THE ECOMMERCE DEVELOPER’S GUIDE TO

Marketing Requests &

Unspoken KPIs

PA N T H E O N . I O

1
As a developer for an ecommerce site, it can sometimes feel
like marketers are speaking another language. Or worse —that
marketers are requesting complicated changes on a whim,
without a clue as to what kind of work is involved for the
development team.

The good news is that marketers aren’t on a mission to make

your life miserable, but there are unspoken motivations and
goals behind marketers’ requests. We’re here to break down
what marketers are really asking for and walk through what that
means for you as a developer.

Table of Contents

What Marketers Care About �������������������������������������������������������������� 03

Drive More Traffic������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 04

Convert More Buyers �����������������������������������������������������������������������������07

Increase Repeat Purchases���������������������������������������������������������� 10

Aligning for Mutual Success�����������������������������������������������������������13

WHAT MARKETERS
CARE ABOUT
Marketing and Sales Benefits
The first thing to understand about marketers’ requests is what’s motivating them.
In the world of ecommerce, everything comes down to increasing revenue through
measurable improvements in traffic, conversion, and the cost to acquire and retain a
customer.

If these numbers take on a negative trend, it’s not only bad for the bottom line,
this marketer’s job could be on the line. Understanding this motivation can help
give perspective on what’s important to marketers and the sense of urgency that
sometimes accompanies those requests.

The key word here is measurable: marketers’ key performance indicators (KPIs) are
tightly bound to these stats and analytics.

Here are a few of the most important figures that marketers are tracking:

• Organic traffic
• Conversion rate
• Return on ad spend (ROAS)
• Lifetime Value: Customer Acquisition Cost (LTV:CAC)

These numbers speak to the success of three main goals for ecommerce marketers:
to drive more traffic, convert more buyers, and increase repeat purchases.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these three goals to identify the relevant KPIs and
likely asks that developers will see in 2019:

3
3
W H AT M A R K E T E R S CA R E A B O U T

1. DRIVE MORE TRAFFIC

When it comes to driving shoppers to the site, it’s all about SEO. While marketers are
thinking in terms of keywords and content, developers control many aspects of the site
that can make or break search engine rankings.

We can group these activities into three categories:

• The things that affect your search engine ranking, making the site more discoverable
• The things that keep shoppers on the site once they land there
• The things that keep your site from crashing once you do get that traffic

For developers, SEO can be tricky. With other coding changes, it’s immediately obvious if the
change was successful or not—it either works or it doesn’t. SEO is murkier.

Changes in ranking don’t take effect immediately, and it’s difficult to pin results to specific
actions. When a marketer or SEO expert asks for a major site change, developers want to
know: will this have real impact or is it just hot air?

As a developer, you know that the way you structure your markup and site architecture affect
your search rankings, but it can be difficult to sort out the meaningful recommendations from
things that have no effect, or worse, even negatively impact your SEO.

Below, we’ll go through a few of the essential considerations, no hocus pocus.

URL Structures
URL structures can sometimes be an afterthought—but they shouldn’t. URLs are the first thing
that a search engine or a shopper sees on your page, and they need to be readable to both.

Your URLs should be descriptive of the page content and as succinct as possible. In most cases,
this means that your URLs should mirror your page titles.

Don’t forget about keywords; URLs are a great opportunity to include keywords that you want
to rank for. Don’t be repetitive, but do include keywords where it makes sense contextually.

4
W H AT M A R K E T E R S CA R E A B O U T: 1. D R I V E M O R E T R A F F I C

In this example, the product page URL and title of the product page are nearly the same. You’ll also
see the keyword used throughout the product description.

Site Speed
To many developers, this might look familiar: First, you do whatever you have to do to make a
feature work, then you focus on making it fast.

While there will always be an opportunity to refactor for performance improvements, there
are some “quick wins” you can use to make sure your site speed is where it should be from
the outset.

Ecommerce marketers care about site speed because of the impact on bounce rate--one
of the primary metrics that a marketer is measuring. There’s not much point in attracting
visitors to your site if they bolt when the site takes too long to load.

5
W H AT M A R K E T E R S CA R E A B O U T:
1.DRIVE MORE TRAFFIC

As a developer, here are a few things that will make your site more efficient
(and win you points with marketers):

CDN EDGE CACHING

CDNs, or Content Delivery Networks, have evolved into much more than just a point of
presence for digital asset delivery closer to users. Advances in technology mean CDNs
can cache all content at the logical extreme edge of the network, commonly referred to
as Edge Caching. Loading an entire page is much faster than loading a dynamic webpage,
and makes a huge impact on user experience and on-site conversions.

IMAGE OPTIMIZATION

You probably already know that images are one of the biggest sources of downloaded
data on pages and the first place to look when you want to shave seconds off your load
time. In addition to compressing your images and using CSS effects or web fonts over
static images when possible, you can do your page speed a huge favor by leveraging a
CDN to auto-detect the type of device a page is being viewed on and serve an image of the
appropriate size and resolution.

