Ecommerce marketing strategy: 26 ways to grow

No matter the stage of your ecommerce store, you’re always looking for better ways to drive more sales. Let me ask you – how thorough is your marketing strategy? How well-planned?

In this article, we offer you a complete overview of how to plan a marketing strategy for an online store. Plus, we talk about the different marketing activities you could have based on the focus of your strategy – more customers, better retention, exponential referrals or larger orders.

Having an eCommerce marketing strategy gives you an edge over the competitors because it focuses your efforts and gets you where you want to be with your online store.

Get а competitive edge with our free ecommerce metrics guide

What to consider when creating an ecommerce marketing strategy

No matter if you are launching your online store now or have been running it for some time, before crafting a new marketing strategy, take inventory of what you have now.

• buyer personas – your target audience’s shopping habits, why they buy the specific product, their budget, information consumption and so on

• what your competitors are doing – ecommerce site design and CTAs; remarketing; social media brand image and engagement; promotions; partnerships; causes, associations, awards, certifications and affiliations; customer support and care
• current marketing assets – marketing materials; social media marketing; connections; proves of quality
• available budget and talent – what you can do in-house and what you can outsource

For more details, check our DTC brand buidling academy

Focus your marketing strategy

Now, let’s talk about what you want to achieve – what your goals are. Because you want to change something, right, to make your business more successful with a new action plan.

And “more successful” usually means more sales. 🙂

The simple formula that shows how more sales are achieved is this one:

So you can either increase the number of customers, the money they spend or the number of orders they place to get an overall uplift in revenue. You can do all 3, of course, or – more realistically – focus on one at a time.

That’s why we classified the strategic activities into 3 groups based on their purpose.

Marketing strategy to get more traffic

If your goal is simply to get more people to your online store, here are a few tactics to use.

Analyze your traffic sources and keep only the top-performing ones

Find which marketing channels bring you good, converting traffic and give them more attention and a larger budget. Digging deeper, you can optimize CPC spend by doing keyword research what works best for you.

Read our guide on Acquisition for more

Attract people not in buying mode

Content marketing is a great to get the attention of potential buyers who are not actuively looking for your products. It is a part of any marketing strategy and pays off over time.

It’s an elegant way of getting people in on your email list, establishing trust and authority, and becoming top-of-mind.

We’ve listed a few suggestions that drive traffic to online stores.

1. A choosing guide (example: types of sun protection, frames that fit particular face shapes)
2. General-interest articles on topics remotely related to your products – trends, research findings in the field, event coverage, etc. (such as What we saw at the S surf festival)
3. Visual styling tips, recipes, tutorials to expand the possible uses of your products.
4. Games, quizzes, contests and other engagement tools that keep website visitors thinking about your product category.

More Ideas for Ecommerce Inbound Marketing

The purpose of all such activities is to give value to potential customers without hard selling. If done right, inbound should position your brand strongly in the mind of the target group so that they turn to you for advice, help and inspiration. Your website should not be just a place for one-time purchases.

How to measure Inbound Marketing in ecommerce?

Shopping holidays

To make the most of shopping holidays is to gain as many new customers as possible. So better be very active promoting yourself.

These dates are pretty fixed so you can plan for the holiday promotions ahead of time.

Some marketing activities to start with so you’re prepared for the big sales are:

• Partner up with trending products/ get licenses
• Decide heaviest-promoted items & secure quantities
• Prepare marketing messaging and materials
• Get holiday content going early
• Implement wishlists
• Monitor prices of the competition
• Engage last year’s holiday shoppers

Events

Going outside, meeting people and presenting your brand in a context different from a website is an awesome way to gain additional brand awareness and traffic.

Events that will help you get new customers:

• a stall at a market/ fair/ industry show/ pop-up shops
• organized consultations/ meetups/ lectures
• other organized events your audience attends – music festivals, sports activities, lifestyle clubs, etc.

All those should relate to the target persona’s past time activities and interests. Working with their media – magazines, blogs, online series (Youtube influencers) is also great.

Fun idea: organizing your own event is even cooler. It just has to cater to the audience’s interests without making it all about your products.

Influencers that can help

Whi are the most influential people in your niche – the ones your audience looks up to? To be able to update your marketing strategy any time, you can keep a list influencers with their contact. Also, take note of the kind of collaboration they might be open to.

Ideas for collaborations with influencers:

• product endorsement on social media
• product endorsement at an event
• photo session with products
• joint event or effort (like charity)
• content sharing & engagement

NEW in Metrilo: Influencer Marketing Performance reporting

Marketing strategy for more repeat orders from existing customers

While getting new customers is good, another way of increasing your revenue is to get your existing customers to order more often and stay with you longer.

The tactics below aim to engage customers, keep them thinking about your products and eventually solicit a new order.

Loyal customer specials

Exclusive promos are a good way to show appreciation of returning customers over newbies. Early-bird offers, sneak peaks into new collections, discounts on partner events are all ways to make people feel special, a part of a cool club.

Loyalty season after season

Use content to keep them hooked throughout the year with maintenance and usage tips (How to take care of sunglasses during the winter?). You can write about your supply chain and your brand values. Or introduce the makers of the product – experts, artisans, or rebels – in videos.

Related: Customer lifecycle emails

Engage in brand development

People love to share their opinion and you can expect huge engagement when you ask for new feature/ varieties ideas. This doubles as feedback and market research. It’s a cheap way to give them what they want while building excitement about the brand.

“Recycle” events

These are gaining popularity because people sometimes want to buy a newer item but still have the old one that’s working. Make it easy for your customers and –more importantly – lock their money by accepting the old items and giving a discount coupon in exchange. Works for all kinds of products – kitchenware, clothes, toys, gear, etc.

Remarketing

Based on their order and browsing history, you can offer them new products from a line they already bought. When following their taste and actions, your offers will be on point and as a result – much better accepted.

Read our guide on Retention Marketing in Ecommerce

User-generated content and contests

You can hold a contest for customer-generated content on Facebook and Instagram. Encourage them to post pictures with your products and promote the brand to their network for likes and prizes. People love the vanity boost to be a trend-setter and you get referrals! Plus, they need to buy your newest product to enter 😉

Marketing strategy for increasing order value

In order to make people spend more in one sitting, you can either make them get more items or buy the more pricey ones.

Since price is linked to quality, you should boost your brand image to justify higher prices:

• get featured in a (online) magazine/ lifestyle blog/ YouTube influencer video
• support a cause
• gain certification for quality/ materials/ expertise or know how to how to patent a product with InventHelp for your proprietary product

Or if you just want fuller baskets,

• upsell and cross-sell with customer behavior in mind
• offer the best bundles with the help of product analysis
• have a free shipping minimum order threshold (the oldest trick in the book)
• send small gifts with orders above a certain value

Measure success of the marketing strategy

It’s all good but how do you know these are working?

Since we’re data geeks, we talk in KPIs. Implementing a structured marketing strategy should give you the following impact:

For best results and future tracking of your performance, we recommend using an eCommercerce analytics tool that shows customer behavior, trends and measures KPIs. Metrilo does all that and our eCommerce experts are ready to show you how.

To wrap up

Hope this outline of a marketing strategy helps you map out the actions you need to take to get to your goals. What we like about the planning part is that breaking down bigger goals into smaller actionable steps makes them look so much possible to achieve.

We’re excited to hear about your marketing plan! How do you do it? How specific do you get? Share your experience in the comments.