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Tips & Guides — 06 May 2022

eCommerce Marketing
Guide

eCommerce Marketing: Major Strategies & Technologies

eCommerce store applies an arsenal of different tactics, tools, and strategies in pursuit of potential customers and sales. It never hurts to get a little bit of refreshing eСommerce marketing knowledge.

With the progress of internet technologies and communications, eCommerce prosperity keeps growing. More and more online stores and small businesses are appearing, making the competition even harder each day. Therefore, it’s essential to find ways to distinguish yourself from your competitors and find unique methods to attract and retain customers.

Let’s define what eCommerce marketing is and highlight its main strategies with some marketing tips along the way. We’ll then pick out the tools and technologies you must-have to rapidly grow your eCommerce business.

What is eCommerce Marketing

eCommerce marketing is an activity directed towards spreading awareness of the eCommerce website and increasing sales of its products or services. eCommerce marketers use various traffic channels to attract visitors and induce them to make a purchase.

eCommerce Marketing Strategies

Marketing strategies directly depend on the channels used for promotion and lead generation. Let’s take a closer look at the main areas of eСommerce marketing.

ecommerce_marketing_strategies

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) aims to achieve high organic ranking in the search engine results pages (SERP). There are many different techniques to help your online store rank higher up on search engines and attract more website visitors. Anyway, mostly SEO relies on Google’s ranking algorithm to optimize content.

In addition to the technical eCommerce site settings such as pages load time and structure, SEO relies quite heavily on content management. When you are selling products online, you surely need product reviews and videos to attract buyers. But you need to use particular keywords to make your content work and bring organic traffic to your website. At the same time, do not forget about content marketing so that your product pages indeed inform about your eCommerce business and generate product sales.

Paid Advertising

Besides SEO, you can get potential buyers to see your store at the top of search engines with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. PPC ensures that the person who entered the search term corresponding to your campaign will see your ad. Efficiency is evident because you make payments only if the user clicks on the ad link.

In addition to search engines, the paid advertisement for eCommerce marketing must include advertising campaigns at online shopping services such as Google Shopping, different social media platforms, and target each stage of the customer’s journey. All the paid marketing costs will ultimately benefit in the long term if you did proper keyword research.

Social Media Marketing

One of the biggest benefits of social media marketing (SMM) for eСommerce is the ability to present products visually and very catchy. The target audience already receives content that suits them when they are scrolling through the feeds, so product ads aren’t usually perceived as something inappropriate.

Not all social media are ideal for eCommerce, because the main task here is usually to show products in all their glory. Social media platforms that deal with photography and video are better suited for eCommerce marketing than, for instance, blogging. Plus, the rise of services like Instagram Shopping will have a positive effect on your marketing efforts in the future.

Email Marketing

Email marketing has always played an important role in eCommerce marketing, but this channel retains its significance in modern times thanks to marketing automation. It is noteworthy that you can stimulate both new buyers and loyal customers who have already made purchases before by using email campaigns wisely.

eCommerce marketer can use a system of discounts for new users who register in an online store. Then, if the customer abandons a shopping cart with the product, he can be politely reminded about the abandoned cart. During the seasonal holidays, an email list with discounts is in good demand. The open rate and conversion rate from promotional emails are pretty high. And this is far from the whole list of marketing tactics and funnels available for eCommerce businesses using email channel.

Partner Marketing

Behind the curtain of digital marketing, there is a hidden layer of partnerships and marketing collaborations. More precisely, everyone knows about this direction in marketing, but in general, this subject isn’t highlighted in articles and other materials like affiliate marketing or influencer marketing. However, all referral programs and any kind of partnership within marketing campaigns are just parts of a larger picture – partner marketing.

Partner marketing can suit different eCommerce business directions and appear in such forms as customer referrals and joint marketing. To create a continuously evolving customer base, you can use customer referrals. It’s easy when the buyer refers his friends to the shop, and a one-time specific code can be generated for that client. 

Of course, affiliate marketing still remains a fundamental tool for eCommerce promotional campaigns. It’s like having an army of marketers working to promote your eCommerce business and the products you supply. All you have to do is create a fair affiliate program and attract professional affiliates and publishers.

The sufficient work of partnership marketing, for its part, is ensured by the automation and compatibility of different technologies. The partnership marketing software of your choice should be accountable for these tasks.

What eCommerce Partner Marketing Platform Does?

Even if you have one partner in your affiliate program, you need to track clicks and conversions that this partner generates. But what if you have hundreds or thousands of affiliates? You would need a proven technology to track and manage this data flow so you can analyze and improve marketing performance.

The central part of the affiliate software work is definitely tracking all the event-level data that leads to sales. But this is far from the full activity range that a good partner marketing solution for eCommerce should accomplish. Thus, while choosing a partner marketing platform, make sure it provides you with the following features and services:

  • Billing and Accounting. It will help you generate invoices and make payouts to your affiliates while staying compliant with any tax legislation worldwide.
  • Fraud Prevention. Advertisers all over the world lose millions of dollars to fraud and fraudulent activities. Thus your partner marketing platform should provide tools to efficiently detect and block such kind of actions. Click-level fraud prevention, traffic quality regulation, multiple other features and integrations are the must for any eCommerce marketing plan.
  • Expanding Partner Network. The right marketing platform will help you find and recruit publishers, influencers, affiliates, and establish lucrative partnerships.
  • Multiproduct Order Tracking will help you easily update the catalog with new products.
  • Clickless Tracking is vital if you want to track sales using promo codes.
  • Integrations with eCommerce platforms. Everyone in the industry uses some of the eCommerce platforms to manage the business and own online stores. It could be Shopify or Magento, for example. So you also want a marketing solution that already conducted integrations with the most demanded eCommerce platforms.

As a last resort, it’s absolutely imperative that the platform has an open API to implement any integrations you need to keep the workflow. Affise partner marketing platform has just that and many more.

Must-have Technologies for eCommerce Business

As we said, it’s crucial for eCommerce that the marketing solution allows quick integration with the tools vital for the industry. This section will discuss in detail what essential technologies are included and already available in the Affise Marketplace.

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  • Salesforce is the world’s number one customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Affise provides ready-made integration with the best-in-class service to automate operational workflows of eCommerce businesses.
  • Affise DataFusion is a real-time event delivery service that allows you to transfer all the data from Affise to your Amazon WS, Google Cloud, or Alibaba Cloud accounts and analyze it in your BI tools in real-time. It will help you to build a robust data-driven advertising strategy.
  • The best-in-class services Billoid & Tipalti provide you with substantial time savings by automating your billing process, giving you full control over your cash flow while keeping you stay compliant with worldwide tax legislation. With Affise, you can get billing and accounting within one partner marketing platform.
  • Even though Affise has robust fraud prevention in-house tools, your eCommerce marketing campaign can get even more with integrated services such as FraudShield, Forensiq, and FraudScore. These three are the leading ad fraud detection and prevention solutions that enable you to score fraud activity in real-time and protect your campaigns from fraudulent traffic.

Conclusion

As you can see, the eCommerce vertical is immense. Unlike other industries, there are many marketing channels to conquer to move your brand awareness forward, attract new customers, and grow your revenue. The key to successful execution is to build a marketing strategy that automates routine tasks so that online store owners and eCommerce marketers can focus on growing their business.

We give partner marketing a particular preference because it has so much potential for eCommerce business expansion, and we provide the universal tech solution for these purposes.

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Affise Academy

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Affise Academy

Affise is a partner marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to scale via all possible performance marketing channels. Synergy of technology and our long standing experience lets you expand your partnerships, automate every step of the campaign lifecycle and make data-driven decisions.

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