4 Ways to Boost Sales with Your Ecommerce Marketing Strategy
From going mobile-first to personalizing your campaigns, these tips will help you meet your sales goals.
The eCommerce landscape is changing. There are more channels than ever through which online businesses can reach consumers, but mastering them all can be overwhelming. On the flip side, consumer expectations have evolved, and today’s eCommerce shoppers hold their favorite brands to high standards. Navigating this industry is definitely challenging, but the right eCommerce marketing strategy can help you find your audience and boost revenue.
That’s exactly what we do at yellowHEAD — work with our partners to create marketing strategies that get results. A combination of sophisticated machine learning and unparalleled marketing expertise results in winning strategies that get results. Want to know more? Get in touch!
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ECommerce Marketing Strategy #1: Optimize for Mobile
ECommerce Marketing Strategy #2: Combine Paid & Organic Strategies
ECommerce Marketing Strategy #3: Personalize Your Approach
ECommerce Marketing Strategy #4: Give Customers a Voice
ECommerce Marketing Strategy #1: Optimize for Mobile
More than 230 million consumers in the United States alone own a smartphone, and 79% of those smartphone owners have made at least one purchase through mobile platforms recently. There’s no way around it: in order to attract modern consumers, eCommerce brands need to adopt a mobile-first approach to marketing.
Optimizing for mobile starts with ensuring your website and app are easily navigable and readable on a smartphone touchscreen, but that’s only the beginning. Here are some other ways to craft a mobile-first eCommerce marketing strategy:
- Make ad and email copy short and sweet. Don’t meander with overly long headlines and huge blocks of text. A skilled copywriter can say a lot with very little.
- Get creative. On social media in particular, posts with photos, GIFs, and videos tend to get higher engagement than text and links to content. Ensure coordination and consistency between marketing creative and your landing page.
- Highlight special promotions. Use promo codes where applicable, as they tend to boost CTR.
- Study your SEO. You want to make sure consumers can actually find your brand. When they’re brainstorming gift ideas or looking for a particular kind of product on their smartphones, your site should be near the top of those search results.
- Reduce friction at checkout. Shopping on mobile should be as easy as doing it on a computer. Make sure the checkout process is seamless, and incorporate payment options like Paypal and Apple Pay to keep things moving. In landing pages, calls to action should be especially visible and easily reachable on a smartphone-sized screen.
ECommerce Marketing Strategy #2: Combine Paid & Organic Strategies
While paid advertising is always going to be a major component of any marketing strategy, it’s important to build an organic following as well. Organic marketing, which refers to unpaid efforts like SEO, brand-run social media accounts, blog posts, and so forth — directs consumers to your brand over time, which translates to increased sales in the long run.
For example, you might know the ins and outs of paid social, and maybe you’ve even studied some of the best Facebook ads, but you might not be taking full advantage of the power of social media. Brands like Nike, Glossier, and even Wendy’s have made tweeting and ‘gramming into an artform, leading to increased engagement and brand awareness. If you’re not getting strong engagement on your social media accounts, it’s time to take a step back and rethink your approach.
This isn’t to say that organic marketing should replace paid campaigns; a good eCommerce marketing strategy should weave the two together. Marketers should explore emerging channels and keep both paid and organic efforts brand-right and consistent. Social media is an excellent place to start, since it’s great for building customer relationships, which results in repeat purchases, stronger customer loyalty, and higher sales over time. DTC brands are especially good at organic social media marketing, so if you need inspiration, that’s a great place to start.
ECommerce Marketing Strategy #3: Personalize Your Approach
Remember those changing consumer expectations we mentioned? One of them is that today’s eCommerce shoppers are used to seeing content tailored to their preferences. Pleasing your potential customers pays off — personalized marketing has been shown to boost sales, making it an important part of any modern eCommerce marketing strategy.
If you’re not sure where to start, these examples of personalized marketing can point you in the right direction:
- Product recommendations: Companies like Amazon have seen great success with recommending products based on a customer’s purchase habits.
- Email reminders: Did someone leave items in their cart? Is it time to restock on those beauty products? These 7reminders let customers know you’re thinking about them.
- Celebrations: Little things can make a big difference. Offering freebies on customers’ birthdays is a great way to show you care — just ask Sephora, the master of the birthday gift.
- Retargeting: Create specific campaigns for users who abandoned items in their cart or showed interest in certain products. This is an effective strategy that’s been shown to increase CTR tenfold.
ECommerce Marketing Strategy #4: Give Customers a Voice
As you may have noticed, customers appreciate feeling like they’re part of the process. One of the best things you can do to build long-term relationships and drive sales is to let customers voice their opinions. There are many ways to do this, such as publishing user reviews, conducting surveys, or sharing user-generated content on social media. What’s important is making your audience feel like the conversation is going both ways; this is another reason why DTC brands are so popular with millennials and Gen Z.
This marketing strategy isn’t just about making customers happy, although that’s certainly a huge benefit! By regularly soliciting feedback about every part of the shopping process, you’ll get a better idea of what’s working and what’s not. This, in turn, allows you to optimize your campaigns for better results. Customer voice can be a powerful thing, so be sure to use it.
If these strategies feel overwhelming, don’t feel like you have to tackle everything at once. Getting eCommerce marketing right takes time and effort, especially in a quickly evolving landscape. The right marketing partner can also make the process easier, so don’t be afraid to utilize others’ expertise.
At yellowHEAD, we’re ready to help. Our approach to ad creative is one-of-a-kind: our proprietary Alison platform allows us to run multivariate tests of different creative concepts, while our strategists perform a comprehensive analysis of the results. This combination of machine learning and marketing expertise results in a data-driven creative strategy with a personal touch. Want to know more? Contact us!