25 Effective ECommerce Marketing Strategy Examples
Owen Baker
Content Marketer at Voila Norbert
In fact, over 80% of eCommerce stores fail within their first year.
An e-commerce business cannot just grow overnight. Sustainable growth is a long and difficult process. After all, there are basically only two ways to grow any business;
- You can find new customers, or
- You can increase the lifetime value of your existing customers.
1. Define Your Sales Cycle
It is vital for you to know how customers move through your sales cycle. For example, knowing how long a customer takes before they convert will allow you to figure out what to work on to drum up sales.
The sales cycle is comprised of the following steps:
- Sales prospecting: In this stage, you look for potential customers and determine whether they need your product or service. You also look at whether they can afford what you offer.
- Contact potential customers: You reach out to potential customers in the hopes of setting up a formal meeting. Your communication channel will depend on the prospect and the business.
- Qualify customers: Here, you determine whether your prospect is able to purchase your product.
- Product presentation: This is when you present your product as a solution to your prospect's problem.
- Overcome customer objections: In this stage, you answer the possible objections your prospect may have to your product.
- Close the sale: This is where your prospect agrees to make that purchase.
- Generate referrals: Finally, you ask your customer for referrals for your product.
Keeping track of the sales cycle allows you to look at the efficiency (or lack thereof) of your sales process so you can make the necessary adjustments. Should you be more aggressive in social media? Or should you focus on SEO? Maybe you should do both.
2. Optimize Your Site
Search Engine Optimization is an essential part of marketing. The logic here is simple. How can your potential customers purchase your products if they can’t find you in search results in the first place?
The easiest way to do this is to target keywords with a high monthly search volume and little competition. These can be found through Google Keyword Planner.
To start ranking for keywords, you need to create high-quality cornerstone content on these topics. You can then create guest posts on high-authority sites to signal to Google your credibility.
You should also ensure your site is SEO optimized on a technical level.
Take Amazon as an example. One of the reasons it is the top US retailer is its visibility in Search Engine Results Pages. When you Google, online shopping in the US, Amazon is at the top of the first page.
The story is the same for just about any product you can imagine.
Compare this with the ranking of Costco, one of Amazon’s rival retailers. In the same search, Costco appears on the third page, in second place.
The results are telling. Based on e-marketer.com, in 2018, Amazon had a 49.1% share of US retail e-commerce sales. Costco sat a distant ninth place, with only 1.2%.
3 - Personalize the Buying Experience
Research proves that personalization of the shopping experience spurs loyalty. According to Segment’s online survey, 71% of people express some level of frustration when their shopping experience is not personal.
The survey also found that 44% of consumers become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience.
You can personalize buying experiences by analyzing your customers’ behavior when they visit your site. You can use your point-of-sale system to collect and store the data and can analyze customer management features to build a profile, including buying behavior.
Here’s an example of a site offering a personalized buying experience.
Note that eBay calls its customers by their first name. It was the customer who provided the name to eBay during the required registration to access the online retail store.
eBay even sends personalized emails to the customer directly after registration.
After the customer logs out and logs in again, eBay shows a list of popular products.
However, the list is actually based on what the customer searched for in their previous log-in. The customer previously searched for “headphones,” so this is what appears at the top of the page.
You can set your parameters to personalize your customer's buying experience. For example, instead of showing what's popular on eBay, you outright recommend the products the customer previously viewed.