Digital marketing enables an organization to reach its potential market – basically, the whole world. The marketing strategies have existed since the world has started the trade.
If we go back to when there was no technology available, people used to use people for marketing their products, which we now know as ‘’ mouth publicity’.
A few decades later, the great medium of communication came into existence – the newspapers. People then started advertising and promoting their products through newspapers, television, and radio.
As technology has advanced, it has given birth to many digital platforms that can sell products and market those products. So yes – we’re talking about online stores and their marketing through online platforms.
eCommerce has become a major sector in the economy that enables the population to get their hands on any products and services from their homes’ comfort.
Being such an important, popular, and in-demand platform, it’s essential for eCommerce business owners to stand out. That’s where digital marketing in eCommerce becomes a necessity.
Those businessmen who are trying to boost eCommerce sales must understand the importance of digital marketing in eCommerce.
This article will make you understand the importance of digital marketing and tell you how to leverage the digital marketing strategy of eCommerce business growth. So, before we dive into it, let’s first understand what digital marketing actually is.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is a broad field that involves using the internet and online platforms to reach out to people to spread awareness about a brand, company, or individual selling products and services.
Digital marketing in eCommerce has proven to be an elixir for companies. It allows them to reach their potential market without changing location or even meeting their audience in person. A seller can reach out to its customers worldwide in several ways, such as:
- Social media platforms
- Emails and SMS
- The company’s or individual’s own website
- Search Engines
With these platforms available to all, there are a lot of digital marketing techniques you can use to promote your brand and products:
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Search Engine Marketing, etc.
Billions of people each hour access these platforms. If business owners can use digital marketing in eCommerce, they can drastically improve online sales and conversions.
To read more about these topics in detail, I’d highly recommend reading more of our blogs that provide deep insight on each of these topics.
What Is The Importance Of Digital Marketing in eCommerce?
The importance of digital marketing in eCommerce keeps growing as the new eCommerce website emerges daily. There are currently 12 to 24 million eCommerce websites on the web, and many are being created every day.
There are a lot of benefits that you can avail yourself from digital marketing in eCommerce, such as:
1. The Only way to reach the huge potential market
Let’s face it, you can’t visit each of your customers, and you can’t prompt your product door to door. Digital marketing platforms allow you to reach every corner of those houses with the internet – Almost everyone!
Digital marketing in eCommerce is the best and the only way to capture such a large portion of the market that no other strategy can get you. Moreover, it allows you to reach globally.
People can interact with you regardless of their location, and they can purchase your products from anywhere as long as you ship to them.
The best example of such an eCommerce that renders its services worldwide is Amazon. From Europe to Asia and Africa to North America, people can buy products from Amazon from their beds.
Whether you launch a new product or promote the existing products, you can use digital marketing in eCommerce to make people aware of your existence with just a few clicks and increase online sales.
2. Helps you Rank better in Search Engine
Google is the largest platform that has a plethora of information available on it. You can find almost anything on Google. With billions of web results, you can have a chance of ranking at a better place in your niche on Google with the help of a digital marketing strategy.
If you know how digital marketing works, you probably must be aware of SEM and SEO, where SEM asks for a little investment in things like Google Adwords.
But SEO is completely free. You make sure that you are using the most searched keywords in your blood, product titles, meta tags, and every written content that you put forward for your consumers.
Getting backlinks from some other websites also helps in gaining better recognition by Google.
You can use these two tactics to rank better on Google so that you can catch the eyes of your customers whenever they look for keywords that are relevant to your eCommerce business.
For example, if you are dealing in women’s fashion, you’d like to appear in the top results of Google whenever someone writes dresses or women’s T-shirts in the search bar.
If you’re wondering why your competitors appear on the first page but not you, then I am pretty sure that they’re making use of digital marketing in eCommerce to rank better, unlike you.
3. Helps you stay ahead in the eCommerce competition
If you have an online store in California offering shipping across the USA, how do you expect the people living in Texas to know about it? You use digital marketing platforms like social media to reach these people.
Remember, your competitors might already be using digital marketing in the eCommerce business. Hence, you need to make sure that you pursue your customers in a better and engaging way.
As digital marketing techniques in eCommerce ensure that you’re reaching all your customers through email, social media and ranking higher in Google’s SERPs than your competitors, you automatically stay ahead in your eCommerce competition.
The customers can now know more about you as long as you stay engaged and implement your digital marketing strategies.
