The days are over where you build it and they come, well truthfully there never were those days. However, it used to be easier to gain traffic to your online store. Competition online is increasing. Companies are starting to realize that marketing online is not an option, but rather necessary in today’s marketplace.
There are many companies that bit the bullet earlier and because of that they tapped their market share, but unfortunately many of them did not stay on top of their competition and the competition snuck up on them and now they are paying the price. It means revisiting and revising their ecommerce marketing plan and developing a strategy to tackle their competition in the online space. Are you in this situation?
It doesn’t matter whether you are new to ecommerce and marketing online or whether you’ve been doing it for years, but are starting to realize there is more potential and revenue than you are capturing. The reason I wanted to visit this topic is because I see a lot of companies that build their strategy backwards. There are steps you must take – in order and there are things you can do to gain the most benefit from your online presence.
Where do you start? How do you jumpstart your ecommerce marketing so that you can capture those online customers? The process isn’t difficult, but each step is important.
Five Steps to Revamp Your Ecommerce Marketing

• Step 1: Spend Time Reviewing Your Analytics
  It’s best if you can use the last 6 months of data to analyze. Where are your customers coming from? Have you seen an increase or decrease in traffic? What did you do in those duration of influx? Was there a promotion? Was it a busy shopping season for your specific product or service? You must know the answers to these questions. If you’ve seen an increase in traffic that’s fabulous, but perhaps that traffic is not converting like you think it should?You cannot get away from analytics when it comes to online marketing – it’s contains the pieces of your ecommerce puzzle. You must treat the data like your roadmap. Look at it weekly, better yet look at it daily and make it a part of your daily tasks that must be accomplished before you end the day.
  
  
• Step 2: Calculate Your Conversion
  You’ve analyzed the data, now it’s time to calculate your conversion rate. How many people that come to your website are being converted into new customers? If it’s under 5% you need to be concerned. Every online business should strive for a 10% conversion rate. Any lower than that you need to figure out what’s going on. Look at your data and see where you are losing them. Are they navigating throughout your website or are they leaving after landing on the homepage? This is the stuff you need to know.
• Step 3: A/B Multivariate Testing
  Once you see the problem areas it’s time to do some A/B multivariate testing. See where you are losing them and start to change things up. Perhaps add bigger images, change your placement of your call-to-action statement or revise and add compelling text. Test…test…test.

• There are a few things that you need to know about multivariate testing.
  • First off, don’t bother if you are not using analytics because the testing will not benefit you unless you know what happens.
  • You must understand your customer segments. What are they looking for? Understanding your customers will help you in creating customer landing pages and this can help in increasing your conversion rate.
  • Give your test enough time, don’t pull your test too soon – make sure you have enough data. The only way that you will know if you have enough data is by using multivariate A/B testing software or using a tool called SplitTester if you are using Google Adwords.
    
    
• Step 4: Evaluate and Increase Website Traffic
  Now, that you’ve looked at the patterns of your visitors, evaluated your conversion rate and learned how to do A/B multivariate testing it’s time to evaluate your traffic. How does it compare to your competitors? If you are not sure, I’ve got a tool for you. It’s the Compete toolbar. You can download this toolbar and visit your competitors and it will tell you the estimated traffic that they get. This is a great gauge to use to see where you stand when it comes to grabbing the market share that you are after. If you determine that your competitors traffic is much higher than yours you’ll want to find out where their traffic is coming from. Is it organic search, paid search or perhaps just a significant number of backlinks? It’s important to know this so you can plan your course of action in capturing your share of that traffic.
• Step 5: Increase Your Average Order Value
  How is your average order value? This is important. Once you’ve done testing, increased your conversion rate and increased your traffic you will want to work on increasing your average order value. You can do this by making suggestions to your customer as they checkout. You’ve probably seen this on other sites. For example, you are checking out and on the same page, it says “other customers that have purchased this also purchased this.” Don’t be afraid to make suggestions to your customers. After all think of it as putting that last minute item in the checkout isle in the brick and mortar retail shops.

Ecommerce takes a lot of work to grasp and analyze, but as you make it part of your daily routine, you will find that it starts to become natural. You will not only learn more about your customers, but you will also see an increase in the revenue generated from online sales.
Source: about.com