Digital Marketing for Ecommerce businesses

With over 10 years of experience helping businesses transform their digital marketing, we have the knowledge and expertise to streamline your ecommerce brand’s online strategy to drive sales.

The Benefits of Digital Marketing for Ecommerce Businesses

Digital marketing is an essential strategy for ecommerce businesses to thrive in the competitive online marketplace. It offers benefits that can significantly impact the success and growth of your ecommerce brand. Here are some key advantages of implementing digital marketing strategies:

Increased Online Visibility

Search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and social media marketing help to improve your online visibility. By optimising your website and content for relevant keywords, you can rank higher in search engine results pages, making it easier for potential customers to find you.

Targeted Audience Reach

On various online advertising platforms and social media channels, you can define specific demographics, interests, and behaviours of your ideal customers in order to reach your target audience. This precision targeting ensures your marketing efforts are directed towards the right audience, increasing the chances of converting leads into sales.

Cost-Effective Marketing

Compared to traditional marketing methods, digital marketing offers cost-effective solutions for ecommerce businesses. With options like PPC advertising, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, ensuring that your budget is spent on actual engagement. Social media and email marketing allow you to reach a wide audience at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising channels.

Improved Customer Engagement

Social media platforms, email marketing, and content marketing enable you to build relationships, address customer concerns, and provide personalised experiences. By fostering engagement, you can create brand loyalty and increase customer retention.

Measurable Results

One of the significant advantages of digital marketing is the ability to track and measure your marketing efforts accurately. Analytics tools provide valuable insights into user behaviour, conversion rates and website traffic, allowing you to make informed decisions about how to optimise your campaigns.

Enhanced Brand Awareness

Through consistent and targeted messaging across online platforms, you can increase brand awareness among your target audience. Building authority in your niche through valuable content and thought leadership positions your brand as a trusted source, influencing customer perception and purchase decisions.

Increased Sales and Revenue

Ultimately, the goal of any ecommerce business is to drive sales and generate revenue. When implemented effectively, digital marketing strategies can significantly impact your sales numbers. By optimising your website for search engines, running targeted advertising campaigns, and nurturing customer relationships through email marketing, you can drive qualified traffic, increase conversions, and boost your overall revenue.

BRAND

Regardless of what sector you’re operating in, your ecommerce site needs a clear brand identity that communicates with your target audience on an emotional level. There are a number of components to this:

Your brand core

At the heart of your brand should be one core message that sits at the intersection of three truths:

  • A business advantage – it must be something that you believe you will always be able to do better than the competition.
  • A long term consumer interest – it must be something that the consumer cares about and that for the foreseeable future will continue to be important to them.
  • A point of market neglect – it must be something that is not already “owned” by another player in the market.

Usually this will come down to one word, in the way that Amazon owns “convenience”.

Understanding your purpose

Most companies know what they do, some know how they do it, but very few companies can articulate why they do what they do. You must be one of them that can.

When people visit an ecommerce website, they are being driven primarily by emotional factors. Your best way of influencing purchasing behaviour therefore, is to communicate with these emotions. That can only be possible if it is clear what you stand for.

Broader brand identity

Of course your brand identity is far more complex than one word and a vision statement. These are the other ways it can be broken down:

  • Product features and benefits
  • Symbolism and language -this includes everything from the logo and typeface to user imagery and words that you feel are “on-brand” or “off-brand”
  • Organisational values
  • Brand personality – if your brand was an individual, who would they be? How would they dress and behave? What would their tone be?

SEO FOR ECOMMERCE WEBSITES

For many ecommerce businesses, SEO is the single most important channel as it brings highly targeted into the site that have an above average conversion rate. Of course all the key principles apply to ecommerce sites that apply to regular websites, but here are a few additional points to consider:

  • Product pages – your most important search traffic will go directly to your product pages. After all, these are the visitors with the most specific and conversion intent. 
  • Category pages – for sites with products of a less generic nature it can be the category pages that play a more important role. The key, is to ensure the pages are on static URLs and not generated dynamically.
  • Rich information – The key to building an ecommerce website that generates lots of search traffic is to ensure that all key landing pages (home, category and product) are filled with rich content that matches the user intent. 
  • Authority – with well populated landing pages, you should find you are well placed for most product terms. However, for some of the more competitive key phrases your site will require greater signals of authority. These will be generated primarily by your link profile, but increasingly in many ecommerce markets social media and brand metrics (such as how often people are searching for your brand terms) are playing a growing role.

EMAIL MARKETING FOR ECOMMERCE BUSINESSES

For those ecommerce sites that generate a lot of repeat purchases, their most important channel is email. In fact some ecommerce businesses generate over 50% of their sales via their email list, with one large ecommerce site generating nearly 95% of their business via email!

However, it isn’t only purchases that email is important for. It’s hugely powerful for generating exposure for branded content via social media. Most people are reluctant to share content they see directly from brands on social media, but if a brand distributes its content to people on their email list and those recipients share it via social media, then other people will be far more inclined to re-share it.

Finally, it’s important to note that as an ecommerce business there are only two assets you own – one is your website and the other is your email list, whereas your communities on social media belong to the social platform in question. Therefore, it’s crucial to invest time and resources into developing an effective email marketing strategy.

REMARKETING AND AUTORESPONDERS

A popular technique for increasing conversion rates on ecommerce sites is to remarket to them via display advertising and email marketing. This is a really important tactic, but it’s important to realise that it’s only going to have a very incremental impact on sales, which will ultimately be driven by your brand and content.

SOCIAL MEDIA DIRECT RESPONSE

It is now possible to drive direct ecommerce sales via social media. The logic, as with any form of direct response marketing, is that you should be willing to pay up to your net profit value per lead but not a penny more. After all, this is about pure sales, not brand.

In reality, social media direct response campaigns don’t tend to be profitable unless they are part of a broader engagement strategy. A broader engagement strategy ensures that social media leads are more qualified and therefore more likely to convert to paying customers.

ANALYSIS AND TRACKING

As with any website, even with all the planning and strategy work in place, much of it comes down to your ability to test, analyse and learn. Key metrics to monitor on any ecommerce site are:

– Direct traffic

– Organic search traffic

– Total sales

– Conversion rate

– Average order value

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions about Digital Marketing for Ecommerce Businesses

Content marketing is a great way to engage customers, improve SEO efforts, and establish your brand as a leader in your industry. This could involve creating blog posts, videos, infographics, and other content that provides value to your audience, answering their questions and providing solutions to their problems.

SEO is not a one-time task, but rather an ongoing effort. Google’s algorithm changes frequently, and so do market trends and customer behaviours. It’s important to constantly monitor these factors, along with site performance, user experience, and content.

Customer retention can be achieved through a combination of high-quality customer service, personalisation, loyalty incentives, and regular engagement. Email marketing is an effective tool for retention, allowing you to keep in touch with customers, provide personalised offers, and update them on new products or services. Remarketing strategies also help to bring back customers who have shown previous interest in your products.

You should regularly analyse key metrics to understand what’s working and what’s not in your current strategy, so you can adjust your efforts for better results. Metrics to pay attention to include website traffic, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime value, and shopping cart abandonment rates.

Influencer marketing can be a powerful tool for ecommerce businesses. You can leverage the trust and authority influencers have built with their followers to promote your products. This can lead to increased brand awareness, customer trust, and ultimately, sales.

our clients

Boss Blog

Our team care about two things – doing brilliant work and making an impact. That’s why we’re directing every free moment to helping the

contact us

Contact us today for a free consultation to drive change and grow your market share.

"*" indicates required fields

Cookie Consent

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it. Read more in our Privacy Policy.