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With how big of a mountain it is to climb, getting started in ecommerce marketing can be daunting. This guide lays everything on the table to set you up for success.
Picture this, you’ve spent months developing your products, you’ve just uploaded the listings to your website, and you’re ready to start making sales.
Instead, a single, digital tumbleweed rolls by.
Unfortunately, the ecommerce industry isn’t that simple.
You may have heard the phrase “a great product will sell itself,” but that’s only true if people can find the product in the first place. And unfortunately, in the world of ecommerce, getting your product in front of people is the hardest part. Without an effective ecommerce marketing strategy in place, you won’t make any sales, and all of your hard work will be for naught.
Whether you’re an experienced ecommerce marketer or you’re desperately looking for advice on how to get more sales, let’s look into answering what ecommerce marketing is, and help you build some strategies to get ahead in the online world.
Ecommerce marketing is a very broad term we use to refer to a number of different strategies that generate sales for an online business. Whilst sales is the most important goal for an ecommerce marketing strategy - as sales are what keeps a business running - it’s also key to drive traffic to an online store, increase brand awareness, and retain customers for repeat business.
Unlike traditional marketing, ecommerce marketing relies heavily on digital channels, and is heavily reliant on data to refine strategies and drive as many sales as possible.
It’s important to note - an ecommerce business can employ marketing strategies outside of those that fall under the umbrella of ecommerce marketing. For example, a business may look to get placements in a magazine, run billboards, and more. Whilst these are all effective brand building strategies, we won’t be touching on them here.
Ecommerce marketing, like any other kind of marketing, has a whole litany of benefits to online merchants. Unlike a traditional brick and mortar storefront - which might be able to get by simply due to sufficient footfall where they’ve decided to set up shop - potential customers don’t just walk by an eCommerce store.
And so, more aggressive marketing is a necessity to get sales. But what else does ecommerce marketing offer to merchants?
Much like how you’ll brand your website and your products to appeal to a particular audience, by employing ecommerce marketing strategies, you can make sure that you’re only putting your brand in front of the type of customer that’s most likely to buy from you.
We’ll get onto the difference between owned and earned marketing in a moment, but strategies such as search engine optimisation, social media marketing, and content creation are entirely free outside of the time investment.
Unlike a billboard located in a particular area, ecommerce marketing strategies can be used to generate interest from anywhere in the world. What’s more, ecommerce marketing strategies are just as effective whether it’s 9am on a monday morning, or 2am on a friday night. This is to say that ecommerce marketing is never not bringing in results for your business.
Now that you understand the benefits of ecommerce marketing, you’re probably wondering what strategies you can implement. After all, sales generated sooner rather than later are always preferred. Whilst it’s not a perfect categorisation, we believe that every ecommerce marketing channel falls into one of three categories.
Owned marketing refers to ecommerce marketing channels that don’t require any direct monetary investment, but don’t guarantee increases in traffic or sales - their success is entirely dependent on the quality of the work completed.
Owned marketing channels include creating content to be shared on digital platforms - from blog articles to YouTube videos and podcasts - search engine optimisation to get your website listings higher on Google and other search engines, and social media marketing.
Earned marketing refers to ecommerce marketing channels that require additional investment, but guarantee visibility. Earned marketing channels include paid advertisements across Meta and Google, programmatic advertising across website placements, and paid for influencer partnerships.
Once you have customers, there’s an opportunity to market back to them and have them come back for more. This process is referred to as loyalty marketing, and it includes strategies such as email marketing and loyalty programs.
Whilst there is no set standard for how much you should weight these three types of ecommerce marketing, it’s best practice to be engaged in all three at the same time, with more established brands investing more in loyalty and earned marketing due to their brand recognition.
Getting started in ecommerce markting is a big undertaking, but there are some things you can do to set yourself up for success from the start
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. This is to say that any marketing effort you spend time on should be part of a well defined strategy with goals and results. It’s key to thoroughly research the market, have a strong presence on the proper marketing channels, and make decisions backed by data.
