E-commerce and e-marketing – what’s the difference?

Marketing continues to be an ever-evolving field, with advancements every single year. Companies are finding more effective ways of connecting individuals to products. The newest trend? Personalized marketing.

Personalized marketing are campaigns tailored to a consumer’s interests and demographics — by leveraging data and digital technology, a marketer can target and tailor ads that will be extremely relevant to the consumer’s interests, and almost guarantee a sale/conversion.

But where does it go after basic personalization? One-to-one marketing.

E-commerce and e-marketing are both widely used in the digital marketing world as they have been gaining popularity over the past few years.

Although the only obvious feature bonding them together is being related to the digital world, they are often colluded and interchanged. But are they truly the same?

The short answer is no. They are not the same, but it doesn’t mean they live in separate universes. In fact, they have a lot in common, interpenetrate each other and one impacts the other, but these are not exchangeable terms.

Once you read this article, you will know:

• what is e-commerce and e-marketing,
• what is the difference between e-commerce and e-marketing,
• what is the relationship between e-commerce, e-marketing and e-business,
• what are examples of e-commerce and e-marketing landing pages.

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An ecommerce marketing plan is your schedule for the activities included in your strategy. It’s a road map for how you’ll achieve your ecommerce marketing goals.

When starting out, keep it simple. Choose a few marketing tactics that fit your brand and that you can set up easily.

What does a marketing plan for ecommerce look like?

Here’s a breakdown of your first year’s marketing activities that will create brand awareness, attract customers, and keep them buying.

• Set up lead generation e.g. email signup forms or website registration
• Work with social media influencers to popularize your brand
• Improve SEO on site
• Add paid search activities — Google Shopping, PPC to catch people who might go to the competition
• Engage existing customers through email to keep them interested with content and offers
• Prepare for important ecommerce events when your target market expects promotions — Black Friday, the holiday marketing season, Mother’s/ Father’s/ Valentine’s Day, back to school, summer vacation, spring break, national holidays, etc.
• Test various marketing campaigns to see what works for your product and ideal customers. Reuse what works and don’t waste money on what doesn’t.

Strategies, Tips, and Tactics for E-Commerce Marketing

If you’re not using data-driven marketing, what are you doing?

Data is a fundamental part of advertising and allows online businesses to connect with customers in the right place, at the right time, with the right offering. By taking a data-driven approach to e-commerce marketing, digital commerce teams can accurately personalize content, target audiences appropriately, and benchmark e-commerce data to improve strategies over time.

Personalize the Customer Experience

Personalized offers and content work to improve customer loyalty, increase active customer revenue, and drive customer retention. A good personalization engine will use artificial intelligence to deliver 1:1 product recommendations, purchase predictions, individualized offers, and ensure optimized send times.

The ability to reach customers at the right time with the right content allows e-commerce marketing teams to increase the likelihood of purchase and drive revenue. In fact, when Salling Group leveraged product recommendations and automated audiences in their omnichannel campaigns, the strategy produced 25% revenue growth in just 5 weeks. 1:1 personalized marketing is key.

User-Generated Content (UGC) is Your Friend

Your e-commerce customers are online and they’re talking about you. Whether you realize it or not, this sort of raw, authentic content is extremely valuable in building customer trust and priming interest amongst potential consumers.

Develop a Customer Loyalty Program

Loyal customers are your best asset. They add value to and grow your business through word of mouth marketing, social sharing, and more. They even spend 67% more on products and services when compared to new customers. So, why not reward them with a stellar loyalty program?

Offer your e-commerce customers a unique, mobile-friendly complement to their online shopping experience with a customer loyalty program. It can be points-based, spend-based, subscription-based, or something different. Whatever it may be, be sure to combine your loyalty program with your current marketing initiatives and customer data insights to truly personalize the online e-commerce experience and retain your loyal e-commerce buyers.

Invest in a Customer Engagement Platform

Be sure to check that the platform you use has the ability to enrich your data with AI and predictive intelligence. Get that right and you’ll have the data at hand to know what’s working and why, and the superpower of being able to predict what to do next based on past performance.

