Hey. Do you have an online store set up? Or you are trying to get more customers through eCommerce marketing?

Are you wondering what’s next? Should I just wait for customers to come in and check out your website? Or do you need to make some moves?

If so, what steps are we talking about?

Today we are talking about just that. The next step to your Ecommerce business is Ecommerce marketing. It is a vast area—so many possibilities. So many things can be done.

Woah. But you are thinking; I don’t know anything about marketing. How can I achieve this? Or you might have some idea, but you need further guidelines. Don’t worry. I will be covering a huge chunk of your problems.

In the end, I would give you a perfect understanding of that road map, and you can bring out your mix of marketing strategies contoured to your specific needs.

So, if you want to start earning from your Ecommerce website within the first month, just follow along and don’t miss a bit. Take everything and, maybe later, you can decide to filter out some of the moves that you think might not work out. You can only determine that when you have a complete understanding of what your Ecommerce business stands for – the product and the moto, who your customers are, who you are competing with, and what your goal is?

Without further ado, let’s dive right into Ecommerce marketing.

What is Ecommerce Marketing?

Ecommerce Marketing is simply a strategy for pulling attention, awareness, and action towards your online store. What are these actions? These are the actions of the customers themselves. This is where the traffic converts into paying customers.

Ideal Ecommerce Marketing achieves this and retains customers even after post-purchase.

Joel Anderson, CEO, Walmart, explains it best through his remark – “You can’t just open a website and expect people to flood in. If you want to succeed, you have to create your own traffic.”

Yes, it’s universal. Be it the US or Bangladesh.

So, how do you create traffic in the first place? Yes, you guessed it, Ecommerce Marketing. This will focus your product or service, online or local store, and your brand.

What comes next is the steps you need to take towards your marketing strategies. This is what you are here for. Now that we are on the same page let’s move on.

Steps to your Ecommerce Marketing

Move onto the real deal! The first necessity is to have a solid marketing plan. Now that you don’t have any idea of exactly who your customers are, and you can’t decide how you will target them? Where and when are you going to target them? What techniques are you going to apply to reach them and convert them from prospects to paying customers?

You can not just start without first answering these questions. You must know what marketing strategies you’re going to pull and try your best to stick to it. A sailor without a map goes nowhere. A business without a plan goes nowhere.

To make these decisions, you must take some action. You have to be on top of some of the most critical areas and research them thoroughly.

So, how do you go about doing e-commerce marketing in the first place?

Step 1: Choose Products that sell

Now you might be asking how about an online shop with a bunch of everything. Well, no! What are you even thinking? Throwing yourself towards everything is possibly the worst thing you would be doing now.

The smartest thing you can do now is to narrow down your vision as much as possible and concentrate on what you know best or what motivates you most. Then flank right or left, you are the boss.

The best way to narrow down, is to choose products that are marketable. This way you can show your customers why they should buy your product.

For instance, you can take lip gloss as an example. A lip gloss that is smudge proof and water resistant is more marketable than an average lip gloss.

The final part here is to prepare your product and make it great for marketing purposes. The marketing agenda will test your product in every way possible. If your product is flawed in the first place, even a great marketing plan will be useless. You will not have a sustainable customer following, and your Ecommerce business will crash.

So, if something is wrong with the quality of your product, you must address that and fix that first and foremost.

Step 2: Build your own brand

This is by far the most important step, and this step is non-replaceable! This is why I am going to elaborate this to a reasonable amount.

Your brand is basically how people perceive your business and how they differentiate your business from others.

How to create your brand?

Research your audience:

You have to look for your potential customers because each product concerns a particular market. Knowing your customers will help you with every step of your marketing. It will help you to find your customers and, most importantly, what your potential customers want.

It will help you create a healthy marketing plan, pick your sweet spot, and your campaign name.

More in-depth in the marketing plan section.

