The e-commerce industry is growing rapidly, particularly in emerging economies like India, where the market size is predicted to grow from $100 billion in 2016 to $300 billion by 2021.

Across the globe, consumers are looking for ways to save money and gain convenience when shopping online. As a result, many traditional offline retailers have set up shop online and are reaping the benefits.

So how can marketers ensure they maximize the success of their online stores? Let’s take a quick walk through the key areas of online marketing and how you can use them to drive traffic, sales, and growth to your e-commerce platform.

Marketing Mix

In the world of digital marketing, we’ve learned to categorize digital marketing tactics into three distinct groups:

• Offers – In-store discounts, special pricing, and so on
• Attractors
• Conversational marketing (or content marketing)

These three pillars — offers, attractors, and conversational marketing — form the basis of your marketing mix. When creating an online marketing plan, you’ll want to consider how each of these three pillars can contribute to your success.

Attractors

An attractor is essentially something that will attract customers to your product or service. For example, if you are an online retailer of furniture, you may want to invest in an online magazine that focuses on luxury lifestyle or a blog that provides in-depth reviews of designer products.

Your goal with attractors is to attract the right audience to your website — people who are likely to buy your product or service. You can use SEO, for example, to attract potential customers to your store via online search. You can also use social media to create buzz about your brand, products, and services.

What’s more, with the right combination of content and offers, you can attract potential and existing customers to your store with offers that are both relevant and valuable.

Offers

An offer, simply put, is a marketing tool used to attract customers to your product or service. Typically, an offer is something that is relevant and valuable to your target audience. You can use various tools, such as Google Adwords, to find your target audience and determine what offers they are most likely to value or benefit from.

If you know that someone searches for “best vacuum cleaner” or “buy online” a lot, you can create an offer that is relevant to them — whether it’s a special deal on a vacuum cleaner or a free shipping offer for an online order.

Make sure to spread your offers across a variety of platforms to ensure your target audience sees them. If you want to rank higher in Google searches and attract more potential customers to your store, create relevant offers that will benefit them. For example, if you know that someone usually searches for “gym wear for women” or “bikini swimwear”, you can create an offer to help them find the swimwear they’re looking for. If you want to learn more about the ins and outs of online marketing, check out Google’s Digital Marketing Guide or read our guide to see how to market your e-commerce store.