If you are new to launching a website you will find it takes a lot of work, time and money to build website traffic which is why having an ecommerce marketing strategy ready when you are finally found is critical. To get found online you need your website to rank high enough for the keywords you are going after. To get found in social, you need to gain followers and be active to attract attention. To get direct traffic you need your brand to stand out and become a household name so someone knows where to go to get your products. As you can imagine, to do all of this takes a lot of work to simply get someone to your website.
You should be approaching your ecommerce marketing strategy in three different lenses:
Ecommerce Marketing Strategy to drive traffic to your website
To get found online you need to really do your marketing work and this requires attracting traffic to your website. So how do you do it? This really requires a few different areas. The first thing you will want to do is learn about SEO so you can increase the organic traffic on your website over time. This requires ensuring you have the right content and technical setup to rank high in search engines. Additionally, you will want to create and manage social accounts to try and convert Facebook or Twitter followers into sales by being active with your brand. Social and Organic Search will require a consistent amount of work but do not cost money, only time. Alternatively, you can look at paid ads. This can be in both social and search as well. If you go down the PPC path for search engines you can get immediate traffic to your website but you are paying for each click over to your website so is a great way to start but can be expensive if you are not converting that traffic to sales.
Ecommerce Marketing Strategy to convert traffic to a sale
When you get that traffic to your website you want to do everything you can to convert traffic to a sale which requires more thought on your website design. Are you pushing the right brand messaging and products on your home page? How easy is it to add a product to your cart and checkout? Are there any snags or slowdowns along the way? Do you have an SSL on your website and is your payments flow secure? A big part of your marketing plan for your website should be to ensure the customer that your brand is established, real and secure. You need to provide your customer information about your brand and business and what you stand for. They need to see you are a real person and not a scam. To be successful on your website in converting traffic to sales you need to make your purchase flow as easy as possible and establish your brand reputation on your website. Use tools like Google Analytics to see how customers interact with your website and your navigation. Look at your sales funnel and watch where people drop off to make improvements.
Ecommerce Marketing Strategy to convert prospects and repeat customers in the future.
Now not all traffic to your website will be ready to make a purchase the first time they land on your site. with that, you want to make sure you at least get something out of that traffic to increase the chances you can convert that traffic to a sale in the future. Be sure to make it easy for traffic to subscribe to your blog, newsletter or to hear more about your products and brands. The more emails you can gather, the more you can do email marketing and increase chances of future sales by just sending the right product via email at the right time in the future. In addition to trying to capture emails for traffic not ready to make a purchase you really need to consider a way to manage the contacts for customers who have made purchases from you already. If someone has bought something, they may be willing to buy again in the future so you need to remind them you exist. This requires traffic the emails of anyone you can and sending out campaigns on a normal basis to remind them you are alive.
When you launch into your own ecommerce shop you need to learn quickly that having an ecommerce marketing strategy is key to being able to grow your business. You can have great products at cheap prices but if no one finds you online, it will not matter. Be sure to include in your business plan a marketing approach that will help you win at all three points of the marketing cycle.
