John Tackett

Email Marketing: Don’t let email own the ecommerce showroom floor

July 11th, 2014

According to the MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Study (free download at that link), email was one of the most frequent sources of ecommerce traffic for organizations across every revenue range.

Email marketing being at the forefront of ecommerce marketing tactics is quite obvious when you consider the mass of storefronts that greet you with an email squeeze before you can even get to the shelves.

channels-drive-growth

 

It works, but only to a degree. According to Ben Pressley, Head of Worldwide Sales, Magento, there is one big problem.

Ben, who was accompanied with Pete Prestipino, Editor-in-Chief, Website Magazine, joined Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS, at MarketingSherpa’s Media Center at IRCE to discuss the state of ecommerce in 2014.

As Ben explained, email now owns the showroom floor because it’s where a lot of organizations attribute revenue, perhaps even when they shouldn’t.

“Email and search are the two top channels in marketing, no surprise there,” Ben explained, “But I think we would classify that as having the approach of last-touch attribution, where you’re giving credit to the channel that didn’t necessarily stimulate the demand; you’re giving the credit to the channel that brought you the sale.”

 

Success in email marketing can have a hidden cost

Ben also made a great point that although email is a successful tactic in ecommerce, you don’t want to reach the point where your storefront becomes a pseudo list building tool.

In this case, making a tradeoff between customer inboxes at the expense of customer experience has the potential of delivering a hidden cost of potentially limiting growth in different channels in the long term.

“The more you go down this path of really banking on this channel,” Ben said, “I think you start to narrow what you can do with your site and your business.”

To hear more insights from Ben and Pete on the state the ecommerce, you can watch the on-demand replay of the webinar interview in the MarketingSherpa webinar archive.

 

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  1. July 14th, 2014 at 19:08 | #1

    The argument of giving the credit to the last touch has been around for hundreds of years and never holds up under research.

    It’s always been an excuse for non effective marketers to justify their existence.

    There’s an old saying: “It’s not a sale until you have the cheque in your hands'”

    Closing a sale or deal is a skill. That’s why the “touch” that makes the sale gets the credit. That’s why great salespeople get such great commissions – they get results.

    Creating awareness is one thing, but stimulating demand enough so that it results in a sale is quite another.

    Good marketers and advertisers know pretty quickly if a campaign or channel is working or not.

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