Top 7 eCommerce Marketing Tools for your brand

This year, help your business grow with trusted and true eCommerce marketing tools for 2022.

E-commerce spending has exploded over the past five years. American consumers spent $454 billion on web retail purchases in 2017, marking the 60th consecutive quarter of significant growth. To put that number into perspective, the level of online spend is enough to match the output of the 27th largest GDP on the planet.

Inversely, the number of e-commerce retailers has grown by 22 percent since 2016, creating a crowded vertical for many independent Ecom practitioners. That said, to successfully grow an e-commerce business, proper strategies are needed to monitor and scale your business.  

At InApps, we’ve recently launched the F4 ECom Formula, a rapid growth system that we’ve employed for a select group of e-commerce clients. These clients have since experienced a rise in profits with as a decrease in ad spend.

This recent success allows us a chance to break down what we are doing to create such rapid change with e-commerce marketing and how we are able to create systems and track KPI measurement with a select set of tools that meet the news of our system.  

After our F4 ECom Formula trial run with e-commerce brands and start-ups at every level of the spectrum, the team at InApps understands the top tools that will help drive traffic, track efficacy, and grow bottom line revenue, independent of market saturation.

In this article, you’ll discover:

• The function of each tool
• The in-market purpose for the digital instrument
• Why we recommend these tools

E-Commerce Tool 1: Improvely

Price: starts at $29/month

Improvely.com is one of the most powerful conversion tracking tools on the market. When the lifeblood of your e-commerce organization depends on new revenue streams, having a full understanding of your paid media efforts to drive sales is vital.  

Best practice for e-commerce brands dictates that multiple traffic sources are used to drive site visits and conversions; this tool is your catch-all in terms of tracking marketing efforts.  

Improvely will conveniently report on:

• Organic Traffic
• SEO
• Social Media
• Paid Media

Tool’s Purpose:

• Conversion tracking for all of your digital sales efforts.   
• Highlights potential click-fraud and saves money by putting a stop to wasted spending.   
• A guard dog to watch for growth blind spots.   

Why We Recommend It:

The tool will showcase where your conversions and revenue are generated so that you, the marketer, can spend more time scaling and less time on poorly converting traffic. InApps strategists believe every successful marketing campaign begins with the ability to track and optimize.

Improvely gives you one of the best opportunities to successfully run multiple marketing campaigns and have an all-encompassing understanding of digital efficacy.  

E-Commerce Tool 2: Active Campaign Workflow

Price: starts at $17/month

Workflow automation is one of the most pressing issues the InApps team comes up against when working with e-commerce brands.  From abandoned cart retargeting to purchase upsell planning, Active Campaign is effortless in its ability to make life easier for the Ecom business owner.  

When incorporated correctly, the tool will:

• Bring customers back to your website to complete a transaction.  
• Offer personalized marketing offers to customers.  
• Help develop a cross-channel messaging strategy for your business.   

Tool’s Purpose:

• Automate ecommerce sales and fulfillment process.     
• Develop repeat sales and referral business pipelines.  
• Serve as an aggregate for customer data that will help streamline the online sales process.     

Why We Recommend It:

Active Campaign is more than an email service provider/ CRM hybrid. It is a fully-functional customer database, that reacts to in-market trends and will alert you to options on how to capture the latest market demands. This tool, for the price level, is one of the most consistent e-commerce marketing helpmates in the market.

E-commerce Tool 3: Ahrefs

Price: starts at $99/month

Ahrefs is your go-to for understanding the digital marketing strategies of your competitors. The data this tool provides will give you a clear understanding of what products your audience is looking for and how to position your brand offering correctly for the e-commerce vertical.  

As you become comfortable with Ahrefs, you’ll be able to:

• Review keyword search volume for your vertical’s best-converting searches.
• Effectively and efficiently extract market data for implementation
• Develop long-term planning based on research provided.    

Tool’s Purpose:

• Explore competitive content
• Research necessary keywords
• Audit website SEO effectiveness

Why We Recommend It:

Ahrefs helps e-commerce businesses learn the “why” behind competitor’s rankings and what your brand needs to do to outrank them. The product collects a large amount of clickstream data, giving you access to the world’s largest keyword database.

