20 E-commerce Marketing Strategies for Beginners

Are you planning a start-up business or a recently established one? Then, you must be looking for some magical marketing tips that can help you expand it, uplift sales, enhance conversions, and bring new customers to your online store.

Entrepreneurs don’t have a lot of spare time to get the word out about their products and services. Also, it isn’t easy to market your products and brand but with some expert guidance and marketing strategies, you can become a marketing ninja.

It’s certainly reasonable if your company now lacks a marketing budget. Start-ups have thousand other things to put money on. These 20 simple and budget-friendly eCommerce marketing strategies for newbies have been developed to fill that void.

1. Know your Product/Services before Marketing

The most important strategy for a marketer is to have deep knowledge about the product features and their benefits. An important sales ability is product awareness. Understanding the attributes of your goods helps you to reliably and persuasively present their benefits.

Customers flock to enthusiastic sales workers who are enthusiastic about their products and willing to share the advantages with them.

2. Focus on What you Want them to Do

The most effective way to reach your target audience is by knowing them. The next step is to find out what is needed to drive them toward a sale once you’ve decided whom you need to meet.

This is easy for certain businesses: encouraging consumers to grab a product and purchase it at the shop. But, before reaching that stage, there may be acts that you push them towards (such as getting on a mailing list or being a follower on social media).

Content Marketing:

Content creation is the simplest and impactful way to reach out to your target audience. Words has more value when spoken at the right time and on the right platform. Make complete use of blogs, social media and try creating your brand identity.

3. Create E-commerce Content

It is one of the best simple marketing techniques to develop yourself as an expert in your field. You are positioned as an expert by writing a series of articles for a trade publication and these can be serialized for maximum impact as blog posts.

4. Improve Efficiency of Content

Clients are drawn by keywords. In the content on your website, they need to be placed in strategic places. Make sure to focus on the subjects that your clients are looking for.

Read: Why is content marketing effective for your marketplace website?

5. Write Blog Posts

On a blog, you can post specials and activities scheduled. These are a perfect way to advertise in a voice of your own.

6. Publish a Book

You are positioned as an expert in the field by writing a book and self-publishing it. These are also marketed by many business people on their websites.

Social Media Marketing:

7. Start Facebook Page Shop

To connect with a larger customer base for E-commerce marketing, social media is the best platform and Facebook stands top in the row. You can create a Facebook page for your brand and enlist your products on Facebook Page Shop.

8. Use Instagram Reels

Instagram has a different crowd than Facebook but some of its features can help you with marketing. Instagram reels are short videos that can be used to display products. All the possible Instagram Reel’s business marketing strategies are discussed in this article.

9. Use hashtags on Insta and Twitter

Here is the list of best hashtags you can use this holiday season for attracting more customers and visitors to your Instagram Page.

10. Start to tweet

Social networking is complimentary. It’s one of the best available simple marketing tactics. You can connect with your target group by posting on Twitter.

11. Run Ads on Facebook

Social advertisements allow you to get out in front of a large crowd. For optimal effect, you can target these to a particular market. Social media advertisement is the best E-commerce marketing method in 2021.

Read: 6 Easy Ways to Boost your Social Media Marketing through Facebook

12. Invest in Personalized Real-Time Marketing

Personalized marketing is the implementation of a strategy in which businesses, use collected data, analysis, and automation technologies to offer individualized content to recipients.

13. Online Video Marketing

Did you know that every minute of over 400 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube? It’s unbelievable. The fact is that it’s the second-largest search engine in the world.

It’s not the only video platform for marketers out there to know about, either. Plus, Facebook and Twitter social videos are becoming increasingly relevant as well.

Read: 7 Benefits of Video Marketing for your E-commerce Business

14. Offer Newsletter Subscription

Newsletters are a fast and easy way to keep new products and services up to date on a mailing list. One of the more common templates is MailChimp.

Read: What’s new with Mailchimp AI integration: An Insight

15. Establish an Email Campaign

In front of your target audience, putting together an email marketing plan gets you out. Your email address will be seen by everyone on your list from inside their inbox.

Read: A Definitive Guide to Effective Email Marketing in 2020

16. Run Give-Aways

In E-commerce, a value-added way of converting guests into consumers is by giving free access to a newsletter or blog. Whether you’re online or in a brick-and-mortar shop, consumers are always drawn to free items.

17. Pay-Per-Click and Ads

Did you ever see such commercials at the top of the search results? Those are pay-per-click advertisements.

These ads provide excellent opportunities for advertisers to sell products directly to seekers. It’s also great because it helps you to see precisely how much you invest vs. how much money your promotional activities produce.

