8 Best E-Commerce Advertising Strategies
In a world that’s growing increasingly digital, developing an effective e-commerce advertising strategy is essential for your brand’s success. According to data from 2021, there are 2.14 billion people worldwide who identify as online shoppers. That means approximately one out of every four people you see spends time perusing the internet, reviewing ads, and making purchases.
But how do you develop the most effective e-commerce advertising strategy for your company? In this Collabstr article, we’ll take a look at e-commerce advertising–what it is, how it works, and the top 6 strategies for developing an effective e-commerce advertising strategy for your brand.
What Is E-commerce Advertising?
The term “e-commerce advertising” simply refers to promoting a product online. The person advertising pays websites to place their ads in locations where the right users will see it, click on it, and ideally become customers. E-commerce advertising can include promoting products not only to prospective customers, but previous and current customers too.
E-commerce advertising accounted for around 14% of all retail sales in both 2020 and 2021, and is forecasted to reach around 22% by the end of 2025. With such a steep incline, it’s essential for companies to develop an effective e-commerce advertising strategy before their competitors beat them to it.
E-commerce as a Percentage of Total Retail Sales from 2013-2025
How Should You Form an E-commerce Advertising Strategy?
When forming an e-commerce advertising strategy for your brand, there are three main questions you should consider:
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How can you attract new customers? One of the best ways to increase sales is to attract new customers. What strategies can you implement to help you grow your customer base?
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How can you upsell current customers? Current customers present a wealth of revenue opportunities. What can you do to make the customers you already have more profitable?
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Maintain current customers: Strategies like post-purchase and marketing emails, extending coupons and offering promotions are some examples of tactics that can help you keep the customers you already have coming back for more.
8 E-Commerce Advertising Strategies
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Personalize your advertising to your audience
Personalization is the technique of customizing your customers’ experience based on data such as their browsing history, demographics, and purchases they’ve made in the past. Using personalization in your e-commerce advertising makes it easier to convert customers into sales, because the ads they see will reflect their individual tastes and interests.
Implementing a personalization strategy can be achieved in various ways, including customizing the customer’s landing page after they click on your ad, personalizing what products are recommended to them, and sending customized marketing and promotional emails to your customers based on their previous purchases.
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Don’t forget artificial intelligence
Although most shoppers complete their purchases on their mobile devices or computers, there’s a new shopping method that is rising in popularity: smart home devices. According to Bloomberg, as of 2020, 1 in 4 households in the U.S. was estimated to own some type of Amazon device.
As smart home devices continue to rise in popularity, investing in e-commerce advertising geared specifically towards these devices will greatly benefit your business.
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Invest in content marketing
Content marketing is a powerful e-commerce advertising technique. Creating written, video or social media content is useful for driving traffic to your site and building a relationship with your customers. Data shows that content marketing results in six times as many sales as traditional marketing does.
Ideas for creating powerful content include starting a YouTube channel and posting consistent content, writing for your own company’s blog (or even guest writing for another site), and creating consistent, strategic social media posts that help build a community and keep shoppers coming back for more.
Content marketing, besides being useful in marketing, is cost-effective too. Research shows that content marketing is far less expensive than traditional marketing techniques (content marketing costs 62% less!).
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Partner with Influencers
Incorporating influencer collaborations in your e-commerce advertising is a powerful way to boost sales. Most of us are familiar with the effect of influencers–following someone you don’t know and seeing them try a product you’ve never heard of, but suddenly feel you need.
Data shows that most shoppers (94%, to be precise) are more likely to make a purchase if they know that it has good reviews. If you’re struggling to get social proof for your brand, leveraging UGC platforms can be a good start. Companies like Gymshark, Fashion Nova, and HiSmile teeth all leveraged Influencer marketing for e-commerce and scaled to massive sizes because of it.
Working with influencers can certainly garner lucrative results. Data shows that 49% of shoppers rely on influencers to help them shop, while a shocking 86% of women log into social media for shopping advice. There’s no doubt that incorporating influencers into your e-commerce advertising strategy can lead to a boost in your sales.
Let’s take a look at Audible as an example. Through working with various influencers across YouTube, they were able rack up 83 million views. That isn’t to mention their campaigns on Instagram either. Their brand reach increased rapidly, to the point where they’re now a household name.
How can you find the right influencer to partner with your brand? Collabstr offers a platform that matches companies with influencers that meet their needs. Brands can filter by price of partnership and niche and use Collabstr’s platform to guarantee secure purchasing.
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Look at your omnichannel strategy
Adopting an omnichannel strategy in your e-commerce advertising is a good idea to boost your sales. But what is an omnichannel strategy? It means using more than one platform to market to your customers.
According to research done by Harvard Business Review, omnichannel customers spend 10% more on online purchases than single-channel customers do. In-store, data shows that omnichannel customers spend 4% more on average than other customers.
Using an omnichannel strategy in your e-commerce advertising doesn’t necessarily mean your ads should be repetitive though. It means that the data you collect on a customer is applied to various channels to allow them to work together.
For example, if a customer has recently purchased a new sweater, they might receive a follow-up email suggesting similar clothing items. The channels work together to create a cohesive and consistent message that proves to be very effective in generating sales.
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Optimize with data
An important part of creating an effective e-commerce advertising campaign is using the data available to you to drive your advertising and increase your conversion rate. This means collecting data during your ad’s interaction with the customer, during the purchase process, and following the purchase.
Using this data, you can optimize your e-commerce advertising to better adapt to the customer’s needs and to learn what’s working and what’s not in your ad campaigns. This will help you raise your conversion rate.
Creating a hypothesis, undergoing testing, and analyzing the results is also a valuable way to optimize data and continually improve your e-commerce advertising. Make assumptions about how a specific strategy will perform, undergo testing, and analyze your results. It’s classic statistics, but data is a powerful tool you can’t afford to ignore.
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Optimize landing pages
Although it’s easy to spend your time, money, and efforts on the advertising itself, don’t lose sight of the other half of the equation: what happens after the customer clicks on the link.
When a customer clicks on a perfectly personalized ad, does the customized experience continue, or are they redirected to a generic landing page? Although it might be easy to overlook, don’t forget that getting the customer to your website is only half of the equation.
Using personalization techniques, you can carry on the customer-optimized experience that led to the customer clicking on the ad in the first place all the way to the online checkout page.
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Focus on mobile marketing strategy
Retail purchases made on mobile devices have skyrocketed in recent years. While this might seem obvious, it’s important to recognize that you should prioritize your mobile marketing strategy. Leverage tools like the TikTok ads library to see how others in your industry are approaching their marketing.
The mobile experience is different from the desktop or laptop experience, and creating a seamless mobile shopping experience is crucial for increasing conversion rates. According to research from eMarketer, the percentage of retail sales conducted through mobile devices in the U.S. is set to exceed 10% by 2025.
(Source: eMarketer)
Conclusion
As the online retail world grows, so does the need to create a powerful e-commerce advertising strategy for your business. With tools like influencer partnerships, content marketing and data optimization, your brand’s potential is truly limitless, and with a few targeted and strategic efforts, you can increase your conversion rate and drive sales.
To learn more about connecting with the right influencer, create an account on Collabstr today. You can search through thousands of verified influencers free of charge to find the best partnership for your brand. With experience serving over 20,000 brands, Collabstr is a trusted and reliable resource for helping your brand reach its maximum growth and potential.
