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In today's competitive digital landscape, successful ecommerce requires more than just having an online store. This comprehensive guide reveals the proven ecommerce marketing strategies and tactics that drive sustainable growth for ecommerce businesses in 2025.
“A great product will sell itself”
“If you build it, they will come.”
“Quality speaks for itself.
In the world of ecommerce, unfortunately, none of these phrases ring true - maybe in the early internet days, when the internet was a new technology. In 2025 though, if you’re on a mission to sell online, simply having an ecommerce store isn’t enough.
As ecommerce has grown, so too has the need for a rigorous ecommerce marketing strategy. Successful brands place as much emphasis on their marketing and customer acquisition as they do their product development, and brand identity (spoiler, they’re all interlinked anyway).
In 2025 a successful ecommerce marketing strategy goes beyond a light touch approach. It requires your business having a presence on all of the major marketing channels - and a few extra ones to put you ahead of the competition too. You need to understand your customers deeply, leverage the right mix of channels, and execute with precision across every touchpoint of the customer journey. This comprehensive guide covers the essential ecommerce marketing strategies and tactics that drive sustainable growth in 2025."
Ecommerce marketing is a catch-all term we use to describe all of the strategies an ecommerce brand might use to drive traffic to an online store, convert visitors into customers, and retain those customers for long-term value. There’s a lot of overlap with traditional digital marketing, but ecommerce marketing focuses specifically on guiding consumers through the online shopping journey. Unlike traditional retail marketing, ecommerce marketing leverages digital channels to reach customers throughout their online shopping journey.
It's a multi-faceted discipline that combines digital marketing fundamentals with commerce-specific considerations like product catalogue optimisation, shopping cart abandonment recovery, and post-purchase engagement. Going a step further, ecommerce marketing provides opportunities for unprecedented personalization and targeting, but also requires marketers to navigate complex attribution models, privacy regulations, and an ever-expanding array of digital touchpoints.
Modern ecommerce marketing extends far beyond driving immediate sales. It encompasses brand building, community development, and customer education. The most successful ecommerce brands think holistically about the entire customer journey - and how their brand, product, and ecommerce stores also play a role in the marketing strategy.
In 2025, successful ecommerce marketing requires a combination of strategic thinking, technical proficiency, and adaptability. The fundamental requirements include a deep understanding of your target audience, mastery of data analytics, and the ability to execute coordinated campaigns across multiple channels simultaneously.
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Oh, and budget.
The most successful ecommerce brands invest heavily in their marketing - in fact major ecommerce stores in the United States collectively spent $3.5 billion on advertising in 2023. So if you want to succeed in ecommerce marketing, a somewhat significant budget is going to be key.
Before we get into any specific strategies, let’s look at how any ecommerce business should structure their ecommerce marketing strategy.
Like with any business, the marketing for your ecommerce business should sit within a well-defined strategy. Running things off of “vibes” alone is only going to get you so far. Having an actionable plan with clear objectives, goals, and key results is required. This entails thorough market research, a strong presence on the channels that actually matter, and making decisions based on data.
Clear objective setting forms the foundation of any successful ecommerce marketing strategy. Your objectives should cascade from overall business goals to specific marketing targets, creating alignment between marketing activities and business outcomes.
The most effective objectives will balance your business ambitions with realistic constraints, considering factors like market size, competitive intensity, and the available resources.
Translating these goals into the KPIs you need to measure is going to be key and will guide your day to day decision making. For ecommerce businesses the most important KPIs are going to be customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, and Marketing Cost of Sale (MCOS), which are all used to track the success of your marketing against the amount being invested. Some other KPIs may be Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), Cost Per Click, and Search rankings. But these are better for tracking the success of individual channels.
We’re big fans of translating objectives into OKRs (Objective & Key Results), a methodology for goal setting. An OKR will typically be a more vague statement such as “increase brand presence,” but will be built on more specific initiatives such as “reach an average ROAS of 2 across all meta ad campaigns,” “reach an average search ranking of 19 on Google,” and “Increase Conversion rate by 10%”. Whatever you choose, make sure they’re aligned with wider business goals.
This is where many first time ecommerce marketers begin to squirm in their seats. Without a promise of a return, spending money on your ecommerce business may be scary, but it’s ultimately necessary.
Budget allocation in ecommerce marketing requires balancing multiple competing priorities while maintaining flexibility to capitalize on unexpected situations. Additionally, it’s a case of deciding what channels you want to invest in and reserving some funds for testing and innovating.
Industry benchmarks suggest that ecommerce businesses typically invest 7-12% of revenue in marketing, but the optimal allocation varies significantly based on factors like business maturity, competitive intensity, and growth objectives - you may want to invest more if you want to grow quickly & more mature businesses can usually reign back their marketing spend to focus on existing customers.
Depending on your industry, there’s also some seasonal considerations, with the glaring one for ecommerce businesses being black friday and cyber monday. This is all to say: define a budget, but leave some room in the tank to flex it around as needed.
Whilst there are no “right” channels for your ecommerce business, with knowledge of your customers, the skill set of your team, and the data you have to hand, you can relatively confidently whittle down the available channels to the ones you need to invest in.
However, there are some non-negotiable channels that ecommerce brands looking to grow should be investing their time and effort in.
The diversity of ecommerce marketing strategies available in 2025 provides both opportunities and challenges. While having multiple options enables businesses to find approaches that align with their strengths and customer preferences, it also requires careful prioritization and strategic focus to avoid spreading resources too thin.
