Creating your personal e-commerce platform and filling it with valuable, catchy products is a great start to a business. However, that’s exactly what it is: a start, with the remaining part of the road being unclear and full of frustrating hurdles.
You might be offering the best products in the world, but it won’t matter unless you let the world know about them. Using marketing strategies is your only solution; the problem is, there are a lot of them, so which ones should you choose to strengthen your business and drive its sustainable growth?
Paying for ads and splashing them all over social media? Sending a ton of emails and hoping to convert a lead into a paying customer? Sticking to SEO principles? Which approach is the best? Let us present the 6 top e-commerce marketing strategies that will show the most efficient results in 2026.
The first strategy is video storytelling. It has a simple but effective principle: instead of doing direct sales pitches, you appeal to your audience through emotions and hold their interest by presenting an engaging movie-like scenario.
Imagine that you’re selling a variety of USB-powered lamps. Instead of simply displaying one of them and describing its features, you create a short video with a character who finds themselves in a new, cold, bare apartment. They’ve just moved in, there is a ton of work ahead, and they’re feeling tired and depressed.
The lamp is one of the few things they brought along, and when they turn it on, the apartment transforms. The warm lighting seems comforting and hopeful: the gray blankness vanishes, and the lamp keeps working through the night, soothing the character greatly.
A video like this will resonate with people emotionally, making them relate to the character and their choice of a product. Here is what you need to know about video storytelling as an AI in e-commerce marketing strategy:
Undoubtedly, this strategy has its drawbacks. As you can probably imagine, creating videos with quality content is time-consuming. While AI can help with some parts, you shouldn’t rely on it to plot and mass-produce your storytelling ads: people have learned to recognize AI at this point, and for many of them, it’s an immediate turn-off.
Besides, finding a balance between a random short movie and a smart, engaging mini-movie ad can take you a lot of time and wasted effort. Storytelling marketing is a complex form of art, and it is difficult to master it. If you do, though, the returns will be more than worth it.
The second effective marketing strategy is making a deal with a couple of micro-influencers. Sure, you might want to target someone with a larger base of subscribers, but this is where quality triumphs over quantity. It’s better to find someone related to your unique e-commerce niche — for example, if you’re selling tea, then targeting ardent tea lovers will be a great idea.
Small communities tend to be more united and dedicated, which is another reason why micro-influencer marketing is a good approach. As the 2025 research showed, around 14% of marketers planned to dedicate about half of their marketing funds to influencer-based campaigns in 2026, so this strategy has been proven to work. It has some other benefits, too, such as:
The key secret to excelling at this marketing strategy lies in finding reliable and suitable micro-influencers. Once you do, your effort will start bringing fruit sooner rather than later.
Paid advertising is one of the most overused marketing strategies, yes, but it’s also highly effective. With its help, you can reach your customers through platforms like Google, Meta, and others, scaling a lot of traffic even with one thoughtful ad if you’re lucky.
Specifically, paid ads tend to capture high-intent users, meaning people who are already looking for something you sell. If someone viewed a product but didn’t buy it, retargeting ads can send them reminders.
In the end, everything depends on how good your ads are and how much you pay for marketing. Quality visuals, catchy messages, and relevant products will stand higher chances of resonating with the audience and getting them to place an order.
Some people believe that SEO is dead. In fact, SEO is still one of the most effective ways to improve eCommerce product discovery by helping shoppers find the right products faster through search and category pages. In reality, it keeps bringing profit to marketers; you just need to know how to keep up with the changes that keep taking place within this industry. Here are the tips to consider:
SEO marketing has an accumulative, long-term effect. You might invest more heavily at the start, but in the end, you’ll see that it’s one of the most cost-effective advertising strategies out there.
After acquiring users through influencer marketing, paid advertising, and SEO, delivering a compelling on-site experience is essential to turn visitors into engaged users and potential customers. A well-designed, personalized experience encourages visitors to explore content, interact with products, and move closer to purchase—making personalization a key focus in modern e-commerce. If you want personalization to scale across channels and customer data, Salesforce Commerce Cloud consulting can help unify your storefront, journeys, and insights without patchwork tools.
For beauty and fashion e-commerce in particular, AI-powered tools such as virtual try-on can significantly enhance user engagement. Today, virtual try-on no longer requires costly or complex AR implementations. Companies like Perfect Corp offer flexible AI API solutions for makeup, hairstyles, and apparel try-on. These solutions enable users to upload a photo to instantly test products, experiment with new looks, and even perform AI-driven skin analysis—creating a more immersive, personalized shopping journey that drives confidence and conversion.
The best thing about content creation is that it can be genuine and relevant, and it will keep bringing you profit. Consumers prefer to do research before buying anything, especially if a product is costly, and you can help them with it. All you’ll need to do is post educational articles, guides, video reviews, and other helpful content. To support this content at scale, many e-commerce teams leverage creative automation to create bulk images from reusable templates for product guides, comparisons, and educational assets.
Imagine that you’re selling products for animals, including toys and tech. Your buyers will be curious to see how a specific product works and how real animals react to it. They’ll also appreciate reading detailed explanations and guidelines about its usage and value.
Instead of simply selling something, explain why people should buy it. Illustrate how pets can benefit from this product, why they tend to like it, what makes it special, and so on.
In addition, you can start posting articles and other types of content related to animals in general. For instance, discuss common illnesses and ways to treat them; share interesting facts and recommendations about food, walks, basic care, etc.
This will bring various animal lovers to your website. They might not be necessarily looking for your products, but once they read your content, a lot of them will decide to check it out, and at least some will place their orders.
Such content creation will work well with SEO marketing. Combine the two, and you’ll start seeing natural results soon enough. The best thing about this marketing strategy is that it’s a long-term one. Every single piece of content you create will keep accumulating and attracting more and more people to your e-commerce website.
There are many more potentially lucrative marketing strategies you can use to make your e-commerce platform successful. However, the five strategies above are what really drives growth these days.
Some of them might not work for you, so decide which approach suits your needs and capabilities best. There are two possible solutions here: you can invest in one specific strategy, maintain it for a while, and then gauge how effective it is, or you can combine several of them at the same time.
Focus on delivering quality over quantity in your marketing efforts. Produce useful, human-written content that your potential clients might find truly helpful, and reap the benefits that will come with it.
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