Whether your company is just starting up or has reached the point of maintaining a well-established customer base, it’s important to stay up to date with the most current marketing trends and techniques for your eCommerce business.
Structuring and finally launching an eCommerce website is a milestone achievement for your brand. Therefore, it’s crucial to invest in an effective website structure and marketing strategy.
If you’re interested in finding out the best tried-and-true methods, as well as the newest techniques of marketing for an eCommerce business, pay attention to the 11 tips below:
1. Produce Original Content
The first step in setting up an eCommerce website is creating the content for it. Creating high-quality and original content will set you up for success because it will resonate with your customers in a way that makes them want to interact with you, purchase from you, and maintain a following.
Be creative. Be original.
Promoting original content is a great way to make a statement, strike a compelling idea, and make a mark on the user’s mind. There is a fine line between content that engages users and content that deters them.
Why not take an extra step, put in a little effort, and create something that will be genuinely compelling?
2. Optimize your website layout
After launching or redesigning your e-commerce site, it’s important to test your website’s layout, language, and placement of conversion elements. When customers visit your website, you want to make sure it’s easy and simple to check out, that they feel naturally inclined to purchase your products and that it’s abundantly clear how to do so.
You should test the language displayed on your landing and product pages, the language in your conversion elements, and even the strategic placement of icons and elements. You can use various usability testing methods for this.
One really nifty tool is Mouseflow — a free heatmap software that reveals valuable patterns in customer behavior on your website. One of their most popular heatmaps, the movement heatmap, reveals the most attractive parts of your website — based on visitor movement data to your website.
With a color guide, Mouseflow will tell you where your customers spend the most time, and the least amount of time! If a specific area of your page receives more attention (in white), you should consider moving your conversion elements to those more attractive areas to increase click-through rates (CTR).
Test it for a week and see how your conversions change. Mouseflow’s heatmaps can help improve your conversions, increase sales, and keep prospects interested. Mouseflow is truly one of your competitor’s best kept secrets — and they offer a free account, so there’s no cost to you.
3. Content Marketing
Proper content marketing can attract more positive attention, interaction, and sustainable conversions in a way no other marketing method can. By creating and promoting original content, you are ensuring that your audience is receiving new information that matters to them on a continual basis.
Brainstorm with your team to create a list of the different types of content you wish to create. This can be blog posts, videos, and newsletters. Also, make sure you are utilizing your marketing budget by consulting with experts, outsourcing work when necessary. Invest in high-quality software, subscriptions, employees, and training for your team.
You will also find that if you work with the right people, many of the things you’ve paid for in the past can be done internally. Create diversity within your team and listen to everyone’s ideas.
We also suggest that you create content based on Pareto’s 80/20 rule, which means that your promotions should comprise of 80% informational content, and 20% promotional content. All of the content you publish should be relevant, interesting, and unique.
4. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a very powerful tool. It allows you to communicate with your industry, customers, and market in a personal way. You can utilize social media to generate engagement and interaction, boost traffic to your website, and develop a larger base of customers.
Utilizing different social media platforms for different purposes also creates a rich presence for your company that diversifies your abilities, efforts. This will ultimately help you cater to your customers’ needs in a way that grows your business over time.
Maintaining a solid tone and personality of your company through social media is very important because consistency is what will create trust within your audience. In order to develop and maintain brand recognition and authority, make sure your outreach efforts are unified by ensuring your team is on the same page with your company’s communication style.
5. Email Marketing
One of the most effective forms of reaching out to your customer base is through email marketing. Although you have to be very careful about the content within your emails and who is included in your outreach, the reason email marketing has been around for so long is because it works.
In order to reach your audience most effectively, provide useful content within your emails. Make them as personal as you can, offer valuable promotions, and use it as an opportunity to socialize.
Open up about what your business is doing, any events you are attending, new features or products, and be transparent about your company. You want to relate to your customers on a level that gauges their interest and keeps them engaging with your emails.
As always, make sure you are monitoring the analytics of your email marketing efforts. One great tool that can help you with this is the Google Analytics Dashboard, which is a free solution that gives you useful data about your email marketing efforts.
You can also track users who entered your website from your email campaigns with the previously mentioned tool, Mouseflow. All you have to do is set a custom URL that users “visit” when entering your site, and their entry page will contain that unique URL. A great way of doing this is to append UTM variables to your URL.
You can use Mouseflow filters or the search feature to find users whose sessions contained your custom URL. From here, you can save and export the list, perform analytics, and watch how they interacted on their site.
