5 Cheap e-Commerce Marketing Ideas for Online Sellers

So your products are listed for sale on an e-commerce platform – now what? Just getting your products online, even on a platform with a lot of traffic, won’t necessarily produce sales. There’s simply too much competition. Become the brand advocate your business needs by putting these free and cheap e-commerce marketing ideas to work to grow your sales online.

1. Think like a social influencer

Features and benefits blah blah blah. Your products are probably great, but are you presenting them in a great way? Take a few minutes to check out how influencers promote products on social media. Do they get bogged down in technicalities? No way! Influencers have mastered the art of showcasing products visually and talking about them with enthusiasm that can’t be matched in a rundown list of features.

Have a few extra bucks in your advertising budget? While celebrities get millions for social influencing, there are loads of less well-known but still influencers you can hire as the social media spox for your products, including low-cost options on Fiverr.

As social media marketing can often be time-consuming and hard to find results, leveraging the influence of social media users with large followings can be the best way to kick off a new product or drive traffic to your products on third-party platforms like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Poshmark, Zulily–and others.

2. Get a video review

You can hire a freelance pro to do an unboxing video review on Fiverr for as little as $15. They’ll provide an objective video review of your product, and you’ll be able to use this video in countless ways, from social media to product listings and email marketing. It provides potential customers with an objective form of social proof to purchase your product rather than an alternative.

This can be a powerful e-commerce business digital marketing tool as video is the most engaging and most-shared type of online content, Google favors videos in online search results, and it can add instant credibility to your business.

3. SEO your e-commerce business the right way

Most e-commerce platforms offer a bit of guidance for ensuring people can find your products when searching the platform, which is great. However, you can drive people right to your product pages from any online search by optimizing your product’s title, description, and your seller bio. This is what’s known as search engine optimization, or SEO.

As part of your e-commerce marketing strategy, use a free keyword research tool like Ahrefs to find keywords someone would type into an online search when looking for products like yours. Then infuse those keywords into your content on product pages and seller bio pages.

You can even start a blog to drive traffic back to your product’s pages. For example, you could add how-to-use instructions, detailed product reviews, showcase your unboxing video and social media posts as articles, and link back to your products.

Whereas you might be limited as to the quantity of content you can add on e-commerce platforms like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Zulily, Poshmark, and so on, you can write more lengthy pieces of content on blog pages, then signal to search engines that your product page is important by linking back to your products with high-volume keywords you discovered using SEMRush, Ahrefs, or some other keyword research tool.

Running ad campaigns to promote sales of your products? High-volume keywords should be added to those as well. It helps search engines understand that your ad is highly relevant to a given search term, making it more likely for your ad to be shown whether run on Google Ads or your chosen e-commerce platform.

4. Send regular email promos

Email marketing is one of the most effective e-commerce marketing ideas you can deploy, but the tough part is often getting started. First, because it takes time to build a contact list, and second, because like any other e-commerce marketing tactic, it requires consistency to nurture interest with people who might not have been ready to buy the first time they checked your products out.

To build your list, make sure you are capturing the email addresses of everyone who purchases from you. Add a signup list to your email marketing profiles and blog or website, if you have one. Use special offers to get signups, such as a 10% off a first purchase when someone subscribes to your email list.

As far as e-commerce email marketing campaigns, segment your lists so that you can personalize offers as much as possible. For example, if someone has already purchased from you, you should be sending marketing campaigns to get repeat purchases, invite reviews, generate referrals, and cross-selling related products (e.g., “you might also like…”)

Alternatively, e-commerce marketing ideas for people who have not yet purchased should be focused on getting that first engagement. With either type of email, you can also use them to get feedback. For example, if someone didn’t purchase from you, ask whether they purchased an alternative, and what made them choose it. This way you can continue to refine your own offerings and marketing campaigns to get more sales.

There are several email marketing platforms you can use totally and absolutely free, at least until your list grows up to 2,000 contacts. Mailchimp is one of the most popular e-commerce marketing platforms, and it’s free up to 2,000 contacts, including basic email automation like autoresponders and a drip campaign.

Zoho Campaigns is also a smart choice, and you can use it for free up to 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails a month, which essentially equates to emailing your contacts 3 times or more (depending on your total number of contacts). This is more than ample for using email to promote a variety of e-commerce marketing ideas that can produce sales.

5. Generate more reviews

Nine out of ten people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, and even more, 93%, say that their purchase decisions are influenced by online reviews (Qualtrics.com). Even if you send post-transaction emails, it might not produce as many reviews as you need. BrightLocal is a great option for getting started generating reviews more systematically and costs far less than comparable review management software.

Need funding for your e-commerce business?

E-commerce factoring allows you to unlock the working capital you’ve earned on e-commerce platforms like Amazon, Zulily, eBay, Etsy, and Poshmark as soon as you receive an earnings or sales statement. Find out more about e-commerce invoice factoring or how small online sellers can use micro factoring to expedite cash flow and grow online sales faster.