HubSpot reports that as many as 95 percent of site visitors don’t convert on their first visit. That’s because before they make a purchase, they want to do some research. In eCommerce, inbound marketing makes sure that when these site visitors are ready to make a purchase, it’s from you and not your competitors!

To enhance your existing online presence and attract leads and customers, traditional outbound marketing simply won’t work. Rather than waiting for an envelope in the mail, research shows that today’s customers seek out information about your product themselves by reading and researching online.

Here’s how inbound marketing and eCommerce work together:

• Attract new customers with intuitive SEO tools, social media monitoring and blogging
• Convert traffic to customers through lead nurturing and marketing automation
• Prevent shopping cart abandonment by sending interest-based emails
• Understand ROI and track customer activity

And here are their benefits:

Cost

According to HubSpot, inbound marketing costs 61 percent less per lead than traditional outbound marketing. This is because most effective channels like blogs and social media generate more leads and more revenue than traditional outbound methods like direct mail and cold calls, which most consider a dead form of marketing. While traditional methods are expensive, most blogs and social media platforms allow companies to sign up for free and are easy to monitor and maintain long term, even without a large staff of website administrators.

Not to mention, all inbound marketing tools are web-based, allowing you to easily integrate them into your web store for little to no cost. This also allows you to quickly and easily download new versions of inbound technology as they are updated.

Inbound marketing also allows web store administrators to advertise to specific keyword phrases to target a specific audience of visitors who are ready to buy. In doing so, your efforts will be both cheaper (per click) and more profitable.

Approach

Today, outbound tactics are deemed aggressive, intrusive and expensive. With inbound marketing for eCommerce, you are taking a technologically-advanced approach to sales. Your marketing efforts should match.

Internet access allows people to control the information they receive – and, therefore, allows leads to choose when and how much they interact with you. Rather than having promotional content waved in their face, you can offer them what most brick-and-mortar stores can’t: web-based content that is fresh and/or educational. When you respect your leads’ privacy and personal space while providing them with useful content, they will develop respect for your brand.

Reach

By now, you already know that eCommerce efforts are capable of reaching a much larger audience than brick-and-mortar stores. With the internet, online stores can reach niche markets and customers in other countries (and therefore can have a higher success rate than local stores).

What you may not know is that you can optimize your web store’s content, keywords, meta descriptions and blog posts so that they appear on the first page of consumers’ search results. These practices, called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ensure your store is seen by its target audience. Inbound marketing allows you to monitor your site to determine which keyword terms are eliciting the most traffic. And as you slowly grow your site, you can add more keyword phrases to extend your reach even further.

Not to mention, your online store’s social media and blog posts (which can be linked or integrated with your website) have the potential to go viral and reach millions.

Growth

A very valuable aspect of inbound marketing for eCommerce is that you can measure your web store’s success with metrics that actually mean something – keyword ranks, lead-to customer conversions, cost per lead, return on investment, etc. Tools like HubSpot, Google Analytics and Google AdWords are effective and easy to use monitoring and measuring your online marketing campaigns.

Because many of these important business metrics are derived from web activity, brick and mortar stores don’t have access to them. For that reason, eCommerce stores can gain a significant competitive advantage over traditional ones

Inbound marketing and eCommerce make for a perfect match, as outbound marketing methods and in-store sales metrics are simply too outdated for such a technologically savvy approach to selling products.

How do you plan to use both in your marketing plan?