Modern eCommerce Marketing Strategy Training: the Roadmap to Find the Customer in the 21st Century eCommerce World

INTRODUCTION 

eCommerce is changing rapidly, and if you are developing, increasing, or working with an internet business today, you feel overwhelmed by this change. The way consumers buy things is evolving at a ridiculously fast pace, changing from how they interact with products (online or in stores) to how long they spend on those platforms (hours). The way consumers interact with brands is also rapidly evolving. They move from one channel (like social media) to another channel (like online shopping) in seconds, and their journey will be affected by both emotion and events called micro-moments, which all happen in a very short period of time. 

Shoppers expect that stores will provide them with personalized experiences and have quick, easy-to-use checkout processes. However, retailers are dealing with rising CPA costs due to a lack of data visibility, increased complexity in privacy settings, and intense competition for consumer attention. Statista forecasts that in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, global retail e-commerce sales are projected to reach about US$7.4 trillion by 2025; therefore, sellers who continue to strive for success in this evolving market must adapt or risk being left behind in a crowded marketplace.

Therefore, it is essential for any business to view its marketing strategies as dynamic entities that continually change based upon customer behaviour; as opposed to relying upon previously established techniques. This will allow for the ongoing improvement of not only customer acquisition but also product discovery and customer loyalty.

This guide will assist you in comprehending the ever-evolving customer journey, building an effective foundation for user acquisition, implementing systems that keep customers loyal and returning time after time, and effectively evaluating performance in an increasingly privacy-conscious environment. Subsequently, each chapter of this eBook provides actionable steps to go from uncertainty to certainty in developing a strategic approach to growth.

In addition, there are insights within each chapter of the guide, which were developed with our experience and expertise that we gain daily. These insights are not intended for selling purposes, but rather to assist readers in developing better eCommerce marketing strategies that can be ultimately more effective and sustainable in the coming years.

The Change in eCommerce Marketing Strategy: Competing Methods

There are no longer predictable steps in the way that consumers shop today. The path is not lines—there are new variations on user experience and how customers are shopping—and it is a never-ending loop of micro moments that change based on what resources a customer is seeking (content and social validation, real-time triggers, and/or localized content) as they navigate their Buying Journey. A customer can see your product on a social development or reel, validate through reviews that they just learned about it, and purchase while still consuming the rest of that content.

This quicker engagement of customers has resulted from one major catalyst, as we’re now all living in a Mobile-First World. The devices our customers use to engage (24/7) are now the products that define their Shopping Assistant, Entertainment Library, Search Engine, and Customer-Friendly Application. Mobile commerce — and the demand for seamless personalization — is shaping how quickly customers make decisions: according to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions and 76% feel frustrated when companies fail to deliver them. 

As a result of this shift in consumer behavior, marketers face additional layers of complexity. Consumers find you via reels, validate prices on search, compare with alternatives on marketplaces, browse reviews through social communities, and ultimately buy in-app or on mobile web. Therefore, it is no longer enough to simply have a presence on multiple channels; you must connect and integrate those channels into a unified customer experience that feels seamless.

To achieve this level of customer experience integration, you will need to rethink how your eCommerce Marketing Strategy is structured. No longer can your growth strategies sit in silos as separate campaigns targeting isolated touchpoints. You must now create an integrated approach that allows for real-time adaptations based on user signals and intent, as well as the ability to respond to changing preferences through developing insights from user behaviors.

You will also need to expand your thinking beyond the traditional framework of paid, organic, or retention tactics; you will need to establish an understanding of the user flow throughout the customer journey, the emotional triggers that create interruptions in their journey, and how these interruptions can influence the next steps taken by the consumer. 

Your competition is speed, personalization, and relevance across all touch points. The brands that win are those whose strategies are designed for this new reality rather than the previous one.

What Your eCommerce Customer Journey Looks Like: How to Win or Lose Attention Along the Way

Your eCommerce customer journey is no longer just how customers move through an organized series of steps within your sales funnel; it is how they access your site or product. Customers today have far more options when trying to purchase a product than they had available previously. Their buying decisions are now shaped by many factors beyond the product itself – including impulse buying moments, emotional states, micro-distractions, and increasing amounts of content available.

