E-commerce marketing is the new and ambitious challenge to digitalization, to aim for progressive growth and international scalability.

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Growth opportunities have never been more accessible than in 2025. Now more than ever, it is important to know the entire ecosystem well in order to fully exploit all its potential.

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In this article we are going to analyze this market scenario, focusing on the most interesting trends in e-commerce marketing.

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A real complete guide on how to grow an e-commerce in 2025.

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But first, it's best to start with a brief mention of what it is appropriate to analyze and define before launching an e-commerce.

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E-commerce marketing: the fundamentals

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Before launching an online store, it is important to:

• carry out market research: analyze the competition, target and price sensitivity
• create a marketing plan where the communication strategy, positioning, targeting and distribution is defined
• define a budget and a business plan to support the investment of the store's growth.

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These points are the basis for subsequent activities.

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If you skip this warm-up phase, there is a risk of not being prepared to face this scenario and any different situations.

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With this small premise, now is the time to address the issue of the 3 fundamental elements to make an e-commerce grow in 2024.

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The 3 Fundamental Elements for E-commerce Marketing

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E-commerce is an increasingly growing market and this is evidenced by the fact that even the competition is adopting more and more digital strategies.

In an effective e-commerce strategy, three things are essential:

1. attract potential customers to your site

2. convert them into customers

3. be able to bring them back to the purchase over time to increase the life time value, that is, the value that customers have for the company.

Consequently, the 3 fundamental elements in an e-commerce marketing strategy are:

• Traffic: attract target visitors within the store
• Converting: converting visitors into customers
• Retention: bring customers back to the purchase to increase life time value

Every single piece of this equation is critical.

An e-commerce that:

• It has few visits, it hardly has many sales (it's a mathematical question)
• It has many visits but does not have many sales, it means that the store does not convert well
• It has a lot of visits and sales, but few loyal customers risk not having margins if marketing costs were to increase.

In this article, we are going to go into more detail on each of these points.

1. How to bring visitors to your e-commerce (Traffic)

For an e-commerce marketing strategy, it is essential to have a constant and growing flow of visitors.

A store with few visits, except in rare cases, can hardly generate a lot of revenue.

As in a store, if only 10 people were to enter a day, we can hardly expect a turnover of thousands of euros in daily sales, if the average receipt is usually 100€.

In Marketing, there are two types of Traffic and “visitors”:

• Organic traffic: that is, the visitors who arrive at our site after a spontaneous search. For example, if you Google the word 'men's shoes' and then visit the organic results produced by the search engine, it would be considered organic traffic. Organic traffic can come from Google, but also from other search engines such as YouTube or Amazon (if the product is present)
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• Paid traffic: i.e. all visitors who arrive at the site attracted by advertising campaigns (Meta Ads/ Google & YouTube Ads, Tik Tok Ads, etc.)

It is often thought that you can acquire visitors only with advertising campaigns.

In reality, for some businesses, it is still possible to do SEO strategies and increase their exposure in the Google search engine to intercept visitors who are looking for your product.

In the next few lines we will see just an example of a store positioned for a somewhat “particular” keyword that manages to generate thousands of visitors every month, without spending anything on advertising campaigns.

Organic Traffic with SEO for E-commerce

SEO is Search Engine Optimization, in Italian it means optimization for search engines.

A good ranking in the Google search engine it allows you to be visible in the SERP and get visitors to your site.

An effective SEO strategy for E-commerce usually:

• the optimization of the keywords of the store and the product page
• backlinks from other relevant websites that link to your store
• the writing of blog articles to position themselves in some informative keywords and guide users to purchase.

And many other more advanced technical SEO tips on site..

Without going too much into the technicalities of SEO, I wanted to give you an example of an Italian store that has obtained excellent SEO positioning results (bypassing Amazon).

The Pellizzari e-commerce store is a valuable “Multi-Brand Store”, in the retail sale of clothing for Women, Men and Children, which operates in the medium-high fashion retail segment.

In addition to the online part, it operates in retail with 16 important stores in the most representative shopping centers in Italy.

The Negoziopellizzari.it store, according to data from similarweb, has an average of 150,000 monthly visitors, of which 72.24% are from Search.

Analyzing the domain from an SEO perspective, it can be seen that it is positioned very well in Google's SERP for many keywords.

