Table Of Contents
Introduction
The role of ecommerce in 2020 and beyond can no longer be ignored.
In fact, its share of total retail sales grew from 7.4% in 2015 to a projected 16.1% in 2020 and it shows no plans of stopping.
There’s never been a better time to invest in your ecommerce marketing plan.
However, it’s more than just building a website and expecting that people magically discover your brand and buy your products the day after it’s built.
And while the 11 ecommerce marketing ideas you’ll learn about in this article are helpful and pretty darn awesome, what you really need is an ecommerce marketing plan that consistently drives revenue growth and exposure to your target consumers.
We witnessed traditional brick & mortar retail giants like JCPenney, Neiman Marcus, and J. Crew file bankruptcy during the tragic COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, while emerging brands like Bonobos, Dollar Shave Club, Birchbox, and Warby Parker have all watched its ecommerce revenue blow through the roof, even during rough economic times.
It’s now clear more than ever—legacy retailers who failed to become an early adopter of ecommerce marketing tactics are becoming more and more obsolete, while new companies who placed a heavier emphasis on their ecommerce marketing strategy are starting to take a bigger piece of the pie.
So without further adieu, here are the 11 Best Marketing Strategies For Ecommerce In 2020….
1. Content Marketing
Creating marketing content can educate customers on your unique value proposition, keep them engaged with your brand, and attract qualified prospects at all stages of their buying journey into your ecommerce marketing funnel.
Content marketing is especially valuable for those who are in the early stages of their buyer’s journey.
Effective content will help them become more aware of their needs for what you sell and the potential solutions that you offer.
Content can be found in many forms, but we’ve seen the best results through video, blog posts, social media, and email.
The best marketers use their content as a tool to educate and inform, while struggling brands keep thinking about their content as another way to bullhorn their message to the masses as a blatant advertising platform.
Yuck.
This is one of the quickest ways to get lost in the sea of direct response ads that we’re constantly bombarded with every single day.
Match your content strategy to your buyer’s journey and you’ll be well on your way to pulling in way more ecommerce sales.
2. Optimize Your Site for Search
Did you know hundreds of thousands of websites are not built in a way for search engines to find them?
The two most common reasons for this include:
- Missing or Incorrect Page Title Tags
- Missing or Incomplete Page Meta Descriptions
Updating your ecommerce site for SEO can be a lengthy and technical process.
However, by taking the first step to properly update all of your title tags and meta descriptions, you’ll make it easy for search engines to index and rank your pages, leading to more qualified organic traffic.
These are clicks that you don’t have to pay for.
And who doesn’t love free stuff?
Other common factors that can crush your site rankings are slow page loading times and not providing an easy navigation experience for mobile devices.
To test your page speed, we recommend using Google Page Speed Insights.
To determine if your website is compatible with mobile devices, Google provides an easy-to-use Mobile-Friendly Test that can give you a quick answer in a few seconds.
You don’t want your competitors outranking you because of easy fixes like these, so take a few minutes to visit these links and discover your specific needs to get your site optimized for buyers.
3. Perform Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the most effective ecommerce marketing tactics that can help more customers find you on search engines.
By researching the monthly search volume of keywords and questions related to your product or service, you can start ranking your website for these keywords by including them in new blog posts, or additional on-page content.
When you answer your buyers’ most commonly asked questions and concerns during their research phase, you’ll immediately build up valuable trust and credibility with your prospects and move them further down the marketing funnel and closer to a sale.
Use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Ubersuggest to find the core keywords your prospects are using to research before they buy.
4. Build High Quality Backlinks By Guest Posting
One of the factors that Google uses when deciding to rank your website higher than others in the organic search results are the amount of other sites that are linking back to you.
This process is called building your backlinks and it’s an important part of improving your SEO.
One of the best ways to build your own backlinks?
Offer to write guest content on other websites with the understanding that you’ll be able to add a link back to your own website.
But be genuine in your approach and actually offer legitimate value to the author you’re reaching out to.
It’s easy to spot someone who is only looking out for their own interests and nobody wants to help people who are like that.
Selfish much?
Instead, offer to write a guest post only when you have something original and unique to contribute on a topic you understand on a deep level.
