eCommerce marketing strategies
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8 eCommerce Marketing Strategies

There are so many eCommerce marketing strategies that it can be hard to pick the right ones to drive your business forward. This article will break down the most promising marketing channels. No matter how big or small your company is, we’ve got you covered.

The Top 8 eCommerce Marketing Strategies

There’s a long list of marketing strategies that work well for eCommerce businesses, but these are the most promising options:

  1. Paid Social
  2. Google Shopping Ads
  3. Influencer Marketing
  4. Email Retargeting
  5. Forum Marketing
  6. Organic Social
  7. Amazon Ads
  8. Viral Marketing

Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with some of these marketing channels. We’ll explain them below. We’ll also talk about when to use which strategies (some will work better in the early stages of your business, while others are more effective for established stores).

Your Top 4 Go-To eCommerce Marketing Channels

Before we dive into which strategies will work best for your store depending on what stage of growth it’s in, let’s talk about the three channels that you should try first no matter what stage your business is in:

  1. Paid Social
  2. Google Shopping Ads
  3. Influencer Marketing
  4. Email Retargeting

These channels are highly effective and, if you don’t have a lot of time to spend planning out an exhaustive strategy, you should start here.

Paid Social

Paid social makes it easy to target potential buyers with visually compelling ads. The key is to find out which networks your target market is on and test them and find out which ones work for you.

People tend to remember the tried-and-true options (e.g., Instagram) and the new up-and-comers (e.g., TikTok) while forgetting some of the in-betweens. Don’t do that! Many other platforms, such as Snapchat and Pinterest, offer cost-effective ways to reach your audience.

Google Shopping Ads

Google Shopping Ads can be displayed across Google Search, the Google Display Network, YouTube, and Gmail to generate brand awareness and capture demand. It takes some time to set up and optimize an effective campaign, but there’s no better way to reach shoppers when they’re ready to buy.  

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is when you leverage the popularity and audience of someone on social media to spread the word about your products or brand. It’s effective for eCommerce stores throughout their lifecycles because there are influencers for every budget.

If you’re just getting started, you can partner with someone who’s just beginning to grow their audience. In fact, you may even identify good partners who aren’t actively trying to become influencers. If they like your company, they may be willing to promote your brand in exchange for free products.

As your company and budget grow, you can target larger, more influential profiles.

Email Retargeting

Email retargeting is like display ad retargeting, but instead of serving ads, you send emails. Of course, you don’t have an email address for every visitor who visits your store, so email retargeting relies on website visitor identification to collect those emails for as little as $0.24 per email.

You can use email retargeting for catalog marketing, abandoned cart recovery, and more.

Two Marketing Strategies for New Stores

If your business is new or you haven’t started yet, you might need to rely on free marketing channels. This is especially true if you don’t have any products for sale yet. In that case, you won’t be able to make your money back on your ad spend in the short term.

Here are two low-cost options.

Forum Marketing

Go to the places where people in your target audience already hang out. There are tons of communities, such as Subreddits, Facebook Groups, and Slack channels, where you can easily find potential customers without spending a penny.

Of course, it’s important not to be spammy or you’ll lose the opportunity to participate. Focusing on adding value first.

Organic Social

Organic social shares many of the same benefits as its paid counterpart. It takes time to build up an audience, but it’s free. And if you identify new networks before they’re saturated you can find opportunities to reach more people than you could on an established social network.

Two Marketing Strategies for Established Stores

As your business grows, you can begin testing channels that didn’t make sense before. Here are the two we’d recommend trying first.

Amazon Ads

 When someone is searching for a product, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll end up on Amazon. That’s why it was the most-visited eCommerce site in 2022. And many Amazon shoppers rely on Amazon Ads to find what they’re looking for. A 2021 survey found that 31 percent of shoppers find ads on Amazon helpful. Over 11 percent said the ads “aligned with their shopping habits.”

Viral Marketing

Once you’re making sales, you should begin to find ways to build virality into your business wherever you can. That will increase word-of-mouth and electronic word-of-mouth sales. Some ways to do this include:

  1. Offer referrals that give the shopper and one of their friends a discount.
  2. Establish a milestone referral program that offers different incentives as a shopper refers more and more of their network.

Keep Testing to Find the Ideal eCommerce Marketing Strategy

The seven strategies above are only the beginning. As you discover which ones work for your eCommerce business, you can scale effective channels. Then, you can reallocate the budget from failed channels to test new channels.