There’s not much point in attracting

visitors to your site if they bolt when
the site takes too long to load.

LAZY LOADING

If we waited until all of a page’s resources are loaded before painting to the
page, visitors would be left looking at an empty screen. Lazy loading is a technique that
initializes the resources needed first before loading resources farther down the page, so
we get a head start on the content that the visitor actually sees at the top.

Images below the fold, for example, would first load a placeholder image which would
populate the final image later in the page load process, after the above the fold content
has rendered.

6
W H AT M A R K E T E R S CA R E A B O U T

2.CONVERT MORE
BUYERS
A full funnel with lots of traffic is great, but at the end of the day, it’s meaningless if those
users don’t buy something. A focus on optimizing UX, design, and engineering can pay
significant dividends in increasing the conversion rate.

USER FLOW

Considering user flow is a great start to optimizing your ecommerce site. The user flow
is the specific set of steps that a user needs to take to accomplish a goal. For ecommerce
sites that means finding a product and successfully executing a transaction.

Begin by plotting out your common user flows and identify steps that may be
superfluous. Every additional step likely means a decrease in conversion. Make it easy to
quickly add products to your cart, and get through checkout steps efficiently. UI devices
like “quick view” enable users to go directly to their cart from anywhere on the site.

Optimizing checkout flow to reduce the number of fields that users need to enter
is another easy win. Enabling a “same as billing address” to populate shipping
addresses is an easy win, as well. Eliminating any nonessential content or
distractions can also help focus the user flow on conversion.

BROWSE VS SEARCH

We often talk about the browse vs search paradigms relative to the user journey. If you
have a significant number of products, browse and search become incredibly important
if we want to quickly facilitate a user finding what they need.

7
W H AT M A R K E T E R S CA R E A B O U T:
2.CONVERT MORE BUYERS

Faceted filtering and clear category navigation are easy wins. For users who
know what they want, ensuring that your search functionality is both fast
and accurate is essential. Some ecommerce platforms have performant
search out of the box. Other platforms may require integration with search-
optimized technologies, such as Elasticsearch or Solr, to ensure highly
relevant and fast results.

WAYFINDING & DISCOVERY

Not every optimization needs to involve significant development effort.

Something as simple as breadcrumbs can help ensure users can quickly get
where they need to be and is often easy to implement.

It’s also important to ensure that users always have somewhere to go.
On single product pages, make sure that there are complementary or
related products on the page to keep the user engaged. The lightest touch
implementation could simply be other products from the same category. More
advanced implementations could reference “also bought” opportunities to
upsell customers.

8
W H AT M A R K E T E R S CA R E A B O U T:
2.CONVERT MORE BUYERS

URGENCY

There are a number of psychological motivators when considering a sales

conversation that can be supported with low-level development effort. “Urgency” is
an attribute that you can leverage in your ecommerce platform.

The used car lot technique of flashing “buy now” or “don’t miss out” style messages is
doable— but ill-advised.

That approach could counteract your goals by cheapening or diminishing your brand.
However, you can still create a sense of urgency around the sale in more subtle ways.
Show low stock counts, or if specific colors or models are out of stock - show them as
such instead of hiding them. If you have items on sale, a small notation identifying when
the sale ends can significantly increase the feeling of urgency the consumer has and
help promote that conversation.

1 in 5 people in the United States

have a disability.
ACCESSIBILITY

It’s worth calling out a big bucket of work that developers can do to optimize and
increase the efficacy of their ecommerce platforms. Making sure that the things you
build are accessible is the right thing to do, full stop. It’s also a great business strategy.
Marketers fight for every potential customer, and as developers we should strive to
serve everyone.

The transactional interfaces that make up ecommerce product and checkout pages
leverage form interfaces extensively. Sadly, forms are often the biggest offenders when
looking through the lens of accessibility. On the bright side, making sure your interfaces
are accessible is more about diligence and care than significant effort. If you think
this doesn’t apply to you, a reminder that nearly 1 in 5 people in the United States have
a disability. If you’re not sure where or how to start, there are many tools available,
notably Lighthouse (built into Chrome) and WAVE (browser plugin and automated tool).

9
W H AT M A R K E T E R S CA R E A B O U T

3. INCREASE REPEAT
PURCHASES
There is a holy grail of ecommerce for marketers: retention. While optimizing a funnel for more
traffic and conversions are key to any site’s success, cracking the nut of repeat purchases will
serve as a foundation to continually increase revenue.

CUSTOMER ACCOUNTS

When customers register accounts, it certainly makes segmentation (see below) easier and
gives the site an opportunity to offer a more engaging experience for the customer. While this
can all lead to an increase in repeat sales, it turns out, asking customers to log in or create an
account at the start of a checkout flow often increases the chance they’ll abandon their cart.