You can also filter your heatmaps for this data to analyze how they engage with each page of your site, which elements they find most attractive, and more!
6. Search Engine Optimization
One of the most important and manual methods of optimizing a successful eCommerce website is making sure it’s optimized for search engines. With today’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) standards, it’s now more important than ever to make sure your website is constantly updated with rich and relevant content, promotes a good user experience (UX), and is optimized to be as error-free as possible.
The content within your website should be rich, reliable, and provide information to the public that is useful and relevant to what they’re looking for. For example, if you have an eCommerce store selling camping supplies, it’s wise to provide detailed product information and possibly even host sections of your website that offer generous amounts of content that elaborates on the topics of camping, supplies, or related subjects. Using keywords within your content in a genuine way will also flag your website as a matching result in search engines when users are looking for something specific.
7. Pay-Per-Click Marketing
There are three basic elements to any pay-per-click marketing campaign: the ad, the offer, and the landing page.
All three must be in good harmony and synchronization if you want to maintain the interest of the lead. The landing page must be a continuation of your ad, delivering what was promised as the reward of clicking on the ad, in order to take the visitor through your conversion funnel. It must also be customized for keywords to appear somewhere near the top of search engine results.
Keep the landing page free of distractions and unnecessary bells and whistles. Also, keep in mind that your landing page is the most appropriate place to boast your product benefits to the customer.
8. Optimize Your Marketing Efforts for Mobile Devices
It is absolutely crucial to make sure your website is responsive to any user layout. Mobile users are starting to dominate the sea of internet use, and it’s important to accommodate their needs to provide a good user experience (UX) for everyone.
People who visit your website do not want to be redirected to an app or web version of your website, they want the full-meal-deal. So, make sure you deliver what they are expecting and make the investment to enhance your website so that it’s fully responsive.
You can also use mobile marketing techniques to target mobile users specifically. One of the most popular marketing trends is called geo-targeting, which advertises to mobile users based on their location. This technique enables you to reach out to customers who are within a specific distance of your business, and provide them with an incentive to stop by or make a purchase.
9. Target Wearable and VR Technology
Targeting wearable and Virtual Reality (VR) technology is a trending technique that grabs users in a new and exciting way. People are still getting used to this technology, and are not yet overwhelmed by or habituated to advertisements.
Your target audience for these mediums will be very refined, as these users are the part of the population that carries the latest technology at the palm of their hands at all times, keeps up to date with trends, and doesn’t mind dropping some extra cash for items they desire. Although creating campaigns that are designed for these technologies can be expensive, the right approach can be worth the initial investment because a filtered audience is more likely to convert.
10. Launch Stores on Multiple Platforms
Consumers have become the power player in the eCommerce industry. Which means your business needs to stand out in a unique way. Because of this, it’s more important than ever to customize your user experience (UX) to cater to the needs of your audience.
Make your outreach efforts personal by taking the time to learn about your customers. People love it when they feel special, and if you make sure to add personal touches like addressing your prospects by name, sharing videos and pictures of your employees, and being transparent about your company processes and procedures, you will reap the benefits of a loyal customer base.
All of this adds to the overall ‘face of the business’. This will hopefully make its way to the hearts of your customers.
11. Retargeting
Customers who have already shown an interest in your website are more likely to make a later purchase.
Retargeting is a technique that tracks customers who have visited your website and displays ads to them while they’re browsing the internet with the intent of getting them back on your website. When these visitors enter your website again, they are far more likely to make a purchase.
To effectively manage a retargeting campaign, make sure your ads are as specific as possible. Was the customer looking at a specific product? Make sure the ads displayed to them are ads of that specific product and link to the page of the product. Just like with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing, it’s important to display the information the user is looking for the instant they click on your ad.
If they click on an ad for hiking boots and are redirected to the home page of your camping website, they aren’t going to be thrilled. But, if they are directed to the exact hiking boots they were considering, or even had added to their cart, before leaving your website, they will be much more likely to continue with a purchase.
In Conclusion
Staying current with the latest marketing trends and techniques is crucial for any successful eCommerce website. It’s important to deliver relevant, interesting and valuable content and products that truly suite the needs of your target market.
Reach out to your customers in a variety of ways and make sure you are working with a team of experts with varying skill sets. If you listen to everyone’s ideas, you may find new ways of improving your current campaigns and outreach methods.
And, as always, make sure you are monitoring your website analytics to examine trends, keep your website optimized, and track your results!
With the right mix of marketing techniques, you can improve your conversion rate and attract sustainable business that will continue growing over time.
