In this episode we provide an ecommerce marketing blueprint and broadly outline the strategy we’re using right now with our ecommerce and online retail clients. This episode is designed to be a broad strokes high level strategy and is similar to what we’d present in one of our ecommerce marketing workshops.

Similar to the Small Business Online Marketing Blueprint in episode 49, we’ve presented the steps in the same order as we’d work through them with you if we were working one on one.

1. Understand your Business Fundamentals

Be clear, is your business a problem/solution type of business or do you need to actively generate awareness and demand for your products/services. In other words, is there active demand in the search engines for what you’re selling.

If there is activate demand then the strategy is likely more straightforward.

If not then you’ll need to test different marketing channels and be creative.

Frank Body is a great example of a business with a creative marketing strategy.

Are you shipping worldwide or just within your country? This will determine the channels you can use to market the business.

Do you need to educate the buyer before purchasing, what is the complexity of the sale? More complex sales are going to require more information on the website and a multi-step sales and marketing approach

Understanding your sales and marketing funnel is key to making your online marketing work effectively.

eCommerce businesses that are pure box shippers are going to be able to leverage a more simple marketing strategy. If your products are complex, are high priced or have a longer sales cycle then you’re marketing strategy is likely going to be more complex.

2. Use the right technology

Your choice of CMS (content management system) can determine whether the business will be successful or fail for two reasons:

* The CMS doesn’t just drive the website, it becomes the underlying system that supports the entire business.

* If the CMS can’t support key ecommerce marketing tools and tactics such as Google Shopping and Abandoned Cart Emails you’ll be at a serious disadvantage over your competition, this is a very common problem and can seriously impact your business.

Shopify is our preferred platform right now, it’s cloud hosted, cheap, has plenty of themes/templates and third party apps that can plug into it BUT that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily right for everyone. This is especially true if you’re doing something more complex than simply shipping boxes.

Other important pieces of technology:

* Email hosting – Google Apps or Office 365, email is mission critical and an ecommerce business has an even greater reliance on it.

* Ticket system for support – Zendesk.com.

* Email marketing – Mailchimp is a good starting point, Klaviyo.com is on the high end.

3. Traffic generation – getting visitors to your site

Search Engines – there are many elements to getting traffic from search and if your search strategy can be summed up as “I want to be number” then you have a problem. There are multiple search engines to take into account in the ecommerce world:

* Google – SEO, Adwords, Google Shopping or PLAs and in some cases Google Plus Local

* Amazon FBA & Amazon PPC

* Ebay – Ebay is still a goldmine for some products and markets

Email marketing – this is a special case because it’s so versatile and so powerful w...