Making it as simple as possible for a customer to create an account is key here. One option is
simply starting the checkout process with an email field to automatically check if it correlates
with a previous purchase. If the email is unrecognized, the customer has the option to
complete their details without forcing them to create an account. This solves both for the cart
abandonment problem, while also making repeat purchases as simple as possible.

SEGMENTATION & AUTOMATION

A quick glance at nearly any marketing or sales blog these days and you’ll easily see that
marketing automation is king. Sending emails to the right customers at the right times,
following up on abandoned carts, reminding a customer that those shoes they bought last
year are now available in yellow, are all key functions of any marketing automation platform.

At its core, marketing automation is about optimization. By developing audience segments,

marketers are able to optimize which customers they are spending effort on and when best to
contact them.

10
W H AT M A R K E T E R S CA R E A B O U T:
3 . I N C R E A S E R E P E AT P U RC H A S E S

For each customer segment, an automated flow of touchpoints can be triggered based on
specific actions. Let’s take for example the shoe customer again. She bought a pair of red shoes
in August, from there she’s in a campaign segmented not only for new customers, but also by
what she purchased and even what else she added to her cart, but removed before completing
the transaction.

The automation flow for this customer would include remarketing via online or social ads when
complementary items are on sale, and email for an existing customer exclusive promotional
offer, touchpoints for holiday shopping, and on and on.

By having comprehensive event tracking throughout the site, you’ll be able to read the overall data
trends to see what repeat purchases a person who has bought red shoes makes, and target the
automation flow accordingly.

EMAIL MARKETING

You’ve made it. The customer has become aware of the brand through your stellar SEO
techniques, and they made their first purchase in large part due to the conversion rate
optimization steps taken on your site. Now we enter the world of email marketing.

It’s true, even today amidst the cacophony of phones pinging non-stop with social media alerts and
texts messages, email marketing still shows the biggest return on investment (ROI) for ecommerce
marketing efforts.

A few stats marketers care about when it

comes to email marketing include: open rate,
click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, and
conversion rate.

First amongst the pillars of email marketing is the newsletter. Implementing the segmentation
and automation tools from above, the marketing team can now send personalized newsletters to
increase open rates an average of 5%.

Next is figuring out email nurture. What this means is connecting with a customer post-conversion
to nurture them along to their next purchase. Automation tools are key here. Triggering email sends
based on time, actions the customer took or did not take, or some combination thereof are all ways
to optimize email marketing.

11
W H AT M A R K E T E R S CA R E A B O U T:
3 . I N C R E A S E R E P E AT P U RC H A S E S

A NOTE ABOUT EMAIL DELIVERABILITY

Email list size has been the ultimate vanity metric for marketers, but it carries less and less weight
as emails that are never opened can soon turn into emails that are never delivered. In an effort
to decrease the noise of spam, email providers and ISPs are rejecting more and more marketing
emails, where they simply end up undelivered.

Following best practices for email deliverability will allow more of your emails to reach the inbox.
Keeping a strong reputation by sending emails that are relevant to your customer will result in
fewer unsubscribes.

From a technical standpoint, authenticating your email streams via domain keys identified mail
(DKIM), sender policy framework (SPF) and having a properly configured infrastructure can
have a huge impact on email deliverability.

FURTHER COMMUNICATION CHANNELS

While email is top of the food chain for customer touchpoints, there are further options to
increase customer retention including push notifications via web or app, SMS, remarketing via
social media ads, and on-site messaging opportunities.

When you learn that text messages have a read rate upwards of 90%, it can be tempting to
move much of the marketing to text, but it’s a tricky medium. Legalities are one thing to watch
for when it comes to SMS marketing, in the US, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991
(TCPA) has pretty stringent guidelines on who may receive SMS marketing. Specifically, they
must opt-in and they must be able to easily opt-out.

Used judiciously, SMS messaging of return customers can increase the sense of urgency and
in-turn increase repeat purchases.

On-site notifications are another perfect channel to communicate with return customers.
A simple alert bar along the top of the site offering a promo code for existing customers or
promoting a loyalty program goes a long way for customer retention.

As messaging apps continue to overtake social networking, expect more and more
opportunities to pop up for personalized messages directly to your customer in their inbox—
wherever that inbox may be.

12

12
Aligning for Mutual Success
It’s easy to feel like your marketing team is speaking a different language when you are
responsible for the technical side of your ecommerce site. With a common understanding
of the overall goal for your site and how it will grow the business, developers and marketers
can easily live in harmony.

We hope this guide helped you understand how to break down what your marketing
stakeholders are really requesting and how you can help provide value as their
development team.

If you’ve got more questions on how to best operate ecommerce sites to grow your brand
and business, let us know!

Ecommerce experts from Pantheon, BigCommerce, and

Modern Tribe contributed to this content. Contact them
today for help with your next project.

13