A guide to marketing your Zoho Commerce store

What is marketing?

Let's begin by understanding what marketing is. Philip Kotler, known as the father of modern marketing, defines it this way:

Marketing is the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires. It defines, measures, and quantifies the size of the identified market and the profit potential.

Marketing serves to create value for your business by generating brand awareness, attracting your target audience, satisfying their needs, and unlocking your business' growth potential. As the market gets crowded these days, marketing is essential—not just for your potential buyer to find you easily, but also to have a competitive advantage in the market over the long run.  

Why is marketing imperative for online businesses? 

New age entrepreneurs, especially online businesses, are constantly competing to make themselves known and remembered. If you’re selling goods online, the traditional approach of setting up a storefront where consumers can walk in and touch, feel, and try your products is not applicable. Statista projected there would be more than 2.14 billion online shoppers worldwide in 2021. In a cluttered space like this, you have to ensure you aren’t left undiscovered.

Ecommerce marketing ensures you are discovered. Ecommerce marketing includes the efforts undertaken through digital channels that are geared towards building brand equity. We’re not overstating the importance of marketing when we say that it can lead to the success of your business, and that the lack of marketing efforts can prove otherwise.

Joint research by Forbes, Huffington Post, and Marketing Signals discovered that 90% of all ecommerce businesses fail within the first 120 days of being launched. Poor online marketing was mentioned as the top reason for this. So we can see how it becomes difficult for a small business to survive without marketing.

Marketing helps in creating demand, staying relevant, and creating a strong identity for the brand. Without it, your online business can be consigned to oblivion or, much worse, be easily swapped for another brand.

Ecommerce marketing

Ecommerce marketers have the option of choosing between various digital channels and tools such as emails, online campaigns and blogs, and social media amongst other options. You can check our blog on marketing tools for different marketing stages that can help you plan your marketing.

Below are some of the notable tools to fill your marketing bucket/funnel.

Social media

According to Hootsuite's The Global State of Digital 2022 report, 26.5% of social media users go to social platforms to find products to buy. It’s crucial for an ecommerce store to be present on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, LinkedIn, or wherever your customer is likely to hang out.

Online stores rely heavily on visually highlighting the aesthetics of their products, and so social media, which by nature is a visual storytelling medium, can be a great place to post your photos/videos to garner attention and drive traffic to your website.

Ecommerce marketers can use the medium to establish their brand, connect with customers, and practice brand marketing. Brand marketing for ecommerce is all about promoting the brand as a wholesome entity along with its values, rather than a single product or offering.

From funny viral reel trends to inspirational quotes, educational how-to’s, festive wishes, social commentary, or even memes on popular events (scores of brands took to social media to talk about Messi and Mbappé after the last FIFA finals), you can use social media to emotionally connect with customers and establish your brand as an authority or expert on a range of subjects.  

In addition, you can explore social selling too, which is tightly knit with your ecommerce stores. On Zoho Commerce, it’s a hassle-free process to set up and run Meta Pixel and Google Shopping.

Meta Pixel 

If you have a business account on Facebook, you can set up Meta Pixel by following the steps here. You can go back to your Zoho store and click on Settings, and choose Facebook Pixel listed under the SEO option. Paste the Meta Pixel ID in the place indicated and then click Save and Publish it. Check your Facebook account to see if Pixel is connected. Enter your site ID under Test Events and in a bit, you’ll be able to see the activity on your website.

You can check who’s purchased something and who hasn’t, who’s filled in a form, added products to the cart, viewed a certain page, and more. Tracking these activities means you can optimize your ads, target a segment for ads, and also plan re-targeting ads. You can even use the tool to add the catalog from Zoho Commerce to Meta Pixel. Once you upload the product information and tags and save it, you’ll be able to view the catalog in a few hours. Clicking on the Sale tab afterward will let you create a Facebook Shop.

Google Shopping 

You can set up Google Shopping on your Zoho Commerce store, which will allow you to list products from your online store for shoppers to see in the Ads section on top of the search result pages. Before that, you need to create a Google Merchant Center account, link your Google Ads account, create a Google Shopping campaign, place bids, and target and schedule your campaign.

