High-level guide to marketing for eCommerce

Running ecommerce companies takes a lot of effort! You need to source and develop products and work a lot with digital marketing. You need to be able to handle logistics and warehouses, and in addition to that, seriously consider what type of technology is best suited for different parts of your business. Here we’re offering some valuable tips on how to get your marketing operation as smooth as possible.

Warm up by reading this post: eCommerce trends for digital marketing in 2019.

Main challenges for eCommerce businesses today

It’s a challenging job, running an ecommerce today, and there are two major challenges these companies face. First, is the challenge that ecommerce and retail meet through profit margins %. It’s more and more crowded today, why profitability is the biggest challenge. See the picture below for the study on profitability for retail, and ecommerce companies today from Svensk Handel. Download the full report from Svensk Handel.

The second one is the fact that in the future, technology will move at a much faster pace.  

If you study today’s customers you see that they generally possess three features. First of all, they’re curious. They turn to Google Search more frequently and are intensely interested in the smallest things, like which product to buy. For instance, in the last two years alone, mobile searches went up 239% for “best travel accessories” and 208% for “best face powder”. The customers also want to know what to shop for, and they tend to look for complete shopping lists these days.

Secondly, they’re more demanding, always on the hunt for relevant and personalized experiences. The 'near me' searches have grown over 4.5X on Google search and over 6X on Google Maps on mobile in the last two years in EMEA. The 'where to buy' searches have increased by over 250% on mobile in the last two years. Find out what trends are moving your segment of the market with the free tool Google Trend.                            

Thirdly, today’s consumers are much more impatient. If a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load, one out of two visits is abandoned. In short, they want everything – and they want it now. 'Open now' searches have grown over 6X on mobile in the past two years. 'Same day delivery' searches have grown by over 200% on mobile at the same time.

Since most ecommerce businesses want to increase revenue, we’ll provide you with three things we believe every ecommerce should work towards.

Whilst talking about revenue, check out this post: 3 offers that will create more ROI for your eCommerce.

1 Increasing retention rate

How triggered email marketing increases the order value

A great way of increasing the retention rate is to implement trigger email marketing. For a long time, global marketers have rated email marketing as the most effective digital marketing tactic, which also delivers the best ROI.

It’s an important factor in making an email campaign shine. The cost per acquisition is very low, which means it’s very cheap to acquire and retain customers through email marketing. You basically create personalized emails with some predefined triggers and send them out to customers to hopefully get a response or just keep them connected with your brand.

Sending smart recommendations through email is a great way to reach out to your customers. Let’s say a customer has bought a TV from you, then you can send out recommendations for HDMI cables and TV wall mounts to them.

Below are some popular methods you can use for this.

How average order value can increase through various forms of up-selling.

Keep customers coming back

Three channels for keeping your customers coming back

• Email / SMS to existing customers
• Loyalty programs
• Re-marketing based on specific behavior on site 

How triggered email marketing can create loyal customers.

It’s hard to get customers to buy from you considering there are a ton of available options out there today, regardless of what you are selling. What you really want to invest your time and energy on is to transform a one-time customer into a returning customer.

Just as mentioned before, when it comes to increasing order value, creating returning customers works in the same way. Re-marketing is your best friend. One way to go about it is to use strategic email marketing to get your customers to return. Some options are listed in the pictures below.

Some examples of how to increase retention rate

Become a Google Ads remarketing pro: How to use remarketing in Google Ads.

This is how the combination of Human + AI allows digital marketers to grow their eCommerce stores.

You can watch the entire webinar here to get more updates.

Focus on your most valuable customers (MVC)  

As shown in this Bane marketing survey from 2017, the top area to invest in right now is your customers. First, you need to find your most valuable customers, then you need to find out which channels your most prominent customers are shopping in, and target them there.

For instance, customers might not be on Facebook but spend a lot of time on Instagram. This is where you should put your foremost attention - and budget. Make sure to redistribute marketing to channels where your best customers are. Also, sync your best customers to Facebook Ads and Google Ads.

Are you segmenting your email campaigns and send specific offers to your top 20% customers? If you know that your most valuable customer stands for 30% of the revenue coming from Google Ads - you can target them.

If you look at the evaluation below you see that the women age group 25 to 34 accounts for 315K SEK of revenue and that their average order value is 316 SEK compared to the average 290 SEK. These are valuable insights for your business that you also can use in other channels than Google Ads.

Some valuable Google shopping tips: 6 Google shopping tips for your eCommerce.  

Marketing for the future

These are some of the ways you can enhance the performance of your eCommerce. To conclude, here are three smart marketing practices for the road -

• Find out which pieces of an integrated platform are missing by auditing the technology infrastructure. 
• Integrate different data sources into a single hub, and then organize data by brand, category, and company division. 
• Begin with marketing and implement the chosen audience plus message timing, frequency, and sequencing to get better results.

We’ve written a lot about eCommerce. Here are two posts that might be of interest to you.

The difference between the most common eCommerce platforms

Pricing strategy for eCommerce and Retail companies