17 Ecommerce Marketing Strategies to Follow In 2024
Ecommerce has revolutionised the entire shopping industry for users as well as business owners. It has helped many businesses to market their goods and reach out to their potential customers using various ecommerce marketing strategies. Ecommerce sales are predicted to generate a revenue of $100 billion by 2029.
Whether you’ve just set up your online store or are running a well-established eCommerce business, these 17 essential eCommerce marketing strategies, combined with insights from a eCommerce accelerator program that will help you explode your sales in 2024!
- August 21, 2024
- by Tanisha Sharma
Get Started with Ecommerce Marketing
Whether you’ve just dropped your toes in the UK’s eCommerce industry or reached a point of maintaining a flourishing business, staying up to date with the latest eCommerce marketing trends and strategies is extremely important. Partnering with a Ecommerce Agency in London can be a game-changer in navigating these trends effectively. The best eCommerce marketing strategies will not only help you shine among your competitors but will also help you generate higher sales and profits. With this in mind, we have compiled this article with some of the best tried-and-tested eCommerce marketing strategies and other crucial information to help you get started. So, without any further ado, let’s dive in!
What is Ecommerce Marketing?
Ecommerce marketing, as the name suggests, attracts customers to your website and encourages them to buy your products or services. But wait, eCommerce marketing doesn’t end here. It also aims to retain your customers and convince them to keep shopping from your store and stay loyal to your business.
It is important to note that eCommerce marketing is far beyond gaining high traffic volumes to a website. Instead, you need to work on your business and optimise the complete shopping experience so that the customers keep coming to your store repeatedly. This is where a eCommerce developer play a crucial role. By working on elements such as social media selling, building mobile-optimised applications, and improving the check-out experience, an eCommerce developer ensures that your online store meets the highest standards of usability and performance. In short, your overall goal should be to gain traction in the eCommerce market while providing your customers with a hassle-free and laid-back shopping experience.
Benefits of Ecommerce Marketing for Your Business
When we say that eCommerce marketing is a necessity more than an option, we mean it. If you still think you can ignore your eCommerce business’s marketing aspect and keep it up and running, then be aware! This can soon become a costly mistake that can affect your business’s overall performance.
On the other hand, when done correctly, eCommerce marketing can bring endless benefits and new business opportunities to your door. Below are some of the ways you can benefit your business from the right eCommerce marketing strategies:
Enjoy More Sales & Conversions
Perhaps the biggest reason online retailers keep searching for the best online marketing strategies is to increase sales and generate higher revenue. Online marketing strategies comprise the necessary business plans and techniques that can help you generate more profits and income.
Gain New Customers & Retain the Existing Ones
You can gain large traffic volumes by working on your SEO and other advertising techniques. But the truth is, only some people visiting your site become your customers. Converting your visitor into a loyal customer is an entirely different story. But don’t worry; this is where the right eCommerce marketing strategies can help you. Using them, you can gain new customers and keep them engaged and loyal to your brand. If you need to become more familiar with SEO and online advertising, you can get services from a digital marketing company to gain more customers.
Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment
Shopping cart abandonment is no less than a nightmare for eCommerce businesses. It badly impacts the eCommerce businesses’ overall performance and revenue generation process. According to statistics, nearly £244 billion in sales are lost annually in the UK. This means one thing – if you don’t try to minimise your shopping cart abandonment rate, you will eventually lose a lot of customers and business opportunities. Ecommerce marketing strategies help you gain the trust of your audience and provide them with a smooth shopping experience, which motivates them to purchase from you repeatedly.
Minimise Operational Cost
When you run an ecommerce store, you can use efficient management systems to automate your business processes, saving you time and operational costs. Ecommerce marketing strategies also include leveraging the best technology and techniques to maximise profits while avoiding additional operational charges.
Increase Brand Value
Using the right eCommerce marketing strategies can turn your business into a well-known and loved brand. Many techniques make transitioning from an eCommerce business to an international presence can make increase brand value easy and less friction stricken. Social media marketing and influencer marketing are two of the hottest eCommerce marketing strategies for 2024.
Gain Traction in Global Marketplaces
Every eCommerce business owner wants to grow and thrive in the global markets. However, this is more challenging than it sounds. Planning an international expansion requires facing many critical challenges, but this doesn’t mean it is impossible. Combining the right business and marketing strategies allows you to target global customers and scale your business at minimum cost and effort.
These are just a handful of ways eCommerce marketing can help your business. You can enjoy many more perks by utilising the right marketing strategies. So, let’s now discuss the top eCommerce business booster tips to try in 2024-25.