This is made possible through Zoho Inventory, which your online store will be synced with. (You can learn more about this under the Integration with Zoho Inventory section in the previous guide.) On your Zoho Commerce dashboard, choose Settings on the left side, and then select Google Shopping under Integrations, after which you will land on Zoho Inventory's page.

Click Join, choose Sales & Marketing, and connect to the Google Merchant Center (GMC). Choose the Google account to connect with Zoho Inventory. If the Google account is already connected to the Merchant Center account, the option will be listed and you’ll only need to choose it and hit Continue. Otherwise, you’ll have to create a new account to start a Merchant Center account. In the next step, you’ll have to grant the necessary permissions.

Click Continue on the next couple of screens until you are prompted to enter your business name and business website and click Create Account. In the GMC Sync Preferences window, shipping zones and tax information will be automatically extracted from your Zoho Commerce store. Select All Products and continue. In the final step, choose the Zoho Inventory fields to map with the corresponding GMC fields.

Click Save and Complete to successfully integrate your Zoho Inventory account with GMC, and after the sync, sign in to https://www.google.com/retail/solutions/merchant-center/ to chart out the next steps.

You can also utilize paid social media to bump up your reach. Sponsored social posts and social media ads allow you to promote posts and specific communication to get your posts on the feeds of those who may not yet be following you.

You can target an audience on Facebook based on demographics (age, gender, education, job title, and more) and the interests they’ve marked. On Twitter, you can target your audience based on demographics (age, gender, or location) and interests (search queries, recent Tweets, and Tweets they recently engaged with, etc). You can get all the ad specs on Twitter.

With LinkedIn, you’ll have additional areas to tap into for targeting, including company (i.e., company name, company size), education (i.e., degrees, educational institutions), and work experience (i.e., work position/title, years of experience).

Content marketing

Ecommerce content marketing must not only publicize the brand or products but expand upon the brand narrative. In addition, it must not shy away from answering questions, educating the audience, taking a stance on social developments (if and when required), and helping people choose the right product for themselves.

Once you publish meaningful content, you can gradually optimize it for the crawlers to index it and rank on top for relevant searches, which in turn will attract more traffic and up your conversion rate. Build content clusters where you approach one big subject that acts as your pillar content, and several other sub-topics branching out from the main topic. It needs to have backlinks to the pillar content page and include internal links to the other sub-topic pages, all of which will add to your SEO efforts.

Make your content assets known through social media posts, email campaigns, paid ads, backlinks, and other ways to get the maximum ROI from your content. Listed below are some of the most prominent formats from which you can choose the best to disseminate information or opinion.

Blog posts 

You can have listicles, expert opinions, how-to’s, checklists, and many other interesting articles to talk about the values of your brand, your viewpoint on a hot subject, a milestone achieved by your ecommerce business, the usefulness of your products, and more.

You can get creative with it by sharing personal stories, the inspiration that leads to creativity, or the people behind the brand, which will enhance the personal connection with the audience and increase customer lifetime value.

You can build blogs on Zoho Commerce by clicking on Settings and choosing the Blog option which will dole out all of the blog features. Check the Blog option in our previous guide to learn more. Read what we had to say about ecommerce blogging to get even more insights. Big brands like Ikea have made sure they utilize this medium pretty well.

Guest posts 

Guest blogs are a refreshing way to connect with a new audience outside of your website realm. Your brand gains exposure and so does the author, which positions your brand as a thought leader.

Search for websites that are related to the brand. You can type in the keyword and search for the same. Once you investigate the website (including the copy and design, site content, and language, all of which should be free of errors with no evidence of plagiarism) and find it okay, you can ask to contribute articles for them.

The inbound links driving traffic from an external site to yours can be of great benefit, especially for SEO purposes. It will positively impact the domain authority for your online store and add to the credibility of the website. You’ll benefit from the traffic that the other website is already amassing.

