Starting an eCommerce shop is easy.
With all the resources and tools available to fit the budget of site owners, creating and launching an online shop takes very little time, no coding knowledge, and doesn’t require a professional developer.
But the problem is, that’s just the beginning.
Just because you’ve launched an online shop doesn’t mean you’ll start generating sales right away. In fact, if no one even knows you exist, you’ll never become a success.
After you build an eCommerce website, you need to focus your attention on creating a solid marketing strategy.
This way you can expose your brand to your target audience, begin to build brand recognition, and start forming relationships with potential leads.
In this article, we’ll share with you some of the best eCommerce marketing strategies to help promote your business so you can compete with your industry’s competitors.
1. Start with Content
To start, people are not going to come to your online shop and only want to buy what you’re selling.
They want to know that your brand has something of value to offer them. This is especially true if they’re going to hand over their hard-earned cash to you.
Second, people will not magically come to your eCommerce site without some sort of content marketing strategy in place.
If you want to market your brand on the internet, you need to develop content to share with your target audience.
After all, this is the only way you’ll get information out about your company, what you’re selling, and how you can help people with your products and services.
Not to mention, Google loves high-quality content and will rank your eCommerce shop higher in search results if you can crank out useful, and relevant, content for people to click on.
There are many platforms available to help you set up a blog to complement your online shop:
WordPress
Use this content management system, and the free WooCommerce plugin, to open up shop.
Plus, publish blog content for customers to read.
There are tons of free and premium plugins and themes available to help you achieve success in terms of customers and followers.
Wix
This is not one of the most robust eCommerce platforms around.
That said, Wix does host your website for you, reducing the hassle and cost of having to use a separate web hosting provider like you need to do when using WordPress.
It’s also an affordable option for those looking to sell online and don’t have a lot of site building experience.
Squarespace
This platform is suitable for general website building, but also comes with plenty of built-in eCommerce tools to go alongside your blog.
If you plan to have a large, complex online shop, however, this solution is not going to work for you.
Shopify
Shopify is a pure eCommerce platform and sets the stage for you to have a lot of success selling online.
This is especially true if you plan to break into the eCommerce world by opening up a Shopify dropshipping store.
With dropshipping, you don’t have to worry about managing your inventory.
This leaves you more time to focus on marketing your brand to your target audience and pushing out high-quality content people will love and come to trust.
In the end, running a successful eCommerce shop is going to require more from you than just selling great products and services.
It’s going to require you offer some killer content to those that visit your site as well if you want to earn their trust and establish yourself as an authority.
2. Build a Mailing List
Once you’ve managed to publish some content on your blog that follows all SEO best practices, and more traffic than ever starts to visit your site, it’s time to start building an email list.
Capturing people’s email addresses is especially helpful for those times when someone comes to your eCommerce shop, doesn’t buy, and plans to leave.
If you can at least get people to sign up for your email list, you can stay in contact and try to encourage them to come back another time.
And since 91% of consumers admit to checking their emails every day, your chances of reaching people through email campaigns are high – if you do it right.
There are many email list building tools you can use. For starters, you can use an email service provider like MailChimp to create signup forms for your site to get people to subscribe.
You can also send out your email campaigns from your MailChimp dashboard too.
There’s also the option of using a freemium WordPress plugin such as WPForms to create subscribe forms on your site.
Integrating with popular email service providers like MailChimp, AWeber, and GetResponse, this contact form builder makes managing your email marketing efforts a cinch.
Once people start signing up, you can run campaigns to market your business that include:
- Welcome messages saying hello and inviting people back
- Links to recently published blog posts
- Product updates or new launches
- Discounts, coupons, or exclusive sales
- Helpful tips related to what you sell
- Information regarding a recent purchase
- A reminder to visit your shop
If you need help with your email marketing campaigns, try signing up for your competition’s email lists and see what they’re doing.
If they’re established brands, what they’re sending out is obviously working. And it can work for you too.
3. Get Involved in PPC Advertising
One of the best ways to market your brand and generate more sales is to get into pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
Now, this strategy only works if you have some money to invest, but it can be very lucrative, especially for new online shops trying to make their mark.
A popular PPC click advertising platform is Google Ads (previously known as Google AdWords).
With it, you can do the following:
- Decide where to display ads (Google search results, Gmail, YouTube videos, mobile apps, etc.)
- Determine how far (geographically) you want your ads to reach
- Monitor the effectiveness of your ads with detailed reports
- Conduct A/B testing to see what works best
- Adjust your ad budget
- Start and stop campaigns at any time
Lastly, perform keyword research using Google’s Keyword Planner to boost your SEO efforts.
This will help more of your target audience see your ads, as well as increase your online store’s traffic numbers and revenue.
If you don’t have the time to run your own advertising campaigns or aren’t sure how to approach digital advertising, consider outsourcing to a third-party for help.
Some of the benefits of outsourcing include:
- Effective content creation revolving around brand awareness
- A sales funnel approach to advertising designed to draw customers in
- Full attention to building your social media presence
- Help with local public relations
- Continual monitoring of your advertising strategies to make sure they’re working
That said, though digital agencies will have the expertise to bring you successful results, the cost of outsourcing an ad agency may be out of your marketing budget.
Final Thoughts
Marketing campaigns take a lot of planning if you want them to work.
And the best way to start a marketing campaign is to come up with some surefire strategies (like the ones above) that are known to work and outline how you’ll tackle each so you too can succeed.
Remember, your target audience is always going to be the focus.
After all, they’re the ones that are reading your site’s content, opening your email campaigns, and ultimately buying what you have for sale.
If you can cater to their pain points, needs, and interests, you’ll boost eCommerce sales in no time, even if you’re just starting out.