Pick your niche, focus, and mood:

You must, from the beginning, target to burn into the mind of the people surrounding you (starting from yourself, your friends who connect with you in social media and perhaps future unknown customers) that you are working your ass off to develop a new brand. You must quickly show them what you are working on.

Perhaps you are a foodie, and you are launching a fast food restaurant online. Or you are the tech guy, and you are launching your very own Gadget and electronic store online. Or you are the clothing or designer, and you are aiming to launch an online clothing store. Start making sounds even before launching the real thing. Start selling a small number of products to close-by relatives, classmates, or friends. Make your position be seen. Pick up the tone to sell your products. How are your products different?

Perhaps you are selling lower end but high-quality gadgets, or selling a particular clothing line of specific design and color.

Let me give you an example. There is a brand called Apparels in Bangladesh that has a section that sells t-shirts. This brand is my personal favorite as they sell t-shirts of a certain kind. Round neck t-shirts with high-quality thick cotton fabric. This makes the t-shirts look great and lines up with the shape of your body just perfectly. So, this is their niche, and the mood they set for their product is no tolerance for quality.

So, what are your niche and motto?

Find a Good Name and Domain name for your Ecommerce and then design your Logo

Imagine Apple not being called Apple or Nike not being Nike, imagine Amazon not being called Amazon. Becomes a different world, does it? A name can change how people look at it, and, like us, people ponder back and highly appreciate those names.

You need to come up with a proper name. So, what a fitting name?

• A name that relates to your product
• A name that gives a positive emotion
• A name that does not confuse you other companies – a unique name

Some context to take the concept from-

• Combine two names – pin + interest = Pinterest
• From an idea or content – Snapchat (the idea that snaps in chat will disappear)
• Reframe an event in your life – Apple
• Made up names – Pepsi
• Names from mythology or different beliefs – Nike
• Contracted names – Tumblr
• Use Acronyms – HBO, BMW

As you come up with a good name for your brand or business you can also decide on the domain name. The easiest way to find a domain name that is available takes help from the hosting company of your website.

If you choose to use BlueHost then they will provide you with a search field that will allow you to find your suitable domain name related to your ecommerce. There are also other sites where you can do this, such a GoDaddy, HostGater or domain.com. You can explore them too if you want to.

So you get the idea.

Then let’s move on to logo design.

These factors make Logos great-

• Unique and simple
• Relevant
• Memorable, Catchy and likable at first glance
• Scalable – understandable even at small sizes
• Timeless

You must also decide on a few things before designing a logo or hiring a designer to design a logo. You must decide on the color/ colors, and if there is any text, you must decide on the fonts. These go when choosing the name for your e-commerce when you place it on your website and also for any slogan or motto you might have.

Deciding on a slogan or trying to tell a brand story:

A catchy slogan or a touching, authentic story has the power to have a significant impact not only on your potential customers but also on the general people. These will become a medium for your business to expand and scale based on word of mouth.

Consider this. This can be part of your social media bio, a website about us page or business card tagline.

Telling a brand story can be more engaging than any slogan. I believe that almost everyone has a story to share. If you have one, why not share it with the world?

Some of the questions you can ask yourself are:

• What motivated you to start the business?
• What problems or issues your business wants to address?
• Why do you think you care most about your customers?
• Why should your customers trust you?
• What story behind your whole business journey should your customers know about?
• What is unique about your business?

With these questions answered, your brand story will be super appealing and engaging to your customers.

Step 3: Creating a marketing plan

Benjamin Franklin: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!”

Well, I bet you heard this. I can not stress the fact of how important a step this is because this is the most complicated step of the process. But what exactly is so difficult?

The hard truth is there is no static way to Ecommerce marketing. The situation is always changing, and you have to work harder and harder when it gets stormy.

Most Ecommerce businesses fail because they can not keep that mentality. As it becomes increasingly competitive, they fail to cope up. Unless you are grinding every day to get your online business to come to people’s attention, your business will stay in the land of the dead.

You can take the following steps to create a healthy marketing plan:

Seek advice from mentors

Find out everything you can know from people around you. Find personals who scaled businesses and ask them exactly how they did it.

