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Introducing Ecommerce Strategy

As the old adage goes, ‘Fail to Prepare, prepare to fail’.  In this blog post, we discuss how you can prepare and outline some common approaches to Ecommerce Strategy.  Building your strategy is a key part of the preparation stage before campaigns are designed.  It is important to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and the tools that are available.

Your strategy should allow you to change in accordance with marketplace advancements and should continually allow you to take advantage of new opportunities.  Being proactive with your Marketing strategy means that you can adapt easily and improve accordingly.  Before you set off on your ecommerce journey, you need to plan the route.  This is where we come in.

In this blog post, we will cover different aspects of common approaches to ecommerce strategy we have seen:

• The Ecommerce Goal
• Available Marketing Channels
• Using Data
• Maximising Performance

The Ecommerce Goal

Before you can build an effective strategy to power you to ecommerce success, you need to decide what exactly you define as a successful campaign.  Without knowing what you want to achieve, you are bound to fail or at the very most, achieve success by luck alone. We have recently discussed how to create SMART goals for Ecommerce.  SMART goals structure your objectives in a framework that you can easily review your performance against.

The goal is the central aspect of your marketing strategy, as without a goal, you lack the direction required to succeed.  Once you have decided what you want to achieve from your marketing efforts, you can begin to put a plan in place.

The Marketing Channels

Why Your Ecommerce Strategy Spans Beyond Email

When building your ecommerce strategy, it is important to consider all the possible challenges and situations you may face.  With a specific goal in mind, it is easier to pinpoint specific details.  Taking a broad overview of what your company is doing and what you want to achieve gives you the foundations for creating an effective strategy.  Identify all the touch-points and potential stumbling blocks that your existing customers face.  Use this insight to then plan how you are going to provide content to overcome these potential difficulties.

From the customer journey that you have established, you should then be able to choose the most appropriate marketing channel for your purpose.  Each channel offers a different kind of interaction with your contacts.

In a recent post, we discussed the many benefits of ecommerce email.  The engagement and personalisation afforded by email as a marketing channel makes it a popular choice for ecommerce marketers.  However, it is also important to look beyond email and consider how you can integrate marketing channels.

There is little dispute that email can be an effective marketing channel, however it is most powerful when used alongside other channels.  By using email in combination with other marketing channels you can:

• Expand the reach of your email campaigns
• Respond to customer behaviours across all marketing channels
• Attract new subscribers
• Engage with your subscribers on many levels, delivering a consistent message

Other Marketing Channels You Can Use

When building your ecommerce strategy, you must consider which marketing channels you will use.  It may be tempting to spread your spend over all available marketing channels in the hope that you will find success.  However, choosing the marketing channels and using proven tactics that are right for your business is a shorter, more effective route to success.

Available marketing channels include:

• Email
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Pay Per Click (PPC)
• Display Advertising
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Social Media Marketing
• Offline – Billboard, Fliers, Leaflets

Before making a decision about which channels to use, consider the performance of each in any previous marketing campaigns.  You may also want to consider your ideal customer demographics, considering which marketing channels they are likely to use and how best to engage them.

You may have a fantastic social media following; it is therefore important to consider how you are going to convert these into paying customers when creating your strategy.  Likewise, it is great to have a large email marketing subscribers list but it is also important to know how you will use this list to your advantage.  A smaller, more engaged marketing list is proven to be more effective than a large yet un-engaged list.

Using Data

Why Ecommerce Strategy Must Be Data Driven

There is little point in creating an ecommerce strategy to maximise performance if you ignore the data that you have already collected.  Real data, based on the ways that customers have interacted with your marketing collateral in the past, can give you clear insights into how you should approach your future strategy.

A data driven approach requires a central storage unit in the form of a CRM which stores data about all customer interactions.  This central hub of data can provide extremely detailed insight into the different ways people interact with your business.  You can then adapt and improve your marketing campaigns accordingly.

There are many benefits of taking a data driven approach to your ecommerce strategy.  These include:

– React to Customer Behaviours:  Analysing how your customers already interact with your marketing channels means that you can build a marketing strategy in line with their needs.  You can create a strategy which not only reacts to the way that customers already engage with your company but one that also pre-empts problems and questions they may have.  This improves the customer experience, builds brand loyalty and ultimately increases revenue.

– Increase ROI:  By analysing your data, you can identify opportunities to improve your return on investment.

– Avoid Wasted Spend:  By identifying why you are performing in a particular way, you can avoid spending time and money on an approach which is not achieving results.  By identifying where you are performing poorly you can either eliminate the channel from your strategy or adapt the way you approach a channel.  In either scenario, you are avoiding spending money on an approach which does not work.

– Attribute Conversions:  Your ecommerce strategy will likely rely on a collection of marketing channels.  With a data driven ecommerce strategy you can identify where your conversions have originated from and optimise under-performing channels.

– Personalisation Improves Performance:  Performance of marketing campaigns which have been designed with a specific customer in mind is much improved.

– The Single Customer View:  By using a data driven approach, you can develop a single customer view of your contacts.  The single customer view allows you to view all the information that your company holds about a customer in one central location.  This data can then be used to develop highly tailored and relevant communications.

Building an Ecommerce Strategy with Email

Your ecommerce strategy should take into account the benefits of email as a marketing channel.  Email provides a number of benefits specific to the marketing channel.

Maximising Performance

Maximising Engagement with Ecommerce Strategies

Your ecommerce strategy needs to make people engage with it and react in a positive way.  To produce an engaging strategy, you should understand your target audience and how they will react to particular stimuli.  You also need to consider the mechanisms within your campaigns that you can change to boost engagement.  For an ecommerce strategy to be successful, it ultimately needs to boost revenues, ROI and conversions.  There are a number of factors that marketers can take into account:

Personalisation

Personalisation can occur on two levels:  The Company and The Customer.

Personalising your company means interacting with the customer on a one-to-one level.  You can personalise your company by sending communications from a recognised and trusted staff member.  You can also adapt your use of language according to the channel and the stage of the marketing funnel that customers find themselves in.

Personalisation at the stage of the customer is also a multiplex issue.  You can personalise marketing campaigns at the level of the customer by addressing them by name, referring to a previous customer behaviour or action and segmenting your contact list to ensure that customers only receive communication relevant to their needs.

Automation

Automation is a powerful tool that you can use to respond to customer behaviour in real-time.  You can set up automations based on triggers which you have identified at key points in your customer journeys.  You can use marketing automations for a number of ecommerce purposes including:

• Cart Abandonment:  Direct individuals back to your website when they have left items in their cart without checking out.
• Browse Abandonment:  Identify when people are leaving your site and give them product suggestions.
• Web Tracking:  See people triggering views on product pages.  Log how many times people visit your site before making a purchase.

Recommendations

Product recommendations can encourage customers to make additional or repeat purchases when they have previously interacted with a company.  Product recommendations rely on profiling customers according to their needs and behaviours.  Well-timed product recommendation emails can encourage customers to make a repeat purchase.  Alternatively, customers can be given new product ideas based on products that they are likely to want or need.

Copywriting

Throughout all your marketing channels, you need to employ effective copywriting techniques.  The language and tone that you use in your marketing collateral should reflect the specific situation the customer is in.  Using appropriate copy which conveys in the information that the individual needs to know to make a decision is key to any campaign.

Summary

To devise the most appropriate strategy for your ecommerce campaigns you need to carefully consider and plan the journey.  By considering the challenges and problems that your customers may face in advance, you can streamline your processes.

We hope you have found this post on common approaches to ecommerce strategy useful.  To boost your campaign performance why not download your free copy of The Complete Guide to Email Marketing.

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