One of the best ways to find blogs to write for is doing some research on the different blogs that are linking back to your competitors and reaching out to the authors directly.
5. Use Email Marketing To Build Value
There’s a right way and a wrong way to do email marketing.
If there’s one thing everyone can agree on, it’s that we all hate getting unsolicited spam emails out of nowhere that aren’t related to anything we’ve shown interest in.
…unless you’re Jo Koy of course.
(Hint: That’s the wrong way.)
A successful email marketing strategy starts with collecting an email address on your website through ethical means.
Some of the best ways to get buyers to give you their email include:
- Using Lead magnets
- Abandoned Shopping Carts
- Newsletter Sign Up Forms (Opt-In Forms)
- Popups that make the prospect a solid offer.
- Coupon offers
Then once you have your prospect’s email, you can finally start firing off messages like:
“Hey are you ready to buy yet?”
“What about now?”
“Ok now???”
Just kidding.
Don’t do that.
Otherwise your prospects will make their best Forrest Gump impression.
One of the biggest mistakes of email marketing is dumping everyone into the same email sequence.
That’s where email segmentation comes in.
Most email drip campaigns average between 4-11 emails spread out over the course of 4-14 days.
Be sure to create email message sequences that are personalized and build value in specific products or solutions that your prospect has shown interest in.
Proper segmentation increases engagement because the more personalized an experience feels to a potential buyer, the more likely they’ll open your message.
Some quick ways to build value for your email list include:
- Providing a deeper level of understanding about your product and what makes it unique
- Telling a story
- Creating a behind the scenes “insider” experience
- Sharing solutions and ideas to solve problems that your customers face
Then you can ask for the sale.
You’re much more likely to get your prospects to pay attention to your sales pitches after warming them up a bit with value.
6. Incentivize Your Customers To Share Your Brand Using Referral Marketing
Did you know that 83% of Americans are more interested in purchasing a product or service when they’ve received a recommendation from a friend or family member?
To supercharge word of mouth about your product, referral marketing is one of the best ecommerce marketing tools that can help you.
One of the biggest obstacles you face when convincing a new customer to buy from you is their lack of trust and perceived credibility of your brand, which is why some companies invest millions per year into their marketing budget to combat these issues.
But an inexpensive strategy that works extremely well is simply incentivizing your customers to share what you offer with their friends.
It’s referral marketing!
Try one of these ideas to get started:
- Refer a friend and get a free gift
- Refer a friend and get cash
- Refer a friend and get a discount on your next purchase.
The sweeter the deal, the more customers will participate in your program.
If you’re selling a product that people buy all the time (like soap, food, or personal care products), we recommend giving away a discount on their next purchase by referring a friend who becomes a new customer.
And if you’re selling a relatively higher priced item that people buy infrequently, a cash prize might be a better option.
Here’s an example of how an ecommerce brand called Teabox is using referral marketing.
They give their customers a $10 discount on their next purchase when they refer a friend, and their friend qualifies for a 15% discount on their first purchase.
Everybody wins.
And when you use referral marketing to spread the word about your products, you may have just saved a friendship.
Give yourself a high five.
7. Work With Social Media Influencers
While we’re on the subject of building trust, influencer marketing is another inexpensive way to take advantage of the trust and support that’s already been established between an influencer and their niche interest audience.
Since modern social media influencer marketing has been on the scene for a few years now, most established influencers will only agree to promote your brand on their channel as long as it aligns with their content and fits the interests of their audience.
Asking an influencer to post a blatant advertisement for you may work for a smaller influencer, but to pitch a larger influencer of 50,000 followers or more, offer some creative ways that your brand could fit seamlessly within the content they would normally publish.
Coming up with a creative pitch that shows an influencer that you’ve done your research and are interested in a genuine collaboration will make your proposal stand out among the hundreds of similar requests they get each week asking them to post a blatant advertisement.
Influencers know their audience pays attention because of the authenticity of their curated content, so it doesn’t help them at all when you ask them to be a billboard for you.
8. Supercharge Your High-Intent Traffic With Google Ads
When you’ve got your organic ecommerce marketing strategy set up and generating returns for you, it’s time to start thinking about paid advertising channels.