What is e-commerce and e-marketing

E-commerce refers to the selling and purchasing of products and services using the Internet, the money and data transfer to finalize transactions.

The e-commerce meaning is often limited to selling physical products online, but the truth is that it can describe any commercial transaction that is done or facilitated by the Internet.

Therefore, e-commerce entails all the activities, both direct and indirect, that lead to making transactions with customers. It encompasses areas such as web design, web hosting, marketing, consulting, accounting services, or credit card processing.

E-marketing definition

On the other hand, e-marketing (or digital marketing) is a process of planning, executing, distributing, promoting and pricing of goods and services in a networked environment (the Internet and the World Wide Web) aimed at facilitating, exchanging and fulfilling customers’ expectations. Its major advantages over traditional marketing are that it is more convenient for customers, offers more competitive prices and allows businesses to reduce costs.

It entails a plethora of online activities that aim at promoting businesses, their products or services. It can be creating SEO-friendly websites, social media activity, elaborating a video marketing strategy or analyzing the Google Analytics data for marketing purposes. Basically, all the digital activities with promotional purposes or aiming at building a relationship with customers can be referred to as e-marketing.

It is worth noting that e-marketing actions may aim at increasing sales and thus have the same focus as e-commerce does, but it is not obligatory.

For example, you can run a social media marketing campaign aimed at boosting sales of your recently launched e-book. It is an e-marketing campaign as you use digital means in order to promote your product. Nevertheless, it also refers to an e-commerce activity since you aim at making a deal with potential customers.

E-Commerce Marketing Challenges

In an age where ease and convenience reign supreme, customer expectations are always growing. E-commerce customers expect a level of personalization and individual treatment that largely surpasses expectations they might have for the traditional brick-and-mortar experience. Additionally, the e-commerce space is saturated with a plethora of choices, which creates a high level of competition that all online businesses must navigate.

So what is an online marketer to do? Here’s how to overcome your most pressing e-commerce marketing challenges:

Siloed, Muddled, Lost, and Disjointed Data

Data is everywhere and e-commerce marketers are inundated with data that, frankly, they don’t know what to do with. Often, marketers will invest in multiple technologies that serve different purposes and end up siloing data. Ultimately, this creates more work.

In order to be successful, e-commerce marketing teams must leverage a single, comprehensive customer data solution that unites data and technology, providing a holistic 360-degree view of available data. Unified data will reveal the clearest picture of your customers and allow your marketing team more time to focus on strategy, content, and creative.

Underwhelming E-Commerce Conversion Rates

The age-old pass time of window shopping has evolved into e-commerce browsing for many online consumers. The majority of e-commerce companies focus a considerable amount of spend on attracting traffic to their websites, but they often forget to push toward the end goal: conversions. The average conversion rate for e-commerce sites is just 2.86%, so there’s certainly room for improvement.

In order to increase conversions, focus on personalization, omnichannel campaigns, and offering incentives.

One-Time Buyers

The cost of acquiring a new customer is five times more expensive than the cost of retaining an existing customer. So, one-time buyers are a major source of monetary losses.

E-commerce marketers must focus on turning first-time buyers into repeat, loyal customers, and make retention a core e-commerce marketing strategy. Retention campaigns that focus on winning back defecting customers or those with abandoned carts, along with loyalty programs that offer incentives for making multiple purchases, can be of great help.

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Based on your industry, the size of your business, and other variables, you can determine benchmarking criteria by which to measure the impact of your marketing. There’s a number of resources you can use to gain insight into industry standards, and once you’ve acquired and analyzed these standards, you can see how your business stacks up against the competition. Falling behind in a certain category? Adjust your e-commerce strategy accordingly.

Execute Your Strategy Step-By-Step

You will not gain success if you try to throw every e-commerce marketing tactic at your audience all at once. Just as batch-and-blast emails don’t always work, neither does an overwhelming marketing blitz.

Keep Going

E-commerce marketing is a cyclical process. It does not stop after you acquire a new customer, or after an existing customer makes a purchase. So keep going.

