Direct response funnel: From advertising to a sale

Abstract

Electronic commerce is growing at an accelerated pace, and customer spending is moving steadily from offline to online shopping. Combined with a new generation of youths growing up with smartphones and online advertising in their daily lives, it’s important to understand online marketing. Therefore, an academic research about e-commerce ecosystem is topical and essential for the future of retail business. Online stores are dependent on online traffic, and they are willing to pay for it. Therefore, the question becomes: how to efficiently drive quality traffic to an E-commerce store? Once a visitor visits the site, another question concerns a website: how to efficiently convert a visitor into a paying customer?

The primary theoretical framework used in this research is the AIDA model that incorporates Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. The basic concept of direct response funnel is to guide the customer to move ahead in the AIDA levels, with fewer and fewer actions to take until proceeding to checkout. The methodology of this research consists of a literature review and real-life cases. The literature review provides a fundamental academic perspective, and the real-life examples will supplement the academic view with up to date methods.

Google and Facebook are the current top traffic sources for E-commerce platforms due to their targeting ability, but other traffic sources are on the rise as well. Conversion optimisation is one of the most critical success factors of an E-commerce store next to the traffic sources, while Mobile shopping is becoming more popular in the future. This study proposes measures to improve the current e-commerce business to ensure efficient marketing by measuring the performance and turn them to customers by understanding and improving the entire customer experience journey.