eCommerce Marketing Full Guide (FREE Strategies + Tools)

Selling online is way different than selling offline. To increase sales, you’ll not only need to know marketing. You need to be savvy in SEO, sales channels, and a little bit of eCommerce analysis. Don’t worry, we got you. This eCommerce Marketing Guide will help sharpen your online selling skills.

eCommerce Marketing goes beyond the goal of selling more. It aims to sell more — with consistency.

And the consistency part is where it all gets tricky.

For instance, paid ads is one of the hottest eCommerce advertising. But lately, online advertising has become a tough thing to crack and everyone agrees.

Thanks to iOs updates…

New Facebook ads policies popping up every day…

And piling suspended and blocked Facebook ad accounts that could sabotage your revenue engine…

But you don’t have to worry about that. We’ve put together a complete guide so you’re always on top of your marketing game, driving traffic to your product pages and turning it into money. Plus, this guide is super simple to follow even eCommerce newbies can execute it.

What is eCommerce Marketing?

eCommerce Marketing is a form of digital marketing that’s solely focused on driving awareness, traffic, and sales towards selling products or services online.

It can use a combination of social media, paid ads, organic marketing, SEO, influencer marketing, and email marketing to facilitate the selling process. Yes, it can involve both free and paid marketing strategies.

So how does this work? It starts with an eCommerce Marketing Strategy.

How To Create an eCommerce Marketing Strategy

An eCommerce Marketing Strategy is a structured plan of action geared towards helping you achieve your business goals in the virtual space. What tools will you use, at what stage, and in what way?

We’ll help you answer all these as you read on.

Online selling platforms are highly dynamic. Every day there’s a new tool or feature, all geared towards helping you reach your audience better and sell more.

In this sea of choices, how do you craft an eCommerce Marketing Strategy that works for you and your brand?

Before you dive in, it’s crucial to first know your target consumers, your goals and objectives, and your brand’s mission like the back of your hand. This would help you choose what strategies best work for your needs.

Proceed in knowing that it takes time to find the perfect strategy that’ll work for your brand and your goals. It’ll take a lot of trials—and some will fail, while some will fly off. From the things that worked, you’ll uncover which strategies and channels will give you the best results.

Don’t hesitate to try, assess, and explore other methods until you find what’s best for you and your brand. There is no failure here, just lessons learned.

How to Optimize Your Product Page for eCommerce Success

Your strategy is now in place and you’re ready to go to the next step. With an effective marketing strategy, you have now brought your prospects to your product page and they’re ready to see your products and services.

How do you ensure success by keeping their attention and making them come back?

Here are some tips:

Don’t just copy and paste product descriptions.

Invest in a good copy for your product descriptions. Ask questions like: What is this product’s significance to the user? What details do they need to know before they buy?

Use professional tools for keyword research.

This will help you rank higher in search engines. You can use tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush.

Optimize your website for all devices, especially mobile.

It’s best to ensure that the site loads quickly, or you risk losing prospects before they even reach your product page.

Pay attention to meta descriptions and meta titles.

These help you improve Click-through Rate (CTR), and help search engines better understand what your website’s content is about.

Build a relationship with customers and make them feel valued.

Offer rewards points, encourage them to sign up for your newsletter if you have one. You can even use CRM tools to prompt them to answer questions and initiate a conversation.

Use marketing strategies that react to customer behavior.

A lot of tools make it possible for you to do this now. Are users hovering over a product for more than 15 seconds? You can make a chatbot pop up. Or place the same product as a Related Product at the bottom of the next page they’re visiting.

Establish authority and trust.

Share customer reviews and feedback! Be ruthless. Customers are 6x more likely to purchase a product if the page includes user-generated content like reviews, feedback, and actual customers’ pictures.

Try writing two product descriptions.

One is long and another shorter. Allow them to skim if they must, and to explore deeper if they’d want to. Give them a picture of how your product and service can contribute to your prospect’s life.

Prioritize giving value to your customers.

Especially when you upsell. When you bundle products together, it’s best if it provides more value to your customers’ lives together.

Those are some ideas, but there are so many more tips that you can try!

Haven’t tried some of these tips on your product page so far? Time to try them after reading this post.

7 Channels in eCommerce Marketing (What are they and how to get started)

You can start marketing for your eCommerce business on different platforms. Each is better than the others in some aspects and it can get a tad overwhelming, but relax.

