Ecommerce global surrounding turns rosy in 2004 and survey or research show the steadily increasing online purchaser population and e-business turns out a business with real profit.
Average spending per buyer is also rising and expected to keep this good state in the near future.
Great innovations can help maintain the leading place of business in the field.
1. Establish links with portal sites to let them refer and introduce targeted visitors to your sites. See an illustrating example on the deal between AOL and Software.net. Software agrees to give AOL $21 millions to trade for frequently positioning on AOL site’s commerce and software area. As the name shows, nowadays lots of surfers go to portals to find resources such as service, product, news and information. Although medium and small sized ecommerce site cannot pay that many bucks, the aggregation with portals is causing more attention and rising of new sites that make profit only by being portals and introducing referral is seen.
2. Sending Email with dynamic personalized contents to users is the new trend of email marketing. In current situation that customers get used to receive tons of email that only try to push product to them and with promotional content, this will help your business to:
•Impress customers about your organization and make you different
•Receive more feedback so as to achieve acquisition marketing in up-to-date style
•Bring repeating consuming actions to increase business revenue
It requires marketers to collect the highly personalized information from users in advance such as gender, education, children, marital status etc. And email software capable of database segmentation will replace the old standard ones to accomplish the job.
3. Image and visualization of products become a new hot strategy lately. A number of consumers feel reluctant to or simply give up buying since they cannot get complete graphic view of the product. It’s surprising that making color swapping of product images can catch more eyes and increase online sales. And dynamic images in email content will definitely be seen by recipients before they click delete button. Clickable swatches and zoom right pictures will also draw more attention than static text content. Companies like Scene7 are paying efforts to create new technology to let shoppers view the product in detail and customize many things when they look at the products.
4. Now search engine marketing is in a full bloom, online retailers are seeking new methods to bring shoppers to the site. The new innovation is the online social network. People expose personal information and contact information in online society, and they are one-step close to each other. This network provides opportunities to make friends as well as room for ecommerce advertising. Usually people turn to whom they know before they search in the yellow page or other impersonal marketing advice. This strategy is still in infant period and a clear picture on how to adopt is not yet formed.
5. Pay for performance promotion is widely adopted today. Typical examples are like pay-per-click by Google, the service provided to advertisers and publishers on affiliate network such as Be Free / Commission Junction. “Affiliate program” is no longer a new term, but Web Services on affiliate marketing leaves a large place for innovations. Web service avoids using browser; rather it uses open standard techniques like RSS to implement information exchange. Through the advanced data accessing to another website and receive remote techniques support, online transaction doesn’t have to be conducted in the online shop website itself. Imagine you are browsing a webpage about your favorite movie director Hitchcock and click on his name, you are directed to a DVD set of Hitchcock. Then you pay to buy the set without knowing you just bought goods from Amazon.com.
