17 Best ECommerce Marketing Strategies to Get Ahead in 2024

As the leading direct mail automation platform, we spend a lot of time analyzing the best eCommerce marketing strategies.

The internet is full of eCommerce advice, but most are either outdated or ineffective. You need to choose strategies that can offer impressive results while requiring less effort. In that case, direct mail marketing is a great place to start because it can help you boost your sales by 500%.

Postalytics is a platform that you can connect with any CRM to automate your mail campaigns and synchronize them with your email efforts. It also helps transfer your data from CRM to Postalytics to get a quick and effective eCommerce marketing engine.

Check out the Postalytics demo to learn more about its features.

Here are the best marketing strategies that you can use to grow your eCommerce business.

Humanize and Personalize Your eCommerce Marketing

Personalization is the foundational element of marketing success in modern times. It creates a stronger relationship with the customer, affects customer behavior, and promotes customer retention. Personalization can help you stay relevant and interesting while speaking directly to the customer.

All of this increases the likelihood that your customer will visit your website to buy a product.

Luckily, personalizing your marketing has never been easier than today. Platforms like Postalytics can help you add pURLs and QR codes to direct mail generated directly from your CRM with the freshest and most relevant data.

Furthermore, personalization helps you stand out in just about any industry. It’s a way to narrow down your audience so that you can target them more efficiently and help them connect with you. Let’s say you only produce hammocks for kids. This way, you can grow popular among parents as the best brand for making safe and fun hammocks for kids. Your CRM can tell you their birthdays, so you can send a promotion a week earlier and make it easy for the parent to buy a cool gift for their young ones. The parents will appreciate the relevancy of the promotion as it takes one task off of their busy to-do lists. 

Email Marketing /w Direct Mail Marekting

Email marketing is ideal for attracting new customers and retaining older ones. It’s also helpful to engage with customers who visit your site and fill their carts but don’t make a purchase. 

Opting for email marketing campaigns also allows you to segment and target specific demographics. This saves you time, money, and energy. The best part of email marketing is that you can personalize it entirely and then some.

However, our mailboxes are spammed to death nowadays. Most emails never get the attention of potential customers. So, you can sprinkle some direct mail to reach your email nonresponders and skyrocket your revenue. This strategy unlocks a powerful tandem that will turn your leads into customers.

Direct Mail Marketing Automation for eCommerce

Though direct mail marketing is one of the oldest marketing strategies. Talk about tested and tried. Direct Mail can help you attract a significant audience on its own, but it works best in a marketing mix with other digital channels, like email and PPC.

Whether you have an online business or operate a brick-and-mortar shop, direct mail for eCommerce can offer greater visibility, improve response rates, and provides more creative opportunities compared to online efforts. Direct mail allows you to send more personal and tangible marketing messages compared to those you deliver online.

Direct mail stands above many disadvantages of modern-day methods in digital advertising. It can help you cut through the digital noise and leave an everlasting window to your eCommerce shop that casually sits in your customer’s living room. On top of everything, the familiarity of direct mail creates trustworthiness and a sense of security that resonates with many potential customers, especially people who are not tech-savvy. 

Other advantages of automated direct mail marketing strategies are:

  • Highly targeted
  • Offers creativity and versatility
  • Cost-effective
  • Trackable
  • Offers amazing results paired with other marketing strategies

Designing marketing materials for mail, like postcards and letters, and sending them can be challenging for a company. Therefore, you need a well-designed system that allows you to design, send, and track mail without putting in too much effort and energy. In this case, Postalytics can help you send professionally-designed mail to your desired audience. Plus, you won’t have to deal with direct mail printing, sorting, and posting, as Postalytics will take care of all this work for you with staggering quality. This amazing tool can help you send thank you letters, new promotions, and seasonal promo offers from a single dashboard, no different from email marketing one.

Retargeting for eCommerce Marketing Strategy

Gone are the days when brands focus on quantity over the quality of audience members they reach through advertising. Carpet-bombing marketing is better left to Pepsi, BurgerKings, and Doritos of the world. Most brands need to efficiently spend their marketing dollars to reach the best quality audience. Otherwise, they’re wasting their money.  

The retargeting method helps your business connect with customers who have visited your website but never completed tasks such as filling out a contact form, purchasing an item, or downloading a file. Encouraging these customers to purchase your products is much easier than staying new ones. These prospects already know about your brand, so you don’t have to build brand awareness. And creating a little nudge and a touchpoint goes a long way. 

You can opt for marketing tactics that help you benefit from retargeting strategies. Email campaigns and direct mail marketing are the best methods to retarget cold leads.

Content Marketing for eCommerce

Content marketing is one of the best eCommerce marketing tools. By sharing valuable content, you can build trust with your audience. Creating impactful content can help businesses tell their story in a way that’s engaging and authentic.

Most importantly, you can improve your eCommerce site search engine visibility. Businesses can also use this marketing strategy to nurture and educate their audience. You can spread awareness of your product and help people understand its benefits and uses. Just make sure that your content is valuable, easy to understand, and addresses customers’ problems.