Search advertising reaches buyer audiences who have relatively high purchase intent, or they are doing research on solutions that can solve their pain points.
As of January 2020, Google searches are 87.3% of the total global search volume, so it makes sense to invest in Google Ads first before making the investment in other search engine ad platforms like Bing or Yahoo.
There are 5 ad campaign types that you can run on the Google Ads Network.
Let’s review how each of them can work within your ecommerce marketing plan.
Keyword Search Campaigns
Keyword search advertising is the most traditional form of search advertising.
These ads are the ones that pop up at the top of Google’s search results.
Below is an example of a keyword search ad that shows up for the keyword “travel luggage”
Before investing in this campaign type, it’s super important to research keywords that are most relevant to what you offer.
Doing proper keyword research can mean the difference between a campaign flop and a smashing success.
And you don’t want a flop.
Review our keyword research section above to discover the recommended tools that can help you.
For example, if you sell kitchen glassware, you can reach people searching for things like “dinner plates” or “salad bowls” and position your ads at the top of their search results.
Then when you’re finally ready to launch your campaign, you’ll set a price you’re willing to bid for someone to click your ad.
The higher search volume that a keyword has, the more likely it is that your competition is already bidding on it, which drives up the price.
It’s important to allocate your budget between highly competitive keywords and less competitive long-tail keywords.
The long-tail keywords are effective in reaching customers who are really specific about what they are looking for.
For example, if you sell Greek Olive Oil, you can certainly bid on the keyword “Olive Oil,” but to reach customers who are specifically looking for Greek Olive Oil, the price to bid on the long tail keywords “Greek Olive Oil” or “Olive Oil from Greece” would be less expensive.
Since only 3% of site visitors are ready to buy when they land on your site, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to buy from you, so an even smaller percentage of those visitors will complete their purchase on their first visit.
That’s why we recommend using keyword search ads within the larger context of building out your marketing funnel.
Shopping Campaigns
Unlike keyword advertising which requires you to write your own ad copy, Google does most of the heavy lifting for you when you set up a Shopping Campaign.
Shopping Ads dominate the top of search results and are positioned even higher than keyword ads and organic search results.
Here’s an example…
The first step is registering with Google’s Merchant Center where you’ll submit your product data feed that updates Google when your inventory, pricing, and availability changes.
Shopping ads are then generated automatically using the data in your feed.
When it comes to setting your budget, you can either bid on individual products or you can set up the bid on groups of products.
If you’re new to Google Shopping Campaigns, you might consider starting slow with a small set of products with high margins and expand them as you go.
That way you don’t exhaust your budget too quickly.
Display Campaigns
Display campaigns (which are also commonly referred to as banner ads) are among the most cost effective advertising platforms compared to the amounts of impressions and clicks you can get with the same budget on similar campaigns and platforms such as keyword campaigns, social media ads, or even traditional media.
Display campaigns can be positioned in front of those who recently searched for keywords related to your product or service, or recent website visitors.
One of the greatest benefits of retargeting your recent site visitors with display advertising is that it keeps your brand top of mind (even if they don’t click the ad) and by bringing them back to your website for a 2nd time, it will significantly increase the chances of them completing a purchase.
Effective display ads have a professional eye-catching design, have a strong call to action, pique your prospect’s interest, and are highly targeted to the appropriate audience.
Check out how Harry’s accomplished all of these keys in their display ad below.
Video Campaigns
Google owns YouTube, so with the Google Ads platform, you can reach YouTube viewers based on their recent search history, sites they’ve visited, or recent videos they’ve watched—just to name a few examples.
One of the best things about YouTube in-stream video advertising is that you don’t pay until someone watches a certain % of your video ad.
That means that you can get thousands of free video views to generate crazy amounts of brand awareness.
The best video ads are ones that fit within your marketing funnel to reach prospects at each stage of their buyers journey.
At the top of the funnel, video ads that generate brand awareness and drive traffic to your website are ideal.
Towards the middle of the funnel after prospects have visited your website, creating different video ads that build social proof and credibility can bring you closer to a sale when visitors return to your site for a 2nd or 3rd time.
