5 Digital Strategies for Ecommerce Brands
Check out the most popular online strategies used by ecommerce brands.
Manoj Mamgai
Guest Writer @ Quorage
Ecommerce companies often start growing with a strong digital strategy. Successful brands must combine various marketing strategies in the same way “quality of goods,” “price point,” and “customer service” are important.
Below’s a look at some key pillars of a digital strategy for ecommerce that may help a brand grow sustainably.
1. Setting up a strong online presence
A digital strategy starts with establishing an authoritative online presence using your website and social media pages. Here’s how:
- Website Optimization: An ecommerce website is supposed to be fast, mobile-friendly, well-organized, and ranking well on search engines. It allows end users to navigate easily and improves the site’s visibility in terms of search results. For best results when starting, it’s better to hire an SEO agency to develop your website using the best SEO practices. They may also help you create a solid keyword and content strategy for your brand.
- Social Media Visibility: Interacting with your followers and potential customers on social media nurtures the brand image and makes your customers feel important while providing opportunities to display your products. In an ideal world, you would use all types of social media marketing. But when starting, you can choose to focus on one or two channels where your target buyers hang out the most. You can add more channels in the future.
2. Data-driven decision-making in marketing and advertising
The best thing about marketing on digital channels is that you can access most of the data produced from interactions between your customers and your online properties (like your website or Facebook page).
The data from analytic tools helps you make informed decisions about your customers’ preferences, your product, and marketing strategies. Hence you should always set up analytic tools as you set up your digital assets like social media pages or your company website.
Here are some of the most important areas of focus:
- Customer Insights: Use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Meta Business Suite, and customer feedback forms to learn more about your customers. You can find out what sells better and which marketing channels work best. Better still, with social listening tools like Brandwatch, you can follow online conversations about your brand, products, or competitors to learn how to stay ahead of your game.
- A/B Testing: A/B testing is about creating different versions of the same message like email and product descriptions or different design elements like call-to-action buttons. Showing the different versions to different users helps determine what works best for your audience. Constant A/B testing will help your brand evolve with its customer base. There are various tools for running A/B tests including Firebase, Optimizely, and Adobe Target.
- Individualization: As consumers continue to receive more spam than ever, brands that take the time to make their message personal to the recipient certainly stand out. By taking the time to learn and understand each customer, ecommerce businesses can customize customer experiences when sharing product recommendations, emails, and retargeting ads. To learn about your customers, you’ll need to use analytic tools available in your chosen digital marketing channels.
3. Using SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to rank your store
SEO helps bring organic traffic to your website through proper website architecture and using the right keywords in your pages, product descriptions, and blog posts. You can then turn this traffic into leads and buying customers. Unlike paid ads, SEO is a long-term strategy that seems slow in the first year but begins to show results in the following years.
The main focus areas in SEO include:
- Keyword Research: This is the process of finding the best keywords to target, considering search volume, competition, and the searcher’s intent. Using tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Keywords Everywhere, and Google Keyword Planner you can find low-competition keywords that will bring revenue when you rank for them on search engines. These include product-specific keywords to add in descriptions, comparison keywords to target in blog posts, and other questions that your audience may have regarding your products or the problems solved by your products.
- On-page SEO: This involves optimizing product pages with relevant keywords, unique product descriptions, and metadata, which includes title tags and alt text, to ensure that search engines can clearly understand the content of each page. Besides using keywords, on-page SEO is also about making the content useful, detailed, and easy to read to provide a great experience for users who land on each page. There are on-page SEO tools like PageOptimizer Pro, SurferSEO, and Clearscope that provide insights on which keywords to add to your pages.
- Technical SEO: This involves resolving technical issues like slow website speed, mobile optimization problems, chains of URL redirects, and more to help search engines crawl and index the website using the lowest resources. You can use a paid WordPress plugin like Perfmatters to resolve most technical issues in one click. But for issues like url cleanups and 404 errors, you’ll need to fix them manually or hire a technical SEO specialist to handle them.