Landing pages 

After all of these efforts, be it through social media, ads, SEO, or emails, your customers will land on a website page that must wow them and keep them engaged. Optimize your ecommerce website by including specific keywords and long-tail keywords that will be of high relevance to your customers.

For instance, don’t just mention "burgundy dress" but describe it as a "ruched burgundy satin dress" to make it more specific. Think of appropriate page titles, headers, meta descriptions, alt images, and other elements of a page that will help you rank well. Ensure they’re optimized for different devices.

The responsive design of your landing pages must mean that it renders the text and images beautifully on all screens. On Zoho Commerce, the built-in tools automatically optimize your pages. Remember to include images, information, and CTA buttons on your page. Zoho Commerce helps you build landing pages for your ecommerce website within minutes.     

FAQs 

Besides answering questions, a FAQ section will help you incorporate the right keywords. You’ll be building authority while simultaneously improving traffic.

There are some brilliant examples that can inspire you. On their FAQ page, Maple Hill, an organic dairy brand, explains everything from homogenization to the use of GMOs among other concerns. They cleverly incorporate all of the long-tail keywords in the process. Sbtrct, an award-winning, zero-waste skincare brand, has six subheads on their FAQ page ranging from the use of their product to packaging, ingredients, delivery, and more. Not only is it comprehensive, it also comes across as an honest brand.

Videos 

According to SEMrush research, "video is the most effective content format for retail and ecommerce businesses." Tutorial videos, customer story videos, and influencer videos are great ways to get your customers hooked. You can post long-form videos regularly on YouTube and repurpose them as ads or reels by taking excerpts from them and making them bite-sized. Airbnb is a good example when it comes to video content.

Whitepapers 

Particularly useful for B2B ecommerce businesses, whitepapers can persuade your audience with in-depth research that states the problem and also propagates a solution. Think of it as an advanced version of ebooks or guide. It’s lengthy and full of statistics, industry terminologies, and information.

The downloadable content reads almost like a research paper containing an abstract, problem statement, analysis, solution, and substantiation of it. It’s particularly meant for those who are almost ready to make a buying decision. Usually, B2B SaaS companies make use of it, just like Google has.  

Ebooks/guides 

These are detailed (though not as much as a whitepaper) articles on a specific subject that are interspersed with interesting infographics, images, cheat sheets, workbooks, and more. Anyone can use this creatively—from a construction company to a fashion brand.

Remember to present the content in a way that’s not tedious and is easy and fun to read and understand. Salesforce often posts guides and ebooks on relevant topics. Most of it is content that requires you to share your name and email address, which makes this a great lead-generation asset. 

Infographics 

Infographics are versatile because they can be used anywhere— social media posts, slide decks, blogs, whitepapers, guides, emails, and newsletters, to name a few. They visually and succinctly summarize important data points and help customers process complex information very quickly.

Beyond numbers, they can also be used to communicate other information, such as step-by-step instructions on using a product or a public service announcement. Make them visually attractive and make the text brief. And, of course, include a watermark of the brand, because infographics tend to get widely circulated. You can find some cool infographics here.

Comparison pages 

When you nail down why your brand or offering is better than others, you can build a comparison page. An easy breakdown of factors differentiating you from the rest of your competition will be of immense help to customers who are on the brink of making a decision.

Other than a feature-by-feature comparison, don’t forget to compare the prices and ability to integrate (in case of software), and present the information in a table. You can title the page as "your brand vs your competitor" along with a few paragraphs that would meaningfully weave in your main keywords.

Our ecommerce software comparison page comparing Zoho Commerce with Shopify is complete with all of the relevant information, a table, a downloadable asset embedded on the page, and a software migration guide. B2C brands use comparison tables, too, as shown below:

Case studies 

Case studies are effective in convincing a buyer that the product is indeed efficient and effective. When a satisfied customer comes forward to share their story of how your product has enhanced their life, there will be similar buyers contemplating the purchase right away.

Case studies often tend to highlight a customer's difficulties and how they solved their challenges with your offering. They need to share why they chose your company over others, and include both the qualitative and quantitative results from using the product. Draft a strong questionnaire that will elicit good responses from the customer when you interview them.