Ask them the following questions.

• How and why did they get started?
• What marketing channels brought them a high return on investment in the short term and the long run?
• Who did they take help from? Did they seek advice from any agency or expert? If yes, who?
• What SaaS products were the most useful and practical?
• How did they structure their marketing plan?

When possible hire experts

This should be a no brainer. To extend your knowledge of marketing, this might be the most straightforward way. Hire a talented marketing adviser who can guide you through the whole process.

The whole process involves some really technical fields that you might have no idea about.

Example of such tasks:

• SEO (search engine optimization)
• Branding
• Product presentation
• Promotion
• Building up your ecommerce website

Set objectives and control policy

Your goals and objectives should be crystal clear and not murky. You have to openly be honest when you are reaching them and when you are not.

Some objectives or goals could be –

• The first month sales are going to x%
• Increase conversions by x%

Thus, your marketing plan should have qualitative and quantitative quality control and measurement.

Thus, get ready to define your control metrics using numbers.

• The number of visitors on your online shop
• The number of leads
• The percentage of sales

Research your audience and competitors more vigorously.

If you have not done this already to a great extent, it is time to close this chapter. Suppose you don’t know about your customers, who to target, where they are. Then how do you understand if you have done enough research or not?

If you can not define your customers, you have not completed your research—some defining elements.

• Age ranges
• Purchasing power
• Customer product expectations
• Customer geographical location
• Gender breakdown
• The season for your products – peak in demand and shortage in demand

You also have to know your competitors. After you have made a thorough assessment of your situation, it’s time to find out what your competition is doing.

• How are the products of your competitors?
• What is lacking in the product or service?
• What more can be added to the product to bring out the highest customer satisfaction?
• What is your competitor’s marketing plan?

Simply leave no stone unturned. Check and recheck your competitor’s online footprint thoroughly.

Pricing is related to marketing.

So, marketing will be nothing without the pricing. This is where all your research bears fruit. Now that you know your market and the competition, you should set the price accordingly. This will be an indicator of what your product is.

What do I mean by that? Let’s first answer this question. Does lower pricing lead to a better marketing strategy? The answer is not always. It depends on the type of market. How do you think food courts sell their high priced food products? This is because their pricing is an indicator of their excellent quality.

So, pricing can also be an indicator of your product’s high quality and stability. This can be a great branding and market domination strategy.

“Quality is the best marketing strategy.”

So, to ensure the quality, you must remember to make products that are great in the first place.

Understanding Ecommerce Marketing Funnel

Understanding Ecommerce funnel is the root of Ecommerce marketing. This tells you about how your customers actually interact with your online shop and when, where, and why you need to target them at what point of the funnel.

What is an Ecommerce funnel? Ecommerce funnel is the route that your customers take towards your product purchase. The process is:

• Awareness of the product presence – customers get to know about your product
• Interest – customers show interest in your product
• Desire – customers want your product
• Action – customers buy your product

The main concept is that the number of customers who buy your product is significantly less than the amount who knows about it.

So, what’s its importance? There are two significant advantages to understanding this concept. First, knowing the areas that lead to the highest conversions helps you optimize your marketing to target those areas. Second is the idea that marketing needs to reach a broad audience. This will result in a significant number of actions taken by customers to buy your product. This glorifies the need for Ecommerce marketing.

We usually have conversions from prospects to leads when customers provide their emails. So, how do you increase these conversions?

Start jotting down ideas and think about their pros and cons concerning your situation. Finally, start applying.

Some ideas could be that you can inject during different stages of your Ecommerce funnel –

• Hosting contests
• Free giveaways
• Hosting conferences
• Free educational pdfs
• Free content on your website with engaging CTAs
• Remarketing or Retargeting

These are some of the great ideas that have high conversions. Because all of these include something in it for the audiences. This is where the viewers are forced and have no way but to engage with your content. Let me give you a simple example of free giveaways.

