Part 5–A Look at the Marketing Component of Our E-Commerce Website

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Okay, welcome back to Part 5 of Lesson 1 of the Build Your Own E-Commerce Web Site tutorial series. In Part 5 of this lesson we’re going to take a look at the Marketing element of the site.
The Marketing element here consists of capturing the email of our customers, providing a value to our customers in exchange for that email and then following up with those potential customers with an email marketing campaign. The trick to all of this is always capturing the email for every transaction that we do with our customers. We want to capture the email when we make a Product Sale. We want to capture the email when they make an Inquiry of us and we want to capture their email when they request a Free Sample.

Obtain Customers Email in Exchange for Value

You can see those elements here on the site. Here’s our free sample. If we go to “Customer Support” then we have this inquiry element. Capturing the email during the product sale is a native part of the WordPress E-Commerce plugin that we’ll be using. Once we’ve directed them into this email funnel what we’re going to do is we’re going to be getting that email address. Once we’ve gotten the email address we’re going to confirm it. Once that email address is confirmed and validated then we’re going to provide the service.

AWeber Email Marketing System

The tool that we’re going to use for our email funnel is AWeber. AWeber is a very powerful email marketing system. I’ve used others and I’m involved with others with clients but I think that AWeber really has the most flexible, the most feature rich system and its price is competitive with everybody else. So we’ll be using AWeber for that purpose and we’re going to learn how to create forms. We’re going to use those forms to capture the emails and to validate the emails and then once those emails are validated we’re going to put those emails in various lists.

In order to be able to get these emails from our customers what we’re really doing is we are exchanging their permission to market to them for something of value. And in this case we are either exchanging it for information that they want to have, or we are exchanging it for a free e-book or we are exchanging it for a preview of one of the books that they may be ordering. I think this is a very effective way both of convincing the customer to purchase the book and also of capturing their email for later marketing. In all of these cases we’re going to, in exchange for their email address and their permission to send them emails, provide them with something that they consider to be of value.

Automating the System

When we do this we want a lot of this stuff to be automatic. For example we want them to automatically be able to download this first chapter of a book rather than us having to send them a link. And so our system is going to provide that for them. Our system will provide them with an encrypted download link for these things and it will do so both for the free products and also for the fee-based products. And the email validation will also be automatic.

Then the final part of this is to have an email marketing system where when they sign up for something they get an email from us. When we have product sales or specials or new product announcements we can send these to the people on our list and hopefully convert them from a recipient of our email into an actual customer.

And that wraps up Part 5 of Lesson 1 of the Build Your Own E-Commerce Web Site tutorial series. In the sixth and final part of this lesson we will be taking a look at the user experience component of this site.

1. By: byobwebsite
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4. Added :04-Jan-11
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