Creating an online ecommerce store is easy enough, in and of itself. However, the difficulty sets in with advertising and marketing. No matter, if you want your ecommerce store to thrive, you have to market it. You must get it in the eyes of your target customers. That’s the way to give it the exposure it needs to grow in popularity. And of course, all of this requires a good understanding of ecommerce digital marketing.
That said, we’ll look at some of the methods and their accompanying tips that you can follow to market your store efficiently and effectively online.
Ecommerce Digital Marketing | Definition and Types
Before delving into the methods themselves, let’s look at what ecommerce digital marketing itself is and which types make it up. Rudimentary stuff, we realize, but laying the foundation is important.
Digital marketing is basically the type of marketing in which something is promoted and advertised via various mediums using the internet. In other words, when something is promoted and marketed via the internet, the process is broadly labeled as digital marketing.
There are many different branches and types of digital marketing. Some of the most popular include:
- Content Marketing: Marketing which involves creating and publishing content to share it with an audience for the purpose of education. This “education” is basically to induce the audience to purchase the respective product/service or to perform any other similarly lucrative actions for the brand or company.
- Email Marketing: This marketing involves sending emails to customers, leads or potential leads. Here, emails serve the same purpose that content does in content marketing.
- Mobile Marketing: Mobile marketing is the term used to describe marketing efforts accomplished through mobile devices. This is a broad term, encompassing everything from marketing emails (for mobile users) to SMS, push notifications and the like.
We won’t go into detail about all the various methods. But these represent some of the most important for getting started. In the upcoming sections, we’ll look at tips you can follow to market your store through these main types of ecommerce digital marketing.
Content Marketing Tips for Your Ecommerce Store
First, let’s discuss content marketing.
We’ve already covered the definition of content marketing above. So, now, we’ll talk about some of the tips and steps you need to follow when doing it for your ecommerce store.
Since content marketing is a multifaceted marketing technique, we’ll assess the techniques one by one.
Starting a Blog
Blogging is one of the most effective and ubiquitous content marketing practices that you’ll find today. Almost every other thriving website has a blogging section where it published different forms of relevant content. That content serves a number of different purposes, such as advertising a certain product or service. It might also education the audience about a certain process or procedure.
However, you must understand there are right and wrong ways of blogging, and there are a number of things to keep in mind. We’ll bring together some of the main ones here:
- When creating a blog, you must focus on the niche your brand specializes in. For ecommerce digital marketing, this means you should create content according to the products or services you offer.
- When creating the blogs themselves, you should focus on the whole “pre-writing” phase. Always conduct audience research before coming up with blog titles and topics to ensure you write according to the requirements and expectations of readers. You should also pay attention to the SEO elements in the planning phase. These might include keyword research to garner primary and secondary keywords.
- Once you’re done with the preamble, you should start writing the content itself, all while keeping readability in mind. Of course, you should also consider proper inclusion of keywords, organization using heading tags, and a number of other factors.
- After you’re done writing, you should perform a standards check for things like grammar issues, spelling mistakes, and plagiarism.
Throughout the entire process, there are plenty of places where you can (and should) take help from online tools. For example, during keyword and topic research, you can use online analytical tools like Ahrefs. Another tool, paraphraseonline.io, can help if you need to paraphrase a sentence or paragraph. And, of course, the list goes on.
Utilizing Reviews and Testimonials
Garnering and showcasing reviews and testimonials that show the quality of your brand is also popular for content marketing.
Basically, people tend to be more trusting of a brand or company once they hear what other people have to say about it. If another customer or consumer vouches for a company and shares their experience, it can create an image of reliability and trustworthiness.
In order to get the most out of this tactic, there are some things you should keep in mind. Just as above, we’ll list the tips here.
- When showcasing reviews and testimonials, you shouldn’t only place them on your website or company social media pages. In other words, don’t put them solely in places under your control. This can, for obvious reasons, be somewhat ineffective. Rather, if you showcase such reviews and testimonials that are posted and published on third-party sites, it will have greater effect. For example, you can show your site visitors the number of reviews and ratings you have on your Google or G2 profiles.
