Your A to Z Guide to Ecommerce Marketing in 2022

Running an ecommerce business is more than just setting up an online storefront. It’s actually a lot about how you take your brand to the consumers – your ecommerce marketing strategy.

In times when the competition for consumer attention is increasing by the day, it’s time for businesses to do more than just post on social media to reach their target market. But the expanse of the digital landscape can often be all too overwhelming to navigate.

That’s why we’ve created this guide on ecommerce marketing, to give you a realistic starting point.

What is eCommerce marketing?

Ecommerce marketing is the process of establishing your brand and selling your products through digital spaces such as your website, search engines, social media, email, messaging apps and practically all the channels that you as an internet user or a consumer make use of every day. But before you get into promoting your brand, products or deals, what you actually need is a strategy. That’s where an ecommerce marketing plan comes in.

What is an eCommerce marketing plan?

An eCommerce marketing plan is a strategic outline that synthesizes a company’s aims to acquire new clients, take care of their existing customers and promote their brand. A strong digital marketing plan is the centerpiece for each digital marketing effort as it ensures all marketing initiatives are curated in line with an overarching strategy, delivering maximum return on interest or ROI and efficiently using time and resources available to the business.

Simply put, an ecommerce marketing plan is like a plan of action of your business that lays out the steps and strategies you need to use to reach your target audience.

Why is an eCommerce marketing plan important?

If you’re looking to launch an eCommerce business or even scale one up, then you need to make sure that your marketing plan is in place from day one. Without a good marketing plan, you will not just be overwhelmed by the ever-expanding and ever-changing landscape, but also not reach your audience as consistently as required.

Keeps efforts consistent – With a well documented marketing plan, you know what the next set of steps or actionables are; this keeps you and your team consistent at making the effort to reach a point of completion of the documented strategy.
Helps manage resources better – An ecommerce marketing plan lays down the details of each strategy you intend to use, the approximate spend to execute them and the ROI you can expect. Without a plan, you may end up either over-allocating budgets to a specific tactic or under-allocating efforts towards a channel that may actually be important.
Makes growth measurable – As an eCommerce marketer, you’re responsible for the growth of your business. A large part of this job is measured by the performance of your marketing and advertising campaigns. A good ecommerce marketing plan lays out the key KPIs based on the SMART model; which further helps align all efforts towards achieving them.

Now that you know the benefits of an ecommerce marketing plan, let’s look into how you can create one.

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Gathering your objectives in this format lets you create a roadmap that shows how you have integrated your key strategies with the bigger picture of your plan’s vision as well as any external factors affecting it.

2. Determine your target audience

Customer groups have become increasingly segmented over time, so it’s important to be precise when defining your target market. Only when you prioritize this can you fully determine how well you know and meet the needs of your audience as opposed to guessing by throwing a wider net that covers a lot of ground.

Shrewd marketers know that the generalizing route does not connect with the customers in a way that builds profound satisfaction for them or large profit for the business. Being able to identify customer attitudes, concerns and trends will help you further define and meet those needs more directly.

Here’s what you need to gauge while determining your target audience:

The benefits potential customers are deriving from your product
How you can satisfy their needs
If you will be able to sustain the profitability of the business with this audience

This 3-step framework by Brafton is a great place to start:

3. Identify the right marketing channels and strategies

Once you have your target market and target audience defined, the next step is to look at where they are the most ‘present’ and ‘active’ digitally. The goal is to be present on the right channels instead of being present everywhere.

For example, if you sell medical products on your website, you’re better off not promoting them on sites like TikTok where users are mostly looking at fun content and not education. Being present on Instagram is a better strategy to follow in this case.

Additionally, when building out your overall strategy, also think about your market positioning. The marketing channels and strategies you intend to use should also match your brand’s overall ethos and how you want the audience to perceive it. That’s one of the reasons why you see luxury brands selling on only a select few marketplaces and not the common ones like Amazon!

Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

Make sure you understand the different types of marketing strategies (more on this in the next section)
Keep your business goals and objectives as the focal point
Identify the most commonly used channels by your audience
Take note of the type of content they engage with
Conduct a competitor analysis for each of the channels
Audit the resources available to you
Create a projection of the time it will take to show results

Additional resources to help you choose the right marketing channel:

How to select marketing channels that drive the best results

4. Create a cycle to measure and optimize

The next thing in your marketing plan needs to be how you’re going to measure the effectiveness of each of the channels and strategies you decide to use.

