Using the retail ecommerce site as a marketing distribution platform

With millions of unique visitors, opting in to the experience, and actively engaged in a search of some kind.....doesn't it make sense for retail marketers to view their ecommerce site as a marketing platform? Not just a place to transact business online with consumers. A channel or platform for the distribution of marketing communications to consumers. And if that makes sense, what type of marketing communication should this platform distribute? Will it be as simple as repurposing content created for television or print? Or is there a unique type of retail-centric marketing media singularly designed and optimized for the ecommerce site?

Before these questions can be addressed, the initial objective is to alter the view within retail organizations as to value of their ecommerce sites. Yes, selling merchandise online is a vital and appropriate focus, particularly when brick & mortar growth is so hard to come by and online growth still seems achievable. And with that fact in mind, it's even harder to expect retailers to shift their perceptions about the value of the website to communicate with brick and mortar shoppers.

But stop and think for a moment. Despite all the gains in ecommerce traction, visit rate and conversion, for most sites, over 90% of all visitors leave without completing a transaction. Certainly much of this has to do with the nature of a shopping behavior cycle (from awareness through to purchase) requiring multiple exposures and current comparison shopping trends. However, retailer's own data indicates that well over half of their online visitors shop their stores. So if a given retailer has 10 million monthly uniques, and 50% of those shop their stores, that's a chance to influence 5 million monthly unique PERFECTLY TARGETED consumers.

Moving to the point of this post. Let's assume,for the moment, that using the ecommerce website as a uniquely powerful distribution platform has been adopted by the retailer's marketing braintrust. The next question is what type of content is appropriate for that platform? Because content MUST be produced specific to a platform. No one thinks that the audio track for a television commercial works as a radio spot. No one thinks that the text of a radio spot works as catalog copy. In fact, each traditional form of consumer communication is understood to require it's own unique approach to content. The same is absolutely true of content distributed through the ecommerce site. And not just "content distributed over the internet". That's a generalized as "all print copy is the same". It's not. The ecommerce site requires a very unique, very specialized approach to content development.

Future Merchants has a powerful point of view on this....please see the white paper at http://futuremerchants.com/news/White%20Paper_ETAIL_FINAL.pdf