Miguel Angel Tolsa
A Story of Success
In 2011, one of our newest clients made up his mind to enter (in a shy and very distrustful way) the Inbound Marketing world and make it a part of his whole marketing strategy. We also helped him see that, because of the kind of products that he sold, working with the E-Commerce global trend would mean a great deal for his success, so he decided that he build his website be as close as possible to an eCommerce page. By as close as possible we mean that everything was ready for it but... he just wasn't ready to sell online. His main reason was that, since he owned a fashion brand, his site could lose class and style, which just didn't make sense to me since, at that time, great fashion brands owned and worked with E-Commerce sites.
Anyhow, we built an amazing and groudbreaking site with Volusion (there are now many other great options, such as Shopify) and hosted the blog on Hubspot. When our Hubspot contact realized what we were doing, he said that his platform was built for B2B businesses, not for E-commerce and, as far as I can recall, he didn't predict good results for us. In spite of such a bad forecast, we kept on going and in the end, we realized we had found the perfect match. The Hubspot staff thinks differently now.
What Does Working with E-Commerce Imply?
A well-managed eCommerce site implies a considerable amount of work. What you are actually building is a store, but just online. Uploading product inventories can be complex since you must describe the characteristics that each product has in-depth (measurements, pictures from different angles, different colors available, etc.) so that customers have enough information to make the right decision for them.
This client of ours offered 200 new products each month, as he had decided to adopt the "Zara" (from Inditex Group) cicle of fashion change, that is, not to have 4 seasons per year, but 6. If you want to be successful with such an ambitious strategy, communication with the storage and inventory areas is key. There are systems that can now communicate the storage warehouse directly to the virtual stores.
Other Aspects to Consider:
- You must develop special offers and sales that go hand in hand with your on-site retail stores.
- The proper delivery method or store-collection system is key for your business to work at its 100%.
Our client's website began to grow at a surprising rate, and not only in the number of pages that were created but in the number of visitors that were visiting the site as well: Monthly visits went from about 200 to 33,000 in just a couple of months. Of course, sales also began increase. This great success was made possible because we paired it with an Inbound Marketing strategy: We worked considering its 4 steps (attract, convert, close and delight) and used its tools:
- Buyer persona: Build smart profiles/models of the people that you want to reach or that you know could become your buyers
- Content: Specialized blogs, videos, eBooks. This premium content is created in order to generate more visits, make it as Google's best answers and design a buyer's journey, that is, an informational road that your buyer will travel while he's led by you to close the deal.
- Conversion roads: Call-to-Action buttons, Landing pages and Thank you pages.
- Email Marketing Campaigns: They must be written with the right language (speak your customers language, one that matches their profile) and delivered at the right time, so they aren't considered spam by those who receive them.
- Adjust the sales funnel of the company to the strategy.
- And be extremely assertive with SEO.
The Marketing Director and his team (1 community manager in charge of posting on social networks pictures and phrases such as "Wednesday, belly-button of the week") could not believe the success, so they asked for evidence that would prove that the Inbound campaign was the one generating all the visits to the site which indeed, turned into sales.
As we couldn't prove it with the site's info -since the didn't want to actually sell on it- we created code-redemption-at-store strategies so we could count with specific amounts of money and measure the ROI. One month after, we had all the numbers we needed in order to prove the success of our campaigns.
So, to our title's question we'll answer yes, E-Commerce and Inbound Marketing work great together. Now, your Sales and Marketing funnels must be perfectly aligned so you can hop on this global trend of a proven growth.
Does your company have an E-commerce site? Do you want to learn more about how to pair it with an Inbound Marketing strategy in order to increase its success? Talk to a DataBrander and we will help you work on your growth strategy.