You can refer to this exhaustive list of case study questions. Zoho Commerce customer stories are a good example of case studies. We have multiple formats of case studies including video case studies, which double up as customer testimonials.

Podcasts 

The on-demand listening format has gained a multitude of devoted followers over the last few years, evident from the fact that there are now more than two million podcasts registered by Google. Podcasts fit into the busy schedules of professionals who like to multitask—you can consume this media while driving, brewing a cup of coffee, or carrying out daily chores. Businesses are cashing in on the rediscovery of the audio medium, and so should you.

Invest in a good microphone, and start speaking on subjects that you’re passionate about (which don’t necessarily need to be about your brand or product). Record and edit it with software like Audacity, GarageBand, or Adobe Audition CC. Host it on platforms like Spreaker, Libsyn, Buzzsprout, or Podbean that can redistribute your episodes to widely used podcast channels like Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Prime, and more.

The wellness podcast by vegan influencer, author, and plant-based entrepreneur Ella Woodward talks about women’s health, mental well-being, metabolism, and other topics related to wellness. As a listener, not only did I discover her brand through her podcast but I enjoyed the conversations so much that I regularly bought food products from her. A good podcast is supposed to establish brand awareness and help in conversion, too.    

User-generated content (UGC)

While you fight fiercely for your audience’s attention, your products can speak for themselves through happy customers. When customers spread the word about your product or brand online and promote it, you have UGC that is just waiting to be capitalized upon.

Customers can post images or videos of their positive brand/product experience, such as reviews or testimonials through social media, blogs, or even podcasts. According to a survey by Stackla, consumers are nearly 2.5 times more likely to consider UGC as authentic compared with content created by brands. Before you evolve into a powerful brand like Apple driving thousands of users and generating content, you can try running competitions to encourage users to post about you or even have hashtag contests to get people to talk about you online.

Users of Lush, a luxury cosmetic retailer, often post online with the hashtag "#lushies." The brand decided to take advantage of this user-generated content on all of their social channels and web experiences that proved budget-friendly and impactful. On their social channels, they incorporate product tags linking back to the page selling those products, and they put these posts on their landing pages too, prompting visitors to make purchase decisions more quickly. Their UGC photos were more effective compared to their branded content, with 1,340% higher reach and 53% more clicks.

Search engine optimization

People often Google their queries or problems, wanting the Internet to throw up solutions to them. They get these search results or solutions because there's a crawler (which is a computer program of sorts) scouring websites and webpages which are then cataloged and pulled up later when it seems like an answer to an online query. You have to make sure that your website gets listed for keywords relevant to your business or brand that people will search for. You can optimize your pages and website to rank better. This is called search engine optimization (SEO).

This isn’t an autonomous task, but something that’s coherently connected to all of your marketing efforts—including content marketing, social media, and website landing pages. You incorporate the right keywords, descriptions, page titles, URLs, headings and subheadings, and alt-image text (and constantly focus on sharing unique, useful information) that will earn you good backlinks and social signals and build authority, eventually ranking you well.

You also need to optimize your site for different devices and make sure the loading speed is good. Make sure that you have a brilliant site architecture with great navigation (via mega menus, filters, and clickable product tags—all of which can be easily done on an ecommerce platform like Zoho Commerce), URLs, breadcrumbs to ease navigation, and sitemaps. 

Keyword research is a crucial step here, after which you can do an SEO audit and choose to optimize your pages. Use tools such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, or SEMrush to mine information on relevant keywords. Check Moz for a DA score and, finally, look at volumes, clicks, and difficulty level.

Now extract a list of your pages on a sheet and analyze the traffic for the same, check the keywords to see if they're performing well and choose ones that can be further incorporated. Remember to do all of this naturally. The goal is to write for humans, not machines. As you scale up your business, you can always look into hiring an agency to help you perform these tasks.  