17 Essential Ecommerce Marketing Strategies to Try In 2024
Starting an online business will be pointless if you’re unaware of current marketing trends. But say no more; here is a list of 17 proof eCommerce marketing trends for you to try out:
Plan and Devise Upselling & Cross-Selling
Cross-sell and upsell are two of the significant eCommerce marketing strategies employed greatly by the
eCommerce business owners to boost their sales and revenue generation. The eCommerce giant Amason itself accepted that upselling and cross-selling make a whopping 35% of their overall revenue. Learn how to upsell your products with effective strategies to enhance your sales performance, continue reading to discover how these techniques can transform your revenue.
If you don’t know how these two types of “selling” techniques work, then here is an example:
Upselling is a selling strategy that involves selling a superior version of a product the customer is buying or planning to buy. The superior version increases the overall value of the product.
Cross-selling, on the other hand, is a strategy that involves selling a product related to the product a customer already owns or is planning to buy. Such products belong to a different category but are complementary, for example, a pair of batteries with a clock, matching socks with shoes, etc.
Learn more about How Upselling and Cross selling improves Online sales!
Build A Mobile Application and Direct Push Notifications
An easy-to-use and responsive mobile application is an excellent way to stay on top of your customer’s mind. The reason is simple: a customer may or may not visit a particular website for shopping, but he checks his phone umpteen times, looking for something, maybe notifications, social media posts, and so on.
A simple mobile application can make a considerable difference in your conversions, so if you still need to develop one for your business, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.
Whether your mobile app enhances the shopping experience with one-tap purchases or purchase recommendations, make sure it has push notifications features. They will help you gain your customers’ attention. The best part about push notifications is that they not only pop up on the other mobile apps your customers might be using but also appear on smart devices such as smartwatches, speakers, etc.
Optimise Your Site for Voice Search
We are moving into 2024, where almost everything has incorporated voice search. Be it Siri or Alexa, voice searches have become an integral part of our lives. In such a scenario, you must prioritise optimising your site for voice search.
According to stats, voice search is expected to account for $40 billion in retail sales in the UK by 2022. Keeping this fact in mind, don’t forget to optimise your ecommerce website if you want to match the pace of the fast-growing eCommerce market.
Below are some tips for improving your site’s voice search:
- Include low-competition long-tail keywords that emphasise the general talking sense of your customers.
- Include short and straightforward answers to the search queries.
- Avoid using complicated words that might confuse the voice assistant software.
- Ensure your page loading speed is appropriate; otherwise, Google won’t prioritise them.
Invest in Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is undoubtedly one of the most powerful eCommerce advertising methods because it allows you to target a specific audience through someone trusted and followed by them. Influencers on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc. have a good following. These followers unthinkingly follow and trust them.
They prefer purchasing the things or products recommended by their favourite influencer. These social media influencers significantly influence their followers’ purchase decisions.
Most business owners believe influencer marketing is only valid for selling/promoting lifestyle products. However, this is not true. There are influencers in almost every industry, so you can collaborate with them to sell just any product or service you want, from health & wellness products and apparel to cars and pets and whatnot. These people can help you expose your offerings to an established set of audiences.
Don’t Forget to Include User Generated Content (UGC)
Ecommerce provides customers with the ease and convenience of shopping online. However, you must recognise that many customers are still reluctant to shop online because of trust issues. This is especially true of new brands. And this is precisely where high-quality user-generated content becomes a powerful tool to entice online shoppers and gain their trust. It helps convince your shoppers that your products are being used and loved by many. The deal is that your customers may only sometimes listen to what you say, but they get influenced by the views of fellow customers.
How can you make UGC a powerful eCommerce advertising method? Here are some tips:
- Request your customers to share product reviews via pictures and videos of your products.
- Create hashtags for your products and ask your customers to use them while using your products.
- Encourage customers to tag your business or brand on social media platforms.
- Repost the positive comments of your shoppers. Meanwhile, eliminate the negative /fake comments.
- Organise a UGC competition and encourage your audience to participate.
Generating and featuring UGC content are two different sides of the same coin. While you can quickly create the content, featuring it smartly is what you need to work on. If your featured UGC comes out to be braggy, it will hurt your audience, and they might lose interest.
So, do it in a way so that it doesn’t look self-appreciating.
Wayfair, a popular eCommerce store in the UK, has adapted UGC by combining it with social media marketing. They’ve created their hashtag “WayfairAtHome” and encouraged customers to use it whenever they bring their product home. They have selected more than 1,000 photos from this hashtag only and added them to their website.