Creating a high quality video ad can be a lot of work and often comes with a significant making investment, which is why a lot of companies don’t do it.
With less competition on this platform, video is one of the most ROI-positive ways to drive increased ecommerce sales.
App Campaigns
If you have an app that is an important part of your ecommerce marketing plan, you can drive app downloads by launching App Campaigns.
Similar to Shopping Campaigns, Google does most of the work and you don’t have to do much to design the ad itself.
These ads run on Keyword search, Google Play, YouTube, and the Google Display Network.
9. Convert Passive Prospects With Facebook & Instagram Ads
While search advertising is great for reaching those with high purchase intent, Facebook and Instagram ads work wonders in driving traffic and sales from prospects who didn’t even realize they had a need for your product or service.
We call these guys “passive prospects” and social media is a goldmine full of these audiences.
Yes. Even someone as old as Grandma is a passive prospect.
By targeting your customers based on their age, interests, job titles, and recent websites they’ve visited, you can craft a message that’s extremely specific to your core customer demographics.
Similar to our other strategies we’ve discussed in this article, we recommend building your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns within the context of your marketing funnel for the greatest impact.
At the top of the funnel, it’s best to drive brand awareness and traffic to your website.
Then stay in front of them using the Facebook pixel which is a piece of code that tracks users based on the websites they’ve visited to serve them additional ads that move them down the funnel and closer to a sale.
Video views, traffic, and conversion objectives are the most relevant ad objectives to an ecommerce marketing strategy, so design some eye-catching video or photo content, craft some amazing copy and launch your social media ads.
Remember that it’s extremely important to test, test, test your social ad campaigns because setting up one ad and hoping for the best is definitely a recipe for disaster.
It’s the same thing as baking something without a timer.
Bad idea.
10. Use Promoted Pins
Did you know there are over 2 billion searches on Pinterest each month?
Compared to the 100 billion searches on Google each month, it’s a small slice of the pie, but Pinterest users are typically looking for ideas for niche interests such as:
- Health And Wellness
- Parenting
- Food And Recipes
- Beauty And Personal Care
The best part?
And they often search on Pinterest first before considering Google.
So if you have a product that caters to one these interests, you can position a visually appealing pin or short video that provides valuable information at the top of your prospect’s feed and then link it back to your website for a super effective form of niche interest traffic.
11. Bring Your Prospects Back To Your Site With Retargeting
Remember: at any given time, only 3% of your prospects who visit your website are ready to buy.
This percentage significantly increases the more they return back to your site.
According to Shopify, when a customer returns to your website for a second time, the chances of them buying from you jumps to 45%.
And the 4th time a customer returns, the odds of them buying jump to 56%!
One of the best ways you can ensure that customers come back to your site is through retargeting (also known as remarketing) and it’s among the top ecommerce marketing tactics to use in your marketing funnel.
We recommend an omnichannel retargeting approach on platforms like the Google Ads Display Network, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and even email.
If you can reach your prospects across various platforms, the chances of them buying from you are increased even further.
In fact, 87% of retailers agree that an omni-channel marketing strategy is critical or very important to their success.
Now that you have all 11 strategies in your toolbelt, make sure you follow these two keys to maximize the return on your investment.
Because even if you have the keys, you still need the car to get to your destination.
And “the car” in mastering ecommerce is a combination of knowing your numbers and designing a website that’s built for conversion.
So if you want even more value, keep reading…
Know Your Numbers
You can execute all of these 11 strategies better than anyone else in the world, but if you fail to measure key performance metrics along the way, it’s impossible to have the information you need to make data-driven decisions to optimize (and ideally decrease) your marketing expenses.
With no retail storefront, ecommerce brands must provide an outstanding user experience on their website that’s designed to convert a high percentage of site visitors into customers.
The 5 most important marketing metrics to track the success of an ecommerce retail brand are:
- Organic And Paid Site Visitor Traffic
Website traffic comes in two flavors: paid and organic.
Paid traffic is driven by digital advertising clicks from social and search platforms like Facebook or Google.
Organic traffic are visitors that land on your site because someone found your content “organically” without clicking on an ad.