Evaluate and revitalize your e-commerce marketing strategies in order to stay ahead. Everyday, there are new innovations, new trends, and new ideas that can be leveraged to entice and delight customers, both new and existing. Always be on the lookout for the next big idea in e-commerce marketing.

Can One-To-One Marketing Improve My Business?

If executed well, yes. It can increase customer spending by up to 500%. However, it will all depend on the social and behavioral data that you collect and how you are willing to use it.

In short, it will eliminate the use of expensive media and promotion to give you a direct communication channel to your customer. This lowers the cost of resources and helps increase overall sales. Need more proof:

Ten quick one-to-one marketing statistics

Display ads can re-engage people who have visited your site and bounced. These ads are displayed on other sites throughout the web. Look at Google’s Display Network or Outbrain to reach your customers throughout the internet.

Social Media

You can personalize a website for repeat visits using an account system that can encourage purchasing behavior — think of consumer sites, like Target or Amazon, that tailor offerings when you visit their website.

Email

Segment your email database to deliver different content to groups or individualize. This can be done using a tool like MailChimp, Marketo, and Hubspot.

The Problem with One-to-One Marketing

The problem is that one-to-one marketing is impossible to achieve manually. Marketers that attempt to achieve the above kinds of tactics manually may find some minimal and isolated success but ultimately become crazed and overworked — driving themselves mad, like elves frantically and furiously breaking their backs to create, wrap, and organize every Christmas gift without an assembly line to help mechanize the process.

When you want to achieve one-to-one marketing at scale across gigantic databases of hundreds of thousands of contacts, this requires specialized technology that can handle massive amounts of customer data and crank out intelligent outputs.

What is Ecommerce Marketing? Essential to Ecommerce Success.

You see that without ecommerce marketing, your online store pretty much doesn’t exist. The only way to get the word out, to attract customers, and to generate (repeat) sales is through intentional marketing activities.

Ready to get started? Check out Sendinblue for all the tools to kickstart your ecommerce marketing strategy. Try transactional and promotional email campaigns, SMS, automation, and live chat — all on our free plan. Plus plugins for major ecommerce platforms make it easy to link Sendinblue to your online store.

To make sure your ecommerce marketing stays top-notch year-round, download our 2022 holiday marketing calendar! It’s full of important dates and helpful marketing advice for every month of the year ⏬

2023 Holiday Marketing Calendar

Downloading this calendar means you’re signing up to our monthly newsletter, too. If you don’t feel like getting regular marketing tips delivered to your inbox, you can always unsubscribe. 😉

What is the relationship between e-commerce, e-marketing and e-business

When talking about e-commerce vs e-marketing, it is also good to mention e-business.

Click the image to view source

E-business is the broadest term encompassing e-commerce and e-marketing activities, but also customer relationship management (CRM) or supply chain management (SCM). Simply put, e-business takes advantage of networked infrastructure to run a business that allows it to reach a global audience, improve customer service or develop a product offer using digital means.

Therefore, e-business entails both e-commerce and e-marketing. These three are very closely tight and interpenetrate each other, but as you can see they should not be used interchangeably.

What is the difference between e-commerce and e-marketing

The primary objective of e-commerce is to finalize transactions between businesses and customers, while e-marketing is a broader term encompassing a whole spectrum of activities and its main objective is not necessarily making a sale.

Although you can run promotional activities under e-commerce, including e-marketing ones, you will always have sales at the top of mind. Some e-marketing actions can also be focused on encouraging the target audience to purchase your products or services, but you can also run e-marketing campaigns aimed at increasing brand awareness or customer base, promoting events or testing some innovative marketing activities.

E-marketing entails all the promotional activities done in a networked environment when e-commerce has a purely transactional goal that is always connected to selling and purchasing.

Overcoming Common One-to-One Marketing Challenges

The majority of modern-day marketing suites tend to enable some level of personalization or customization, but only on a channel-by-channel lens.

This siloed approach limits the capabilities, creativity potential, and visibility of marketing teams, and, most importantly, almost always causes a fragmented customer experience.

To overcome this common technological limitation, these brands often find that communications work best when they’re calculated and executed based on singular customer events (defined, isolated instances like a customer making a purchase, or implicit events like customer churn and attrition).

