Advanced tactics for ecommerce marketing success is a must have for all professional ecommerce marketers. You already know you need the right marketing strategy to grow your business. It will help you build brand awareness, obtain new customers and drive customer loyalty. the cornerstones of the strategy however can sometimes get lost in the fog.

You can read all day long about strategies and tactics for growing your online store, but you are probably already asking yourself, that’s all well and good but what delivers the biggest and best results, fastest?

The truth is:

There are certain ecommerce strategies that are timeless and always work, no matter what industry. But there are also some phenomenal new technologies, that many often fail to appreciate, and so wander-past but for being led, be that by peer pressure of unparalleled results, or something as simple as someone pointing it out.

The key to Ecommerce Marketing

The key to successful ecommerce marketing is simple:

Make it easy for your customers to get what they want.

Of course, it’s easier said than done.

Below are the 4 highest-performing ecommerce marketing tactics that always work:

Advanced tactic #1. Upsell and cross-sell to existing customers

If you are like most businesses, you may well be thinking that in order to grow your business, you need more customers.

While customer acquisition is definitely important, it may not be the smartest strategy to start with.

The biggest mistake we see a majority of companies make is ignoring their existing customers.

Both up-selling and cross-selling to your existing audience is more cost-effective than acquiring new customers. Check out our advanced guide to customer acquisition.

People who are already buying from you are familiar with your brand and products – you don’t have to waste time introducing them to your brand or waiting until they decide to trust you.

All you have to do is improve your current customer experience and help them with valuable suggestions during the check-out process, retargeting or email campaigns.

The difference between upselling and cross-selling is that when you upsell you encourage people to buy a higher-end product than what they originally planned, while cross-selling invites customers to buy related and complementary items.

Advanced tactic #2. Optimise your checkout process

Did you know that nearly 70% of shoppers abandon their carts and a majority will NEVER return to complete their purchase?

Shopping cart abandonment is the biggest problem for many e-commerce businesses, but it is also the most neglected one.

Marketers spend so much money building trust with their potential customers, they forget about building trust throughout the most crucial part of a user journey – the checkout process.

Here’s what you can do to unlock your highest revenue potential by recovering those lost sales:

• Instead of sending a follow-up email, present an exit offer with a promo code to shoppers who have attempted to leave the cart or checkout pages in the moment it occurs
• Send an immediate recovery email if the person ignores the exit offer
• Try to get your whole checkout on 1 page (if you can’t, show a progress bar on each page, so that your customers know how long time they have left)
• Don’t confuse a customer with too many choices and buttons (the more time they spend deciding the more frustrated they become)
• Offer a discount or free shipping (cart abandonment often has to do with price or shipping)

Advanced tactic #3. Improve your product pages

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the practice of optimising your pages for conversions and increased sales.

If your product pages don’t convert as well as you want, your website may have some of these common problems:

• You aren’t properly segmenting your products
• You are putting too many products on a single page
• You don’t have the right balance between text and visuals
• Your product descriptions are not helpful or SEO friendly
• You don’t show icons/batches that prove you are trustworthy
• You don’t have customer reviews

A big part of conversion optimisation is providing helpful and search-engine friendly product descriptions.

Optimising your descriptions for search will help your business get more qualified traffic and revenue.

Advanced tactic #4. Personalise your email marketing

Roughly 70% of ecommerce sales happens because you have provoked the consumer into action, instead of waiting for them to come to your site. Therefore those only personalising web content will perpetually suffer from lethargy, compared to those that go and hold the hand of their customers, and lead them gently in.

But while the email has remained the largest provocation source for so long, IT has moved on, as has the AI it uses. Now the power of email marketing is truly vested in the personalisation, not of peripheral elements that ESPs try to confuse and gas-light you about. But you should be focused on personalised product selection – which smashes AOV, for each and every individual consumer you have. In turn this leads to massive customer lifetime value, and decimates your rate of return of goods.

Imagine knowing every customer, like you do your best friend. Predictive personalisation software (PPS), like SwiftERM, can supplement and indeed complement your marketing and promotional segmented emails, by perpetually delivering exactly the products that they want to buy in an email. More in depth details are available here: Explaining predictive personalisation for ecommerce.

PPS is verified by many highly acclaimed global research companies as delivering 20 times the volume sales, and ROI, over those not using it. Take a free trial here.

Summary: Best Ecommerce Marketing Tactics

We hope this article helped to clarify ecommerce marketing strategies and tactics and gave you a good indication of what to focus on.