Top Advertising Strategies for Your Online eCommerce Store

 

The revenue from the electronic commerce sector is projected to reach $27.15 trillion by 2027. The intense growth in the eCommerce industry is leading to the emergence of new players. If you want your eCommerce business to sustain for a long time, you will have to resort to advertisement strategies. 

 

But before we start talking about how to advertise your eCommerce business, we will tell you more about what is eCommerce.  

 

What Is eCommerce?

 

The buying and selling of goods using the internet can be classified as eCommerce or electronic commerce. Apart from the physical sale of products online, you can include any commercial transaction via the internet under the definition of eCommerce. ECommerce has come a long way since its inception in 1994 with its first online sale. 

 

An integral part of understanding what is eCommerce is knowing that it has made it easier to discover and buy products via online marketplaces and retailers. Therefore, eCommerce has benefited independent freelancers, large corporations, and small and medium businesses. In addition, it has enabled retailers to reach new heights of scalability that was impossible with traditional offline retail. 

 

Let's learn about some of the popular eCommerce in business models:

 

• Business to Consumer

 

This electronic commerce model refers to the sale of products and services by a business to consumers. For example, when you order a pair of jeans from your favorite shopping website. 

 

• Business to Business

 

It refers to one business selling a product or service to another business. For instance, software-as-a-service businesses sell their products to other businesses.

 

• Consumer to Consumer

 

This type of eCommerce model refers to one consumer selling their products or services to another. For instance, people enlist their old furniture on a platform for others to buy.

 

• Consumer to Business

 

It occurs when a consumer sells their products or services to a business. For instance, photographers license their images for a business to use. 

 

What Is eCommerce Advertising?

 

Incorporating eCommerce in business is extremely crucial for increasing revenue. But business owners also need to promote their eCommerce services to make their websites more visible and popular among customers. After understanding eCommerce, you should learn some tips to develop advertising strategies.

 

• Set Goals and Objectives

 

You must clearly define your goals and strategies before building eCommerce advertising strategies. Of course, your ultimate goal is to increase revenue generation and profits. 
However, you must have specific and time-bound objectives in mind while formulating your strategy. For instance, you can aim to enhance your conversion rate by 10% within the next six months.

 

• Understand Your Target Audience

 

Identifying and understanding your target audience is crucial for advertisement strategies to be relevant. Once you figure out your target audience, you will also be able to find the most appropriate channels for your advertisements. It is also possible for an eCommerce business model to have multiple target audience segments.  

 

If you have multiple target audience segments, you can create different buyer personas for each one of them. It will ensure that you can better understand your target audiences. 

 

• Map the Customer Journey

 

Once you understand what is eCommerce, you will realize that mapping the customer journey is crucial for growing your business. It will help you see your business from the eyes of your customers and understand different touch points. It ensures that you can optimize every touch point and provide customers with everything they need.    

 

Top Strategies for Advertising Your eCommerce Business

 

If you want to incorporate eCommerce in business, you will need a stable platform where customers can discover and purchase your products. But after you build successful eCommerce websites, you will have to keep promoting them to survive in the market with cutthroat competition. Learn about the top eCommerce advertising strategies to generate higher profit and revenue from your online business.      

 

1.Concentrate on Your SEO Strategy

 

 

SEO is a sustainable method to grow your eCommerce business amidst the competition. Around 44% of users begin their online shopping with a search engine. Therefore, it makes sense to make your eCommerce website rank on top of search engines and make it more visible to users. When you understand what is eCommerce, you should focus on implementing the following SEO tactics on your website:

 

• Develop High-Quality Content

 

You must focus on creating high-quality content to enhance the rankings of your website. You need to ensure that your website's content matches your target audience's search intent. Integrate as many keywords as possible and make your content interesting. 

 

• Add High-Quality Links

 

Search engines tend to rank websites on top that have high-quality links. Therefore, remember to add relevant and trustworthy external and internal links to your website. 

 

• Enhance Mobile-Friendliness

 

If you want to build successful eCommerce websites, you will have to make them mobile-friendly. An intuitive and responsive website that is easy to navigate, even on small screens, will rank higher on top of search results. It is particularly useful for B2C models as most consumers shop from their mobile phones.  

 

• Improve Website Structure and Navigability

 

Every eCommerce platform for startups or large enterprises is different. But your website needs to be well-organized to keep your target audience hooked. Remember that if your website is cluttered or difficult to navigate, visitors will leave it within a few seconds. 

 

Improving your website design will help you with SEO and user experience. For example, a major method of improving website navigability is breadcrumbs. Breadcrumb navigation enables users to understand where they are inside a website without looking at the URL.

 

• Secure Your Website

Every eCommerce store owner collects personal information from customers. Therefore, customers want their information to remain safe and encrypted with you. If users don't feel secure on your website, they will leave it. 