The best one-to-one, omnichannel experiences are built in engines that are channel-agnostic, ensuring every interaction is unique, containing the best content, independent of channel.

For example, a platform that consolidates all web, mobile, email and purchase information into a unified customer profile would include preferences, behavior trends, predicted behaviors, propensities, and affinities for individuals. This unified customer profile is the “single source of truth,” the foundation for which hyper-personalization can begin to take place across all channels.

Personalization engines understand the nature of individual events, and they can associate context with events, then choose relevant content (without any channel-specific styling), and ultimately syndicate that output via the preferred channel of the customer.

If this sounds far-fetched, complicated, or too techy, rest assured that it’s the only way by which true one-to-one is happening today. By working with the machine (in essence, AI, as we get to below) you VASTLY simplify this process — relying, as it is, on the genius of the machine to take over the pulling of the strings in your show. Now, you don’t have to understand the ins and outs of the machine for this stuff to work. But if you want to pull back the curtain just a tad, read on.

What Are the Types of Ecommerce Marketing?

Ecommerce marketing spans virtually all digital marketing channels as well as some offline, traditional ones:

• Search engines
• Social media
• Email marketing
• SMS
• On-site
• Owned media like blogs
• Non-owned online publications and podcasts
• Offline marketing e.g. print, TV spots

Let’s look at the ecommerce marketing strategies most popular among ecommerce marketers. You’ll get a full picture of the many possibilities to help you decide which best fit your brand.

Ecommerce SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is making your website more visible and easily discoverable on search engines (Google, Bing, etc.). It’s mostly about adding keywords to your site copy that potential customers would use when searching for products like yours. Then, the search engine recognizes you have what they want and shows you high in the results.

This way, you capture people with high purchase intent — like someone searching for “men’s white linen shirt”. It’s also a chance to convert people who don’t know your brand. Finally, SEO is a free way of marketing your ecommerce business.

Ecommerce SEO should be done on product page copy, your home page (meta description too), and FAQ page. Starting a blog will also help boost your SEO. There, you can answer potential buyers’ questions such as, “How to wash a linen shirt?”

Email marketing

All you have to do is choose an email marketing service. Then, you can start building your email list and sending them email campaigns. The main features to look for are:

Looking for a platform to manage all your ecommerce emails in one place?

Check out Sendinblue’s ecommerce email marketing software. From transactional messages to automated journeys and list segmentation, it’s all on our free plan. Plus you’ll get unlimited contacts and up to 300 free email sends a day.

The more you know about your subscribers, the more relevant email campaigns you can send. A CRM added to your email tool will enable you to reach everyone at the right time with the right offer.

There are many types of emails you can send to engage and convert your subscribers:

• Welcome email — like onboarding to your website and brand
• Abandoned cart email — reminds the customer they’ve added something to their shopping cart but haven’t purchased, a gentle nudge to complete the checkout
• Post-purchase email — continue building a relationship with the customer to stimulate more orders
• Upsells and cross-sells — email offers with products related to past purchases
• Win back email — reactivating an idle customer who hasn’t ordered anything in a long time
• Loyalty reward email — thank your loyal customers with an extra perk, a next-level discount, or a freebie
• VIP offer email — engage VIP customers with a special offer just for them to make them feel appreciated
• Ecommerce newsletter — a regular update on your brand and products so you stay top-of-mind

If you’re unsure where to start, here’s our email marketing checklist and tips on how to build your ecommerce email strategy.

An example of a post-purchase email with the simple goal of making the buyer feel even better. Source

Conversion rate optimization

The measures you take to convert as many site visitors as possible is called conversion rate optimization. You’ve worked hard and/or paid for your traffic so you want it to result in sales. Traffic without revenue is nothing.

There are various tactics you can use on your website to drive sales:

• Push notifications
• Live chat
• Choosing guides
• VR fitting and placement tools e.g. for fashion or furniture

To dive deeper, check out our guide to ecommerce optimization.

Live chat helps convert site visitors just like a sales assistant in a physical store

SMS marketing

SMS marketing is sending text messages for promotional purposes. It’s best for alerts, updates, and time-limited offers that need to be read immediately.

