eCommerce Marketing Strategies for Customer Acquisition

Building out your brand is hard, and setting up your eCommerce business and an online store is only half the battle. Determining how to help your target audience find your store and bringing them on board can be even more difficult - that's where eCommerce marketing comes in.

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What is eCommerce marketing?

eCommerce marketing is the process of attracting, acquiring, and retaining customers for your online business. Anything that brings more people to your online store, helps convert them into customers, and subsequently gives them a reason to keep buying from you is eCommerce marketing.

eCommerce marketing is a better and more cost-effective way of promoting your business than conventional marketing. eCommerce marketing builds digital touch-points between your business and your customers using a combination of channels such as email, SMS, social media, contextual ads, and so on. Over time, you’ll know what works best for your business. With some solid first steps, you can set your store up for success and boost revenue while you figure out your long-term strategy.

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eCommerce marketing ideas to increase online sales

Get social with Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter

Instagram has grown to over 1 billion monthly active users, with 500m people using it every day. Facebook is still the biggest platform by far, with 1.2b daily users. If you are looking for an audience, you have to go where they are. Take a week to build an account for your business on each of these websites. Get into a comfortable rhythm for sharing content, and keep generating original posts to share. With high quality pictures showcasing your products, positive customer reviews and feedback, and content videos, you can use social media to get noticed and drive traffic back to your platform.

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Build your audience for direct to consumer marketing

Websites and social media are digital platforms which customers can use to get to your products, but direct marketing turns that on its head. Direct marketing refers to the use of channels such as SMS and Email to reach out to potential customers and giving them a good reason to buy your products. This is one of the best ways to generate revenue and generally offers the best ROI in digital marketing.

The advantage of direct marketing lies in personalization. Direct messaging is designed for a specific user, not the public at large. 80% of consumers are more likely to buy when their experience with a brand is personalized. But you can’t send these messages without gathering an audience by building a distribution list first.

Make sure your website and your social media pages have a way for customers to sign up for a newsletter or other DTC platforms. You may choose to incentivize customers to share their emails or phone numbers by offering them a small discount. Once they confirm their credentials and opt-in, they receive a discount and become an eager customer waiting to hear from you.

Here are some basic rules for building your direct marketing campaign -

• Use multiple channels: Using SMS and email together increases sales by 38%. Text messages for business are best to offer targeted promotions, while emails are better in following-up and getting feedback and surveys.
• Make sure they opt-in: This is a legal requirement. Anyone receiving emails or texts from a business must consent to receive them.
• Make it exclusive: Everyone likes getting a deal no one else is getting. Ensure that your direct audience is offered exclusive promotional codes and discounts which encourages them to buy more.
• Thank your biggest fans: Make sure that people who become regular customers feel valued. Provide more targeted discounts and acknowledge them as personally as you can.

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Reclaim abandoned carts

Around 69% of all digital carts are abandoned, causing massive losses in terms of customer acquisition costs. The best way to win that customer back is to send them timely reminders. An immediate SMS letting them know that their cart is waiting for them is a good start. If they still don’t take the bait, send an email after some time to remind them once again. A follow-up SMS or email after a few days can also capture some conversions. Cart abandonment messages are clicked on far more often than normal promotional emails and show a CTR of 21% and a conversion rate of 10.5%.

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Start building out your content

Building a blog helps your website rank higher in search engines, attract more traffic, engage customers better, and tell stories which create more loyal customers. Most importantly, it humanizes and enriches a connection which the consumer shouldn’t see as purely transactional.

The great thing about blogs is that they don’t just stay there on your website - you can promote the content on social media and start valuable conversations with your audience. Plus, building brand loyalty and community ensures that your customers remember your product and business. Marketers who prioritize blogs are 13x more likely to achieve a positive ROI on their marketing efforts than those who don’t.

eCommerce marketing requires a bit of time and intentionality; in the end, the ROI and customer retention that it generates makes it a worthwhile venture.