Running an eCommerce business needs extra attention and energy towards your marketing strategies. This is because apart from targeting new traffic to your platforms, you are also working to ensure that you entice existing customers to keep coming back to your store.

Even though we live in a digital age, there are still many challenges that eCommerce sites undergo. As the competition remains unforgivingly fierce with millions of shopping options, it becomes a lot harder to convince online shoppers to purchase products from you.

There have also been various developments in the eCommerce world, thanks to search engine giants such as Google. This is because people can easily check out the prices of products much quicker, compare the goods with those of competitors, and they can decide on who to settle on, even before approaching your site.

To ensure that you remain relevant and close more leads, you may need to relook your marketing efforts and stay ahead of the trends. Here are five effective digital marketing strategies for eCommerce sites that will ensure you capture your share in the $2.8 trillion annual online sales.

1. Define your sales cycle

Before you embark on any digital marketing campaigns and even before writing your business plan, the first thing you’ll always hear is that you should understand your audience. In the eCommerce world, going in without defining your user personas would be heading for doom, as the chances of your business failing are pretty high.

Every business is unique, and therefore, you ought to define your sales cycle before launching any marketing strategies. In essence, you need to know how long it takes for a customer to make a purchase on your website. Learn their journey and understand how they move through your sales process. This is the only way you’ll be able to come up with relevant eCommerce marketing strategies that will actually work.

Without a clear understanding of how long it takes for a customer to complete the entire sales cycle, you will find it a little more difficult, trying to pinpoint the areas of improvement and what platforms you need to focus on the most.

Furthermore, with such information, you are also able to know how to target and qualify leads, how to move them onto the next stage of the sales funnel, and what needs to be done to keep them coming back. Fortunately, all these can be done on a trial and error basis so you don’t have to be perfect with your first findings.

2. Optimize your checkout process

One of the biggest mistakes made by eCommerce business owners is the failure to have a seamless checkout process. Getting your prospects to the checkout page takes a lot of convincing and they are satisfied that your products would actually help them solve their pain points.

However, if your checkout process isn’t smooth, then you may end up noticing a high bounce rate emanating from your checkout page.

Ensure that all actions and buttons are clearly visible and that the visitor knows exactly what to do after they have added their preferred products to the cart. There are some methods that you can easily learn by registering to some of the best distance learning platforms, and get to know the different ways you can optimize your checkout page for higher conversions.

3. Provide helpful product descriptions

Having clear product descriptions will help a prospect throughout their sales cycle. They’ll be in a better position to understand exactly what the product is all about and make a decision if it would be helpful to them.

As for the seller, you will gain customer trust if you know how to correctly label your product. This will establish you as an authority, which can boost the customer’s trust in you.

Furthermore, apart from helping to convince your customers, having clear product descriptions can help your site even further through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). By using the right keywords within your product descriptions, search engine crawlers would be able to rank your page as an authority site, helping you to appear on the first page of the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This will ultimately enable you to land on more leads and conversions.

4. Invest in retargeting

The hard truth is that 98% of website visitors do not make a purchase on their first visit. Most of them will be window shopping on your site, or maybe trying to compare you with a competitor. Another batch of individuals would actually add the items to the cart, and leave it half-way, even before they proceed to the checkout page.

If this is the case, you need to invest in retargeting marketing strategies. With this type of marketing, whenever someone visits your website and fails to make a purchase, and you could check on your dashboard that they were interested in a particular product, you reach out to them using other means.

For starters, you can use retargeting ads on other websites that the prospect may visit and bring to their attention your deals and offers on the specific product. Furthermore, if they had subscribed to your website, or had put in their email addresses, you can use these details to reach out to them and offer a personalized offer. By doing this, they will feel appreciated and can end up making the purchase from you.

5. Boost product visualization

People love what they see and if you’re an eCommerce business site owner, this is one of the first things you need to understand. Although content is king, you should beware of the type of content to add to your website. Although blog posts will be a boosting factor, they are not the key selling points.

Ensure to invest more in having quality images of the products you wish to sell. You should also use advanced methods such as 3D technology, where customers are able to view the product from all angles, including rotating 360°. One company, Fourth Source, has recorded increased conversions and sales from 25% to 30% when they used 3D images over flat surface photos for their products.

Conclusion

Having a concrete eCommerce digital marketing strategy will not only be vital for your company’s success through increased sales, but will also ensure you remain relevant to the changing trends and stay ahead of the competition. These five tips are just a starting point for you to up your game and get a piece of this elusive market share.

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Lidia S. Hovhan is a part of Content and Marketing team at OmnicoreAgency. She contributes articles about how to integrate digital marketing strategy with traditional marketing to help business owners to meet their online goals. You can find really professional insights in her writings.