Today, there is a massive Pubg mobile and pc fan following around the world. Youtubers are trying to use that to their advantage actively. Probably a broad audience of this article will be able to relate to this awesome game too. So, how is it connected to free giveaways?

When a YouTuber typically starts, their follower’s count is small. They try to attain more and more audiences through the idea of free UC giveaway to subscribers (which is a form of fake money in the game to buy new skins and designs for guns and clothes).

Usually, you have to buy UC with real cash. This can be a hassle for many. SO, free UC giveaways are one way to attract audiences, and this is beneficial for both the YouTuber and the prospective subscriber. This is the concept of mutual benefit.

So, you can also target your Ecommerce visitors with the same idea of mutual benefit, and this is something that works, without a doubt. Makes sense?

I would like to mention those actions that you need to focus on when you are taking steps to inject different lead magnets into your Ecommerce marketing funnel. These all require you to analyze and optimize some parts of your website. By optimizing, I mean to improve on SEO and user experience. They are:

• Optimize your main pages – this will set the first impression for your audience just right.
• Optimize your different forms – this will help you to get more leads out of visitors. These forms will help you obtain all of your lead contacts. One caution here is never to ask your visitors for any unnecessary data, which may be location info (until when it becomes necessary.
• Optimize your checkout pages – this is something that becomes important. You can see at the end of the funnel, and only a few people commit to your agenda. This will specifically attack this problem. Some ways include – including various payment options, use urgency, give time-limited discounts, do not include surprise charges, ask for payment details last, and so on. Let’s discuss the concept of cart abandonment next briefly. This concept will answer why optimizing your checkout pages is the most helpful thing (for your Ecommerce and you) that you can do with your time.

Concept of Cart Abandonment

Have you noticed HOW MANY PEOPLE just place their products in the cart and just let it lie there and leave? I bet you don’t want to do just that. You want them to go through the whole process of ordering your product. How can you get them to not leave just like that?

There are a few right things you can do to address this directly and a few things to address it indirectly. One way would be to send them polite emails as a reminder of their abandoned carts. So what are the others?

Let’s list them so you can spread them out individually.

• Build trust from the first page
• Have a clear indication of the progress.
• Have image thumbnail of the product at each stage
• Make navigation and cart placement effortless
• Have multiple payments options
• Very strong CTA like 100% free delivery or exchange offers
• Don’t bring surprise charges

These are some of the best methods to make sure your carts are always cared for – that is, until the end of the Ecommerce marketing funnel.

Refining your plan

Finally, it is essential to come and revisit your plans. Update them as required. See what is working and what is not. Be sure to use a significant part of your time to retweak, refine, and adapt your marketing plan accordingly.

Step 4: Executing Marketing Plans

Get Your Softwares and Technologies

There are so many tools out there. You have to ask yourselves a few questions and find out which means you might need.

Do you have the software or system to check your marketing effectiveness, check your KPI, or measure your ROI?

Some great Ecommerce platforms are –

• Shopify
• Magento
• WooCommerce
• Wix

Some great Ecommerce tools would be:

• Google analytics
• Online stores managing software – such as Netsuite
• Customer order management software – such as Brightpearl

Mostly for the starter most of these Ecommerce tools have integration alternatives from the Ecommerce platforms themselves. Some of the good ones you can get started for free. You can consider trying out some of the tools and software platforms.

On top of that, you have a content management system (WordPress, for example), email marketing tool, page builder software, or plugin, and probably a CRM (customer relationship management) tool.

If you have all of them powering you, you are massively geared for the whole journey. But do keep in mind that not all of them are necessarily. You can start with a bare minimum of a few selected tools such as WordPress, Shopify and one email marketing tool.

Also, don’t forget your equipements. Having a good camera or phone with a great camera and a laptop will be great to start with.

Product Promotion and Presentation

This is where you start officially making some noise about your products. Remember your product requirements? They must be useful to customers. So, these are products that work and provide solutions. These are products ready to be marketed. Remember that the products are your marketing.

