Planning to open an online store? The sales outsourcing company, AOB India, believes it as a strong business growth strategy. With the unpredictable market scenario, online store seems to be the easiest and the safest way to presume business. And once that you have taken the decision, let’s talk money! You will have to invest at the correct level to drive traffic, and for many brands or retailers that translates to maybe 8-15% of revenue – it depends on the market, product, and how established the business is. The trick will be to develop a marketing blueprint that builds your organic traffic, forms your loyal customer base while also funding new customer acquisition through paid advertising.

Use Analytics to Understand the Value of Your Sales

Assuming that you have correctly set up your web analytics, then the starting point for this process is to understand the value of every sale. That means looking at both revenue and margin, or the lifetime value of every new customer, as that tells you what you can afford to spend to acquire that sale. When you know the cost per acquisition, you can determine what sort of return you need from each of your marketing investments. For eCommerce sites with large catalogs, you need to understand this at least at the product-category level but preferably at the individual product level.

The sales consultancy, AOB India, frequently meets clients who have then put all their advertising activity into one channel, either Facebook or Google Paid Search, for example. For smaller clients, that might be ok due to limits on the available budget to invest, but for most cases, it takes a mix of different channels – to arrive at the most optimized solution. The sales outsourcing company in India believes, when you have multiple campaigns in the market, then it is increasingly important to understand how they interact with each other. Up until recently, most analytics gave all the credit to the channel that created the last click before the customer purchased. In reality, a customer might have seen a Facebook ad after opening an email or SMS and then did a Google search before purchasing. So it’s essential to understand the entire modeling and how to use it between your different channels.

The sales consultancy in India, AOB India, has worked in creating sales and marketing funnels for various clients. They know that people go through three phases.
1. Awareness – where they learn about your Brand/Store
2. Consideration – where they engage with your Brand/Store
3. Conversion – They purchase from your Brand/Store

So, your campaign planning should account for these three stages. Each business will have a different set of priorities at different times, and the campaign plan or marketing blueprint needs to adapt to those priorities.
Here are some general guidelines and thoughts:

• Make sure you are at least capturing any business that already exists out there for you.
• Ensure your site is optimized for Generic Search engine traffic. Because, in almost every case, this optimization is always a long-running project, and cannot be overlooked.

Use Google Paid Search as an Interim Strategy

A pro-tip given by the sales consultants and strategists –SEO takes time to build traffic, so in the short term, to drive immediate traffic, you should use Google Paid Search. However, this can be expensive in the early days of a store. So, your first objective should be to develop a campaign that at least breaks-even in terms of cost versus revenue generated. Once you have achieved that, then you can start to expand it out and scale it up. Initially, you will need to decide a budget that you can afford to invest as a two to three-month discovery project. It needs to be big enough to deliver you at least 10k-20k clicks. If you cannot get to that breakeven point in the first three months, then pause it to return to it at a later stage. You may need to address the conversion rate of your site to improve the return, but at least you will have more information about what people are searching for. Alternatively, you may need to use Google Search and Specific landing pages to focus your effort on selling a particular product or category at the right time – especially if there is some element of seasonality to some of your product sales.

Email, SMS and WhatsApp marketing is the next priority, and there are three things to ensure:

1. Build a content plan that engages your audience and is not just a series of promotions and discounts.
2. Segment your list to send the right content to people who have not bought from you versus those that have.

To grow your business, you either need to find new customers, have your existing customers buy more frequently, or increase the average amount that they spend. Finding new customers tends to be more expensive than nurturing those you already have.

Grow Your Lead List

Once you are capturing the right customers who already know you and are most likely to purchase from you, your attention can move to how to build awareness of your store and brand. The client acquisition team of AOB India believes that you want to reach as many people as possible in as affordable a way as possible. You have to remember that generally, people need to see between 4 to 8 ads before they will engage at all with your store. This is where we would typically use Facebook, YouTube, or Programmatic Display to grow the visibility of your brand. Your Facebook campaigns should start with the mission to introduce yourself to your audience. The creative needs to be ‘thumb-stopping’ and educational. This is where the short-form video is essential. It gives you the ability to talk about what you do and, more importantly, why you do it and why the person watching this should buy from you – selling a specific product comes later.

So there are two things you need to take away. Firstly, if you are running an e-store, then you have to invest at the right level in demand generation activity to be successful. Secondly, there are always more things to do than you or your team can reasonably take on in one go. You need to develop the right Digital Marketing blueprint that recognizes your ability to invest in these tactics. Generally, this is a balance between time/speed and money. The more budget you have available to spend, then the faster you can go.

If you start by understanding the required economics of your campaigns in terms of where your break-even point is, then you have an excellent starting point. That way, you know you are never wasting a budget.
Having a blueprint to follow and a partner who can look over your entire spectrum of digital activities and help you develop that blueprint are essential. Growing and scaling an e-store business is something that has to improve every day. Just when you think you have it cracked, something will change in the environment – a new competitor will emerge, someone with insanely aggressive pricing will try to buy market share, the market tastes will change, and so on. You are open to more outside influences more quickly in the online world. Understanding your roadmap, interpreting what your data is telling you, and making the right changes are all part of the journey. Digital sales is an exciting space, exhausting at times, but exhilarating when you see the success.