E-commerce marketing pertains to activities that guide prospects through the conversion funnel. E-commerce marketing enables the following:

Creating awareness about your e-commerce store

Driving traffic to the store

Converting visitors into paying customers

                                5 Steps to Document an E-Commerce Marketing Plan

Before getting into developing an e-commerce marketing strategy, document your E-commerce marketing plan as it acts as a guide when executing the strategy.

Step 1: Define Goals and Objectives for Your Store

If you are a complete beginner, start by setting goals for your new E-commerce store – review the conversion benchmarks for your niche/industryOpens a new window , and set the goals and objectives accordingly. Setting bold goals without considering what is currently working in the industry might lead to disappointment when you review the performance later.

Existing stores should review their current performance and compare it against industry standards. If the performance is below industry benchmarks, then setting the goals as the mean between current performance and industry standards is the ideal way to go. If your performance exceeds the standards, then you can set higher goals depending on your marketing budget.

Step 2: Assess Your Target Audience and Competition

Do you know your ideal buyers? If so, what are their characteristics, interests, purchasing power, and other demographic, geographic, psychographic characteristics? Collate all this information to create multiple buyer personas. Knowing your ideal customers will help you decide a conversion funnel that works for you. Simultaneously, keep an eye on competitor activities to see what is working for them. Are they investing heavily in Facebook ads or creating YouTube videos? Use this information to decide the best techniques to get your e-commerce marketing plan off the ground.

Step 3: Determine the Marketing Strategies and Tactics

What activities will help you achieve your marketing goals and objectives? Knowing this will allow you to choose the marketing channels and their appropriate strategies and tactics to ensure you’re hitting your sales targets. If you are a B2C e-commerce store with aspirational sales targets, you might have to make significant investments in social media ads to reach your target audience. If you have devised a conversion funnel, it will be easy for you to determine the marketing channels that would bring the best results for each stage. For example, SEO will play a crucial role in the awareness stage, whereas email marketing will keep your leads engaged throughout the interest and desire phase.

Step 4: Build Your Martech Stack

A martech stack is a suite of applications tailored to your marketing activities. To build a martech stack for your store, identify the marketing channels you need to be on and find the tools and applications that make it easy to automate and manage marketing activities on different channels. 

Choose products that offer comprehensive features to make your martech stack robust. For example, apart from the e-commerce platform, a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) and a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application will help develop the foundation for your marketing activities. So, if you choose a full-feature MAP, you don’t need to invest in a separate email marketing and social media management software. Let’s look at the various marketing channels and recommended e-commerce tools for each category in the next section.

                                      Creating Your E-Commerce Marketing Strategy

Running an e-commerce store is a high-octane activity. There are plenty of tasks to be done at any given time, and automation is a basic requirement.

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Ranking organically on the search engine result pages (SERP) requires you to have a sound SEO strategy. Here are a few considerations to help your store rank higher up on search engines: 

Optimize page load time (Google PageSpeed Insights).

Run an SEO audit (Ubersuggest)

Perform thorough keyword research and identify keywords that you want to rank for (Google Keyword Planner).

List all product, category, and blog posts and pages. Correlate target keywords and keyword phrases to each post and page and place them strategically in on-page elements such as the title, URL, header tags, text, alt text, anchor link, and so on.

Strengthen your local SEO game by creating your Google My Business profile.

Fix technical SEO errors such as duplicate pages. Seek help from an SEO expert if necessary.

Setup your website on Google Search Console.

Other Recommended SEO Tools

SEMrush

Moz Keyword Explorer

Site Explorer by Ahrefs

2. Content Marketing

We will expand on the concept of on-page SEO in this section. Content marketing for e-commerce websites goes beyond its conventional meaning and includes product, category, and cart pages. Copywriting is an essential component of e-commerce marketing as it contributes to effectively driving conversions. Let’s look at the different areas where you can implement content marketing:

Product pages: Headline, product description, high-res images, and demo videos.

Blog Section: Create content around your niche that is valuable and informative to your prospects and customers. Example: blog posts, downloadable content, infographics, checklists, etc.

Rich Media: There is a lot of space for storytelling for e-commerce stories. Try out videos, podcasts, or other interactive media to create content.

Top Content Marketing Tools

Feedly

Buzzsumo

Google Trends

Grammarly

Uberflip

3. Email Marketing

You can significantly amp up your conversion rates if you use email marketing wisely. No matter how many ‘Email is dead’ articles surface occasionally, email is not losing its prominence in e-commerce marketing. 

Transactional emails to keep buyers updated on their purchase (including an order confirmation, receipts/invoices, shipment, delivery confirmation, and returns/exchange emails)

Promotional emails occasionally to promote upselling or cross-selling opportunities

Top Email Marketing Tools

ConvertKit

ActiveCampaign

GetResponse

Learn More: Top 10 Best Email Marketing Services Software Platforms for 2020Opens a new window 

4. Social Media Marketing

E-commerce is one of the industries that benefit tremendously from social media. The reason is the user intent while scrolling social media, plus the product ads are not always perceived as an intrusion. 

Sprout Social

AdEspresso

Buffer

5. Paid Advertising

Once you have peaked your reach through organic ways, your e-commerce store revenue becomes a function of the money you spend in ads. That’s why almost every successful online store invests heavily in paid ads (search ads, social media ads, native ads, etc.) that target each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Target people who visited your site but didn’t complete the purchase through remarketing ads

Expand your target audience through lookalike audience ads

6. Influencer Marketing

People are influenced by people they trust. Users would rather trust a celebrity or an expert in their niche than a brand, that’s why e-commerce stores are now investing in influencer marketing.

Top Influencer Marketing Tools

Followerwonk

Kred

HypeAuditor

7. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

The conversion rate is perhaps the most important metric for any e-commerce store. It is the number of visitors converted per hundred visitors. Here are four ways that can improve the conversion rate of e-commerce stores: 

Cart Abandonment: Cart abandonment software sends reminder emails to shoppers who left the website without completing the purchase. E-commerce platforms such as BigCommerce offer this feature as a part of their product.

Lead Generation: These tools help you guide shoppers through the conversion funnel via exit intent pop-ups, opt-in forms, and social proof notifications.

Top CRO Tools

OptinMonster

TrustPulse

8. Customer Service and Support

Online stores face occasional hiccups in the logistics, inviting angry customers concerned about their orders. To tackle this effectively, e-commerce stores need to have a prompt customer service department in place. 

Top Customer Service and Support Tools

Freshdesk

Intercom

9. Marketing Analytics

One of the crucial aspects of CRO is testing various elements of your website. Additionally, tracking the store performance helps you evaluate the impact of these changes.