4 Basic eCommerce Marketing Tactics for Retailers

To help businesses, particularly retailers, adapt to the ever-changing business landscape, StraightArrow, in partnership with the National Retail Association of Australia and Small Business, conducted a four-part webinar session on eCommerce marketing. 

The webinars covered cost-effective tactics to drive revenue, optimizing an existing eCommerce site, search engine optimization (SEO) and social content strategy, and email marketing.

Each webinar was led by eCommerce expert Claudia North of Small Business along with digital marketing specialists from StraightArrow.

Here's a short recap to give you a glimpse and impart what we learned from the webinars.

Cost-effective tactics to drive revenue

In the first installment of our webinar series on eCommerce marketing, North shared ten practical tips to boost the conversion rates of eCommerce sites or online shops to drive revenue.

Here’s a quick look at them:

1. Display your best-selling products on your homepage.
2. Make your online shop accessible and easy to navigate to improve user experience.
3. Enable live chat on your website.
4. Create a well-crafted About Us page to showcase your brand.
5. Generate leads by using lead-capturing forms or pop-ups.
6. Set up a welcome email series automation to nurture your new contacts.
7. Have an “abandoned cart” automation to remind visitors where they left off.
8. Run Google ads to increase visibility.
9. Optimize your landing pages and use relevant keywords throughout the content.
10. Run re-targeted ads. These ads on Facebook are 76% more likely to get clicks than regular display ads.

One of our digital marketing specialists, Earl John Diaz, also took part in the discussion and introduced QuicklyLaunch—a subscription-based solution that can help retailers build a marketing-ready eCommerce website as fast as three days.

Optimizing an existing eCommerce site

North discussed conversion rate optimization (CRO) for the second learning session. She stressed that CRO is essential when it comes to increasing your revenue because it focuses on extracting more value from the existing traffic coming to your domain instead of getting new people to visit your website.

However, North said CRO is a process, not a “setup and forget tactic.”

To give the attendees a clear picture of this, she broke down the steps into the following:

• Identify the roadblocks or breaks in your customers’ journey on your website.
• Hypothesize potential solutions to stop the visitors’ break in their journey and map these out for A/B testing.
• Once you’ve tested your hypothesis and clearly indicated which solution had the better result, you can implement these as permanent changes across your website.

SEO and social content strategy

The journey to eCommerce won’t be complete without discussing SEO and social media.

So for the third webinar, North simply defined SEO as the act of acquiring traffic from search engines, for our website, social media accounts, and other digital assets.

Then she discussed the three SEO components, along with her recommendations.

1. Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the structure of your site, which makes crawling and indexing easier for search engines. You will need to conduct an SEO technical audit to optimize for this aspect. This will involve examining your site’s meta robots, headings and more.

2. Relevancy

Relevancy is about providing answers to users' searches by creating helpful content. 

3. Authority 

Building your brand’s authority would require you to focus on the metrics that show search engines that you are trustworthy and helpful to users. These metrics include backlinks, video views, engagement, etc.

After North’s lecture on SEO, StraightArrow’s Digital Marketing Lead Trisha Chua discussed social content strategy. She debunked the belief that social content strategy equals posting regularly on social media.

Chua pointed out that you’ll need to identify the best social media platform/s for your business to craft a specific strategy for each.

To help attendees choose their platform, she presented a step-by-step process:

1. Identify your buyer persona or ideal customers.
2. Set your business goals and milestones. 
3. Match your numbers 1 and 2 by answering these questions: On which platform/s can your customers be found? On which platform/s does your brand’s style fit? On which platform/s can you achieve your business goals? Which platforms are your competitors using?

Email Marketing

For the last part of the eCommerce webinar series, North focused on email marketing which is a great way to nurture your leads and even new customers down the marketing funnel. 

North talked about the customer journey and the two critical automation for your email marketing campaign. These are your welcome series and abandoned cart email automation.

North distinguished that a series of welcome emails are helpful when engaging a new subscriber. On the other hand, abandoned cart emails are best for reminding prospects of the item they left in their cart without checking out. Although these two series are entirely different, both are essential to the success of your email marketing campaign.

Final word

Although everything discussed in this webinar series might look independent, an excellent eCommerce marketing strategy is the ability to tie all these in with your users or customers at the center. 

Do you need help setting up an online store or executing an eCommerce marketing strategy?

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