Ecommerce brands that diversify their traffic and sales sources are the ones that win in today’s marketing world.
While the giants Facebook and Google have been reliable for most brands over the last few years, platform changes, added restrictions and increased competition are forcing higher acquisition costs and little room for mistakes.
The good news? There are plenty of other ecommerce marketing channels just as (or even more) qualified as the traditional digital marketing platforms to bring in revenue for your brand and help you scale profitably.
1. Influencer Marketing
Influencer Marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in the marketing space today and for a good reason: it truly is an incredibly effective ecommerce marketing channel.
If it’s still unfamiliar to you, Influencer Marketing is a type of social media marketing that involves product placements and endorsements by influencers in exchange for monetary or product payment.
An influencer can be:
- A single person
- A brand
- A blog
- An organization
- A community
An influencer DOES NOT need to be a celebrity. An influencer simply needs to have influence over a targeted group of individuals (usually their followers) in order to compel purchases, brand authority and trust.
Why do Influencer Campaigns work so well for ecommerce marketing?
Influencer-generated posts consistently outperform branded posts, according to 60% of marketers (Source: GRIN).
To be specific, influencer-generated content receives an average 8x more engagement than branded content and influencer campaigns see an average of $5-6.50 return on every $1 invested in social media creators (Source: GRIN).
That’s because more than half of consumers state that word-of-mouth and social media are their preferred ways to discover new brands.
Creating successful influencer campaigns
Influencer marketing still receives its ample share of resistance, and the reason why is not because this channel doesn’t work, but usually because the sponsored content is not thoughtfully planned, executed or authentically aligned with the audience.
What usually kills an influencer marketing campaign
Many factors can negatively affect your influencer campaigns and in my experience the following are most common:
- Partnering with influencers who aren’t aligned with your brand, or who wouldn’t typically use your products
- Not paying attention to the influencer’s audience before partnering up
- Failing to set clear terms and timelines for your campaign agreement
- Publishing blatantly promotional, hard-selling content that turns off fans
- Not setting up proper tracking, like URLs or landing pages beforehand.
When executed correctly, influencer marketing works for ecommerce marketing and it works really well.
How to run a successful influencer marketing campaign
A successful Influencer partnership follows these steps:
Determining goals:
Influencer Marketing needs to receive the same respect every other major ecommerce marketing channel does. And that starts with determining the goals of your campaign. These goals need to be aligned with your overall yearly and quarterly goals
The most common goals influencer campaigns we set with our ecommerce brands are:
- Direct sales
- Followers/group members increase
- Content reach and impressions increase
- Content creation (photos, videos, reels, blog articles)
- Reviews gathers
Your influencer campaign goals need to be clear, actionable and include timelines. A goal should ALWAYS have numbers attached to it.
Determining your budget
Just like every other marketing initiative, a budget needs to be attributed to each influencer campaign.
A budget will include monetary value (cash directly paid to influencers or monetary value of products offered) and time allocated to this project.
Selecting the right influencers
The success of an Influencer campaign largely depends on how relevant your influencer’s audience is to your product.
The right influencer should have real followers with an audience similar to yours, has the power to influence purchases through content, and is comfortable sharing their account stats with you prior to collaborating.
Setting up an agreement
One of the most common Influencer misalignments I see is brands sending products to influencers “to try and provide feedback”. Influencer marketing should not operate on a good faith model alone, but as a business transaction. Get what you need out of this partnership and set up an agreement with your influencer where you clearly outline the payment, delivery expectations, delivery timeline and penalty for failing to deliver.
Tracking and measuring
Influencer partnerships need to be measured and tracked as every other marketing item – that includes targets, expected vs real results.
Important to note: you need to track the metrics of your influencer partnerships according to your campaign goals. One mistake I see brands make is complaining about lack of results that weren’t even planned. The most common one being not gaining direct sales when the campaign was supposed to only gain followers.
2. Facebook Groups
Despite doom and gloom Facebook still kicks derriere when it comes to ecommerce marketing.
69% of Americans use Facebook (Statista, 2021) and worldwide, Facebook has reached 1.8 billion active users in 2021, which was a 11%-year increase from 0220. (source: Hootsuite)
Facebook groups have made a major comeback in 2020 with the desire to connect with others, collaborate and stay educated while social distancing. With this, Facebook also took the opportunity to add new features., making its groups function as a great marketing channel for ecommerce brands.
Who are Facebook groups for?
Any company that has an audience with a:
- Passion for their product
- Passion for their niche
- Desire to be educated in that niche
- Desire to follow the founders’ journey
How to use Facebook groups as a business
While Facebook groups have traditionally been great for communities, you can use Facebook groups as a business to deepen connections with your customers, and create & grow a community of raging fans.
The key is to run a Facebook group methodically and understand the dynamics of a group, and how they differ from those of a page. A few strategies to keep in mind:
- Lead with education. Sprinkle sales occasionally but keep your content mostly educational
- Enable your community to be your voice and to create content. You won’t be able to create, publish and manage all content by yourself and you don’t want to either. Facebook groups are all about community collaborations so empower your community to collaborate
- Be authentic and approachable. Facebook groups are not not a ‘from us to you” avenue but instead a mutually beneficial conversation. Bring out your brand’s friendliest personality trait when participating in Facebook groups
- Optimize your group to lead your community to your landing pages. You don’t have to be sales-y but your content will lead to sales. Just make sure you’re taking your audience where they need to go.
