What is the best way to market an e-Commerce site?

Depends on the site and what stage of the buyers journey you want to market towards.

For early stage / top of funnel. You’re looking at a few key strategies:

1. Social
2. SEO
3. Email
4. Paid Acquisition

Social

When it comes to building up your social awareness the channels you choose depend on your product and market. I typically advise Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest for eCom. However, there are several niche social sites that you can use to build awareness. In terms of strategies, it’s all about great content. Take great photos of products and promote them HEAVILY. Begin interacting with people in your target market as well as businesses that are related to yours. This will open opportunities for collaboration and partnerships to extend your reach.

SEO

This is the long game. Make sure you optimize your site with titles that are search engine friendly. Do some research into longtail keywords and try to take advantage of those. This is one of the best ways to grow your SEO profile.

Email

Start collecting or purchase a list of opt-in users that would be a good fit for your product. You’ll want to nurture them with content that builds trust. After you’ve spent some time building trust, then you can start pushing your products on them.

Paid Acquisition

This is paying for Google or Facebook ads. It’s a great way to generate traffic to your site, but you’ll be wasting money if you don’t have a good conversion process in place.

For more bottom of the funnel marketing, you’re looking at ways to improve cart abandonment and upsell/cross-sell. These are a couple of key strategies to focus on here (keep in mind this is for after you have top of funnel traffic to your website):

1. Cart/Website Abandonment Email Series (for registered visitors)
2. noCRM Email Retargeting (new strategy)
3. Conversion Optimization

Cart/Website Abandonment Email Series

This is pretty standard for eCom websites. Even tools like Mailchimp have a standard abandoned cart series. This is a MUST for any ecommerce website to keep marketing to your visitors until purchase.

noCRM Email Retargeting

This is a really new concept that not many eCommerce stores have started to use. Using tools like BouncePilot you can match your unknown website visitors to their email addresses, and automatically message them with abandoned cart / website emails. This is AWESOME. Especially, if you have big influencer campaigns or a lot of paid acquisition spend. It allows you to continue to market people that would otherwise have been anonymous website abandons. This is going to seriously catch on this year and be a staple in most ecommerce businesses.

Conversion Optimization

Marketing is a really broad term. Conversion optimization is basically looking at your website and purchasing process and making incremental changes that increase your visitors purchase rate.