You have done your customer research. The central concept that you need to address here is how the product communicates with your customers. You have to make a clear message of your product that benefits the customer and how it targets their pain areas, needs, or aspirations.

What components make a product?

Although the big differentiator is tangibility (product or service), these are factors that make up the characteristics of a product.

• Usefulness
• Innovation
• Convenience
• Value
• Quality
• Packaging
• Branding
• Design
• Technology
• Process
• Experience

What are some of the media through which we can reach our customers?

The method of promotion can be anything from VR, video, photo to showcasing the actual product. But these are the most used media for product promotion:

• Social Media
• Conferences
• Fairs
• Newspaper or Press Release sites, Tv channels
• Marketing stunts

Marketing Stunts

Let me just give you one example of this. This is one of my favorite marketing stunts ever made. This was done by Volvo trucks. The idea behind it was to show the precision and directional stability of Volvo Dynamic Steering – a technology that makes Volvo so easy to drive. This precision was shown by the help of Jean-Claud doing his famous split between two Volvo trucks as they reversed. Like Wow, right? The link to this is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7FIvfx5J10.

Promoting Your Physical Store

This only concerns you if you own a physical store in the first place.

Having a physical store has a massive advantage to your Ecommerce business. This will give you the best branding capabilities. You will gain more trust and validation.

And don’t forget to publicize and promote your local store wherever possible, maybe in your content writing, your website, or in your product promotions and presentations.

For more details look at the local marketing section near the end of this article.

Different Marketing Strategies, Channels or Tactics

This is the final point. Here you will be exposed explicitly to the different marketing methods, channels, or tactics. Whatever you call it.

Let’s jump in.

Social Media Marketing

Not every social media site will be your ideal platform. This is the first tip that you have to understand.

Mostly all Ecommerce products are highly visual. So, Instagram should be your top priority. Since this platform helps you post pictures with sharp product photography, this will be an excellent social media platform.

But let’s forget our friendly neighborhood platform Facebook. With all the tweaks of group making, page making, boosting, and advertising, Facebook is the best friend to Ecommerce business owners.

More on Facebook marketing here {{https://www.najmc.com/facebook-marketing/}}.

Social media marketing is also a great way to receive your feedback and reviews from your customers on the fly. But more on customer reviews later.

Conversational Marketing

If you want a new personalized marketing approach, conversational is the legit master for this. Conversational marketing involves texting. Yes, this can also be done through social media, but I want to focus on two methods. Live chat and chatbots.

With live chats and chatbots, you are capable of completing the first stages of ordering the product to the shipping details of the product. This is just unbelievable how powerful chatbots are. You can be super responsive and get things done very quickly, such as receiving orders and payments.

Content Marketing

This is one of the most vigorously used methods of marketing. Content writing does not only mean writing blog posts about your classy products. It also means making videos of your products to “show” how your product is an excellent addition to the world.

It also means keeping your image alt info, headers, titles, and other HTML stuff to be really SEO friendly.

This also means having keyword-driven FAQs on your website. Not only that, but do some guest blogging on the way. This is to make your “content” more SEO friendly again.

And this, my friend, is content marketing.

Festival And Discount Marketing

It is as the name suggests. Have you ever heard about Black Friday or how about Eid sales? Well, that’s festival marketing in one say.

You can sell your products at a cheaper rate at a particular time of the year and carry out festivals and discount marketing. More customers will be inclined to your products, and, on the way, you are getting big product promotions.

This can also be a technique that you might want to use when you want to clear out your inventory for the new season.

Customer Review Marketing

Social media can be a great way to get reviews. A company with a good amount of reviews will dominate anywhere. I believe reviews are the first thing that showcases your valor and your authenticity. Reviews are a must!!!

How to get customer reviews?

Ask for them

Don’t be afraid to ask for reviews from your customers. You can email them politely to provide them a review. You could add a survey or a simple question. The best way is to provide your customers with a good incentive. This ensures excellent quality and a proper review. It could be a discounted or free product to use.

