How to Establish a Growth Marketing Strategy for Your E-Commerce Business
The e-commerce industry has grown exponentially, with total e-commerce sales for Q3 alone reaching $284 billion, with sales surpassing $1 trillion in total for 2023.
By 2040, it is estimated that 95% of purchases will be made online. With consumers increasingly relying on online shopping, e-commerce is opening doors of opportunity to many entrepreneurs.
Furthermore, those e-commerce sale opportunities are growing at a rapid rate. However, as more e-commerce businesses start to emerge, standing out becomes more challenging.
In this article, we will examine how to go about creating a growth marketing strategy for your e-commerce business. We will also look at the key characteristics of creating a growth marketing strategy, the benefits of creating a growth marketing foundation for e-commerce stores, and how the growth marketing framework can be applied specifically for e-commerce businesses. Finally, we will go about outlining the steps needed to create a growth marketing strategy for your e-commerce store, as well as highlight 10 specific tactics that can (and generally speaking, ought to) be part of a series of growth marketing tactics for your e-commerce shop.
What Exactly is E-Commerce?
E-commerce is a business model in which business transactions are done over the World Wide Web.
E-commerce is not to be confused with e-business, as e-business involves businesses conducting their activities online while e-commerce involves business transactions between buyers and sellers over electronic media.
E-commerce can involve a wide range of options including online shopping, dropshipping, crowdfunding, electronic payment, online subscriptions, and digital transactions.
What are the Different Types of E-commerce Businesses?
There are four main types of e-commerce which we will go over below.
Business-to-Consumer (B2C)
Business-to-consumer involves the direct business transaction between businesses and their consumers online. Out of all the 4 models, it is the one which aligns most similarly with retail. Examples of companies that practice the B2C e-commerce model include Amazon and Well.ca.
Business-to-Business (B2B)
B2B is an e-commerce model where businesses carry out business transactions with other businesses over an electronic medium. What is involved is that products or services are usually exchanged with other businesses which might then sell directly to consumers or use them to benefit various aspects of their operations (ex; manufacturing, safety, etc.). The B2B e-commerce model examples can be seen in small businesses buying goods from Alibaba to resell to consumers.
Consumer-to-Business (C2B)
This is the least common of the 4 e-commerce models. This business model involves consumer products and/or services directly with a business over an electronic means. The consumer-to-business e-commerce model is a direct sales business model, and it generally not involve a middleman or a wholesaler. Examples of the C2B model can be seen in an artist licensing his artwork to a business or freelance social media influencers offering marketing services to businesses on Fiverr.
Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C):
The consumer-to-consumer e-commerce model is also referred to as the peer-to-peer (P2P) e-commerce business model. This e-commerce model involves the electronic exchange of goods, services, or information between consumers through a third-party platform such as Kijiji or Facebook Marketplace. These third-party platforms are usually referred to as peer-to-peer selling platforms. C2C is a direct opposite of the consumer-to-business e-commerce model where consumers exchange their products and/or services with a business.
What are the main benefits that running an e-commerce business provides?
The impact of e-commerce reverberates around the world, both for businesses and consumers. These benefits include:
The sheer variety and volume of different products and services that one can make available to the market.
The ability for businesses to reach a variety of potential consumers from different countries around the world.
Related to the previous point, the simplicity of offering products and services online and the ease of access it provides for consumers.
The fact that there are number of ways of purchasing goods and services online (ex; bank transfer, PayPal, credit and debit cards, cryptocurrency etc.)
What are the main challenges inherent with e-commerce businesses?
Unlike purchasing in-store, ordering products requires that you wait a certain amount of time to receive them (delivery)
Security can be an issue, both in the sense that online retailers can potentially sell fake or spam products, and that websites acquire sensitive personal information about their customers
You cannot feel, sense, try, and analyze products before you buy them online
As much as e-commerce stores can do their best to answer questions that customers may have about their products, the ability to explain or demonstrate product capabilities and differences is severely limited
What are The Benefits of Creating a Growth Marketing Plan For Your E-Commerce Store?
