Here’s the thing about digital marketing channels: there’s no shortage of them out there, but as a new store owner, you cannot afford to be on every one. Nor do you have the time to figure out which ones are best for you.

This troubling image concepts what it feels like to be a new ecommerce store owner.

So, we’re going to save you hours by sharing the top seven ecommerce marketing channels for new businesses—including the pros, cons, and tips for getting the most out of each one!

The top 7 marketing channels for ecommerce stores

Below are the top ecommerce marketing channels we recommend for new store owners to drive sales and maximize profit.

1. Influencer marketing

As a new store owner, influencer marketing is one of the guaranteed ways to fast-track your journey to market. There are micro-influencers in every industry, and consumers respect and follow the recommendations and words of authority figures they know.

Pros

• Builds trust.
• Easiest way to spread word of mouth.
• Cheaper than mainstream media.
• Very effective if executed properly.

Cons

• Difficult to predict ROI.
• A change in the influencer’s reputation could impact your brand.
• Can be hard to identify and get responses from influencers.

Tips

Gretta Van Riel, a multiple 7-figure ecommerce store owner, uses influencer marketing as her primary marketing channel. Here are some tips from her on how to get the best out of influencer marketing:

• Give your influencers creative freedom. They know their audience better.
• Do not overwhelm influencers in your initial outreach message.
• Be clear with deliverables. Quantify where possible. For example, they will write one round-up blog post mentioning your product and three social media mentions (Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok). And what are you giving them in exchange? A free trial, unlimited or early access, or a discount?
• Stay small. Micro-influencers oftentimes have better engagement than macro-influencers.

2. Social media marketing

Organic social media marketing refers to using the free posting and online store options available on major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, and more.

Many consumers use social media to learn about brands and ecommerce stores and will look to see how other customers engage with your brand before they buy from you.

Poppin Candy uses social media marketing to sell ecommerce products with catchy videos about its candies.

Pros

Cons

• Takes time to build a presence and stay active.
• You do not have complete control over the content you create, since people can comment, share, and generate their own content.
• You need to have the time to engage back with your audience.

Be sure to engage back with your followers!

Tips

For more help with social media marketing, check out our resources:

3. SMS marketing

SMS marketing remains one of the OG means of telecommunication, and people trust marketing content delivered via emails and SMS more than generic online content or ads.

According to SMS Comparison, it has an open rate of 98%.

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Pros

• Easy to set up and deploy.
• High delivery, open, response, and conversion rate.
• Easy to integrate into a sales funnel.
• Great follow-up channel to engage prospects on your list.

Cons

• Can be costly.
• Becomes intrusive if not done properly.
• There are regulations against it in some countries.
• Can be subject to spam filters.
• Difficult to measure and track.

Tips

For tips on getting started with SMS, head to our guide to SMS marketing.

4. Email marketing

Email is one of the most effective marketing strategies available today and a great way to communicate with potential, current, dormant, and even churned customers.

Below are a few steps you can take right now to start getting results.

• Define your target market.
• Collect emails to build a list.
• Nurture the contact.
• Use a clear call to action.

Pros

• High response and conversion rate.
• Easy to track and tweak.
• Great for nurturing prospects through any stage of your funnel.
• Easy to personalize.

Cons

• Requires list maintenance and efforts to stay out of spam filters.
• Like SMS, requires list building and maintenance.
• Need good copywriting skills.

Tips

For tips on email marketing, we’ve got plenty of resources:

5. Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is the science of optimizing a website so that it ranks high in search engine results for terms relevant to your business and services. The more relevant traffic you get, the more you can convert that traffic into leads and sales.

The key to the blog is to write articles that target informational intent keywords. For example, Quip is an ecommerce site for oral care, and it’s got a blog on topics like how to use an electric toothbrush, how to clean an electric toothbrush, and more.

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• SEO is free! And keyword-targeted evergreen content produces long-term traffic growth.
• SEO is scalable so you can maintain performance as your traffic increases.
• When combined with conversion rate optimization, your SEO can boost sales.

Cons

• Long-term strategy. It takes time to see results.
• The SERP for evergreen topics is more competitive than the local SERP, so it can be difficult for new stores to gain visibility.
• SEO may be free, but it does require time to write articles, do keyword research, and maintain pages.

Tips

To get going on your SEO strategy, here are some helpful posts:

6. Pay per click advertising

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is a great choice for new ecommerce store owners with some marketing budget. It simply means paying ad networks to show your marketing messages or banners across search engines or other online media.

Pros

• While SEO takes time to gain traction, PPC yields immediate results.
• Because you can target highly specific audiences with PPC, and because you’re only paying when someone clicks on your ad, this method is cost-effective.
• Data! With clear visibility into which campaigns are working and which ones aren’t, you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your campaigns and maximize your ROI.

Cons

• Running effective Google Ads and other PPC campaigns requires regular maintenance, audits, and reporting.
• You need to pay to play. If you underfund your campaigns, they won’t generate enough volume and data needed for machine learning to take place and optimize your campaigns for profitability.
• The online advertising landscape is always changing, so it’s important to stay on top of platform updates.

Tips

Here are our best resources for PPC:

7. Video marketing

It’s impossible to overlook the power of video marketing. Most social media platforms now favor video content over any other form of content. You can use video to create educational tutorials, ads, educational ads, product demonstrations, explainer videos, and more.