More often than not, marketers rely on immediate insights and metrics provided by each platform. This results in disjointed data that does not speak to or can be used on other channels, giving the business inaccurate or lesser insights than they can actually derive.

So make sure your marketing plan has a defined cycle of reviewing, measuring and monitoring the performance of your strategies. Use the insights as actionables to keep, discard or optimize your efforts and campaigns to get the best of results.

Delivering on our promise in step 3 here, let’s look into the ecommerce strategies you need to try this year.

Ecommerce marketing strategies you need to try in 2022

When you’re listing down the marketing channels and strategies you intend to use for promoting your business, break them up into 2 categories – organic and paid. We’re listing them all down along with additional resources to help you understand the marketing strategies better.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

According to Search Engine Land, about 71% of consumers begin their shopping journeys from the search engine to discover new products and services. That’s why the number one place you need to promote your brand is the search results of your consumers!

That’s where search engine optimization comes into play. This typically includes ensuring your product descriptions, product media (images and videos), and other content on your website, is optimized with the right keywords – phrases that your target audience actively makes use of to search for products. But there are a number of other parameters that you need to meet as well.

Note: It can take some time for you to start ranking on the search engines; but keep your efforts consistent.

Social media marketing

Social media plays a major role in building brand awareness and fostering relationships with the new-age consumer. According to surveys and studies, 1 in 3 consumers use social media to discover new products and services of their interest.

But merely posting content on social media is going to get you nowhere. You need to identify the type of content your target audience likes to consume, how you can create the same and add value to them, and which platforms you should be using.

Ideally, we recommend starting with one social media platform, creating a consistent content calendar for the same and understanding how your audience engages with it. Post which, you should look into bringing in other channels into the mix to cast a wider net.

Here’s how you can choose where to begin:

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Content marketing

In times when there is a lack of physical touch and feel of a product, it’s the content you offer that helps a consumer make an informed purchase. Your content not only holds the power to make or break a sale, but also the experience you deliver.

And we’re not talking about creating product descriptions alone.

We’re talking about leveraging other content formats like blog posts, FAQs, product videos, how-to guides, lookbooks and more to educate consumers about the value of your products or how they can be put to use.

Leading ecommerce brands like Gymshark are already leveraging this organic marketing strategy to reach their audience, and keep existing customers engaged:

Loyalty programs

The number one marketing strategy for an ecommerce business to grow in a competitive market, is retaining its existing customers.

Studies have found that a mere 5% increase in customer retention can increase a business’s profits by 25-95%. In fact, the study also found that loyal customers are 5x more likely to make a purchase from the business, as compared to a new consumer, making the cost of customer acquisition or conversion, much lower.

This is why leading brands have a Shopify loyalty program in place.

The marketing strategy focuses on keeping customers engaged by offering value in lieu of their time and engagement. Loyalty programs reward customers in the form of points, store credits, cashbacks or additional perks to keep them coming back for more purchases.

Here’s an example of a loyalty program:

As of today, 90% of businesses have a loyalty program in place and it’s getting tougher for brands to keep members engaged. But we have cracked the code to creating a program that actually works: The complete guide to reinventing customer loyalty programs (template included).

Here are some additional reads to inspire your loyalty program marketing strategy:

Referral marketing

Another organic marketing strategy that leverages the loyalty of customers towards your brand, is having a referral program.

A referral program essentially moves around the concept of word of mouth marketing. In this tactic, you encourage your existing customers to recommend your brand to friends and family, in lieu of a perk or a reward. At the same time, you also offer a similar reward to the referred customers to create a win-win emotion.

Here’s an example of a referral program:

Statistics have found that 90% of consumers choose to buy from brands that come as recommendations from their network. It was also found that customers acquired through referrals have a 37% higher retention rate and are more likely to stay engaged with the brand.

Email marketing

As per surveys, emails continue to be one of the most effective channels to reach out to consumers and engage them. In fact, 87% of ecommerce marketers use emails to distribute content that addresses different stages of a customer’s life cycle with the brand.