It’s important to install an ecommerce marketing tool such as Google Analytics to properly measure and analyze the different forms of traffic that are flowing to your site.
That way you can make data-driven adjustments accordingly.
Ideally you can strike a nice balance between organic and paid traffic so that you don’t rely on only one form of traffic to continue driving revenue for your site, which can put you in a really bad situation should something change overnight that is largely out of your control (such as Google algorithm update).
- Sales Conversion Rate (SCR%)
Your sales conversion rate is defined as the amount of sales generated in a given period of time, divided by the number of site visitors in that same timeframe, multiplied by 100%.
For all you visual learners out there, here’s the formula:
If you’ve got your data handy, you can calculate your very own SCR% below…
At the time of publishing this article, the most recent data we have is from Feburary 2020, when the typical ecommerce SCR% is currently 3.0% across all industries.
That means for every 100 visitors, getting 3 sales is considered a pretty solid conversion rate.
But it’s equally important to understand the SCR% specific to your industry to determine how your site fares against the competition.
For example, industries like Consumer Electronics get an average SCR% of 1.4%, while the gifts sector regularly gets the highest sales conversion rates achieving 4.9% on average.
For a brief rundown of the current SCR% by industry, here is a brief snapshot:
If your conversion rate is lower than the industry average, consider making the following improvements to your site in order to drive more conversions.
- Improve your website speed
- Use an omnichannel marketing funnel strategy
- Improve your product photos
- Strengthen your offer
- Average Order Value (AOV)
Your average order value (AOV) is a great barometer of the upsell, cross-sell, and downsell systems that every growing ecommerce website should have.
Without the proper selling systems in place, you could be leaving thousands of additional sales on the table.
Pretty sure that’s how this guy felt…
Generating more customers usually means increasing your marketing expenses, but if you’re looking to boost your revenue without increasing costs, then increasing your AOV is the way to go.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Whether it’s investing your marketing dollars into paid traffic, or spending valuable time producing organic content, every customer that buys from you has an acquisition cost.
If it’s costing you more money to convert a new prospect into a paying customer than your average order value, you have a failing marketing strategy.
To learn 7 strategies that can dramatically reduce your customer acquisition cost, check out our blog post dedicated to this topic.
- Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate (SCAR)
On average, shoppers abandon their carts nearly 70% of the time and a lot of this revenue is recoverable with the right selling systems in place.
This metric can help you better understand the typical user experience when completing a purchase on your site.
If you have an abandonment rate of 90% of more, you may have a typical abandonment problem with your checkout experience.
According to the Baymard Institute, the top reasons why shoppers abandon their carts include:
- Higher than expected added costs at the end of checkout (i.e. shipping, taxes, fees)
- Forcing a user to create an account
- Complicated checkout process, or too long of a checkout process
- Website errors
- Delivery options couldn’t meet their deadline
By fixing these common problems, less of your prospects will abandon their carts, leading to more sales.
Even a small improvement as little as 0.3% could mean an additional thousands of dollars in sales that would have otherwise been lost for your company.
While some of these reasons may be out of your control, abandoned cart shoppers are among the best audiences to reach with retargeting campaigns.
5 Tips To Building A High Converting Website
Web design is one of the most overlooked, but most important aspects of a well oiled ecommerce machine.
Bad design will destroy your conversion rates faster than Godzilla tore through the streets of Tokyo.
But strategic web design could be the difference between a profitable or unprofitable ecommerce brand.
And no, that’s not an exaggeration.
Follow these 5 tips to increase your on-page conversion rates.
1. Optimize For Mobile Devices
Did you know that in the fourth quarter of 2019, mobile phones made up nearly 50% of all web traffic?
Because 1 out of every 2 visitors who visit your site are using their mobile phone or tablet, it’s critical to provide an outstanding user experience across all web browsers and devices.
One of the biggest advantages of having a mobile optimized site is that Google will actually rank you higher than outdated sites that are not easily navigated on mobile.
To establish your brand’s credibility, reputation and trust with your customers and prospects, building a modern website is one of the best investments you can make.
2. Image Is Everything
One of the greatest challenges of ecommerce marketing is the fact that your customers cannot touch, smell, or feel your product before buying.