For example, for the keyword 'Friulian', in Italy it has an average of about 14,800 monthly searches by people on Google (as you can see from the data below).

In the SERP, the Pelizzari Store store is ranked as the first result and, according to Semrush estimates, managing to obtain a traffic volume of more than 16,000 visitors:

Assuming that the store has an average final conversion rate of 2%, with an average of 16000 monthly organic visits, thanks to this positioning in Google's SERP, it means that it could obtain more than 320 orders per month thanks to SEO, only for this specific keyword.

Considering that the product costs 47.50€ (the average order will certainly be higher), we are talking about a hypothetical potential of more than 18,000,000€ in annual revenue, just for this positioning of this keyword and product.

Not bad, considering that the cost to acquire this SEO traffic is free. The average order is probably higher than the assumed one, therefore, so are revenues and margins.

I would like to point out again that these numbers are for illustrative purposes only, in order to give a practical example of all the reasoning about the potential of SEO positioning (using hypothetical estimates and the average market benchmark).

This SEO positioning strategy can be carried out for multiple keywords in order to intercept different market questions and organic searches.

The advice is not to underestimate a particular keyword at the outset, but to technically evaluate the volume of traffic they can generate.

Even Keywords with traffic volumes that may not seem too high (such as 14,800 monthly searches) are actually a great opportunity because they allow you to intercept direct market demand that is looking for a specific solution.

Tools like Semrush, Hrefhs can help you both identify search volumes and keywords. In addition, they can also help you understand the 'difficulty' of entering the keyword.

In fact, it is very interesting to evaluate this parameter because for some keywords it is really difficult to “enter and position” because there are already very strong competitors.

In many cases, you can do a more granular strategy and go and intercept secondary or long-tail keywords, which, even if they have lower traffic volumes, if exploited and combined, can generate excellent results as a whole.

The SEO optimization strategy can be applied, with a different strategy, also on other search engines that are widely used by consumers to obtain information on purchases.

YouTube and Amazon (if your product is available on that distribution channel) are two very important search engines to consider.

Paid Traffic and SEM

In addition to organic traffic, it is possible to promote products with online advertising campaigns on Google, YouTube, Meta, TikTok and other channels.

The advantage is that, compared to SEO, you can start getting visitors right away and not wait a long time before ranking in the SERP.

Before looking at this topic in detail, it is appropriate to distinguish between:

• Advertising campaigns that intercept direct demand
• Advertising campaigns that target latent demand

How to intercept direct demand (conscious question)

With the Google Ads' Search ',' Shopping 'Campaigns you can go and intercept some keywords and show your ad.

It works with the same mechanism as the SERP, only in this case you are paying to be placed in search engine results.

These types of campaigns are usually very effective because they allow you to intercept an audience that is already looking for a product/service.

For example, for the keyword “men's summer shoes” you can see how different brands are running campaigns to target this keyword in the SERP

Similar speech also applies to Google Shopping campaigns.

In this type of campaign, it is really important to optimize the product feed and the photos because, as you can see, there is not much space available.

The advantage of this type of advertising campaign is that it allows you to intercept an audience of people who are actively looking for a solution or product.

The conscious question is at a more advanced stage than the people who can be intercepted in social media campaigns.

How to generate demand in social networks (unwitting question)

Sometimes it happens that there is no large direct demand to generate thousands of visitors every month.

In the case of an “innovative” product, it is difficult for there to be thousands of searches in search engines if the product is new. If only because people don't know it yet:)

In this case, it is advisable to start working on latent (or unconscious) demand to make the product known.

In social advertising campaigns (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Video) you usually intercept an audience that is not actively looking for a solution to a problem, but may still be interested in your product.

In this way, it is possible to reach a much larger audience than direct demand (which may be limited).

For this reason, it is advisable to integrate both types of campaigns and to intercept a wide audience of potential customers.

In Social Advertising Campaigns, it is essential to take better care of the visual aspect (images/videos used).

For this reason, it is important to design creatives that are in a format. “Scroll-Stopping” with the aim of attracting the user's attention in the social feed and at the same time Direct Response, so as to illustrate in detail the problem/solution mechanism offered by the product.

You can see an example of this type of creativity in the campaigns we have created for the client JNPR (an international store that promotes non-alcoholic distillates).