We have so far established some background information about e-commerce businesses as well as what it entails, the various types of e-commerce, as well as some inherent advantages and disadvantages that e-commerce businesses and e-commerce as a whole provides for consumers. Now that we have done that, we need to examine how to go about helping your e-commerce business become more than just another online store that exists. You need for it to stand out and set apart from other stores that are like it. That is where creating a growth marketing strategy comes into play.
Rather than fixating on one stage of your funnel, growth marketing focuses on the customer journey as a whole. It is a strategy that is oriented with the long game in mind, one that is as focused on building customer relationships and fostering loyalty as it is on awareness and acquisition.
At every stage of the customer journey, a growth marketing plan will analyze data to generate insights that inform strategic initiatives. To quickly learn from and iterate on these initiatives, business owners and leaders need to establish a culture that celebrates creative problem-solving, experimentation, and agility.
This is by and large the greatest benefit of establishing what exactly the growth marketing framework entails for e-commerce stores . Growth happens at every stage of the funnel. Rather than acquiring a large volume of new customers or leads who eventually churn, you are focused on acquiring and retaining customers who go on to become advocates for your brand.
The entire funnel is considered and marketing is incentivized to pursue campaigns and tactics that generate leads that fit the various stages of the customer journey. Those leads gained today will be retained and primed to expand in the future, contributing to greater business growth overall in the long term. Once marketing activities start bringing higher-quality customers into the funnel, your ROI will start to soar and more budget will be unlocked to continue expanding on or experimenting with growth strategies.
Furthermore, since a growth marketing plan focuses on all parts of the funnel, your attribution model and return on investment (ROI) calculations need to consider the long-term customer value. Every major KPI including customer lifetime value (CLV), monthly recurring revenue (MRR), churn rate, and activation rate needs to be attributed to understanding how and to what degree at every step along the way, your business is benefiting from strategic, messaging and operational adjustments stemming from tactics performed at every point along the e-commerce purchasing funnel.
What Are the Key Characteristics of a Growth Marketing Strategy
To put it in simple terms, a growth marketing framework is a way of examining the customer purchasing process. The idea here in analyzing the whole experience is to help a business grow as quickly as possible and most strategically. It is not just another generic marketing tactic, but rather a precise, targeted, ongoing approach required to stimulate growth, involving critical steps that take the position of the business and where it needs to get to into account.
Growth marketing considers the entire business cycle as a potential lever for growth. Now depending on the nature of the business itself, the specific framework can differ. Just as a reminder, the growth marketing framework consists of :
A: Acquisition
A: Activation
R. Retention
R. Revenue
R. Referral
This framework was created as a way of giving small companies a method by which to focus on the right metrics, and more importantly, the events/occurrences that truly impact their business’s success. By shifting a business’s focus to the channels and tactics that move the needle most at every stage, smaller companies can find a way to thrive and, in many cases, even outperform bigger competitors. They evaluate the best channels to focus on by looking at metrics such as the number of interested visitors, conversion rates, ROI, CPA, etc. This framework has allowed many businesses to maximize growth on a comparably razor-thin budget.
How Does One Apply the Growth Marketing Framework to E-Commerce Stores?
Now let’s look at how the growth marketing framework applies to e-commerce businesses at every stage of the funnel. Of course, AARRR metrics are traditionally applicable to SaaS (software as a service) companies, but we believe that it’s a concept that can easily be adopted by e-commerce businesses (and other businesses) to drive consistent and repeatable growth to your online store.
However, if we are concerned about the precise order of the framework as it pertains to the e-commerce framework, we just need to make a few changes to the order of the metrics. It is worth noting that for SaaS businesses revenue comes after retention (during the free trial or the product demonstration). For e-commerce stores, the revenue part (placing an order) usually happens before retention (repeat purchases).
A: Acquisition: Acquisition is basically how you “acquire” visitors. For e-commerce stores, the bulk of the traffic these days comes from search engines (Google, Bing), social networks (Facebook, Twitter (X), Pinterest as well as via influencer campaigns), and pay-per-click ads through advertising giants like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads.
A: Activation: Activation in ecommerce means either signing up for the product or subscribing to a newsletter. For the purpose of KPI metrics, activation can be “measured” through a few key visitor activities.