So your prospects are relying on their visual senses more than anything else to influence their perception of your product.
According to a Stanford University study, 46.1% of people say that web design is the #1 criteria for establishing a company’s credibility.
That’s why you have to go above and beyond with high quality imagery to communicate your unique value.
Images that are taken with proper lighting and staging will always outperform stock, blurry, or low quality images.
It’s important to remember that you want image sizes that are large enough so that they aren’t blurry but small enough so that the page loads reasonably fast.
Slow loading pages can drastically hurt your SEO rankings.
Usually this means using jpeg formatted photos.
Emotion & Context
Emotion and context also play a large role in conversion.
Think about it.
Would you rather buy a product featuring an image of someone who looks happy and excited to use it or from someone who looks like Gollum from Lord Of The Rings?
All jokes aside, here’s an image of a golfer who looks enthusiastic and it would be a great image to use on the product page of a golf club.
Subconsciously, the positive emotions make the product look more appealing and superior to other golf clubs.
And here’s an image of a very similar golf club, except you can’t see any expression on his face.
It’s important to note that these are only recommended best practices and that every image on your product page should undergo a rigorous A/B testing process.
Dynamic Image Technology
Take advantage of modern website tools that let your site visitors zoom in on your product, or do a 360° image rotation.
The more realistic that you can make your product appear on your site, the easier it is for someone to perceive your product as something that’s high quality and worth buying.
Compared to a static image with no context, no background, and no emotion, dynamic image technology can add a significant boost to your bottom line.
For example, portable charger company ZAGG increased its revenue by 40% by using a 360° product viewer.
3. Videos Tell Your Story
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million.
Videos are some of the best content you can add to your website for several reasons.
First, it can immediately boost your SEO because Google loves video.
Second, people are more likely to remember your message in a video compared to a static image.
And last but not least, video is arguably easier to digest more quickly than written text.
Maybe that’s the reason why the average American watched 4.5 hours of TV per day in 2019, compared to only 48 minutes per day reading.
4. Design Like A Pro
One of Albert Einstein’s best quotes also translates over into the world of ecommerce.
In other words, you want to avoid giving your prospects “analysis paralysis” at all costs.
This actually dates back to a psychological study conducted in 1952 by William Hicks and Ray Hyman.
They discovered that the more options to choose from, the longer it takes the end user to make a decision on which one to decide on.
It’s known as Hick’s Law.
So how does this translate to your website marketing?
Keep it simple!
In most of the Western world, people read from left to right and top to bottom.
So our eyes naturally follow the shape of an F or Z as we skim over a webpage.
Keep this in mind when designing your sales pages.
5. Showcase Your Reviews
Humans crave the ability to exert control over our outcomes.
We are naturally hardwired to avoid uncertainty.
In fact, one of the most sophisticated psychological scientific experiments researched how uncertainty is even more stressful than knowing something bad is confirmed to happen.
Here’s how it worked: volunteers played a computer game where they had to overturn rocks where virtual snakes may be hiding.
If a snake appeared, they were electrically shocked!
Not necessarily a game I’d like to play by any means… sounds awful!
So what’s the path forward?
Social proof!
It’s the marketing world’s secret weapon against uncertainty.
Customer reviews are one of your greatest tools to combat the general uncertainty that your prospects naturally feel before buying a product for the first time.
Professor Robert Cialdini pioneered the concept demonstrating that social proof is one of the six key principles of persuasion.
Recent studies show that 63% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a site that has user reviews and reviews produce an average 18% uplift in sales.
Conclusion
Use a combination of the 11 ecommerce marketing strategies we discussed today within the larger context of your marketing funnel.
First, we recommend driving awareness of your brand with the primary goal to get prospects to visit your website.
Then build up trust and social proof to separate yourself from the competition and build value and credibility in what you offer.
Using an omnichannel marketing approach increases the chances of a purchase, as long as you are carefully measuring your KPIs and your website’s landing pages are designed to convert the maximum number of prospects.
If you’re looking for support to launch or improve your own ecommerce strategy, take advantage of a 30 minute complimentary strategy session with our team below.