In addition to advertising campaigns, you could also think about creating collaborations with Influencers to reach additional potential target customers with your product.

Collaborations can be useful for:

• Take advantage of the reputation and social proof of the influencer who recommends the product
• obtain new visual content that can also be used in social media marketing or paid ads.

Together with JNPR, we have dedicated a specific strategy for collaborations with influencers to further expand latent demand.

Finally, with Remarketing campaigns, you can “take back” and stimulate all visitors who have not yet purchased by offering additional informational or inspirational content to encourage them to buy.

For remarketing, you could also use Google Ads Display in combination with Social campaigns.

Traffic sources, as you have noticed, have different purposes and channels. The choice of budget allocation is as important as the choice of channels to start with.

The possibilities and tests that you can carry out are many, both on the platform side but also in creativity, budget permitting.

2. How to convert your visitors into customers

The second important element in an e-commerce marketing strategy is conversion work.

The store's conversion rate is one of the fundamental KPIs for evaluating if the online store is performing or if it can be optimized.

Traffic is certainly important, but without a store that performs in terms of conversion rate, sales can hardly take off.

For this reason, it's important to focus on:

• in the use of the store's contents: so that the user has simple and intuitive navigation with a fast site and an excellent shopping experience at the checkout. It is important that your store is also accessible and usable on mobile.
• in marketing strategies and tactics to increase the conversion rate and sell more (in technical terms it is defined as CRO).

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is the set of marketing tactics and strategies that aim to increase the number of visitors and convert them into customers or leads.

The 3 fundamental points to optimize in a CRO process are:

• Clear and simple text that encourages buying
• a Design with a layout that guides the navigation and the information phase of the user after purchase
• an offer, as irresistible as it is.

For example, the Nonstick Pan product page (by Misen) has a very simple layout with:

• a textual part that describes the product, its technical specifications and use cases
• a very well-kept design that uses images and videos to illustrate the product and the differentiating aspect compared to competitors
• reviews and testimonials to generate social proof
• trusted items with a very strong warranty (90-day home trial, free return)
• payment in installments to increase the conversion rate and reduce the price 'obstacle'
• a section dedicated to frequently asked questions to resolve any doubts the user may ask before buying.

Continuing on the Nonstick Pan product page, you can see how they have created a comparison table to further position the irresistible offer they offer.

This type of content is very interesting to convince the user in their purchasing decision phase.

To optimize the conversion rate of a store, it is very important to understand what are the elements and information that may be useful to it, in its customer journey, before deciding to buy.

In addition, I recommend that you also take advantage of a marketing automation strategy (email, text messages and other channels) to convert all users who did not buy right away.

In fact, it is very important to consider all the touch points that the user could create and their conversion time because many times people do not buy immediately on impulse, but carry out a more detailed evaluation phase.

For this reason, it is important to provide a remarketing advertising strategy that accompanies the user in their purchase decision.

3. Increase revenue with retention

Very often, when it comes to e-commerce marketing, we focus mainly on organic and paid traffic.

Mistakenly people think that the purpose of marketing is only to find new customers.

In reality, in addition to always acquiring new customers, it is important to work on retention, that is, in bringing customers back to buying.

All the more so in 2024, where advertising costs are constantly increasing and the various advertising platforms do not seem to perform as well as they used to (see IOS14 Update and tracking).

Retention is the lifesaver for dealing with the ocean and the complexities of an online business.

Increasing the Life Time Value of your customers allows you to increase the margins of your business and to be prepared for a possible increase in costs (product, advertising, personnel, etc.).

To increase your store's revenue, in addition to acquiring new customers, you could focus on increasing:

• the Purchase Frequency in such a way as to bring the customer back to the purchase in a shorter time.
• Increase the average order value with upsell/cross sell, so as to increase margins.

I'll conclude this article with 3 tactics you could implement to increase your store's retention:

• Email marketing sequences to bring the customer back to the purchase. With this tactic, you can increase both the purchase frequency and also increase the average value if you offer crossell or upsell offers.
• Loyalty plan with a collection of points on every purchase to build customer loyalty.
• Stimulate word of mouth with a referral plan. Who better than a satisfied customer can recommend your product to other people like them?

Many times it is underestimated how important it is to retain customers to increase their life time value.

Scaling a business is not only acquiring thousands of new customers, but also increasing the average margin per customer and retaining them over time.