No matter what stage your ecommerce business is at, remember to have an email marketing strategy from day 1. Your strategy should address new subscribers, new customers and keep your existing customers engaged to bring them back to your site in a meaningful way.

If done right, email marketing can deliver an ROI of $36 for every $1 spent. And the good thing is that running the campaign is much easier as compared to other organic marketing strategies, owing to Shopify email marketing automation tools for ecommerce.

Here’s an example of a promotional email marketing campaign:

In case you don’t have an email marketing strategy in place, here are some resources to get you started:

SMS or text marketing

Another great way to reach the new-age consumers is SMS.

SMS marketing has been making waves lately for getting messages across almost instantly, delivering a high open and click through rate. They are being used by ecommerce businesses to run promotions, recover abandoned carts or sending updates about orders, and more pretty proactively.

Statistics have found that SMS marketing campaigns deliver an open rate of about 98%, and a click through rate of 35% when strategized well. That’s also because almost 64% of consumers ‘want’ businesses to reach out to them on SMS.

WhatsApp marketing

With over 2 billion users across the globe, WhatsApp has emerged as another promising channel for ecommerce marketing.

Marketers can use WhatsApp to broadcast new offers and deals, offer instant customer support, share product information, provide order status and tracking details and much more using the WhatsApp Business API.

WhatsApp marketing campaigns have proven to deliver similar results as text marketing campaigns, adding an additional layer of customer engagement owing to the ability of sending media files along with messages.

Here’s an example of a WhatsApp marketing campaign:

If you haven’t yet heard of the WhatsApp Business API, we recommend reading these resources:

Web push notifications

Web push marketing is a type of marketing that sends notifications to users in handy headline pop-ups inside web browsers. This marketing strategy has been around for a while and can be used to promote your product, remind customers about orders they placed, update them on new products you have in store, or any other valuable piece of content you feel compelled to share with them.

Owing to its interface, web push notifications get instantly consumed/ read, delivering your message effectively. The good thing is that just like email, you can run segmented web push notification campaigns with the help of smart automations.

Here’s an example of a web push notification to run promotions:

If you’re just getting started with web push notifications, we recommend going through these resources:

Pay per click (PPC)

PPC is a type of digital marketing that utilizes search engines to drive targeted traffic and increase sales by paying for each click on a promoted link. PPC can help draw in new visitors to your website or landing page at an affordable cost, if strategized well.

Consider this a strategy that gets you noticed on the search results of your consumers even before the effects of your SEO efforts begin to show.

Here’s an example of a search shopping ad:

But PPC can be hard to crack considering the play of keywords and the competition around them. So here are some resources to help you get started:

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing refers to marketing efforts that take advantage of online personalities who have a significant influence on the potential customers in your target market.

Their already established communities of followers often trust their recommendations and are more likely to pay attention to anything they have to say about products than brands that typically promote themselves using ads on social media. Many marketers have seen huge success with this technique with over 90% of them opting for this strategy to promote products.

Over 60% of marketers have also realized that influencer-generated content performs better with the lifestyle industry seeing the highest distribution of Instagram influencers.

Here’s an example of the same:

Social media ads

Social media platforms offer nifty tools you can use to target your ideal customers through paid advertisements. A well-planned ad campaign is more likely to generate traffic than organic efforts that may be slow on pick up.

As of today, it’s wise to use Instagram for ads since it has crossed Facebook’s reach. Not only this, the forecasted reach for Instagram ads in 2022 is 1.8 billion people with almost $16 billion being generated in Instagram stories ads. But we do recommend exploring other social media platform ads based on who your target audience is.

Here’s an example of a social media ad on Facebook; the brand is also running the ad across Instagram:

Affiliate marketing

Affiliates are those that help sell your product via their websites, social platforms, or email newsletters for a commission. It is also responsible for a good 16% of worldwide sales.

They differ from influencers since they use traditional tactics like paid ads and content marketing to increase traffic to your website. You can leverage their skills to gain brand awareness and power your SEO efforts.

But good ecommerce marketing is incomplete if you’re not measuring the impact of your efforts.

