Shipping isn’t just a way to get your products to your customers – it can be a valuable marketing tool. Integrating shipping into your eCommerce marketing strategy can help you to increase sales and turn potential customers into new customers.

Keep reading if you want to learn how to integrate shipping into your eCommerce marketing strategies. This guide will give you all the information you need to implement and execute a shipping eCommerce marketing strategy successfully.

Shipping And eCommerce Marketing Strategy – Why Does Shipping Matter?

When considering your eCommerce marketing strategy, you might not consider shipping important. However, when consumers shop online, they don’t just pay for the products from your online store. They must also pay for shipping costs.

If your products require refills, replacements, and repeat orders, your repeat customers will become increasingly fed up with the shipping costs. So, it’s in your best interest to ensure your customers aren’t paying exorbitant fees for the items on your product pages.

So, shipping costs matter regarding customer satisfaction – but did you know that it’s also an essential marketing strategy?

You must let your customer base know that you’re offering extremely competitive shipping costs. If your customers know they can access your products without paying for shipping, they will be more likely to purchase products from your online store.

Keep reading to learn how to use shipping in your eCommerce marketing strategy to promote sales and customer satisfaction for your existing customers.

How To Plan Your Shipping eCommerce Marketing Strategy

Here are the best tips to help you plan your shipping eCommerce marketing strategy – take these tips onboard to maximize your marketing strategy.

Streamline Your Shipping Methods

You need affordable shipping methods to offer accessible or more affordable shipping to your customer base. To do this, you need to evaluate your current shipping methods and determine whether any competitor shipping companies can offer you a better price.

If you can’t switch shipping providers to improve shipping costs, you should take the following steps:

• Automate shipping processes – you can implement software to automate your inventory management, freeing up your time to focus on essential tasks. It will also allow your shipping provider to digitize the inventory management process, eliminating the potential for human error – which can incur additional expenses.

• Reduce storage costs – plan your inventory management more effectively to reduce the cost of storing your products in fulfillment centers.

• Get a commercial rate – for small eCommerce business owners, it can be highly beneficial to seek a commercial rate for your shipping, which will give you more competitive pricing.

• Reduce the weight of packages – if you have the option, it can be beneficial to reduce the weight of your packages by opting to sell lighter and less heavyweight items. Since most shipping is priced differently depending on the size and weight of the box, you can streamline your shipping costs by choosing cheaper packages.

• Stay aware of rate changes – sometimes, your shipping provider might up the pricing without notifying you. So, keep up-to-date on rate changes to ensure your profits will not be affected.

• Utilize flat-rate shipping – flat-rate shipping ensures the shipping cost does not vary depending on your item’s size, weight, or shape. You get a single consistent price for your packages.

• Adjust your pricing strategy – to offer free shipping; you may need to up the price of your products.

Create Limited-Time Free Shipping Offers

Offering blanket free shipping isn’t viable for every business – you may not be able to incorporate the cost of shipping in your product pricing strategy. So, you might consider creating limited-time free shipping offers to promote sales.

For a successful eCommerce marketing strategy, you should ensure that your limited-time free shipping offers are broadcast to all your customers. You can do this by taking the following steps:

• Create free shipping banners – the banners on your social media platforms present an excellent opportunity to advertise your limited-time free shipping offer. By creating banners that show you’re offering free shipping, anyone who visits your website or social media platforms will know about the limited-time offer.

• Create posts, stories, and reels – you can create social media posts to advertise your free shipping offer. You might consider boosting these posts with ads to ensure your customer base sees the offer.

• Use email marketing – your email marketing strategy is essential in reaching out to your customers and cultivating customer loyalty. You should send out an email to your existing customers and subscribers to let them know about the offer – including links to some of your most popular product pages to whet their appetites.

• Use paid promotions – you can use google shopping ads to promote your products with free shipping. Google ads with banners displaying your free shipping offer might also come in handy. Google ads are often priced in a pay-per-click system, so you will only need to pay for the ads when they are effective in increasing traffic to your website.

