Ecommerce Marketing Strategy: Are You Investing in the Right Channels?
Updated: 5 days ago
Written by Abbie Evans, Founder and Principal, Arqet Consulting
Abbie brings more than 25 years of experience across ecommerce, retail leadership, finance, merchandise, operations and building her own online retail business.
Direct Answer
No single ecommerce marketing channel delivers the best return for every business. Paid social creates awareness and supports acquisition. Search captures demand. Email and CRM support conversion and repeat purchasing. The right investment depends on customer acquisition cost, incremental sales, retention, contribution margin and the cost of operating each channel.
Your Social Media Looks Good. But What's Driving the Other 86%?
Your social media looks polished. Campaigns are running. New customers are arriving.
But how much attention are you giving the rest of your ecommerce business?
One Australian ecommerce dataset estimates social media accounts for approximately 14% of website traffic, with a conversion rate of around 1%.
That leaves 86% of traffic arriving through other channels.
A separate, older survey found small and medium businesses allocated approximately 28% of their marketing budgets to paid social.
These figures measure different things and come from different studies. They don't establish whether paid social delivers a better or worse financial return.
They do raise an important commercial question.
Are you investing enough in the channels and systems supporting the rest of your customer journey?
Winning the First Date Is Only the Beginning
Paid social helps attract new customers. But acquisition is only one part of ecommerce growth.
Your website needs to convert visitors. Your product information needs to answer customer questions. Your email journeys need to encourage customers to return. Your delivery experience needs to support the next purchase.
Each stage influences the commercial value of the customers you've already paid to acquire.
The Opportunities Receiving Less Attention
Customer retention and Klaviyo flows
Your existing database provides opportunities to generate additional sales without paying to acquire the same customer again.
Welcome, abandoned-cart, post-purchase and win-back flows support different stages of the customer relationship.
Australian ecommerce benchmarks suggest email traffic converts at approximately three times the rate of social traffic.
This doesn't mean email is automatically three times more profitable. Email audiences generally include customers already familiar with the business.
The opportunity is to understand how effectively you're using an existing commercial asset.
Organic search and product visibility
Customers actively searching for products represent another important source of demand.
Clear product titles, accurate descriptions, structured product data and well-organised collections support search visibility and customer decision-making.
Organic search requires ongoing investment, but unlike paid advertising, there is no charge for each organic click.
Website conversion and order profitability
Attracting more visitors won't solve every sales problem.
Poor navigation, unclear product information, weak merchandising, unsuitable shipping thresholds and high fulfilment costs all influence commercial performance.
Increasing advertising investment without addressing these issues risks increasing revenue without improving profit.
Measure the Whole Business
Paid social, organic search, email and direct traffic serve different purposes.
A strong reported ROAS measures attributed advertising revenue relative to media spend. It doesn't establish whether the business is growing profitably.
Founders need visibility across customer acquisition cost, conversion, repeat purchase, average order value, contribution margin and fulfilment costs.
The question isn't whether paid social works.
It's whether your marketing investment, customer strategy and operations are working together.
What Should Your Ecommerce Marketing Strategy Deliver Across Each Channel?
An effective ecommerce marketing strategy considers how each channel contributes to the wider business. Paid social attracts new customers, organic search captures demand, and CRM encourages repeat purchases. The priority is understanding how these channels work together to improve customer value, conversion and profitability.
Paid social: reach relevant new customers, build demand and support acquisition. Review new customer CAC, conversion quality, first-order margin and subsequent purchases. A low first-order ROAS is not automatically poor performance if the customer relationship is profitable over time.
Paid search: capture active demand. Separate branded searches from non-branded acquisition. Review spend, conversion, new customer share and margin.
Organic search and AI discovery: improve visibility for relevant products and questions. Review non-branded visits, engaged traffic, conversions, product data quality and the ongoing cost of SEO work. Organic traffic is not free to produce.
CRM and email: convert subscribers and encourage customers to return. Review list growth quality, welcome and abandonment flows, repeat purchase, revenue per recipient, unsubscribes and contribution margin. CRM needs consent, accurate data and a useful content plan.
Merchandising and operations: convert demand into profitable orders. Review AOV, product mix, shipping subsidies, fulfilment, returns and margin after variable costs.
Why comparing reported ROAS leads to poor decisions
Platforms use different attribution windows and rules. Meta, Google, Shopify and Klaviyo might each assign revenue to the same order. Adding channel-attributed sales together does not establish total business revenue or incremental growth.
A practical review starts with net sales and orders from the commerce system, then considers channel attribution, new versus returning customers, spend, contribution margin and changes over time.
A useful founder question is: If we spend another $5,000 here, what additional profit do we expect, and how will we test the result?
What do Klaviyo flows contribute after the first visit?
Welcome, abandoned-cart, browse-abandonment and post-purchase flows reach shoppers at different moments. Measure flow conversion, revenue per recipient, second purchases and incremental contribution. Email can convert well because recipients often know the brand already.
An Australian ecommerce dataset reported email conversion of 3.0% and social conversion of 0.99%. These are different audiences, not proof that email generates three times the profit. The same dataset reported organic search at 38% of sessions and email at 4.6%. Session share is not sales share.
Start with your existing customer database. Review subscriber quality, consent, welcome flows, abandoned carts, post-purchase follow-up and replenishment. Test changes against net revenue and margin.
Organic search, product information and the commercial basics
Organic search brings customers to your website without paying for every click. But attracting traffic is only part of the opportunity.
Clear product information, well-organised collections and useful content help customers find what they need and make purchasing decisions.
The commercial opportunity extends beyond search visibility. Website conversion, average order value, repeat purchases and fulfilment costs all influence how much profit your business retains.
The question is not simply how to attract more customers. It's how to get more value from the customers and traffic you already have.
A founder’s monthly channel scorecard
1. Total net sales, orders and contribution margin.
2. New customers acquired and blended acquisition cost.
3. Paid social and search spend, attributed sales and incremental tests.
4. Organic non-brand search visibility and revenue.
5. Email revenue per recipient, flow performance and unsubscribe rate.
6. First-to-second purchase rate and returning customer sales.
7. AOV, shipping subsidy, fulfilment and returns costs.
Use the scorecard to coordinate marketing, CRM, merchandising and operations. Do not treat each team’s report as a separate definition of success.
How Arqet helps founders
Arqet brings a commercial perspective across the whole ecommerce business. We help founders understand marketing performance, coordinate priorities across teams and agencies, and identify the practical work most likely to improve profit.
Engagements include an Ecommerce Growth Audit, focused improvement projects and independent ongoing advisory. Work directly with senior ecommerce expertise without large agency overhead.
Next step with Arqet
If you are unsure which channels deserve more investment, book an ecommerce strategy call. We will discuss what your business is reporting, where the gaps might sit and the best next step. https://www.arqet.com.au/contact-arqet-consulting
Research and Sources
The following industry research informed this article:
Grips Intelligence, Australian Ecommerce Traffic and Conversion Benchmarks (October 2025 to April 2026)
Australian ecommerce traffic distribution and conversion rates across social media, organic search, email and other channels.
Klaviyo, Ecommerce Marketing Mix Report (2023)
Research into how surveyed small and medium businesses allocate marketing budgets across paid social, paid search and other channels.
ThoughtMetric, Ecommerce Attribution Benchmarks (May 2026)
Analysis of attributed ecommerce revenue across paid advertising, organic search, email and direct traffic from participating brands.
Note: These studies cover different businesses, periods and measurement methods. Traffic share, marketing expenditure and attributed revenue are separate measures and should not be interpreted as a direct comparison of channel profitability.
