Creating an Internet Marketing Strategy to Grow Online Business
Creating a successful internet marketing strategy is key to helping grow your online business. It needs to be multi-faceted, realistic, and implemented consistently over time. This process has no short cuts and requires time and patience. Keep in mind that in order to accomplish your internet marketing strategy you need to know what you can afford to spend and have the staff who can dedicate their time and effort. Any inbound marketing strategy will require time and effort.
Establishing Your Internet Marketing Strategy
Determine your weakest area
It’s important to remember that growing your business doesn’t happen from one single activity, you continually get better by optimizing your business. Your business is only as strong as your weakest area, and your weakest area is where you will have the biggest impact. Remember, in order to be successful in any business you need to be good at every stage in the buyer process.
Is your acquisitions a weak area?
Traffic to your website is the lifeline of any ecommerce business and this area focuses on just that.
So how exactly do you identify if this is your weak area?
- How long has your business utilized the internet? If you are a new business then this will be a weak area, but keep in mind the longer your business has been online the more traffic you will see as your awareness grows.
- Are you experiencing increasing traffic growth? If you are not, then this is a weak area. You have to grow in order to succeed and if you’re not, your business will suffer.
So how can I improve these weak areas?
- Test, Test, Test! Testing your acquisitions should be done on a weekly basis in every ecommerce business, unless you are struggling, then it should be done on a daily basis.
- Don’t put all of your resources into PPC, because it is not cheap. Yes, this strategy results in a quick win but you cannot ignore the slower moving channels like SEO and content marketing. Over time this slow moving channels will have a positive impact on PPC and increase your ROI. Content is also helpful to have during slow times because most businesses loose attention due to the decrease in content.
- Tweak your landing page to make them targeted. When you are creating your ads, make sure when a potential lead clicks on one it leads them to a landing page that creates an action. This can be a form submission, a download, or any other type of CTA. Before you can implement this you need to know first what you want from that customer and how you want them to do that. Lastly, make sure the customers experience is consistent from ad to site, this is a big mistake most ecommerce marketers make.
Are you having trouble converting strangers into customer?
Once you have traffic to your site the next step is to turn those strangers into paying customers. You want to make small tweaks to your conversion process because this will have a big impact on your overall growth.
So what do you need to check?
- Macro conversion rates: If less than 3% of your vistitors are turning into customers, this is a big problem.
- Micro conversion rates: These are the smaller conversions that happen along the way and dont immediately translate to revenue growth. Actions like subscribing to your blog or newsletter, adding items to a wish list or interacting with your company’s social media help to improve and indicate a healthy ecommerce business.
How can you improve your conversion rates?
- Optimize! A/B test as much as you can. Make optimizing your best friend so you can get smarter about how, where and when to test.
- Check your visitors flow. Google Analytics provide great insight as to where your customers are going and when and where they drop off at.
- Send follow up emails. Keep an eye out on abandoned shopping carts, this is a huge opportunity for your company’s ecommerce. Find out when the best time is to approach these soon-to-be customers and send them follow-up emails to boost your conversion rates.
Are you having trouble getting repeat customers? 
Having new customers are great but its what you do to keep them coming back that is important. You want to make customers for life so keep in mind what you are doing to keep them coming back.
So how do you know if they are coming back?
- Check your repeat purchase rates. These rates vary depending on what your business is selling so keep that in mind. Once you have found an optimal rate, keep this as a benchmark to judge your success in the future.
- How high is your churn rate? This is a vital health metric of your business but keep in mind, high churn rates destroy the success of your business.
What can you do to keep them coming back?
- After finding out your repeat purchase rate and your customer flow, find out exactly where the customer is dropping off. From there you can see what the different characteristics are of those who bought a second time and those who didn’t. This will allow you to know what you need to change or what you can do to increase your repeaters.
- If you have a high churn rate discover what is happening and why. Website difficulties and shipping delays can all negatively affect your churn rate. If these factors are an issue, make sure to apologize and invite the customer to give your business a second chance. Always put yourself in the customer’s shoes.
- Make sure you are testing your email marketing. This can help to drive your repeat purchase rates because email marketing is a staple in any ecommerce company. Test your subject lines, content and the items your recommend.
Start looking into how you can get churned customers back.
Every company at some point will lose customers, but as your company becomes more established, you will want to start looking into how you can get churned customers to come back.
What measurements are important?
- You want to know your win back rate. This is a meaure of customers who came back and remained customers. A low rate means that there is something wrong with your reactivation strategy and changes need to be made.
- Keep track of your lifetime valued customers. If you are losing a high number of these customers, start here to get reactivation results.
Let’s start getting these customers back.
Don’t just automaticallystart discounting because then customers will only come back for the discounts.
- Understand why customers start coming back and turn into repeat customer’s again.This data will help you design an effect reactivation strategy.
- Start retargeting those who have looked but haven’t purchased. This is a great tool to use not just for acquisitions but also to get a customer to come back.
Its all about testing and measuring
Now that you have identified your weak area, it’s time to revisit and recreate your internet marketing strategy. Keep in mind what your customers are wanting, their behavior, and how your company effectively uses this information to rework and revise your internet marketing strategy to benefit your customers. Now you are ready to grow your online business with a successful internet marketing strategy!
