12 Killer Ecommerce Marketing Strategies:
we’re going to unpack 12 killer ecommerce marketing strategy tips. This is one that you can’t miss if you have an ecommerce store. Check it out.
ECommerce marketing can be super complicated. There’s just so many different things that you can do. And so in this video, I’m going to break down 12 tips that we recommend you really focus on first.
If you dial these in, you’re going to be successful online. So let’s jump right in.
Tip number one is use a good shopping cart. There’s three shopping carts that we work with clients all the time that we really love. And so check these out if you’re not already on these carts– Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce.
These three carts are really good from a perspective of SEO, design, and also paid search– so running paid ads, even on social. It has everything you need to scale your business.
It also has a support team to back you up when you need the help. So check out one of those carts if you don’t already have them. Tip number two, spend a tremendous amount of time optimizing your product pages with regards to SEO and design.
So what I mean by that is SEO would be a good product title, OK? Don’t just call it something that only you would know. Call it something within the title that people are actually searching online.
So do some keyword research, figure out what people are searching for– your products– and make that part of your product title. Also, include that in the description of the product.
Write a good description. Remember, this is your 24/7 salesperson. Your product page never calls in sick. It works through the weekends and the holidays. Every time somebody visits your product page, they want your perfect sales pitch, so put some time into that. Also, product photography, hugely important.
Make sure that photography is really, really clean, smooth, and a nice design, and professional. And also, if you can do a product video, this is massively valuable.
Make sure you invest in doing some product videos to explain your products in more details. Final tips here, make sure you have trust badges on the page.
Make sure it says things like you have fast shipping, free shipping, all of that, if you have that. And also, get reviews of your products. You want to have reviews on your product pages. Studies show if you have reviews on your product pages, that can increase your conversion rate significantly, up to 400%, by having product reviews.
So make sure that you get product reviews on your page. Tip number three is a little more advanced with regards to SEO, but it’s making sure you have schema markup on your product pages.
What this means is when somebody searches on Google, right there on the Google search page– before they even go to your website– they’re going to see what Google calls product rich cards, which is going to show your product image and some information right there on the search page.
This is going to give you an advantage over your competitors and make you a little more visible organically to people as they’re searching on things like Google. So here’s a quick tip.
If you just Google search “schema markup testing tool,” it’ll take you to a testing tool. You can just put your product page URL in there, and it’ll tell you if you have the proper schema markup or not. If not, there’s some warnings and some tips there on how to make sure you add that.
But if you use one of those carts, BigCommerce, Shopify, or WooCommerce, they typically have good schema markup out the gate, and so you can just kind of build upon that.
Tip number four is to optimize your product feed via Google Merchant Center. Google Merchant Center is what you’re going to use to run Google Shopping ads, which we’ll get to later, but the product feed is hugely important.
You’re going to want to make sure you have good information in there with regards to your product title, the description, the keywords, those sorts of things so that you’re showing up when people are searching on Google Shopping when you’re running your ads.
You don’t want to be not in the game when somebody is looking for your product because your product feed is not very well optimized. Tip number five is running Google Shopping ads. Google Shopping is very, very popular. People go to Google.
They’ll search something like pink shoes, they’ll click the shopping tab, those are all ads. So if you want to be in that shopping tab, which we highly recommend, you’re going to want to make sure that you are running Google Shopping ads. So invest in running product ads. And then here’s a tip, optimize your product ads based on results.
So if you have ecommerce tracking set up, you can see the revenue generated from each product. You can really see your ROI, per product, on your product ads.
What you want to do is as time goes by, turn off the ads that aren’t doing as well, the products that aren’t doing as well, and increase the budget on the products that are doing well.
This is going to really increase your return on investment over time. Tip number six is run dynamic retargeting campaigns off of your Google Shopping ads and your website visitors so that people that go to your website and they browse maybe two, three products, as they’re surfing the internet after that on the Google Display Network– which has thousands of websites online– they’re going to see banner ads for your brand actually showing the specific products that they looked at.
So it’s a very, very relevant. This stays top of mind and it kind of just wears them down until they are ready to buy those products. They click it, and they purchase on your website.
Also, you can run retargeting on Facebook and Instagram as well. So if somebody comes to your site, they look around and they don’t do anything, that night when they’re on Facebook kind of looking through their feed, all of a sudden they’ll see an ad for your brand.
This is bringing you back to the top of their mind. They’re like, hey, I didn’t have time earlier to put my credit card in there because I was getting interrupted, but hey, I do right now on this commercial that’s on TV, so I’m going to buy right now. So by doing retargeting in a dynamic way, you’re going to bring a lot more sales back to your business.