4. Improves brand identity and visibility
With digital marketing in eCommerce, you can engage with your customers on social media. Talk about what your brand stands for and let them know how your products can benefit the customers via email and social posts.
Share with them your experiences relevant to your businesses to keep them engaged with you. When you regularly stay in touch with your customers digitally, they gradually start recognizing you.
When you show them your ads, they click and start exploring your brand; if they like something, they buy. That’s how you keep building your network with digital marketing in eCommerce.
If customers respond to your digital marketing activities, ensure that you fulfill your promises (deliver quality products on time with excellent customer support).
If you can provide a good shopping experience for your customers, they will keep returning to you. Not just that, they’ll bring in new customers too.
Digital marketing helps you become more visible to your audience. The ads, offers, and campaigns you run online make you appear professional, authentic, and credible.
Your digital marketing efforts in eCommerce help you gain more goodwill, i.e., better brand visibility and improved identity.
5. Better Customer engagement
If you don’t stay engaged with your customers, they’ll forget about you. So you must keep in touch with them individually and remind them of your products and what’s new with you.
Digital marketing does the job for you. It allows you to share personalized ads via social media, update your consumers via email and SMS, and share exclusive offers and discounts. As a result, your customers can connect back with you in the same way.
6. Boosts eCommerce sales
Promoting your brand using digital marketing in eCommerce drives more traffic to your online store. This traffic ultimately converts into sales.
As long as you don’t make people aware of who you are and why you sell your products, the customers will not come to you.
Digital marketing in eCommerce helps you engage your potential market that improves online conversions.
7. Improves customer retention
Most online stores fail to turn one-time shoppers into lifetime customers and retain their other customers too. But, again, it’s because people are dynamic.
As soon as they see something different or trendy, they quickly get attracted to it, forgetting your brand.
It’s your responsibility that you keep up with the trends and spread your ideas. Retain them by providing the customer service that others can’t. Use digital marketing platforms to share your ideas with them.
With the help of digital marketing in eCommerce, you don’t only work towards your customers, but you also learn a lot about the market and your competitors.
You can compare how others are running their campaigns and what better you can do from them. You can entice your customers with offers that you can share via email marketing, social media marketing, or SMS.
Write engaging content in blogs, websites, and the ones you share over other platforms too. If you don’t put any effort in carrying out digital marketing in eCommerce, you can’t retain your customers, neither can you attract new ones.
8. Promotes personalization
Digital marketing enables your customers to connect with your website. You can embed your links on ads, posts, and other content you share with your customers on digital marketing platforms.
These will take your customers directly to your website, showing them the personalized suggestions they might like. Then, you can greet them with personalized messages and provide personalized offers.
How do you know what to show to which of your customers? Well, you’ll have to do a little bit of research on that. Then, as you perform digital marketing, you gain more insight into that.
Through social media and newsletters, you can ask your customers questions in the form of surveys, feedback, and forms.
Such questions help you in customer segmentation with which you can better cater to your customers. How can digital marketing in eCommerce help with this? Do read the blog attached here and use digital marketing platforms to fulfill those needs.
9. Trackable and measurable results
With traditional marketing methods, you can’t figure out whether those particular campaigns are working or not. So, for example, you can’t determine if the customers influenced your TV commercials, radio, newspaper, or pamphlets.
But with digital marketing in eCommerce, you can completely measure your results. You can track the journey of your customers online.
With the help of tools like Google Analytics for eCommerce, you can even find out where your customers are coming from (FB, Instagram, email, etc.), where they are clicking on your website tabs, where they are spending most of the time on your website.
You can even track what recently they’ve been looking for to target them with those similar ads.
You can measure your results. So, for example, if you see no engagement coming from FB, but many customers are getting engaged on Instagram, you can start focusing more on that.
This way, you can also manage your expenses for which platform to invest your money in and which not.
Conclusion
Digital marketing in eCommerce has aided a lot in the enhancement of the industry. It allows you to reach more customers in a better and effective way.
This not only improves the sales of your company but also improves the whole identity. In addition, you can make use of a lot of tools to leverage your eCommerce growth strategies.
Bio: Chetan Menaria is Partnership & Collaboration Manager at PixelPhant, an eCommerce & fashion photo editing service provider. PixelPhant edits product images to make them look professional & eCommerce ready. He loves to learn new things every day, read something all the time, never miss the sunset & do Product Designing & Create content.