The path taken by users leading them to a purchase may include four or five different layers. These layers include the content viewed, the reviews read, the influencers followed, and the presence of algorithms that suggest other products similar to what the user is looking to purchase. The entire pre-purchase experience is greatly influences a customer’s decision-making process. Most shoppers end up leaving before completing a purchase, due to a lack of logical, sequential support and/or emotional alignment throughout their entire shopping experience.

Mobile shopping is highly emotional, with users buying things that they feel are appropriate, certain, and rewarding at a particular time. They abandon their purchases when the shopping experience feels either confusing, dangerous, or labour-intensive due to factors such as lengthy checkout forms, vague pricing, slow page loading times, and lack of social proof. These conditions not only dissuade users from completing their purchases but also detract from the emotion that made them shop in the first place. Therefore, effective marketing of eCommerce apps focuses on driving traffic and minimizing emotional friction throughout the user’s entire journey.

Personalisation helps to differentiate your application. When you personalise product suggestions, streamline user purchase processes, or deliver to the user relevant content, you are not just “optimising” the user’s shopping journey; you are showing the user that you value their wants and needs. Ultimately, you are turning the user from a potential buyer into a buyer. Additionally, by providing small pieces of context (e.g., recently viewed items, returning users, and dynamic messages), you can change users’ responses and time spent on your app.

Understanding attribution, CPA and retention is vital to identifying and interpreting drops throughout the user journey when accurately measuring how consumers interact with your brand. These are important indicators for how you interpret data, assess performance and determine where users lose focus within your e-commerce funnel.

Once you understand the emotional, behavioral and contextual aspects of users during your journey, you will then be able to create a journey that maintains user focus, builds customer confidence, and encourages customers to engage with your brand and continue moving toward completion—even at an impromptu moment.

Establish a Successful eCommerce Marketing Strategy in 2025

Developing a Successful eCommerce Marketing Strategy in 2025 is all about understanding how consumers find products, given the fact that consumers’ attention is divided between short form video platforms, digital marketplaces, search engine result pages, digital influencers and mobile applications. Consumers no longer follow a linear path within a sales funnel from awareness, consideration and purchase. They have the ability to quickly jump around from touchpoint to touchpoint, comparing offers instantaneously based on a combination of relevance, trust, and timeliness. Because of this, acquisition strategy today is less focused on achieving maximum reach, but instead on properly interpreting current signals of intent.

One of the leading indicators of consumer intent is Contextual Targeting. Due to the disappearance of user identifiers as a result of increasing Privacy Regulations, Contextual Data has provided an effective and efficient means for brands to reach consumers without having to rely on the use of personal tracking data. When consumers are served advertisements that appear in an adjacent context to other relevant content they are consuming, such as beauty tutorials, gadget reviews, travel videos or home renovation videos, they will naturally engage at a higher level than they would with advertisements served to them in isolation. The contextual environment serves to further reinforce the meaning of your message and to communicate to the consumer why the product is relevant to them in that specific moment in time. Context has therefore become one of the most cost effective tools for acquiring new customers in Today’s Consumer Acquisition Landscape.

One additional deciding factor for consumer choice is based on the season of the sale. For example, many consumers purchase products at higher rates during specific times of year (i.e., Black Friday, 11.11, Ramadan, Christmas, vacation season, and payday) than they do at non-peak periods. Increased shopping activity can be seen in the increased frequency of browsing behavior, discount expectations as well as product discovery behaviour and ad responsiveness. Brands that effectively leverage seasonal shopping activity are able to anticipate shopping spikes, develop and deploy seasonal creative themes, deliver time-sensitive messages, use adaptive bidding processes in the peak hours of shopping activity, and create product-focused advertising campaigns that draw on significant amounts of inventory.

Creative Optimisation has now become the most concentrated area of untapped opportunity within a competitive advertising environment. By the time we reach 2025, the number of unique Creatives will be of considerably greater value to advertisers than the number of targeted campaigns they use to market their products. The average consumer is scrolling through online media at a significantly increased clip compared to previous years and as such, advertisers need to provide them with relevant ads within seconds of initiating the journey online. Therefore, advertisers will see the most significant increases in ROI through Structured Testing of Creative as it relates to Campaigns by experimenting with imagery that conveys the product, the value proposition, the story behind the brand and the Consumer is supported through established Social Proof. Simple changes to a Creative, such as developing clearer hooks, creating ads that are designed for a mobile-centric audience, or shortening the cuts, can produce substantial increases in CTR and Conversion Quality.