- Similarly, you shouldn’t become too biased or partial when choosing reviews to showcase. Sure, you can bring your 5-star ratings to light. But you should also keep some of the less favorable ones in the mix as well. This makes the showcase more natural and can even build trust with potential customers.
Starting a Newsletter Campaign
Newsletters also represent a popular content marketing method. They basically constitute pieces of content a brand regularly sends to a defined list of subscribers. The purpose of a newsletter is providing information about the company itself – information pertaining to recent activities or products.
For the most part, the tips we’ve mentioned above for blogs apply to newsletters as well. In other words, you should conduct proper research, write with readability in mind, and so on.
The thing to note about newsletters is that they should not come across conversationally or casually. Rather, they provide information in the clearest method possible.
Email Marketing for Your Ecommerce Store
Since email marketing is not multifaceted like content marketing, we won’t split it into multiple parts. Instead, we’ll discuss the process here and follow up with some tips to adhere to.
Email marketing is the process of marketing something through email. This we mentioned above as well. During an email marketing campaign, the company or brand can send different types of messages. For example:
- Promotional emails help promote a new product or service from the brand.
- Informational emails provide information about an existing product for the purpose of marketing it.
- Lead nurturing emails follow up on existing leads to convert them into customers.
Email Marketing Tips
Let’s take a look at some tips you can follow during an email marketing campaign for promising results.
- Create messages according to your audience: This important tip, while true for all types of marketing, applies heavily for email. After all, emails are more direct than other types of content-driven marketing channels like blogs. You must craft your message according to reader preferences so they respond favorably. So, you’ll need to conduct audience research and create user personas. Afterward, you must write your messages with the tone and style that resonate with those particular user personas.
- Focus on email readability and engagement: People are often quick to abandon marketing emails if they find messages boring or suspicious. You have to make email messages engaging while also maintaining readability and simplicity. This you can do by 1) adding colorful visuals and graphics, 2) using easy wording, 3) keeping sentences short, and 4) organizing the text for easy perusal.
- Time your email blasts for maximum exposure and attention: What makes sense? Sending an email blast to an American audience at 1 AM ET or at 4 PM? The time when you engage in your marketing activities drastically affects their success.
Ecommerce Digital Marketing for Mobile Users
Like email marketing, mobile marketing isn’t extremely multifaceted. Actually, mobile marketing is perhaps one of the most abstract types of marketing. Any sort of marketing activity targeting mobile users falls within this category, including SMS, mobile ads, apps, and so on.
The best way to get about explaining mobile marketing in this context would be simply listing different steps and methods it entails:
- SMS Marketing: SMS marketing is as simple as it sounds. It is a form of marketing where a particular brand or company markets its wares using SMS messages. Since SMS are sent via mobile devices, this strategy comes within the ambit of mobile marketing.
- In-App Marketing: In the simplest terms, in-app marketing represents the process of marketing something via a mobile app. This can take the form of in-app redirects, ads, and so on.
- Mobile-Friendly Websites: Mobile-friendly websites open in a scaled-down, optimized version when launching on a mobile device. This is a form of marketing since it allows mobile users to easily open a website and learn about the company behind it.
Tips for Mobile Ecommerce Digital Marketing
These constitute a few of the main types of mobile marketing out there. So, now let’s take a look at some tips you can keep in mind when engaging this method.
- As with other types of marketing, audience research and personalization become very important for mobile marketers. Whether you’re sending an SMS or push notification via an app, you need to know who the people at the receiving end are and the type of efforts they’ll receive well.
- Focus on user-friendliness. This applies when discussing apps and mobile-friendly sites. If your app or sites are easy to navigate and get around, your audience will use them more often.
- Utilize AMP-powered emails. Arguable, this is something we should’ve mentioned when dealing with email marketing. But it suits well here. AMP-powered emails allow recipients to interact with included elements right inside the message itself. In mobile marketing, AMP emails can prove helpful when used for reminding users about abandoned carts or confirming payments.
Conclusion
While there are many other digital marketing methods available for your ecommerce store, we’ve discussed some of the most common and popular options.
Affiliate marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization represent a few of the digital marketing techniques up there with those mentioned in the post.
If you want to learn more about best marketing practices in general, make sure you check out our full Marketing course.
Article written by Annie Bay.
Last updated September 27, 2023.