• Influencer marketing – you can promote your free shipping by investing in influencer marketing. You can leverage an influencer’s following to access more potential customers and draw in more sales.

By making the offer a limited-time-only offer, you can entice your customers with a sense of urgency – this will work well for all your eCommerce marketing strategies. Using a countdown widget in your marketing campaigns can be pretty helpful to drive the sense of urgency home.

Offer Free Shipping For First-Time Shoppers

As an eCommerce business, you need to encourage loyal customers, but you also need to attract new customers to your store.

An excellent way to attract new customers to your store is to offer them free shipping on their first purchase. If they are considering buying from your online store, this offer may just be the deciding factor that makes a new customer at your store.

You should ensure customers know about this offer by including it in your marketing strategy – incorporating this offer into your product posts, product pages, and email marketing to reach prospective customers.

Offer Free Shipping For Offers Over

One of the best eCommerce marketing tactics is offering your customers free shipping when they spend over a certain amount at your store. Not only does this help you to cover the cost of offering free shipping, but it increases your sales by incentivizing the customer to spend more at your eCommerce store.

If a customer is just under the limit for free shipping, this will allow them to buy another product – so choose your minimum order for free shipping carefully.

Use SEO Strategies To Promote Your Free Shipping

You should incorporate keywords like ‘free shipping’ into your eCommerce marketing strategy if your business offers free shipping to all customers. Creating target keywords about free shipping for your marketing strategy will help you promote one of the key selling points of your business and help advertise that you’re offering free shipping.

Offer Location-Based Free Shipping

Unfortunately, the shipping cost varies depending on where you’re shipping to. This means that you may not be able to offer free shipping to all of your customers. Those who live in areas where shipping costs more will not be able to access free shipping. However, those who live close to your fulfillment centers can access free shipping due to the lower cost. This strategy helps attract more customers in areas close to your fulfillment centers.

Use Product-Specific Free Shipping

You can use the free shipping offer to help you sell a specific item. If you have an item selling poorly, you can reinvigorate your sales for that product by implementing product-specific free shipping.

In addition to boosting sales for specific items, you can use product-specific free shipping to ensure your customers do not purchase many low-profit margin items (which might leave you footing the bill for their free shipping). Product-specific shipping gives you more control when offering free shipping – ensuring your profit margins aren’t significantly affected by the offer.

Test Your Marketing Strategy

If you are implementing a shipping eCommerce marketing strategy, you need to know how effective the method is. You might need to scrap the plan if it’s not bringing in many prospective customers or increasing sales.

You can use analytics tools to gauge the performance of your free shipping offers or marketing strategies. You can see how many free shipping posts on your marketing channels have generated clicks and sales on your website and compare them to your other posts.

You can also survey your customers to find out whether the free shipping is what drove them to purchase your products.

Summary

If you’re weighing the benefits of free shipping, you should consider how free shipping might be helpful in your eCommerce marketing strategies. Free shipping is like a discount for your customers and can help alleviate any ‘purchase guilt’ they might feel before hitting the order now button. Use the tips in this post to implement shipping in your marketing strategies.

FAQs

Here are some frequently asked questions about shipping eCommerce marketing strategies.

How Can Shipping Affect Your eCommerce Marketing?

Shipping is a powerful tool you can use to draw in new customers. You can offer free shipping for a limited time or free shipping to new customers on their first order. Shipping is a powerful tool to help drive sales.

How Do You Market Free Shipping?

You can let your customers know that you’re offering free shipping by adding information about the offer to your Google ads, social media platforms, banners, and email marketing campaigns.

What Do You Need To Consider Before Offering Free Shipping?

You need to consider how this will affect your profit margins to offer free shipping. You should think about whether location, item size, profit margin, and weight make your products more costly to ship – and decide which products and areas you are viable for free shipping.