If you put all your budget into the design and development of your new eCommerce store, you may end up with a gorgeous store and no traffic. Your eCommerce launch strategy has to be focused on actively marketing your store; it’s not enough to just ‘post it on Facebook’ and hope that people will find it and come and visit.
Digital Marketing for eCommerce Stores
Ideally, you’ll want to start setting up your launch marketing plan when your store is in development. It might be tempting to think of launch marketing as something you’ll do once you have launched, but the most successful brands and eCommerce startups are planning their digital marketing spend when they are planning their store design.
If you’re really savvy, you’ll already start your digital marketing planning around the same time that your branding and design team is researching buyer personas and the UX journey. Your marketing tactics and assets need to be aligned with your overall brand voice. Far too often, we have seen mixed messages from marketing assets that create a disconnect in what potential customers see when they reach the store. When that happens - your visitors just bounce.
Data Driven eCommerce Tip!
You can see this in Google Analytics in your Acquisition reports. Navigate to All Traffic --> Channels to get an overview of how many users, transactions and revenue each channel contributes to your store.
Your eCommerce Launch Marketing Plan
At a minimum you need to consider the following marketing strategies as part of your overall plan:
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
- Affiliate Marketing
The key though, is to make sure that each strategy is part of a unified whole that wi working to accomplish a preset list of goals. The overall goal of course, should be to guide your potential customers down the marketing funnel. When you work on one aspect of your marketing plan, always consider how it might affect another aspect, and how it will affect your store.
Build Your Audience Before you Launch
As it becomes increasing tough to gain social media platform purchase and traction. It is essential to build an audience BEFORE you launch your brand. If you’re bootstrapping your brand, you may not have the budget to spend on advertising on social media after launch to build a following, so you’ll have to do it the long way round. The trick to doing it cheaply is consistency.
- Choose a single channel ahead of launch - one that is most likely where your potential customers would spend their time.
- Post consistently - at least once a day!
- Share more frequently than you post - share community stories, community events and look into partnerships with other complementary brands and people.
- Engage with individuals on your channel.
Why Do We Engage on Social Media First - What is the End Game?
The goal of building an audience on social media is to build an audience for your store, but we’re not just talking about having a few thousand followers to launch your products to, we’re talking about having a committed, subscribed community of customers who will carry your message to the world.
One of the best ways of doing that is through email marketing, in our next blog post we’ll discuss the phenomenal power of email marketing for eCommerce and how conversion rate for this channel is usually always much higher than most other traffic sources on your store.
