Key eCommerce Marketing Channels for Your Business

Do you have a marketing strategy? Whether you are marketing your products already or wondering where to start, you probably know about the multi-channel approach. Promoting your products through different channels ensures a wider reach and a higher marketing ROI.

For an eCommerce business, key marketing channels are:

● Paid search

● Paid and organic social media

● Email

● SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

While it may take some time to master all of them, these channels are the backbone of a successful marketing strategy. Let's take a closer look at how each one of them works.

1. Paid Search Marketing

Paid search marketing involves demonstrating your ads to the target audience based on their search queries or browsing behaviour. These ads are text, image, and video-based. Once a lead clicks on an ad, they are automatically redirected to your website.

● Paid search ads — appear on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) on top of other search results.

● Display ads — appear on third-party websites your target audience is highly likely to visit.

● Shopping ads — appear on SERPs in response to the searcher's query about specific products.

To put these ads in front of your audience, you need to work with a service like Google Ads or Bing Ads. You pay either for each click the potential customer makes (for Paid Search Ads) or for a number of impressions (for Display Ads).

The most useful paid search marketing options for an eCommerce business are:

● Google Ads — by using Google Ads, you can place your ads on top of Google search results. Google chooses which ad to demonstrate to the searchers based on its relevancy to their queries.

● Google Shopping — by using this service, you can demonstrate specific products in response to a searcher's query. These ads can contain an image and basic information about your products, unlike Google Ads that feature mostly text.

● Bing Ads — similar to Google Ads, this service puts your ads on top of Bing search results.

The cost of your paid ads depends on many factors including the industry, keyword popularity, the time of the day, and more. With the right paid search strategy, it's possible to achieve a high marketing ROI.

2. Social Media Marketing

With almost half the world's population using social media, it's an excellent channel to generate leads and convert customers. You can either take advantage of paid social options or build your audience organically.

Paid Social

Social media platforms offer you an opportunity to put ads in front of their users. Depending on the platform, you can demonstrate the ad in the news feed, on top of search results, and on different parts of the screen. The format of these ads can differ from pure text to long videos.

The approximate (current) costs per click on different platforms are:

● Twitter —$0.38

● Instagram — $0.5 — $1

● Facebook —$0.97

● Pinterest — $1.50

Just like with Google and Bing Ads, the cost per click depends on various factors including the type of your ad, ad placement, the popularity of the content, industry, and much more.

Pinterest and Instagram are highly valuable marketing channels for eCommerce companies since they allow high-quality images, long videos, and detailed descriptions.

Organic Social

Organic social media marketing involves building a following on social media without the use of paid ads. The key to attracting customers organically is creating high-quality useful content with a high sharing potential and doing it consistently.

While organic social marketing takes much longer to start working, it doesn't cost you almost anything. Even if you are getting excellent results from paid search marketing efforts, don't ignore organic social completely. Once it kicks in, your business can grow tremendously.

3. Email Marketing

When done right, email marketing can have a 3,800% ROI. This marketing channel is highly effective since it creates a direct connection with each customer, thus tweaking your personalisation efforts.

Email marketing helps you promote products, keep in touch with existing customers, create personalised offers, and much more. Different types of emails that help you market and sell your products include:

● Onboarding emails — to welcome the customer and explain how your company works.

● Lead nurturing emails — to send educational content in order to move the lead down the sales funnel.

● Re-engaging emails — to bring passive customers back.

● Abandoned cart emails — to re-engage customers who left the website without purchasing items in their carts.

● Promotional emails — to let customers know about new products and educate them about your offering.

● Upselling emails — to motivate customers to buy more expensive products with advanced functionality.

● Behavioural emails — to react to the user's actions on your website

● Special offer emails — to let customers know about new promotions or offers crafted specifically for them.

The toughest part about email marketing is building a robust email address list. To do that, you need to optimise your website with pop-ups, contact forms, and lead magnets. Meanwhile, each customer should share contact details when making a purchase.

4. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimisation is a set of tactics that help your website get to the top of SERPs organically:

● Creating high-quality useful content

● Using the right keywords

● Improving user experience on the website

● Link building

● Guest posting on competitor websites

● Optimising for mobile use

● Streamlining technical SEO

While SEO is highly efficient, it can take months before your efforts start paying off. Meanwhile, regular changes to Google algorithms could throw you back at any time. That's why it's imperative to combine paid and organic marketing efforts. One always supports the other, keeping your marketing ROI high.

Exploiting Top eCommerce Marketing Channels

To be effective, your digital marketing strategy should explore key marketing channels. Such an approach doesn't just keep you from putting all eggs in one basket. It allows you to reach customers from a variety of angles, thus maximising conversion opportunities.

To distribute your efforts among the above 4 channels, you need to consider your budget, evaluate your team's capabilities, and determine your current business and marketing goals.

Would you like these top eCommerce marketing channels to start working for your business? Schedule a discovery session with us today.