 E-commerce
marketing is all about enticing web surfers to your site and,
once there, becoming a customer. While overall similar to
marketing a physical business, e-commerce marketing has some
unique ingredients. For instance, marketing a physical store
requires substantial enticement to move a customer to make the
effort to physically come by your store. It also means that the
customer has an “investment” in the visit. They have
expended time, energy and money to get to the location.
On the web, “visiting” your store requires far less
effort. A single mouse click and there they are. Unfortunately,
the minimal effort to get to your site also means that the
customer has nothing invested in the visit. It took almost no
time or effort to get to your site so there is no “client
side” investment in the process. They can just as easily move
to another site. In fact, they can visit a dozen sites in as
many minutes.
Customers who “invest” in visiting a physical location
can generally be said to have a “higher motivation” for
making a purchase. The specific need of the customer was great
enough to overcome the investment of time, energy and money
necessary to make the visit. This investment means that they
are far more likely to make a purchase. After all, if they
don’t purchase from you they will have to increase their
investment by going to another location. If you have the
product or service they are looking for at an acceptable price
the additional investment they will have to make to visit
another location may be all that is needed to close the sale.
Conversely, the online customer has almost no investment in
the visit. Going to your site requires one click of a mouse.
Leaving your site requires one click of the mouse.
Many e-commerce marketing companies look at this and use it
to justify increased spending on getting new traffic to the web
site. For the small and medium business the cost of increasing
traffic to the site is substantial and will continue to
increase. Just five years ago it cost almost nothing to bring
new visitors to your site. As the competition has increased,
however, this has fast become the most costly aspect of having
an e-commerce web site.
Our view of e-commerce marketing is somewhat different. We
look at Internet marketing success as the total cost of
converting visitors into customers. This allows you to measure
the effectiveness of your total marketing program including
getting new visitors, web site design, customer service and
after sales marketing.
After all, what good does it do you to get thousands of
visitors to your store if you don’t have any inventory to
sell?
We divide web site marketing into two primary divisions:
- Converting visitors (non-customers) into customers
- In-site promotions
- Sales / Special Offers
- In-store Coupons
- Associated Products
- Customer Recommendations
- Opt-in Email Promotions
- Site Effectiveness
- Enticing appropriate visitor behavior
- Establishing emotional context
- Building relationships
- Increasing per-customer purchases
- After sale marketing
- After sale relationship building
Enticing visitors and converting visitors work hand in hand.
One without the other dramatically reduces the opportunities
for creating new customers. You have to get the new visitor to
the site and you have to provide sufficient incentive to turn
that visitor into a buying customer.
In many cases the visitor has almost no investment in
visiting your e-commerce web site. With no investment your site
needs to provide sufficient and immediate enticement/reward to
keep the visitor from clicking the back button and going to
another site. This requires a very close relationship between
the keywords they used in their search (or the information in
the advertising) to the content on the web page they view. The
closer the relationship the more chance you have of enticing
the visitor to continue looking at your site.
It also means that in-site promotions may make a substantial
difference in the ration of visitors to customers. Adding that
one-time, immediate offer (on sale today only) may create a new
customer relationship
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