- Off-page SEO: This refers to activities done outside your store to promote it in search engines. Building backlinks is the most common for all websites. It means reaching out to other website owners in your space so that they can add a link to your store on their website. Links from other websites act as votes of confidence for search engines. If you have a physical store, you may also create and update your Google Business Profile and add your business details in directories like Yellow Pages, Yelp, and others.
4. Effective content marketing to establish expertise
Content marketing is the term used to describe creating and distributing content through videos, blog posts, emails, and other media available online. It’s mostly used to educate, inform, and build trust with potential and existing customers. In recent years, ecommerce brands have been using user-generated content and influencer marketing to build trust and attract more customers.
Some key content marketing approaches for ecommerce businesses include:
- Product Guides and Tutorials: This is educational content – the kind that helps people learn how to use your products or solves problems in your industry. They help build your brand’s authority and earn respect and loyalty from customers.
- User-Generated Content (UGC): Customer-generated content on social media like personal reviews and testimonials, or photographs of purchases tend to create proof of authenticity. Brands such as GoPro and Canva often use these strategies to engage audiences while promoting products organically.
- Influencer Marketing: Content creators (influencers) with many followers can help you reach a new ripe audience while also generating some sales. After all, people like to get recommendations from those they respect. But when collaborating with influences, you’ll need to do your due diligence. This guide covers how to find and vet influencers. Many ecommerce brands use micro-influencers to help with authentic endorsements and word-of-mouth marketing.
5. Email marketing for building customer relationships
Email is also one of the most frequently utilized digital marketing channels in ecommerce and other industries. It should be your ultimate long-term strategy since you may lose your social media pages and your websites because you don’t actually own them. But when you have an email list of all your existing and potential customers, you can always reach them in their inboxes. And, they make the best buyers because they already know about you.
Email marketing tools like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), MailChimp, and Hubspot provide automation sequences, customer segmentation options, and other useful features.
Let’s break down some aspects of email marketing for ecommerce brands:
- Welcome Sequences: After a new user subscribes, you can send out emails to introduce your brand, give exclusive discounts, or present best-sellers through automated email sequences. That helps in creating rapport with the customer right from the start.
- Abandoned Cart Recovery: You can set up automated emails reminding users of items left in carts to increase conversion chances. Personalizing the same with product images and reviews can push the recipient to buy the items in the cart.
- Post-Purchase Engagement: You can set up automated emails to thank each customer for their purchases, suggest other products, and ask them to provide feedback about their experience.
- Paid Advertising (PPC and Social Ads): With the PPC advertising technique, you pay only when someone clicks on your ad. It’s especially helpful for new brands to create awareness because ads typically appear at priority locations on all digital platforms. So most people will see the ad. However, you must use ads strategically to get the best Return-on-Investment (ROI).
Ecommerce brands can combine PPC and social media ads to help reach a wider audience. Here’s how:
- Google Ads (PPC): Google Ads allows ecommerce brands to reach users as they search for products on Google. They appear at the top of the search result page before organic (non-paid) results. You can use shopping ads and text ads to attract users currently looking for one of your products.
- Social Media Ads: Instagram, Facebook, and other social platforms offer advertising tools with advanced targeting for demographics, interests, and behaviors. You can capture your target user’s attention using carousel ads, video ads, or influencer ads.
- Retargeting Ads: Through remarketing ads, you can win back users who have visited your store without purchasing anything. That’s how potential customers come back to finalize the transaction.
When done right, all the above-mentioned strategies help you build your store’s brand online. The goal is to make the most of all your interactions with customers so they learn to trust your name in your industry. From the content on your website and product images to emails and advertisements, your brand values and tone should remain consistent. You should also stay in touch with your customer’s evolving needs to adapt successfully.
If you’re still wondering whether or not to get into ecommerce, check out my guide on the pros and cons of a small ecommerce business.