When discussing the advantages of ecommerce marketing, bringing up online channels and tactics is inevitable.
Internet-based activity is at the very core of ecommerce. This form of retail has been around since the beginning of the 1990s and, in less than three decades, has grown from novelty to a modern business necessity.
It’s common sense to focus on digital marketing campaigns. The latter is especially true, if you already conduct business online.
Benefiting from offline marketing is still included in the advantages of ecommerce companies. However, offline tactics that can encourage significant returns often need a significant budget. Offline campaigns may also have limited integrations with online tools.
Unless efficient resource use isn’t an issue, online marketing campaigns come first. Offline equivalents should be at a lower priority level.
What are the most common online ecommerce marketing tactics and channels?
There will always be fresh marketing channels. For instance, one of the most recent is the audiovisual self-expression app TikTok. Established networks like Facebook and Google change ways marketers can reach customers too. These adjustments get rolled out during periodic updates.
Read on to discover some common online ecommerce marketing tactics and channels. All four work well with email campaigns for ecommerce businesses.
1. Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of website rankings and traffic, as well as organic search engine results. Despite its name, current SEO practices focus on people as much as they do on search engines.
During its early days, part of SEO was finding exploits to boost numbers quickly. As the internet settled into the normalcy of everyday life, so did online marketing. Now proper SEO is all about best practices and earning good search engine rankings through legitimate work.
Instead of loopholes and workarounds, SEO experts now study what people want to know and how they search for information online. Knowing audience intent and vocabulary are key to connecting people to helpful websites.
If your business has an active website, organic SEO is a must. The most detailed blogs and even truly amazing products and services aren’t enough. If people can’t find you easily through search engines, you might as well be offline.
2. Content marketing
We mentioned detailed blogs above, which brings us to content marketing.
It’s frequently paired with SEO and sometimes thought of as text-only, but content is more than words. Content marketing is the careful planning and use of articles, infographics, videos, and more. The goal, as with any digital marketing effort, is to reach more customers online.
Comprehensive content marketing pairs successfully with any marketing channel. High-quality content with the right keywords is educational, informative, and an excellent magnet for organic traffic.
3. Social media marketing
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and now TikTok—these are examples of social media platforms and online marketing channels.
Social media is constantly evolving and reinventing itself. Keeping up with technological advances changes the way social media platforms work, which affects the way people use them. This, in turn, impacts how brands and people interact through these platforms. Social media marketers and experts need to augment best practices and adjust social media marketing strategies constantly for the best results.
It can be easy to forget that putting up content isn’t enough. Posts should always add to the advantages of ecommerce marketing plans. Without a clear goal, there’s no way to measure how effective your social media activity is, in terms of contributing to your ecommerce marketing strategy.
4. Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing uses social media but isn’t the same as social media marketing. It’s all about the influencer and has little to do with the marketing channels used.
The brand-influencer partnership is the contemporary equivalent of traditional celebrity endorsement. However, they work differently. The practice of endorsing products started in the late 1940s. Bizarre vintage print ads often featured odd celebrity-product pairings.
This brings up another mistake that’s often made: conflating influence with popularity. Being popular isn’t enough. An effective influencer has the power to affect the perception of their followers. Influencer actions and words must be aspirational. Their content must be strong enough to impact their audience’s behavior and way of thinking.
Today, influencers give brands a less intrusive way to promote products, and brands are able to drive sales without creating big-budget advertising campaigns.
How can email marketing work with and elevate other ecommerce marketing strategies?
The advantages of ecommerce marketing show in the way complementary techniques come together. An overarching marketing strategy shouldn’t feel disjointed and awkward. It should feature sensible interactions between its many components, especially email.
Traditionally, email generates the highest ROI among all marketing avenues. More than 60% of consumers prefer brand interaction through email. These statistics, among others, are why email is at the heart of most digital marketing campaigns.
How can you integrate email marketing with other online marketing techniques?
1. Recycle email campaign content to populate your blog section.
Crafting an insightful, actionable, and purposeful email takes time and skill. Why not get the most out of your hard work and repurpose your quality email content? These materials could add more SEO content to your blog too.
This practice adds a holistic approach to the advantages of ecommerce marketing. Think of it as making the great content available for more people to find.
You’re giving non-subscribers a peek into what happens in your email list and, at the same time, you’re helping your website rank higher in search engine result pages.
2. Use newsletters to feature content marketing.
Some ecommerce newsletters could turn into blog posts later on. Some, on the other hand, may serve as a way to curate great blog content for your subscribers to go through. You may even introduce your website and encourage some page visits through this strategy.
You can personalize emails in many advanced ways and, if you segment your email list carefully, your recommended blog posts have a better chance of being truly useful to specific portions of your target audience. Segmentation can depend on different subscriber data, including location, age, past buying behavior, and more.
Source: Really Good Emails
When it comes to email content that may include curated content from your blog, remember that you may still add original material alongside your repurposed content marketing. In this Emma email, article descriptors and an invite to an upcoming event bolster content links.
3. Track trending social media hashtags to support targeted sales emails.
Did you know that you can use content keywords as hashtags, and the other way around? Most multichannel marketing strategies do this. An advantage of ecommerce is that most marketing for it is bound to be online-ready.
Both keywords and hashtags make the internet an easier place for people to find information. They also help brands and marketers find ongoing topical conversations on the internet for them to join and chime in with information about their products and services.
Source: Really Good Emails
In this GoPro email, we see three products with respective highlighted keywords. They may as well be hashtags, and social media marketing may use them to generate buzz and interest.
Notice, too, that the bottom of the email includes links to the brand’s social media accounts. This is a great way to grow your social media follower count. On the other hand, mentioning your email list on social media can help grow your email list organically.
4. Bake influencer marketing into promotional emails.
Influencer marketing is typically published by influencers themselves. They’re usually in the form of social media posts showing them using a product or talking about its features.
That said, some brand-influencer partnerships do result in email material.
Email marketers know how important personalization is to connect with your brand’s community. However, it’s influencer marketing that’s raised the bar when it comes to customized messaging and displaying authenticity.
Wrap up
One of the major advantages of ecommerce marketing is that the most widespread and effective channels and tactics are digital. Some offline marketing campaigns can be worth executing for certain brands, but online is the way forward.
Some of the most common ecommerce marketing strategies and channels include:
- Search engine optimization
- Content marketing
- Social media marketing
- Influencer marketing
How can the ecommerce marketing tactics mentioned above work together sensibly? All of them can improve or enhance email marketing executions. You can:
- Recycle email campaign content to populate your blog section.
- Use newsletters to feature content marketing.
- Track trending social media hashtags to support targeted sales emails.
- Bake influencer marketing into promotional emails.
Creating a digital strategy that utilizes different marketing channels and practices can be tricky. What can make bringing different disciplines together into one cohesive approach easier?
Campaign Monitor’s new ecommerce email marketing platform is both powerful and comprehensive, featuring advanced automation and segmentation tools along with many helpful premade templates. Try CM Commerce today.