Set ecommerce marketing goals
Set ecommerce marketing goals
1. Use your company's objectives to put together objectives for your ecommerce marketing.
For example, if one of your company objectives is to increase revenue from new customers, your ecommerce marketing objective might be to improve lead conversion rates or increase the quality of new leads.
2. Set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals to help you achieve your marketing objectives.
For example: Reduce bounce rates by 10% at the end of the year. Increase sales by 5% in six months. Boost customer engagement to increase conversion rates by 15% in one year. Ensure that the SMART goals focus and encourage efficient use of resources. Together, small goals combine to achieve marketing objectives. For example, if your objective is to increase sales using email marketing, then your SMART goals might be: Increase email click-through rates by 20% in six months. Increase the conversion rate by 15% in six months. Improve sales by 10% in six months.
3. Talk to stakeholders to check for scaling issues and develop goals that maintain or improve the customer experience. Look for goals that are compatible with and support your marketing goals.
For example, increasing lead volume can overwhelm the sales team or cause a website to crash from an unexpected amount of traffic. An increase in sales can create more demand than inventory can meet. More products going out can overwhelm a packing and delivery team. Delays in sales responses and delivery create bad user experiences. Ask how other departments can support your efforts. Use stakeholder mapping to find ecommerce marketing goals specific to each group. Know the needs, capacity, and goals of each team. How much money is the accounting team willing to allocate? How many personnel is the HR planning to assign? Consider stakeholder interests and goals. Classify them by importance in the goal-setting process. List relevant groups, organizations, and people. Rank teams in HR, accounting, marketing, and management higher as they have direct interests.
4. Calculate the budget that you'll have available for ecommerce marketing.
5. Research ecommerce marketing best practices relevant to your goals and industry.
For example, if the best practice for increasing conversion rates is to provide discounts, you’ll know to include discounts in your action plan.
6. Reflect on your competition, customers, and market trends to choose marketing tactics that suit your business and will help you achieve your goals. Ensure each tactic is responsible for attaining some part of a goal.
For example, if the goal is to get $10,000 in monthly revenue, you might use tactics like: Content marketing Email marketing Mobile optimization PPC marketing Social media marketing SEO.
7. Using your best practices research and the tactics you chose, create an action plan to achieve each of your ecommerce marketing goals.
List activities you’ll complete to make your goals happen. For example, if your goal is to boost website traffic by 15% in one year, your activities might include: Research industry keywords. Optimize landing pages. Build backlinks. Build subscription list. Reach out to industry influencers and thought leaders. Improve on-page SEO. Find key industry leaders to write guest blog posts.
8. Decide how you'll measure and evaluate your progress towards your goals. Identify KPIs like customer lifetime value or brand sentiment that are important to your company and might be indirectly affected by your action plan.
Pick an analysis platform and a dashboard or reporting platform that can help you to track and publicize progress within the company. Make sure these are set up to offer easily-understood charts to help people outside your department understand what’s happening so far.
9. Break up your budget depending on the importance of each goal. Allocate more resources to goals that promise higher returns and are more closely aligned with your core objective.
Allocate money based on the performance of different campaigns. Choose campaigns that strike a balance between cost and return. For example, instead of hiring an influencer, you can manage your social media handles and engage with customers directly. While that option is free and hiring influencers costs money, influencers have a broader reach.