The 8 Best E-Commerce Marketing Strategies for 2024

E-commerce business can simply be described as the process of selling or buying of goods and services on the internet. People can shop for different items using their phones, tablets, or computers from any location and they may buy products from sellers in any location. Some of the biggest e-commerce marketplaces are Amazon, Alibaba, Shopify, and eBay.

E-commerce sales in the U.S. are projected to grow 8.95% annually from 2024-2028. The boom in e-commerce businesses means that the online market is becoming more concentrated each day, especially among small businesses. Only one activity can allow these organizations to appeal to their target audience: e-commerce marketing.

E-commerce marketing involves using different promotional strategies and tactics to increase traffic to an online store, attract paying customers from that traffic, and boost brand awareness.

This article will highlight a variety of strategies and tactics that could improve e-commerce marketing for your brand. We will also provide a detailed explanation of how each e-commerce marketing strategy works.

Top e-commerce marketing strategies:

1. Focus on customer experience

2. Use SEO to build search traffic

3. Launch an affiliate marketing program

4. Implement social media strategies

5. Add an email signup option to your website

6. Implement pay-per-click advertising

7. Set up cart abandonment emails

8. Reward loyal customers

1. Focus on customer experience

Providing an excellent customer experience can help an e-commerce store distinguish itself from its rivals. This practice contributes to revenue growth, enhanced customer loyalty, increased click-through rates, and a higher return on investment.

Improving customer experience has become the top priority for huge online retailers such as Amazon and Alibaba. Before going further, let’s take a minute to review what customer experience actually entails.

Customer experience includes all the interactions that clients have with your brand. These experiences involve marketing activities, communication, and website design and continue throughout the actual product delivery process.

Having a positive customer experience is vital because it allows individuals to perceive the brand positively. As a result, customers are likely to become loyal to the brand and may recommend it to their family members and friends.

Excellent customer experiences also pave the way for cross-selling. In this context, cross-selling involves offering additional products or services to existing or repeat clients.

So, are you wondering how to create that great experience?

Read on for some of our best marketing tips to improve customer experience.

Offer a personalized shopping experience

Personalization makes customers feel appreciated and helps successful e-commerce brands to deliver better product recommendations and discounts. This, in turn, can translate into higher sales.

Understand the unique needs and preferences of different users and market to those needs.

Improve communication processes

Since technology has evolved greatly from the start of e-commerce, selling platforms should use tools such as chatbots and live chats that are now readily available. Chatbots provide ready feedback to customers, which could improve their overall online shopping experience. And now, AI chatbots can further enhance the online shopping experience by providing 24/7 instant feedback, leading to faster resolution of customer inquiries. E-commerce retailers should have website pages dedicated to frequently asked questions (FAQ) for faster clarification of points.

In addition, customer service agents still need to be trained well to supplement chatbots. Customer service agents need appropriate skills to identify and resolve conflicts before situations escalate to problems.

E-commerce platforms should also provide customer reviews and testimonials. Such information can enhance the consumer decision-making process.

Provide an appealing user experience

In this context, the user experience is achieved from the look and feel of the e-commerce website or app. The software should be reliable, simple, and functional. Users with little IT knowledge should be able to navigate across different pages easily.

Customers are likely to exit a website if they find it too hard to use, if it responds too slowly, or if they keep encountering errors. Offering certain clues, such as loading indicators, error messages, or visual cues and icons, can help avoid these negative actions. Websites need to have a fast loading speed to improve customer retention. The image below shows what a typical checkout process should entail. Diverting from this established process may lead to confusion.

Not sure where to start with creating a positive customer experience transformation within your business? Upwork has numerous customer experience freelancers for you to choose from to make the job simple and effective.

2. Use SEO to build search traffic

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps drive search engine traffic to your website. Using keywords and optimizing your product descriptions and other content can improve your website's visibility and direct users to specific product pages, enabling them to easily explore the range of items available in your store.

To put things into perspective, only 0.63% of searchers click a link on the second page of Google's search results. So, you want your offering to appear early on the first page of the search results, even though Google might provide hundreds of thousands of website pages that are relevant to a customer’s query.

The following are essential SEO tactics for e-commerce sites:

1. Perform keyword research. Keyword research involves identifying certain words, phrases, and queries people use when they search for information online. By implementing the right keywords on your website, you can increase your search rankings and generate traffic to your site, ultimately leading to potential customers, engagement, and sales for your e-commerce business. This research can also help you identify other product offerings customers want.

2. Optimize your product pages. Ensure your content is high quality and relevant. Also, make sure your website's structure is user-friendly and easy to navigate, with clear headings and meta tags. To ensure optimal visibility, focus on specific things such as keyword placement and title length. For example, it's recommended to have titles with fewer than 60 characters because only the first 50 to 60 characters are shown in the browser.

3. Optimize media for the web. To improve website performance, opt for web-optimized file formats such as WebP for high-quality images without compromising page speed. Large images can negatively impact both SEO and user experience, leading to slower page load times. You can also maximize SEO benefits and improve accessibility by adding descriptive alt text for images.

4. Use content marketing to build your audience. Due to market saturation, most e-commerce platforms deal with similar products. To distinguish your site, create compelling, keyword-optimized content, such as guides or industry insights, to establish authority and engage users. Encourage interaction and social sharing to foster a community around your brand, improving both reach and customer loyalty. You can also implement email marketing campaigns to engage with your subscribers and deliver targeted content and special offers directly to their inboxes.

