12+ Ecommerce marketing strategies that actually work

Ecommerce is not something new to people, especially today. Back in 1994, when the first purchase was made online by Phil Brandenberger, nobody had thought it was going to be revolutionary in the coming years. Fast forward to today, many people prefer online shopping over traditional means of shopping.

Statistically speaking, 27.2 percentage of the world’s population love to buy online. So it is not false to say that e-commerce has become an essential part of everybody’s life.

From buying gadgets online to groceries, everybody is now dependent on eCommerce sites. This is the reason why people are shifting their brick-and-mortar stores and starting their own eCommerce stores instead. Business owners and brands know the power of scrolling and tapping, that’s the reason why they are doing everything possible to stand out in the market.

As there are 12 – 20 million online stores available, eCommerce store owners are required to do something out of the box to grab users attention and not to forget, Google’s frequently dropping new algorithm updates now and then, is making life even harder for stores that rely on blogs for traffic. Hence it has become harder today to rely on old marketing techniques.

To survive in this cutthroat competition, you need to have a top-notch eCommerce marketing strategy. So without any further ado, let’s answer the question of the hour, which is what is eCommerce marketing and how to do it in the right way with working examples.

What is Ecommerce Marketing?

Ecommerce marketing is the use of strategies and techniques to convert visitors into customers. In simple words, it’s a strategy/funnel to convert traffic into sales. The ultimate goal of having an online store is to make more sales. The more you sell, the more revenue it will generate. I know everybody wants their eCommerce stores to be successful.

Thus we can’t expect to sit around and wait for customers to land on our shop like a sleazeball. Also if we considered marketing decades ago, businesses used to advertise via a newspaper to draw foot traffic to their stores and arrange various discounts to convert visitors into customers.

Today, the online or digital world is no different, the only advantage you have as a seller is that you can leverage a plethora of options to enhance your sales. There are various eCommerce marketing strategies that you can adopt to boost your store revenue.

You can even combine paid and non-paid marketing techniques to see which combination attracts the most people. However, there is no such thing as a static marketing plan. In a desire to afford the maximum return on investment, your approach must be to develop marketing techniques that should have proven to work well. So below, I have listed down the eCommerce marketing strategies that you can give a try.

13 eCommerce Marketing Strategies

The sky’s the limit when it comes to employing eCommerce marketing strategies. I mean, if you have the budget and creative brain going behind your campaign, then there are ‘n’ number of techniques that you can adopt.

Instead of implementing every other tactic that you see, I would prefer to try an approach that is well tested and has worked well for multi-million dollar brands. So to help you out, I have jotted down the tested and tried eCommerce marketing strategies implemented by these successful brands.

1) Educating people about the product

Nothing allures customers more than transparency and honesty when brands try to be clear about their products. You might have heard about Allbirds, one of the rising sneaker brands. With so many fierce competitors like Nike, Puma, and Adidas, this brand has successfully set an impression on thousands of buyer’s minds.

The company is worth over a billion dollars, and if you’re thinking, what makes it unique? How did they able to build such a brand? Then it is all rational because they employed techniques that can stand them out from their competitors.

Allbirds is a brand from the very beginning that was focused on providing the best comfy sneakers at the lowest environmental cost. Their premiere shoes are made up of merino wool, and people were made aware of their production impact on the ecosystem.

If you look at their website, an entire page is dedicated to ‘Sustainable-practices‘.

The brand has been educating people about carbon footprints through various channels, not only that they have been very transparent with their operations and use of materials. To let people know that Allbirds is leaving a lesser carbon footprint on the planet.

In today’s clutter and nuisance where buyers are conscious about everything, customer education is a placard that draws the user’s attention. By educating your customer about your products and brand, you are building trust. Consumers trust brands that take the opportunity to improve their understanding of the items nature. 

Studies have found that consumers of today gravitate more towards eco-friendly brands than non-eco-friendly brands/products. Thus, people prefer to contribute towards such brands, which is the reason why Allbirds has been selling sneakers successfully.

