Top tips for a killer ecommerce digital marketing strategy

What is a digital marketing strategy? 

Already know and are just looking for top tips to improve your ecommerce digital marketing strategy? Jump ahead. 

The difference between a digital market strategy and a digital marketing campaign is that your strategy directs your campaign. Your strategy includes your goals, metrics, tactics, campaigns, and the overall business imperatives. It’s your marketing blueprint. 

Campaigns comprise tactics, deliverables and actions that you do in order to achieve the goals of your strategy. 

As with any marketing efforts, your strategy needs to be compiled cognizant of any seasonal fluctuations in trading. 

Setting goals and objectives

The very first stage of developing a digital marketing strategy is to identify and define your goals and objectives. 

At ESM Inbound, we are strongly in favour of SMART goal setting. These are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely goals that provide an invaluable framework to analysing the effectiveness of your efforts. You can read more on SMART goals here. 

Search Engine Marketing Tips for Ecommerce

SEO 

Optimisation of product and category pages

Using keyword research, ensure that your product pages and category or collection pages are written with SEO in mind. 

Reviews

Review acquisition is an important ecommerce marketing tactic. Reviews from happy customers instil a sense of trust in potential customers. Set up a post-purchase workflow to prompt shoppers to leave a review - incentivising this with a discount can encourage submissions. 

Ensure your reviews are marked up with Review Schema so that your site can have rich results on SERPs, i.e. lovely gold stars next to your products!

PPC

Google offers a huge range of PPC opportunities. Typically, the most effective ad type  for ecommerce is shopping ads.

With Google’s shopping ads you can signpost any discount codes to shoppers, as well as benefits such as free shipping or buy-one-get-one-free offers. 

Reviews can also be pulled through here, meaning your 5 star reviews will appear alongside specific products on the SERPs. 

Search ads for more generic search terms - such as a broad search for “sofas” - and/or branded queries can be another fruitful digital marketing tactic. 

Remarketing Ads

If you’re setting up PPC campaigns, it is advisable to also set up remarketing ads to re-engage users who have already interacted with your website. 

To do this effectively, you need to have the global site tag installed on your site in order to collect audience data and create your remarketing audience list.  

Google’s how to guide is accessible here. 

Social media Marketing 

Organic social media content calendar 

Your digital marketing strategy must include your plans for social media. Building a content calendar for the quarter that comprises organic and paid content aligned to seasonal changes will help you schedule posts ahead of time and save you from last minute, reactive posting. 

Paid Social Campaigns

Paid social media campaigns are another excellent ecommerce marketing strategy. Facebook, Instagram and/or Pinterest are the most typical platforms used for ecommerce campaigns. 

An important tip: It is paramount that you have excellent, high quality product photography for any PPC campaigns. This is especially true for Instagram; as an image based platform, relying on stock imagery will not cut it. Investing in product photography is vital, and neglecting to do so risks wasting PPC budget on ineffective ads. 

Consider influencer marketing

Influencers get a hard wrap, but it's ill advised to ignore the potential impact this resource can have. By partnering with the right person, on the right platform, 

you can further your brand’s reach and reputation tremendously. 

For a new product launch, for example, engaging a social media influencer can vastly improve the hype and excitement, which could manifest itself in pre-orders! 

Email marketing

New customer workflows 

You’ve successfully converted a new customer, now what? 

Welcoming new customers can help secure, or at least encourage, repeat business. 

Why not delight them with a ‘Welcome’ discount, exclusive to new customers? 

Re-engagement campaigns 

Where new customer emails aim to delight customers and ascend them to the advocate stage, re-engagement campaigns look to recapture lost sales; you’ve already captured the attention of these people but have yet to retain or convert them. 

One example of re-engagement emails is the ‘abandoned cart’ email. Anyone who has ever browsed on ecommerce sites before will be familiar with this email, and it works! Be sure to imply a sense of urgency, such as ‘order now whilst stocks last!’ to grab your customer’s attention. A 5% or 10% can also help closed deals here. 

Advanced ecommerce digital marketing ideas

Already familiar with the above tactics and strategies? We’ve put together a short list of some advanced ecommerce digital marketing strategies. These will take longer to implement, often requiring development resources, but can skyrocket your sales when done properly. 

Build an app or PWA 

Do people regularly shop and/or browse your website? Perhaps you regularly update your collections or perhaps the decision stage is lengthy if you sell high price point items. If so, you could benefit from developing an ecommerce app or PWA (progressive web app) that users can download onto their smartphones. 

Apps offer an entirely brand-focussed interactive experience for customers and with prompts and notifications, you can reach out directly to customers with sale and deal information. 

Virtual reality - ‘try on’

Virtual reality or digital ‘try on’ options are growing in popularity, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

This website feature requires large upfront investment, however, can support your customers in the decision making process. 

A ‘try on at home service’ is an alternative to virtual reality website functionality, though you must ensure you have the infrastructure behind you to manage this. 

Buyer’s journey and ecommerce

Bear in mind the buyer's journey when drawing up any marketing strategy. 

Ecommerce businesses should not consider themselves exempt from this buying habit methodology. It's easy to focus decision-stage tactics but too much ‘buy now’ content and you’ll put customers off! 

For example, encourage product browsing with inspirational posts, such as: 

"Looking to refresh your wardrobe this spring? Check out our spring pastel collection now!" 

Then link to a stylised collection page, rather than specific product pages. 

And, of course, it goes without saying that for all businesses, excellent customer service is a must-have. Everyone, companies included, makes mistakes, but if you can’t recover those sales with friendly, helpful customer service, you will be leaving a bitter taste in your customer’s mouths. 

Implementing ecommerce marketing plans may seem daunting but with these tips, you can and will make a real impact. For more advice, tips and guides, sign up to our dedicated content library today.