As eCommerce platforms ramp up features to meet the needs of the savvy online buyer, retailers often struggle with effectively maintaining them. To be effective, retailers not only need the latest "frontend" merchandising capabilities, but "backend" systems that allow them to manage, what could be hundreds of promotions at any given time. Retails must have technology that gives their product teams the ability to manage the site proactively and reactively given the buying trends they experience.To be effective, retailers need the ability to:
1. Launch promotions quickly
2. Time promotions to buying events
3. Measure promotion success
The OrderDynamics On-Demand eCommerce Platform combines the latest frontend merchandising technology with a powerful scheduling engine and management metrics that gives retailers "point-and-click" control over website promotions.
Launch Promotions Fast
It is important the the eCommerce platform technology provides real-time ability to create, stage, test, and launch new promotions. Whether it is, for example, a new sale, bundles, eCast (email) campaigns, shipping discounts, or in-cart promotions, the platform should provide easy-to-use web interfaces designed for a product manager or marketing resource to make website changes easily. The platform should also provide XHTML access and a secure Content Management System (CMS) for advanced levels of access.
For mid-market to enterprise reatilers, the ability to stage these changes and test orders against a test gateway prior to going live (without impacting their timeline) is equally as important. Staging changes also allows marketings teams to pre-provision promotions, but leaving them inactive until needed.
Time Promotions "Scheduling"
To effectively time website changes to buying events, like Thanksgiving for example, retailers need more control than simply being able to launch promotions quickly. They require a sophisticated scheduling "engine" to create and manage hundreds of running promotions at a time, and on a per-website basis.
The scheduling system must allow for multiple website promotions to be running concurrently with status reports. Some of the important scheduling capabilities are: eCast (email) marketing, personalized content areas, site seach controls, product / brand / category content areas, coupons, overrides, free shipping amounts, etc. These scheduling and promotion tools must provide granular control at a per-product / brand / category and per eStore website basis. The system must provide control to activate and deactivate promotions on a particular date/time, date range, recurring date/time, and the ability to chain promotions.
With this level of control, retailers can start marketing to their Clients well before the event, making them more proactive and always on top of the next promotion.
Measure Success
Like any other successful sales and marketing program, eCommerce websites require detailed metrics that allow promotions to be managed effectively. It is important that the marketing team can measure the success of each promotion in-real time, and against other promotions across the website.
This isn't specifically about web analytics (Google, Omniture for example), although they play a role, it is about the metrics provided by the eCommerce platform. It is important the platform itself can produce metrics about the performance of a particular promotion. For example, the ability to track click-throughs and impressions on personalized content areas, tracking delivery and open rates of eCasts (emails) promotions, sales from referring websites, ads, keywords, and ability to trend sales across different promotions; all core requirements of mid-market to enterprise online retailers. And all of these must be viewable against sales / orders across a defined time period.
With the right metrics, retailers will have the business information needed to make decisions about the promotions running on the website.
Look at your eCommerce Platform
For retailers to stand a chance against the ever more savvy online buyer, they must take a close look at their eCommerce platform provider to determine their plans for making site promotions more effective. There many of "add on" services out there, but we feel the platform provider plays a key role in this area and should have, at a minimum, the tools and technologies available in this article for launching and managing promotions.
To learn more, please contact us today!
