E-commerce Marketing: Strategies to Boost Your Online Sales
1. The Importance of Data Marketing and Email Marketing
Data: The cornerstone of e-commerce marketing
Data marketing is undoubtedly one of the most critical components when establishing your e-commerce marketing strategy. Without precise and detailed data (both qualitative and quantitative), it’s impossible to succeed online and grow your business!
By leveraging data collected on customer and visitor behaviors, preferences, actions, and purchase histories, you can personalize your campaigns and significantly increase their ROI.
Email Marketing
Email marketing remains one of the most profitable channels for most e-commerce websites. Whether it’s newsletters or personalized emails for follow-ups (abandoned carts, discovery emails, etc.), email marketing should be a cornerstone of your strategy.
2. Optimizing the User Experience (UX)
Prioritize seamless navigation
A poorly designed, slow, or non-user-friendly website—no matter how good your products and services are—can quickly discourage visitors. This often translates into a high bounce rate, i.e., the percentage of visitors who leave your page or website after just a few seconds.
Tips to improve UX:
- Loading time: According to Google, a one-second delay in page loading can reduce conversions by 7%! Take the time to optimize your page loading speed (image sizes, videos, pop-ups, and heavy content).
- Responsive design: Over 50% of online purchases are made on mobile devices, yet many websites are still designed primarily for desktop. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to analyze your site’s performance.
3. The Importance of Effective Customer Segmentation
Why segment?
Generic communication is unlikely to capture the attention of potential customers or visitors to your site. By segmenting your audience and properly identifying your buyer persona, you can deliver messages that resonate with their specific needs. Sounds simple, right? Let’s look at how to do it effectively.
How to segment effectively:
To achieve good customer segmentation, you need to analyze and gather various types of data:
- Demographic data: age, gender, geographic location.
- Online behavior: pages visited, time spent on the site, products added to the cart.
- Psychographic values: personal preferences (lifestyle, personality, values, and beliefs).
With effective segmentation, you can better target and personalize your approaches, boosting campaigns like email marketing.
4. Marketing Automation: A Time and Efficiency Booster
Often overlooked, marketing automation is also essential for e-commerce. It enables you to manage all customer interactions without manual intervention while increasing conversions. This includes actions like email campaigns for specific triggers (abandoned carts, time-sensitive promotions, personalized messages, retargeting…).
Example: Recovering abandoned carts
According to a Baymard Institute study, 69.57% of shopping carts are abandoned! That sounds like a lot, right? But it’s the reality! A good marketing automation strategy, such as a sequence of reminder emails, can help recover 10–15% of those lost sales.
Action to implement: In your email follow-up sequence, consider two steps:
- The first email can be general (“Are you sure you didn’t forget something?”).
- A few days later, offer a 10% discount code with a clear call-to-action.
Another example: Automating loyalty campaigns
Repeat customers typically represent 40% of an e-commerce site’s revenue. Automating thank-you emails or personalized offers helps reinforce loyalty and maintain strong customer relationships. Take the time to develop a marketing automation strategy tailored to each customer category (What defines “repeat customers”? What is their average cart size? How often should you contact them? What offers should you provide?).
Platforms like ActiveTrail allow you to create automated workflows to interact with your customers in a personalized way.
5. Investing in Content and SEO
Create a blog to educate your customers and increase content volume
According to an Extencia study, websites with blogs generate 67% more visitors than those without. Since most visitors begin their searches directly on search engines, it’s essential to have a blog with plenty of content and to publish frequently using specific keywords.
Similarly, optimizing your product descriptions and pages for industry-specific keywords can significantly improve your Google search rankings (and it’s free, unlike paid ads!).
Our advice: Use long-tail keywords like “best sports equipment for beginners” or “best e-commerce strategies for 2025” to target more specific potential customers.
Tools like Bold Upsell or ReConvert on Shopify can help automate recommendations during the purchase process.
6. Upselling and Cross-Selling: Increasing Average Order Value
Upselling: Offer better (and more expensive) products
Upselling involves encouraging your customers to purchase a higher-end or more expensive version of a product (e.g., recommending a computer or smartphone with more features).
Recommended tools: Platforms like Shopify and Magento make it easy to configure upselling options during the customer’s purchase process.
Cross-Selling: Expanding purchases with related products
With cross-selling, you recommend complementary products related to the customer’s initial purchase, before checkout. For example, if they buy a computer or smartphone, you could suggest a protective case or cover.
Although upselling and cross-selling are often overlooked, these strategies are simple to implement and can significantly boost sales!
7. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) Wisely
In 2025, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is undoubtedly one of the top tools to prioritize for optimizing your e-commerce marketing strategy. AI can help in several areas:
Predicting trends
AI can analyze massive volumes of data to identify emerging trends in your industry or niche, enabling you to adjust your strategy ahead of competitors.
Example: If AI-processed data shows a rise in searches for sportswear, you can adjust your inventory, email campaigns, and promotions accordingly.
Product recommendations
Tools like those used by Amazon demonstrate how effective AI-driven recommendations can be, particularly for cross-selling and upselling strategies.
Ad optimization
Some AI algorithms can also adjust your advertising campaigns in real-time, maximizing their effectiveness based on trends and updates to algorithms and operating systems.
Other uses of AI can include implementing chatbots for customer service or product searches.
8. Connecting Your Physical Store’s Cash Register to a Digital Marketing System to Automate Campaigns
If you also have one or more physical stores, integrating a connected cash register with your e-commerce platform is essential for real-time tracking and optimizing your marketing strategy. This is particularly useful for:
Synchronizing customer data
By combining data from in-store and online sales, you get a comprehensive view of your customers, enabling you to personalize your marketing campaigns across all channels.
Automating campaigns
After an in-store purchase, you can automatically send recommendations or online promotions. For example, a customer who buys a dress could receive an email a few hours later asking, “What did you think of your purchase?” along with suggestions for matching shoes.
Solutions like SumUp allow you to connect your in-store payment system to your online platform.
Want to learn more about e-commerce marketing and the tools and solutions to choose for implementing your marketing automation or email marketing strategy?
Try ActiveTrail’s software free for 30 days!