Here’s an overview of the most common ones and how you can get started:

1. SEO

SEO for eCommerce is one of the free ways to be easily discovered and trusted by your target prospects.

An optimized page with a good ranking appears on the top of search results for search engines like Google. Higher visibility would also mean more traffic and higher possibilities for conversion.

Sounds great, right? So how do we get started?

It starts with knowing how search engines work and how do they reward particular optimization actions?

One of the very first things that you need to learn and pay attention to is keyword research. It’s the very foundation of every SEO campaign because you won’t be able to optimize without knowing the keywords you need.

It’s worth noting that eCommerce keywords are different from others. It’s tailored around product search keywords. These keywords are product-focused, and typically the keywords that your prospects type when they’re looking to buy a product you offer.

A good example of a product search keyword would be, “baby clothes store”. It’s different from other “informational keywords” such as “how to knit a bonnet”.

Other fundamental things that you can address to get started and establish a good SEO foundation would be making sure your URL, H1 header, content, meta descriptions, and meta titles are optimized.

Pay attention to the little details, make sure the website is mobile-friendly and the pages load quickly.

Link building will also be incredibly helpful. Which links within the website (internal) and outside (external) would you link to and from? Choosing these carefully and being cited by other websites can also help boost your brand reputation.

2. PPC

PPC stands for pay-per-click. It’s an internet marketing model where advertisers are charged fees for each click that their ads get.

It comes in many forms, the most common one being search engine advertising. Search engines like Google and Bing display your ads in a strategic place specifically made for sponsored links.

But there’s also display advertising, where your banner, image, or text ads are strategically placed in authority websites.

Another form would be what’s referred to as social media advertising. Social media websites like Facebook have users that can be your leads. PPC advertising on platforms like this can help you increase click-through rates to your website.

There are more ways to do PPC but the last one that we’d like to share would be aggregator websites. These are websites that allow users to compare prices of similar or related products.

Each pay-per-click campaign on these different platforms would have varying results and prices.
The price would depend on different factors.

For example, Google may charge less if you provide relevant and carefully targeted campaigns. If your landing pages are useful and satisfying to users, that is.

For social media advertising, you can choose your target prospects based on their demographics and interest. Aside from the intention of making them buy your products, campaigns like this also help increase awareness for your product or service.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing can be used to inform your prospects about your products and services, establish authority in your niche, build a community, and drive sales to your brand.

Here’s a sample from Mossery.

Everyone (almost, 91% according to a Hubspot survey), uses email. It’s an incredible opportunity to reach out to your audience. Signups are voluntary, it’s highly personable and easy to measure. If you must choose one, it’s worth it to start here!

Here, your prospects permit you to send them emails by signing up for your email list. Once signed up, they are then called your subscribers.

Especially for eCommerce stores, you’d benefit a lot from automating your emails.

You can build better relationships with your customers by setting triggers for particular customer behavior.

One example would be abandoned cart emails. What if a customer never checks out the items on their checkout page?

You can send an automated email. This will either prompt them to check out the items or give you insights on why they haven’t done so!

Email automation takes a lot of work off of your plate and makes customers feel more valued.

Here are other types of automated emails that you can use:

1. Order confirmation email

A customer receives this once their order is paid for. It gives them their invoice, a tracking link if applicable, and other details such as the Order ID, estimated date of arrival, and more.

2. Post-purchase follow up

This can be set up a few days after an order is made. Here you can ask for feedback on the product, or let them know how they can reach you if they have any questions or concerns.

3. Welcome series

You can set this up for people who choose to subscribe to your newsletter. Tell them about your brand, the latest trends, or something you think your customers will find useful to make the most out of what you sell.

4. Educational content

These are emails that are meant to establish trust and develop a relationship with your audience. Give them useful details about your industry and your products.

Share content that can be conversation starters, and don’t hesitate to provide more value to both people who already bought from you, or people who are interested in your brand (as they have signed up for your email list).

Those are some of what we’d suggest, do you have other messages that you’d like to automate for your customers?

4. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based promotional model where advertisers only pay when affiliates are able to provide a particular customer action.

Affiliates are people who help sell your products and are typically people who know and believe in what you do. They can come in many forms, but it’s common for your existing and raving customers to be your affiliates.

It’s simple, an affiliate simply looks for a product or service that they enjoy and believe in, and promotes the product. They will, in turn, earn from each sale that they make. This is tracked through affiliate links.

