Proven eCommerce Marketing Strategies To Try in 2023

As far as proven eCommerce marketing strategies go, while we use the word “try” in the title, what we really mean is that you “should”. 

By the end of 2022,  global eCommerce will be worth a whopping $5.55 Trillion. By 2023, eCommerce is going to be worth $6.17 Trillion. 

If anything, eCommerce is only going to get bigger and is a viable opportunity for any eCommerce brand.

While eCommerce gets bigger, it only gets harder for eCommerce brands to stand out -- calling for a more efficient way to delve into the world of digital marketing, workflows, and so on. 

Here are a few new but proven eCommerce marketing strategies you should try in 2023. 

These are in addition to the mainstream eCommerce marketing strategies:  SEO; social media; blogging; eCommerce videos;  landing pages and email marketing workflows; social ads; video ads; Google Shopping and Google Ads; retargeting ads and emails; and more. 

Say Hello To Live Shopping 

Whether an influencer or not, a celebrity or not, a major brand or a small one, live shopping is available for everyone. Riding on the popularity of live streaming as a medium, it’s quickly turning out to be a veritable channel for eCommerce brands to pay attention to. 

Live stream aided shopping or live shopping is when creators (or streamers) go live and discuss or recommend products, reveal recent shopping hauls, and maybe just “chat and showcase” products. 

This also led to the launch and rise of Amazon Live --dedicated live stream shopping powered by Amazon (for Amazon Live Shopping)

Live shopping is quickly catching up to be a force to reckon with. In total estimates, Live stream shopping is worth $500 Billion globally, according to Forbes. 

Live shopping events generated $5.6 billion in US sales in 2020 alone. It’s projected to reach nearly $25 billion by 2023, according to Coresight Research. 

 If CoreReserach insights are anything to go by, live shopping or live commerce is a more sustainable way of selling online with at least 40% lower cost estimates than traditional eCommerce (let alone traditional commerce). 

McKinsey reports that live commerce sales could account for as much as 20% of all ecommerce by 2026 in China alone (without even considering any other major eCommerce markets, including the United States). 

Email Marketing Will Stay The Course

Email marketing is not dead, contrary to what you might end up reading online. If anything, it’s only getting more mainstream. If the number of email campaigns tracked on Panoramata is anything to go by, email marketing and email automated workflows are now bigger than ever. 

Automated email workflows, sales email sequences, regular email promotions are all the rage now. 

Graduating to advanced email marketing strategies such as segmentation, retargeting shopping cart abandoners, retargeting email workflows for other use cases, and email journeys are a “must do” and not “nice to have”. 

SMS Marketing: Rise and Shine

More than 25% of marketers, brands, and businesses don’t use SMS marketing to its full potential, according to Dri. 

Research by Attentive, however, reveals that more than 67% of consumers specifically signed up for receiving promotions, notifications, and more information from brands through SMS marketing. 

More than 19% are happy to hear from their favorite brands, and over 58% of consumers, and even willing to receive SMS messages from brands multiple times per week. 

More than 75% of all consumers open and read their text messages, according to TextAnywhere. 

‍

‍

Upsells, post-purchase nudges, and Cross Selling 

“Would you like fries with your burger?” 

“Do you need a cheese topping on the sandwich?”

Harmless and easy questions like these have the potential to quadruple your profits. It’s called upselling and it’s been the major reason why some brands like McDonalds (and now BurgerKing and several other brands) are striking gold. 

You can do it. Embrace the power of upsell funnels, send email marketing messages that are sent post-purchase to nudge your customers to purchase more (they are primed to buy at this stage, right after a transaction), or use SMS marketing to send exclusive one-time deals right after a purchase. 

You can also put cross-selling into practice which is the effort you take to help your customers discover more products “related” to the product they just purchased. 

Do it manually. Automate it. But do it. 

UGC Content For Interactivity in eCommerce

Using the content derived from your own customers is magical. 

Using the information that your customers give you (direct or indirect), information from your branded community (including Facebook communities, Slack, and others).

