Ecommerce promotion strategies to maximize your returns on investment

Ecommerce has been on a rise for many years so does ecommerce promotion, but the increased competition and investments have made it challenging to find a way to stand out from the crowd. We all want to make as much as possible with our investment, right? In this article, we’ll explore some of the ways that business owners and eCommerce sellers can go about making the most of their investments.
For any eCommerce promotion to be successful you have to make a plan with a budget and execute it. Only if it shows some results you should scale it. There are a lot of tools and techniques which you can use to maximize your returns but before that, you have to measure your campaign success.

Marketing Budget and Return on Investment

Here we are going to discuss the cost of marketing and let me be clear there is no such thing as zero-budget marketing. You have to fix a 10-15% of expected revenue as a marketing budget. Also, organic traffic is not free traffic, it is created by efforts of SEO, Content Marketing and Branding. While with paid marketing you can see the results soon whereas with organic and content marketing you can measure the result of the campaign in a few months.

Ecommerce promotion ideas

Promoting an eCommerce site is a little different from a service business or any local business because eCommerce websites have more products and various categories. Promoting all those products is insane or impossible unless you have money to burn on ads. What you can do is find out which products are worth advertising, based on certain factors like are high in demand, fast/ quick selling products, and other factors like whether you can recover the cost of ad spend. Don’t promote anything unless you can recover at least the Ad Cost. Before planning any campaign or promotion please make sure in while preparing the budget you have space for calculating the Cost of Acquisition and Customer lifetime value.

These are some things you should consider before launching any ecommerce campaign blindly.

Basics of ecommerce promotion

The Basic of ecommerce promotion is to choose the right marketing strategy to build your customer base. Because once you made some to buy from you, you can do it again and again via strategies like upsell, cross-sell, annual promotion etc. For any marketing strategy the funnel doesn\’t end with sales, it continues with future sales.

To promote your Ecommerce store, the first thing you should have is beautiful stock/ product images, because customer can\’t touch or feel your product. Next is your website it should load fast and easy to navigate.

What is ecommerce promotion?

The activity done digitally to promote your ecommerce store and result in sale. The activity are SEO, Google Ads, Content marketing, Email Marketing, WhatsApp marketing and social media marketing etc.

Note: To know the basics of ecommerce business click here

Ecommerce promotion techniques

\”Jack of all trades, master of none\” Just like the quote, similar to how I told you cannot focus on all product, you shouldn\’t focus on all techniques and platforms. If your product is selling on social media it doesn\’t mean it easily sellable in google. because they work on different concepts while social media is push marketing and Google is pull marketing. For Google you have to pull the audience to your site via content marketing, where in social media you are pushing your products

You have to fill the hole in your website and strategy to gain more sales, for example you have to enable abandon cart email or whatsapp so that you are able to capture the sale which is almost lost, likewise you have to make use inbound strategy and landing page optimization to get maximum conversion. You have to identify your target customer so that reaching them will result in higher conversion.

Content Marketing for Ecommerce

Content Marketing for Ecommerce is quite easy, most part is covered in the product description, You have to use own/ unique content such as images, videos etc. You can also use UGC-User Generated Content in your Content marketing strategy.

Social Media Marketing for Ecommerce

You have to use the ratio of 80:20 rule i.e. the majority of your content should be helpful in solving the customer problem and only the 20% in promoting your products or service. You can also do influencer marketing to create content for your products.

Email Marketing for Ecommerce Promotion

Email marketing is one of the best promotional technique with high on returns, Be sure to collect email address on your website. You can offer discounts for sign-ups. Please don\’t just stop there, make sure you have set up a welcome series or automated emails which will convert them in your customers. You can also use the email list to create audience on Facebook, which are more like to convert than new audience.

Paid Ads for Ecommerce Promotion

Don\’t hesitate to test out all platform on Paid ads, because as i said earlier you will be able to measure it success soon so that you can decide whether you can invest on the platform. Google merchant center and Google shopping ads are wonderful place to invest to see which products in your website are driving traffic and sale so that you can focus on those products more.

How to maximize your returns?

There are many techniques that can help you with 2-8x sales hence maximize your returns, but it doesn\’t work for all products and in all platforms, you have to identify the right strategy and channel to scale your ecommerce business. Once you get a sale identify how you are able to make the sale happen, does your investment on the ad is worth to spend. Make sure you have a decent budget to test out ads, spending less/ low budget will burn your money without returns. There are other strategy like referral, affiliate and loyalty programs make sure you calculate the customer acquisition cost and other non – vanity metrics to determine the success of the campaign. Hope you get to implement the idea while promoting your online store.