9 Ecommerce Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Store Through a Targeted Audience

Already growing for some time, ecommerce sales have skyrocketed since the COVID-19 pandemic started. Now that many consumers have a taste of ecommerce for the first time (and really like it), many brands are switching their strategies.

But just offering products isn’t enough. 

You have to earn the trust of your customers. You have to find the right customers. You also have to find a way to stand apart from your competition, which now includes major brick-and-mortar stores.

This post goes over a few ecommerce marketing strategies to grow your store, so you can win hearts and minds.

What should you consider when adapting ecommerce marketing strategies to grow your store?

A successful ecommerce store thrives on communication. 

To stay in touch with your audience digitally, you’ll need to pick the right channels. Specifically, you want to pick the channels your audience already uses. 

First, you’ll need to figure out how to reach new customers. 

Social media is your best bet in this arena. Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest make it easy to run targeted advertisements for specific audiences or demographics. Plus, you can show off your branding, communicate with followers, and build trust.

Organic traffic through Google search engine optimization is also another splendid choice for reaching new customers. You can create targeted blog posts and build trust.

Once you entice people to visit your website and buy from your brand, you’ll want a more sustainable way to stay in contact with them

Social media and organic traffic aren’t the best choices here. 

Facebook, for example, has its own interests in mind. The entire business model revolves around selling you back the audience you’ve already built. 

That’s why email marketing is the most effective choice for communicating with your customers and leads:

• Email provides a direct line of communication with your customers—no algorithms or paid advertisements. 
• It offers cutting-edge personalization features to segment your audience and offer relevant content.
• Email lets you automate your marketing campaigns, so you can enjoy maximum engagement with minimal effort.

9 ecommerce marketing strategies to grow your store

You don’t have to spend a fortune on ecommerce marketing strategies to grow your store. It’s all about zoning in on the right channels to reach the right people for your product.

1. Develop your audience personas.

Developing audience personas is essential because you’ll need them for all the other ecommerce marketing strategies to grow your store down the list.

As CoSchedule describes it, your brand’s marketing persona is a document that describes (in detail) who your targeted audience’s “who, what where, when, and why” is. It also details the general demographics of your audience, such as gender, job function/title, business/team size, their needs, and their pain points.  

So the question is: how do you define your audience personas? What tools can you use?

• Research: draw insight from Google Analytics. Who’s visiting your website and what are they reading?
• Social listening: after you’ve identified a target demographic, set up social listening tools to follow what they’re talking about on social media. What problems do they have?
• Surveys: if you’ve already built an audience, you could use email to send out surveys to simply ask questions.

2. Use a smart budget for targeted social media posts.

Social media advertising can get quite expensive. A CMO survey found that companies devote 13% of their marketing budgets to social media. 

Brands can’t not be on social media—it’s where their audience hangs out. However, the key is to develop a highly targeted social media strategy (rather than trying to reach as many people as possible).

Create relevant and interesting social media posts for each audience persona and use Facebook’s tool to reach them. You can follow the same strategy on other platforms like Instagram and Pinterest.

3. Set up automated transactional emails and receipts.

Those transactional emails you send for shipping and order confirmations? They have 8 times higher open rates than other email types and the potential to deliver 6 times more revenue.

Email gives you a wide range of tools to optimize your transactional campaigns, so you can maximize their results. 

Sending a thank you email post-purchase as your confirmation is a smart way to build rapport with your customers. You could also include a discount coupon inside your campaigns to encourage loyalty with their next purchase.

Your receipt emails could also include widgets for personalized up-sells based on the item/items the customer purchased. Let them know it’s not too late to add the items to their order. 

4. Optimize for mobile and consider an app.

Nearly half of all internet traffic happens on mobile devices. With email, the figure is even higher: Over 50% of all opens happen on mobile. 

Your audience might spend even more time on their smartphones. 

Regardless, it’s critical to optimize your website and emails for mobile browsers. Google switched to mobile-first indexing a few years back. So, if any pages on your site aren’t optimized for mobile, Google will hit your rankings. 

Think about your audience and whether an app is worthwhile. Developing an app also gives you the opportunity to send push notifications directly to their phone and build communication in all types of new ways.

5. Use content marketing to boost SEO and authority.

Seventy-five percent of marketers say content marketing is successful for boosting website traffic and winning conversions. 

Writing regular blogs can help you rank for hundreds—or even thousands—more keywords in Google. In other words, it’s awesome for boosting relevant visibility.

The keyword here is visibility. You can’t write blog posts for the sake of it and expect content marketing to deliver results. Instead, you need to choose targeted long-tail keywords your audience personas might type into the search bar.

Once you have your keywords, you can write authoritative long-form content to reach and connect with your visitors.

6. Don’t forget their birthday.

With innovative email tools, you can automate your communications. This comes in particularly handy when their birthdays and other milestones come around, and these make awesome ecommerce marketing strategies to grow your store.

If you have a customer’s birthday on file, you can send personalized birthday messages. Birthday emails deliver 481% higher transaction rates than promotional campaigns. 

Don’t forget to include a gift. Experian found that mystery offers perform best followed by offering a free gift with any purchase.

You don’t have to limit yourself to birthdays either. Celebrate other milestones with your customers like:

• Your company launch anniversary
• Reaching a certain number of social media followers
• The anniversary of a customer making their first purchase

7. Reclaim sales with abandoned cart emails.

People abandon their shopping carts for all sorts of reasons. In some cases, it’s inevitable. That doesn’t mean, however, you should sit idly by and let those sales slip through the cracks.

Email lets you set up automated and personalized campaigns to send after a shopper adds items to their cart but exits your website. 

It’s smart to include a discount code with these emails to give shoppers an extra nudge. You could also build urgency with a time limit like Society6 did here:

8. Optimize your social media shopping features.

Social media makes it easy to convert browsers into customers directly through their platforms. Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest all offer extensive “store” features for promoting your products from your social media pages. 

When users type a search term into Pinterest, for example, they can filter the results to display product pins and start shopping. 

With Instagram, you can tag different products in your photos and display details like price. Users can click on the tag and visit a dedicated product page to learn about the item.

Instagram lets you use the same features in stories as well.

9. Reduce friction in your checkout process.

Of all the ecommerce marketing strategies to grow your business, this one might just be the most critical. 

Visitors won’t complete the checkout process if you don’t provide a friction-free experience for buyers. That’s the bottom line.

So what does a friction-free checkout process look like? The user experience experts at Nielsen-Norman recommend:

• Offering a guest checkout option (don’t require shoppers to register an account)
• Giving shoppers access to the full shopping cart (don’t use a mini cart)
• Providing a clear image of the product along with any sizes, colors, or other customizable features
• Linking the product in the cart to the relevant product page
• Letting shoppers adjust the quantity of items and remove items, including setting the item to zero

Wrap up

As you choose ecommerce marketing strategies to grow your store, you’ll want to balance between reaching new customers and staying in touch with current ones. 

• Optimize your site for mobile and offer a shopping app.
• Win back at the inbox with abandoned cart emails.
• Run targeted social media ads.
• Take advantage of social media shopping features.
• Create a user-friendly website and shopping experience.
• Build your authority with content marketing.
• Automate your transactional emails and receipts.

Learn how automation can help you reach the right audiences at the perfect time with personalized content.