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The e-commerce industry has been steadily expanding. And because of the digital trends triggered by the pandemic, we’re witnessing even more accelerated growth, making the competition between e-commerce businesses that much more intense.

If you want to set yourself apart from your competitors, now’s the time to get into growth marketing.

What is Growth Marketing?

The main benefit of this digital era we’re in is that there’s an abundance of data to process and analyze. Instead of going in blindly or just following your instincts, it is important to make use of current technology to your advantage. Analytics is a powerful tool to help you develop and execute your marketing gameplan. This data-driven approach, combined with marketing fundamentals, makes up growth marketing.

Growth marketing is a branch of marketing that is focused not only on increasing brand awareness and acquisition, but on the complete customer lifecycle, or funnel.

The Growth Marketing Funnel

1. Acquisition: This stage refers to the users that you’ve reached or visited your page.
2. Activation: The stage when a visitor turns into a customer.
3. Retention: This stage shows which customers came back and those who left.
4. Referral: The stage where you explore how you can turn loyal customers into advocates for your business.
5. Revenue: This stage answers the question: how do you increase revenue or monetize customer behavior?

Growth marketing uses data-driven techniques and constant analysis to maximize the company's marketing resources. This contrasts with traditional marketing, which relies on techniques that have been used for as long as we can remember. This can be beneficial in the short-term, but executing the same methods over time without improvement may lead to diminished results. Growth marketing's cycle of applying innovative techniques and consistent evaluation allows for continuous improvement of your marketing strategy, not only improving marketing spend efficiency, but also contributing to increased revenues.

To help you outperform competitors, we’ve listed growth marketing tactics for your e-commerce business.

Study and improve on your platform

A good way to start with your growth marketing is with your homebase, your website. There are various tools that help you very easily create a dashboard to monitor website visits. Website analytics lets you track useful information that can help you improve your website to gain more traffic and conversions. Having insight into visitors’ behavior on your website allows you to identify opportunities and create solutions to address users’ concerns.

• Retarget cart-abandoners – While cart abandonment cannot be avoided, it’s possible to minimize your cart abandonment rate by retargeting visitors who leave your site without purchasing, even when they’ve still got items left in their virtual cart. You can address this by sending a targeted e-mail to cart-abandoners highlighting that they’ve still got X items left in their cart or singling out one product to mention in your subject. In the body of the e-mail, you can add urgency by mentioning if a product is out of stock or highlighting the main benefits of a certain item. Not only that, you can also include customer reviews to add more authenticity to the retargeting e-mail.

• Upsell or cross-sell products – You can do this by getting analytics on which products are typically purchased together and creating "other users also bought this" or "this goes well with" suggestions upon check-out. Cross-selling or upselling increases the basket size of customers, providing you with more revenue per user.

• Invest in campaigns that deliver high returns – Tracking where your website traffic comes from allows you to see which channels provide you with better revenue and those that don’t. Constant review of these campaigns gives you a better understanding of where to focus your marketing resources.

There are many other ways website analytics can help you improve your ecommerce marketing strategies and optimize your marketing budget, so make sure to choose the right growth marketing partner for best results.

Effectively each out to customers

There are multiple online platforms and social media channels to choose from. While you may want to market your e-commerce business through all channels, it may not be practical financially and time-wise. Here are some growth marketing tactics that you can apply to reach out to your target audience without completely burning through your marketing funds.

• Paid search and shopping ads – These allow you to be visible to your customers during the moments that they’re looking for your products or ones similar to yours. It’s important to bid for search terms that will deliver traffic that has the intent to purchase. For example, a person that uses the search terms "buy custom furniture online" or something as specific, has a higher potential to actually purchase the product as opposed to someone who just uses "furniture."

• Content marketing – This is a great way to increase visibility and engage with your target audience. Adding blogs and engaging quizzes to your website helps potential customers find you. This tactic helps customers learn more about your product through related content.

• Embrace social media – This is one of the most far-reaching and relevant marketing channels for most users, which is why you shouldn’t neglect social media when marketing your e-commerce business. Running ads like a Facebook carousel can help you highlight multiple products in one go and can lead users directly to specific product pages. Most platforms, like Pinterest or Instagram, also have shoppable ads where users can seamlessly transition from liking a post to clicking on and purchasing the product.

Reaching out to customers is essential when growing your commerce business. What’s great about modern technology is that you, with the help of your partner agency, can continuously monitor your efforts across different platforms to fine-tune your growth marketing strategies.

Create a personalized approach to develop and leverage customer relationships

The one-size-fits-all approach to marketing is largely outdated. It’s important to rely on available information to provide personalized messaging to customers. Adopting a personalized marketing approach keeps your e-commerce business relevant and lets you build better connections with your customers. Below are some growth marketing efforts that show that adding a personal touch is possible even without face-to-face interactions.

• Celebrate holidays and milestones – Build relationships with your customers by reaching out on important days like birthdays and holidays. You can also celebrate milestones such as their first (or tenth!) purchase or newsletter sign-up anniversary. When you reach out, it’s a good idea to send a special offer to show your appreciation.

• Personalized suggestions – Continue engaging your customers by providing personalized suggestions. It can be a complementary item or styling recommendations for a product they recently purchased. Keeping the relationship warm with personalized content can help increase customer loyalty.

• Implement referral programs – When you’ve built solid relationships with your customers over time, they can become advocates for your e-commerce business! This can come naturally when you have quality products and customer experience worth referring to, but you can further incentivize your most loyal customers by implementing referral programs. Try providing personalized referral codes that they can share with their inner circle in exchange for credits that can be used on your website. You can also incentivize the leaving of product reviews, which you can utilize for product research and marketing efforts.

Your e-commerce business has the potential to not only survive, but thrive in this highly digital and fast-paced world. Your business can grow sustainably by partnering with a digital growth agency that provides data-driven, end-to-end solutions.