What Marketing Channels Were Effective For Different eCommerce Niches In 2018

Marketing channels may work differently for different ecommerce niches. There is no one-size-fits-all success recipe. However, tracking the current situation on the market can help you better analyse your state, improve your multi channel marketing strategy, and make some prediction for the next years.

In the CEE Ecommerce Report, we studied 10 niches: electronics, car parts, health&care, fashion, children’s goods, books, travelling, food delivery, home&garden, and entertainment. We separately examined marketplaces as well.

In this article, we’ll provide you with our findings within four market segment which can probably help you allocate your advertising budget for 2019 in a more cost-efficient way, especially if you work in one of the following niches.

Electronics stores

This year, many online stores widely used Google Shopping ads. According to the Adthena Search Advertising Report, Q1 2018, US business spent 76.4% of their retail’s total paid search advertising budget on this type of advertising. And won 85.3% of clicks. It is entirely possible to help Paid Search became one of the leading traffic drawing marketing channels for the Electronics niche this year. Moreover, branded paid search attracted around 4% of traffic generating 9.4% of ecommerce revenue.

Users also preferred to go on consumer electronics sites directly, that indicates strong customer loyalty. Direct marketing channel generated almost 10.8% of ecommerce revenue. Organic search was the most cost-efficient digital marketing channel in this segment since its ratio “traffic-income” is the highest.

However, email marketing was inefficient for electronics stores in 2018. Probably, the long preselecting period that characterises this niche caused these results. Home appliances and gadgets often cost more and consumers prefer to choose the best price and convenient delivery method before completing a purchase.

The social media trailed far behind other ecommerce marketing channels in both traffic attraction and revenue generation for Electronics e-retailers. However, they began to develop their YouTube channels and collaborate with vloggers who reviewed their products.

Market average indicators for European electronics e-stores:

Average order value — $178
Conversion rate — 0.78%
Bounce rate — 46%
Average page load speed — 6.8 sec

Tip for businesses: Do not neglect ads for a brand query. These provide you with two places in the search results instead of one. Remember, that if competitors use your registered brand name in the promotion, you can complain to unfair advertisers officially.

Fashion stores

Even though paid and organic search gained the most traffic and revenue to retailers who sell clothes, shoes, and accessories, email marketing also demonstrated quite decentish results “gifting” almost 10% of the total income. This reveals that triggered emails of all types (abandoned cart, recommendations, behavioural, reminders and so on) are carefully configured.

The fashion niche has the lowest share of referral traffic among all other categories in 2018 — 3.4%. Concerning social media, they didn’t demonstrate high indicators, but all business accounts of clothing stores are maintained permanently and have numerous followers.

Market average indicators for Fashion stores:

Average order value — $72
Conversion rate — 0.71%
Bounce rate — 42%
Average page load speed — 6.8 sec

Tip for businesses: Carefully segment your customer base and elaborate email marketing algorithms for each.

Home and garden stores

Retailers who sell furniture, homewares, and gifts received the most significant volume of traffic and revenue from the organic search results. Besides these points, this niche has the most considerable average order value and the lowest conversion rate — 0.46%. This indicates that users look through many different sites when browsing products, comparing prices and designs. Moreover, many purchases are completed offline as consumers want to “see & touch,” e.g., the furniture they have chosen online, do not want to overpay for delivery, or simply visit physical stores to look through assortment and buy something impulsively.

Email marketing channel in this category showed the lowest results among all niches. This mainly results from the products of long-term use which shops within this category offer. So that discounts you include in emails may work only on the first stages of the purchase funnel.

Market average indicators for home & garden stores:

Average order value — $226
Conversion rate — 0.46%
Bounce rate — 39%
Average page load speed — 7.1 sec

Tip for business: Since such indicators are conditioned from the niche specifics, try to elaborate the multi-channel marketing strategy on how you can simplify the online purchase for your customers. Offer free delivery or bonuses for online orders. Provide shoppers with real video reviews by cooperating with YouTube bloggers or setup instant online chats to answer all customer questions.

Children’s Stores

Paid search is the safe winner within the children’s goods niche. This marketing channel generated more than half of all revenue (50.63%) and attracted the largest share of traffic (36%) last year. Organic search ranks second, however, its share on generated traffic just slightly exceeds email’s. It might have been caused by pinpoint queries when searching for kids products as well as not a high level of brand loyalty.
Email marketing has the most impressive indicators among all niches — this digital marketing channel generated over 10% of all income. This partly results from attractive offers in the well-considered trigger emails based on consumer behaviour. Most purchases in this category can be completed spontaneously.
Along with that, display ads were inefficient within kids online stores since its percent of generated revenue is almost 7 times less than a percent of attracted traffic.

Market average indicators for Kids stores:

Average order value — $35
Conversion rate — 1.53%
Bounce rate — 42%
Average page load speed — 7.4 sec

Tip for business: Try to customise remarketing to return users who previously bought products on your website and enhance the profitability of your media campaigns. Allocate your advertising budget only according to the existing results to improve the performance of ecommerce marketing channels that lead users to conversions.

Conclusion

Paid and organic search are the most traffic and revenue generated digital marketing channels almost within all analysed categories. We know that search engines requirements are always transforming, but only following the current trends, you can keep the top in the results and quickly adapt to the novelties such as product list ads.

We would recommend you pay special attention to email marketing when planning your advertising budget since this channel is demonstrating positively dynamic results in ecommerce marketing now. Using email marketing ‘hacks’, you can simultaneously work on customer attraction and retention. 

In turn, social media networks generate over 3% of all home and garden shops revenue, and these are utterly senseless in terms of profit almost in all other niches. However, this digital marketing channel is highly significant as a part of a strategy to improve brand loyalty.

Read Next: What Marketing Channels Were Effective For Different eCommerce Niches In 2018 (Part 2)

About the Authors

Valerie Lavskaya

Marketing Content Manager at Promodo