Today people are more willing to spend money online, and internet marketing is becoming a must even for offline businesses.
In this article, we’ll talk about how to do marketing for e-commerce websites, as well as the most important promotion methods and channels.
Marketing strategy
In short, a marketing strategy is an undetailed long-term plan aimed at attracting more customers and increasing your sales. Any strategy includes three steps:
- Define your target audience. Learn why people buy your products and make a customer’s profile.
- Study your competitors, both direct and indirect. While your products should solve clients’ problems, also learn how else this problem can be solved.
- Define your goals and what methods to use, i.e. what marketing tools you are going to use and how.
Despite a strategy is usually designed for a year or so, it’s Ok to make adjustments to it in response to its efficiency and changing market conditions.
Marketing tools
1. Landing page
A landing page is a single-page website designed for presenting a product or a service. This tool is used to introduce your product to the audience. Its main purpose is to convince a visitor to do something – to buy goods or to register.
Such websites demonstrate high efficiency and low cost. Even an inexperienced user can create one with website constructors.
Furthermore, this tool can be used to test business ideas as they will show you which ideas spark interest and which don’t.
How to create a landing page:
- Make a freestyle description of what you want to show on your landing page and define your goal. Separate out conceptual blocks from the text and make up informative titles for them. These will become the site’s sections.
- Think of three benefits your product offers and how it can help your potential customers.
- Think of your visitors’ behavior. Decide what must be the first thing your client will see, what questions and objections he or she might have, etc. Answer those questions and objections with titles, texts and calls to action.
- Use call to action which drives visitors to the desired action. If the landing page is too long, you can place calls at the top of it, in the middle and in the bottom.
A landing page is an efficient tool to do marketing for e-commerce websites by offering a solution for whatever problem your potential customers may have.
2. Web analytics
Be it a landing page or an online store or any other type of e-commerce website, you need web analytics to monitor the site’s traffic, sales, your expenditures and revenues.
Web analytics combines tools and methods of gathering and analyzing the information about visitors and their behavior. This way you can find out what works and what doesn’t and know more about your target audience.
Google Analytics is your major caliber in this mission. Here’s how to start working with it:
- Register at Google Analytics or log in under your account.
- Add your website to your account.
- Add tracking code for all the pages you want to monitor. To do that, click on ‘Admin’ – ‘Property’ – ‘Tracking Info’ – ‘Tacking Code’. It’ll allow you to gather the necessary statistics.
- Go to ‘Admin’ – ‘View’ column – ‘Goals’ to choose the desired actions you want to monitor. You can monitor up to 20 goals simultaneously.
- Gather statistics in ‘Reports’ – ‘Real-Time’ – ‘Conversions’. This parameter shows how many visitors (in percentage) have performed the desired action.
This way you can find out what the most important sources of your traffic are, what people do on your site and how you can change their behavior.
3. Search engine optimization
The purpose of SEO is to make it easier for internet user to find your website in search engines. The more often the site gets to the top of search results, the more visitors and conversions you get.
Start with creating a semantic kernel for your site. Semantic kernel is a list of keywords (search queries) that characterize the website’s activity. The list should include precise queries leading to your site’s pages. Related and distant keywords are avoided.
Create a list of keyword which can be used to find your product. Add synonyms and morphological forms. Analyze the list and remove the keywords you cannot use to compete with others. Arrange the result into groups, with each related to a certain page of the site – a few keywords for each page.
A proper search engine optimization will help very much with marketing for e-commerce websites. Use these tips:
- Check the URL of your pages. Use clear and understandable words describing the content of the pages. The first 5 words of the address are the most important for search engines.
- Indicate the name of the page with <title> tag. It should contain the page’s keywords, and it’s advisable to place them in the beginning of the line as search engines only show the first 65-70 symbols in the search results.
- Use <description> meta tag to describe the content of the page because these lines can be used in the snippet, the text under the title in search results.
- Don’t neglect <keywords> meta tag. Although nowadays search engines mostly ignore it, fill it with keywords just in case.
- Create Robots.txt. This file is required to tell search engines which pages of your website are allowed to be shown in results and which pages should stay closed.
- Create Sitemap.xml. It’s your site’s map containing all its pages. It helps search engines to scan the site.
- Add Alt attribute to all images on your site and write a description for each of them. It’ll help attract organic traffic from image search.
- Use <H1> to create a title for a page, but only one for each. It should contain a keyword.
- Use Google Insights to check the download speed of your site and follow its instruction to improve it if necessary.
- Add keywords in the texts on your site, but make them look natural.
- Adapt the site for mobile devices.
4. Social media
It is a great channel to do marketing for your e-commerce website. A social media account can be regarded as a standalone website where you can tell people about your business and communicate with your audience.
The main task here is to create your own community, i.e. attract and gather people who love your brand and will promote it on their own. Here are some recommendations for working in social media:
- Find out which social media your audience prefers and create accounts there.
- Come up with themes for your content and create a publication plan so that you don’t have to think about it each time.
- Think of the mood of your posts. As a rule, authors use a less formal style in social media.
- Post something every day.
- Choose the time for important posts carefully. The best time is 11:00 on Mondays and Tuesdays.
- Each social media platform has its own features so you should either adapt your activity for each or focus on just one of them.
- Keep testing different content to understand what your audience likes most.
- Don’t forget to add links to your website or blog.
5. Content marketing
Be it a social media account, a blog or your main website, you need to fill it with useful content. When people discover something valuable or get an answer to their questions from your content, they get to like your site, and these relationships will eventually turn into sales.
Remember that content marketing is about creating and distributing useful materials that help people solve their problems, and it’s not about self-advertisement. It attracts high-quality traffic which has high chances of conversion.
So how do you start creating useful content?
- Decide what you are going to write about. Study your target audience to understand what problems they face and how you can solve them. You can find ideas by studying your competitors and from your customer support service.
- Create a content plan, a scheme of what and when you’re going to write.
- When writing articles focus on its content rather than the keywords you use. Search engines are more likely to rate the page higher if it looks natural.
- Make your texts easy to read. Use lists, short sentences and short paragraphs. Don’t try to sound smart. Make it clear and simple.
- Use photos and pictures to make articles more vivid. You can take them from free sources, buy them for money or make your own.
- Watch out for your spelling! Poor grammar always smells fishy.
As for your content distribution, you can post it on a corporate blog, in social media or your website.
6. Email marketing
One may wonder how can you do marketing for e-commerce websites with spamming? But remember, email marketing is not spam. First of all, because addressees have signed up for it. Second, because each letter must contain useful information instead of plain begging for purchase. Also, you should not send emails too often.
To get subscribers, you can ask visitors to leave their email addresses in exchange for something ‘tasty’ like access to a valuable article, a book or a discount.
Such emails usually contain:
- product reviews and discount offers as well as presentations of new products and promotions;
- instructions, reviews and tips to foster customer loyalty;
- news about what happened in your company this month.
Pay huge attention to the titles of your emails. It should be both informative and catchy to evoke the desire to open it and look at the content.
Speaking of content, break the text into blocks and provide each of them with a headline. Such letters are easier to read. Besides, this way people can quickly find the most interesting part. In most cases, subscribers read only titles. Don’t forget to add photos or pictures to letters as visual content is easier to perceive.
After a while you can check how many subscribers performed the desired action or unsubscribed. Remember, to avoid the latter, make your emails useful and simple to read. And don’t send them too often.
There are many other ways and tools to do marketing for an e-commerce website, but these should be considered as your basic promotion methods. Do not neglect them when creating a marketing strategy.