18. Influencer Marketing

Why talk about your goods yourself when you can promote them through trusted people? That’s the crux of influencer marketing, which includes working to bring the goods in front of their audiences of famous people within a given niche or industry.

19. Nailing the Execution

It’s time to put it into motion once the plan is in place.

It requires:

Having the skills: You need to know how to do it once you know what to do.

Getting the best people: The secret to success is putting the right people in the right place.

Having the right instruments: To tackle a given task or problem, a professional always uses the best possible solution.

20. Use Data to Monitor your Progress

If the effect of your E-commerce marketing efforts cannot be determined, then you might not be doing anything at all.

To achieve a particular objective, any move should always be related to specific metrics.

Wrapping up:

In this article, there are a lot of strategies to process. But, now that you’ve covered much of what you need to know as a marketing professional (both at the surface level and with links to deeper reads on loads of sub-topics), you’re more informed than ever to continue your marketing skills and increase your career level.

If you want to add something to it, let us know below.

Case Study: How Marketinglessons became Successful without doing SEO?

“Work hard in silence, let your success be your noise.”

This line is well-suited for the self-made man, a marketer, an influencer, a blogger and an inspiring entrepreneur, Arpit Srivastava. He is marketing experts and works on providing value through his own website https://marketinglessons.in about the latest trends and marketing approaches. His blogs get remarkable 30k visits every month. What makes these stats remarkable is the fact that he is not doing any SEO works for his site and hasn’t even hired any agency for the same.

I think it’s enough for this question to strike your mind that “how has he managed to do that?” Let’s know in Arpit words:

1. What made you think of starting marketinglessons?

Initially, like every newbie blogger, I started a personal blog named after my name and jotted down everything under the sun. The very soon harsh reality of the web struck me that no one else was interested in the portal except me.

However, I decided to live within over the years and kept writing once in a while. Unintendedly, the content started aggregating majorly towards 2 topics – Marketing and Technology. The portal was then renamed from my name to Technology, Management and What Not. I started to witness some traffic on a couple of articles on Marketing.

Considering that it was difficult to keep pace with tech websites with plenty of resources, I finally decided to drop technology as a category and write only on something which I was passionate about – Marketing. It led to the portal as you know today marketinglessons.in

2. What problem were you trying to solve with your writing and who is your audience? What is the USP of your blog? What you found attractive and interesting which that inspired you to continue this?

I realized that there was a stark difference between what was taught in MBA classes and how was it in the corporate world. My intent was to find synergies between the two and make content more useful for college students and first jobbers. I also found that there were many websites catering to needs of seasoned professionals into marketing and media. So my target was relatively underserved.

So currently 80% of my audience fall into 18-34 yrs old age bracket. This audience doesn’t understand the jargons of the corporate world but loves to learn via marketing examples around them. My intent to be seen as an effective trainer and influencer in this space has kept me going.

3. How much time or effort do you put in to make a post? Share your approach towards research while writing the blog?

Initially, I just used to write something which I read and found interesting (in Marketing of course) but now I have an approach where I divide my articles into different categories like – Academic, Research, Management Models etc- Notably, I do not jump into News articles which I think are fad and come and go. They might give traffic momentarily but are never there to stay for long.

A fully exhaustive article with proper research can take anywhere in between 3-4 hours and most of the times even longer. There are smaller pieces which take 2-3 hours but I prefer to keep it explanatory and long. This time also includes the time taken to fine-tune the article to meet SEO requirements.

Few of the elements I take care while I write an article:

a) Snippet Preview which gets indexed by Google
b) Choose the right Focus Keyword and repeat at the right keyword density
c) Jot down the meta descriptions as per the Focus Keyword
d) Images to get the right Alt Attributes
e) Choose a search friendly slug

Basically, I do take care of on-page optimizations to an extent but do not do any off page SEO.

4. Did you face any hurdles because you don’t have a technical background? Do you advertise your blog or did you hire an agency to popularize your blog?

I take care of the design, content, SEO and promotions single handily. It is definitely not the way to handle it if I want to see it bigger but this is how it all started and continues to do so until I find someone like minded to share the load. I have never had a technical background and most of the things learned are via various websites, video tutorials. I started from the free WordPress followed by a paid URL being mapped to the free hosted portal and into the current state the website is an independently hosted website built on WordPress.

One thing that has remained constant is that I have been on WordPress throughout and with time gained knowledge on how to manage the platform. Few ready to use templates and even a couple of paid tools helps the website to look more professional than what I could have ever developed.

I have never resorted to paid advertising to bring in traffic for the blog. I am a firm believer of organic traffic read about SEO techniques and implement them while I write articles.