You can even use the content derived from testimonials, customer feedback, and customer-generated videos as firepower for your eCommerce branding and marketing efforts. 

Gather visuals from your customers and create native ads, emails, landing pages, and other marketing elements out of these. 

Create ads and email marketing campaigns that lead to surveys so you can qualify your audience, use the information you get for marketing, and build social proof for your brand. 

For instance,  

• Request your customers to share product reviews via pictures and videos of your products. Use this information in your ads and email marketing campaigns. 
• Create the hashtags of your products and ask your customers to use them while using your products.
• Encourage customers to tag your business or brand on social media platforms.
• Repost testimonials, positive comments of your shoppers on social media, use testimonials in product ads and product-specific email marketing campaigns, and more. 
• Launch UGC competition and encourage your audience to participate in it

‍

Go International with eCommerce

As you read this, International eCommerce is already a thing. In a survey conducted by flow.io, more than 67% of customers reported to have made a cross border purchase. 

There’s more eCommerce happening elsewhere in the world than we think. 

While it’s already on, brands will have to be more intentional about cross-border eCommerce and international eCommerce. With rising markets elsewhere -- such as the UK, APAC, China, and other countries with a burgeoning consumer base, it’s potentially a gift that just keeps giving.  

Tap into the power of localizing, geo targeting, and easy to use translation apps (along with localized content delivery on eCommerce product pages along with localized price display for products). Enable cross border transactions to start intentionally targeting a wider customer base. 

Try Programmatic SEO for Ecommerce

Programmatic SEO is like regular SEO on steroids. Instead of spending time creating cornerstone content alone, you could bring in the power of programmatic SEO to help aid the process of discovery, building trust, and getting traffic to your eCommerce store. 

With a 91% market share, Google is the search engine you’ll focus on (while other search engines such as Bing, Baidu, and DuckDuckGo will also send in some traffic). 

Programmatic SEO relies on specific keyword pairs or key phrase pairs that are used in a similar pattern. For instance, you could build and scale landing pages or product landing pages at scale for following keyphrase pairs

[Shoes] for  [Gender Type] in [Country] 

Example: Sneakers for Men in the United States. Replace sneakers with sandals, boots, work boots, etc. 

[Apparel Category Subset] for [Body Type or Size, Gender]. 

Example: Trousers for large-sized Women. Replace trousers with shirts, tee shirts, jeans, etc. 

One specific keyphrase pair or keyword pair is probably what you’d need to make use of programmatic SEO. 

Pick your keyword pair (usually dwelling on the power of long tail keywords), build landing pages to help do justice (with pertinent and specific layouts for those landing pages with appropriate content), and work on content that focuses on the keywords while still trying to provide value to users. 

Programmatic SEO is now possible thanks to the maturity of several eCommerce (and non-eCommerce) platforms in a way that these platforms allow you to use integrations, other tools, plugins, and apps to help you create very specific commerce landing pages at scale. 

Learn more about Programmatic SEO for eCommerce, how it works, and some examples (and keep tab with our own experiments) by contacting us.

Test, Analyze, & Benchmark Campaigns 

There’s nothing new about testing, analyzing, learning, and benchmarking your eCommerce marketing campaigns. We feel we should include it here since most eCommerce brands give it a miss -- for various reasons. 

Testing and analyzing your marketing campaigns is as old as marketing campaigns themselves. They are important since they are the bedrock of data-driven campaigns and sharp decision-making which in turn gives you the competitive advantage (while every other eCommerce brand also uses these eCommerce marketing strategies. 

While you launch and run campaigns,  test as many creatives as you can for ads (and give each campaign enough run-time to ensure that you let data drive decisions). 

As for benchmarking eCommerce campaigns, you don’t have to sweat. With smart and capable tools such as Panoramata, you can organize campaign calendars, draw instant inspiration from other brands within your industry, create campaign inspiration lists, and more. 

Watch, learn, observe, implement, test, analyze, and relaunch.