How to Become an eCommerce Expert

To become an eCommerce expert, you learn the business in layers: how eCommerce works, what your platform does for you, how to bring customers in (email, SEO and PPC), how to keep them (retention), and how to read the metrics that tell you what is working (NPS, RFM, AOV and CLV). This guide walks through each layer in that order.

It may sound overwhelming. It does not have to be. By the end of the article, you will also meet the nine eCommerce experts who teach these skills in the CVO Academy course.

1. Understand how eCommerce works

   Know where online selling came from and what makes a store succeed at scale.
2. Learn the pros and cons of eCommerce platforms

   Understand what the platform should automate so you can focus on growth.
3. Build email marketing skills

   Personalization, automation, data privacy and mobile optimization.
4. Learn the basics of user acquisition

   PPC for fast, paid reach and SEO for organic visibility.
5. Master customer retention

   Keep the customers you paid to acquire.
6. Read the metrics that matter

   NPS, RFM, AOV and CLV tell you where to spend your next hour and budget.

Understand how eCommerce works

Want to know when eCommerce came into being? On August 11, 1994, NetMarket, an American retail website, sold a copy of Sting's Ten Summoner's Tales CD to a shopper in Philadelphia, who paid by credit card over an encrypted connection. The New York Times reported it as the first secure retail transaction on the internet.

Since then, the goal of a successful eCommerce business has stayed the same: make products easier to buy for people anywhere, through online stores and marketplaces. A well-built eCommerce channel lets big companies and independent freelancers alike sell at a scale that physical stores alone could never reach.

eCommerce is an extremely organic domain of commercial activity. It keeps changing. Learning it in depth, through tutors and courses, gives you a real advantage, not necessarily over the competition, but over the way you ran your business and allocated your marketing resources before. Becoming an eCommerce expert means paying constant attention to how eCommerce works, to eCommerce trends, to the evolution of prices, and to the different customer segments that come to your brand.

Learn the pros and cons of eCommerce platforms

One blog post is not enough to cover every platform. The main idea to keep in mind is simple: there is no platform that can single-handedly offer you everything.

An eCommerce platform manages the back-end functions of your shop with precision and efficiency. That frees you to focus on the other important parts of your business. A good platform gives you:

• Error-free accounting
• More transparent order management
• More efficient inventory management
• Better customer service

Even if you choose one of the most popular platforms, remember that the best platforms still come with their own trade-offs. Judge each one by how well it handles these functions for your business model, your catalog and your team.

Build email marketing skills

Digital marketing tools, social media channels and eCommerce technology keep evolving fast, and online stores keep getting more competitive. That makes email marketing skills more important, because email helps you connect with your customers in a more meaningful way.

Modern eCommerce marketing gives brands many touchpoints to reach customers and collect new leads at any stage of the journey. If you want to get the most from your email campaigns, these are the skills to build (and the subjects the CVO course covers):

• Email personalization and automation
• GDPR and data privacy
• Interactive content
• Mobile content optimization
• The benefits of artificial intelligence

Learn the basics of user acquisition (SEO & PPC)

Customer (user) acquisition, when you give it the financial resources it needs, is the best way to prevent business regression. Do not worry if you see some churn. Every business has some unavoidable, natural churn, even if your product is extraordinary and your customers seem happy. Acquisition leads to visible growth and allows you to scale more effectively.

To acquire new users efficiently, you have to know your target audience much better. That means taking the time and resources to understand each of your user segments. After that, the two main ways to increase your acquisition rate are PPC and SEO.

PPC (pay-per-click) is a paid customer acquisition strategy. It can deliver faster results and a wider reach than organic methods, and it helps you reach hyper-targeted audiences who might never have heard of your brand otherwise. Search ads run through a Google Ads campaign or any other ad engine.

SEO (search engine optimization) is an organic acquisition strategy. You do not pay for clicks, only for the software and people involved. SEO means optimizing your site and web presence for search engines such as Google, so that when people search for a keyword related to your store, your pages show up.

Find the tips and tricks of customer retention

Acquisition is only half the job. It should be common knowledge that, in the long run, keeping a customer usually costs less than winning a new one. And the cost is not the only reason retention is worth it. Returning customers are ready to spend more when they buy from your store, and they are much less likely to abandon their shopping cart.

