360 degree marketing goes beyond mastering the search engines with SEM and SEO there is a sea of opportunity to get in front of more potential customers to build traffic to your online store. Rick Wilson, VP of Miva Merchant, explains how to have more customer touch points to increase your chances of closing the sale in this video.

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Anyone who has been involved with ecommerce for any amount of time knows that the key to raising conversion rate is testing to see what works and what fails. Most people I talk to about testing to raise their conversion rate are so overwhelmed that they just don’t know where to start. Usually I get my best ideas from looking at other websites than the site I want to optimize. Over at Practical Ecommerce, Armando Roggio posted a chart that shows the top converting ecommerce sites for December 2008. This is a great resource for anyone who wants to increase the revenue from their existing traffic. Proflowers.com came in number one with a 31.1% conversion rate and Victoria’s Secret finished off the list with a 19.2% conversion rate. Given that the industry average is around 2% these online retailers are in a league of their own.

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Part of being human is the desire to know where you are and what you’re doing, says Rick Wilson, Executive Vice-President of Miva Merchant. And that means that nothing will frustrate your customers more than having no idea of what is expected of them in order to purchase something, or even what they should do next.

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I recently read an article from comscore that web coupons are almost off the radar given that only 0.4% of all coupons were distributed via websites versus 88% through newspapers in 2008 based on data from NCH Marketing. When was the last time you clipped a coupon from a newspaper? Given that less than 1% of those coupons distributed were actually redeemed seems to indicate there has got to be a better way to get promotions in front of the right people.

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Creating a social atmosphere on your site with open communication with your customers is the key to a successful social media endeavor. Remember you do not need to be on every social site; just concentrate on a few or even one to start and build up from there. You will learn things about your customers along with more about interacting on the internet just by participating on one social site. Here are some ideas of ways to enabling your customers to be more social with you and your ecommerce site.

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