Upsell / Downsell / Cross-sell Your Products for eCommerce 

Businesses had practiced these strategies for centuries before sales experts started packing them under catchy titles. Upselling, down selling, and cross-selling are some of the most common strategies that help you attract customers and retain them. Upselling is the practice of motivating consumers to buy higher-end services or products compared to lower-priced items. In the case of a down-sell, you offer lower-priced products to the consumers when they refuse to purchase high-priced ones. Lastly, cross-sale means selling an additional product to existing customers.

Upsell, down-sell, and cross-sell strategies can help increase your brand sales. However, it’s a bit challenging. You need to offer different solutions to customers based on their needs and requirements. These strategies help you build a deeper relationship with consumers and increase customer loyalty. By practicing different selling strategies, businesses can improve customer retention and lifetime value.

Influencer Marketing

Whether you have an eCommerce business or a physical store, influencer marketing is can work wonders for some brands. When you ask a minor celebrity or popular teenager to support your brand on different platforms, it helps you reach their followers. This encourages their followers to trust you and purchase your product or services.

These eCommerce marketing tactics enrich your content strategy, increase sales, save time and cost, drive purchase decisions, and increase brand awareness. However, not every influencer on Instagram or Facebook can help you in this case. You need to choose a brand or personality with quality followers, and they should be interested in your product or service. For instance, if you’re a cosmetic company, you need model influencers.

Affiliate Marketing for eCommerce

It indicates a performance-based marketing method in which a business promotes its services and products through affiliate sites. Simply put, in this marketing method, you need to talk about your product or service through a podcast, social media platform, or website.

Though affiliate marketing is beneficial for you, it’s not an easy and quick method. You need skills, experience, and knowledge to affiliate your brand and generate impressive income successfully. Building an affiliate network where you offer a percentage of revenue to on-demand sales agents is a strong marketing channel for young eCommerce businesses.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO for eCommerce)

If you have an eCommerce business, search engine optimization is ideal for increasing your brand’s visibility. You can rank high on Google’s SERPs by optimizing your website, such as its blogs. The best part is that SEO offers an organic audience and search engine results and helps you drive traffic without paid advertisement. With the help of search engine optimization, your online store gains customer attention and helps you reach customers looking for your products.

Additionally, search engine optimization is more than just adding keywords to your content. You need to employ an SEO homepage strategy, create valuable content, and include calls to action. Adding necessary images and videos creates easy-to-understand content and optimizes your site. Keep in mind that search engine optimization requires skills, experience, and knowledge. Luckily, the internet is an open book that offers all the information you need to get started.

SEM: Pay-per-click advertising for eCommerce

SEM is also commonly known as paid search or pay-per-click. Since a significant number of people choose online shopping, PPC search engine optimization is growing important for digital marketing campaigns. SEM helps marketers or businesses only pay for impressions that offer a great number of visitors. Furthermore, each visitor supports your organic search ranking, making it an effective way to drive conversions and traffic. However, SEM can turn into a costly mistake if not run by a professional. Due to staggering competition, it’s very difficult to cut through the noise in strong markets. 

Strategic SEM marketing can distinguish your business from competition on the internet. Note that when more of your products appear on a search engine, it gets greater engagement and higher visibility. SEM can help brands reach target customers instantly, connect with local markets, bring in more qualified leads, and boost brand awareness.

Use Marketplaces for eCommerce

Since eCommerce businesses don’t have any physical stores, it becomes difficult to attract people, especially those looking for solutions to different problems. Online marketplaces solved this problem by providing a platform that offers everything to the consumer. This way, people can shop for groceries, home accessories, or clothes in a single place, saving their time and energy by checking different online sites.

This is beneficial not only for consumers but for brands as well. As many people will be searching for the products that you sell on these platforms, you can sell your products easily. Fortunately, most eCommerce marketplaces have introduced different strategies to ensure a business’s visibility. For instance, Amazon and eBay allow keyword research and include them in the product description so that your product ranks high on these platforms. The best part is that opting for this platform will not cost you money and will offer the results you’re looking for.

Social Media and Video Marketing for eCommerce

We all know that social media marketing is growing popular among ecommerce merchandisers. Since many of your audience is active on social media networks, it has become much easier to connect with them. Some of the most used social media networks for marketing are:

TikTok

TikTok is a platform where brands can share creative video content that inspires or motivates their customers. You can share videos that show your product’s features, the company’s production process, or employees at work. When you share unique and creative content, your customers start to trust you.

Instagram

Though Instagram was initially a platform to share pictures and videos with your family and friends, it’s now a platform to market any business. You have multiple options- you can share pictures and videos, add a story, 0r run paid advertisements to attract your customers.

Facebook

Facebook is continuously trying to improve its marketing features. They have even introduced a marketplace where businesses can market products and services. Like Instagram, you can run paid advertisements and set a specific demographic so that your ad only reaches your desired people.

Youtube

Youtube allows you to share video content with your target audience. Keep in mind that videos leave a greater impact than text-based content and offer quality results. 

Twitter

This is a more professional platform where you can find people of all ages, genders, and backgrounds. Twitter allows you to build quality followership so that people can benefit from your content and engage with your brand.