Intent-based advertising takes this a step further by tailoring the formats to the customers’ position in their purchase decisions; either they are browsing, evaluating options or have decided to buy. Converting occurs when the customer is presented with advertising matching their mindset during the sales process and, in certain retail categories such as fashion or electronics, the intent-based ad formats have consistently produced the strongest and most profitable downstream results.

For example, in the apparel space, by marketing options to users who have already shown some intent to purchase, users can easily move from intent to purchase by eliminating potential barriers, thereby reducing point-of-purchase friction through simplification. Product-driven advertising also allows advertisers to present customers with options that are ready and available for consideration.

In addition to the importance of matching messaging and mindset, it is essential to have measurement tools that are privacy-safe tools to accurately measure conversion; this is most commonly accomplished today through tracking methods that include aggregating data through modelled performance, using first-party event data and utilising post-view impact measurement to help determine meaningful outcomes such as quality install base, high value session counts and repeat purchases. Overall, achieving a greater understanding of the signals associated with each of these measurement types is not the goal, although tracking all steps within the conversion process does assist in building a comprehensive performance report.

Industry trends show this trend. Recent research shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer a personalized experience, which underscores how important relevant content and product recommendations are to boosting online conversions. This is a major reason why the five factors that you have in the infographic—relevance, timing, creative, context and trust—are more valuable today than old-fashioned target audience profiles.

The acquisition strategy of the future (2025) is not based on educated guesses. It is based on the understanding of the signals, matching user intent, creating better advertisements and measuring the results of that effort with privacy in mind. When all of these elements come together, the brands that align themselves will have a higher level of quality users, a lower percentage of wasted spending and an ability to be competitive even in the most hectic holiday seasons.

Developing a Retention Strategy for eCommerce: Fostering Loyalty from One-Time Purchases

While acquisition is focused on attracting potential customers, retention is centered on keeping current customers loyal and returning to your website or online store, thereby creating a sustainable revenue stream. Once you have optimized the layers of your customer acquisition with relevance, timing and trusted experiences, the next logical step is to create ways for those new customers to be retained, so that they can continue to return to purchase. This is a very important transition, because repeat customers will generally convert shopping carts into revenue faster than casual visitors, resulting in greater word of mouth and stronger customer lifetime value.

Retention begins with realizing that today’s customers expect to receive targeted communication from retailers and not general mass promotion. Every communication message sent to customers, be it via push notifications, notifications through the app, email journeys or SMS, should feel personalized to a particular stage in the customer’s lifecycle. When the way in which you communicate with customers is relevant to their behaviors and needs, it creates a stronger connection between your brand and the customer. 

A strong retention strategy is built around lifecycle campaigns that respond to user behavior (or lack of behavior). A first-time buyer should receive a post-purchase email sequence that helps build trust, provides information, and encourages future purchases. These messages can include order tracking information, care instructions for the product, style suggestions, and complementary product recommendations. These are not only transactional but also help alleviate the uncertainty that many eCommerce shoppers have about their purchase, creating emotional reassurance and loyalty triggers.

In addition, segmentation is a very important component of a successful retention strategy. Rather than segmenting customers based on broad demographics, a successful brand segments its customers based on intent, purchase frequency, how deep they browse a category, and other behavioral signals. A customer who has visited multiple high-value categories repeatedly will have more varied messaging than a customer who has abandoned at checkout. The personalization aspect of these messaging differences creates the meaningful communication that leads to the customer having higher levels of engagement and loyalty over time. Additionally, very small personalization differences can yield significant increases in customer return sessions, including product-based recommendations, reminders regarding previously viewed products or product care tips.

After purchasing, customers have specific expectations about how the company will communicate with them. They want to communicate without difficulty, receive information about delays and when things are shipped, and know the status of their current orders. Trust signals include information about when items ship, how they ship, as well as other news, such as requests for reviews and other recommendations, that will help establish a sense of trust among customers. A good post-purchase experience generally gives potential repeat customers the confidence to return without a lot of hesitation.

Loyalty triggers are another tool that can help foster customer retention. Loyalty triggers refer to anything that makes someone feel wanted or appreciated as a member of the brand community, including priority, access to exclusive deals, points for shopping, or creating loyalty programs based on you as an individual. Loyalty triggers can be used to remind customers that they belong to a special community with exclusive benefits just for them, rather than merely to sell merchandise at a discount.

