Companies of all sizes, in every sector, and with an online presence are commonplace today. This makes it difficult to compete for the attention of shoppers. Only a tiny fraction of the US’s 2.1 million ecommerce companies will be able to attract enough customers to grow their online sales.
You’re probably an ecommerce retailer who knows that digital marketing is crucial for the success of your store. What is digital marketing, and how can you use it? Find out more.
Digital Marketing: Why You Need It
Digital marketing offers many advantages, even though traditional channels still exist.
Online marketing allows you to reach a global audience.
You can target and segment your audience more effectively with personalization.
Even with a small team, you can do more marketing with efficiency and automation.
You can increase your brand’s visibility on digital channels.
Digital marketing strategies can be adopted faster and more efficiently with software.
Communication with your customers can be done more quickly and often.
Your business can make better decisions by collecting and analyzing data.
Digital Marketing Types
It would be best if you had a successful digital marketing strategy to capitalize on digital opportunities and differentiate yourself. This means engaging in a variety of digital marketing strategies. G2, a software review site, found that marketers who use three or more channels for their campaigns saw a 250% increase in engagement and purchase rates.
Consider including popular inbound marketing techniques like paid advertising, social media, email marketing, influencer marketing, SEO strategy, Google Adwords, or affiliate marketing in your digital marketing strategy.
Text marketing should be part of your digital strategy if it isn’t already. Text marketing has consistently higher conversion rates than paid ads and email. G2 claims text marketing is “a well-kept secret” and that 61% of marketers don’t even use it.
Understanding Your Customer
Understanding your target market is essential to ecommerce marketing. Who are they exactly? What are their needs, wants, and interests? What do they do? You may conduct research to identify and better understand your customers. This can be done by simply surveying your current customers. This data will be used to create buyer personas and a customer experience map showing a potential customer’s journey from being an anonymous shopper to a loyal customer. You will want to create customer segments based on age, gender, and other factors such as income, location, and interests.
You can create marketing campaigns tailored to your customer’s interests once you have a clear image of who they are. Remember to use customer feedback as a source of information to help you improve your products and services or the customer experience.
Optimize your website for conversions, and SEO regularlyIt’s crucial to optimize your website for conversions. It’s essential to ensure that your website is easy to use, has a call-to-action, loads quickly, and allows frictionless checkout. Your online sales can increase significantly if you optimize your website to convert visitors.
You can collect valuable data about your customers by using your site. This includes top purchases, browsing history, and click paths. You can identify patterns and discover new opportunities to optimize your site.
You should include the top search terms in your website and content: those words and phrases customers use to search for similar products, services, and websites. Google, many ecommerce platforms, website builders, and other companies provide free tools to help you research keywords.
Effectively Use SMS/Text and Email Marketing
Email is the backbone of digital marketing for a good reason: It’s an inexpensive, high-volume way to keep in touch with your customers, remind them about your company, and promote your products, sales, and news. Software products allow you to create email templates, track clicks, and open rates, and maintain your email list. You can quickly increase your customer base by adding a pop-up, banner, or form to your website. Email is a great way to communicate important and timely information. However, SMS can be used for urgent messages.
Text marketing campaigns, especially two-way and conversational ones, can help you create relationships, create urgency and reach shoppers where they spend most of their time – on their phones. Gartner research found that while most marketers use email, text marketing campaigns had response rates 7X higher, click-through rates 30 times higher, and were more effective than email.
Digital Advertising: Invest in it
Pay-per-click advertising is a powerful digital marketing strategy for reaching your audience and driving traffic to a website. Spending money on digital advertising can be risky, but PPC ads in the highly competitive online marketplace are a must.
PPC ads are a great way to experiment with your brand and message. The goal is to learn what works best and improve your ROI. PPC advertising includes Google Ads, YouTube Ads, and social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Personalize content
We share important information about ourselves every day online. You can use this data to connect your customers with products they want and need. This type of personalization competitively boosts digital marketing, whether you’re addressing customers with their first names in emails or letting them know that an item on your website they browsed is now in stock. Demand Metric found that 82% of customers are more likely to feel positive about a company after engaging in personalized content.
Take advantage of modern digital tools
Online stores are a natural evolution of brick-and-mortar stores. Digital marketing tools help marketers be more efficient, data-driven, and effective online. You can improve your website’s customer journey and experience, from lead generation to referral. If you haven’t already, here are a few examples you can explore.
Chatbots are artificially intelligent programs that communicate with website visitors. They can answer questions, provide customer support, or promote products. When you don’t have the resources to provide a human to answer all questions, chatbots can be a cost-effective and scalable way to engage with your customers.
Use video prospecting to build relationships with your potential customers. You can use short videos that are personal and aimed at introducing your brand and business, explaining your products, and educating them about your services. Add product demos to the site to inform your customers and accelerate the sales process.
Use all integrations on your ecommerce platform. These integrations will make your business more productive and allow you to focus on other tasks. They do this by connecting data from different software platforms and providing a better view of your company.