Leverage The Power of Social Media Marketing
Social media has become an irreplaceable part of today’s life. That’s why it is very hard to believe if someone says that they don’t use mainstream social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. With millions of social media users, it is the best area for conducting social media marketing campaigns.
The first step is to identify the right platform. This means you must choose a social media platform that most of your target customers use.
Establishing healthy customer relationships is the secret to success with social media marketing. But how do you do that? Creating your social media accounts and connecting with your followers by posting interesting stories, photos, and other content is straightforward.
Remember, social media is like a two-way street. So, care about the engagement before dropping new posts. Instead, prepare an exciting and product-relevant post, drop it, and use it to engage your customers. Reply to their comments, answer their queries, entertain them, solve their problems, etc.
Which brands are reaping the benefits of effective social media marketing? Then, head on to your Instagram handle and observe the social media strategies of Nike, H&M, Chanel, etc.
Discover Social Media for a Small Business
Re-target Your Customers
Shopping cart abandonment is like a slow poison to eCommerce. If not addressed, it can hurt your business’s overall performance. If you’re still ignoring your website’s shopping cart abandonment rate, you’re letting a huge chunk of revenue slip from your hands.
A shopper going through the check-out process and just about to make the payment suddenly abandons your cart (for any number of reasons). Now, the best thing you can do is nudge him with a well-designed shopping cart abandonment email sequence. And this is how you re-target your customers.
The best cart abandonment strategy is to use a personalised email sequence. Data shows that personalised abandoned cart emails significantly impact shoppers. Customers receiving such notifications are 2.4 times more likely to complete their purchase than those receiving regular emails.
Here is a great email sequence you can consider for reducing your online cart abandonment rate:
- 1-2 Hours After Abandonment — Remind them to finish their purchase before the product runs out of stock.
- 1 Day After Abandonment — Remind them to buy before the cart gets cancelled.
- 2 Days After Abandonment — Offer a social proof
- 4 Days After Abandonment — Offer an exclusive discount or limited period deals on the same products.
- 5 Days After Abandonment — Last chance to grab the deal.
This is just an example; you can become more creative here. The only goal is to engage with your targets and make them finish their purchase. Apart from following this sequence, it is essential to reduce the cart abandonment rate from increasing in the first place. You can do this by offering a smooth check-out experience to your shoppers. This includes providing them with their favourite payment options, quick check-out, deals and discounts, etc.
Add Optimised Product Videos to Your Website
The downside of online shopping is that you can’t feel or touch the product to check its quality before buying. This is one of the reasons why shoppers don’t easily trust new eCommerce businesses. However, you can remove this uncertainty by providing real product videos to your customers.
Product videos are a great eCommerce marketing strategy for enticing customers. They help customers better understand your products and make informed purchase decisions.
Therefore, record high-quality and optimised product videos and add them to your website. A good idea is to include a product review video by popular social media influencers. Apart from adding high-definition videos, you can consist of a short but straightforward FAQ section on your product page.
Work on Your Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
Let’s be crystal clear: If you’re ignoring your CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation), you’re hurting your revenue generation!
You can generate more profits and extract more revenue from the same traffic by boosting your conversion rates. You can reinvest this revenue to drive more traffic, increasing your conversion rate and profits. In short, CRO is like a multiplier for your earnings and income.
For instance, if your website gets around 10 million visitors and you have an average conversion rate of about 4% with a monthly income of £20 million. So, if you optimise and increase your conversion rate by 1%, your annual income will increase to £300 million, an impressive increment of £60 million.
Develop Powerful Personalised Email Marketing Strategies
You can make a massive difference in the performance of your business simply by launching a personalised ecommerce email marketing campaign. Statistically, over 91% of customers will likely purchase from brands that communicate using personalised messages.
The science behind this is simple: customers want to feel more familiar and comfortable with the companies they purchase. They prefer being treated like a partner or family, and personalised messages do the same for them. They make them feel like an essential part of the company they are shopping from. With this matter in light, work on your email marketing personalisation.
Here are some tips to do the same:
- Address your customers with their names or nicknames… Maybe!!
- Offer meaningful product recommendations based on their previous behaviour.
- Offer special discounts/deals/freebies.
- Offer occasional discounts on your customer’s special occasions, such as birthdays and wedding anniversaries.
- Use a well-segmented and customised email list from a trusted subscriber.
- Send messages according to their mood and shopping behaviour.