 

Securing your store with HTTPS is important for winning the trust of customers. But it is also crucial as Google views HTTPS as a factor for determining the ranking of your website. 

 

• Improve Website Speed

 

As a part of your SEO strategy, improving the speed of your eCommerce is crucial. It will improve user experience and help your website rank on top of search results. Compressing image files and eliminating unnecessary code is ideal for improving website speed.

 

2. Don’t Underestimate Email Marketing

 

You should never ignore the potential of email marketing to grow your eCommerce business. Several online stores are successfully generating leads. However, a huge majority of their generated leads don't convert. 

 

ECommerce for businesses demands following up on leads to prevent loss of potential sales. Consumers usually prefer businesses that communicate via email. Therefore, email marketing is one of the most efficient ways of nurturing leads.  Some tips for eCommerce advertisement using email marketing are as follows:

 

• Seek More Information

 

ECommerce for businesses should focus on collecting as much information as possible from leads. Collecting information like gender, city, product category interests, and the frequency at which they wish to receive emails helps develop a personalized email campaign. In addition, it ensures that your business no longer sends generic emails that your leads ignore.

 

• Collect Feedback

 

Sending emails to inform leads about your new products and services is one of the best eCommerce advertising strategies. However, there's no need to stop there. You can continue the conversation by demanding feedback and increasing customer satisfaction.  

 

• Test Your Emails

 

You should always evaluate your marketing emails before sending them to your customers. For instance, you need to check whether your emails are mobile-friendly or trigger spam filters. You should also check the links and images in your email and ensure that the receivers can open them.

 

3. Focus on PPC

 

 

While organic traffic is necessary, one should pay attention to PPC for an eCommerce advertisement. The paid advertising strategy is one of the best in generating ROI on your eCommerce website. 

 

Online businesses often try PPC once and give it up because they need more ROI. However, the remaining ones must see results from a PPC strategy. Some tips regarding how eCommerce for businesses can make the most out of PPC strategies are as follows:

 

• Choose the Right Platform for Your Ads

 

You need to select the right platform for your PPC advertisements. While Google Ads is an excellent platform for PPC ads, you can also opt for alternatives like Facebook. Since social media platforms have huge audiences, combining your PPC and social ads can be a great idea. 

 

The different types of PPC ads to promote an eCommerce platform for startups are as follows:

 

1. Display ads include banner ads that can be found on any part of the Google ecosystem. For instance, they can appear on Gmail and YouTube.
2. Video ads: They are made to appear on YouTube in between videos people stream.
3. App ads: These are useful for promoting your app on Google Play, YouTube, Google Search, and more.
4. Search ads: These ads are visible alongside organic SERP results.

 

In PPC advertising, the platform will charge you for every click on your ad.

 

• Track Your Conversions

 

You should use a conversion tracker to understand the effectiveness of your PPC strategy. It will help you understand which ads resonate the most with your target audience. 

 

4. Leverage Social Media

 

A huge majority of your target audience will be available on social media with the knowledge of eCommerce. Social media advertising is cost-effective for an eCommerce advertisement and can result in high conversion rates. Some tips to ace social media advertisements for your eCommerce platforms are as follows:

 

• Identify the Right Platform

 

You will find a wide range of social media platforms, and it is optional for you to get on all of them. However, to build successful eCommerce websites through social media advertising, you need to figure out which platforms your target audience dominates. 

 

For instance, Instagram and TikTok should be your go-to platforms to capture millennial and Gen-Z audiences. Likewise, Pinterest can be an ideal platform for advertising your eCommerce services if you have a women-centric online business.

 

• Be Consistent

 

You can go further with your social media advertising strategy with proper planning. First, you must figure out the right time to post your content. Then, remember to post something relevant to upcoming festivals and special days. Consistency is key to improving your social media advertising game and generating successful revenue. 

 

• Utilize the Art of Storytelling

 

If you want your social media ads to do well, you must incorporate storytelling. Stories enable your target audience to build an emotional attachment to your brand. They are the best to trigger interaction and inspire ideas. 

 

You can make an animated video to tell a story. But you will also have simpler ways to tell a story on social media. For example, you can make next posts to tell a story and keep your audience to find out what happens in the end.

 

• Humanize Your Brand

 

You can communicate with your target audience through multiple social media platforms. However, creating an emotional connection with your target audience is crucial to get them to choose you over competitors. Brand stories are a great way to acquire a customer base without a sales pitch.

 

Advertising Ideas for eCommerce Campaigns

 

You should borrow ideas from big eCommerce stores to ace your eCommerce advertisement campaign. Some top eCommerce marketing campaigns that you need to learn from are as follows:

 

1. Mothercare

 

The brand launched its #BodyProudMums campaign to promote body positivity and make new mothers feel confident about their bodies. Mothercare chose 10 mothers to shoot powerful images and spread them across their online and offline channels. The campaign gave voice to new mothers struggling with body image issues. 

