5 Best Ways to Start Marketing Your eCommerce Store

by Mike Young Web Developer

How do you draw in consumers to your eCommerce store and make sales? Simple: you need to effectively market your eCommerce store. Pretty obvious, right? Sure, but if you’re reading this, chances are you either don’t know where to start or you’re not finding much success with the marketing strategy you currently have in place. Not to worry. Struggling when you’re just getting started, especially when you’re new to the game is (although frustrating) completely normal.

Online you can find many pages of useful tips and tricks to get the marketing ball rolling for your eCommerce Store, but here we've gathered the ones we think are the most effective and productive:

1. Stop looking for that one perfect strategy

So many small business owners make the mistake of thinking that there’s this one glorious marketing strategy that’s going to solve all their problems and make them rich. There’s no exact science to marketing and there’s not one perfect strategy either. There is more than one type of marketing, and if you want to truly find out what the right combination of these different forms of marketing is for your eCommerce site, you need to step out of your comfort zone and try different marketing combinations until you find the one that works best for you.

For instance, you might discover that social media brings you more customers than PPC (pay-per-click), or the opposite. The results you uncover from utilizing different marketing methods will help you decide where you should be dedicating most of your resources.

2. Understand your customers, intimately

This may sound like another no-brainer tip, but many eCommerce startups fail to intimately understand their customers and end up burning cash and suffering falling short of their revenue growth goals as a result. What do you really know about the customers you’re trying to target? What are you offering that will make them want to buy from you over your already well-established competition? Without knowing who you’re selling to, how could you ever market your business in the best possible way? Try to look at your eCommerce store from an online shopper’s point of view and remember that not every online purchase made is a logical one.

Get in touch with your customers directly and ask them questions about your business. Find out what they like and what it would take for them to buy what you’re selling. This is definitely a forward approach, but if you want the answers that are going to make you sales, you can’t keep guessing at what you think might appeal to your target market. Stop guessing, hoping and assuming; reach out via email, phone, messaging service, etc. and talk to them.

3. Improve your site’s SEO health – SEO is vital for helping customers find you

Did you know that most consumers use search engines to inform their purchase decisions? In fact, according to a Fleishman-Hillard and Harris Interactive Annual Global Study, 89% of consumers use search engines for this purpose. Why do statistics like these matter to you? If the SEO on your site is subpar or non-existent, consumers won’t be able to find you, and if your site can’t be found, you’re not going to make sales or the number of sales that you could be making with better SEO.

Furthermore, as an extra bonus, integrating SEO with your other marketing activities will benefit you in two ways. First, it will boost the effectiveness of these marketing actions. Secondly, it will enhance your organic search visibility at the same time. Ultimately, this will save you time and money and lower your cost per conversion. In short, you’ll gain more by spending less. A win-win for you!

Not sure how SEO friendly your site is? Check your website with a free SEO audit tool, which can analyze your site in a matter of minutes and identify where your SEO is strong and where there might be issues you need to fix.

4. Take a contextual monetization approach

You might know that one of the best ways to make money is to monetize your app, but are you applying your monetization methods with context? You can’t just slap random ads on your site and expect to generate decent results. According to a study from Harris Interactive conducted on behalf of Janrain, 74% of online users expressed frustration with displaying ads, promotions and offers that had nothing to do with their interests.

Consumers like relevancy and they like to feel special and important. Our brains are hardwired to process information with context. This means, in order to get the greatest benefit from ad revenue, the ads you choose need to connect to the consumer in a meaningful way. The ads need to make sense to what you’re selling, otherwise you’re just going to frustrate consumers and drive them off. Customers are far more likely to appreciate and engage with relevant ads. More engagement means more revenue for you.

5. Don’t ignore abandoned carts

eCommerce marking isn’t only about getting customers to visit your site. It’s also about getting these visiting customers to make a purchase. Pay attention to your cart abandonment rate, because reducing this rate will mean more sales.

A customer might abandon their cart for any number of reasons, such as:

· Your site is running too slow

· They don’t want to take the time to create an account to checkout

· They got spooked by the cost of the full order or the cost of shipping

Frequently check to make sure your site is running smoothly, efficiently and speedy all the time. Give customers the option to checkout fast by only requiring information that’s absolutely necessary for the order. While shipping costs may be beyond your control, you can offer promo codes to new customers and loyal customers to make shopping worth their while.