The best part about affiliate marketing? You get free exposure and only pay usually when a sale is made, or when a specified action is taken (for example, if you receive an inquiry).

This would work best for businesses that have already built trust with their customers. It’s an easy way to scale without having to hire extra help.

Affiliate marketing doesn’t only allow you to make more sales. It allows you to know your customers better through people that they trust and follow.

Social proof is a powerful tool to establish trust and authority in your niche. Customers who have proven results with your brand or experts who believe in your products can be powerful drivers of action.

Ready to get started? Here are the simple steps you can follow:

1. Choose a platform. This platform will help you generate affiliate links that will help make it easier to attribute every sale or action to a particular person.
2. Know your niche. Where do your customers hang out most? Who do they follow? You can start finding affiliates here.
3. Create great content. You’ll have a pool of trusted people to share your brand, what would they see when they’re about to make that purchase?
4. Set everything up on the backend. Let affiliates know how the links would work, when and how often they will be getting their share, and how can they best promote your products (with the content you crafted).

You’re all set! You’ll surely learn more along the way. Once the foundations are laid out, this will be a great opportunity to scale.

5. Live Chat

Chat is not just a way to interact with your customer or address their most pressing questions. These days, it goes beyond customer service and can be used for marketing as well.

 

Source – Revechat.com

Like automated emails, you can set custom actions as triggers and in turn send them live chat messages based on their behavior on your website.

Not everyone will take the time to write an email and wait for an answer to their questions. But most people may have questions that they need to be answered before making a purchase.

To help you visualize, for example, you have a customer who lingers for more than 30 seconds on a product page, you can automate chat to initiate conversation. Like this.

Do they have questions about the product? How can we help?

This way, friction is reduced as prospects get the answers that they need right away.

You can also link this to your FAQs.

There are numerous platforms out there that can allow you to do this. It can also be linked to your CRM.

One more advantage of live chat is its ability to record and categorize your customer’s most frequently asked questions. With these insights, you can further optimize your website and make the user experience more seamless.

6. Social Media

A lot of brands and growing businesses start by creating pages on various social media platforms. As an eCommerce marketer, you can focus on more visual platforms.

Keep in mind that primarily, people are in Social Media to connect and not to make a purchase. Although it doesn’t stop them from buying, it’s important to note that your social media presence will be best for interacting with your audience.

It’s an excellent opportunity to get in front of your prospects and increase awareness of your brand.

Show them what your brand is about. Create shoppable content with high-resolution images that they can click to purchase, or be directed to your website.

Target who your ads are shown to based on their demographics and interests.

You can also use this to show reviews and build a community.

7. Content Marketing

Content marketing is all about drawing people in by providing answers to the queries they post on various platforms (search engines, videos, and social media).

This can come in the form of informative articles, tutorials, or some informative images and diagrams.

• As an eCommerce business or marketer, here are some ways you can use it to your advantage:
• You can create blog posts that would be beneficial to your prospects and are relevant to their needs.
• As we discussed in SEO, make sure that everything is optimized.
• On social media, think of content with some call to action and spark conversations.
• If you do content marketing on multiple channels, encourage your followers to follow you on each. Link your blogs to your
• Instagram. You can also post reels from a fraction of the video content you crafted.
• Note that these are just parts of the bigger picture. You can mix and match these to ultimately create the perfect strategy.
• Now let’s get to the best parts! You’re almost ready to take some action.

Dukaan’s Free eCommerce Marketing Tools

Dukaan is an eCommerce platform that helps you start, run, and grow your online business the easy way. It’s made that way so you focus on what truly matters for your store: setting the right foundations and generating sales.

In Dukaan, you can:

1. Set up your online store in 30 seconds
2. List products online under your own domain name
3. Ship and deliver products anytime, anywhere
4. Easily track and manage all orders with a dashboard
5. Access free eCommerce tools like the card maker and Custom WA stories

Dukaan also allows you to set up your eCommerce store with pre-built templates that you can easily customize based on your branding and customer preferences.

Tracking orders & conversions: Single Channel Attribution vs. Multi-Channel Attribution

Now let’s talk about analyzing the how and why of your eCommerce marketing strategy.

To know which marketing and advertising activities work for you, you’ll need to know marketing attribution.

Marketing attribution refers to the process of evaluating marketing touchpoints that a customer goes through to complete a purchase.

