1) Brand Awareness
For any online business, brand awareness is a must to make a dent in the e-commerce universe. Thanks to disruptive platforms such as Shopify and Etsy, the e-commerce space is packed with countless players more than ever.
To make people recognize your brand and products, you need to tell them your brand story. Digital marketing is an excellent way to forge a connection between your brand and customers.
It uses various channels to reach the right audience through compelling storytelling with visual and audio elements. Social media promotion, PR, Pay-per-Click (PPC) campaigns, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are important channels to market your brand and products digitally.
2) Credibility
People may not trust your online business at first glance. You need to convince the audience that you are a trustable business. Content pieces, reviews, accessibility, and excellent customer service are some of the ways to build trust with your customers.
Digital marketers will leverage social media and marketing trends to instill trust in your audience. They gather customer reviews and testimonials through digital marketing and display them at the right spots to get more eyeballs.
Another way to build trust is through cleverly written articles, product descriptions, videos, etc. Whatever the content may be, you need a suitable medium to communicate it to your audience. Digital marketing can be that medium since 59.5% of the world’s population use the internet.
3) More Traffic
There are a variety of ways to bring traffic to your e-commerce website in digital marketing. To name a few, social media, email marketing, content optimization, link building, and influencers are some of the best bets.
Let’s see the value and potential of each.
An effective social media marketing can harvest the power of social media to its full extent. Witty-yet-sensible responses to customers’ queries on social media, hashtag campaigns, and contests are a few ways to bring in more traffic.
Email marketing is an effective tool to make people not only visit your site but make them subscribe to your email list. Features like personalization abandoned cart alerts, and shoppable emails are great in making people land on your online store.
Content optimization techniques involve improving your existing content and drafting new content to make them easily discoverable by search engines.
4) High Conversion
One of the main reasons for eCommerce stores’ low conversion rate is marketing to the wrong people. The likelihood of a site visitor becoming a buyer highly depends on the purchasing intent.
You cannot drive 1,000 random people to your website and expect a quarter of them to buy your products. Ecommerce does not work that way.
In Digital Marketing, you can target the right people at the right time so that the chances of them becoming your customer is high. The first strategy is through keyword research.
A person who is searching for something online is far likely to make a purchase sooner than one who may or may not be interested in the product. But to reach the former, you need to have the right digital marketing strategy in place.
Urgency and scarcity meters, PPC ads, heat maps, call-to-action (CTA) buttons, and native advertising are a few Digital Marketing techniques to boost the conversion for your e-commerce store.
5) High ROI
Compared to the traditional forms of advertising, PPC, SEO, email marketing, and social media advertising give you a better ROI.
Let’s begin with the power of SEO. According to a study by Moz, for every $1 spent on e-commerce SEO, advertisers get $2.75 in return.
When it comes to Google Ads, the results become even juicier. According to Google, for every $1 spent on Google Ads, advertisers, on average, earn $8 in return. Read this Google report for more insights.
A study by Searchenginejournal has even more exciting results. Nearly 49% of the respondents say that Organic Search, aka SEO, has the highest ROI.
While 18% consider that social media gives the best ROI, 14% believe email marketing is the real ROI king. Only 19% responded that Paid Search gives the highest ROI.
Note that social media marketing, email marketing, and SEO are part and parcel of Digital Marketing.
6) For High Perceived Value
Your product may be an out-of-the-world one. But there is no need for your audience to think the same way. To make them understand the true value of your product or service, you need to tell your customers that you, too, go through blood, sweat, and tears.
Yes. They need to know the amount of effort you put in to bring a product to life.
Digital advertising is the most effective method to increase the perceived value of your product and e-commerce store. It allows you to tell impactful stories using which you can position your brand in the desired way.
Next comes user-generated content, reviews, and testimonials. These things will create a positive image among the fence-sitters and even the tire-kickers.
7) Recurring Benefits
The frustrating thing about all forms of advertising is the recurring expenditure involved in it.
You shell out a certain amount and enjoy a steady stream of traffic for a while. The moment you stop spending on ads, the traffic to your e-commerce site dries up.
