What’s missing from your ecommerce marketing? Last year consumers in the US spent roughly $844 billion on eCommerce purchases. The industry shows no signs of slowing down with the amount consumers spend on online shopping projected to grow next year. By the end of 2022, the eCommerce market in the US alone is expected to reach $1 trillion in sales. 

As mentioned, eCommerce is projected to keep growing in the years to come. If you’re a seller on an online platform, it’s essential to take note of these trends and statistics as you map out your business decisions for the next year.

• Mobile eCommerce is expected to grow even more
  The mobile eCommerce market raked in $0.97 billion in 2016 when it first started gaining traction. It grew exponentially from there, eventually hitting $2.91 trillion in 2020. It’s estimated to be worth $3.56 trillion by the end of 2021.
• 78% of consumers expect to see product photos on eCommerce platforms
  Ecommerce platforms thrive off visual content. Potential customers want to see what they are purchasing, so product photos are their top expectations from eCommerce stores. Ranked next are product reviews, product comparisons, testimonials from other customers, product demonstrations, and live chat with the brand. 
• 49% of consumers refuse to check out if the extra fees are too expensive
  Security issues, complicated check-out processes, and account creation are some of the common factors why consumers abandon their shopping carts, but the most common is when extra fees are too high. The fees in question include shipping, taxes, and miscellaneous expenses.
• Ecommerce sales are expected to make up nearly a quarter of global retail sales by 2023
  Because eCommerce is growing exponentially, by 2023, a little over 20% of global retail sales will be made through eCommerce channels. As more brands turn to the digital space, it’s expected that the role of eCommerce in consumers’ daily lives will become more prominent.

Important Categories for Ecommerce Marketing Tools

Given the abundance of eCommerce marketing tools available, you may find it difficult to choose the best one for your needs. This list of eCommerce marketing tool categories will help you keep track of useful tools that cover important aspects of eCommerce for your business.

Email Marketing 

Email marketing is a tried and tested marketing strategy that, when done right, can improve user engagement, build relationships, promote customer loyalty, and drive sales. Email marketing is commonly used to promote your products or services and let your potential customers know about what you’re currently offering. 

It’s one of the best tools for generating leads and boosting your site’s traffic. But why is it so effective? 

44% of people check their personal email on a regular basis, between one to three times a day. On average, people spend approximately five hours a day checking their emails (work and personal). Email marketing is so powerful that 4 out of 5 marketers would rather give up social media than email marketing. In 2020, there was a 7% increase in marketers who thought that email was vital to their company’s success. 

Email marketing is a powerful tool that presents a world of opportunities for marketers, provided that you get your messaging and targeting right. Often, what happens is emails aren’t optimized, rendering them not interesting enough for recipients to open. 

Aside from being easy to track, your email marketing campaigns can be automated, allowing you to save time and focus on other aspects of your business. Popular choices for email marketing tools include Klaviyo, Omnisend, Sendinblue, Mailchimp or Emarsys.

But while these make selection of products to choose for content easy from the perspective of your creating them yourself, it doesn’t take into account what the individual consumer is actually in the market to buy at that precise moment in time, and that’s what’s missing.

Analytics

Without analytics, your campaigns won’t be as effective. Analytics tools use data science and let you gain data-driven insights on things like consumer behavior and market trends. You can use analytics tools to make sense of all the data you’re getting so you can optimize your website or performance, opening it to opportunities for growth and innovation. 

Applications of analytics tools include monitoring how visitors are engaging with your site, understanding what your customers need, and showing you opportunities for attracting more customers. Some of the key metrics to track include customer retention, conversion rates, customer engagement, and mobile adoption. 

Analytics tools take the guesswork out of marketing strategies and let you create more targeted and optimized campaigns. Some of the best analytics tools include Moz, SEMRush, and Ahrefs. All of these are capable of going above and beyond analyzing customer data. They’re also capable of letting you track brand mentions, optimize your website, use keyword exploring tools to find out what customers are searching for, and conduct backlink analysis. 

Ecommerce Platforms or Website Builders

One of the most crucial components of any eCommerce business is having a platform or a website that lets you showcase your products, manage your online store, and get insights from the data you receive. Think of your eCommerce platform as your foundation—without it, you’re practically treading on thin ice. Without an eCommerce platform, it’s almost impossible for your business to compete and thrive online. 