An example would be an automated SMS with a special discount going out on the morning of a customer’s birthday. Shipping updates are another key ecommerce communication that works well for SMS.

Just keep in mind that you need the contact’s permission to send them SMS. Also, some countries regulate this kind of marketing heavily so check before you send.

SMS marketing is great for limited-time offers

Organic social media marketing

Paid social media marketing

Ad formats vary depending on the social media platform. You’ll have to test them to find what works best for your ecommerce store.

Then, there’s influencer marketing — paying popular people on social media to promote your products. They can help you reach difficult audiences like eco-conscious moms or hardcore perfume fans. They also represent the product as part of a lifestyle so it enhances the brand image.

Search advertising

• Pay-per-click (PPC, Google AdWords) — appear on top of search results for chosen keywords, e.g. “recycled shoes”
• Google shopping — a free service where you can list your entire product range with images and prices, and directly capture high-intent shoppers
• Display campaigns (banner ads on sites) — based on searches and browsing behavior so the potential customer sees your ad for “cat tree” on a news site, for example, after browsing for one

An example of an AdWords campaign, Source

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is an interesting part of ecommerce marketing. It relies on a network of affiliates, or referrers, who drive traffic to your online store and get paid for each sale they help make.

Partnerships

You can join forces with other companies in the form of a partnership to extend your reach to their audience as well. It’s an effective marketing strategy for lifestyle ecommerce brands with overlapping target customers.

For example, you can agree to swap email lists so each brand connects with more potential customers. Just label the email campaign properly so subscribers understand their details have not been sold. Another option is to create a special cross-brand offer for both brands’ clients.

PR and brand awareness

PR sounds outdated in ecommerce marketing but it’s not. Especially at launch, you’ll benefit from getting featured in media publications both offline and online.

It can be a founder interview, a mention in a listicle (X gift ideas for Y), or getting your headliner featured in a photoshoot. Whatever fits your product, the goal is to increase brand awareness and create demand.

An example of being included in a gift guide on Good Housekeeping.

And let’s not forget events and sponsorship opportunities. Going offline and meeting your customers in real life is a great exercise for ecommerce businesses. Local fairs, pop-up stores, and themed expos are not to be overlooked in ecommerce marketing.

The best practice here is to choose the events you support carefully to get closer to your target and not alienate them.

Ecommerce content marketing

Content is another marketing tactic that can bring long-term results to ecommerce businesses. It comes in many formats:

• Blog articles
• Video
• Podcasts
• Guides and help content

Example of ecommerce content — the whole blog helps convert visitors to customers, Source

The goal of content marketing is to answer questions, educate, expand the company narrative, help people choose a product, and even entertain.

The best thing about content is that, once created, it’s out there working for you. When optimized for search and easily found on site, it can boost your conversion rate. It can also be reused for other ecommerce marketing campaigns such as newsletters, organic social, and partnerships.

Improve Your E-Commerce Marketing With Emarsys

E-commerce is booming and will only continue to grow as the world becomes more and more connected. Online retailers and service providers have a multitude of e-commerce channels, strategies, and tactics they can leverage to drive website traffic and conversions and develop a loyal customer base.

Remember to personalize your content, focus on retention, and offer a top-notch customer experience. That way, your e-marketing strategy will be unbeatable.

See how Emarsys can help you power-up your e-commerce marketing for more growth and revenue.

Since landing pages (which you can create with a Landingi landing page builder) are an integral part of the vast majority of successful digital marketing campaigns, let’s take a look at a landing page created purely for transactional purposes and one aimed at generating leads.

An example of a landing page aimed at selling

If you create a landing page strictly for selling, you won’t try to build a relationship or try to inspire trust by bragging about your expertise. The main focus of such a landing page is emphasizing the value that comes with your products or services. You will try to prove that your offer is absolutely stellar and encourage visitors to purchase from you right away.

The landing page template seen above is an example of a landing page created for an online flower shop. It has a chic design, subtle colors and a neat structure. It has a feminine look and brings to mind the delicateness of flowers which perfectly fits into the landing page offer.