Referral loops extend the capabilities of referral marketing exponentially. When an excited customer shares your product with a friend or family member, this increases the overall effectiveness of sending new customers to you because it increases both trust and acquisition efficiency.

Referral journeys work best when integrated into a natural post-purchase moment; for example, using incentives to encourage customers to share, using invite-based credits to offer additional points for referring others, or using milestones and other reward systems to reward the customer for their loyalty. These systems can turn happy customers into advocates and create a loop of ongoing growth in terms of loyalty and new customers.

Retention is not an afterthought; it is a fundamental component of profitable eCommerce brands. By anticipating user needs through your campaigns, personalizing their experiences and building trust throughout the entire customer journey, you move from merely chasing after new buyers to developing long-term relationships; thus, sustainable growth can take place.

The Importance of Measuring and Optimizing eCommerce Marketing Strategies

Retention and acquisition are the two most important components in growing an online business, but without measurement, it is impossible to know whether or not you are going in the right direction when making those decisions. To truly understand how well your eCommerce marketing strategy is performing, you must have a performance measurement system in place that allows for continuous analysis and optimization based on the results of your campaigns. Data collected through measurement shows you not only what happened during your campaigns but also provides insight into why users acted in the manner that they did; this information allows you to optimize each touchpoint, campaign and creative asset within your strategy.

Identifying the appropriate metrics for measuring success should be the first step to developing an effective eCommerce marketing strategy. Many marketers look at traffic and impressions as indicative of success but they do not always correlate with intent. Therefore, marketers need to look beyond the traditional traffic metrics and evaluate their eCommerce sites using four metrics: conversion rates, average order value (AOV), repeat purchase rate (RPR), and churn rates. These four metrics, when combined, provide a complete (360-degree) view of user behavior and campaign effectiveness from multiple perspectives.

Once you understand the basic metrics associated with eCommerce performance, you can begin conducting cohort and segment analyses. By grouping users by acquisition source, behavioral patterns or purchase history, you can determine which campaigns generate long-term value and which ones are only able to generate a one-time conversion. Through cohort analysis, you will discover trends in user behavior that cannot be identified by aggregate reporting; this will help you determine which messages, timing and creative assets are most effective when reaching out to high-value customers vs. low-value customers. In essence, these four metrics and cohort analysis are the foundation for creating a feedback loop that integrates acquisition, retention and lifetime value.

Data should guide creative/ contextual optimization. Test iteratively to improve based on actual performance indicators. As an example, some push notification send times could produce enhanced click-through rates, while a particular type of product recommendation template may drive increased repeat purchases. Utilizing insights from this data to inform your creative strategy will allow you to eliminate wasted budget dollars while aligning content with reader interest and engagement.

Observed user-device behaviour between devices has increased dramatically, so understanding users’ cross-device behaviours while maintaining compliance with Privacy Laws is an important consideration when assessing the effectiveness of different types of marketing campaigns through tracking the associated contact points for users. Utilising aggregated reports, anonymous event-tracking and privacy-centric analytic approaches allows you to gain an understanding of the effectiveness of any marketing campaign without needing to gather any personally identifiable information (PII) from the users of your Campaign, thus ensuring your optimisation activities are both ethical and effective while maintaining trust with the Users.

Ultimately, optimizing your company’s marketing efforts cannot be a “once-and-done” approach—it will always need to be done repeatedly. This is because each marketing campaign, message, or product update serves as additional data for improving your audience’s targeting, creative, timing, and retention strategies. Over time, building these types of optimization loops allows you to improve your understanding of how predictive analytics work and will ultimately lead to more effective and efficient use of your marketing resources.

A modern eCommerce marketing strategy emphasises the idea that you will have measurable growth. By creating synergies between acquisitions, retention, and optimization through sound measurement practices, you can ensure that every decision (creative-testing experimentation and lifecycle campaigns) is data-driven. This creates a system that will keep your brand innovative, relevant, and profitable in an ever-evolving digital environment. Reach out to us to learn about structured insight methodologies to strengthen your eCommerce performance by enhancing your measurement framework and optimizing your future marketing campaigns.

from Apptrove https://apptrove.com/modern-ecommerce-marketing-strategy-guide-2025/
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