5 Best Marketing Tactics to Drive Your Ecommerce Startup Growth

This year, experts anticipate there will be a whopping 2.14 billion online shoppers worldwide.

5 Best Marketing Tactics to Drive Your Ecommerce Startup Growth

That equates to more than 27% of the global population!

While that colossal number represents countless sales and marketing opportunities, it also means intense online business competition.

If you’re still a budding E-commerce store, how can you effectively capture these digital shoppers, stand out, and be a step ahead of your rivals?

In this guide, I’ll show you five must-use marketing tactics to drive rapid growth for your E-commerce startup.

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1. Harness High-Performing E-Commerce Platforms.

Choosing the right E-commerce platform is crucial for your promotional campaigns because it’s where you build your online store or website, your primary marketing channel.

That said, use a platform with the features you require for your virtual storefront and other marketing techniques, such as pop-ups, vouchers, product photo galleries, and more.

With the many E-commerce platforms you see online today, how do you pick the most suitable one for your marketing needs? Consider these aspects:

Smooth integrations with other software tools you will use, such as MailChimp, Facebook Messenger, and others;
Harmonized set-ups for blogs, product photo gallery, checkout, etc.
Attractive, customizable website layouts and themes;
Data analytics;
Built-in functionalities designed specially to optimize marketing and sales performance, and others.

Explore your E-commerce platform options alongside your general and channel-specific promotional plans (if you’ve already developed them) and business operations. This lets you determine more carefully the best platform for your business.

2. Track Your Performance Data.

If you want your promotional campaigns to yield your desired results, supplement them with relevant marketing performance data and insights.

Track your performance data to help you make precise buying behavior predictions for targeting, personalization, and satisfying investment returns.

It also helps you uncover evident and underlying problems in your E-commerce store, make sound business decisions, and enhance your future marketing plans.

Get valuable marketing and business performance data from E-Commerce platforms with data analytics and insights reports.

You can also use marketing dashboards and SEO reporting tools to learn about your traffic sources, how your social media and email marketing activities are doing, and more.

Focus on major metrics to avoid getting overwhelmed by vast information volume and improperly processing your data.

Examples include conversion rate, email click-through rate, customer acquisition cost, monthly recurring revenue, return on investment, customer lifetime value, etc.

3. Optimize Your Content and SEO Campaign Strategies.

Choose the best set of SEO and content marketing tactics for your business to help you produce high-quality traffic with profitable, long-term returns.

Here are some SEO tactics to do and keep in mind:

Build high-quality backlinks;
Link internally;
Target high-volume, low-competition keywords;
Optimize your images (excellent resolution but not too large in size) and loading speed;
Diversify your content;

All these boost your website traffic and rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Now, if you’ve already identified your target customers and buyer persona, begin creating your content marketing plan.

Pick relevant topics that resonate well with your customers, diversify your content formats, then insert your selected keywords into your written posts and visuals’ descriptions and alt texts.

Next, identify the channels through which you will relay your content. Publish primarily on your E-commerce website, so you can drive traffic to it and other parts of your online store.

You should also regularly send exciting, customer-targeted emails and post on social media sites where your ideal buyers frequent.

Additionally, insert relevant keywords in your content to boost your SEO strategy and even help improve your customer engagement, but avoid overloading it with too many identical keyword phrases.

Doing this not only repels your users but also runs the risk of being penalized by Google (by demoting your web page’s ranking or deleting it from its index).

Instead, invest in top-notch content with variations of your target keywords sprinkled throughout the piece.

Finally, use stunning product photos and images (such as infographics and designed quote images) and different kinds of videos.

4. Run Enticing Referral Programs.

According to statistics, 84% of shoppers trust personal recommendations from family and friends more than any other marketing tactic.

Referral programs capitalize on this, so if you’re aiming to build an enormous following, leverage this tactic that lets customers promote your E-commerce store to other people.

Referral programs usually work by rewarding or giving incentives to your shoppers every time they share your store with another person (and in some cases, when the invited person does another of your desired actions).

For instance, in your referral program, your customers can get a 5% discount for every successful invitation to another person to sign up as a member of your store. The invited shopper also receives a 5% discount upon signing up.

Using this tactic can quickly and cost-efficiently widen your brand awareness reach and get more potential customers.

5. Install Chatbots on Your Website and Marketing Channels.

Chatbots can work as conversational assistants to help you generate leads and sales and provide 24/7 customer support.

Chatbots help you forge excellent relationships with your customers and visitors on the early touchpoints and drive interest in your products.

They can instantly reply to your customers’ inquiries anytime — especially when they’re in different time zones, and you’re not online.

Chatbots won’t get tired of answering the usual questions and can personalize every dialogue like you would with your shoppers. Plus, they can collect, store, and remember customer data and work to acquire more buyers.

These give you more time to focus and work on other productive business activities needing human intervention.

Leverage These Marketing Tactics to Grow Your E-Commerce Startup.

Apply these and other tactics to establish a secure footing in the e-commerce landscape, capture your ideal customers, and stand out in your niche.

Keep in mind, though, that getting your desired results from your marketing strategy can take a while. So, maintain a positive attitude as you wait and continually improve your campaigns.

In time, you can rise to be a top e-commerce brand that shoppers and competitors will have to watch out for. *wink*

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