Signing up – some online stores still require and encourage creating accounts with them.
Subscribing for a newsletter
Starting the checkout process
Adding a product to their shopping cart
Browsing at least a few products or product categories
Actually making a purchase
Even if you do not actually generate a sale or an order the fact that prospects undertake even one or more of these processes is a clear indication that the channel your visitors come from is worth diving into, since it shows indications of purchase intention.
To improve activation, you can invite people to subscribe to your newsletter that includes special discounts or access to exclusive deals. That way, even if people abandon your online store, you can reach out to them later and remind them to get back.
R. Retention: Retention is a huge challenge to most e-commerce stores. At the end of the day, you already went through the effort of acquiring, activating, and converting those people into customers. The trouble is getting them to re-order from you.
Ideally, you want to keep customers around and improve their LTV (lifetime value) to your business. To do that, make sure you understand your customers’ needs. When you proactively invite them to purchase again, make sure you’re always offering something relevant to each one of them. Discounts and keeping segmented customer and e-mail lists are extremely helpful in this regard to get previous customers to re-order.
R. Revenue: Revenue is pretty straightforward, but it is the lifeline for any business, including e-commerce stores. For e-commerce stores, that means placing an order. A key aspect of this is to make sure your checkout process is flawless, absolutely clean and clear, and optimized for mobile.
After all, approximately 65.7% of online purchases in 2022 were done with mobile phones and tablets. This is a phenomenon that is not going away anytime soon.
Referral: Now that you have actually acquired these customers. Chances are, they have friends and family that could also be interested in your products or services.
Referrals usually come about in 2 ways. The first is to make it easy for customers to invite somebody else to your business, and to motivate them via incentives (ex; discounts, free stuff, etc.) to do it. The other way is to just be amazing in their mind that they spread the word on their own.
Keep in mind that the AARRR pirate metrics don’t provide a simple formula for success. However, it sets up a structure that by sticking to it in terms of implementing tactics (which keep the framework in mind), creates a system that can help you grow your business in a steady and seemingly predictable way.
What Are the Growth Marketing Fundamentals Needeed to Create a Viable Strategy for Your E-Commerce Store
Let’s face it: the e-commerce playground is vast and ever-changing. An effective e-commerce growth strategy guides your online store toward success, helping you adapt to ever-evolving market trends and outperform competitors.
Crafting a successful e-commerce growth strategy is less about complexity and more about a deep understanding of your market and customers. It’s a strategic process that involves several key steps to ensure your e-commerce business, whether an e-commerce store or a comprehensive online marketplace, thrives in today’s digital economy.
This holistic approach to e-commerce strategies focuses on understanding and catering to both potential and existing customers’ needs, fostering customer loyalty, and driving repeat business.
A well-crafted e-commerce growth strategy pays close attention to the customer journey, aiming to create seamless and memorable experiences for online shoppers. It’s about understanding your target market and tailoring your offerings to meet their expectations, from the product line to shipping options like free shipping thresholds. This approach boosts sales and builds a solid customer base, essential for long-term e-commerce success.
So here below are 6 factors that need to be taken into account when crafting an e-commerce growth marketing-focused strategy.
1) Identifying Your Target Market
The first step in formulating an effective e-commerce strategy is pinpointing your target customers.
Are they savvy online shoppers looking for the latest trends or value-driven consumers seeking the best deals?
Recognizing their unique needs and preferences as they pertain to the product(s) that you offer is crucial for tailoring your e-commerce marketing strategy. This understanding helps your business to create targeted marketing campaigns on social media, search or PPC platforms, enhance the purchase process for your customers, and ultimately drive more sales.
2) Analyzing Your Competitors
Keeping a close watch on your competition is key to defining your ecommerce business strategy. It is extremely important to constantly evaluate their tactics, from social media marketing to customer loyalty programs and their messaging, and learn from their successes and missteps.
These insights help shape your e-commerce strategies, allow your e-commerce store to differentiate itself, and create a unique value proposition for your e-commerce brand.
3) Defining What to Measure
Developing clear, achievable goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) is essential for measuring the effectiveness of your e-commerce growth strategy. Whether boosting website traffic, increasing customer retention, or enhancing the overall customer experience, these goals, important as they are at various stages of the customer journey, provide a benchmark for success.
