Cream of Life

Sales and marketing are often linked and regarded as one single aspect that almost every business has. I was asked about this question one day: how do you view the relationship between online marketing and online sales?At the first sight, online marketing is pretty straight forward to understand, but the question is how I should understand the idea of “online sales”.

While online and offline marketing have the same goal of improving communication with target customers, they may differ in terms of marketing channels, tools, and metrics. Same for sales. Both online and offline sales aim at increasing the revenue for the business, but the means to achieve the goals are very different.

In the retail world or B2C business, offline sales efforts may involve cold calling, pitching and product consultation. Sales team simply reach out to your potential customers and show and discuss with them how your products or services resolves their problems. Online sales may appear to be more reactive, but instead focuses more on user experience of online store where transactions take place. The success of online sales relies on building a best-in-class online shop through website and conversion optimizations.

Optimizing the website may simply start with being relevant to users. It means showing every user coming in your site the right information on the right page at the position and at the right time. It involves your understanding of who your users are, where they are from, and what they expect to see on your site. One way to do so is to work with the SEM folks to ensure a relevance between the keywords they use and the landing pages they send users to. As part of site optimization, the bounce rate of different site sections is a good metric that should be reviewed regularly to check the relevance of the pages your users perceive.

The other idea to build a good e-commerce site to through optimizing conversion. The goals of conversion optimization are to address customers’ anxiety as they shop and improve their trust level with you as a retailer. One metric to measure success of conversion optimization is cart abandonment rate, and the fallout report of your SiteCatelyst or Google Analytics definitely can tell you a lot about it.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 11:03 am and is filed under E-commerce, Search Engine Marketing, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.