But what if you need not invest every single time to get traffic. SEO is the way to go. Now, that does not mean that you invest once and forget it. SEO is an ongoing process, and you still have to spend money on it. But compared to advertising, it’s way more cost-effective.
But the benefits, aka traffic, you get out of SEO can last for years, if not decades.
In short, advertising is buying traffic. In contrast, SEO is earning traffic.
8) Boost in Social Following
Because social proof is a prerequisite for the masses to follow you without being told, social media marketing is vital to get a headstart.
Social following greatly influences your audience. Effective social media marketing will shape customers’ perceptions and make them follow you.
Once things are on a roll and you gain a sizeable following, the campaign will snowball. Upon witnessing that many are following your account, more and more will join the bandwagon.
Digital marketers employ specific strategies to make your ecommerce brand follow-worthy. They will make the audience invested in your brand by running contests and giving shoutouts.
Marketers will ensure your brand’s relevancy by using the correct visual elements and hashtags and sticking to a posting schedule.
9) To Build an Authentic Customer Base
A carefully executed digital marketing strategy is a must to earn a loyal following. Fans are extremely important to make your e-commerce business sustainable.
Because loyal customers tend to indulge in word-of-mouth publicity, you need them to build a positive image for your business among the masses.
Digital marketing can get you customer insights such as their likes and dislikes. Digital marketers, using the buyer persona, then develop a personality for your ecommerce business that appeals to the target audience.
In short, they set the tone and voice for your brand. Apart from defining a personality for your brand, they run polls and contests to make the audience feel connected to you. Giveaways, shoutouts, quick responses to comments are the ways digital marketers use to create brand loyalty.
10) Ability to Track Performance
Digital marketing can help you know how your campaigns fare among the target audience. Using the right digital marketing tools, you can get access to valuable customer data.
Using the data, you can personalize and optimize your marketing campaigns. Analytics also tells you which campaigns performed well and which ones have tanked.
The data can help you channel your time and resources towards the campaigns that are likely to strike a chord with your customers.
Another great benefit of analytics is that it can help you segment your customers. Segmentation is essential to personalize your marketing campaigns. Personalization, in turn, will result in more conversion and brand affinity.
11) Know Your Competitors
Knowing what your competitors are doing is essential to devise your strategies. Maybe you want to dominate the domain where your competitor is shining or fill a void that your competitor has not captured yet.
Either way, you need raw and undiluted data to create an action plan.
Say that you optimize your online store for a set of important keywords. You wait, wait and wait. But traffic seems to be a thing that can give an elusive thief a run for her money.
You scratch your head, analyze data and find that your competitor is killing it on the exact keywords.
You realize that it is not worth optimizing your site for the same keywords and start concentrating on low-competition keywords that your competitor ignores. As a result, your rankings go up, and so is the revenue.
If you had not analyzed the data, you would still be trying to rank high for the keywords your competitor is dominating.
12) Dictate Prices
If you are a new entrant to the e-commerce space, you don’t have enough say in pricing. Because you have not gained a spot in the market, you need to price your products competitively.
Even if you price your products competitively, there is no guarantee for traffic unless you vehemently advertise them.
If you don’t have a deep pocket, you will be left with slim profits or perhaps even losses. The way to overcome this situation is to position yourself in the market and make your presence felt across your target audiences.
Digital marketing can help you achieve this by promoting your e-commerce business across multiple channels. By bringing in a steady inflow of right traffic, you can now dictate the prices.
13) Break Boundaries
Going global is an exciting dream for any business. If you are an e-commerce business, expanding your business to new regions is no more a dream but a naturally occurring phenomenon.
But going global or national is easier said than done. You need to know the ins and outs of the region and the people you intend to target.
Digital marketing will help you understand people’s preferences, views and wows, income level, educational qualification, purchasing power, and whatnots.
For a successful expansion plan, mere observations won’t help you, but hard-hitting data do. Take the case of Starbucks’ failure in the Australian market. The coffee giant miserably failed in understanding the local coffee culture and adapting to them.
