Front-End Vs. Back-End Marketing For E-Commerce Brands

In this article, you will learn the difference between Front-End Vs. Back-End Marketing For E-Commerce Brands – and how to make your business more profitable by increasing your efforts on both.

Most e-commerce businesses are good at focusing on one of the two central pillars in their marketing strategy: the front-end or the back-end.

It’s increasingly rare that we come across organizations that spend the appropriate amount of time, energy, and resources on both.

Before we get started when we talk about front-end vs. back-end systems, the following is what we are referring to:

Front-End Marketing

• Anything related to growing the business by obtaining new customers.
• Putting the right offer, in front of the right people, at the right time. Turning them into new customers.

Back-End Marketing

• Any efforts to grow revenues through the existing customer base and email list.
• How you can turn a first-time purchaser into a loyal brand advocate.

This article will give you the tools to conduct a quick audit on your business and determine how you can ultimately pull more profits from your company.

Profitable acquisition + strong backend sales = a healthy and growing brand

Let’s dive in.

Front-End Marketing is your customer acquisition machine.

Strong direct-response advertisements should champion your front-end marketing systems to get new customers to engage with your business.

For most e-commerce companies, these front-end marketing systems are typically PPC or influencer advertising campaigns. 

The most popular current methods for direct response marketing are the standard ad platforms: Facebook Ads, Google Ads, TikTok Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Bing Ads, Apple Search Ads, Amazon PPC, etc.

Keeping your customer acquisition efforts profitable will likely be one of the most significant problems you must continually address to keep growing your company. Don’t ever stop experimenting with different audiences, platforms, and offers – this will keep you ahead of the inevitable ad fatigue that chases down any good advertising campaign.

If you currently don’t have a social platform operating as a viable customer acquisition source, we recommend starting with Facebook Ads. The primary reason is that Facebook’s ad platform is mature, results happen very quickly, and you can run tests with much smaller investments than the other platforms.

We would be more than happy to run an audit on your Facebook Ads account and provide you with an action plan to improve your performance, so don’t hesitate to reach out.

Here are a few additional resources to get you started: 

“How you can leverage Machine Learning to improve your Facebook ads ROAS by 47%.” 

“Improve your Facebook Ad tracking with Conversions API.”

“The Ultimate Facebook Ads Campaign Structure [E-Commerce]”

A quick note: 

Direct response advertisers are notorious for telling business owners that they simply have to run their acquisition efforts at a loss, or they will calculate profitability based on lifetime value (LTV). Don’t fall for this trick.

We fundamentally believe that this is a recipe for failure. You need your front-end marketing to run at a profit to create scalability in your acquisition efforts. 

Depending on the amount of experimentation you have conducted and the size of your business, the profitability of your advertisements may be small but don’t settle for losses here.

Run an audit on your front-end marketing efforts

You might still have the question, is my front-end marketing working the way it should? Is my business in a healthy growth position based on the return I’m getting from my investment?

Here are a few questions that will help you identify your areas for improvement on the front-end:

1. What returns do you see from each ad platform? Are you running a profit on these advertisements?
   
2. What is the conversion ratio on the offers that you have created?
   
3. What is your cost per acquisition?
   
4. What is preventing you from scaling your acquisition efforts?
   
5. Are your offers strong and catching the attention of your target audience?

Back-End Marketing is your profit center.

In a healthy and growing organization, the back-end marketing system needs to be the key profit driver in the business. 

Ideally, you’ll develop an extensive list of loyal customers (email addresses and phone numbers) that you can remarket all of your new sales and products at a low cost.

We are continually surprised at the number of e-commerce brands that don’t spend enough time or energy on having reliable communication methods with their customers.

You want to build your email list independently from any social media platform. Yes, you want the email list subscribers to follow you on social media, but having a direct point of contact is a better solution. Algorithm changes, new restrictions, and legislation are a few reasons you are vulnerable without an independent list.

So, what does a back-end system look like for an e-commerce company?

You need to spend your time and attention on two primary avenues which will help you grow your business exponentially.

1. The introduction of new products to serve the needs of your most loyal customers.
   
2. Email marketing campaigns that introduce your customers to the list of products you already offer.

We understand that the first of these two options may be outside your current operating budget, so let’s focus on growing that fund by reengaging with your existing customers and email subscribers.

How to run an audit of your back-end marketing efforts.

Here are a few quick questions that will help you identify if your email efforts are working. If you’re unhappy with the answers to these questions, you need to work on improving these areas. Back-end marketing revenue comes at a much higher profit percentage, and you need to capitalize on it.

1. How many email subscribers do you have?
   
2. How many email promotions are you sending to your subscribers a week?
   
3. Is your unsubscribe rate healthy? Below 0.5%
   
4. What percentage of your revenue is directly attributed to your email? You’ll want at least 30% for ideal growth conditions.

Now, go and audit your Front-End Vs. Back-End Marketing efforts.

You now have the tools to properly your front-end and back-end marketing systems. Following these steps will improve your profitability and create sustainable growth for your business.

Want our help maximizing your front or back-end systems? 

Don’t hesitate to reach out to our team. You can do so on our contact page or email us directly at: [email protected].

If you found value from this article and want to learn more about advertising your e-commerce business, scroll down to find a few more articles that will help you out.