Founded in 2007, Infibeam.com owns and operates an e-commerce retail portal as well as customized products portal. The company provides e-Commerce and interactive marketing services to brands, retailers and media companies in India and internationally.

The focus of this article is purely on profitable e-commerce business. The steps as mentioned are tried and tested methods that have resulted in profits and large volumes in a highly competitive business environment.

Demand Side Estimation techniques
This is the first and most important aspect that needs to be understood. If you are selling more than 20 products on your website, then you need to know which one has maximum demand on every given day. This can be understood by seasonality, by historical data, by competition analysis and by new product launches.

The Best method is to understand the entire demand by 9 AM in the morning by analysis of TVCs, print Ads, Competition site home pages, by promoted products on affiliates sides and other such methods. Once this part is understood, a list of products (that are high in demand) should be created.

These are the products that are of highest demand on a given day and then it is all up to the business teams (ensure stocks and lowest pricing) and the promotions team to sell those products.

Campaign Management
Campaigns are the heart and soul of every e-Commerce promotion.

Campaigns need to be planned for every day of the year. They can be around Sale days, around Festivals, around Days of the week, around Product prices or Product categories, around Customer types (e.g.new/loyal) and so on.

An ecommerce brand needs to understand the mentality of its customers and how they want something new all the time

Each and every day for an eCommerce site is a set of campaigns. Campaigns can be category specific or brand specific or price range specific. Other variations are geographical campaigns, time based and so on. The list is endless but an ecommerce brand needs to understand the mentality of its customers and how they want something new all the time. Some thing new in terms of the reason to buy. That's what campaigns fulfil.

Media Planning (Online Platforms)
Media needs to be planned based on the understanding of each and every platform. Use search engines for high intent users, use Twitter trending for launches, GDN, Facebook and YouTube videos help in generation of frequency

Each and every platform has differences in the cost and the conversations percentages. Understanding of this is important to allocate budget to each channel.

Similarly the type of content (banner,video, text) also determines the Best platform for promotions.

The Last and most important factor that determines the selection of the channel is the match between target audience and the buyer personal(+mindset)of the channel. The better the match, the higher the allocation of budget.

KPIs
All the standard metrics are important, but everything has to be tied to the most important Metrics-(Revenue/Cost)%

Efficiency of marketing is determined by this simple metric that measures Output/Input in purely simple and business terms. No confusion in terms of definitions and the trust on the data that's available.

That's exactly how marketing should be done. Simple and measurable at every level with the same set of KPIs. If we have multiple and/or conflicting KPIs, then we are set up for failure.

Keep these tips in mind and implement processes to achieve success at each step.