Without doing eCommerce Store marketing, you’ll only hear crickets and the sound of your head buzzing.
It’s not enough to get a great idea, a minimum viable product, or setting up a great foundation for an eCommerce store; you have to do much more.
One of those things that several entrepreneurs who start with eCommerce websites absolutely ignore. I don’t know what it is about eCommerce stores but most people think that if you set up an eCommerce store and launch it, that’s all you need to do, ever.
No one even thinks of promoting their eCommerce stores the right way.
Without putting in the power of Inbound marketing to work for your eCommerce store, you don’t have much to write home about.
Read the complete guide to WordPress eCommerce now.
Here are the quickest, strongest, and the most reliable ways to promote your eCommerce store:
Commit to eCommerce Blogging [Long-term eCommerce Store Marketing]
If your products qualify for a healthy margin, you should consider eCommerce blogging for your business. Producing and distributing blogs for exposure (on social media and elsewhere) are a terrific way to enhance brand appeal, build brand equity, get traffic, and generate leads.
Using Shopify? You can take advantage of several free Shopify marketing tools to start generating leads right away — with opt-in bars, opt-in forms, regular forms, and more.
Here’s what blogging does for your eCommerce store:
- Gets you visitors as your blog content (along with other content), pulls in traffic from Google, Bing, Duckduckgo, and several other sources — all thanks to your blog posts, optimized for search. Remember that SEO is overrated (as in how others promote SEO to you). Real SEO is led by content marketing (including blogging) and that you’d need to publish regularly with a publishing velocity. You may also take advantage of AI tools to help speed up your content marketing and SEO.
- Gives you tons of content to share on social media and boost your social reach. Meanwhile, social networks (and your presence on these networks) isn’t just about sharing content though. You should also be building a network, making connections, engaging, having conversations, create communities, and a lot more (not withstanding how social media could be a great way to build social proof, answer questions (pre-sales?), monitor social conversations around your brand, and also for customer support.
- Provides you with ammunition to start generating leads for eCommerce — visitors get options to sign up for coupons, download freebies, attend courses, subscribe to your newsletter and more. Shopify alone provides you with tools like Shopify Forms and other free marketing tools (along with other business tools) to help you. Alternatively, you can use tools like OptinMonster, ConvertPro, and many others. Using WordPress? Take advantage of several features that come with your WordPress theme (such as Divi or Elementor).
Google Loves eCommerce: Use Free Google SEO For ECommerce Features
Google is in it for the money.
Pampering eCommerce stores is what Google does best. Google has several features (rolled out as a part of making user experience more relevant and better for its users).
Search for any product specific keyword (on the money, with the intent to buy) such as “rental apartments in Chicago” or “Best Walking shoes” and you’ll see that Google does all it can to show you the most relevant search results as possible.
For relevant searches, Google shows the following:
- Google Shopping ads
- Google image clusters
- Google Product clusters
- Google Map listings
- “People also ask…”
- “People also search for…“
- Shopping Guides
- Keyword clusters at the bottom (and also in the middle of the search pages)
- ..and more.
Here’s an entire explanation on Google SEO features and what Google shows to allow to you to think ahead and plan to make inroads so as to boost your exposure on Google Search results.
Focus on eCommerce Conversions
Checkout optimization is one of those things that’s overlooked. Instead, it should be your primary focus.
Fast, unfailing, and dependable checkout flow, showing trust signals on your checkout page, allowing guest checkout, offering 1-click checkout, enabling chat support during checkout (use Gorgias or Shopify Inbox), and a few other tips really help boost your conversions during checkout (among other things).
A few other things you could consider are auto-filling form fields, allowing multiple payment methods, removing any surprises such as additional costs, and adding free shipping.
Read:
11 eCommerce Checkout Tips: How to Increase Conversions at Checkout
12 Shopify Checkout Best Practices You Should Know About
Run Paid Ads for eCommerce Stores: Fast results
Want results fast? You should seriously consider paid ads (across channels available to). From Facebook Ads to Google Ads; from Twitter Ads to LinkedIn Ads; from Quora Ads — you have several sources available to help you run targeted campaigns.
While it might seem that doing PPC advertising for eCommerce might be easy, it’s really not.
