Understand your customers’ path to purchase

The lockdowns during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic led to a huge boom in e-commerce. According to the US Census Bureau, in the first year of the pandemic, e-commerce sales grew by 43%. But the consumers are continuing to choose online shopping.

MARKETING FOR ECOMMERCE BUSINESSES

According to eMarketer, the ecommerce ad spend in 2021 was around $31 Billion and is expected to grow by 65% in the next two years. Retail contributes to 76% of the Digital Ad spend with Apparel & accessories and Beauty & wellness industries accounting for the lion’s share of the ad spend.

The return on digital advertisement has been excellent. According to a study conducted by The Performance Marketing Association, the average ROAS was 12:1. $1 invested in the digital marketing drove $12 sales. With such great returns, digital marketing for ecommerce businesses will be a great investment towards driving the revenue.

CONSUMER JOURNEY

If you own an ecommerce website, it is possible to track all the movements of each and every one of your consumers. Using the same strategies to target all the users who might be interested in or have interacted with your brand is tantamount to mass media marketing.

Digital analytics can be used by online businesses to understand customer’s online purchasing behavior, track the activities that led to purchases and use that data to make informed decisions to convert new and existing users.

PURCHASE FUNNEL

Consumers’ mindset and their likeliness to transact with your business is different at each stage of their purchase journey. Identifying the stages and adopting distinct marketing strategies to nudge them to make the purchase is be one of the most effective ways of driving conversions on ecommerce websites.

Awareness

Introduce the brand/product to the target audience with the right message that you want you want your brand to identify with. Find this audience through domain targeting — ads on websites/blogs relevant to the brand’s vertical, keyword optimizations — targeting keywords associated with the products or those that drive users to similar businesses/websites or geo-targeting — target regions/cities/postcodes that are over indexed with people interested in the products/services that the brands offer.

Interaction

Redirect most of the spend on Ad-click based campaigns to drive more users to the website. Design your ad creatives based on the most popular products/services. Identify the landing page of the ad based on the website metrics — Most visited page or the page users spent most time on. Spot the pain points faced by these users and work on fixing them to avoid users abandoning the website in the future.

Confirmation

This is the stage when the users confirm their intent to buy something from your business. These users should be retargeted heavily as they’re most likely to convert. Provide promotions/coupons to push them to make a purchase.

Conversion

Analyze these customers’ overall online and website behavior to optimize the campaigns. Recognize them with rewards and referral programs. Retarget them lightly to ensure that they stay loyal to the brand.

TAKEAWAYS

The return on Digital Ad Spend is 12:1. Therefore digital marketing can be one of the best investments for ecommerce businesses in order to drive their revenue.

Segmenting the target audience & website visitors and using appropriate strategies for each of the segment is the wisest way to spend the digital ad budget and achieve more conversions.

Introducing the brand to new users, pushing users to visit the ecommerce website and to interact with the business, aggressively targeting users who have already shown interest in making a purchase and attracting users who have a similar behavior/demographic as the purchasers are some of the best tactics to increase purchases and drive revenue.