18+ SAMPLE E-commerce Marketing Plan

What Is E-commerce Marketing Plan?

An e-commerce marketing strategy is the tactics that businesses plan to use to encourage an online store and get more sales. The strategy is a long-standing idea of where your ecommerce business is going. It is based on the knowledge of the market, trends, consumer research, brand values, and product.

While, e-commerce marketing is any marketing effort done to promote an online store and generate sales, it also applies both to getting new customers and making old ones shop again.

Ecommerce marketing does the following:

Without ecommerce marketing, it will be impossible to make any sales. Launching ecommerce site is not enough—people need to discover you before they spend money with you.

More than this, constantly remind them of your brand so they come back again and again, generating revenue.

What Are the Best Strategies For Ecommerce?

Here are some general marketing tips that will help create and enhance ecommerce marketing strategy:

Define your target audience and market. To be able to find the right voice, messaging, channels and offers, you need to understand your audience first.See what your competitors are doing. Some of it is probably working—there is no point reinventing the wheel. But look for what can be done better too. This can become your competitive advantage. Set targets based on benchmarks. Before you have data of your own, base your projections on industry benchmarks. This will give you a direction to work in.Research marketing tools. As you have seen, there is so much to ecommerce marketing that it can be overwhelming. Luckily, there are tools to help you get started with many of the tactics mentioned at an affordable price.Add more marketing channels as you find your ground. Once you feel your initial marketing setup is working, expand to other channels and tactics. For example, you can add a live chat when you have a dedicated customer service person.Automate as much as possible. To be able to scale, small businesses need sales coming in on autopilot. The more you can run hands-off, the better. This is where marketing automation tactics like bulk emails, automated workflows, notifications, and lead scoring come in handy.Personalize your communication. Ads, emails, SMS, and live chat bring in much better results when personalized and relevant. Customers like the experience of being understood and not getting just another generic message.Measure your ecommerce marketing results, refine and reuse what works. The only way to know if an ecommerce marketing strategy is working is to track the return on investment (ROI). The campaigns that don’t bring results are not worth wasting money on. For the ones that do work, try to use them for a bigger audience, rinse and repeat.Build loyalty into your strategy. Customer loyalty is good news: it boosts profits, improves your brand image, attracts new customers who‘ve heard about you from fans. And it has a long-term impact so start working on it as early as possible. Loyalty tiers, automations, and behavior insights from CRM will help you.Focus on profitability, not just sales. If you pay to get new customers all the time, that might shave off your profit. One-off sales come out more expensive for you because of ad prices, as well as more returns and exchanges (new customers don’t know their size, etc.). It’s cheaper to drive repeat sales to current customers.

What Are the Types of E-commerce Marketing?

Ecommerce marketing spans virtually all digital marketing channels as well as some offline, traditional ones:

Take a look at the ecommerce marketing strategies most popular among ecommerce marketers. You’ll get a full picture of the many possibilities to help you decide which best fit your brand.

Ecommerce SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is making your website more visible and easily discoverable on search engines (Google, Bing, etc.). It’s mostly about adding keywords to your site copy that potential customers would use when searching for products like yours. Then, the search engine recognizes you have what they want and shows you high in the results.

This way, you capture people with high purchase intent — like someone searching for “men’s white linen shirt”. It’s also a chance to convert people who don’t know your brand. Finally, SEO is a free way of marketing your ecommerce business.

Email marketing

Email marketing is a key strategy for promoting your ecommerce. It’s a channel you own as it’s not controlled by a big company like Facebook, Google or Amazon. This makes it cheaper and very reliable.

All you have to do is choose an email marketing service. The main features to look for are:

Conversion rate optimization

The measures you take to convert as many site visitors as possible is called conversion rate optimization. You’ve worked hard and/or paid for your traffic so you want it to result in sales. Traffic without revenue is nothing.

There are various tactics you can use on your website to drive sales:

SMS marketing

SMS marketing is sending text messages for promotional purposes. It is best for alerts, updates, and time-limited offers that need to be read immediately.

An example would be an automated SMS with a special discount going out on the morning of a customer’s birthday. Shipping updates are another key ecommerce communication that works well for SMS.

Just keep in mind that you need the contact’s permission to send them SMS. Also, some countries regulate this kind of marketing heavily so check before you send.

Organic social media marketing

This is your unpaid presence on social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok and wherever else your audience hangs out. Today it’s an absolute must to be discoverable on such sites. It’s a way for people to know you are in business and often determines if they will visit your website at all.

When marketing for ecommerce, you can share company updates, educate about your products, and promote causes aligned with your brand values.

Paid social media marketing

Often organic social reach is not enough for ecommerce businesses and you might need to pay to play. This means two things in general—ads and influencer marketing campaigns on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

Ad formats vary depending on the social media platform. You’ll have to test them to find what works best for your ecommerce store.

