Driving eCommerce traffic by attracting the ideal consumer

This post is sponsored by DKSH.

Selling online is impossible without the first step – bringing enough traffic to your brand’s online store, be it on a marketplace, or not. Bringing in traffic is easy, but bringing in high-quality traffic that converts into sales is the challenge brands are struggling with.

Smart traffic generation means identifying and bringing in the right audience – people who have shown actual interest in your brand, your products, and are open to online shopping

Performance marketing is a very powerful tool to achieve this objective. Not only is it effective, but  brands can monitor performance in real-time and make changes on the go – across target audiences, across channels, marketplaces, and even across screens.

Performance marketing works through medial partners – displaying the catchy ads on Facebook or Instagram or Google as prospective consumers scroll through their daily feeds and stories. The ad has to get their attention, and be designed to work on different devices, be easy to read and have a clear call to action. Designing such small, but impactful images requires not only designer skills, but also experience based on data – what works and what doesn’t.

Once the traffic lands on your store, what happens next determines whether you will lose a high-quality lead, or get a sale. Is your “digital shelf” easy to browse, and attractive? How are your products ranked? How visual and interactive is your content? How is the “sense of urgency” translated into the user experience?

In most cases, consumers drop out and don’t immediately click and buy in a single session, but may return a few days later searching for your products. And when they do, how effective are you  converting that intent into a sale?

Key drivers of online buying in Asia are convenience and, more importantly, great deals and bargains.

Online sales across the region are promotion-driven as an incentive to trigger that channel shift or channel expansion behaviour. Unlike a brand-building campaign that may last over a period of a few months, each performance marketing campaign runs within a time frame of a few weeks.

And for brands, you want your sales to happen within that period of just a few weeks and not in six months or a year’s time. Attractive pricing and promotion strategy is a great incentive to create that sense of urgency to buy. And it doesn’t always have to be a discounted price.

Understanding how consumers buy your product category, and insights into pricing across multiple trade channels, will help you arrive at the right pricing and promotion strategy for your brand – whether it is as simple as a price cut or exclusive online-only items, virtual bundles, free gift with a purchase, on-top voucher codes or a “buy one get one free” mechanic.

Now, how can you get started with performance marketing? Finding the right partner begins with understanding what is the objective of performance marketing.

To summarise: performance marketing drives online sales. The key here is “sales” – a strong performance marketing partner is also an eCommerce expert and vice versa. They should understand and advise how you can optimise your media channel and targeting strategy to get the most out of your media budget and translate your efforts into actual sales.