Text Message Campaigns for eCommerce

Text message marketing is a successful eCommerce marketing strategy. With SMS marketing, companies can consistently market to and reach out to their customers, ensuring that their consumers are satisfied with their experience. In addition, customers love feeling valued, which makes text message marketing strategies effective for building and sustaining customer relationships.

You can send a personalized message to people, encouraging them to build their trust in you. Text messages are also a direct and immediate channel that helps businesses reach a specific audience. Based on the automatic system you choose, you can support and integrate them with other channels. Also, text message campaigns help with customer engagement. For instance, a business can use SMS marketing to send promotional offers, reminders about a sale, or inform customers about loyalty rewards. 

Live Chat Online for eCommerce

Nothing can satisfy a customer more than an opportunity to contact your company at any time. Live chat online boosts customer satisfaction as it provides instant services to consumers. When you’re able to deliver personalized service and solutions, it boosts customers’ trust in you. Most importantly, it will improve customer acquisition.

Not only is it beneficial for your target audience, but it also helps you retain customers. By quickly answering queries and giving instant solutions, customers are more likely to make a purchase from your site. Even if you are not available to answer queries, online live chat sends automatic messages to the customers. This allows them to solve common issues or, at the very least, inform the customer that you’ll tend to their concern as soon as possible. In the long run, this improves customer satisfaction rates. So, it’s important to offer 24/7 support to your customers. You can do this by hiring experts to answer your queries throughout the day and seven days a week. Or, you can outsource this task to boost sales.

Use User-Generated Content for eCommerce

User-generated content or UGC is content that customers create, referring to a brand, to publish on different social media platforms or other channels. The content can be anything like videos, images, testimonials, reviews, or podcasts. User-generated content is an ideal way to market your brand. This is because this content is by someone who doesn’t officially represent the company. They don’t even get something in exchange for creating this content, which makes the content authentic, unbiased, and valuable for other customers.

Brands can use it to build brand awareness and attract customers. User-generated campaigns are also a cost-effective way to grow a business, as you simply use preexisting content in your favor. During your marketing campaign, share this content on your website, advertisements, and social media pages, and pair it with a different marketing strategy. When people see your customers’ positive experience, they will consider you a reliable brand to purchase products from.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) for eCommerce

As the name suggests, CRO helps increase the percentage of conversions from a mobile app or website. CRO helps you make customers perform the desired action on your website. This can include adding products to their cart, purchasing a product, clicking a link, or filling out a form. Conversation rate optimization is important for several purposes. It helps reduce your customer acquisition costs by gaining more benefits from visitors and customers you already have. Business owners can also increase revenue per visitor, grow the business, and acquire more customers.

Practicing conversation rate optimization is challenging for business owners, as it requires skills and experience. But then, all of this can be found online. Google really is your friend.

Customer Loyalty Schemes for eCommerce

Customer loyalty schemes motivate customers to maintain an excellent connection with your business. These practices encourage customers to make repeat purchases and earn points in return. These schemes are designed to engage a large number of people. Also, these schemes have something to offer customers, such as rewards, gifts, discounts, or points that can be redeemed to gain services and goods.

Savvy marketers often automate sending coupons or postcards once a customer reaches a milestone, wins a lucky draw, or simply before their birthdays. You can automate this process by connecting your CRM to Postalytics and setting up triggers that automatically create high-quality direct mail and ship it to your lucky customer.

Introducing customer loyalty schemes to your marketing strategies is important. This is because loyal customers are more likely to purchase more of your products in the future. It’s easier to convince existing customers to purchase your products again than to attract new ones. A strategic design loyalty program can encourage customers to choose you over competitors. It can bring them back to shop frequently from your brand.

personalised direct mail

Bottom Line: The Best eCommerce Marketing Strategies

Now that you are aware of some of the best eCommerce marketing strategies, you can start using them to expand your business, boost sales, and retain customers. 

Ideally, your business should deploy a variety of marketing methods that work in unison to create the largest possible impact. But if you are on a budget, don’t have time, or lack the expertise to practice most of the above-mentioned marketing strategies, you can simply opt for direct mail marketing, email marketing, and personalize your message. 

Wondering why? Well, these are the simplest yet most effective strategies that help you attract a great audience.

Postalytics allows you to automate a direct mail marketing campaign, personalize messages, and automatically send mail to any number of people at a time. You can also benefit from its CRM integrations, which help you connect Postalytics with any CRM out there.

What are you waiting for? Sign up for a free account today.

About the Author

Dennis Kelly
Dennis Kelly

Dennis Kelly is CEO and co-founder of Postalytics. Dennis joined Boingnet, the predecessor to Postalytics, in 2013. Boingnet was focused on providing print and direct mail marketing service providers the ability to add digital marketing channels to their direct mail campaigns. Postalytics is Dennis’ 6th startup. He has been involved in starting and growing early-stage technology ventures for over 30 years and has held senior management roles at a diverse set of large technology firms including Computer Associates, Palm Inc. and Achieve Healthcare Information Systems.