ecommerce marketing strategy

Before you start … what should you ask yourself?

I make my living advising companies how to build their ecommerce sites. Let me share with you what I need to know from them before I can even start to do that. It’s a set of questions you can very usefully ask yourself if you want to be successful in the business of selling online.

QUESTION ONE - What exactly do you want the site to do for you? Draw attention to you? Or sell lots of stuff?

Believe it or not, some companies are more interested in getting attention (increasing brand awareness, they sometimes call it) than in making actual sales. Such companies would be happy to settle for getting lots of traffic to their site. But I hope that you’ll want that magic concept of high “conversion” – a large proportion of visitors who stay and make a purchase.

QUESTION TWO

Who is your primary target audience and who is your secondary target audience?

This is an important distinction – and it’s a revealing question, not least for showing everybody connected with the enterprise how many different kinds of people do visit a site. The primary audience is of course the people from whom you expect to get the greatest rate of conversion – those who actually buy. The secondary audience is simply everyone else, from curious passers-by to prospective investors, partners and employees (and also, of course, existing customers, partners, investors and employees).

Then you can concentrate on the primary audience, without ever totally forgetting the secondary one. Who is the typical primary audience member – what are their age, gender, occupation, income level, and purchasing habits? What do they generally use the web for?

QUESTION THREE

What exactly are you offering the audience that’s distinctive?

What is it about your product that would make your audience choose it, above your competitors’ products? Is it the cost, quality, value, service, or what? This is important, because it determines just what aspects you’ll emphasize on your site.

It’s a good idea to include this challenge to yourself, as well. If your target audience wouldn’t purchase on your site, which site would she or he go to? And for that matter, if YOU would buy at other sites, where would that be? It might be worth copying, or at least learning from, what has attracted you there.

There are many more questions I could ask clients of course, and I do … but these three are a very useful starting point, and they’ll give you a basis for choosing what designs and functions to concentrate on when you start a new site, or begin improving your existing one.