Tip number seven is to make sure that you’re running Facebook and Instagram ads. These are huge channels today. People are on Facebook all the time so you’re going to want to target people on Facebook. And the targeting is so intense that you can get right in front of the person that would be perfect for your product.
So one example like that is, let’s say, that you sell gymnastics equipment to kids, maybe to girls, in particular. You could actually target mothers that make over $50,000 a year that have daughters that are in gymnastics.
How targeted is that? If these mothers see these ads, they can afford it, right? They’re making enough money to afford it. They have daughters in gymnastics. It just only makes sense.
They’re going to like your product and they’re going to understand your brand, and they’re going to eventually buy from you. So make sure you take advantage of Facebook and Instagram ads.
Those two channels are big breadwinners for ecommerce stores today. Tip number eight, invest in your social media organically. Whether you need to do this yourself or hire somebody or hire another company, you need to make sure you have an organic presence on social media.
What that means is you’re posting content, you’re engaging on social media. So not paid ads, but just being involved, being a part of social media today.
By doing this, this is going to be building your brand following organically. So eventually you have 10,000 followers, 100,000 followers. The more followers you have as you’re posting content, building this awareness, you’re only going to get more sales.
Tip number nine is to automate your email marketing. Email marketing is hugely important.
A lot of ecommerce stores fall short because they spend a lot of money to get that customer to make that first purchase, but they don’t re-market to those people via email marketing and other channels to get them to come back and make future purchases.
If you could just get each of your customers to make one more purchase than they normally do, think about what that does to your revenue. So with email marketing, it allows us an automated way to make that happen.
So here’s an example, you could set up an automated campaign for holidays. You just set this up at the beginning of the year for the whole year, with promotions on all these different holidays that automatically get sent to all of your past customers.
So that’s one example. There’s tons of other examples. Like sending them automated emails to capture reviews for your products is another way to build product review content in an automated way.
If you’re creative with your email marketing and you automate it, this is going to scale your business so that you can increase your sales overall and increase your return on investment on your marketing dollars.
Tip number 10 is invest in SMS marketing. SMS marketing is text message marketing. The reason why that’s important is because only about 20% of people will typically open up your emails, sometimes even less.
And they also won’t open it up in real time. There’s a lag there, right? But with text messages, it’s almost 100% of people open the text message.
And most of them are within a five-minute window. So that can be really powerful on slow sales days, on end of the month, times when you need to clear out old inventory, stuff like that. So build a VIP text message marketing campaign.
And one way to do this is put a banner on your site that says, hey, for VIP deals, text something like hot deals to 39970 to opt in and get an immediate 20% coupon right now. By doing that, it gets people to opt in to get that coupon, but now they’re in that list for future VIP deals that you can tap into when you need to.
Tip number 11 is to use a CRM. So many ecommerce stores don’t really have a CRM. They’re actually using the backend of their cart to look at customer data and kind of using that as a CRM. That’s not effective.
You want to integrate your cart with an actual CRM so that you can populate all of your customer data and even add additional data in there, as you get to know your customer.
And so if you hire a salesperson or if you’re the salesperson, working through the CRM and actually making proactive calls to your customers can be life-changing for your business.
If you just reach out and say, hey, how was it? Did you get your package in time? Is everything going OK for you? What else are you interested in? Can I keep an eye out for other deals that come up and let you know? Do you have any kids? When are their birthdays? What are they interested in? If you get to know the customer, you can save this information in your CRM.
Your salesperson can just continually follow up with these people. And I’m telling you, you’ll see four or five times more sales per customer than you would otherwise.
So it’s a huge investment, but a great return to look at a salesperson in CRM and connecting those into your process within your ecommerce business. Last tip, tip 12, is to create a customer care package that you send with all of your product purchases to the customer.
So don’t just send them a bag with a logo on it. Send them a nice package that has a handwritten note. It has a coupon in it for a future purchase.
It maybe has a referral card in there they can give to a friend. This is going to be a nice experience for the customer, and it’s really going to give them a good sense of feeling towards your brand, and probably get them to come back and purchase with you again.
But one really hot tip here is if you’re selling on other channels, such as Amazon or something like that, when you send those products with a care package, the coupon and whatnot should recommend they come back to your branded website to make future purchases.
This is going to increase your profitability and get your brand going on your own website, which is what you want to do. So take advantage of these care packages.
Design something real nice so when they receive your product, you stand out in the crowd from other businesses you may be competing against. So ecommerce is super intense.
We could go for days with different tips, but these 12 tips I feel like are really the ones that are the most important. So focus on these tips. If you have questions, give us a call or leave a comment.