Ecommerce businesses typically succeed the most when they’re investing time and resources in multiple channels at the same time, rather than just placing all of their eggs in one basket.
This is really where any ecommerce business should look as a first port of call.
Content marketing involves the production and distribution of video, written, and sometimes audio content. It has the primary goal of engaging customers, and subtly encouraging them to progress through the purchase journey. Whilst the term “content marketing” casts a wide net - spanning across instagram, tiktok, youtube, and your website, it goes a long way to create a more holistic “world” around your brand that customers can sink their teeth into.
Content marketing is a great place to start with an ecommerce marketing strategy as it gives you a large library of video and written resources to pull from when expanding into other channels. For example video content created for social media can be repurposed into PPC advertisements on Meta and TikTok.
Springboarding off content marketing we have SEO. Search engine optimisation (SEO) involves strategies to make your website more visible in Google search results. Even as social media becomes more popular for product discovery, SEO remains a cornerstone of the ecommerce marketing game.
SEO is a multifaceted process, with technical optimisations, content production, and customer knowledge all playing a role.
Here’s a breakdown of the key elements of an effective SEO strategy, all of which are used by google’s ever-elusive algorithm to decide which pages should rank where..
Performance marketing (or Pay-per-click advertising) involves carefully bidding for your advertisements to appear directly on potential customers' social media feeds, within Google search results, and on website ad placements.
Performance marketing gives advertisers a ton of different metrics to refine, tweak, and optimise in order to generate as much revenue as possible for their advertising campaigns. Within ecommerce marketing strategies, performance marketing is a major point of focus - with entire agencies dedicating their services to Meta ads.
Performance marketing remains one of the most scalable and controllable ecommerce marketing channels, but success requires increasingly sophisticated campaign management and optimisation strategies. The landscape has become more competitive and expensive, making efficiency and precision critical for profitable growth.
One of the oldest digital marketing strategies still kicking in 2025. Email marketing involves relaying your messages, promotions, and new product launches to your email subscribers. It provides ecommerce brands with direct access to customers' inboxes and excels at nurturing customers who’ve bought previously or have signed up to your email list but never made a purchase.
Through automated sequencing and the thoughtful relaying of campaign messaging, email marketing provides brands with another touchpoint to push their message out and get customers further through the buying journey.
Once you have customers, best believe you need to keep them. Loyalty marketing is a tailored ecommerce marketing strategy that focuses on keeping existing customers engaged through loyalty programs and rewards.
Modern ecommerce loyalty programs extend beyond simple point-based systems to create comprehensive engagement platforms that reward various customer behaviors and interactions. This might include social sharing, review writing, referrals, and community participation in addition to purchase-based rewards.
Personalisation has become essential for loyalty program effectiveness. Customers expect rewards and communications that reflect their experiences with the brand, their purchase history, and that tap into their engagement patterns. Developing these programs requires significant investment in both customer data platforms and marketing automation systems that can deliver individualized experiences at scale.
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Whether you're launching a new online store or scaling an existing ecommerce business, these proven marketing strategies will help accelerate your growth.
If this is all sounding like a bit too much for you - potentially you and your team - to get into, then it might be worth partnering with an ecommerce agency.
Partnering with a specialized ecommerce marketing agency can provide access to expertise, technology, and resources that might be difficult or expensive to develop in-house. For brands lacking the resources or expertise to fully implement an ecommerce marketing strategy, an ecommerce agency can provide strategic support in the areas you need.
Partnering with an agency can do more for your business than simply executing on the marketing strategies you’ve outlined. They can help guide your ecommerce marketing strategy, and be a pioneer in the entirety of your ecommerce operations. Ecommerce agencies can support with everything from brand positioning & website development to meta ad campaign management and the minutia of SEO strategies.
Ecommerce agencies don’t work for free, nor do they lift any of the costs you’d invest in your marketing. But ecommerce agencies are skilled at managing ad spend and can near guarantee increased revenue from performance marketing campaigns than if you were to manage the same budget on your own.
Not all ecommerce agencies are going to have the same skillset. Some agencies may be more proficient than others in areas like web development. And within the sphere of ecommerce marketing, some ecommerce agencies may specialise in meta ads, whereas others may specialise in SEO - it’s key to align your marketing goals with the skillset of your agency of choice.
Not a major factor. But you as a brand will have a much easier time communicating with an agency if they’re relatively close to your business. Slack messages, emails, phone calls, and zoom calls are all well and good. But sometimes, sitting down across from your collaborators really is best.
In 2025, The ecommerce landscape offers plenty of opportunities for businesses to grow. But the ecommerce marketing required to succeed balances multiple priorities: building brand awareness while driving immediate sales, personalizing experiences while scaling efficiently, and testing new approaches while optimising proven tactics. In short - you have to have a good head on your proverbial shoulders
The brands that thrive in this environment are those that maintain customer-centricity while leveraging data and technology to create competitive advantages. These ecommerce brand understand that sustainable growth comes from building genuine relationships with customers, not just optimising conversion funnels. They’re investing in long-term capabilities while remaining agile enough to capitalize on emerging opportunities.
From SEO and Performance marketing to understanding how your product and ecommerce store plays a role, it’s a complex game that’s best navigated with some additional help.
Trepidation is a word we could use to describe many things in 2025, and the landscape of ecommerce marketing is surely one of them. But even as strategies change and evolve, the foundations of an ecommerce marketing strategy remain the same.
So, if you’re looking to build an ecommerce marketing strategy for your business and need some additional help, contact us.
