Ecommerce Marketing

Ecommerce marketing is all about enticing web surfers to your site and, once there, to becoming a customer. While overall similar to marketing a physical business, ecommerce 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.

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. The need must be relatively higher for this to occur.

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 ecommerce 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 ecommerce web site.

Our view of ecommerce 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?

Ecommerce Marketing Priorities

We divide web site marketing 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

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 ecommerce 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.

The parts of E-Commerce

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 E-Commerce can be divided into:

• E-tailing or "virtual storefronts" on Web sites with online catalogs, sometimes gathered into a "virtual mall"
• The gathering and use of demographic data through Web contacts
• Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), the business-to-business exchange of data
• E-mail and fax and their use as media for reaching prospects and established customers (for example, with newsletters)
• Business-to-business buying and selling
• The security of business transactions

E-tailing or The Virtual Storefront and the Virtual Mall

As a place for direct retail shopping, with its 24-hour availability, a global reach, the ability to interact and provide custom information and ordering, and multimedia prospects, the Web is rapidly becoming a multibillion dollar source of revenue for the world's businesses. A number of businesses already report considerable success. As early as the middle of 1997, Dell Computers reported orders of a million dollars a day. By early 1999, projected e-commerce revenues for business were in the billions of dollars and the stocks of companies deemed most adept at e-commerce were skyrocketing. Although many so-called dotcom retailers disappeared in the economic shakeout of 2000.

Market Research

In early 1999, it was widely recognized that because of the interactive nature of the Internet, companies could gather data about prospects and customers in unprecedented amounts -through site registration, questionnaires, and as part of taking orders. The issue of whether data was being collected with the knowledge and permission of market subjects had been raised. (Microsoft referred to its policy of data collection as "profiling" and a proposed standard has been developed that allows Internet users to decide who can have what personal information.)

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

EDI is the exchange of business data using an understood data format. It predates today's Internet. EDI involves data exchange among parties that know each other well and make arrangements for one-to-one (or point-to-point) connection, usually dial-up. EDI is expected to be replaced by one or more standard XML formats, such as ebXML

E-Mail, Fax, and Internet Telephony

E-commerce is also conducted through the more limited electronic forms of communication called e-mail, facsimile or fax, and the emerging use of telephone calls over the Internet. Most of this is business-to-business, with some companies attempting to use e-mail and fax for unsolicited ads to consumers and other business prospects. An increasing number of business Web sites offer e-mail newsletters for subscribers. A new trend is opt-in e-mail in which Web users voluntarily sign up to receive e-mail, usually sponsored or containing ads, about product categories or other subjects they are interested in.

Business-to-Business Buying and Selling

Thousands of companies that sell products to other companies have discovered that the Web provides not only a 24-hour-a-day showcase for their products but a quick way to reach the right people in a company for more information.

The Security of Business Transactions

Security includes authenticating business transactors, controlling access to resources such as Web pages for registered or selected users, encrypting communications, and, in general, ensuring the privacy and effectiveness of transactions. Among the most widely-used security technologies is the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which is built into both of the leading Web browsers.SSL

What is E-Commerce?

Electronic Commerce, commonly known as (electronic marketing) e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. The use of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at some point in the transaction's lifecycle, although it can encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail as well.

A large percentage of electronic commerce is conducted entirely electronically for virtual items such as access to premium content on a website, but most electronic commerce involves the transportation of physical items in some way. Online retailers are sometimes known as e-tailers and online retail is sometimes known as e-tail. Almost all big retailers have electronic commerce presence on the World Wide Web.

Electronic commerce that is conducted between businesses is referred to as business-to-business or B2B. B2B can be open to all interested parties (e.g. commodity exchange) or limited to specific, pre-qualified participants (private electronic market). Electronic commerce that is conducted between businesses and consumers, on the other hand, is referred to as business-to-consumer or B2C. This is the type of electronic commerce conducted by companies such as Amazon.com.

Electronic commerce is generally considered to be the sales aspect of e-business. It also consists of the exchange of data to facilitate the financing and payment aspects of the business transactions.

(wikipedia)