Have you dreamt of a moment in which you finally get the big picture of your digital marketing efforts? Probably, this is just one of the many advantages that contemporary marketing tools can bring about.
Nowadays, digital marketing enables you to adjust marketing strategy to digital data insights. And this has an enormous positive impact on your marketing strategy and tactics. Supported by right marketing tools, you can enhance your brand recognition, optimize marketing costs, and drive sales, to name a few.
How does this apply in the case of eCommerce? Can you do better targeting for your online store offerings, turn insights into conversions and increase sales? Are there any proven marketing tools that can help you achieve more?
This article is going to look into the above questions. It is going to further tackle what a good eCommerce marketing is and how to achieve it by proper strategies and toolsets. Then, we are going to dive deeper into best-ranked marketing tools for e-commerce and outline their purpose.
Sounds familiar? Well, think twice.
Believe it or not, there are more than 80 proven marketing tools and software to support digital business. Our goal however will be to narrow them down to the ones which best apply to your online store.
This is how we come to the notion of eCommerce marketing.
What is eCommerce marketing?
Definition at a glance
Simply put, eCommerce marketing is the art of driving customers to your online store and persuading them to shop online. eCommerce marketing works along all steps of your digital funnel. If employed well, it may be your primary means to launch, develop and run your digital brand and products.
To showcase an example, back there in 2012 no one has ever heard of the now-famous RooBar. It is amazing how the brand started off locally and thanks to focused eCommerce marketing turned into a favorite global product! Now, RooBar already is a label for a bio, vegan and gluten-free chocolate product in support of healthy living.
Which eCommerce marketing strategies?
Your eCommerce marketing strategies may include SEO, email, social media, paid advertisement, content and others such as referrals. What are these used for?
Here is a snapshot:
- Content-building – one of the proven long-term strategies to build your brand’s voice, reach out to customers and engage them with your offerings;
- Email – one of the best approaches to build relations with customers, retain them and build a loyal customer base;
- Social media – widely popular and best used for gaining worth of mouth promotion, social proof and fan engagement;
- PPC – stands for pay per click campaigns which can help you run paid advertisement to display your offerings in Google;
- SEO – search engine optimization is used to help your online store rank higher in organic search results.
It feels really rewarding getting a purchase enquiry into your Inbox, doesn’t it?
Why is eCommerce marketing that important?
eCommerce marketing is indispensable for helping you build better brand recognition, earn global customer base and manage your promotions. It can help you develop lasting customer relationships, brand engagement and loyalty.
eCommerce marketing is vital for enhancing your overall website experience with proper UI/UX and responsive web design. The latter however may be complex and it is where we are always ready to help.
eCommerce marketing enables you to make your site search engine friendly and run your sales at best cost for money. This however can be significantly optimized with the introduction of specialized marketing tools.
How to make sure eCommerce marketing is effective?
eCommerce marketing effectiveness depends on your high-level strategy planning as well as on your actual marketing implementation. A key prerequisite for your effectiveness, however, is the proper targeting of activities based on your target groups definition.
Marketing activities rarely address all your potential customers. They need to be specific, tailored to the needs of your buying persona. In our example of RooBar we can see a clear targeting at young, active, healthy living persons.
The better work you do in defining your persona, the more chances you will have to convert it into a customer. And here is where marketing tools come into play to help you gather customer insights. And more!
Marketing tools for eCommerce
Key benefits of marketing tools for eCommerce
Leveraging the potential of digital marketing tools can bring you a pile of benefits, among which:
- Reduce your cost on marketing staff;
- Enrich customer insights and reduce guesses;
- Increase sales revenue and customer life-time value;
- Improve marketing efficiency, performance and reporting;
- Save time, repurpose content, improve campaign planning, etc.
Best of all, you will be fully empowered to automate business processes and thus support your overall work productivity.
25 marketing tools for eCommerce
As we mentioned above, marketing tools are developing fast and their number is constantly increasing. We have grouped our selection of shortlisted marketing tools into the following categories: analytical tools (help analyze customer data), content marketing tools, email marketing tools, marketing automation and optimization tools, and social media tools.
Analytical tools
This category is of key importance for eCommerce websites because it can help ensure that sales funnels are streamlined and working. Main marketing tools here feature:
Google Analytics – this is the most widely used tool for gathering customer data. The eCommerce performance data can help you take improvement actions and enhance your marketing, website, sales, etc.
Kissmetrics – analytic tool which specializes in e-commerce with helping optimize checkout funnels, conversions, customer lifetime value, etc.
Content marketing tools
Fast and efficient content creation allows for collaboration, automation, sharing, etc. This can be greatly supported by the following tools:
Google Docs – offers a convenient cloud environment for collaborative work on shareable documents;
Grammarly – provides excellent proofreading and spell checking in web environment;
Canva – a free graphic design web tool which offers predesigned templates;
Trello – a great free tool for project organization and planning of teams;
Slack – a free tool for online discussion with additional business functions, which may offer good customer experience for eCommerce.
eMail marketing tools
Email marketing tools offer various functionalities. These include newsletter content creation, campaign set-up, audience analysis and interaction, sequence emails, automation, as well as integration with other channels such as sms. Here follows a well quoted selection of email marketing tools for e-commerce:
MailChimp – contains an inbuilt email designer and optimization tool which facilitate your work;
Campaign Monitor – really easy to use with good personalization and customization options;
Active Campaigns – in addition to email functionality the tool offers direct messaging option which can help you get in direct touch with customers;
Omnisend – designed especially for eCommerce with automation workflows and additional features such as SMS messages, push notifications, etc.;
Klaviyo – disposes of automated options suited to the needs of eCommerce such as welcome email series or abandoned cart email series;
GetResponse – offers really good multi-lingual support which can make it a preferred choice.
Marketing automation tools
This group of tools help you automate various aspects of your marketing activities. It features:
Zapier – helps you save time by integrating information among your apps automatically;
Smile.io – engages customers into a brand community by a proprietary program;
Google Marketing Platform – unifies Google advertising and marketing;
Drift – mainly used for conversational marketing.
Optimization tools
These give you deeper insights on customers behavior on your website, which can support your decision-making.
Hotjar – analyses website user behavior by generating heatmaps and recordings of customer website action;
CrazyEgg – uses heatmaps and analyzes marketing campaigns.
Social media marketing tools
Social media tools for eCommerce can help you reach and engage your audience better.
Facebook Ads – used for designing, targeting and managing paid ads in Facebook;
AdEspresso – lets you run campaigns across different social media by using a single dashboard;
SEMRush – a SEO tool which helps you find your best keywords based on your website contents;
Ahrefs – extremely helpful with analysis of competition in terms of keyword selection
AdNabu – great for creating ads to be run on AdWords;
Google Ads – the main tool for managing your paid aids in Google.
Key Takeaways
eCommerce marketing is key for driving traffic to your website and transforming visitors to customers. It can be greatly supported by the proper selection and use of digital marketing tools.
Marketing tools for e-commerce are constantly developing and one should regularly update their knowledge. They may be applied in almost every step of the marketing planning and implementation process.
Your online store performance may be greatly enhanced when following the right metrics. You can always consult us on how to realize improvements based on you customer behavior.