 

The campaign became viral as thousands of users shared their stories about struggling with body image issues. The campaign resulted in more than 1 billion impressions, and the engagement of Mothercare increased by 18%. In addition, the campaign taught how standing up for their audiences enables a brand to increase sales. 

 

2. Uber

 

Uber launched a campaign called #BeyondFiveStars which encouraged customers to share their amazing experiences with Uber drivers. They focused on humanizing a brand to form stronger bonds with customers. They leveraged the power of social proof to develop their ad campaigns and online content.

 

3. Dollar Shave Club

 

Dollar Shave Club beat direct competitors like Gillette with their quirky and well-designed ads. The crisp CTAs from the brand enabled the communication of value propositions to prospective customers. One of the greatest ideas from big eCommerce stores like DSC is touching upon customers' struggles to develop compelling ad campaigns.  

 

4. Purple

 

Purple made funny videos to promote its products to its target audience. The ideas from big eCommerce stores like Purple include not waiting for your videos to go viral. Instead, they used paid ads on Facebook and Google to make their videos visible to their audiences. 

 

Another reason behind the success of Purple's advertisement campaign is that they could communicate the value of their products to the target audience. In addition, they tried highlighting areas of their products in which their direct competitors fell short. 

 

5. Alllbirds

 

Allbirds is an eco-friendly footwear and apparel brand. They were able to transform into a $100 million dollar company within three years of their inception in 2016. The success of the brand can be attributed to its savvy advertising campaigns. 

 

Their social and display ads are a blend of vibrant visuals and creativity. They use a simple but effective CTA and highlight the USPs of their products. Even though they might not be doing too much, they have a powerful way of delivering messages through their ad campaigns. 

 

KPIs for eCommerce Websites

 

You have learned enough about what eCommerce is and how to promote your eCommerce websites. Now, you should learn about some KPIs to measure the effectiveness of your existing advertising strategies or how to improve your future campaigns. 

 

Return on Ad Spend

 

Revenue on ad spend is a metric to determine the revenue earned from the best online marketplace for your products for every dollar spent on advertising campaigns. The indicator is useful for keeping track of the budget of the advertising team and its success in driving sales and revenue. 

 

The ROAS benchmark varies from one industry to another. But the 4:1 ratio used by BigCommerce might be beneficial for you. According to this ratio, you should generate a revenue of $4 for every $1 spent on ad campaigns. 

 

Conversion Rate

 

You are incorporating much effort into developing your eCommerce website and adding CTAs. However, are the CTAs fulfilling their responsibility of making people buy your products? Conversion rate is one of the eCommerce key performance indicators to reveal its truth. 

 

It will reveal what percentage of your visitors are taking a particular action on your website. The action can include anything from purchasing to signing up for a newsletter. The conversion rate will help you gauge your website's effectiveness in encouraging visitors to take action. 

 

Even a small change in your conversion rate can increase your revenue to a huge extent. Therefore, you should be measuring the conversion rate from different advertising campaigns. It will help you spend your ad revenues in areas that lead to higher conversions.  

 

Customer Lifetime Value

 

What is the value of a customer for your business? Customer lifetime value helps you determine the average net profit every customer can contribute to a business during the overall length of their relationship. 

 

Determining the worth of a customer for your business will help you understand your ROI. It ensures that you can strategize your future goals properly. It is also one of the best eCommerce key performance indicators for understanding the customer retention ratio. 

 

Understanding the CLV is crucial for knowing how people can bring easy money to your business. In addition, it will ensure that you can target your eCommerce advertising strategies more precisely. 

 

Clickthrough Rate

 

The clickthrough rate or CTR helps you understand how many people took action after seeing your advertisements. The KPI is crucial for understanding how much your advertisements match the target keywords in your campaigns. CTR has the potential to have a real-time impact on your conversion rates and overall marketing efforts. 

 

Customer Acquisition Cost

 

It refers to the amount of money required to buy a customer. For instance, you have spent $2000 on your sales and marketing campaign in a month. It helped you acquire 20 new customers. 

 

Therefore, you spent $100 to acquire each customer. Understanding your customer acquisition value will help you decide how many customers you need to acquire within a specific period. In addition, it ensures that you can determine your marketing budget accordingly. 

 

Summing up 

 

After understanding what eCommerce is, you also need to know that multiple players dominate the space. Therefore, it is crucial to resort to eCommerce advertisement strategies to make your online business thrive amidst the competition. You can alo implement Proper advertising strategies suggested by some top ecommerce consultants for your eCommerce business will increase your visibility and help you generate more revenue in the end. 

 

Startups and new businesses can take clues from well-established eCommerce businesses to develop their advertising strategies. Moreover, startups must choose the right eCommerce platform to build their website effectively. In the end, eCommerce businesses should measure their growth using different key performance indicators like conversion rate and customer acquisition costs.