How to become an eCommerce expert

Understand How eCommerce Works 

Want to know when eCommerce came into being? It happened on August 11, 1999, when a man sold a Sting band CD to his friend through his website, NetMarket, an American retail platform. This is considered to be, up to this point, the first-ever successful eCommerce transaction in history. 27 years later, we came up with a great CVO course held by eCommerce experts with decades of eCommerce business experience. 

Since 1999, the goal of a successful eCommerce business is to make products more accessible for purchase for people worldwide via online store business owners and marketplaces. Properly setting up an eCommerce channel can help plenty of big industries or independent freelancers, enabling them to sell their goods and services at a scale that was simply impossible to attain through traditional physical stores. 

ECommerce is and will always be an extremely organic domain of commercial activity. As such, understanding it to a greater extent through tutors and courses will help you gain a real advantage – not necessarily over the competition, but over the way you were conducting business and allocating marketing resources before. Becoming an eCommerce expert involves paying constant attention to ecommerce trends, the evolution of global prices, and the different segments of customers that flock to your brand. It may sound overwhelming, but by the end of the article, you will find out about 9 of the greatest e-commerce experts out there who are ready to help you understand how eCommerce truly works. 

Learn the pros and cons of top eCommerce Platforms 

There are pros and cons to each eCommerce platform out there and one blog post wouldn’t be enough to cover all of them – even though we already have a great series on choosing the top eCommerce platform. To summarize the main eCommerce platform philosophy: there is no platform that can single-handedly offer you everything.

An eCommerce platform is the main engine of your online business. It manages the back-end functions of your shop automatically and with great precision and efficiency. In doing so, you are allowed to focus on the other important aspects of your business. Using eCommerce websites will allow you to benefit from errorless accounting, more transparent order management, more efficient inventory management, and way customer service.

Even if you think about opting for one of the more popular eCommerce platforms out there, always remember that even the best eCommerce platforms come with their own pros and cons. During our CVO course and by accessing our blog, later on, you’ll be much more prepared to choose the best eCommerce platform for your needs. 

Build Email Marketing Skills 

Digital marketing tools, social media channels, and eCommerce technology continue to evolve at a rapid pace, especially considering that the need to create more effective online eCommerce stores is on the rise. It becomes more and more important to build email marketing skills so that you can better help direct the strategies that help you connect with your customers in a more meaningful way.

Thanks to the rapid technological advancements, marketing eCommerce can uphold various touchpoints that allow brands to connect with their customers and collect new leads at any stage of the customer journey. If you’re on the prowl for methods to refine your marketing strategy and reap maximum benefits from email marketing campaigns (which still comprises roughly 50% of all communication channels), know that we’ll be covering the following subjects in our CVO course:

• Email personalization and automation
• GDPR Data Privacy elements
• Taking advantage of an interactive content marketer
• Mobile content optimization
• Benefits of Artificial Intelligence

Learn the basics of user acquisition (SEO & PPC) 

Customer (user) acquisition, when you allocate the necessary financial resources for it, is the best way to prevent business regression. Don’t worry if you are dealing with a certain degree of churning, each and every business out there has some unavoidable, natural churn rates. Yes, even if your product is extraordinary and your customers seem happy. Customer acquisition can lead to visible business growth and allows you to scale more effectively in future endeavors.

To be able to efficiently acquire new users, you have to get to know your target audience much better. What does this mean? It means taking time and resources to understand each of your user segments. After doing so, the 2 main methods of increasing your acquisition rate are SEO and PPC marketing campaigns.

The PPC (Pay-per-click ad campaigns) are a paid customer acquisition strategy that can deliver faster results and can have a  wider reach than the organic alternatives. PPC campaigns help you reach those hyper-targeted audiences who may never have heard of your brand, otherwise. They can be: 

• Display ads – ads are shown to users when they browse online, such as banners. They are good for retargeting purposes and for generating demand.
• Search ads – ads are shown to users in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) when they search for a keyword you are targeting through a Google Ads campaign (or any other ad engine). They are great for taking advantage of demand, allowing you to capture high-intent users.

The SEO (Search Engine Optimization campaigns) are an organic customer acquisition strategy, meaning they are free to use (besides the costs associated with used software and human resources). SEO means optimizing your web presence and your site for search engines such as Google. When people search for a keyword related to your online store, the SERPs will be more responsive to your particular store if you have good SEO optimization.

