Now that most businesses operate online, the competition has increased exponentially in many industries.
It’s becoming harder to increase revenue without employing advanced eCommerce marketing strategies. When running paid ads, it’s getting more expensive to acquire new customers, and successful ads require more planning than ever before.
Although an increase in competition doesn’t mean you can’t be successful. It just means you need to work a little harder to get results. The good news is you can start driving more sales by using the following 9 simple and effective eCommerce marketing strategies.
Table of Contents
ToggleRemarketing, also called retargeting, is a PPC ad strategy that can go deep. This is a strategy that anyone can employ, with any level of experience, but there is no limit to how detailed you can get.
Retargeting is when you run PPC ads that specifically target only users who have previously interacted with your brand, either by visiting your website or clicking on your ads. Since 92% of first-time visitors don’t intend to buy, you can influence them into making a purchase by showing them more ads. This keeps them in your marketing funnel even when you don’t know who they are; you don’t need their email address to nurture them.
The statistics vary between organizations, but generally speaking, a solid remarketing campaign can boost conversions by around 50%. Those are not small potatoes!
When people see your ads more than once, your brand becomes familiar to them and makes them more likely to click, provided the ad is relevant to what they want. This is why market research and selecting your target audience are important.
Google’s Shopping campaigns are the perfect way to reach consumers right when they’re searching for something specific that you happen to offer. When a user searches for a phrase related to your products, your ads will show up at the top of the search results. You can include important information in your ads, like product images, prices, special offers, customer ratings, and anything else designed to persuade users to click.
How it works is pretty simple. First, you create a master list of product data in a spreadsheet that identifies your products and all the pertinent information. This gets uploaded to Google’s Merchant Center, which you’ll connect to your Google Ads account. From there, Google’s algorithm will automatically spin up ads for your products based on user search queries.
Instead of creating one campaign with one Ad Group that gets divided into product groups, consider running separate campaigns tailored to attributes that are important to your market. For instance, you can run a generic campaign, a brand campaign, and a campaign that runs ads based on brand and size queries. This way, you’ll reach people searching for generic terms (like “men’s hoodies”), brand-specific terms (like “Nike men’s hoodies”), and size-specific searches (like “Nike men’s hoodies XXL”).
This type of structure is superior because you get better control over negative keywords, and increasing your bids will yield more targeted impressions and clicks. If you don’t use this more nuanced ad structure, you’ll have to remove items from your entire feed if you want to exclude them, and some of your products might never be seen.
You’ll have more campaigns to manage, but it’s worth the effort because it will get you more targeted traffic in the long run. If you’re looking for ways to drive a bunch of relevant traffic to your website, you need to run Google Shopping ads.
One last tip is to use remarketing with your Shopping ads. The average conversion for Google Shopping ads is just under 2%, which doesn’t seem like much. However, these ads work well as the foundation for a powerful retargeting campaign.
Did you know that Amazon’s brand ads convert an average of three times higher than Google Shopping Ads? Running ads on Amazon is crucial for your eCommerce business. The sponsored brand ads in particular will promote up to three products at a time and get displayed in search results across the site. Since they show up when users are looking for something specific, it makes sense that they’d see a high conversion rate.
Are you against using pop-up ads to avoid annoying users? This is common among marketers, but it’s based on a myth. Pop-ups have a reputation for being off-putting to web users, but that’s not actually deserved. In spite of this reputation, there are plenty of effective pop-up ad strategies that are proven to generate higher conversion rates, whether it’s sales or email list signups.
You can use pop-up with your paid ad strategies as long as they adhere to Google’s guidelines. If you place a pop-up ad on a landing page, it needs to directly represent the offer in your ad or else people will bounce. It’s risky, but can yield big conversions when done right.
If you’re not cross-selling and upselling, you’re leaving money on the table. Both of these strategies are proven methods to increase conversions.
Upselling is when you aim to increase the value of each purchase. Cross-selling is increasing the number of items on the sales ticket. For example, if you run a custom t-shirt shop, cross-selling might include offering customers the same designs on a baseball hat, or providing a discount on additional t-shirts. Upselling might involve offering an upgrade to a higher quality, more expensive t-shirt fabric (like organic cotton or hemp).
