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Marketing your business is important to generate awareness and bring in more paying customers. In ecommerce, with dozens, if not hundreds, of new brands popping up all over the world every day, your marketing efforts may need to be a little creative.
Today’s buyer is discerning, busy, and on the hunt for exactly what they need. To grab their attention and convert them into buyers, consider implementing an ecommerce marketing strategy for your online store. A solid ecommerce marketing plan is diverse, data-rich, and flexible.
Ahead, we’ll break down what ecommerce marketing is and provide you with 12 actionable ideas and best practices to market your products and business.
What is ecommerce marketing?
Ecommerce marketing is a mix of advertising and promotional efforts by a business to get in front of new customers, drive traffic back to a website or webstore, and convert them to paying customers. Ecommerce marketing doesn’t stop at the first purchase: post-purchase relationship nurturing in the form of ads, email marketing, or other engagement is important to turn new customers into future loyal buyers.
Types of ecommerce marketing
When we talk about the types of ecommerce marketing available to a business, we’re generally speaking of the channels available for reaching customers. Ecommerce marketing strategies vary depending on what you’re promoting, what a customer is looking for, and the goals of your business. For most shops, a multichannel strategy is useful because you can reach customers where they are, in a variety of formats and channels. Essentially, every business needs to be in a lot of places all over the internet.
The most common channels used in an ecommerce marketing strategy include:
Content: Text, video, audio; blogs, webinars, short-form videos
Email: Newsletters, discounts, welcome emails, abandoned cart follow-ups
Social media: TikTok, Instagram feed, Reels or Stories, Tweets, Facebook Ads
Paid-per-click (PPC): Display or banner ads
12 ways to market your ecommerce business
There are a number of ways a business can market their online store or website on many channels without making the content too similar. Each channel or tactic in the marketing strategy can (and often does) have different goals to support your overall campaign.
To help get your ecommerce marketing plan started, consider the 12 ideas below.
Content marketing
1. Create original written, video, or audio content
Users and buyers are keen to see original content from any business. It helps a buyer understand your brand, differentiate you from competitors, and generally be educated or entertained.
For example, if you run a wellness brand that provides customers with homemade soaps and bath products, you could create blog content about the ingredients and their history, uses for the products, and the appeal of naturally sourced materials. Even video content showcasing how those products are made or used is helpful for your customer to understand what they’re buying and potentially investing in your brand long-term. Audio content like a podcast—whether starting your own or guesting on relevant ones—is a useful way to help build out your following and community.
2. Feature guest writers, bloggers, or influencers
Community is a big part of any business, and it doesn’t need to apply only to your buyers. Consider the business ecosystem you’re part of, including who you follow and who follows you, and collaborate where possible to expand your reach.
A great example of this includes bringing on influencers, thought leaders, or anyone else relevant to your business world to create content with or for you, which they can then cross-promote with their audience. A vote of confidence from established people and businesses can also build trust in your brand.
3. Engage users with quizzes and interactive content
Interactive content can be a bit more time-consuming, but consider that if a user is willing to spend time taking a quiz, they are very likely highly interested in what you offer. A quiz can help customers (and you) narrow down exactly what they are looking for. It’s fun for the user and useful information for you later on to tailor any further marketing needs.
Quizzes are also a good way to collect email addresses—just give visitors an option to opt into joining your mailing list.
Email marketing
4. Run customized email campaigns
Emails are a conversation between you and your buyer. They elected to provide you with a direct line to their inbox, so use it wisely. Run targeted and customized email campaigns based on what you want to accomplish and what your subscribers respond to best.
Types of email marketing include newsletters (another content opportunity as well), thank you or welcome emails, promos for sales you’re running, or gift ideas and product recommendations.
5. Use pop-ups to capture more emails
Get more customer emails and conversions by implementing email sign-ups via a pop-up on your website. Here, you can offer customers a one-time discount code (perhaps without an expiration date) if they sign-up for your mailing list.
Automate a welcome note in response to subscriptions to make potential customers comfortable with your brand. With an included discount code, the customer is incentivized to spend with a perk. In exchange, you get access to contact information to send more targeted, personalized offerings in the future based on what they purchase.
6. Send abandoned cart follow-ups
We’ve all added something to our carts and then moved onto something else, forgetting what was there. Sometimes your customers forget or sometimes they are unsure about the purchase.
Send a follow-up email. It can include a discount, testimonials for your store, or just be a simple reminder of their abandoned order. Not only is a follow-up email important to keep the conversation and connection between them and the brand but it’s an opportunity for you to convert them on their purchase.
