit for ecommerce businesses as it can help you distinguish your band and your website from the competition. Marketing your ecommerce business makes it easy for your potential customers to find your website and find out useful information about your products. 

And as an online store, it is probably highly important for you to drive traffic to your website and to increase conversions. You can do that by creating marketing strategies for your ecommerce business. 

Here are 8 strategies to help you stand out from the competition:

1. Content marketing

Content marketing is the process of creating online material that attracts customers to your website. Instead of just driving the customers to the brand website and pushing them to click the buy button, content marketing can educate, entertain and delight. Both B2B and B2C brands educate customers about the product/service and subjects related business through video, photo or interactive media forms. This too will help you raise awareness about your brand.  

Simply, it is any online material created with users in mind.  Read how to create a compelling video and get inspired by video marketing trends in 2021!  

Each and every eCommerce business needs a strong content marketing strategy to stand out out of the crowd. Write a list of all the ways you plan to use in order to reach out to customers.

Picture 1. Content marketing strategy

Guest Blogging

What is also important when it comes to content marketing is guest blogging. It is a way to extend your reach to other blogs by publishing your content to somebody else’s website. It is great for your business because you are getting a new audience and backlinks to your site. But, the content needs to be high-quality and respond to the target audience.

2. Social media marketing

Social media marketing is a powerful tool that helps you to build and nurture relationships with your customers. Besides nurturing, it can help you to connect with potential customers and boost traffic to your website. 

So when talking about ecommerce marketing, it is highly important to put your focus on customer relationships.  For example, unless you don’t want to see abandoned carts, try to answer to customers inquiries fast. At the same time maintain a solid tone because that will create trust within your customers. Also, by managing multiple social media platforms you will create a rich presence for your company, and that is sure a benefit.

If you want to read more about planning social media strategy, check our other blog post: Importance of Social Media Marketing for Business.

3. SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential part of ecommerce marketing. It is a set of practices increasing the quantity and quality of the website traffic through organic search engine results.

To achieve the best position in search engines that will bring you more traffic, the website needs to be SEO optimized. Good SEO is hard to achieve but it is possible with good skills and experience. 

When optimizing ecommerce website, one of the most important methods is to make sure the website is fully optimized for search engines. Keyword research can help you with that as SEO uses keywords strategically in order to increase search engine rankings. And plus bringing more traffic to your website.

Also, make sure your website is technically bulletproof because you don’t want floppy mistakes to stop you from climbing the first page of Google. Google, or other search engines, will have a hard time ranking you on the first page of the search results if they can’t find or interpret your content. 

When speaking about SEO mistakes, you can read our other article about it: SEO Mistakes to Avoid.

Picture 2. SEO strategy

4. Optimize your website layout

After you have launched your website, keep an eye on the customer journey and how customers behave on your website. Many free tools such as Google Analytics and Hotjar can help you optimize ecommerce website. 

Test your website layout, along with main elements such as CTA-s, product placements and shopping cart. Because when customers visit your website, every element of your online presence is crucial and will either encourage users to shop, or to back off.  

Also, don’t forget to optimize your site for mobile devices! Since mobile users are popular nowadays, it is important that your website is responsive to any user layout. This will help you to provide a good user experience for every one of your customers.

Read our article on customer experience journey mapping to gain a better understanding of ecommerce optimization.

5. Email marketing

Email marketing is one of the most important parts of ecommerce marketing. Did you know that 91% of customers check their email on a daily basis? And still, marketers often neglect the importance of this channel.  

It only takes a little effort to build your email list, stand out from the competition with personalization, great visuals and good copywriting. And those are some of the email marketing trends nowadays. 

So when it comes to personalization, which is seen as a thing customers love, try to add customer’s names to the email subject line. Or try to send automatically customized recommendations based on past purchases with segmented email lists. According to research, automated personalized emails had a 75% higher open rate than those that lacked personalization.

Also, you can always monitor your email marketing efforts. There are a lot of great tools such as Mail Chimp and Campaign Monitor.

Picture 3. Email marketing strategy

6. PPC

Brands use this marketing technique to reach highly targeted audiences. These ads come in a variety of forms, such as text-based ads, product listing ads, product-based advertisements. And they all allow customers to see important information at-a-glance.

The greatest thing about PPC is that it offers brands to advertise to motivated customers who are ready to buy at the precise moment. No other advertising medium today can do it this precisely.

7. Retargeting

Retargeting is a technique of sending targeted ads to customers who have visited your website. With this technique, you are more likely to make a later purchase. 

It is important that your ads are as specific as possible. Only then you will be able to successfully manage your retargeting campaign. So ask yourself what was a customer looking on your page? Was it a specific product or the whole line of products? Ads that are displayed to your customers need to be ads of that specific product.

Learn more about behavior marketing strategy and how it can help you increase sales in e-commerce.

Picture 4. Retargeting strategy

8. Increase customer loyalty 

The higher the quality of your product is, it will be easier to attract and keep customers loyal. And people who are loyal to your business are more likely to buy a new product from your business. Because they are based on previous positive experience. To marketing experts, getting and maintaining brand loyalty for an established product is the ultimate goal.

Also, you can increase customer loyalty by implementing a loyalty program. 

Hub Spot defined how: „A customer loyalty program is a rewards program offered by a company to customers who frequently make purchases. A loyalty program may give a customer free merchandise, rewards, coupons, or even advance released products.“

If you want to read about increasing customer loyalty more, check our other blog post: How to Build Brand Loyalty?

Final Thoughts

With the right mix of ecommerce marketing strategies, it will be easier for you to stand out from the competition. We hope you will implement these strategies and that they will help your business to grow. 

So, deliver relevant and high quality posts, reach out your customer through social media platforms, optimize your website. When you manage to do that, you will surely improve your conversion rate, grow your business. And most important thing, your customers will keep choosing you over competition as they will be more familiar with your business. 

Have you already implemented some of these strategies? Let us know what you think!