Setting targets related to increasing online sales, expanding your customer base, or improving product line visibility ensures that your ecommerce store remains focused and driven toward greater success.
4) Understand your audience
Creating personas for all your major audience groups can help you determine what they’re thinking at every step of the customer buying process.
Each persona will have its unique combination of interests, worries, and motivations, and aligning messaging in a way that shows that your ecommerce business is attuned to these factors can help you stand out from your competitors.
A strong understanding of your audience is also important if you want to gain insight into the channels they use. If you know which social networks are most popular with your target market, you can focus on that platform for sharing news and updates and monitoring feedback.
4) Invest in customer service as your top customer loyalty & retention program
Without your customers and their loyalty, your business wouldn’t exist. Simple as that. Focus on providing incredible customer service, and you’ll see increased customer satisfaction. This will manifest itself in the form of more testimonials and customer referrals, and higher retention, less churn, and repeat purchases from customers.
Live chat is actually one of the best ways to provide in-context, efficient customer service. Moreover, using live chat can increase conversion rate through the channel by proactively offering discount codes and answering any prevalent product or purchase questions promptly.
Live chat also allows your customer service agent to serve multiple customers simultaneously. Furthermore, when you use a self-service portal and chat contact form, you can offer live chat support even when you don’t have a human agent to staff the channel.
A customer can’t just walk up to you at an e-commerce store and ask you a question in and of itself. Live chat can effectively offer that capability, which helps to facilitate sales, just like a physical attendant who can answer questions and give product recommendations at the moment.
5. Find the channels your customers are in
A successful strategy must personalize its presentation for the audience by finding where your customers are spending most of their time and then making the most out of the features that that particular platform entails.
Growth marketing is about focus and testing. It makes sense to start with a small list of channels and then test your ability to attract customers on each channel.
When it comes to growth marketing, it’s equally important that you identify what doesn’t work as what does. The mission is to identify the best channels to help you achieve your goals while avoiding those channels that drain your time and resources.
It’s OK to select a small number of channels to test that makes sense for your business. Then test measure, improve and test some more.
The key is to get in front of your customers where they are most engaged and catch the attention of enough potential prospects to pull into your sales funnel.
6. Add to your core marketing tactics & don’t hesitate to experiment with new ones
After identifying the most successful channels for your e-commerce growth strategy, you need to go beyond the basics of what is currently working to further entrench your competitive advantage and increase the returns for your growth marketing strategy.
Automation tools like Zapier and Integromat can help you with marketing automation so that your social media, blog, and email updates can all be automated.
This will allow you to be more efficient with your time and ensure a more consistent customer experience.
However, to drive real change in your business’ growth, you need to try new tactics and strategies, if not every quarter, certainly with a certain amount of regularity.
It doesn’t mean that you switch off existing tactics, but you should constantly be looking to tweak them or add in newer ones. Sooner or later, however, the ROI of your existing channels will taper off, and finding new channels to acquire new customers, and new sources of revenue and to build brand awareness becomes important.
10 Best Growth Marketing Tactics for Your E-Commerce Business
1) Conversion Rate Optimization: Optimizing your e-commerce website for conversion can turn more of your visitors into paying customers. That drives revenue and grows your business.
Not optimizing your e-commerce store for conversion is a missed opportunity.
If you drive 100,000 visitors from Instagram to your e-commerce website each month, but your website takes more than 10 seconds to load, many of them, perhaps even potentially tens of thousands, will choose to leave. Moreover, even if there are no technical issues with your website, if the content is not captivating enough to keep them on your website long enough to inquire about a product you offer, let alone purchase it, then your business is leaving revenue on the table.
Simply put, if your website creates a bad experience for would-be buyers, your marketing efforts are not being optimized to their potential.
There are plenty of platforms you can use to host your ads. This includes search engines like Google and Bing, social networks like Facebook and Instagram, as well as popular websites like TechCrunch and Search Engine Journal.