That power alone is valuable as you have the ability to map out the process to scale your business at the tip of your fingers.  

E-commerce Tool 4: Google Search Ads

Your e-commerce organization depends on new revenue streams, having a full understanding of your paid media efforts to drive sales is vital.  

Best practice for e-commerce brands dictates that multiple traffic sources are used to drive site visits and conversions; Google Search Ads is your catch-all in terms of tracking marketing efforts.  

Google Ads offers:

• Search ad traffic;
• Display ad traffic;
• Shopping ad traffic

Tool’s Purpose:

• Drives targeted traffic to your business.
• Increases calls to your location.
• Drives people to your website.  

Why We Recommend It:

Google Ads for e-commerce helps brands attract targeted shoppers to their site with an offer. The targeting audience power, coupled with the keyword, intent-driven traffic, make the potential traffic to your offer very valuable as they are coming from a focused mindset to learn about a product in your vertical.  

Google Search ads convert at an 11 percent higher clip vs. social media traffic, as the potential buyer is in a mindset to learn, and/or purchase your product at the time of interaction.

E-commerce Tool 5: Sprout Social

Price: starts at $99/month

E-commerce brands live off of the social proof that social media provides. Social media is also a time-consuming task that requires manual effort, from ideation to implementation. Tools that save effort within the social media realm are in vogue and for good reason: time equals money when it comes to e-commerce.

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media scheduling tool that allows you to pre-set posts across multiple networks.  It provides an overview of your social media efforts and allows complete control of your creative implementation.  

Sprout Social Offers:

• Content planning  and publishing;
• Campaign and conversation management;
• Measurement and optimization features  

Tool’s Purpose:

• Helps drive strategic decision making;
• Streamlines engagement across platforms;
• Uncovers audience trends and offers actionable insights

Why We Recommend It:

Social media allows brands to form deep relationships with users and allows them to interact with people who love them. Sprout Social is the perfect tool to have 100 percent control of your social media effort’s scalability – which will ultimately lead to sales and profit.  

E-commerce Tool 6: Jungle Scout

Price: starts at $25/month

If you sell on Amazon, then you understand the competitive nature the site brings for the e-commerce vertical. With over 10 million individual sellers on the Amazon platform, the need to choose products that are popular and products that help you stand out as an Amazon e-commerce seller is important. Jungle Scout helps Amazon e-commerce sellers discover profitable areas where expansion is possible.  

Jungle Scout Offers:

• Product search web app;
• Chrome extension

Tool’s Purpose:

• Helps you, the e-commerce guru, to boost revenue by targeting profitable products and niches for your business.
• Allows ECom professionals to even the market with competitor data tracking, seeing who is running promotions, who may be low on inventory and how the overall sales landscape, by vertical, is shaping up for your e-commerce brand.
• Offers data that helps you scale your business by identifying high-growth niches.  

Why We Recommend It:

Jungle Scout is your secret weapon to navigate the deep waters of the Amazon seller. The product helps you organize, track and extrapolate data that will help your business grow while staying in front of your competition. 

E-commerce Tool 7: Zapier

Price: starts free – forever

Too often, different tools used in everyday business do not connect or “talk” to each other.  If you sign-up a new potential customer to your newsletter via MailChimp, how do you get the individual into your CRM?  

Zapier gives you the freedom to connect a number of your web apps together, serving as a conduit for the various services needed to run an effective ecommerce business.  

Zapier Allows:

• Link integration to your most-used web apps;
• Automatic pass-through of information from one connected app to another;
• A structured process for effective, everyday tasks.   

Tool’s Purpose:

• Allows the opportunity to create easy automation for busy e-commerce brands.  
• Zapier is a connector, allowing apps to work independently of the account owner, while you work on your business.

Why We Recommend It:

This tool is a dream automation software. Once your automation workflow is set, you’ll discover infinite possibilities for your business, which means elevated processes and better efficiency, which leads to focus on selling, not operations. In short, Zapier is one of the few tools an e-commerce brand can’t grow without.

Conclusion

These are the marketing tools for e-commerce brands, as recommended by the InApps team, that help our clients achieve measurable results year-over-year.

Keep in mind, this is not a full list of the marketing tools we use for our clients; these are some of the most popular that help facilitates rapid growth and scalable insights.