Pros

• Video gives you a competitive edge because it allows you to not only tell but show your value and demonstrate how your product provides benefits.
• While it can be hard to take creative freedom with SEO and PPC content, video affords plenty of room for ideas and creativity to help you distinguish your brand.
• Live shopping streams are becoming more popular and accessible.

Cons

• Video marketing can be resource heavy—it takes time to edit, and you need to have the right equipment so that you’re working with quality footage from the start.
• Requires consistency. To gain traction with your YouTube Channel, you need to be consistently posting content and monitoring your YouTube analytics.
• Lots of influencers use video, so your business can be up against some heavy competition with large audiences.

Tips

Here are our best tips and resources for a successful video marketing strategy:

Final tips for choosing the best ecommerce marketing channels

Not sure which marketing channel to start with for your new ecommerce store, or which one will be best for you? Here are some final tips:

• A multi-channel strategy is the way to go. Each channel has its strengths and weaknesses, but employing multiple channels in concert with one another will bring you the best results.
• Research your target audience. Find out the platforms your target audience uses most. For example, Tik Tok works more with Gen Z than the baby boomer generation. And emails work better with the baby boomer generation than with Gen Z.
• You’ll only know how each channel works with your niche if you pay attention to your metrics. Use tools like Google Analytics, Data (Looker) Studio, a CRM, and the native analytics tools within each channel to monitor and measure your results. This will allow you to see which channels bring in the highest ROI as well as to A/B test different approaches within each channel.

The best ecommerce marketing strategies (recap)

Using these ecommerce marketing strategies can help your new store flourish and get customers.

1. Influencer marketing
2. Social media marketing
3. SMS marketing
4. Email marketing
5. SEO
6. PPC
7. Video marketing

About the author

Bhujal Patel is a marketer and SEO, passionate about helping businesses get more revenue and profit through customized strategies. He lives in Toronto and writes about business ideas and scaling organic growth at mydigitalkube.com. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

There are certain facets of marketing that have always seemed to capture more attention than others in regards to growing your business online. One of these is testing.

This adherence (and some might conclude, obsession) with data is not confined solely to the marketing world, as it seems most aspects of society have transformed into “data-driven” models.

Data-driven decision-making in marketing is incredibly valuable, but there is a time and place for everything, and marketing itself is a lot more than just numbers.

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The data that drives successful marketing campaigns can’t materialize prior to creating said campaigns. The chicken that lays the egg that makes testing possible is the creativity that drives results fuels the data that informs decisions.

In this post I’ll walk you through what A/B testing is from a paid media perspective, when it’s necessary, and when human abilities like creativity, intuition, and common sense lay the groundwork.

What exactly do we mean by “testing”?

There are many forms of testing within marketing including multivariate testing, usability testing, and content testing, but for the sake of simplicity within paid advertising we will mostly be referring to A/B testing.

With an A/B test, you create two variants of an ad or landing page, and everything is identical except for one element so you can see which variation leads to more conversions. You can test ad copy, button colors, creative elements, the length of the landing page, and more.

The variant that performs better needs to reach statistical significance, which Investopedia defines as “the claim that a result from data generated by testing or experimentation is likely to be attributable to a specific cause. A high degree of statistical significance indicates that an observed relationship is unlikely to be due to chance.”

You generally want a confidence of 95% to consider that a change or variant is statistically significant.

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When is it appropriate to begin testing?

Many folks take an extremely “scientific” approach right out of the gate, analyzing every impression and click with a magnifying glass and conducting micro experiment upon micro experiment with slight alterations in ad copy and creative.

The problem with this is that they are limiting themselves by hyper-focusing on small details too early on. Successful paid media is not always an immediate victory in regards to the quality of feedback or results that you may experience when you get started.

With a channel like Google Ads, for example, patience and observation is key to learning which levers to pull and where to make strategic adjustments. You may create an ad or make and adjustment and wait a week or two to observe the impact. Plus, there’s the algorithmic learning period to consider.

So the question is, when should you begin testing?

Every business is different—their stage of growth, the number of creative resources available, and the industry they are competing in. When it comes to paid media channels, everyone starts with a blank slate at some point. The promotions and strategy that you choose from the start often influence the evolution of your paid advertising accounts for better or worse.

From my experience, testing should begin after you start to get some traction with the results you are looking for. So for example, if you are looking to generate conversions from a lead form submit, then you should begin testing after you begin to see some results. So you might now be thinking, “What if I’m not driving any results and therefore need to test in order to do so?” My answer to that question is to separate testing from experimentation.

Testing vs experimentation

From a paid marketing perspective, testing is comparing a control to an alteration. You are “testing” a new variant against a pre-existing one to see if the changes you have made are statistically significant or not.

Experimentation, on the other hand, is pushing your creative juices to produce a variety of different ads or promotions against your target audience to see what appears to gain the most traction.

Experimentation is not to be confused with Google Ads experiments, a feature within the platform.

Some may call this testing but in my opinion, it is less scientific and restrictive. Once you begin to accumulate meaningful data and feedback you can then identify and zero in on what works and test within that framework.

How to do experimentation the right way

When you are in the experimentation and exploration phase, there is a strategy to apply as well. On paid social networks, I like to create the target persona as best as I can manually, then create 3-4 ads targeting that persona.

Given the objective of the client, these ads will be in alignment from a conversion or web traffic perspective. I will also typically create a retargeting audience to test against visitors who are already familiar with the brand. From there, we may incorporate more variations of ads, play around with copy or creative, and allow the campaign to run and collect data.