For most businesses, when they start trading online the best audience to approach is existing offline customers.

The quickest way for an eCommerce site to earn its money is to use it to transfer traffic from the phones/fax/email (all areas which mean you are paying staff to enter orders) to your online store. Allowing your customers to place their own orders online increases your efficiency and cuts costs in these areas.

Not only does that mean your customers are keying the orders in for you but also that they can now browse your full product range and buy 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Experience shows that when this is the case, average order values climb and re-order frequency increases.

How can you also target potential new customers to get them to start buying?

For most SME companies Search Engine Optimisation can be a frustrating escapade, unless you operate in a niche market offering a unique product or service it can be very time consuming and often fruitless.

Pay Per Click is more likely to get you seen in the search results, but make sure that you pick your search words or terms carefully, and set you budgets conservatively until you have some proven results. Google provide many tools to help you with this from their AdWords search tool, to full analytics that will allow you to see where your visitors are coming from and where they go on your site.

However, the most effective way to drive traffic from a targeted audience to your eCommerce site is to use effective email marketing. Clearly data is king here – but you should now have some staff resource to build a targeted database of email addresses. Then with an integrated email marketing system like the ProspectSoft eMail Marketing solution you will be able to target specific messages to the correct audience & follow up on results (clicks to your eCommerce site) tracking whether or not those customers purchased.

Let’s be clear here, the absolute key to leveraging all of these advantages is integration:

Integrated eCommerce

• to allow existing customers to use their credit account online
• to allow existing customer to receive their agreed special pricing online
• to avoid having your staff needing to re-key web orders

Integrated CMS (Content Management System)

• to allow you to have full control over your eCommerce key SEO data
• to allow integration to Google analytics for vital visitor intelligence

Integrated eMail Marketing

• to allow specific messages and appropriate targeted audience generation
• to allow full feedback for action on results from eMail campaigns