Monday, May 28, 2012

E-commerce Marketing



E-commerce marketing is all about attracting web surfers to your site and, once there, to make them 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 take the effort to physically come by your store location. It also means that the customer has an “investment” in the visit. They have expended time, energy and money to get to the location.

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 the site. As the competition has increased, however, this has fast become the most costly aspect of having an e-commerce web site.

On the other hand,Internet marketing success as the total cost of converting visitors into customers. This allows  to measure the effectiveness of total marketing program including getting new visitors, web site design, customer service and after sales marketing.

E-commerce Marketing Priorities can be divided into three primary divisions:

  • Enticing visitors (non-customers) to come to the site
    • Search engine registration (natural search results)
    • Pay-per-click
    • Public relations – news releases, articles and stories
    • Online advertising (banners, links / cross-links, directories, newsletter placement, etc.)
  • 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

In many cases the visitor has almost no investment in visiting the e-commerce web site. With no investment the 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 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 of enticing the visitor to continue looking at the site.

Conversely, the online customer has almost no investment in the visit. Going to the site requires one click of a mouse. Leaving the site requires one click of the mouse.


For more details about E-Commerce Consulting, Website Development and Maintenance please feel free to contact Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.