5. How far Marketinglessons.in has reached since inception in terms of traffic/revenue?

The portal has seen many ups and downs form the time I moved from wordpress.com to independent hosting. There have been instances where the website has been completely down with zero traffic to a peak of 56K pageviews per month. Currently, it keeps on fluctuating between 15-20K visitors every month.

Jul 2017 – Dec 2017

With a busy schedule, I hardly get time nowadays to write. As I respond to this the last article I wrote was 1.5 months back. I know the numbers can increase exponentially provided I write regularly.

Ad revenues are not the main motive behind this. For instance, the blog exists form last 6 years but I monetized it with ads only 2 years back. Besides ad revenues, I also get a request to do sponsored (paid) content which I make sure are clearly demarcated from the regular articles.
Also, the objective much broader with marketing lessons workshops in B-Schools rather than only making money via ads.

6. I heard that you lost your entire blog and had to restart. When and how did it happen? What did you do to get back on feet again?

That was one nightmare of an incidence. This happened while I was migrating the blog from one server to another. I hosting was on windows shared server earlier. I learned that WordPress works best on Linux server and decided to move from Windows to Linux. As I had no technical background, I thought this would be an easy move but it wasn’t.

I lost database files in the migration and almost all content, Google search rankings and therefore traffic.

March 2018 has almost NIL traffic

Writing fewer articles off late turned out to be a boon as I had a backup file dated couple of months back. I used that file for getting back the content but still lost 3-4 articles in the process. Also, all media files were missing which I to re-upload the link to the articles individually. I started by building the most popular articles to the less popular ones and finally resubmitted the website for indexing.

Thought could not get back to initial levels but have recaptured 80% of the earlier levels.

7. What are the future plans?

With a regular job at hand, the bandwidth to dedicate on the blog had gone down. As a long-term goal, I would want to see the portal as one of the go-to pages form MBA students specializing in Marketing. As a stepping stone, I aim to write more regularly.

If I adhere to a regular schedule I do not a reason why I won’t be doubling the traffic in the next 1 year.

8. If you were to give one piece of advice to the readers/bloggers, what would it be?

Think about it this way, what is that one thing that you would do even if you didn’t get paid from it for years. If its writing or creating content sit back and pick a topic which will never dose you off. Writing or blogging aside, for instance, if you think that you love dancing just because you are passionate about it, go ahead and pursue it and simultaneously create YouTube content while you do so.

If monetization is the driving factor to start something it might just die away as you might not see it coming for years.

“Success is not just what you accomplish in your life, it is about what you inspire others to do.”

All the best.

__________________________________________________________________________

Arpit Srivastava

With 8 yrs of experience with leading brands in the corporate world, Arpit brings with himself marketing insights across industries – namely Consumer Durables and Media & Entertainment.

He started his career with HCL Technologies where he was a part of the Corporate Brand Team. After his stint at HCL Tech, he went on the lead Product Marketing function at Sony Electronics where he was responsible for the nationwide launch of Xperia Smartphones; including the award-winning campaign of waterproof smartphones featuring Katrina Kaif.

Currently, Arpit leads Marketing (North & East) for Entertainment Network India Ltd; better known as Radio Mirchi, and has played a pivotal role in adding 2 new brands in ENIL’s portfolio – Mirchi Love & Ishq FM.

Work apart, he loves training students and professionals in marketing. He has conducted various workshops in leading campuses in India – Amity, SRM, Thapar, NDIM, Asia Pacific etc-. Pursuing his passion for teaching, he has trained marketing professionals at HSBC, Citibank, Tata Sky, Star and Pernod Ricard as an Assistant Professor with Edupristine, a leading MNC into corporate training.

With awards spanning throughout his career, the latest one in his kitty is the Pitch Top 50 Brands Award which he bagged for Radio Mirchi.

2018 Holiday Calendar: A Marketing Guide for eCommerce Marketers

Gone are the days when the eCommerce sale was all about the holiday season. The marketing strategies earlier would revolve around the last quarter of the year. The new eCommerce promotional calendar presents an abundance of festivities and commemorations that can help the savvy e-marketers gear for the year-long marketing campaign.

We’ve created a quick promotional checklist of the holidays and sales dates of 2018. Identify which holidays and sales dates align with your brand and create your marketing campaign accordingly.

Do not wait for the holidays to begin. Instead, start marketing your business to your customers right from the beginning of the year. We at Knowband assist you in every phase of eCommerce marketing and sales. Our Spin and Win modules can help you double the customer base during the sales season. Stay in touch with your customers with our intuitive mobile app builder. Expand your reach and integrate your shop with the popular marketplaces like Walmart, Etsy, eBay, Jet, Newgg and many more with our marketplace integrators for Prestashop, Magento, Shopify as well as OpenCart.