As you can see, an e-commerce landing page looks highly professional, but what truly makes it built for transactional purposes is its straightforwardness:

• offer and prices are quoted,
• benefits and value for customers are outlined,
• testimonials from existing clients prove the high quality,
• there is a possibility to get a unique offer.

All of these elements make this landing page a great example of a well-planned and created teaser aimed at selling, perfect for e-commerce purposes. It’s nice, honest, and enticing for potential customers. Its call to action (CTA) does not encourage to subscribe but to get a unique quote and, in the end, make a purchase.

An example of a landing page aimed at generating leads

On the other hand, when you create a landing page for lead generation, first you will try to convert potentially interested visitors into leads, and only after thorough lead nurturing make them purchase your product or service.

The above example of a consulting landing page is an ideal candidate for lead generation purposes. Its main focus is not pushing for sales but making visitors subscribe.

Join us and create the best-converting landing pages

Examples of One-to-One Marketing

What does one-to-one marketing look like? Let’s look at a few examples.

Incentives

One-to-one marketing brings an unmatched “human” touch. In that spirit, Sigma Beauty sends an individualized code to customers.

Birthdays and other anniversaries

Many B2C brands already do some triggered communications around key dates for customers. These are a sort of “must” in e-commerce (and tactics you can’t afford to get wrong).

Real-time availability

These examples scratch the surface of the potential of AI-infused marketing technologies. But they give you an idea of how the disruptive technology can manifest outwardly within your marketing.

Any Questions on 1

Do you still need some help with understanding one-to-one marketing? We are here to help you learn.

Feel free to leave some comments below, and we’ll help walk you through it. And feel free to check out Vedia and let’s find out if we can get your personalized marketing campaigns started.

Types of E-Commerce Marketing

E-commerce marketers can leverage a number of advertising channels including web, social, email, and search to attract visitors and guide purchasing decisions. Below, we outline the most lucrative e-commerce marketing channels and how you can use them to attract buyers to your online store:

Email marketing is a great way to generate sales for your online store. From abandoned cart emails to intricate and personalized campaigns, email works to build relationships with customers. Think about the way you’re pushing promotions, coupons, and lead nurturing emails. Leverage segmentation and avoid the all-too-passé email blast. Your bottom line will thank you later.

Mobile Marketing

Since 2018, mobile traffic has represented the majority of global web traffic. Today, online shoppers are making more purchases via their mobile device than on their PC, and around 51% of all shoppers purchase items using their smartphones.

Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing is a cross-channel strategy used to drive a unified customer experience across all possible channels and touchpoints including both traditional and digital channels.

According to SocialMediaToday, between 2018 and 2020, customers’ preference for omnichannel marketing campaigns increased by 14.8%. Additionally, marketers using three or more channels in any one campaign earned a 287% higher purchase rate and earned a 90% higher customer retention rate than those using a single channel campaign.

By leveraging all available marketing channels (including those listed above), marketers can develop an effective omnichannel marketing strategy that drives e-commerce customers to make purchases, whether on mobile, web, or social.

10 of the Best Ecommerce Marketing Strategies

What is an ecommerce marketing strategy?

An ecommerce marketing strategy is the tactics you plan to use to promote your online store and get more sales. The strategy is a long-term idea of where your ecommerce business is going. It’s based on your knowledge of the market, trends, consumer research, brand values, and product.

• What are your sales expectations?
• How big is your market?
• What target group do you want to reach?
• Where are they? — both geographically and online?
• How do you want your product to be perceived?
• What are your competitors doing?

The answers to these questions will help you pick your “battle weapons” from the ones outlined above, a.k.a. marketing tactics that best fit your needs and abilities.

As for the best ecommerce marketing strategies, there’s no right answer.

Ecommerce is a huge industry, with countless products, business models, and target groups, making it impossible to pinpoint just one best practice. What works for one seller with a specific product won’t necessarily work for another selling something else to another audience in a different market.

Here are just some universal marketing tips that will help you create and enhance your ecommerce marketing strategy.

