Online marketing has given businesses large and small all over the world the ability to compete on a level playing field. But although your online store has the potential to reach more potential customers than you could ever dream of, converting them into sales is often overlooked in this constant push for a high Google position and a strong link campaign.

Too many online marketing campaigns focus on achieving high levels of traffic. But if that traffic doesn’t produce a corresponding increase in sales, the return on your investment suffers

The battle to convert site visitors into customers is hotting up and many websites will fail by not understanding the issues that affect customer behaviour.

Recent research has demonstrated that price was the major factor in online purchasing decisions, and that postage costs mean online sellers are competing with traditional stores.

But if online businesses solely compete on price, eventually, profit margins will be shaved so much that price differences will be nominal and profits will suffer. If all the competing online stores have prices within the same narrow band in an attempt to stay competitive, there is nowhere left for the marketer to go. Or is there?

You may have heard the term Social Media thrown around a lot, usually in the context of Web 2.0 and other bits of jargon designed to make the novice feel like an outsider.

Yet social media is one of the newest platforms for online marketing and is fast defining the direction many successful businesses are moving.

Social media refers to the internet trend towards website interaction and online community building. Starting out merely as chat-rooms and bulletin boards, the marketing potential has exploded with the arrival of Facebook, MySpace, social bookmarking sites, modern blogging techniques and more. 

Marketing companies are fast realizing that the future of advertising is going to be interactive. The beauty of online social media is that this interactivity is within reach of even the smallest online business.

In these days of search engine advertising, search engine optimisation, blogs, social networking sites and more, the humble email has become the maligned and underestimated marketing tool, employed as an afterthought or out of habit rather than with careful strategy and planning. But, with care, email can become a central and effective part of your online marketing strategy.

After all, isn’t this exactly how you came to be reading this article?