Email marketing

SaleCycle shared its findings on email marketing, and one of them stated, "59% of respondents said that marketing emails influence their purchase decisions, while just over 50% buy from marketing emails at least once a month." Although an old form of digital marketing, email marketing hasn’t lost its sheen over the years. Particularly useful for ecommerce businesses, you can use your database to communicate with your potentials and customers at different points in their buying journey.

Read our blog that explains the benefits of email marketing and the ways to measure ROI. Here are some types of emails that you can send to your customers:

• Welcome email: To customers who have just signed up or bought their first product on your website, making them feel valued and special.
• Promos and discount email: To those who need a reminder that they have already purchased from your online store and there's more they can shop. It can even nudge a dormant customer into becoming a repeat customer, and a repeat customer to come back to your site.
• Exclusive sale sneak peeks: To a select few who are your shop regulars or whose purchase volumes are high.
• Ecommerce newsletter: To all of those customers who have signed up to learn more about your brand, products, and other connected stories.  
• Drip nurture email: To communicate with your customers regularly, informing and sharing content from time to time. For instance, a trial user may be sent a series of emails that are instructions and possibilities about your product.
• BOGO email: For those who need to know about the season's special Buy One Get One kind of offers. Whether it’s the holiday season or any other festive season, a BOGO email campaign is the best way to tell your customers about it.
• Abandoned cart email: To customers who slipped out without buying though they may have added products to the cart.
• Post-purchase email: To build a relationship with your customer that will encourage them to shop again from you soon.
• Review/feedback email: To those who have regularly shopped from you and can share a review about the product. You can choose to embed the email with a link that will take them directly to the review page of the product they have purchased. You can also share questionnaires to get feedback from them about their experience with your product.

You will have to automate your email campaigns. You can carry out email marketing for your Zoho Commerce store by integrating it with Zoho Campaigns, which is another part of the Zoho ecosystem. First, visit the Zoho Campaigns account, click on the Ecommerce button on the left, and choose the store connected to it. When you land on the Zoho Campaigns dashboard, click the Create Campaign, and then Automated emails tab, to land on a page that will provide you with two workflows for sending out automated emails. Click on Create Now under Abandoned cart to email customers who never bought the products they added to their cart.

There are readily available email templates that can be tweaked to define email triggers and action. 

Tip: Include a great subject line, sender email address, and the main content that can be a reflection of your brand. It can be funny, quirky, or simple. Zoho Commerce will let you do this and also define the time after which the emails can be triggered; for instance, 24 hours after cart abandonment. This makes cart abandonment recovery simple and will certainly boost your revenue besides improving your customer relationships.

You can also segment your customers based on their purchase history, money spent on your products, and other profile details. This will help you target the right customers with the most effective messaging. Those who segment their audience have better chances of seeing an increase in their revenue.

Affiliate marketing

In one study, Forrester claimed that, "Forty-two percent of affiliate marketers say that their affiliate programs are successful, and 33% highly successful, at driving customer acquisition." Particularly helpful for ecommerce businesses, affiliate marketing uses the influence and popularity of an external/affiliate member who'll promote your products on their channels, which could be a blog, video, email, or ad.

As affiliate marketers, they earn a commission based on the goal they’re supposed to achieve, and as an online business owner, you can set the goals such as sales, and pay-per-lead (PPL) programs that will require the audience to perform a specific task, such as a form fill, subscription/sign up, or follow on social media. Be very clear about what you want though—e.g., improved traffic, increased sales, increased average revenue per order.

Research what your competitors are doing—their affiliate payouts, commissions, bonuses, email communication, etc. This will help you figure out your affiliate program better. You will also be able to come up with a well thought-out commission strategy that’s crucial to your revenue in the long run. Zoho Thrive, an upcoming performance-based marketing automation tool, can be integrated with Zoho Commerce to manage affiliate marketing.

Coupon marketing and discounts

Trust me, you don't need any statistics or reports to prove how coupons can nudge a shopper into buying. There's plenty of interesting information online that will do this job and assure you of the amazing impact coupon marketing can have on sales and revenue. It can be an excellent solution to sell overstocked goods or products that are selling poorly.

