The ‘Marketing’ Pillar of ecommerce

‘eCommerce advertising’ can be defined as the methods through which your products can be promoted using various digital marketing platforms. These ads may come in the form of display ads, banner ads, or rich media ads. Please find listed below some of the most prominent channels and their KPIs that can be used to market and sell your eCommerce products.

Why Facebook

• Most trafficked social media site
• Top social search engine
• Create a community around your business
• Connect and engage with current and potential customers
• Promote content you create, including webinars, blog articles, or other resources

Generate social proof and credibility along with sales potential

KPI’s Measured

• Number of fans
• Conversation rate
• Engagement ratio
• Sentiment

Why Twitter

• Allows you to connect with your target audience easily
• Allows you to send information to your followers in real-time
• Allows you to increase traffic to your website and blogs
• Helps customers to stay updated with the latest trends
• Building brand and visibility
• Get mobile with Twitter

KPI’s Measured

• Number of followers
• Follower/ following ratio
• Retweets
• @connects: both @replies and @mentions

Why Instagram

• Allows you to connect with your target audience easily with #hashtags, @mentions
• It’s currently a very friendly, amicable community
• Identify influencers and promote Influencer Marketing 
• Allows you to increase traffic to your website and blogs
• Connected with other social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr

KPI’s Measured

• Number of followers
• Follower/ following ratio
• Comments and Shares
• Both #hashtags and @mentions

Why YouTube

• Second most extensive search engine after Google
• It has the potential to go viral
• People would much rather watch something than read it
• Global and local audience
• Brand awareness and recognition
• Leverage sharing options by using bulletin boards feature
• Submitting to other social media sites increasing reach
• Instant distribution of information
• Making own customized channel and customer base

KPI’s Measured

• YouTube Insight
• Views
• Shares
• Audience Retention
• Engagement

Why Blogs

• Creating a real dialogue with those who matter
• Develop your position and your reputation as an expert
• Public Relations & Press Releases
• Awareness
• Educational Marketing
• Multiple Authors
• Instant distribution of information

KPI’s Measured

• Number of visits
• Traffic Source
• Top viewed posts
• Subscriber rates
• Social Shares per posts

Once you identify the platforms and the KPIs that you would want to track, the next step is to develop a marketing plan. A step-by-step approach to enable digital marketing for eCommerce would be:

• Create a marketing strategy
• Decide the eMarketing objectives
• Decide on eMarketing tactics
• Align tactic to eMarketing objectives
• Plan and evaluate strategies for each decided eMarketing tactic.
• Implement & go live with each tactic
• Track, Measure, and Analyze
• Optimize the tactics
• Review the tactics
• Repeat

Once you have the right strategy in place, you can always add some more eCommerce marketing ideas to increase online sales.

• Upsell your products
•  Reduce abandoned carts
• Reward your loyal customers
• Ensure post-purchase follow up

Use email marketing extensively

• Keep generating email subscribers
• Improve your email campaigns
• Send wish-list reminder emails
• Send an offer for abandoned cart emails

Go high on

• Put product-related videos on YouTube
• Influencer marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• User-generated content (UGC)
• Generate word-of-mouth marketing
• Set up referral marketing campaigns
• Launch search engine marketing campaigns
• Set up relevant re-targeting campaigns
• Product listing ads

By working on some high performing strategies and tactics to help you reach your goals, one can tweak to fit your niche, and you can build the perfect plan for your eCommerce store.