This approach ensures the effectiveness of your strategies and helps you stay ahead in the dynamic ecommerce landscape.
Set objectives and define KPIs.
Whilst all ecommerce marketing efforts are in the larger pursuit of generating more sales for your business, having a series of measurable goals is the first step towards bringing that goal to life.
Whether it’s getting more social media followers, increasing the size of your email database, or getting more site traffic - objectives help provide direction and purpose.
It’s equally as important to determine the KPIs or measuring sticks for each of these objectives, which will be specific to each objective you lay out. We’re a big fan of using the OKR framework for goal setting.
OKRs stands for objectives and key results. They’re a goal-setting methodology that helps us collaboratively set and track measurable goals.
An objective is typically a qualitative statement, and a key result is a quantitative indicator we use to measure success against the objective.
OKR example
Objective:
Increase brand awareness and establish a strong following on social media
Key Results:
Initiatives:
If you’re just getting started in the ecommerce game, you may feel like allocating a dedicated budget is a far cry from where you are. But even if the budget starts small, nothing is better than something.
We use the marketing cost of sale (MCOS) metric for marketing, which indicates how much a business spends to acquire a single sale through marketing efforts. It’s a percentage metric, calculated as marketing spend divided by revenue generated (multiplied by 100).
So if you spent £100 on marketing costs and made £250 in revenue, you’d have an MCOS of 40%
We tend to say an MCOS between 18% and 22% is ideal, with 30% being the absolute highest a brand can realistically afford to spend whilst growing. You may be wondering - why not as low as possible? Well, if you have an MCOS below 18%, you can realistically afford to be investing more in your marketing, and therefore, should be.
Identify your target audience.
There is no one-size-fits-all tactic for defining and marketing to your online audience.
Your brand will not appeal to everyone - which is 100% fine - but that means it’s a waste of time to try marketing to everyone. It’s key to study your target audience and understand their interests & shopping habits to get in front of them as best you can.
Consider factors such as age, gender, and location as a first point of call; for example, British men in their 20s. You can then take it steps further by honing in on interests - maybe f1, football, or photography.
When using paid marketing tools, such as Meta and TikTok you can give your brand the best chance of getting sales, by only targeting people who fit this select persona.
With endless ecommerce marketing channels available, knowing where to start can feel like taking a blind shot in the dark.
But, online businesses must prioritise the ventures that are most likely to reach their target customers.
If you’re just getting started in ecommerce marketing, and need to generate some semblance of an audience quickly, earned channels are where you should look first. Whilst getting your website and social channels in a good place should also be a point of focus, those owned marketing strategies are going to take some more time before their effects are felt. Whereas earned marketing is felt instantaneously.
Once you have a number of customers to market back to, you can make a more substantial effort in the email marketing and loyalty department, whilst you start to see traffic through owned channels too. It’s also key to keep in mind that your website is a key marketing tool, and needs to be in the best position to make sales once customers have made it to the site. If you're wondering what to do in that regard - refer to our ecommerce scorecard.
Here’s a list of quick tips you can implement to generate more traffic and more sales from your ecommerce marketing strategies.
A topic that could have a blog all of its own. Just like how we’d try our best to tailor a fitting or sales approach to a customer in a physical store, we can do the same in ecommerce.
Ideally you have different advertisements built to appeal to different types of customers, different messages to run in emails, and so on - making sure that a customer is fed the message most likely to appeal to them. This is certain to boost the effectiveness of your ecommerce marketing campaigns, with 80% of customers stating that they prefer when marketing is tailored to them.
Those of you who are familiar with the intricacies of the different social media platforms will know this, but there’s at least a little bit of crossover between how we post on the different platforms.
For example, the maximum length of a YouTube short is 3 minutes. This is the exact same amount of time as the maximum length of an Instagram reel, and a 3 minute long video will also fit on TikTok. Whilst the majority of people use all of the different platforms, they may do so to varying extents, or prefer one platform over the other two. So, it’s within your best interest to post your content across all three platforms to expand your reach. There are multiple ways this methodology can be applied, for example repurposing blog content within emails and so on.