This is what happened: Australians love coffee but not as Americans do. They are known for their love for latte, cappuccino, and flat white coffee. They also prefer to have a snack with
coffee. Starbucks failed to understand this and priced the items as they did in other markets. The result was a disaster. Australians felt that Starbucks’ coffee was overpriced. The coffee company ended up closing 61 stores and sold 24 others to Withers Group.
If they had done a comprehensive market study, they could have avoided the failure.
14) Better Customer Relationships
There is very little room for hiccups in customer relationships when it comes to digital marketing.
Thanks to the rise of social media, today, a good volume of interaction between brands and customers occurs on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The thing that makes brand-customer communication a breeze in social media is the quick turnaround time. Because a negative comment can trigger a public backlash, brands never hit the sack when it comes to social media.
Multinational brands such as Nike, Walmart, and Starbucks have separate handles to address customer queries. The comments section is also a nice little place where brands can sway public opinion with quirky responses.
Your response may be a funny reply or an acknowledgment of a mistake. Irrespective of its nature, your brand visibility and customer relationships become better and better with social media.
15) To Make Your Customers Feel Special
Personalization is crucial for every business for long-term success. To harvest loyal customers, you need to cultivate a habit of personalizing messages and offers.
Personalization goes beyond sending birthday cards and saying ‘Happy New Year, John!’ As an e-commerce brand, knowing a customer’s preferences, previously viewed products, purchase history, and browsing behavior will allow you to personalize the marketing.
Let’s say a visitor has searched for inflatable pools on your e-commerce site a couple of times but never made a purchase
If you have a robust product recommendation plugin installed on your site, you can display a list of inflatable pools when the user visits your site next time.
Or you can curate a list of best-selling inflatable pools and send them to the user in a shoppable email. This will make the communication genuinely personalized.
FAQs on Digital Marketing for Ecommerce
1) Why Digital Marketing is Important for Ecommerce?
Because online is where your customers hang out, an e-commerce site needs digital marketing more than any business. Digital marketing will bring you more traffic and sales.
It will also put customer relationships in order and personalize your marketing campaigns.
In addition, you will get access to rich customer data, which you can leverage to multiply sales. Precise targeting, competitor analysis, room for branding are a few perks associated with Digital Marketing.
2) Is Digital Marketing a Costly Affair?
The budget purely depends on your needs. Think twice if you assume that marketing your products online will cost more than doing the same in a newspaper or a magazine.
Digital marketing is one of the cost-effective marketing channels. Depending on your budget, there are a variety of options for you to choose from.
If you have a deep pocket, you can collaborate with celebrities and influencers as FashionNova does. If you are on a shoestring, you can use strategies such as content marketing and email marketing.
3) Is Paid Advertising and Digital Marketing the Same?
Yes and No. Digital marketing is an umbrella term for a range of strategies. They include social media promotions, PPC ads, email campaigns, blogging, SEO, and affiliate promotions.
Of these, only PPC is Paid Advertising. Though you need to invest money for all other digital marketing strategies, PPC, as the name suggests, is a “Pay As You Go” type. In layman’s terms, you only need to pay when someone clicks on your ads.
4) What are Some Most Affordable Digital Marketing Strategies?
Blogging is one of the most affordable digital marketing strategies. By learning the basics of blogging, an e-commerce store can even use its manpower to create blog articles, promote them on social media and earn decent traffic.
Next comes email marketing. You can start testing the waters by spending as little as $10 a month.
It is also one of the best strategies that give you an impressive ROI. According to this study, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you get a return of $40.
5) Which Digital Marketing Strategies Suit eCommerce the Best?
PPC ads, Google Shopping ads, and shoppable emails are tested and proven digital marketing strategies for e-commerce businesses. PPC ads connect your products with the right customer who has a high purchasing intent. Google Shopping ads are one step ahead.
Let’s say you run Google Shopping ads for your men’s fashion brand, and a customer searches for “Black Tuxedo.” Google shopping ads will display your ‘Black Tuxedos” at the top of search results. As a result, you will get high-quality leads.
