Big-Ticket E-Commerce Marketing StrategyBlueport.com

If you’re an ecommerce marketer in the 2010s, then your marketing efforts likely span multiple channels: SEO, pay-per-click, banner ads, retargeting banner ads, email, social media and more. Like so many others, you are doing more with fewer resources and with a higher need to show your return on investment.

Determining ROI Begins with Multichannel Analysis

What are you doing to determine which of your channels are working the best for you? Here at Blueport Commerce, our multichannel analysis begins with tracking, tracking and more tracking. We tag and track everything, but we also know even that does not give us the full picture.

Today’s marketers and analysts must be forensic scientists, piecing together the information from our multiple channels with an overlay of our own site data and sometimes even gut instinct. And in this multichannel world, beyond data, we need to communicate a story.

Use Multichannel Analysis to Tell the Marketing Story

Perhaps someone makes a purchase seemingly through a pay-per-click ad on search. That’s not surprising, since the majority of consumers begin their online shopping at search engines. But is it solely that pay-per-click text ad that sealed the deal?

With a little further analysis, you may find that user also saw your banner ad the day before on a news site and received an email from you earlier that week. Does this make pay-per-click more valuable than your other marketing channels, or does this tell you that there is a buildup that crescendos by being in front of the consumer at the right place and the right time?

From my perspective, it's different channels working together to make the sale. As time progresses, we'll likely learn that different marketing combinations better attract a certain type of customer or more quickly lead to different types of conversions. But one thing is for sure: Putting all your marketing eggs in one basket is not the best strategy in this  multichannel age.