Interested in learning basic online marketing for eCommerce websites? Once you have your new eCommerce website and the team to manage your online business, you have to drive traffic to your store. The top five basic online marketing methods every eCommerce company should focus on, at least initially, are:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Social Media Optimization (SMO)
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Email Marketing
SEO needs to be the first thing you focus on because it will determine how you build your new website. After the site is live, you still want to continue to focus on SEO because it is a long term investment. It will take time to build up, but once it does it turns into a snowball affect and you can see significant revenue from organic traffic.
SEM is your quickest ROI by far because you instantly see results within 30 – 60 days. Just make sure you know what you are doing, if you aren’t careful you can end up spending a lot of money with minimal or no return. Work with a knowledgeable professional, either in-house or a firm who has years of experience. For eCommerce, make sure you are using Google Shopping and other Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE) because they will usually have the best ROI, at least for consumer facing products.
SMO is just like SEO, but instead of impacting your organic ranking, you are building your online reputation and loyal customer base. Just like SEO, this is a long term play so don’t expect immediate ROI. Just make sure you have clear goals in mind when you start your SMO campaign. Don’t look at how many “likes” you have, rather look at how much engagement and reach do you have, how much are you getting your followers to talk about you. Make sure your customer service team is tied into your SMO campaign because social media needs to be a proactive as well as reactive customer service channel of communication.
SMM is just another channel of SEM, but the benefit of SMM is you can really target people not only based on location but by interest and status. Since people on social media aren’t necessarily in a buying mindset, you won’t usually get as high of an ROI, but you will develop a much better brand awareness than traditional SEM.
Email Marketing is almost always going to be your best ROI out of your basic online marketing for eCommerce websites. However, since it takes time to build up a mailing list, I listed this last because it isn’t really a way to acquire a ton of new customers but rather a way to up-sell to existing customers. You can get some new customers that opt-in, but generally most of your mailing list is going to be existing customers. Make sure you take full advantage of things like shopping cart abandonment and don’t just blast all customers treating them as if they are the same person. Make sure you are segmenting your list based on what customers have purchased so you can target them with highly relevant marketing content. As your business grows you can start to utilize Marketing Automation tools, but that is more of an advanced marketing tool, which I will cover in other posts.
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