Social media marketing
7. Prioritize videos on social channels
Nearly everything in marketing has a visual element to it, because many users prefer watching content over everything else. This includes social media channels that once held only text and static images. Think of TikTok’s power or Instagram’s Stories and Reels. Prioritize short, engaging pieces of video content relevant to your brand’s offerings.
If you’re already creating video content as part of your marketing, you can potentially repurpose some of it on your social media channels in a shortened, attention-grabbing format.
Get tips for building your social media presence
8. Tap social media influencers for a campaign
Many buyers today look to specific influencers to help guide their purchases. Find and work with influencers who have either purchased your products before or orbit the category of your products and might be interested in a sample or to be part of a campaign.
9. Encourage user generated content (UGC)
Why not let your customers participate in your marketing? On social media, users love to share their purchases and how it has improved their lives or mood. Consider running a campaign exclusively built on the content that users make tagging your brand.
For example, if an apparel company with clothes for all body types and sizes wants to emphasize this message, repost content from real buyers and how they style your products.
PPC advertising
10. Run a PPC campaign
Create ads and messaging that will appear at the top of search engine results for keywords relevant to your products. Ensure your PPC ads are customized by certain buyer demographics and interests to get the best leads possible.
11. Retarget customers
A key way to reach customers for conversion is to engage with the ones who've already seen what you’re offering. Retarget customers who have clicked on your brand’s social media profile or website. If a customer has become more familiar with your brand, they are more likely to make a purchase.
12. Consider your product pages
Often, PPC campaigns have everything to do with the ad in question—from text to visual, everything is crucial to get a buyer to click. But what about when they do click and it leads to a thin product page? Ensure the pages your display ads are linked to are engaging, user-friendly, and capture a customer’s attention.
Keep in mind that PPC ads on search engines aren’t a replacement for organic SEO ranking. Organic SEO requires a time investment to optimize your site and see results, but is much less expensive—often free—than paid ads.
Get the guide to ecommerce SEO
Ecommerce marketing strategy and best practices
Now that you’ve got a wealth of ideas to work with on your ecommerce marketing efforts, let’s run through some general strategy and best practices that will help you make the most out of your plans.
Define your marketing goals
Every business has different priorities at different times. Understanding what you want to get out of your marketing efforts will help you better tailor what those efforts look like.
Begin by establishing your goals and create benchmark key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure against to understand your success. Then, choose the platform or platforms that will best help you tackle those goals.
If you’re a new business, working on awareness may be best for your efforts, and tapping an existing influencer or thought leader’s audience may help broaden your reach. Have low conversions? Consider providing useful content to your audience so they can see exactly what they’ll get out of your products.
Prioritize authenticity
Today’s buyer is not just buying a product. They are often buying a story or making an investment in a brand, and that’s usually because there’s an alignment in values or a belief in the narrative or people behind it. A great way to make an impression in a busy ecommerce space is to lead with authenticity in your marketing efforts.
Tell a founder’s story on your website. Post a behind-the-scenes video of a product’s life from idea to a customer’s hands. Curate your link in bio to the essentials of your business’ story. Whatever feels authentic to you and your brand’s story, run with it.
Cross-sell and upsell products where you can
As your business grows, you’ll find that some products naturally complement each other or are often bought together. This presents an opportunity to cross-sell or upsell products or services wherever possible. This is a tactic to increase your sales, where you either promote a product with a complementary one (cross-selling) or promote an upgraded version of a product (upselling).
Not every channel or tactic will be the best way to cross-sell and upsell your offerings, but it’s common to use in email marketing or even in the content you post. With that same soap and bath products example, one message could talk about the benefits of a specific ingredient in one product while mentioning all of the other products featuring it as well—a cross-sell. The same message could link to a bundle of those products to make it easy for readers to make a purchase if they want—an upsell.
Learn strategies for upselling products
Monitor results and adjust your strategy
It’s important and useful to collect data on your marketing efforts. Over time, those results can tell you what channels or types of messaging were a success or where you might need to pivot for better results.
Once you’ve set your benchmark numbers and understand your goals, set a regular reminder to check how well paid ads are doing, what the traffic to your website is week-over-week, what the click-through-rate (CTR) is on emails, or if there are any trends in video engagement and drop-off.
If the numbers aren’t exactly where you want them to be, don’t fret. They tell you a valuable story about what you might need to do next and how to pivot accordingly. Don’t forget to make note of your successes either. These can help you identify where to lean in on or repeat a strategy.