Don't you want to read? Try listening to the article in audio mode 🎧
Two things are essential in an effective e-commerce strategy: bringing prospects onto your site and managing to increase their conversion rate.   A carefully crafted and effective marketing campaign is essential to reach these objectives. Of course, your marketing strategy must be part of a comprehensive ecommerce strategy: you should take care of site optimisation but you should also constantly monitor how the campaign is going, be prepared to make adjustments, have all the interesting data collected and in good order, make sure that the backend is working fine, etc. And, coming back to marketing, you should implement some key strategies, like the following ones.

Let yourself be found: SEO and SEM

First of all, your potential clients should be able to find you. And search engines are still the best way to be found on the web. Put your best efforts (and even better, hire a qualified professional or an agency) on the SEO optimisation of your site, with a special focus on the product pages. Why? Well, when you are desperately seeking something, if you find it, it’s quite probable that you are going to buy it, right? Your objective should be to appear for the keywords that interest you the most on the top 5 results of the SERP. Of course SEO for ecommerce has difficulties of its own because products and product descriptions do change often. Here are some SEO tips for your ecommerce:
  • Exploit long-tail keywords: don’t focus only on the most desirable, common keywords. Long tail keywords have low competition and often represent exactly what the users really want, so if you manage to capture those it can do a great deal for your business.
  • Profit from reviews and user generated content: do include them in your pages (Google truly appreciates user generated content) and be sure that they are crawled.
  • Elaborate on product descriptions: if your product description is identical to the ones of all your competitors you may be penalised, either by Google or by the disinterest of your potential clients. So work on product descriptions and make them unique.
  • Study and develop link building strategies that are proven to deliver good quality organic traffic.
  • Add your brand name to everything you circulate (video, podcasts, links…) because that makes you recognisable and more relevant.

Do more content marketing

As we all know, content marketing is the creation and distribution of different kinds of content (articles, videos, audio, graphics) to targeted audiences with the objective of gaining new leads and strengthening your brand. You should aim to produce high-quality content that gives people something really useful, something that they are truly interested in. To reach this result you should do a lot of research and then develop an editorial and distribution plan.  You should make your contents easily shareable and consider guest blogging, syndication, and also engaging in some serious PPC campaigns. Always remember that your goal is to drive conversions. So do consider also how the kinds of content you are producing may help your primary goal (conversions): typically customer stories or webinars (that are at the bottom of the content marketing funnel, the so called “BOFU”) do facilitate conversions, while blog posts, ebooks and podcasts facilitate awareness.

Email marketing

Email marketing it’s not about advertising the things you sell. It’s about building relationships. And if you build successful relationships, then you will also succeed in generating more sales. You should make these people feel that you are giving them something precious, opportunities that other customers miss, information that otherwise they would never access. Email is also very effective at converting sales. For example, did you know that nearly 70% of users abandon their cart before buying? Abandoned cart emails have a high open-rate and great conversion rate. Up-sell and cross-emails can also bring good results: your users buy one product, you remind them that there is a similar or connected item that may interest them. To sum up, you should profit from any piece of information and data that your clients give you because each one is potential inspiration for action on your part. 
Article updated on: 09 August 2023
Talent Garden
Written by
Talent Garden, Digital Skills Academy

Keep reading

5 Ways to Accurately Measure Advertising Effectiveness

Whether it’s checking your phone for the latest Instagram updates or simply driving to work, ads have become an ...

Digital Marketing for Startups: Where to Start

The primary goal of a startup is to grow fast. Typically if it doesn’t experience rapid growth in its first years, you ...

Cross-Channel Marketing: How to Promote Across Multiple Digital Channels

In today’s digital age, reaching potential customers through a single marketing channel is no longer enough to stay ...

5 Reasons You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy

If you are a publisher or a retailer you know you need to do some digital marketing campaigns to thrive, especially ...