E-Commerce Strategy and SEO: Lessons from Spanx

Introduction: Spanx and the Power of E-Commerce

The AiMA (Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association) awarded Sherpa Web Studio the title of most effective search engine marketer for the year 2008. Sherpa was recognized primarily for its outstanding search engine marketing work for Spanx by Sara Blakely. Spanx is primarily an e-commerce website, and through its partnership with Sherpa the online business was able to amplify sales by 550% by means of search-engine-driven traffic. The world of e-commerce is becoming more sophisticated day by day — an attribute that has not only enhanced online business operations but has also eased the transition from brick-and-mortar retail to e-tail and online shopping.

The present state of the Spanx online business is the product of more than ten years of continuous work and innovation by its founder, Sara Blakely. She launched the company from a single brick-and-mortar operation with a starting capital of $5,000. Through continuous innovation and product line expansion, Spanx became a necessity for its target market. What began as a traditional retail business has since become a high-performing e-commerce operation, benchmarking its growth over a decade. Among its many milestones, the most significant and innovative has been the expansion of its product line to encompass a larger portion of the audience as its target market.

The Spanx brand line now includes the following product categories:

The Target Market of Spanx

This broad product range reflects a deliberate strategy to extend the brand's reach across multiple consumer segments, moving well beyond its original shapewear niche to serve a diverse and expanding customer base.

Modern Trends in E-Business

The boundaries of what management once considered acceptable work redesign have been expanded by burgeoning e-business technology combined with continuous competitive pressures. The approaches now being developed give employees considerably enhanced discretion and opportunities for skills development, lifestyle change, and improved performance. These assertions are not entirely new: in the 1980s, Reich argued that rapid changes in the technology of products and production demanded the development of "flexible systems." Market segmentation, increasingly informed and demanding consumers, and complex, sophisticated product and process management were already pushing organizations toward adaptability.

E-business brings with it certain design issues that management must address, including:

Renewed interest in work design is thus based on pressures arising from turbulent market conditions, and from the development of electronic business in manufacturing and services, both of which encourage a reconsideration of work flows (Alm, 2002).

A dynamic, cost-cutting, quality-maximizing business environment creates pressure on organizations to reduce fixed assets and minimize spending on buildings and facilities. However, this occurs at a time when businesses find it difficult to accurately predict future demand for products and services. Consequently, organizations need to accommodate fluctuations in the number and location of personnel for restricted durations, but in a way that does not lead to a corresponding increase in support costs. The management of facilities design brings with it a growing, unsatisfied demand for faster response, limited-duration business space, and infrastructure.

Paralleling the change in demand for business space is an e-business technology revolution that offers the following advantages:

E-business thus allows organizations to reformulate what they mean by "the organization" and "the workplace." This reformulation has two crucial aspects. First, for the individual working within an e-business environment, the concepts of space and time are fundamentally different — such individuals are capable of working independently of location and time. What these individuals need is access to their organization as a collaborative "club" in which to meet with other highly autonomous e-business collaborators.

Effective website content should be attractive, simple, easy to navigate, and interesting to read. Technology standards evolve rapidly: just a few years ago, it was strongly recommended that newsletters avoid HTML and stick with plain text formatting. At that time, only about 20% of internet browsers opened HTML easily, meaning that what appeared as a professionally designed newsletter often arrived as disorganized, sometimes nonsensical text and characters. However, that situation has since reversed. Now over 80% of newsletter readers open HTML emails with ease and prefer the professional appearance they offer.

The current advice is as follows: if you have the resources to create an HTML-formatted newsletter, that is ideal. However, many publishers lack such resources or the ability to test how an HTML format will render across all major Internet Service Providers (ISPs). In that case, a plain-text newsletter with links to full articles on your website is a sound alternative. This approach drives traffic to your site rather than delivering all content directly in the email (Liu, 2003).

Conclusion

When examining e-commerce issues, it is necessary to pay attention not only to the technological aspects but also to the business aspects. The core of e-commerce is to effectively match the effort to create superior value with the technical capabilities of the new medium. Several e-business inhibitors — including implementation costs, limited financial resources, and insufficient knowledge or experience — can prevent small firms from fully leveraging digital channels. Since utilizing these technologies in SMEs is clearly challenging, it is important to examine whether the same barriers appear in micro-sized firms and to identify how such companies could benefit from e-business in their marketing efforts. Moreover, there is reason to believe that barriers such as scarce resources or lack of skills become even more pronounced in micro firms.