What is the effective marketing plan when you are starting an e-commerce website?

If you are talking about cheapest way, I think the most effective I ever used it send out my product free to influencers in Instagram and ask for a post on their account and tag us back. I will repost it. Is very effective ways.

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hey , how are you doing i'm new to this forum and i love the vibe and motivation in this group . you can build some followers on ig or you can use ig shoutouts with small influencers .

If your "store" is niche specific, IG is kinda the way to go. I always suggest using Gary Vee's $1.80 IG strategy - it simply works, and cost nothing more than your time.

Definitely agree with the IG promotion - especially create IG taggable products or the shoppable posts. For that, you can easily create FB feed and select placement as Instagram on the Facebook business manager account.

Along with that, you can also list your products on Google Shopping which will redirect visitors to your site. For this, you can submit your product feed to Google Merchant Center and connect your Google Ads account for your shopping campaign.

To create your product feed, you can also use ExportFeed (get free support to create feed) or similar tools.

Instagram is one of the most popular and effective method these days. And also try influencer marketing with influencers in Instagram.

There is no way to answer this question without knowing what your total shipped cost is of products and what your average profit per order is.

People who automatically declare that sending free samples to influencers is a good idea might be singing a different tune if they were told that your cost is several hundred or several thousand dollars per product.

Facebook and Instagram work quite well with some product niches but absolutely suck with others. Google and Bing Shopping work with most niches but may not be the best if there is not a ton of people searching for your products (in other words, products that you need to create a desire for vs. ones that people are already looking for).

Likewise, if your average profit per sale is less than $5, you really have extremely limited paid advertising choices compared to a product line where your average profit per sale is $150.

Like I said ... more information is needed. There are no one size fits all marketing approaches in eCommerce.

The best and cheapest way depends on your niche.

But generally here's a VERY effective strategy that we've used to scale our clients' dropshipping store to 6-figures in 3 months or less...

Start by doing some research on your competitors and your prospects. What are the biggest needs, frustrations, desires and pain-points that your prospects have? What do your competitors offer to solve the needs of your prospects, and which needs are they leaving unaddressed? Use tools such as SEMrush to identify what ads, landing pages, and offers your biggest competitors in the niche are running. These are marketing strategies that are working and pulling in the cash - they've done the hard work for you of identifying them.

So start by following their lead, and market similar products to a similar audience. This will get you started and making some revenue. Then immediately start build your email list and marketing to your list on the backend - this is where you profit margin will be made. Virtually all dropshippers we've worked with get to around 5-10% profit margin just on the front-end... but if you include email marketing and the backend, profit margin can easily go to 40-50%

Here's a quick trick... check out the Facebook Ads Library. Type in there the name of the FB page of your biggest competitor. See what ads they're running, and where they're linking to. Have a look at their offers. That will give you some insight as to how to structure your funnel and lay out your offers. You'll also see what kind of copy works well for your audience.

Then you can start by doing your own Facebook/Instagram ads based on what is working, and complement this with a backend that is better than what your competition has going. Over time introduce new and better products. Make your offers unique. Make sure you provide valuable content via email as well. Slowly build your list, they will be your best buyers.

So that's a very effective marketing plan: see what your competitors are doing, do it better, and then start innovating and move a step ahead of them

If you have any other questions, reach out and I can provide more guidance.

Many effective ways were mentioned by other users. I just want to add that if you want to do competitor analysis or just to monitor their prices, there are tools like Octoparse can help. Real-time price monitoring can be achieved with much free software on the market.