Question

Topic: E-Marketing

Best Practices For E-commerce Marketing

Posted by Anonymous on 3/19/2008 at 10:03 AM ET 125 Points
I'm looking for a general discussion about the best architecture (or system strategy) for an e-commerce client to accelerate their on-line marketing efforts. i.e., what strategy works best vs. what strategy has been awful.

Essentially, is it best to build a marketing strategy around a shopping cart or around a demand-creation engine?

For example, some shopping carts have built-in e-mail marketing, CSE feed and CRM modules. Other systems are more marketing oriented, with no link to an inventory or sales report from a shopping cart).

An integrated approach makes it possible to consider thinkgs like variable PPA bid strategies for ads based on a formula of gross margin * real-time conversion rates. It also makes it possible to run short-term e-mail promotions based on current inventory.

While these sound appealling in theory, I am interested in actual practice.

Is it better to focus on the basics of demand creation and not get taken in by integrated approaches that never quite live up to the promises? Without getting into specifics like budget, what works best as an organizing principle: an all-in-one, integrated approach or a marketing-front end (without a hard-wired link to transaction data/shopping cart)?

I am NOT looking for a quick shopping cart recommendation, nor am I interested in responding to a lengthy laundry list of "budget & buying considerations" that are irrelevant to the central strategic question. That's where my 1st post went wrong.

I am looking for some thought-provoking discussion about what approach you've tried, why it worked (or didn't) and what you would do differently.

Background: My client is an e-commerce company who heavily uses CSE (shopping.com, Foogle, Nextag). They also have a considerable e-mail database.

Integration with QuickBooks Enterprise edition would be important. Ideally the solution would have an automated CSE feed parser/uploader and be SEO savvy (with flat URLs).

Key consideration: many of my clients' transactions are completed off-line where a consumer calls after hesitating at check-out. Combinationof bad shopping cart and buyer's concern (high-ticket items). This is a part of the business process that unfortunately can't be changed. Therefore, I am also looking for a strategy as to how we can link this abandoned cart to an actual transaction, thereby preserving the clickstream data.

The ideal "magic bullet" is some type of DNIS management system where a consumer could shift to a phone call to the order center yet the operator could salvage the session ID from the abandoned shopping cart and complete the order, thereby preserving the connection between click and action.



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RESPONSES

  • Posted on 3/19/2008 at 10:36 AM Accepted
    The biggest problem with eCommers websites is that it is hard to merge good Search Engine Optimization in with a shopping cart. The other problem is that, if you are selling products or goods from a manufacture and you have other competitors doing the same with the same manufacture, you end up with "duplicate" content across multiple web domains.

    We strive to build a marketing side to capture the traffic first then convert them into the shopping cart. We track all of the transactions from a PPC campaign, organics, all the way into the shopping cart. If we get abandonment we can track that as well. Sometime that is due to someone wanting to call instead of completing the transaction. We have tools to track this as well. You can look at www.ppcmanagement.com or www.buildtelligence.com for more information.
  • Posted on 3/23/2008 at 2:56 PM Accepted
    Hi David,

    As a business consultant working with a number of e-commerce companies, I've seen good and awful approaches...

    The best approaches I've seen start with the needs of the target market and then seek out the platform elements necessary to serve those needs. Each target market is a little different and can require a little different "recipe". Believe it or not, for some market segments, PPC and SEO are much less critical than say, very robust email sequencing and autoresponders. The point is, the most-effective folks seem to start with identifying the 4 or 5 priority marketing approaches for the particular market segment and then bring together the technologies to accomplish that ---- integrated or not.

    The worst approaches I've seen start with the platform and then work outward. They find a shopping cart solution with what seems like a lot of bells and whistles, they get excited about everything they "could" do with it, and then they form their marketing approach around those capabilities. Of course, they run into trouble when they discover that many of these bells and whistles are worthless for marketing to their specific target market.

    Integrated versus non-integrated is really a secondary consideration relative to making sure the most effective approaches are being utilized. A bunch of point-solutions doing the right things will always out-perform an integrated solution doing the wrong things.

    That's my $0.02 -- Hope it helps.

    Rafe VanDenBerg
  • Posted on 3/23/2008 at 8:31 PM Author
    Sorry for the confusion...I'm asking specifically what works and what doesn't work in emarketing, not a primer on how to plan.

    Since technology platforms often drive tactics (and occasionally strategy), I would appreciate any specific experience on what shopping cart platforms or overall stratgies have been useful vs. others that have ended up in a box canyon.

    If a SC platform is integrated with e-mail, for example, do people actually find that to be a critical benefit or, in practice, is it irrelevant. Yes or no and why, please.
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