SEO might be a more cost-effective way to market your business, but paid advertising is a great way for quick bursts of growth that amplify the seasonality and seasonal variation of your business. Paid advertising allows you to target specific subsets of customers looking to purchase, but also allows you to vary your spending and adjust your messaging and strategic positioning to account for both insights and seasonal variation.
Ranking highly can help attract more traffic to your e-commerce store, particularly traffic that is interested in what you have to offer.
Imagine you have a growing e-commerce business selling leather bags. One of your premium products is a pair of brown suede shoes. You want to drive traffic to that product page.
Optimizing its product page for the keyword “brown suede shoes” can increase its chances of showing up on search engine results pages (SERPs) when shoppers search for that term.
SEO is more of a long-term play compared to SEM & other forms of PPC. However, your SEO gains tend to be more long-lasting and entrenched. Furthermore, the connection between content marketing and SEO allows your business to produce content that demonstrates the value of your products thereby providing more value to your prospects and customers alike.
4) E-mail Marketing: E-mail marketing can help e-commerce businesses drive repeat purchases.
For example, if a customer hasn’t purchased from you in the past 30 days, you can send them an email with a 15% off coupon code to entice them to make another purchase.
Or, if they’ve left items in their shopping cart, you can send them a reminder email along with a convincing offer to encourage them to check out.
Beyond promotions and reminders, you can also use email marketing to empower your customers similar to what we mentioned previously about how search engine marketing can be used.
For example, if you sell electric kitchen mixes, you can send them emails with recipes, seasonal cooking inspiration, and kitchen safety tips. In this content, you can highlight how your kitchen mixers make their overall cooking experience better.
Moreover, another of the key additional benefits of email marketing is the fact it allows you to engage in direct targeted marketing to customers that fit different customer segments or profiles based on needs or interests. For instance, if you run a men’s clothing store, you can segment your email list based on prior purchases, to see if the customers have bought more shoes or pants with you.
5) Remarketing: Speaking of which, remarketing efforts involve more than just the reminder emails we just alluded to. Remarketing is simply a digital marketing strategy through which you can re-engage those who have visited your e-commerce website or social media platforms.
For example, let’s assume you visited a website looking for a workout tank top but ultimately didn’t buy anything.
However, after that, you may have noticed ads for that same website and workout tank top multiple times on search engines, email, social media, etc. That is exactly what remarketing is.
Remarketing can be done by using various channels, such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Instagram, Email, WhatsApp, SMS, and others
Reaching those customers who have interacted with your business in the past will increase the probability of those prospects buying from you.
Moreover, because the people being targeted, whether or not they have previously bought from you or not, already know of you, the costs inherent in running such campaigns (and acquiring customers from them) are inherently lower.
6) Pinterest: Pinterest is so much more than a digital scrapbook. Pinterest has inherited the search engine capabilities of Google and the visual nature of Instagram.
These 2 factors encompass the main reasons why Pinterest should be a mainstay for most e-commerce stores (even though many tend to overlook and underestimate it). First, as mentioned, it acts as a visual search engine. People can type a phrase into the search bar and get millions of visual results in seconds. The emphasis on photos helps shoppers make fairly immediate decisions. 75% of consumers say product images are ‘very influential’ in their buying decisions. Moreover, it helps shoppers discover new products: Pinterest users have saved over 240 billion pins and 46% of weekly pinners have discovered a new brand or product while browsing Pinterest.
Moreover, Pinterest has a wide range of features that seamlessly allow potential customers to browse and shop online. Product pins, personal wishlists, and shoppable catalogs are only some of the native shopping features that make it easy for your audience to find and buy your products while scrolling through their feed. Moreover, whether you want to increase visibility on your products, foster a community around your brand, run targeted ads, educate shoppers, or simply add another traffic source to your mix, Pinterest can help.
No wonder e-commerce brands are using it as a key marketing channel. Getting to grips with Pinterest’s extensive shopping features will help you get more eyeballs on your products and increase traffic to your website. recipe videos. It’s a product catalog, search engine, marketplace, and online store all in one.
7) Influencer Marketing Ads: Collaborating with influencers can serve as an excellent e-commerce growth tactic. You also leverage the trust that influencers have built with their followers.