There are a lot of moving parts with PPC advertising (regardless of the platform you choose such as Facebook, Google, Quora, or others). To ensure that your campaigns work properly, you’d have to master several aspects at once such as:
- Choosing the right kind of offers to make with your ads.
- Positioning your ads properly. After that, you’d have to design compelling ads.
- Work out platform-specific features for you to enable before your campaigns go live.
- Start with the right budget, work on budget optimization, campaign optimization, and more.
- Roll out specific workflows to enable split testing (or A/B testing your ads).
- Connecting your ads to message matching landing pages and sales funnels, which leads us to…
Read:
The eCommerce Marketer’s Guide to PPC Advertising
39 Best Resources For Facebook Ads That Can Make You a Pro
Ecommerce Store Marketing: Landing Pages & Sales Funnels
Continuing the story from your ads (above) you would, however, not be able to milk any of these PPC ad platforms if you don’t use landing pages and sales funnels.
- Specific ads (one for each product or one for each product category) should lead to an eCommerce landing page (not product pages)
- Every landing page should have a singular goal (and the goal is not to “sell” right away); it’s to generate leads (giving away a coupon, a free download (relevant to problems you solve).
- Your should be testing your ads and landing pages (in pairs) — like version A and Version B. One single landing page URL is automatically displayed (at random) to your visitors showing either of the two versions.
Make use of tools such as Unbounce, Leadpages, Instapage, and Simvoly to build dedicated sales funnels and landing pages (built with proper upselling and cross-selling sequences) to help make the most out of your campaigns.
Ideally, your offers (on ads) should point to specifically built landing pages or sales funnels which not only match the message on your ads, but actually carry the story along and help assist with conversions as you run your campaigns.
The right kind of eCommerce funnel is the one where you use your ads to specifically build an email list by giving up something of value to your potential buyers such as a discount coupon, an offer, or by hosting a giveaway.
In exchange for your offer, your potential buyers provide you with an email address or subscribe to your Facebook Messenger sequence.
Email Marketing For eCommerce
You’d think people know this by now. Maybe they do. But most brands still don’t use email marketing for eCommerce. If they do, they don’t do it right, or don’t do it enough.
Email marketing for eCommerce involves sending out regular broadcast messages, transactional emails, and other emails. It also covers email marketing automation workflows, advanced email marketing campaigns (such as Dynamic Emails), Trigger-based emails, segmentation, personalization, and more.
If you are ambitious, there are also retargeting emails (using platforms such as Adroll) and so on.
The money is in the email list.
You start generating sales not through your ads but by using automatic post sign-up sequences and eCommerce email marketing sequences
Brands like Nike do it well. So can you.
Some of the best tools in the business for email marketing are as follows:
- MailerLite
- Drip
- Moosend
- Klaviyo
- MailChimp
Learn what to look out for when you go shopping for email marketing platforms.
Read:
The Ultimate Guide On How to Build a High-quality Email List
How to Build an Email List that Builds Your Ecommerce Business Email Marketing
Upsells and Cross-sells For eCommerce
This is also the stage where you’d want to set up opportunities for upselling and cross-selling to maximize your revenue with sales funnels and landing pages.
- If you use Unbounce , Instapage, or LeadPages as your primary tools for building landing pages and sales funnels, make use of multi-step landing pages or to use your “thank you” pages as an optimal opportunity to cross-sell or upsell.
- Using tools like Simvoly, you can automatically bring in cross-selling or upselling opportunities into your workflow.
- Tools like Webflow allow you to construct a checkout flow exactly as you like. Use the advanced features of Webflow to build out upselling and cross-selling modals to assist you in taking advantage of the power of upselling.
If you use Shopify, some of these apps can help you cross-sell and upsell, built right into your Shopify Store.
Best Apps for Cross-sell and Upsell On Shopify
Bundles, Also Bought Together
Reconvert Post Purchase Upsell
You can certainly look for several such apps on Shopify (both paid and free)
Read:
19 Ways to Use Offers, Coupons, Discounts, and Deals to Generate More Sales
How are the marketing efforts for your eCommerce store going?
Tell me all about it on Twitter, LinkedIn, or my LinkedIn Brand page.
These are superb tips!
Do these apps have any demo version?