You’re looking to target eCommerce companies. You’ve got your ICP right, your copywriting right, and your automated sequence on LinkedIn and email ready, but can’t manage to identify eCommerce companies easily using Sales Navigator. That’s normal, there are no dedicated industry filters for these categories.
There are however workarounds you can implement to identify and segment eCommerce companies on LinkedIn
Want to implement a great ABM strategy targeting e-commerce? Read-on!
Table of contents :
Basic: Identifying eCommerce companies using Boolean searches on LinkedIn
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great source to identify decision-makers and companies, except when it comes to finding eCommerce companies. If you’ve read our guide on building advanced account-based strategies using Sales Navigator, you’ve probably already tried to build lists of accounts of e-commerce companies.
However, there is no dedicated industry sector suited to finding eCommerce companies :
If you use the Apparel & Fashion, Consumer Goods, Cosmetics, or Retail sectors, you will also end up with a lot of traditional brick-and-mortar companies
If you use the Internet sector, you’ll end up with a lot of irrelevant software companies as well
These sectors can help you address a company category but not identify e-commerce specifically.
You may be tempted to use Boolean searches to filter in eCommerce within these companies. If you’re not familiar with using Boolean search to improve your search, refer to this guide.
This is a quick win to finding eCommerce companies but it won’t be enough - any keywords you’ll input are going to be too restrictive on LinkedIn. Most eCommerce companies don’t identify themselves as such, but as lifestyle/retail brands having online stores.
You’ll end up missing out on many business opportunities if you rely on this!
Since Sales Navigator won’t be of any help in identifying the companies, we need to work first outside of LinkedIn by :
Identifying all websites of interest to use
Use LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator capacity to import companies' names and domains to automatically match the companies into account lists
Use advanced data sources to build strong segmentation filters according to traffic size, revenue, money raised, etc…
Use La Growth Machine to automate lead enrichment and outreach
Advanced: Identifying eCommerce companies using domain imports
Since we know account search on Sales Navigator is too restrictive, let’s work our way out.
There is a key (hidden) feature available on Sales Navigator that allows you to upload a CSV of company names and domain websites, from which LinkedIn will automatically build an Accounts list for you to do your search from
With that in mind, our goal will be to build a list of companies for LinkedIn to match in their database using outside sources!
How to identify e-commerce companies online?
You have three options to identify eCommerce companies online :
Using dedicated databases
Based on the technologies websites use
Based on the website’s IP address
Dedicated databases are a great place to start. It’s their job to do the actual research and provide you with relevant filters to help your segmentation!
A few selected ones include:
Crunchbase - well-known startup database worldwide, listing 122 309 possible e-commerce using the E-Commerce, Marketplace, and E-Commerce platforms.
Using them, you’ll be able to filter with additional segmentation data such as location, total money raised, number of employees, Traffic size, and technologies used.
It’s a great source to build advanced segmentation, and is very inexpensive: $49 / month
Dealroom - similar to Crunchbase, Dealroom is a database listing startups only. It has a dedicated “marketplace & eCommerce” filter that lists 45,573 startups with additional filter options including categories, tech stacks, open jobs, traffic growth, and total money raised, and can be a great addition to Crunchbase - though way more expensive
eCommerceDB - a very comprehensive database listing all e-commerce companies online. It’s one of the few databases reporting revenue range and allowing you to segment based on this - Price: 400€/month
While these databases are a great starting point, they tend to miss a lot of less well-known/smaller e-commerce players.
That’s why you need to also look for companies based on the technologies they use, especially which dedicated eCommerce solutions :
Shopify
WooCommerce
Magento
OpenCart
Prestashop
Squarespace
Wix
BigCommerce
Volusion
As it so happens, there are companies specializing in identifying websites based on the technology they use - a selected list includes :
BuildWith - the most famous technology lookup company, with extensive results (3.6M Shopify website, 5.1M WooCommerce companies, etc…) and advanced segmentation filters
Price: $495 / month
TheCompanyAPI - another technology lookup company, with much smaller databases but much more affordable to start with
Price: $95 / month
Wappalyzer - similar to ProspectWith with a slightly bigger database
Price: $249 / month
A last (free) source includes IP-based targeting Most Shopify-based websites are hosted on the same IP and listed here. Though it’s comprehensive, it lacks segmentation filters to allow you to target the right company based on location, size, traffic, etc…
How to segment e-commerce companies using external tools?
Using any of the sources mentioned above, you’ll have ended up with a very large source of companies to target. A big mistake would be to address them all the same way.
You want to adapt your copywriting to criteria such as traffic, revenue, company size, money raised, markets they’re serving, etc… Not all databases mentioned above provide this information.
Should you need to enrich that data, here are a few sources you can use :
Traffic ranking using SimilarWeb or SEMRush
Company size once you’ve imported them in LinkedIn Sales Navigator (see below)
Funding raised with Crunchbase
Any of these solutions will allow you to upload a CSV of the company's domain to return the required segmentation information to segment further!
Importing accounts on LinkedIn to find the right decision-makers
If you’ve followed all the above steps, you’ll have lists of 100,000 accounts, well-segmented based on relevant eCommerce data including :
Location
Traffic size
Types of goods sold
Company size
Revenue size
Money raised
Tech stack used
The first step to a great ABM strategy is completed, but you haven’t yet identified the company's points of contact.
This is where we will finally use Sales Navigator. As mentioned previously, there is a hidden feature that allows you to import a list of company names of company websites, which LinkedIn will then automatically match in their database. Imports the segments you’ve built in the previous step and let the magic happen!
You’ll end up with a very-well Accounts list - and if you’re read out content dedicated to showing how to turn an account list into a lead's search, you know what to do next - if not, here’s a quick video
You just have to input your designated persona (CMOs, Head of Marketing, etc…) and you’re set to succeed!
Automating multichannel outreach
Now that you have the lead results of your designated target audiences, you can import them using the Lead imports features from Sales Navigator to LGM.
La Growth Machine will automatically enrich the leads to find their professional emails and phone numbers so you can start outreaching to them automatically.
For a good outreach on eCommerce people, we recommend using our automated LinkedIn then Email sequences! E-commerce company employees are tech-first companies and tend to be very active on LinkedIn, it’s a great way to first outreach to them.
If they don’t reply, the sequence will automatically fall back to email! You can get started in about 20 minutes!
It’s up to you now!
We’ve shared with you the basics. You now have many tools are your disposal to successfully outreach to eCommerce companies. Build the right sequence in La Growth Machine and close more deals!
Here’s some additional reading you should look into :