Search advertising

Apart from social media, you can pay for more exposure on search engines as well. The most popular options are:

Pay-per-click (PPC, Google AdWords) — appear on top of search results for chosen keywords, e.g. “recycled shoes”

Google shopping — a free service where you can list your entire product range with images and prices, and directly capture high-intent shoppers

Display campaigns (banner ads on sites) — based on searches and browsing behavior so the potential customer sees your ad for “cat tree” on a news site, for example, after browsing for one

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is an interesting part of ecommerce marketing. It relies on a network of affiliates, or referrers, who drive traffic to your online store and get paid for each sale they help make. It is usually done through blog posts where they talk about your products or simply list their picks in a certain category.

Partnerships

You can join forces with other companies in the form of a partnership to extend your reach to their audience as well. It’s an effective marketing strategy for lifestyle ecommerce brands with overlapping target customers.

PR and brand awareness

PR sounds outdated in ecommerce marketing but it’s not. Especially at launch, you’ll benefit from getting featured in media publications both offline and online.

Ecommerce content marketing

Content is another marketing tactic that can bring long-term results to ecommerce businesses. It comes in many formats like Blog articles, Video, Podcasts, Guides and help content, and User-generated content — photos, video, forum entries, testimonials. The goal of content marketing is to answer questions, educate, expand the company narrative, help people choose a product, and even entertain.

How Do You Write an Ecommerce Marketing Plan? Here Are The 7 Steps to Follow:

  1. Know your main goal. The first step to a framework for your marketing plan is to know your goals. But it is also important to know how you plan to accomplish your goal. That is why you need to create a simple quant-based marketing plan. In short, quant-based marketing helps you guess what you need to do to achieve your goal.
  1. Get Friendly with Your Customers. Buyer personas help you to create the right message, to the right person, at the right time. If you have customers, you should survey them. To be clear, your target audience is not your entire audience. Both of these potential buyers are not my target audience. But these buyers are not who I will write my content for because it will water down my message.
  1. Find the competition’s weaknesses to build your strengths. Good research about your competition will help you know where opportunity lies to grow your business faster. Most companies make one critical mistake—they assume the competitors they know are the competitors their customers consider.
  1. Create a keyword research plan to easily rank in google. After knowing who your competitors are, learn how to easily out-maneuver and outrank the competition in Google. The goal is to find keyword phrases that your customers use and is easy to start getting traffic from Google.
  1. Create truly useful content. First, know what subject lines work best, what to include in an email to increase response rates, and how to follow up effectively without spamming someone. And then, ask your fellow peers on what they do. Not only do they backup and enhance ideas, but you will also discover new topics you have not thought of, like adding value before you make an ask.
  1. Promote the content. When it comes to promoting content, SEO is the most effective traffic source to scale. There are five ways people come to your site:

Direct traffic is rare. I occasionally type in a URL into a search, and I assume the same is true with you. Most direct traffic is thought to be search traffic. On the other hand, email traffic is often a secondary traffic source. In other words, 90% of the time email traffic comes as a result of other traffic.

How to Choose Ecommerce Platform:

When choosing an ecommerce platform, there are many things to consider, such as:

Each of their reputations as marketers say something about the company because smart marketers also invest into their products, knowing that while growth is good, retention is forever.

FAQs

What should I keep in mind?

There is a theory that domain age plays a role in SEO. It is not proven, but it may play a small role. There should be relationships with many marketers and entrepreneurs, but no known relationships in the style industry. You may not plan to use any network to actively build new relationships but the marketers may help.

What are the 3 Elements of E-Commerce?

Customer Experience. Most brands can’t underestimate the importance of user experience when designing or revamping their e-commerce websites. This is why e-commerce companies need to take a scientific approach to UX and front-end design, performing an in-depth analysis of the user environment and testing the quality of the experience from every conceivable angle (this is where usability testing comes in handy).

Back-end Integration. Brands that invest in back-end engineering for their e-commerce platforms will have a major competitive advantage in a marketplace where time is of the essence for customers at every phase of the buyer journey. When inventories, transaction software, web content, and other back-end systems are all coordinated properly, the website will simply perform better, creating a great experience for everyone who visits.

Digital Marketing. A successful digital marketing strategy is a massive undertaking, and brands need to approach this area of e-commerce as they would any other. Search engine optimization, social commerce, and content marketing are just a few of the ways in which companies are boosting awareness and engagement in their audiences today.

What are the main activities of ecommerce sites?

Ecommerce websites help online shoppers make a safe purchase from online stores and they are considered as platforms that help in buying and selling. In addition, it helps in gathering and using demographics data from various channels and improves the customer service.

You should not need to revisit your plan often after creating an effective marketing plan takes time once it is complete. Electronic commerce (ecommerce) refers to a business model that lets companies and individuals to buy and sell goods and services over the Internet.

Lastly, e-commerce operates in four major market segments and can be conducted over computers, tablets, smartphones, and other smart devices. Make sure to utilize and maximize your reach.