3. Pinterest
One of the most underrated sales channels, in my experience and opinion.
This platform now has over 430 million monthly active users – and it’s not just for arts and crafts – gen Z audiences are increasing by 40% year on year (Source: Hubspot).
What makes Pinterest such a great option for ecommerce marketing?
97% of top searches on Pinterest are unbranded. That means users are not looking for specific brands but rather products and ideas.
One thing that brands often forget is that Pinterest is a search engine before it’s a social media platform. That means people go on the platform searching for items, according to HubSpot.
How to use Pinterest as a brand for ecommerce marketing:
- Remember it’s a search engine, so use practices similar to what you would use for your content marketing and YouTube marketing
- Optimize your description and headline with keywords. Spend some time with keyword research in the planning phases of your Pinterest strategy
- Use visually beautiful pictures that get clicked
- Optimize your landing pages and include links in every pins
- Don’t forget the videos! People watch close to one billion videos per day on Pinterest
- Extensions! Integrate your Pinterest account with your website for shoppable pins and easy product-Pinterest “collaboration”
- Pin ideas: they’re there for just 24 hours but they’re the hottest trend next to videos
- Use a tool like Tailwind to plan and schedule your pins
4.Text Marketing
If you’re not using SMS as a marketing channel you are missing out on engaging with a significant portion of your customers that are not very committed to opening emails – which for most businesses is in the ballpark of 80% (Source: Klaviyo).
Why SMS might be the right ecommerce marketing avenue for your brand:
- 95 percent of all received texts are read. That means this channel can help you reach not only a large audience, but an engaged one too.
- Promotional text messages have an average click through rate (CTR) of 36 percent—that’s eight times email’s average CTR of 4.5 percent. That’s because text messages are very personal and conversational.
- The engagement brands receive from SMS leads to a high revenue per recipient (RPR). For marketers using services like Klaviyo, where text messages make up at least 30 percent of their total messages, their RPR increased 187 percent after adding SMS. (Source: Klaviyo)
How to do text marketing well
- Get explicit consent and don’t abuse it – data privacy is an ongoing challenge for ecommerce marketers. Texting can be a very personal affair and unlike email marketing, implicit consent doesn’t count with SMS
- Short and sweet wins. Don’t try to be fancy with your copy – get to the point and leave the fairy tales for your blog and social media channels
- MMS is expensive but worth it. A picture is worth one thousand words and since you can’t fit one thousand words into a text, let the picture do it for you
- Pair it with email marketing. SMS is great but it never tells the full story. Texting should be used as reminders of sales, launches, important updates but your brand’s personality comes off better in email marketing
- Use an ESP like Klaviyo that offers both email and text within its platform for a seamless integration or opt for a solo option like Emotive.
Text marketing has been controversial since its inception. Not everyone will want to subscribe to your brand’s text messages, and that’s okay. But don’t you want to be there for the 54% of consumers that do want to receive promotions via text message?
5. Email Marketing
I’m not talking about introducing you to the ground-breaking discovery of email marketing.
Although if you’re currently not doing any email marketing at all, you really need to get on that. It is one of the cheapest, highest converting, most reliable ways to generate sales as an ecommerce brand. I have built several 7-figure brands myself; I have worked with dozens of 7 and 8 figure ecommerce companies, and I have yet to see a company with a real email list not be profitable.
Remember, 50% of people buy from marketing emails at least once/month. More than 8 out of 10 people will open a welcome email, generating 4x as many opens and 10x as many clicks as other email types. (GetResponse, 2020)
And with 59% of respondents that say that marketing emails have influenced their purchases. (Salecycle, 2022), email marketing needs to be a pillar in every ecommerce marketing ecosystem (Source: Hubspot)
Now, while it’s widely used, most brands are still not harnessing its full power. The most common ways to use email marketing is through subscriber welcome, post purchase, cart abandonment flows. Great start, but there are plenty of other ways to use email marketing to grow your sales.
A few other powerful ways to leverage email in your ecommerce marketing are:
- PR and Reputation Management: stay on top of your reputation and gather real customer reviews
- Integrate email with your contests. Contests are great for growing your email lists and blending them with your social media efforts can result in more fans, subscribers, referrals and sales
- Integration with your Facebook groups. You already know that Facebook groups can be a great avenue for sales. Make your group so exclusive that everyone needs to give you their email address to sign up: you’ll end up with an engaged audience that really wants to hear from you
- Partnerships with companies serving the same audience but sell different products. Similar to Influencer Marketing campaigns, but via email instead of social media
- Run extremely exclusive sales. I don’t see enough of this: exclusive one day sales for your most VIP of the VIP, creme de la creme subscribers, complete with a hard deadline and a ticking timer to sweeten the deal. Earlier this year I created an exclusive VIP email-only 3-day sale for one of our clients that resulted in 6 figures in sales. The key here is to keep it truly exclusive and put the sale extension and other email trickery.
If you’re not using email marketing at all, start with your automation campaigns. They are easy to set once and keep them making you money.
Whether you are ramping up for holiday sales, determined to scale shamelessly or simply tired of the increased customer acquisition costs on your current advertising platforms, any of these five sales diversification channels is a great bet to start with. Bonus points for implementing all of them if it fits your business.