Real-time Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) Benchmark Report

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Find the Tips and Tricks of Customer Retention 

Besides Customer Acquisition, our CVO course relies heavily on helping you understand the importance of Customer Retention through various insider marketing tips and tricks. It should be common knowledge that, in the long run, it’s much more profitable to invest in customer retention than in customer acquisition. Some figures measured in global eCommerce over the years reveal that it usually costs 5 times more to earn a new customer than it to retain an existing one.

Setting the fact that it’s statistically more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain them, there are many other reasons that make retention great, one of the main ones being that returning customers are well-prepared to spend anywhere from 30 to 50 percent more when purchasing from your ecommerce store than a new customer, besides having an extremely low risk of abandoning the shopping cart.

You can now see how it can be more profitable to retain than to acquire. Having access to behind the scenes marketing tips and tricks can save both time and money, as will be seen during our CVO course: 

• Building long-term relationships with your customers
• Using automation to your advantage
• Improving customer service
• Leveraging customer feedback surveys

Understand the Important eCommerce metrics (NPS, RFM, AOV, CLV) 

At the end of our CVO course, you will be able to perfectly understand the importance of eCommerce metrics such as the NPS (Net Promoter Score), the RFM (Recency, Frequency, Money), the AOV (Average Order Value), and the CLV (Customer Lifetime Value). In short:

• The NPS (Net Promoter Score) metric can reveal how many customers feel like recommending your product or service to others. This is a very important KPI for your eCommerce business, due to it giving insight into customer behavior. NPS can be seen as the difference between your Promoter percentage and your Detractor percentage.
• RFM (Recency, Frequency, Money) segmentation helps identify your most important type of customers by segmenting them for better targeting with more relevant content for their particular behavior. In turn, this will generate higher response rates, increasing customer loyalty and optimizing the customer lifetime value.
• The AOV (Average Order Value) measures the average amount your customers spend on your online shop each time an order is placed. It’s calculated over a specific period by dividing your total revenue by the number of orders in that interval. 
• The CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) is a net profit prediction derived from your relationship with your clients. It can be measured globally or for a specific segment and is calculated using different formulas, according to your choice. Retaining your customers and creating repeat customers will increase your CLV. 

Ecommerce experts

More about all of this in our Customer Value Optimization course which will be held by 9 world-class instructors and eCommerce experts that will show you how to be truly successful in your future business endeavors. 

Valentin Radu 

Valentin Radu is a serial entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in B2B and B2C marketing. Valentin is the current leader of Omniconvert, a tech company with over 8 years of experience in data-driven growth solutions for worldwide eCommerce companies. 

Bob Moesta 

Bob Moesta has helped launch more than 3500 products, services, and businesses across almost every industry out there, ranging from pure software to financial services and education. You can find him at The Harvard Business School, or at the MIT Sloan School of Entrepreneurship and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management as a guest lecturer. 

Dennis Yu 

Dennis Yu shines when it comes to amplifying the exposure and sales of successful entrepreneurs via systems, analytics, and digital marketing training. He is a Revenue Optimization proven expert. 

Juliana Jackson 

Juliana Jackson is an entrepreneur turned serial-intrapreneur with more than 10 years of experience in SaaS and eCommerce technology. She provides guidance and education that transforms eCommerce brands through the implementation of Customer Lifetime Value Principles. 

Val Geisler 

Val Geisler has founded Fix My Churn, being its current Chief Email Officer. As the name suggests, her expertise focuses on helping your eCommerce company retain its customers in the long run of your business. 

Karl Gilis 

You surely won’t mind hearing thoughtful advice from a person who is considered to be the 3rd most influential conversion expert in the whole wide world, would you? He has helped businesses grow by increasing customer happiness through better customer experiences since 2001, thus having 2 decades of activity. 

Julia Whatley 

Julia Whatley rounds up the CVO course with her strategic partnership expertise, simply because she loves building relationships with partners and watching eCommerce merchants grow through better customer shopping experiences. 

Cristi Movila 

Cristi Movila has over 13 years of experience in building online business lines for Romanian large companies and has been active in the local eCommerce industry since it started sprouting. He also has a great Software Engineering background. 

Chase Diamond 

Chase Diamond has acquired more than a million online community members in a completely organic fashion and has driven more than $50 million in email revenue since June 2018. 

Become a CVO eCommerce expert with CVO Academy courses 

Experimenting aimlessly can also bring results and help you grow experience – but you will find out that you’ll soon be losing time and mental energy, and start depending more and more on luck. 

Relying on our 9 e-commerce experts, however, who is behind the amazing CVO Academy Courses, you will be able to achieve your goal much faster and in a more relaxed fashion. Why? Because they will be providing you with amazing industry inside tips and will help you set up the proper mental state to efficiently take advantage of them. 

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