If you want to grow your brand, you’re going to need several solid eCommerce marketing strategies to get more customers.
Without a strategy, you’re leaving it up to fate for people to become aware of your brand. Or you will have some initial success selling your products, yet without repeatable results.
The key to a good eCommerce marketing strategy is a sales focus. Click To TweetYou need to ensure that everything points to the bottom of your sales funnel. After all, awareness about your brand is good, but only if it eventually leads to a sale, right?
With that in mind, here are a few eCommerce marketing ideas that will solidify your strategy and boost your sales funnel ROI.
eCommerce Marketing Definition: Why It’s Different Than Digital Marketing
eCommerce marketing is not the same as digital marketing.
According to marketing expert Prateek Gahlot, digital marketing is defined as “marketing the product or service to a specific targeted customer.”
The eCommerce marketing definition, on the other hand, is the a focus on buying and selling.
In other words, digital marketing wants customers to take some form of action (conversion), like signing up for a newsletter or buying a product.
eCommerce marketing strategies focus solely on getting someone to purchase. Yes, you might want a customer to sign up for your newsletter too, but it’s a supporting activity. The goal is ultimately sales on your store.
In order for an eCommerce marketing strategy to succeed, there must be sales.
That’s why it’s so important for businesses to focus on eCommerce marketing strategies that promote sales, not just generic conversions.
The Best eCommerce Marketing Ideas for Sales
Lead generation comes in two forms: conversions and purchases. A conversion could be a purchase, but it could also be an email sign up or a social media share.
Lead generation for eCommerce should be in the latter category: it should lead to an actual purchase.
According to Kissmetrics, this requires eCommerce marketing ideas that show your customer the benefits of your product as soon as they become aware of it.
As they put it, “Look at ways to educate, rather than persuade.”
Or as Buffer says, “People don’t buy products, they buy better versions of themselves.” If your marketing campaign can show a “better version” to the customer, they will be more likely to buy in.
This means creating marketing campaigns – like email campaigns – that revolve around the why – why should someone purchase your product? What value will it add to your life? – and the what – what will happen once they buy from you?
Lead Capturing Marketing Ideas
Here is an example of a lead capturing idea from Nest Thermostat that shows how it helps save energy (with a video). When it’s done, it asks if you want more information about how to do the same in your house:
Source: Buffer
Or a welcome email from Aritzia, that tells more about the product with a direct link to how to buy:
Source: Oberlo
Another lead capturing marketing idea would be to offer a discount for a first-time purchase like MyWardrobe.com does:
Source: Picreel
Focus on ideas that move towards the bottom of the funnel, like financial incentives (discounts, a free product, etc.)
Recapture Marketing Ideas
If someone was on the edge of making a purchase but left the cart abandoned, or they purchased once but never came back to purchase again, you can turn them back into an active lead through a recapture email campaign.
Here’s a great example of an abandoned cart email campaign from Modcloth:
Source: HubSpot
Or the one from Ralph Lauren:
Source: Oberlo
As Shopify notes, there are typically three emails you can send as a part of a recapture campaign:
- Email 1 is a reminder – This tells them that something has been left in their cart or that you miss them as a customer
- Email 2 is objection handling – This addresses concerns about why they didn’t buy and gathers feedback about the shopping process (e.g. “Why did you buy?” or “Where’d you go?”)
- Email 3 is a discount email – If they don’t come back, offer them a financial incentive. Give them 5% or 10% off their purchase if they complete it (or make a new one)
At Recapture, we call this Remind-Persuade-Close (or RPC for short). Email recapture campaigns are one of the easiest and most cost effective eCommerce marketing ideas to set up for your store (learn more here).
Review Marketing Ideas
Reviews can have a positive impact on your sales funnel since they provide immediate incentive to buy (if the review is positive).
In fact, 88% of people trust online reviews written by other consumers, the way they would trust a recommendation by a personal contact.
Mountain HardWear has a great example of a review marketing email:
Source: Oberlo
This is a great idea for a post purchase email. If you can follow up customers with an email to request reviews for the items bought, they will be more likely to purchase, review and recommend similar products.
You can also use referral marketing ideas, like Schwan’s discount for referral example (with an appropriate incentive to get you to act):
Source: Padicode
Focus on getting reviews for your products so you know how to retarget these customers in the future.
If your customers really loved a particular product, for example, send them more offers for similar products. Or if they hated something, try a “You might like this instead” campaign.
Other Lead Building eCommerce Marketing Strategies
While the email marketing ideas above are perfect for stores, there are other non-email focused eCommerce marketing strategies that can help you build leads, too.
These include things like:
- Behavioral targeting with site pop-ups
- Running social media campaigns for new product launches
- Creating product explainer videos and tutorials
- Doing eCommerce content marketing on your site’s blog
- Answering common eCommerce questions on sites like Quora or Reddit
- Running an eCommerce AdWords campaign on Google
If possible, gear each campaign toward either specific customers or specific products. While creating general brand awareness is important, you want to move them through your sales funnel to a purchase.
By giving them a specific product or benefit to focus on, you can move them through the funnel much faster and improve your ROI for your marketing.
Final Thoughts
Generating leads with traditional digital marketing strategies is fine, but you need to concentrate your effort on capturing (or recapturing) a sales lead. Successful eCommerce marketing strategies ultimately result in more bottom line sales for your store.
To do this, offer real tangible benefits for customers that they can see. This could come through an email campaign about specific products, a product video that shows them how it works, or even a review email (or video).
Don’t be afraid to point people directly to account creation or a “Buy Now” product page.
Remember that sales are your ultimate goal when you’re brainstorming some eCommerce marketing ideas.
