eCommerce Digital Marketing 101:
How To Grow Sales Of Your eCommerce Business
eCommerce Digital Marketing Strategies & Watchouts
You have a beautiful e-commerce website with unique products to market. It is user-friendly, easy to navigate and to shop. Yet, the sales are just not coming in: your organic visits are not enough to create a strong Online Revenue flow. The question is: where and how do you find customers?
Simply having a website with your products on it isn’t going to bring you enough online sales. Here is where Digital Marketing steps in, or as we call it “Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions”.
Digital marketing strategies – if planned and executed accurately – can place your products in front of the focus audience by targeting specific signals of their online behavior. Your ads will show up on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), on Shopping tabs, in the Search apps, or on YouTube – all when the online shoppers are looking for or interested in purchasing items just like yours.
How it works
Say, you have a skin-care product line and would like to introduce it to all women in the Nation with an age range of 35-54 who frequent salons and enjoy fitness classes. The power of digital marketing allows us to set up your ad campaigns in such a way that only this target audience will be singled out and shown your compelling ads. In order to track the effectiveness of the campaigns, we will be able to tag your eComm website and see how many visits have actually resulted in a purchase or other actions that are meaningful to your business.
Another product example is footwear. If you want to sell your sports shoes, one of the ways to go would be to create Paid Search campaigns on Google, Bing, or Amazon where the keywords would be your main way of honing in on your target audience. Example of a keyword would be “White Sneakers For Women”.
There is a number of Digital Marketing Campaigns and Ad Types that can be utilized for generating awareness, interest, and most importantly action among your target audience. Let’s take a closer look.
Digital Marketing Campaigns for eCommerce Marketing:
Search Ad
Campaigns target keywords like “eye cream age 37”, “size 8 white snickers for women”, or “mattress deals near me”. These campaigns are generally your “meat & potatoes” of any eCommerce marketing plan due to the high intent of the audience.
Shopping
Campaigns showcase product images, prices, and promotions as well as discounts.
Display
Network Campaigns are also known as banner ads and allow you to remarket to the shopping cart abandoners as well as to prospect for future shoppers.
Discovery
Network Campaigns are also known as banner ads and allow you to remarket to the shopping cart abandoners as well as to prospect for future shoppers.
YouTube
Ads where your products can show up in a variety of ways: from being in a video ad for branding to having your search and shopping ads shown along with the relevant videos on the page.
When launching an eCommerce Digital Marketing Campaign, you need to ensure the marketing plan is well-thought-out and the campaigns are set up accurately.
5 Things To Keep In Mind For Your e-Commerce Digital Marketing Campaign
- Profit margin. Understanding where your profitability starts and ends are crucial. Small Ticket items + high Cost Per Click + high Competition = high risk; while Small ticket items + low Cost Per Clicks + low Competition = opportunity, and so forth.
- Targeting. Keywords, locations, audiences, devices, time of the day, day of the week, age ranges, gender, etc – are all targets that will waste your money if not set up accurately
- Ad Spend. Spending too little may not create necessary traction and won’t generate the right results in time. Spending too much in a short period of time may overwhelm the performance and the ad spend can be wasted.
- Duration. Short-term campaigns generally do well for a pop-up store or a week-long promo event, however consistent presence of your digital marketing program will define the long-term success of your brand.
- Learnings. If you have run the ad campaigns for more than 3 months, there will already be enough data to evaluate and derive learnings from. These learnings can be crucial for optimizing your ad spend, cutting off some unprofitable initiatives, and pivoting towards the new tests. Without this, you won’t be able to advance in your eCommerce digital marketing strategy.
It takes plenty of data analysis, forecasting, and a big creative effort to pinpoint the right strategy and the direction for any eCommerce digital marketing campaign. Having an experienced team by your side that has a full understanding of the advertisement platforms as well as a good grasp of your brand is a great start.
Once the campaigns are launched, give them at least one month to fully ramp up and start generating initial results. It is recommended to evaluate performance on a quarterly basis with your team during the Quarterly Business Review & Planning. With the derived learnings and insights, the strategy will be updated and your eCommerce marketing program will become more and more effective.