Having an email channel in place is a great first step, but you can’t expect anyone to sign up without some sort of incentive. We’ve all seen those “get 10% off by signing up to our mailing list” pop ups when shopping before. Whilst annoying, there’s a reason they’re everywhere - they work. Even if you think a pop up doesn’t fit with your brand, if executed with proper art direction, it can. We’ve seen them first hand deliver results.
People are busy and the checkout process is a chore - even Shopify, with the best converting checkout in ecommerce, has a long checkout process. So, it’s only natural for people to forget to complete their purchases.
Cart abandonment and checkout abandonment emails are simultaneously an extremely low effort marketing tactic and an extremely effective one. It’s a simple nudge to remind customers to continue with their buying journey, but they’ve shown to rescue roughly a quarter of all abandoned carts and purchases.
Upsells fall outside of the ecommerce marketing mix established earlier, but they’re still worth talking about. Initiatives such as a complete the look, product bundle, or suggested products within the checkout are all examples of upsells, which can dramatically increase average order value and revenue generated overall.
Whilst ecommerce has opened the floodgates for people around the world to buy from anywhere, thinking locally is also a great tactic.
One such example of this is refining your targeting across Meta to only major cities or areas where you suspect your customers live. Another is taking more general steps to establish your brand within your local community - all certain to build a following.
It is essential to make sure you have your website’s meta Pixel, Tiktok Pixel and more set up properly. This allows you to retarget your website’s site visitors with paid-for advertisements across social media and the wider web. It’s an effective 1-2 punch for getting them interested in your brand.
User reviews and social proof are two of the most effective ways to boost your conversion rate when it comes to ecommerce. After all, customers are far more willing to trust another customer than a brand.
There’s a ton of ways to leverage reviews, but making sure they’re used both on your website and across social media are both great tactics to make the most of. If you’re unsure how to get started with reviews, explore tools such as reviews.io, Influence.io, and feefo, which are compatible with Shopify.
Again a topic that deserves its own blog.
Meta data is the information search engines use to understand the content of your website. Quite literally the data’s data. Meta data not only plays a key role in your search engine optimisation, but also in generative engine optimisation.
Generative engine optimization is a new phenomenon within the world of ecommerce, but essentially refers to getting your site to show up within queries made to large language models such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and more. With an increasing number of people preferring these tools to Google, it’s key to get your site set up for them.
Both google and these Large language model ai tools rely on meta data to understand a page, so you need to make sure yours is formatted correctly.
This last one is a more general statement to let the data make decisions for you. If you try two different styles of instagram posts and one performs better than the other, lean into that style in future content. It’s a general statement that can be applied to all aspects of your ecommerce marketing.
Track metrics like website traffic, conversion rates, average order value, customer acquisition cost, and customer lifetime value using analytics tools integrated with your marketing channels.
Whilst there is some crossover between digital marketing and ecommerce marketing, ecommerce marketing is more focused on generating sales, whereas digital marketing is focused more on brand awareness and web traffic.
Whilst not a direct marketing question, deciding on which ecommerce platform to use will have a direct impact on your ability to market effectively.
Platforms like wix, squarespace, and weebly may limit your ability to remarket to your existing customers, whereas platforms like Adobe commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and WooCommerce can take a lot of time to make updates too so will limit how quickly you can make changes.
We believe that Shopify is the best platform for ecommerce, as it enables merchants to quickly make changes as they need and market their product effectively.
Ecommerce marketing is a complex and ever evolving game. With many moving parts, it requires extensive, dedicated time and resources and it is not guaranteed to reap rewards instantly. However, when ecommerce marketing is nailed, the impact it has on your ecommerce business is undeniable.
If you are wanting to work with an ecommerce agency who understands the intricacies of ecommerce marketing, talk to us today.
