E-commerce Marketing: An Overview for 2020

Online shopping is fun. It is just like the digital form of window shopping. But what about all the processes that go behind online shopping? Right from the time you know about the brand, to buying the products. As glittery and glamorous as it looks from the outside, the more strategies it requires.

With the internet and online facilities, setting up an e-commerce site is just a matter of a few clicks. Then what is the difficulty? The major challenge is to sustain and grow the site. How is this done? Reach the target audience. And how do you reach the target audience to sell your products? The answer is e-commerce marketing.

E-commerce Marketing: The Definition

E-commerce is the process of driving the audience to e-commerce online sites through digital platforms. This further facilitates purchasing the products. No, you can’t grow and expect an upsurge in the e-commerce site in a day. You need to tackle it with patience and consistent efforts. This is what e-commerce marketing does.

E-commerce marketing works on a simple 3-step strategy, which is:

Attract

Capture

Convert

Process of E-commerce Marketing: The Marketing Funnel

Building a brand is just like building an empire. You just can’t expect the kingdom to be ready without efforts. You need to join and strengthen every brick, every wall. Imagine having to convince a large group of audience to buy your products with no personal interaction. The first thing to do is to target potential customers. After this, you can’t do anything and everything. You must follow the right process to gain an audience and drive sales. The process flow of e-commerce marketing is:

Awareness: It is about publicity. You need to drive the audience to the site, or just make them aware of the brand presence. You can do this through social media, blogs and other digital marketing strategies. The brand must appear a few times before the customer finally lands upon the e-commerce site.

Interest: You have to capture the audience and potential customers by developing their interest in the products and services offered. The main aim is the conversion of the traffic that lands on the site, to the leads. This is exactly what lead generation is. You must make the customer sign up on the site. You can do this with email marketing. By sending personalized emails with special offers makes the customers inquisitive about buying the products.

Purchase: One achieves the goal when the customer finally ends up buying the product. As per the marketing funnel, only 5% of the customers make it to the purchase phase. Therefore, the step of conversion of leads into the purchase by driving sales.

E-commerce Marketing Channels

Now you might wonder how you can get started with e-commerce marketing. Before getting into the details, there are mainly 3 prime channels through which one can carry out a successful e-commerce marketing. These include:

Emails: In today’s generation, every single person has an email address. Well, what’s a better way to reach out to the target audience to gain potential customers. Majority of the people check them once in a while. This makes it even easier to grab their attention. All you need to do is build a proper email list with a segregated audience. After this, you need to be consistent with sending them emails with the right content and offers of your products or services. This allows driving the audience at least to the e-commerce site.

Content: It is the most powerful and successful strategy. Whether it be your e-commerce site or social media platforms, keep them updated regularly. You can also interlink the content by adding backlinks and through social media shares. Post unique and engaging content to increase their on-site and on-page time. This allows for increasing the customer-business relations.

Video: Once you have the content, how do you present it? Video is the answer. It helps in convincing the customers why the product is the right fit for them. Also, people end up watching videos instead of reading the long blog posts, which is a plus point.

Among all these marketing channels, one tip to consider is trying to grow the content organically. Do not go for paid advertisements, if unnecessary.

E-commerce Marketing Plan

You always have a plan before you start anything. Same is the case with building your e-commerce site. You must plan everything beforehand. This allows streamlining all the work procedures. Right from the goals to the expectations, try having everything sorted. It need not be a book-sized plan, even a page works if it has the right strategy. Some details that you must mandatorily have in your e-commerce marketing plan include:

Business Summary: It is like an overview of what the business is about. The products and expectations. Summarize the complete strategy in as short as possible.

Goals: You need to define some goals to keep yourself going. There can be one long-term goal or many short-term goals. These are mainly to track business growth. The goals may vary throughout the journey, but they surely streamline the procedures.

The value proposition of the brand: It is the key element of all forms of marketing. A value proposition is about adding value to all the products you offer to the customers as a  brand. This clarifies why the customer should buy a specific product.

Target audience and buyer persona: You can’t go about selling a car to the person looking for shoes. Define the target audience. This helps in finding potential customers. One way to do this is by breaking them down according to the several categories they fit in. Also, understand the buyer persona and what they expect from the brand.

Situation analysis: Track business growth at regular intervals. This allows the marketer to build the strategies and change the plan according to the analysis and marketing trends.

Pricing strategy: Starting off selling products at high prices won’t work. You need to understand the audience. Develop a proper pricing strategy with discounts and offers that work for one and all. Who does not get happy about getting a special discount?

Distribution plan: The last and most important is the distribution plan. From packing to the final delivery, you need to have a warehouse and customer support to carry out the process seamlessly. Create the right distribution for effective operations.

Conclusion

E-commerce doesn’t end here. You need to learn about the various strategies and marketing tools that work effectively for e-commerce growth. Start small to gain big. One of the most famous e-commerce sites is Amazon. They started from scratch to reach these heights. It is about how these marketing strategies are implied, more than the investment and other factors. By following the right plan, along with setting up the website, you can easily retain your customers.

By Tanmayi Arora

Tanmayi is a creative content writer at NotifyVisitors. She believes in the saying, “ Writing is not just putting out facts, it is the catharsis of emotions”. She blends imagination with logical facts and pours it out in words. Writing has many facets, she lives every bit of it.

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