The minimum marketing stack to accelerate your ecommerce
If you go to your fitness club, do a training session, and observe your body, don’t expect to see any changes after one single session. But with time, effort, obstination, and rigor, chances are you will get some results. And if you follow a proven method, fitted to your needs, you definitely will get them sooner, better, and in a more sustainable way. The same goes for your e-commerce marketing campaigns.
Now that you've finally decided to start selling online, it's time to figure out what you need to get started. You could go crazy and buy all the marketing tools out there, but that would be a waste of money.
Instead, start with the basics and work your way up as your business grows. Here's a list of the minimum set for marketing for ecommerce growth. Happy selling!
What is e-commerce marketing?
E-commerce marketing is a set of means for converting potential customers to paying customers on e-commerce sites. Every year marketing trends evolve according to buyers' guts, trends, and opportunities brought by software editors, platforms, and social networks. Battles are also raging to gather and leverage buyers data.
Minimum marketing settings to survive
Set your analytics and conversion tracking
Yes, it sounds obvious. But from our experience, a lot of e-commerce sites do not have good settings when it comes to tracking conversion and behavior on websites. Yet it is a must-have to track basic things like traffic in order to answer key business performance questions such as:
- The shopping behavior of your visitors and knowing if they are struggling at some point of the sales funnel: Are people struggling to add a product to their cart ? Is it an easy task to set your delivery options or to proceed with the checkout?
- The efficiency of your marketing initiatives: How much did the last email blast generate sales? Do you spend money wisely on ads?
- Did your last redesign succeed to engage people by increasing the time they spend on your website?
- Did Google index all your pages? Which pages are missing?
- Google Analytics enhanced e-commerce
- Google Optimize
- Google Tag manager
- Consentment manager
Set your must-have platform
These platforms below are the basic tools you will need to move forward and make your business grow.
- Meta Business account (Including Facebook Page and Instagram professional account) and taking care about all the processes to get it the right way.
- Facebook Pixel is required to help Meta to get relevant data that will help for ads
- Meta catalog to easily promote your product
- An emailing solution that still remains the best channel to reach your customers
- A Popup solution that will help communicate specific information promptly and relevantly to your website's visitors, boost their journey and build your email list.
- Meta ads account
- Google Ads account
Customer journey automation
Understand and support the customer journey as it is your new playground to chase growth opportunities. You have to think all along what type of initiatives you can take.
The good news is that some of them can be automated and our experience showed us many times that the sooner you automate your customer communication, the sooner you grow your business.
Let’s review the must-have flows you can automate:
Welcome email series
8 out of 10 customers expect to receive welcome emails after they sign up for a mailing list. That’s a huge untapped opportunity to approach your new subscribers and tell them your brand story, onboard them, and let them explore your offer and its benefits. Plan for 3–5 welcome emails to send.
Abandoned cart
This will allow you to send Abandoned Cart emails to the pool of shoppers who not only start their checkout, but add products to their cart, targeting customers earlier in the buying cycle. You can expect a good ROI on this.
Post sales series
This flow is a great way to build loyalty by enabling flow to thank customers post-sale.
It can include dynamic product blocks for recommendations based on order and asking customers to write product reviews and share their feedback.
Customer winback
Enable flow to reach customers who have not purchased in a certain amount of days (ex. 180 days) to prevent customer churn. This will change for each brand depending on their average sales cycle
Sanity list
Create flow as a "last chance" for customers to stay on your email list, to help you proactively clean it up. It’s important to keep your list as clean as possible and keep a closed loop.
Growing
You need an acquisition strategy but maybe not the way you think. Of course, you have to invest the right way with campaigns on Meta, Google Shopping, Google Ads, and Tiktok, as well as using SEO to leverage organic traffic, but the most important thing is to find the right way to animate your offer.
If you don’t create a good narrative to make people visit your website and buy from you, they won’t do it. You need to give people a reason to not only visit your website, but also to keep them coming back to discover new products. This can be done by creating good assets that help demonstrate your novelty and appeal.
Of course, you need to leverage channels to acquire new customers. But If you think that your acquisition relies on them, you are wrong. Your growth relies on your capabilities to make your offer continually fitting with your customers’ needs and desires.
Afterthought
Ecommerce is not as simple as it seems and requires a lot of digital marketing capabilities, orchestration, planning and resources. To us, this is the minimum you need in order to generate steady and sustainable results.
By the way, they are all part of our Growth program
Happy selling!