Use social media

On social media, you usually don’t get reviews on a single page and beautifully handed out to you. You could add social listeners to your tool list. This way, you can listen for the reviews and understand where your products are moving toward. If there are any improvements needed, you can add them.

However, the first method is the best way to get customer reviews of good quality. These reviews can be showcased on your Ecommerce website or your social media page.

Email Marketing

Email marketing has been used for ever so long and has been every marketing campaign’s best tool. And believe me, it’s going nowhere.

Email marketing has its specific importance in the world of Ecommerce marketing. And the best thing about it is our capability to automate email marketing. So, we can follow up with our customers and send them our messages without spending our valuable minutes, if not hours.

Email marketing has two specific uses in Ecommerce marketing. Number one is when you want to follow up with your customer after buying the product. And number two is when you want to remind your customer about his or her abandoned cart.

There are fantastic tools to help you automate and help with your email marketing. You would find it relatively easy to get up and to run.

Ecommerce Marketing Via Influencers

Influencers are people with a large group of followers. He or she can be an Instagram figure with 1000 followers to a celebrity. These people have the power to motivate and influence people. That’s why they are called influencers.

Therefore, you could definitely sponsor an influencer and tell them to showcase your Ecommerce product or business or website. In this way, more people get to know about you. People who you might have never touched might know about your product or website. This will be great for your cause. More the visitors and traffic, the more the conversions and eventually the purchases of your product.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is like having an extension to your marketing team. This is simply people trying to sell your products to get commissions. One instance could be people telling you to click on their links to get discounted prices.

Unlike influencer marketing, affiliate marketing is normally done through the same old marketing maneuvers. This often includes paid adverts, content writing, or video marketing. All these generate more traffic and significantly increase purchases. Especially, four-fifths of the brands are using this type of marketing.

So, I believe it is a great strategy.

Joint Ventures And Partnerships

Many businesses have reached great successes through partnerships and joint ventures. Having a collective arsenal might be a great advantage, especially, surviving the first few stages of a startup Ecommerce business.

Your resources will be far more, more skill or talent pool. Plus, your ecommerce marketing will reach further horizons.

There are a few rough sides to this. You might have more struggles to finalize your decisions: more commotion but less value.

On the other hand, it is not easy to find partners, especially partners, that share a great mutual understanding.

However, if all the bad sides are not there in your partner, I believe it is an excellent maneuver to partner up and strengthen your Ecommerce business.

Local Marketing

This is, especially important for an Ecommerce business with an additional physical location.

Local marketing is a strategy to target audiences that live within a certain radius of the business. I believe with all the marketing strategies available, we forget about the most visible marketing strategy.

Some of the ways to local marketing are:

• Be active in your community
• Sponsor small events in your locality
• Attend events in your locality
• Set up booths at local events
• Give your local media something to talk about and maybe write to them
• Use posters and signs
• Place locality suggestion box for suggestions directly from your local people

Conclusion: Set Sail and move toward your specialized marketing strategy

It has been one hell of a journey. The journey was great from establishing your product and building your unique brand to Ecommerce market planning and implementation. I believe this article has all the nitty-gritty jargon to get you started with your Ecommerce business or take your existing one to greater heights.

But, as always, I have some helpful farewell words for you.

“Trust Your Instincts And Set Sail.”

It always pays to captain your ship. Take charge of everything from here and build on it. Put everything to test and find out your own formulae of ecommerce marketing strategies that work. Use your talents to understand to the full extent of what you are implementing.

Find out what works for you and what does not. Once you have made a marketing plan, review, and replan when necessary. Implement your own form of the control system to re-evaluate the plan. This way you can know where you went wrong and how you can replan your ecommerce marketing strategy.

Through all your hard work and realization, not only you might build up a steady sustainable Ecommerce business but develop the muscle for building bigger and better companies in the future.