8 Benefits for Marketers Working with Multi-Store ecommerce Harness the Power of Multi-Store ecommerce to Get the Most Out of Marketing Efforts This is one part of a four part series. Don't forget to check out how multi-store ecommerce benefits customers, business management, and IT professionals. Reaching customers in a competitive market saturated by promotional messages is a challenge that all companies face. Multi-store ecommerce provides marketing professionals with a diverse platform from which to target specific market segments using specialized storefronts. With all stores integrated under one dashboard, marketers enjoy a range of benefits conferred by diversity and ease of use and tremendous savings. Design Customization Layout and navigation dictate the usability of ecommerce websites. In multi-store ecommerce, marketers and developers can work together to create designs that easily direct consumers through the purchasing funnel. Once the basic flow is established, the marketing department is free to change stylistic elements to reflect the tastes of the consumers who frequent each shop. Pricing, text and keywords are all managed from the administrator dashboard within the multi-store platform. This freedom supports endless possibilities for store design, targeted marketing, product pricing and international expansion. Faster Content Deployment Shops managed in a multi-store environment are built using an inheritance model in which “child” objects take on the characteristics of their “parent” categories. In practice, this means that developers in the IT department only have to define one set of parameters for each of the elements in a shop, such as homepage layouts and menus. With these parameters in place, any number of new stores may be created and launched without the need to start from scratch each time. The inheritance model allows the marketing department to make changes to any store at any time. Updates to product descriptions in the main catalog are applied across all stores. Price changes and discounts may also be applied in this way or updated only on specific shops. Pages for new products inherit the layouts of existing product pages, and entire stores can be built using templates created by the IT department. With no delay waiting for fresh code to be written, it becomes possible to divide growing product offerings into niche stores in as demand dictates. Simple Data Management and Analysis CRM integration ensures that data from every store is available in one place. Running multiple stores used to mean tracking metrics from each store separately through different dashboards and attempting to reconcile all the data into a cohesive whole. In a multi-store setup, all important customer information is consolidated in one reporting system. Marketing employees can analyze every data set at once to isolate trends in consumer behavior that impact campaign development. Data updates in real time as customers search, browse and make orders, so the trends observed are always relevant and timely. Analytics information can be applied to create marketing automation rules tailored to the customers of individual stores or devotees of specific brands. Automation programs the system to respond in certain ways to customer actions, such as sending an email when a cart is abandoned or delivering coupons for products similar to those ordered in the past. After the initial parameters are set up, marketers don’t need to attend to these tasks themselves and are free to focus on other aspects of promotion. Audience Segmentation Comprehensive analytics work in combination with marketing automation to increase conversions among the target audiences for every store that a company runs. Using data gathered from each shop, it’s possible to segment audiences by any number of criteria, including age, location, income, life stage, personal shopping preferences, purchase histories and brand loyalties. Audience segments make it easier to diversify marketing efforts across channels and to determine when it may be necessary to create new stores to reach a growing group. Greater Local and Global Reach A 2014 survey by Common Sense Advisory showed that 75 percent of people in countries where English isn’t widely spoken would rather shop in their native language. Sixty percent of those surveyed rarely shopped at sites that only present content in English. Multi-store ecommerce platforms provide the solution to this problem by allowing stores to be created for audiences in specific countries. Translations are applied across stores using the inheritance model, and each store can be set to display price, shipping and tax information in the local currency. Targeted SEO Google limits the number of links that display from a given domain in search results, but multi-store ecommerce lets businesses work around this by creating separate stores with dedicated keyword sets. This boosts the visibility of individual brands by allowing multiple links from a variety of stores to appear for any given keyword. Make sure your ecommerce platform provides all the SEO meta data for each individual product in the catalog, natively provides category landing pages, and can build your product and category sitemap XML files, like Clarity ecommerce does. Products may be separated into categories within a multi-store platform and given their own sets of keywords to target consumers in precise locations both locally and globally. Localization of keywords also improves site rankings in mobile search results so that marketers can leverage the growing segment of mobile shoppers around the world. More Profitable Marketing Campaigns Enterprise-level businesses have wide audiences with diverse tastes and shopping preferences. Integrating multi-store ecommerce with CRM opens the door for niche marketing campaigns directed at consumers who already display an interest in a given type or group of products. The result is a higher ROI thanks to less time spent trying to generate conversions from a broad pool of potential leads. Marketers can use the platform to: Suggest products and stores related to past customers Offer deals on previously purchased brands Create stores for specific campaigns or holidays Send personalized content to target segments These tactics encourage repeat purchases and build the kind of brand loyalty that creates lifelong customers. Smooth Customer Experience Any part of the shopping process that feels slow or confusing can cause customers to abandon orders before completion. Multi-store environments combine products from every shop into one cart for a seamless checkout experience requiring only one login and one set of payment and shipping information. That means marketers can create stores for specific products to make it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for without feeling overwhelmed. It also offers the opportunity to cross-market products from other stores on shopping cart and order confirmation pages. Clarity Can Help Clarity’s versatile ecommerce solutions can help enterprise-level businesses looking to expand into the world of multi-store marketing. Clarity creates custom platforms that offer scalability to support hundreds of separate storefronts. ERP and CRM integrations increase functionality and improve marketing results. contact Clarity today for a free quote on a multi-store ecommerce solution tailored specifically to your company.