Define your target audience and market

To be able to find the right voice, messaging, channels and offers, you need to understand your audience first.

See what your competitors are doing

Some of it is probably working — there’s no point reinventing the wheel. But look for what can be done better too. This can become your competitive advantage.

Set targets based on benchmarks

Before you have data of your own, base your projections on industry benchmarks. This will give you a direction to work in.

Research marketing tools that can help you

As you’ve seen, there’s so much to ecommerce marketing that it can be overwhelming. Luckily, there are tools to help you get started with many of the tactics mentioned at an affordable price.

Add more marketing channels as you find your ground

Once you feel your initial marketing setup is working, expand to other channels and tactics. For example, you can add a live chat when you have a dedicated customer service person.

Automate as much as possible

To be able to scale, small businesses need sales coming in on autopilot. The more you can run hands-off, the better. This is where marketing automation tactics like bulk emails, automated workflows, notifications, and lead scoring come in handy.

Personalize your communication

Ads, emails, SMS, and live chat bring in much better results when personalized and relevant. Customers like the experience of being understood and not getting just another generic message.

Measure your ecommerce marketing results, refine and reuse what works

The only way to know if an ecommerce marketing strategy is working is to track the return on investment (ROI). The campaigns that don’t bring results are not worth wasting money on. For the ones that do work, try to use them for a bigger audience, rinse and repeat.

Build loyalty into your strategy

Customer loyalty is good news: it boosts profits, improves your brand image, attracts new customers who‘ve heard about you from fans. And it has a long-term impact so start working on it as early as possible. Loyalty tiers, automations, and behavior insights from CRM will help you.

Focus on profitability, not just sales

If you pay to get new customers all the time, that might shave off your profit. One-off sales come out more expensive for you because of ad prices, as well as more returns and exchanges (new customers don’t know their size, etc.). It’s cheaper to drive repeat sales to current customers.

How Does Artificial Intelligence Marketing Actually Happen?

As mentioned, by working with an AI-enabled marketing automation system, you can automate the process of delivering one-to-one experiences to your entire database, at scale, across every channel. Let’s lift up the hood and see how it all happens.

Artificial intelligence works best when it’s weaved into the fabric of a marketing platform. This distinction is critical — AI isn’t one individual tool or thing. It’s a part of the entire system. In other words, AI isn’t an individual atom making up the body; it’s the emotion or love or air that runs throughout the body.

An underlying layer of code that’s hard-wired to “self-learn” can work with multiple channels, in multiple instances, and across a database. That means that AI works best when vertically integrated across a platform for enhanced capabilities, not when implemented within a single channel.

Self-learning systems — which most AI-branded tools should also be — have to learn on their own, creating, reacting to, and defining rules that aren’t explicitly told to them by humans. On top of all that, these processes will all need to occur within a matter of milliseconds. A solution that helps you do this ostensibly sits atop all customer data with 360-degree coverage — including CRM, behavior, product, and external datasets.

The good news? AI-driven solutions are built to make this easy to manage so you’re as hands-off as possible — in fact, they work best this way.

The best AI machines literally let you tell them your strategy (e.g., setting a sliding scale to indicate how aggressively you want to discount an item for a particular campaign), and then do the rest.

AI systems lean on complicated algorithms (which, like the fire burning the coal, you don’t touch) that work in conjunction with previous behavior data to develop probabilities of certain events happening (like a customer purchasing), taking into account expected revenue/cost as well as the guidelines that you set in place to create a final output. The whole process works at once, kind of like this:

One-to-one incentives

Let’s look at one use case, and how it works: Incentives.

AI-enabled engines typically contain rules for personalizing. So, during “send-time,” the channels basically dial up the personalization engine, and request content for individual contacts.

Since the machine is programmed to (a) consider all previous purchase, historical, and website data of each contact, (b) understand that information, (c) develop customized communications mostly likely to convert each contact, then (d) send, it can intelligently, automatically evaluate how much to discount for every customer:

Consumers are then provided with incentives most likely to engage them, personalized at the point of interaction.