Allow Your Customers to Shop Directly from Instagram
Believe it or not, Instagram is the hottest eCommerce marketing strategy, helping thousands of brands and businesses amplify their sales and generate revenue.
It is the most used social media platform at this moment. Its visual mechanism is why you can use it as a powerful ecommerce advertising method. Because it emphasises photos and videos, you can use them to sell your products directly to the target audience.
Make the most of your social media marketing by allowing your customers to shop directly from Instagram. People might not always check out the websites and shopping apps, but they check their Instagram every 10 minutes. Thus, by making your Instagram shoppable, you can increase your chances of getting positive sales.
Target AR & VR Technologies
Everything around us has become more advanced and intelligent in the digital era. Thus, it is essential to target futuristic technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). Although the former lets you target a particular audience, the latter can work wonders for eCommerce marketing. Below are some examples of eCommerce businesses using Augmented Reality:
An online cosmetics store that allows you to upload or click your pictures to try different lipstick shades or foundations matching your skin tone. Sephora is an excellent example of an eCommerce business that is running this strategy.
Asos offers a “see my fit” feature, which allows customers to try out the outfits virtually before making the final purchase. It’s like a virtual changing room.
Learn more about Improving Your Ecommerce Business Sales
Engage Customers in Online Contests
If you’re struggling to get enough traffic to your online store, there is no better eCommerce advertising method than running an online contest. It helps bring new customers to your site and engage existing ones.
When you run a contest, make sure to choose a prise that is relevant to your target audience. Otherwise, you’ll deal with irrelevant users who participate only to win prises and have no interest in your products. But when you run the content correctly, you can experience a considerable difference in your sales.
Now, the question is, how do I run an online contest? Don’t worry—it’s simple!
Many plug-ins, websites, and software allow you to execute contests on your eCommerce websites. RafflePress is a giveaway builder that helps you create and launch online contests and giveaways.
You can also run giveaways on your social media pages, not just on websites. This is an excellent way of gaining new followers and turning them into customers.
Leverage Referral or Word-of-mouth (WOM) Marketing
Referral or Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most popular yet underrated eCommerce advertising methods. When done correctly, it is a powerful and cost-effective eCommerce strategy. The reason is clear—human beings are very social. We love sharing our shopping experiences and recommending new products to friends and family. We do so to avoid bad shopping experiences and support the best businesses and brands.
But keep one thing in mind: Your customers are going to talk about your products with their family and friends—sooner or later. So, it’s up to you: What do you want them to say about your brand or products?
It’s called referral marketing when you deliberately encourage people to share their positive responses about your products. Plan it correctly, and you’ll see a notable difference in your conversion rates and brand value. Not only that, but word-of-mouth marketing is also a powerful way to increase your online reputation.
Use Personalisation
Before we get to the point, here are a few stats:
- Personalisation facilitates repeat purchases for nearly 44% of customers.
- Lack of personalisation can generate 83% less response rates in marketing and sales campaigns.
- Almost 77% of consumers prefer shopping for brands that offer personalisation.
Need we say more…?
Be it personalised emails, check-out experience or personalised product selection, you can establish a great bond with your consumers by addressing them personally. This ecommerce strategy lets you make your customers more familiar and comfortable with your brand.
Showcase Case Studies
Many successful eCommerce businesses prefer adding impressive case studies to their websites. It allows you to showcase your capabilities to your target audience. Having a couple of impactful success stories of your customers using your products can lead to a much better response rate.
Leverage The Power of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing accounts for around 16% of total online orders, and over 81% of eCommerce businesses use it as their marketing strategy.
Trust us, affiliate marketing can be a game-changer for your business. Not only does it give a much-needed boost to your conversion rates, but it also improves the credibility of your brand. It is one of the best eCommerce strategies for budding eCommerce businesses.
BONUS – Have a Responsive Website
Finally, have a responsive website!
Many of you may argue that it is not an eCommerce marketing strategy, which is somewhat valid. However, with a well-optimised and responsive website, you can expect an ecommerce strategy to work and show results. So, before anything else, ensure your website is highly responsive and offers an excellent user experience.
Conclusion
And there you have it!!
These are the most lucrative eCommerce marketing strategies to increase sales and conversions in 2024. You can try to test all these points, so you can stay assured of their effectiveness. But we understand that implementing these eCommerce advertising techniques can be very challenging, especially if you’re a beginner. This is why we are always ready to lend you a helping hand. As a leading eCommerce agency, RVS Media has been revolutionising the performance of eCommerce businesses by implementing the most powerful marketing strategies. If you wish the same for your business, contact our team today!