Note that the eCommerce platform you end up choosing will have an effect on your business’s progress. Different platforms and website builders come with their own unique set of built-in tools, which are ultimately designed to help you scale your business. When choosing an eCommerce platform for your business, keep the following tools and features in mind:

• PCI compliance
• Excellent customer support
• Built-in eCommerce features such as analytics and reporting
• Mobile-friendliness 
• User-friendly interface (preferably with a drag-and-drop functionality)

The best way to determine whether or not an eCommerce tool is right for you is to start a free trial and ask the sales and support staff relevant questions. Furthermore, you can check out the websites of eCommerce platform providers so you can get a bird’s-eye view of features and pricing plans. 

While it may be tempting to go with popular options, sometimes, they’re not always the right fit for your business. Consider if a particular platform is able to help you meet your desired outcomes and objectives for your business. To help you get started, you can check out the following eCommerce platforms: Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento.

Customer Service

Customer service has the power to make or break a business. On the one hand, a positive customer experience can drive sales, boost your average order value, increase customer loyalty, and encourage customers to give your business a positive review. On the other hand, a poor customer experience can prompt customers to stop doing business with you. In 2020 alone, 40% of customers stopped patronizing a business because of poor customer service.

Make sure that you provide your customers with the best customer service experience by leveraging customer service or support tools like Zendesk and GrooveHQ.

Optimisation 

Optimisation, whether you’re talking about website optimisation, product optimisation, conversion rate optimisation (CRO), or search engine optimisation (SEO) is crucial for your business’s success. By ensuring that all aspects of your site or business is optimized, you’re helping your customers make the most out of what you’re offering. 

Furthermore, optimisation is a crucial component for increasing conversion rates. By giving customers a more streamlined and seamless shopping journey, you’re making it easier for them to convert. CRO, for example, lets you get more value from your customers while allowing you to enjoy lower customer acquisition costs. 

Once you’re able to optimize our conversion rates, you can start enjoying benefits such as increased revenue, more leads, and increased website traffic.

SEO, in particular, can help drive more customers to your site through organic search, promote brand awareness, and complement your other marketing campaigns. Best of all, you can track your performance so you’ll know where you stand and come up with appropriate strategies to scale your business.

Social Media Marketing 

Social media has become a large part of our daily lives and it proves to be a valuable marketing asset. Social media platforms let you find, connect, and engage with your target audience. 

Social media marketing platforms help you find brand ambassadors, monitor their performance, create and manage content, and more. Some tools are also capable of enhancing your social reach, giving you insights for building your brand strategy, and helping you create optimized ad campaigns.

Automation

Automation covers a lot of ground, including ad automation, workflow automation, and task automation. We spend a lot of time on completing mundane or repetitive tasks that we often get distracted from doing other more important tasks. With marketing automation tools, you’re able to operate more efficiently . 

Automation tools can increase productivity, enhance employee engagement, enable you to tackle more complex processes or issues, and give you more opportunities to provide customers with a better experience overall. 

Personalisation

This is the critical element of ecommerce marketing, and without it you will sit and watch your competitors destroy your business. If you appreciate how unique and personal product selection is, that uniqueness to each person distinctly, you are perfectly placed to appreciate that what is offered to each individual consumer must be unique and essential to them alone.

Products selected to be offered by predictive personalisation software (PPS) uses data from watching both that individual’s buying habits but essentially what they browse, how often they return to look at them again, how long they peruse, what they spend most time reviewing etc. Data not collected by platforms, but available with the right PPS software installed on it. Be warned segmentation used to be considered personalisation, but that myth is now dead and buried.

All of which creates a unique profile and contributes to their selections. To ignore this is to offer your competitors an opportunity to steal-away your customers, but equally important it fails to illustrate your empathy and lack of effort, to be worthy of being their preferred retailer.

Further it not only identifies products most likely to be purchased next buy each individual consumer (thereby, according to Statista and McKinsey – delivering 20x the return from regular email marketing) it sends those selections to the consumer as they perpetually change. It doesn’t have to rely on the consumer returning to your site, to see their neatly arranged personal selection, as they are just as likely to go to someone else’s site. this is why email predictive personalisation is critical to include in your marketing technology stack.