➤ Pro Tip: There’s a lot of fear and rhetoric about AI taking jobs. It won’t! Menial and repetitive tasks like segmenting data, crafting campaign blueprints, and creating if-then rules should be and can be offloaded to the machine. In addition to a superior customer experience, half of the point of using AI is to relieve your workload and create efficiencies previously unattainable.

When all of this comes together, the end result is true omnichannel one-to-one marketing that is driven by AI. AI marketing is, indeed, the bridge that leads to scalable, individual interactions.

Now that you have a better understanding of personalized marketing, you can get creative with how you can position your product, marketing campaigns, and customer experience.

Need some inspiration to get started? Here’s how some of the top companies use 1:1 marketing —

Grammarly— Personalized Emails

Spotify — Personalized Music Playlist

Coca Cola — Personalized Bottles

This marketing strategy consisted of having each bottle of Coke stamped with popular first names. This campaign ended up going viral, with over 12 million media impressions and a 7% increase in young adult consumption.

Table of Contents

After the World Wide Web became publicly available in 1993, opportunity flourished for retailers to sell online. Over the past few decades, online shopping has grown to become a multibillion-dollar industry. Today, there are over 2 billion digital shoppers throughout the globe.

The convenience, security, and experience associated with online shopping have improved tenfold since the inception of e-commerce. In this guide, we’ll explore the world of e-commerce marketing and online shopping, and discuss the ways you can improve the digital customer experience for your online store.

E-commerce marketing is the process of driving awareness and traffic to an online store and converting website visitors into loyal customers. When done correctly, e-commerce marketing and advertising can help online retailers and service providers realize considerable ROI and reach business goals.

Definition of One-to-One Marketing

One-to-one marketing or 1:1 marketing is a strategy that emphasizes having an individualized experience with customers. The personalization of interactions is thought to improve customer loyalty and have a high return on marketing investment.

One-to-one is not necessarily a new concept. The one-to-one approach is about as old as business itself.  Since the birth of commerce, store owners have remembered details about their customers to use that knowledge to improve service and boost sales.

So, what’s all the fuss about?

1:1 marketing campaigns can be “a segment of one,” instead of having to segment consumers into a group and send them all the same message, you can now deliver marketing material that appears unique to the individual.

Well, not exactly. This is what we’re working on here at Vedia uses contextual data to serve unique ads and videos to consumers. You can use different bits of data to create a video that is suited for your customers. Here’s an example:

We are working with companies in various industries to have personalized ads, offerings, check-in videos, e-mail videos, and more. Whatever data you have that you’d like to see turn into a video, we can make it happen —  we are positioning ourselves to be the most flexible one-to-one video solution.

How To Start a One-To-One Marketing Initiative

We’ll delve into design thinking a bit more in the future, for now, we’ll keep it simple and provide four steps to start a one-to-one marketing campaign.

1) Identify Prospects and Customers

Build and maintain an extensive customer database with information from all the channels and customer touchpoints.

2) Interact With Customers

If possible, ask for feedback that can help improve your product and customer experience as early as possible. This is a great way to establish rapport with your customers early and have a better understanding of customers and their individual needs.

3) Differentiate Customers

After you find out more about your customers, find ways to differentiate them and put them into groups. If they are likely to purchase “product a” than “product b” build out a programmatic messaging strategy that will encourage them to buy your products.

4) Customize

Final Thoughts

AI is real, and it allows us to solve real problems for real people — to help our customers, by:

• Trying to anticipate what else they might find helpful in tandem with a current or recent purchase, e.g. via product recommendations
• Allowing customers to stay up to date with content that populates in real-time based on when it’s opened, e.g. weather updates or local hotel availability
• Making it easy to take the next best action in a given circumstance, e.g. with timely push notifications from a mobile app

As an optimization technology and depending upon how much quality data you have and which technology you’re using, AI can help you deliver a mildly better to drastically enhanced customer experience.

Whether the marketing masses know it or not, AI has the potential to be the salvation that time-strapped, over-worked teams have been waiting for.

AI marketing solutions connect the entire marketing spectrum, including customer data, access to that data by the marketer and machine, campaigns and content, and execution. AI will help you provide one-to-one personalization for each and every one of your deserving customers.