Just like PPC, social media ads can be overwhelming to understand due to the number of formats and targeting options available across different channels.

How to measure the success of your eCommerce marketing efforts

The success metrics you need to measure may vary based on the ecommerce marketing strategies you put to use. But here are some that we recommend to measure the success of each of the above marketing tactics:

Return on investment (ROI)

ROI is a way of quantifying a return on investment by assessing the revenue generated in proportion to the amount spent on executing a marketing strategy/ campaign. Be it organic or a paid tactic, this should include your spend on human resources as well.

Cost per win

This is a good metric to use when comparing two marketing plans. It translates to the cost of each sale you made through the strategy. The ecommerce metric is best used to decide what strategies you double down on, and which can take a backseat to optimize spends.

Cost per lead

Cost per lead is similar to Cost Per Acquisition because it tracks how much, on average, it costs a business to generate a lead. For an ecommerce business, this typically means getting an online shopper to subscribe in one way or another. A good consumer base subscribed to the business, gives them an opportunity to nurture them towards making a purchase.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate is a term that describes the success one has in regards to generating a profit from a marketing initiative. Some may refer to this as cost per lead, but conversion rate generally focuses on evaluating what percentage of customers or clients make it through the sales funnel and become a part of a business’ customer base.

Customer LVC

It refers to the total amount of money a customer will spend with your business from the moment they first became a customer. This ecommerce metric also shows how effective your marketing strategies are at staying on top of the consumer’s minds and keeping them engaged.

Brand awareness

Brand awareness refers to how well your brand is understood by people who are a direct target audience. It’s one of the key metrics you can use to track how effective your marketing strategy is at assuring potential customers to learn about your brand. A good way to measure this is to use social listening or brand mention listening to track conversations around your brand.

Customer engagement

It goes a step ahead of brand awareness and checks the frequency of a customer’s positive interaction with your brand on digital platforms. This impacts the recurring revenue your business can generate from the customer.

If you’re someone who loves to deep dive into numbers, we recommend the following resources to understand ecommerce metrics:

Note: Measure only what’s important to your business goals and objectives to not get overwhelmed by numbers. Analytics tools have a lot to offer, but to make data count, you need to focus on measuring the right metrics.

Tips to keep your eCommerce marketing strategy streamlined

The digital landscape is growing by the day and so are consumer expectations. This can result in ecommerce marketing strategies evolving as rapidly as trends, becoming all too overwhelming to handle or resulting in overspending of resources to keep up.

So here are some tips that can help you keep all efforts streamlined and optimized for maximum returns:

Firstly, you need to narrow your focus towards platforms on which your target audience spends time. This way you will be able to reach a wider audience and you can work towards gaining authority on that platform, before getting started on the next.
From day 1, you need to concentrate on customer retention. This could be anything from setting up a loyalty program to providing excellent customer service, to ensuring they remain engaged with the brand and don’t walk away to a competing store.
Make sure you’re leveraging user generated content and word of mouth marketing right from the first customer you acquire. You can integrate a referral program into your loyalty program to encourage high participation, getting you new customers at a much lower acquisition cost.
Assess your goals and needs and then opt for multipurpose apps like AiTrillion to avoid switching between marketing tools. This will help you not just streamline marketing data, but also optimize the cost of marketing tools bringing it down by almost 76%.
Leverage multiple sales channels so that your brand can create an omnipresent experience for the customers. Doing so can also double the results you get from your marketing efforts.
An important way to keep things streamlined and consistent across all strategies, is to leverage automation. Investing in a marketing automation tool can help you run campaigns more smoothly, segment customers based on their interactions/ behavior and also collate insights with ease.
Lastly, remember to continually document your strategy and the changes you make to it during execution. This will help you pass on the learnings about your target market with teams and also help in strategizing better campaigns in the future.

Summing up

Ecommerce marketing is not easy; not with a competitive environment where there’s a new brand reaching out to your target audience every day.

As ecommerce experts, we actually recommend starting out slow, focusing on understanding who your target audience is and who make for your ideal customers, and then devising an ecommerce marketing plan to reach them.

Remember, being on the right channel will get you in front of the right audience with the right message.

Don’t have an ecommerce marketing plan in place? Reach out to our experts for a consultation today.