Updated March 28, 2023
Customers are increasingly shopping online through their smartphones, tablet, or laptops due to the convenience rather than visiting offline stores for their purchase. However, businesses have still not realized and made a reliable ecommerce digital marketing strategy to increase their market share.
The Online Shopping Landscape is Evolving. Create a Future-Proof Digital Marketing Strategy.
Table of Contents
- Industry Overview
- Focus on Your Ecommerce Digital Marketing Strategy
- Win the Micro-Battles First
- Experience is an Important Aspect of Ecommerce Digital Marketing Strategy
- Race Towards Results
Industry Overview
There are still some brands that have outgrown every competition or challenge that you throw at them. Problems are from young, nimble, digital savvy, heavily backed by investors startups. Here are a few facts and stats that will provide insight:
- Procter & Gamble understood the importance of ecommerce and made it their core element.
- Unilever watched its sales grow twice the global ecommerce market and has invested in the right capabilities for the digital transformation.
- Businesses like Harry and Birchbox are leapfrogging over the traditional business models to create new capabilities.
- In a single day annual sales, China’s Alibaba generated $17.8 million more than the total revenue of Whole Foods Market.
From the stats mentioned above, the first question that should pop-up in the mind of any aspiring entrepreneur should be how to capture maximum benefits from this digital wave. We did extensive research in this area and found some points that will be important for entrepreneurs.
Focus on Your Ecommerce Digital Marketing Strategy
Digitalization has been perceived as a time to re-think the ecommerce digital marketing strategy. However, some businesses still lag making a strong strategy for their business growth. Companies do not take bold steps towards their growth; instead prefer to make small/unnoticeable changes.
These businesses do not understand the power of digital transformation and are perceiving the online world as just another platform. They are assigning tasks to lower designation executives rather than utilizing the strengths of top-level leadership.
Procter & Gamble worked on the ecommerce digital marketing strategy by partnering with Amazon and Alibaba’s Tmall and experimenting in direct to consumer model.
Win the Micro-Battles First
The digital world is ever-evolving, and marketers can never predict what is going to happen shortly. While some product categories do much better than others in the digital world, and some products do much better than in other countries, market leaders have been investing in understanding the opportunity and trends in the industry.
To become the market leader, you have to either outperform Amazon in the US and UK or Alibaba in China. 80% of the online sales from significant categories come from China, France, the UK, and the US.
Do not spread your business into every channel as it may minimize the impact. Find the channel which has the most impact and develop your ecommerce digital marketing strategy around it. Research the type of consumers, seller behavior, and more, before you jump right into it.
The systematic approach most big businesses usually work by while devising a strategy is by first deciding the geographical location, then the categories they will sell in, and finally, determine the business model.
After deciding the primary channel, they move towards understanding the consumer behavior and what makes them add a product to online shopping cart and proceed to checkout by leveraging payment gateway. Various aspects influence different currents.
Experience is an Important Aspect of Ecommerce Digital Marketing Strategy
We all know the importance of ecommerce website design in placing products on specific shelves to make it sell more, but how do we use the same tactic in the online world. In digital commerce, the website becomes your shelf, but it becomes compact due to other aspects needed on the website.
If we consider the mobile experience, the product list becomes even smaller according to the screen size. Before providing the online shoppers an experience, the entrepreneurs first need to focus on designing search UX strategies for ecommerce success and adapting to the changes in experience from offline to online.
An entrepreneur’s primary focus is to provide value to the customers. He tends to forget the primary purpose of why customers are shopping online. Different studies state that the main reason for customers to choose online over offline is convenience rather than value.
Entrepreneurs have to provide comfort at every touch-point from when the customer discovers the website, find the products, select the product, and finally checkout. Particular emphasis has to be given on designing search UX strategies for ecommerce success as product-search is one of the primary activities of an online shopper.
Race Towards Results
A China-based startup, “Three Squirrel,” is a perfect example of this point. This business sells nuts and have used three animated squirrels which interacts with customers who buy the product. The amount of experience this company is giving its customers is greatly improved through designing search UX strategies for ecommerce success.
They have used the customer data to combine it with innovation and used it across the different departments of marketing, sales, packaging, and others. The digital commerce race can only be won if you are swift.
The only way to stay ahead in the competition is by adopting an agile approach. By replacing the annual planning cycle with a shorter cycle, will help in generating an idea and launching products in a shorter period. Bring changes to the launch on live customer testing like Hotel change menu and introduce new items after hosting a tasting event.
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Conclusion
Other than these 4, there are other actions to consider while implementing an ecommerce digital marketing strategy. Understanding the impact on all the channels is crucial. Accept the channels that digital commerce possesses and embrace the future of digital business as it has enormous potential.