Behind-the-scenes retention tactics save you both time and money. These are the ones to learn first:

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

To track whether retention is working, measure how many customers come back. Our guide on how to calculate your repeat purchase rate shows you how.

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

• NPS (Net Promoter Score) shows how many customers would recommend your product or service to others. It is a very important KPI because it gives insight into customer behavior. NPS is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.
• RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) segmentation identifies your most important customers by grouping them according to how recently they bought, how often they buy, and how much they spend. You can then target each group with content relevant to its behavior. That generates higher response rates, increases customer loyalty and optimizes customer lifetime value.
• AOV (Average Order Value) measures the average amount customers spend each time they place an order. You calculate it over a specific period by dividing total revenue by the number of orders in that period.
• CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) is a prediction of the net profit you will earn from your relationship with a customer. You can measure it for all customers or for a specific segment, with different formulas. Retaining customers and creating repeat buyers increases your CLV.

Worked example. A store makes $50,000 from 1,000 orders in a month. Its AOV is $50,000 ÷ 1,000 = $50. In the same month, 500 customers answer an NPS survey: 250 are promoters (50%) and 75 are detractors (15%). Its NPS is 50 − 15 = 35.

eCommerce experts who teach Customer Value Optimization

These are the instructors of the Customer Value Optimization course, with the topic each one teaches. Details come from the CVO Academy instructors page.

Valentin Radu

Teaches Customer Value Optimization. Valentin is a serial entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience in B2B and B2C marketing, and the CEO and founder of Omniconvert, a tech company that builds data-driven growth solutions for eCommerce companies worldwide.

Bob Moesta

Teaches customer research and the Jobs to Be Done methodology. Bob has helped launch more than 3,500 products, services and businesses across nearly every industry, from software to financial services and education. He is a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School, the MIT Sloan School of Entrepreneurship and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

Dennis Yu

Teaches customer acquisition tactics. Dennis amplifies the exposure and sales of successful entrepreneurs through systems, analytics and digital marketing training. His specialties include digital marketing, Facebook advertising and revenue optimization.

Val Geisler

Teaches email strategy. Val's expertise is helping eCommerce and subscription brands keep their customers in the long run, and email is her main tool for doing it.

Karl Gilis

Teaches customer experience, CRO and company culture. According to PPC Hero, Karl is the third most influential conversion expert in the world. He has been managing partner of AGConsult since 2001, growing businesses by increasing customer happiness through user research, facts and A/B testing.

Maria Caciur

Teaches RFM segmentation. Maria has more than 15 years of experience in marketing strategy, business development and entrepreneurship. As Managing Partner at Omniconvert, she leads the Managed Services department, helping retailers become customer-centric.

Chase Dimond

Teaches email tactics and flows. Chase is a top eCommerce email marketer. His academy profile credits the agency he co-founded in June 2018 with helping clients gain more than a million online community members through non-paid acquisition and more than $50 million in email-attributable revenue.

Julia Whatley

Teaches customer support tactics. Julia brings strategic partnership expertise from the eCommerce software industry. She loves building relationships with partners and watching eCommerce merchants grow through better customer experiences.

Cristi Movila

Teaches eCommerce growth. Cristi has more than 13 years of experience building online business lines for large companies in Romania, and has been active in the local eCommerce industry since it started to grow.

Become a CVO eCommerce expert with CVO Academy courses

Experimenting without a plan can still bring results and help you gain experience. But you will soon find that you are losing time and mental energy, and depending more and more on luck.

Learning from experts who have done it before gets you to your goal faster and in a more relaxed way. They give you inside tips from the industry and help you build the right mindset to use them. The CVO course includes:

• 9 international eCommerce experts as instructors
• 20 chapters and over 100 video lessons
• 12 frameworks, calculators and resources

When you are ready to put the metrics into practice, Nexus by Omniconvert calculates RFM segments and customer lifetime value from your store data. It pushes those segments directly to Meta Ads, Google Ads and Klaviyo, so your campaigns reach each customer group with the right message.

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