Any email with coupon codes or a social media post announcing discounts is bound to generate more website visits, and in that way coupons can increase website traffic. It can maximize the customer lifetime value (CLTV), which estimates the revenue that a customer generates throughout their relationship with a company. As an online entrepreneur, you just have to ensure that your coupon marketing is not affecting the bottom line of your business or damaging your brand reputation.

You can incorporate coupons in many creative ways in your Zoho Commerce store. You can find Coupons under Settings, and click Add Coupon to generate coupon codes. In the next window, you can name the coupon, automatically generate a code or manually enter one, specify a minimum order value to use the coupon, the discount value, a coupon limit for the store per customer, starting and ending dates to use the coupon, and more.

Most importantly, there are two great options that will enhance the way you implement a coupon. One, you can choose to generate coupon codes that are specific to products (that can help you clear inventory), product categories or particular collections, shipping zones (when a seasonal sale is relevant to a region or you need to boost sales in a particular region), or customers (to reward your loyal customers, for which you should have activated the Member Portal on the Zoho Commerce store).

When you’re incorporating coupons, it’s essential that you plan them well and target them specifically to avoid erratic coupon-driven sales that can hurt your inventory, reputation, and business. Zoho Commerce gives you the flexibility to make this possible.

Second, you can make sure that coupons entice your website visitors into buying your products by prominently displaying the coupon code next to the products, placing a countdown timer beside a product, or mentioning the claim rate of a coupon or displaying it on the checkout page.

The placement of these coupons is important, and so is how and where you highlight them so the customers don’t miss out on a discounted shopping opportunity. You can click on Settings> Store Settings> Preferences and then scroll down to Coupon Settings to enable the timer or claim rate or other options.

Create a unified experience

Now that you know what the different marketing channels are, you must diligently plan an interconnected journey that will be relevant to potential buyers and will give them maximum value. Your ecommerce platform must have the tools to track the customer journey and help you target them with concentrated marketing efforts rather than a broad, generic approach. You can channel these efforts through common digital avenues that will help your ecommerce store.

Zoho Commerce and Zoho SalesIQ

Zoho Commerce leverages Zoho SalesIQ within our Zoho ecosystem, which is a great sales, support, and marketing tool. With its built-in website tracker, you can get customer insights such as their location, traffic source, time spent on your pages, the number of visits, and more. Based on this precious information, you can choose to segregate your website visitors, and define if they are high-intent visitors or not.

You can categorize them as warm (moderately interested), hot (very interested), or cold (not interested) leads. You can then woo the customers with chat support or make use of Zoho's chatbots that, based on past user behavior, will prompt them with appropriate messages. For frequently asked questions, you can have your chatbot display the right help documents or support information. In addition, you can have specific chat triggers based on a failed payment or product unavailability to help your customers complete a transaction.

Zoho Commerce and Zoho PageSense

Zoho PageSense is yet another platform that can be integrated with Zoho Commerce to get accurate insights into customers' shopping behavior. The heatmap will help you understand the parts of the website that are grabbing their attention; the scroll map will indicate the extent to which they scroll down a page; and the attention map will let you discern the areas where the website visitors spend the most and least amount of time.

You can also benefit from video playback, which is a recorded version of visitor interaction (mouse movements) and navigation between tabs. These can help you rethink your website layouts, where you place CTAs, the position of images and text, and more. You can also check how many people are filling out forms on your page, how many are dropping midway, and even know the questions where they are dropping out.

Indispensable to online shops are pop-ups that can be easily incorporated into your Zoho Commerce store with the help of PageSense's pop-up templates. You can choose modal pop-ups (appearing in the center), slide-in (menu on the corner), or a banner (on top or bottom of the page), and you can choose whether to make it appear when you enter the page, exit it, or scroll it to a particular fold, after a particular amount of time spent on a page or a specific trigger that you define.

You can use it to announce offers, invite visitors to sign up for your newsletter, share a content piece like a look book, or find out why they’re leaving the page (exit intent). You also have the option of designing polls for your customers where they can share short or long answers, rate you in stars or smileys, check boxes, or make choices ranging from agreement to disagreement.