The goal of attribution is to know which channels contributed to and had the greatest impact on the decision to convert.

Learn more about attribution and attribution models in marketing to understand the true value of your marketing channels on RedTrack’s YouTube channel!

There are two main categories of attribution: Single Channel and Multichannel.

Single-Touch Channel Attribution Model

A Single Channel Attribution model would either assume that a consumer converted to a paying customer through the first touch point or the last touchpoint. This is without taking into consideration the other touchpoints that they went through.

Multi-Touch Channel Attribution Model

This model takes a look at all the touchpoints that the consumer went through before conversion.

Some weigh all channels equally, while others would give more value based on when a consumer interacted with the touchpoint.

Now that you know where those customers are coming from, you should also know how to manage your customers’ info. This way, you can sell to your loyal customers and keep them much longer.

Honestly, based on your industry, this can get complex. For example…it could go from simple single click attribution to time-decay and multichannel attribution. When getting started, you don’t need to worry about it, but it’s good to know the basics.

Tracking Customers: Popular CRM Tools

You’ll need a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool to manage your customers. A CRM stores and analyzes all data related to customer interactions with your website and the various channels you used.

It’s incredibly helpful to track this to continuously improve your current systems in place and reduce friction from awareness to conversion.

Here are some of the best in the market:

Intercom

Intercom is a messaging platform for all your customer’s needs. It tracks customer interactions, engagements, and can facilitate customer support. It can even house your knowledge base!

Their focus covers all stages of the sales funnel and starts at $87 per month.

Drift Live Chat

Drift combines an email marketing solution, with video communication and live chat tool that you can integrate into your stores.

It features a drag-and-drop bot builder that would help you easily set up your chatbot with ease.

Here, the bot greets and welcomes the consumer on your website, and smoothly passes them onto a corresponding sales rep.

The standard plan starts at $40 per month.

Hubspot

This CRM platform covers landing pages, email, social media, lead management, analytics, and marketing automation.

Hubspot CRM is free and the number of users is unlimited.

A Starter Growth Suite starts a $113 per user/month. But pricing would be highly customizable, depending on your needs.

Drip CRM

This CRM focuses on drip marketing. Here, potential leads get a series of reminders about a brand through a scheduled email sequence.

Drip’s pricing depends on how many users would be in your account, starting from $49 per user monthly, billed annually.

Dukaan makes this all easy for you. You can set up your store through the platform’s easy-to-use and visual tools to create a website that fits your consumer’s tastes.

Dukaan has integrated with the best CRM tools in the market. You can easily add Intercom and Drift as plug-ins to your eCommerce website in Dukaan.

Insightly

Insightly is another sales CRM tool that can be integrated with G Suite and Microsoft Office 365.

This allows your sales and marketing teams to gain more insights into your leads, customers, and suppliers by streamlining engagements with your customer base.

Plus plan is $29 per user/per month, billed annually.

3 Examples of Brilliant eCommerce Marketing

Now that you know more about the marketing tools you can use for your eCommerce store, it’s time to learn some best practices through these examples;

1. Myntra

Myntra has an estimated 48.03M monthly visitors.

They make use of banners and cards to display the best deals on their home page.

The website is one of the leading fashion retailers in India and offers a wide range of goods from local and international brands.

Navigation is made easy through filters that are easy to navigate, with product pages that offer upsells and feature customer reviews.

2. BookMyShow

Is the number one online ticket vendor in India, with 43.25M monthly visitors.

They have an intuitive flow that makes users select their city first before providing the list of shows and activities that consumers can choose from.

They also have a list of helpful resources to keep web visitors up to date with the latest in the entertainment industry.

3. Flipkart

Flipkart has an estimated 242.62 M visitors.

It’s most popular to its customers for electronics. But they also sell a wide variety of products.

When you first open the website, they start to build a relationship by prompting customers to create an account. Track orders, create Wishlists and have access to recommendations.

They also have a loyalty program that gives their loyal customers more perks through discounts and other offers.

What other successful eCommerce stores can you derive inspiration from?

Don’t hesitate to share it!

Face eCommerce Marketing Head On

At its very heart, marketing allows you to connect best with the people who can benefit from your products and services.

You can initiate, nurture, and scale sales when you get to know your customers and their needs better and learn more about the tools that can help you visualize and assess your current state, to define paths for improvement.