These marketing methods will boost revenue, increase customer satisfaction, and support your efforts to build long-term relationships with loyal customers. However, the items you cross-sell need to be relevant to the customer’s needs or it won’t work.
One of the best examples of cross-selling can be seen in the marketing for Dollar Shave Club. Before a subscription box is mailed out, customers get an email asking if they would like to add any additional products to their order, like aftershave, wet wipes, or hair care products.
Cross-selling and upselling are convenient because they won’t cost you any additional marketing spend and they can help you acquire more customers affordably. With the right application connected to your shopping cart system, all you need to do is program the offers once and they’ll run on their own.
You may have heard expert digital marketers say that social marketing is only good for building brand awareness and isn’t ideal for sales. Well, that’s not entirely true. It depends on the platform and your market. For example, Instagram has a built-in shopping feature that makes it easy for people to buy from businesses. All you need is a Facebook product catalog, and you can tag your products in your Instagram posts. Now, when your fan base sees your posts promoting your products, they can click on your tags to visit your product pages instead of having to search your website for the awesome products they just saw on Instagram.
Social shopping on Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms, reduces the friction users feel when searching for products. Your followers can buy from you seamlessly and easily right from your posts.
You’ve probably visited a website or received an email from a company that was promoting another business. This is called cross-promotion, and it’s one of the most effective eCommerce marketing strategies around.
The basic idea is that you find a company to partner with who will promote your products. Sometimes you’ll land a mutual agreement, but not always. These kinds of deals usually require payment as a percentage of sales brought in by the company promoting your business. For example, if company A promotes your t-shirts and their efforts generate $5,000 for the month, you’ll pay them a percentage of that amount that you agree on ahead of time.
One eCommerce marketing tactic that gets big results is social proof. Your potential customers need to see proof that you are a trustworthy business and that you have great products. Social proof (like reviews and testimonials) goes a long way to impress potential customers and influence them to buy from you.
Your leads are most likely on a budget and they don’t want to risk wasting money on something that doesn’t work or live up to their standards. They’re going to be selective, so you need extra reinforcement to convince them to make a purchase. Reviews and testimonials are exactly that.
Make sure you display product ratings and customer reviews on all of your product pages. At first, it may take you a while to generate a substantial amount of reviews, but after a while, you’ll get them and they will help persuade new customers.
You don’t need to get only positive reviews, either. Having a mix of positive and negative is actually seen as more trustworthy than having a 100% five-star rating. Your products won’t be for everyone, and some reviews under five stars will still be helpful. Knowing what didn’t work for others might help people choose between different items, for example. Even if a review deflects sales from some people, that’s okay, because you can’t please everyone.
Referral marketing is another term for word-of-mouth marketing, and it’s one of the most effective methods you can employ. People take the opinions of others very seriously, and that includes friends, family, and online reviews. According to a BrightLocal survey, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust recommendations made by friends. That’s some big trust for opinions posted by strangers.
So, how do you start referral marketing? How do you get people to post reviews and recommend you to their friends? The short answer is to start incentivizing referrals. The simplest way to do this is by offering a cash bonus to anyone who refers a paying customer to you. Give people referral links, and anyone who makes a purchase from a link will generate a cash reward for the link’s owner. This is simple and effective.
If you want a successful marketing campaign, you need the right tools and the expertise to turn leads into sales. We can help you with this. Whether you need high-converting PPC ads, Facebook and Google ad management, a PPC audit, better landing pages, or a full package deal, we have you covered.
We work with Google, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, and LinkedIn ads, plus we offer display ads and retargeting management. We can create, manage, or improve any paid ad campaigns you need.
Contact us today to learn more about our PPC ad management services and get a free proposal for your business.
Please fill the below form to download the PDF
“*” indicates required fields.
Please fill the below form to download the PDF
“*” indicates required fields.
Please fill the below form to download the PDF
“*” indicates required fields.
Please fill the below form to download the PDF
“*” indicates required fields.
Please fill the below form to download the PDF
“*” indicates required fields.
Please fill the below form to download the PDF
“*” indicates required fields.