Congratulations!  You’ve got your E-commerce business up and running and now it’s time for the fun stuff: marketing.  The key to any marketing plan, online or offline, is targeting, consistency, and measuring.  Know who your market is, get your product or service in the media they’ll be viewing and measure and adjust according to what’s working and what’s not. 

As an E-commerce business you’ll most likely have a mix of traditional (collateral, newspapers, magazines, t.v., radio, expos) and online (search engines, viral, e-mail, banners).  Whatever the method, you’ll want to put your web address anywhere and everywhere: ads, car, business cards, e-mail signature, etc. For purposes of this article we’ll focus on online marketing methods.

What is E-marketing?
E-marketing is the activity of promoting your online business through electronic channels.  There are many avenues on the internet, as well as channels through your personal computer that can work to market your business online.  The most common methods include search engine listing and optimisation, viral marketing, e-mail marketing, banner advertising, and search engine advertising.

Search Engine Listing & Optimisation
These are free methods to get listed and improve your rankings on search engines.  To get listed with the top search engines so that they can search your site for content to match search requests visit the links below:

Google  www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
Yahoo!  http://submit.search.yahoo.com
MSN  http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

Once you’ve registered your site with the major search engines you can use our quick guide to SEO to get a better ranking.

Viral marketing
Viral campaigns can be jokes, videos, and cartoons – basically anything that people may find entertaining and forward to their friends.  It may be a video clip that gets forwarded through e-mail or put on a website (like You Tube). Its name comes from the term “virus” as successful campaigns are said to spread and replicate just like a computer virus (minus the disabling effect).    In order to be effective virals need to be clever, so circulate among peers to ensure that a viral doesn’t work against you.

E-Mail Marketing
Possibly one of the strongest forms of E-marketing is via E-mail.  Through e-mail you can send E-coupons, product updates, tips and generally be top of mind with your current and future customers.  As many people are wary of giving out their e-mail address in fear of spam, it helps for you to ensure that you will never sell or give away their address to anyone and offer the option for people to unsubscribe from your mailing list.  The big question is how often do you send e-mails?  That depends.  Most companies will send e-mails on a regular schedule be it quarterly, bi-monthly or monthly.  It comes down to how much time you have to send them out and how often you have fresh content.  Things to remember with your e-mails are to have a catchy subject line and to make your copy concise and relevant to your target market.

Banner Advertising
A number of companies (online media, trading sites, businesses) sell space on their site to advertisers at either a set cost or a pay per click cost (you pay for each person that clicks on your ad).  Banner advertising usually requires you to outsource the design of the banner to a graphic designer and pay the website owner accordingly for the space on their site.  Creation of banners are usually around the $1,000 mark and the cost of the advertising space anywhere from $500-$5000 as a set cost and $2-$10 for a pay per click cost.  Economically speaking it’s good to reuse your banner ad for multiple runs so that you’re not constantly spending more on new designs.

Search Engine Advertising
Often Search Engine Optimisation is not enough to get you ranked on the first page of search results and search engine advertising, or text ads on search engine pages, allow you to be seen as an advertiser on that crucial first page.  The way search engine advertising works is that if someone does a search for say “domains,” the search page will come up with the results as well as links highlighted at the top and right which are paid text ads.  These ads are done as cost per click pricing so that you only pay the amount you’ve set for each click when qualified leads click on your ad and through to your site.  The most common form of search engine advertising is www.adwords.google.com.  

E-marketing like any form of marketing is a constant endeavour of targeting, consistency, and measurement.  Go boldly forth and see what mix is right for you.  There’s no cookie cutter formula other than what works for your business so use tracking measures to understand where your business is coming from and spend accordingly.  And lastly remember that marketing’s fun!