Other things to consider include technical SEO aspects of your website. These factors may include optimizing your homepage speed by reducing file sizes, making your URLs clear and descriptive, and adding an SSL certificate to your site to ensure a secure connection. Technical SEO ensures search engines can crawl and index your content and improves a website's overall performance.

Don’t know where to get started with SEO? Find a ready-made project to meet your SEO needs on Upwork.

3. Launch an affiliate marketing program

An affiliate marketing program involves partnering with other individuals or parties to promote a firm’s products. Affiliate marketing programs can build awareness and increase user traffic to a website. As a result, e-commerce stores may experience higher sales due to new customers.

E-commerce affiliate marketing programs have few operating expenses when compared to those in other sectors. You can place Google ads or Facebook ads and links on other stores’ websites. These links will then redirect users to your site. Using influencer marketing and user-generated content (UGC) can add social proof for your website and introduce the e-commerce platform to an already established target audience.

Alternatively, you can partner with manufacturing firms to promote their products in exchange for a commission. For example, Upwork offers an affiliate program that enables you to promote the platform and earn commissions for every successful referral. With freelancers and clients from different industries and backgrounds, your site could reach a broad market.

Affiliate marketing can help you generate an additional revenue stream for your site and you can build relationships with other businesses. Plus, if your audience finds your recommendations valuable, it can cultivate customer trust and credibility.

4. Implement social media strategies

Social media is the ultimate digital marketing tool in the modern world. Popular marketing channels such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X (formerly known as Twitter) have millions of active users. When implemented correctly, social media marketing strategies can boost the conversion rate, which represents converting users to paying customers.

E-commerce stores should maintain an active presence on social media platforms. Posting frequent product images, messages, and links with appropriate hashtags can attract users’ attention and direct them to your website. This regular activity also facilitates increased customer referrals.

Social media channels can help you keep in touch with the target audience. For example, managers can respond to customer queries and deal with complaints. Such actions can promote a loyal community, which is quite beneficial to online stores.

E-commerce stores can collect valuable data on demographics and interests from social media channels that they can use for personalization. A perfect example is monitoring the number of shares, likes, and follows that product postings have. The information can then be used to stock appropriately.

You can also look at ad placement on podcasts. Finding subject areas that appeal to the specific demographics of your target market can dramatically expand your brand reach.

If you’re struggling to maintain an active social media presence or require some assistance with conversion rate optimization, Upwork is here to help. Find qualified social media strategists on Upwork today.

5. Add an email sign-up option to your website

Email marketing enables e-commerce stores to communicate with their customer base. Businesses can engage in email campaigns to update new customers regarding upcoming sales discounts and the availability of new products. To leverage these functions, adding an email sign-up option to a website is recommended. The store can offer certain incentives, such as discounts, free shipping, or freebies, to encourage more website visitors to sign up.

E-commerce platforms should send emails with clear subject lines. It’s important to make the content of the email easy to understand.

Once emails are sent, you’ll want to monitor business analytics using different automation tools to understand the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts. The information can help e-commerce platforms understand how customers receive and respond to email notifications.

6. Implement pay-per-click advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is also an effective e-commerce marketing plan. This marketing activity involves placing sponsored ads on a website that will then redirect users to other sites when clicked. The advertiser will need to pay the publisher whenever the advertisement is clicked.

When engaging in pay-per-click advertising, online stores should consider the ad, pay offer, and landing page. The ad needs a clear message of what the advertiser is offering. The advertisement will also contain certain keywords to rank higher in search engine results.

When users follow the link on the ad, the landing page needs to present what was advertised to the user. The page should also be free from all kinds of distractions, including unnecessary pop-ups, for better user satisfaction.

7. Set up cart abandonment emails

It’s a common practice for users to place items in their shopping cart and exit an e-commerce site before placing an order. Successful e-commerce stores have proper strategies in place to capture sales and upsell to such customers. Upselling involves convincing individuals to purchase their selected items or retargeting them to additional ones.

One right step that these businesses take is to notify users on their email list of their abandoned cart, possibly with additional information or offers. Customers can respond to this call to action by purchasing or modifying items in their cart.

8. Reward loyal customers

Having a customer loyalty program is among the best ways to keep existing customers. Online stores can create healthy relationships by celebrating their loyal customers.

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Common ways of rewarding customers in a customer loyalty program include making them brand ambassadors, granting them access to early programs, and offering discounts, price cuts, and free deliveries.

Hire an e-commerce specialist and boost your business's marketing potential

As the number of online businesses has increased, the need for e-commerce marketing specialists is at an all-time high. You’re likely to find numerous benefits of working with an e-commerce marketing specialist. For starters, an e-commerce marketer will work within your marketing budget to help you deliver an excellent customer experience, which will contribute to better online sales and repeat purchases.

An e-commerce marketer will also assess your SEO and social media strategies and advise how to improve them. As discussed above, SEO marketing tactics affect your visibility on the internet. Good SEO can help you appear among the first results whenever a user performs a Google search for specific product reviews.

You can start experiencing the benefits of e-commerce marketing by hiring an e-commerce marketing specialist on Upwork. Alternatively, if you're an e-commerce marketing expert, you can provide your freelance services to clients across various industries. Your knowledge and skills can help businesses optimize their digital marketing strategies, attract more customers, and enhance their online presence.

If you're interested in earning some extra income by referring clients to Upwork, you can also join the Upwork Affiliate Program. By promoting Upwork to your network, you can earn a commission for every new client you refer.

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Upwork is not affiliated with and does not sponsor or endorse any of the tools or services discussed in this article. These tools and services are provided only as potential options, and each reader and company should take the time needed to adequately analyze and determine the tools or services that would best meet their specific needs and situation.