Furthermore, customers like it when brands are transparent about anything. It’s not like you have to go above and beyond to educate your customers. You can actually create and distribute simple information where customers can easily find it online, such as on company websites, by email, or on social networks, just like Allbirds.

Educating consumers and bringing awareness about your product can prove to be a potential eCommerce campaign for brands.

2) Creating an unique customer experience — before and after buying the product 

Customers are everything to eCommerce store owners, and honestly, business owners try every possible thing to bring out a unique customer experience to their visitors. From customizing websites using landing page builders like ClickFunnels and SamCart to providing top-notch customer support, eCommerce store owners do everything.

Instead of giving a good customer experience to visitors, brands have also focused on providing a better customer experience even after selling the products. You might have heard about the razor brand called ‘Dollar Shave Club(DSC)‘. They work on a subscription business where they sell razor blades and other men’s grooming products every month.

Despite having giants like Gillette and Schicks in the market, the company was successful in becoming a billion-dollar brand. The thing which helps the DSC the most is their unique customer experience model, they have actually taken time to create the model which helps them build a community.

When you land at their store, visitors have a section that explains and simplifies everything for their potential consumers to understand how the subscription model works and how one can go about it.

Not only that, to make visitors engage even more on their website, there is an entire page dedicated to a quiz where consumers can answer random questions, which helps DSC to come up with a customized subscription package for each individual.

If you’re using platforms like Shopify (or) ClickFunnels to create landing pages for your store, you could actually build such customized quizzes within minutes by using their amazing features.

Anyways this tells you that DSC has invested a good amount of time and effort into providing a good customer experience before taking an order. But what about when someone becomes their monthly subscriber? Do they provide an exact/good customer experience even to their existing customers?

The answer is ‘yes’. Once you become their paying subscriber, there is a welcome email that confirms you have joined their club, and each month, along with your monthly blades, DSC does provide customized grooming suggestions according to your purchases.

Now and then, they keep their existing customers engaged by offering a DSC gift card worth X dollars for each referral and purchase. Thus through email marketing and regular order customizations, DSC had been able to provide a soothing customer experience even after buying from them.

Here the point to take is to make your customer experience a property for both potential buyers and existing buyers. Creating a community through such actions can make your store make money per one customer.

3) Doing crazy offline events

If you’re wondering how offline events can impact your online sales and also if you think how come organizing offline events is a good eCommerce marketing strategy, then read along.

There is no denying that social media has completely taken over the marketing world, and every marketing expert circles back to online social media campaigns when it comes to boosting sales. 

But is that the only approach left? If you think so, then you need to learn a lot from Sweetgreen marketing. The company is rising in the US, and it is one of the first salad chains that has earned billion dollars in revenue.

But how they were successful in grabbing people’s attention is a question. The answer is their marketing tactics.

You see, running an online store doesn’t imply that you can’t connect with your customers offline. After all, customers also want to know the company better, and they would love to be a part of it if they feel more involved and belonged. The thing which helped Sweetgreen a lot was their offline event named ‘Sweet Life Music Festival’. 

This offline event was planned to get exposure, and they succeeded in that. Each time when an event was hosted by Sweetgreen, professional singers like Kendrick Lamar and Weekend showed up, and it made hundreds of youngsters come to these events and get indulged in the music around them.

As you can expect, the events got viral among people, and people started showing up even more. Within the events, Sweetgreen was handing out its merchandise and was widely promoting itself. Soon with more and more events, Sweetgreen became a famous/familiar name.

If you’re wondering, hosting such an event will cost you thousands, and also, it’s lots of work to be done. Then you should know that it was not always like that for Sweetgreen in terms of hosting huge events. Initially, Sweetgreen had to host music events in their parking lots, which derived a lot of foot traffic, and eventually, it helped them boost their salad sales.

Like Sweetgreen, an Indian food delivery brand called ‘Zomato’ has been actively experimenting with offline events to attract more customers into their online sales.