Over the past few years, the number of people turning to influencers for purchasing decisions has risen. According to Pew Research, 54% of 18-29 year old social media users report that influencers impact their purchasing decisions. For people in the age range 30-49, the number stands at 42%.
It is important to seek to work only with influencers whose followers/subscribers are within your target audience demographics for the reason of reaching as many people as possible that fit within your customer base.
However, keep in mind that major influencers can be extremely costly and may not necessarily have the type of engagement needed to pay attention to the message that they may put out about your brand or products. Working with nano- and micro-influencers is an excellent way to run a budget-friendly influencer marketing campaign. These influencers often have engagement rates that are higher than mega and macro influencers. Their audience is more likely to interact, comment, share, and take action on their posts.
8) Cross-selling and upselling campaigns
Cross-selling and upselling are great ways to increase your online sales while giving your customers more value.
These strategies also help with customer retention. If there’s a higher value product in the market and your customer finds out from your competitors, they’re likely to leave your store. You don’t want that. Cross-selling and upselling ensures your customers are always aware of the available options, and makes it more likely that prospects can buy more products from your e-commerce store.
To get the best results with these campaigns, suggest reasonable cross-sells and upsells. For example, if someone is placing an order for a 128GB iPhone 13, it makes little sense to upsell them to the 1TB iPhone 13. The specs and price differences are too big. In such a case, the customer is more likely to upgrade to the next best thing, the 256GB iPhone 13.
You can use offers to make your cross-selling and upselling campaigns more successful. You could provide discounts or free shipping, for example. Moreover, do not limit cross-selling and upselling on just landing pages. They can be just as effective during the checkout process.
9) E-commerce Marketplaces Like Amazon, Walmart, etc.
Establishing your presence on e-commerce marketplaces is another strategic move that can expand your reach and increase your sales.
E-commerce marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and Alibaba attract millions of shoppers each month.
By putting your products on these marketplaces, you can put your products in front of those marketplace shoppers and expand your customer base.
In addition to their massive prospective customer base, shoppers trust these platforms. Therefore if your products are on these platforms, by extension, they must also be trustworthy. They’re more likely to purchase because they're familiar with the interfaces, have confidence in the buying process, and often feel safer with the payment and return policies in place. Moreover, several of these marketplaces offer warehousing, packaging and shipping solutions and contingencies, which reduces the hassles of managing the fulfillment of these orders that potentially go above and beyond the current capacity that your business may have.
10) Customer Loyalty Programs: eCommerce loyalty programs are essential for customer retention, increased sales, and competitive advantage. One of the major issues that many e-commerce stores face is churn, much of which stems from the fact that purchases are often spurred by one-time needs or needs that originate due to needs at any particular time. Loyalty programs vary and can be based on simple mechanisms related to upgrading to higher tiers, earning points, and receiving simple rewards. Alternately, they can combine multiple mechanisms at once, including gamification and gaining new achievements. Regardless of how loyalty programs are structured, the main focus of them is to try and spur customers to remain engaged with your e-commerce businesses, with the idea of trying to get them to purchase repeatedly.
Creating a Growth Marketing Strategy for Your E-Commerce Business: We Are Here to Help
Growing an e-commerce business in today’s fiercely competitive market is tough.
Whether it’s a focus on delivering exceptional customer service, running a multi-channel influencer marketing campaign, building an enviable loyalty program, or getting to the top of the search results for every high-priority keyword on your list, knowing which tools to use and in what way helps to establish your e-commerce strategy framework. This in essence is the key to the success of your e-commerce business.
Finding the best e-commerce strategies for your business is the only way you can stand out and thrive. Creating a broader growth marketing strategy that recognizes the growth marketing framework as it pertains to e-commerce stores will help greatly in this regard.
If you feel you need help in this regard, please reach out for a growth marketing consultation.
Our expert growth marketing consultants recognize that while there are many similarities in terms of the challenges that e-commerce stores might face, no e-commerce business is the same. If your e-commerce business is struggling to set itself apart from other businesses in the wider online marketplace, we would be happy to examine your current marketing efforts for not just areas of improvement, but for insights that can provide opportunities that we can help your business leverage for prospective growth.