Retail Marketers are not using their ecommerce sites fully!

This posting is NOT intended for the executives responsible for the operation and maintenance of the ecommerce site of a multi-channel retailer. It is NOT intended for the executives evaluated solely on producing online sales through the ecommerce site. It IS intended for executives responsible for the marketing budget of multi-channel retailers....particularly those held accountable for measurable impact on sales volume across all channels.

Getting acceptable ROI's from existing methods of driving volume for key items in the assortment is becoming more and more difficult. Every retailer I've worked for or with has had some level of awareness that circulars, inserts and direct mail ALL are diminishing in ROI....to one extent or another.

Here's an answer: use your website to MARKET to your target consumers, not just try to sell specific things to them. Your ecommerce people have done an amazing job of creating effective nav tools, easy to use search options, and are working on individualized product recommendations and display results. Yet.....a huge percentage of the visitors to your site leave without buying anything. Let's market to THOSE people. What are they looking for? Information is one of the top reasons consumers visit ecommerce sites and then leave...they look for it, fail to find it, and search elsewhere. And here's the kicker: once a consumer has become self-educated about the products they need to fulfill their needs.....it's all about price. Yuck.

The problem may not be in understanding that with millions of visitors to your site you have an opt-in audience that MUST be marketed to. The problem may be in HOW to market to that audience without impacting the main purpose of the site - transacting business. Well, maybe the answer is that the main purpose of the site SHOULDN'T be to simply transact online business. Rather, it should be to drive business across all channels. This opens up a lot more area for discussion.

Beyond that, there are technologies available today that make marketing messages deliverable to the consumer without impacting any of your existing nav patterns. Check out Future Merchant's RetailTV® technology.....it's an amazing platform designed to make delivery of the most powerful marketing media available (VIDEO), easy, seamless, and completely integrated. Worth looking into?