Thus as an ordinary eCom store owner, you might not need to do something extraordinary. Instead, you could host/organize small events within your neighborhood and try to make your brand name familiar to people in the community.

4) Running industry-wide collaborations

Collaborations in this age of influencers have become a common marketing strategy for many brands, but despite saying that, I think few brands have felt this way back and took collaborations/influencing to the next level.

Here I want to talk about GymShark, the billion-dollar sportswear brand that built a cult-like following using this very particular strategy. In 2012, when GymShark was found, most of its business was based upon drop shipping, and unlike most dropshipping stores, GymShark didn’t intend to invest heavily into paid advertising.

Instead, they focused on targeting niche influencers who would be a perfect fit to promote their products. For them, the elite athletes were the right kind of brand ambassadors who could promote their brand. In 2010, GymShark joined hands with two popular fitness YouTubers, Lex Griffin and Chris Lavado, who were gaining hundreds of thousands of followers every day.

Remember back then, influencer marketing wasn’t even a term. GymShark started distributing free samples to these influencers to give themselves a chance of exposure and soon expanded this strategy to other platforms. To date, such influencer marketing and collaborations have become the crucial aspect of GymShark’s success.

Along the way, they were able to land collaboration deals with Whitney Simmons and Nikki Blackketter, which was instrumental in riding towards billion-dollar status. It was not just influencers promoting GymShark. Soon GymShark launched collections like Gymshark X Whitney Simmons to offer more exclusivity towards influencers and their target customers.

5) Don’t miss out on abandoned shopping carts

The very last thing you would want as an eCommerce store owner is the abandoned shopping carts experience in your store. Every store owner wants to reduce abandoned cart rates and there can be many reasons for cart abandonment, like customers getting distracted, prices are too high, and all. 

But when it comes to dealing with abandoned carts, often store owners think they can’t do anything about it. However that is not true, and you could actually make the most out of the abandoned shopping carts. The first thing you need to do is pay attention to why the customers are leaving the process in between. 

Is it because of long checkout details or payment concerns or something else? 

Accordingly, you need to rectify it. If your stores don’t offer seamless checkout due to limited payment options, then assure customers about payment safety by attaching a small message conveying about your secure platform.

Also, lengthy checkout processes are a bummer for everyone, and by displaying/analyzing where consumers are in the purchase process, you may alleviate any concerns when purchasing goods from you will take longer than the consumer is ready to commit. 

Not to forget the first-time buyers are always hard to get. They need a little more convincing when shopping from unfamiliar stores. So you can try sending out abandoned cart emails. It is the best approach to build a customer base and reduce abandoned shopping cart rates. 

And if you are still second-guessing the opportunity behind abandoned carts, then you need to learn from Levi’s abandoned cart emails. The company is nailing in abandoned cart emails by offering discounts for a limited duration to its customers. In a blink of an eye, they are changing customer minds. 

Honestly, by far, the best-abandoned cart emails are from Whisklylook.com. I mean, if you look at their email, it clearly jots down:-

• List of reasons why you should go through with the purchase. Also they come with relevant points to prove why someone should go with the purchase. To make it even easier, the email clearly describes what you would get once you complete the order.
• Including FAQ’s which lets readers know answers for any of their common queries
• Having a clean and straightforward email design which is easy to read and skim

After reading this email, the buyer who wasn’t sure whether or not to buy the product could jump on the checkout page to avail of the discount. Isn’t it a worth-a-try technique? I know, right!

Note: If you’re a Shopify user, you can easily create such abandoned cart emails within their dashboard using their pre-existing templates, you can also tweak those templates and design emails accordingly.

6) Experimenting with humour and storytelling

Adding humor to your brand and its promotion could be a little tricky and, at the same, could also prove to be successful. Usually, people connect to humor, and pulling off both humor and branding is not an easy task, though.

But one brand, especially Micheal Dubin, the CEO of Dollar Shave Company, surely knows how to connect humor and storytelling. If you are an early customer of DSC, you would have watched their video ‘Our Blades Are F***ing Great‘ with over 27 million views.