Where to begin with your ecommerce strategy?
As with any effective business planning, your ecommerce strategy needs to start with an overview of the current situation and a target for where your business needs to be by the end of the planning period. A commercial goal (i.e. your budget) will assist you in drawing up SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound) objectives for your ecommerce strategy... meaning your team has a better chance of actioning it in a controlled and effective manner.
How you then segment your strategy to define tactics and actions will depend on what makes sense for your business. In the past I've split the budget across channels and markets and then phased it throughout the year, accommodating for seasonality and steady growth where appropriate. I’ve then reverse engineered the metrics for the reach, traffic and conversion required to hit target.
While this is certainly a valuable exercise and will provide a framework for benchmarking future channel and site performance, my preferred approach now is to take a more holistic view that addresses the key components of an ecommerce function - acquisition, conversion and retention. Put another way… finding a new and qualified audience, converting them to customers and encouraging loyalty.
ACQUISITION.
Driving traffic to your website is easy, right? Not if like most businesses out there you’re working with a limited budget. You need to find the right audiences in the right places at the right cost. This stream of new, qualified traffic will help to feed the purchase funnel and hit budget, and your ecommerce strategy needs to outline a plan for how exactly you’ll do this…
Traditionally marketing and ecommerce teams have operated in silos. Customer behaviour has forced change and businesses now need both a digital and an offline marketing plan to drive ecommerce (and in-store, if applicable) sales.
The digital marketing plan (online to online).
Digital marketing is a discipline that straddles a number of skill-sets. On one hand it requires a mathematical mind to navigate all the performance metrics required to efficiently grow sales. On the other hand, it can present an opportunity to tell your brand story through visual messaging in a creative and engaging way. Therefore, to get it right, collaboration across teams will likely be needed. With the right people involved, you'll need to agree how best to leverage the available digital marketing channels across different stages of the customer buying cycle…
The upper funnel, otherwise known as prospecting, is the process of demand generation – finding new audiences that don’t yet know they need your product. Often this will take the form of social media advertising and influencer (or affiliate) partnerships and may result in direct sales or leads (email addresses). Social media advertising can be incredibly powerful when done correctly and combines audience management with creative optimisation.
The middle funnel is less about generating new demand and more about capturing the demand that already exists. Your target audience will already be in the consideration mindset, and this will likely manifest in product or category searches across popular search engines. To exploit this demand you will need to define a non-brand PPC strategy to target relevant search terms you don't have organic coverage for, alongside an SEO strategy that works to improve your organic ranking for these target search terms.
The lower funnel is where you'll find an audience that is ready to buy. They have high shopping intent and are generally identifiable by having already spent a longer-than-average time on your site, having viewed products, added them to their cart or initiated but not completed the checkout process. Brands often attract these visitors back to their website with email and display remarketing campaigns, as well as up-weighting PPC bids to ensure their ads are always visible for this audience.
In order for acquisition activity to efficiently generate as many sales as possible, you should calculate an acceptable CPA (cost per acquisition). This can be calculated using a short term view (i.e. net value of an average transaction minus required margin) or a longer term view that bakes in purchase frequency and lifetime value.
It’s also worth noting that in order to nurture your new audience through to their first purchase, a strong email programme (complete with automations and personalisation, e.g. browse abandonment) as well as social community management will be needed.
The offline marketing plan (offline to online).
The advantage to having a strong digital marketing plan is that it can be controlled and scaled up in line with your appetite for risk (i.e. expanding your reach for a higher CPA). However, you should also consider feeding the top of the funnel with more traditional communication methods, such as PR, out-of-home advertising, TV, brand partnerships, product sampling and/or direct mail. It’s hugely important to understand the impact that your offline marketing activity is having on ecommerce performance, and this will only be possible if your reporting and analytics capabilities are fit-for purpose.
So you've now defined how to attract all these beautifully qualified and valuable visitors to your site, what next…?
CONVERSION.
You need to give your site visitors a reason to purchase – there are many things that can be done to improve onsite conversion rates, and as part of your ecommerce strategy you should be auditing your website to understand what you do well and what you could be doing better. And once this list is prioritised, you'll have a conversion rate optimisation plan. Some areas to consider...
Firstly, what is your point of difference? Is it immediately clear from your site messaging, tone of voice and imagery who you are and what you do?
How easy is it to navigate through your site? An effective site design with a powerful UX will have your visitors transacting without them even thinking about it. UX considerations include:
What is the UX like across different devices? Mobile is here and isn't going anywhere soon – if your site isn’t mobile-optimised then you’re ignoring a large and growing population of potential customers!
Does your product setup make it easy for visitors to find what they want as fast as possible? It’s also important to consider how the setup influences faceted search and shopping categories across your site... Users should be able to browse products efficiently on a category page, but also have the choice of selecting from options on a product page.
Clear CTAs / buttons, both primary and secondary, should be designed to drive more of your visitors through the funnel towards the checkout.
Do you have a content strategy that surfaces relevant and engaging content throughout your site and supports the user journey, without obstructing it?
Visitors using your site search are likely to convert at a much higher rate than those that don't. Ensuring your site search is returning the most relevant selection of products, categories and content for any given search term will boost your conversion rates.
The checkout can be a dealbreaker. The process must be as seamless as possible for your shoppers. If it feels like work, then the chances are they won't do it! Are you clearly displaying the cart summary? Do you have a guest checkout option? If a multi-step checkout, are you displaying a progress bar? What trust signals are you displaying? How much data does your user need to manually input? Do your shipping and payment options offer the right choices for your users?
Is your site performance at an optimal level? A slow site will not only frustrate your users and likely end in shopping abandonment, but you'll also be penalised by Google and lose ranking on SERPs.
Do you offer any financial incentives to purchase? Promotions are a great tactical method for improving conversion rates in the short term. If you're concerned about brand integrity, then running a promotion doesn’t have to mean slashed prices - GWPs (Gift with Purchase), free shipping and 3 for 2 are examples of non-discounting offers that can be just as effective.
Offering support to your customers at the moment when they need it could also be the difference between an order placed and an order lost. Live chat is a really valuable tool for optimising conversion rates when activated on product pages and in the checkout. Also make sure that your contact details and returns policy are clear throughout the journey.
Finally, if you have an international presence, then do not just assume that whatever you have built for your home market will work abroad. Consider opening up your options for language, currency, shipping and/or payment to supercharge global sales.
Your ecommerce strategy should now articulate not just how you'll drive large volumes of affordable yet qualified traffic to your site, but how you'll convert it to sales. So what next?
RETENTION.
Well, the customer journey doesn’t stop on the order confirmation page. You need to not only meet, but exceed customer expectations at every touchpoint so that they become loyal customers and brand advocates.
There are a number of weapons you should have in your arsenal to encourage repeat custom, summarised below. However, you need to get the basics right first. Good product pricing and availability, delivery and payment options, and returns policies are considered to be key loyalty drivers, indicating that you will build brand trust by removing any pain points along the shopping journey.
Taking a less passive approach, your ecommerce strategy should articulate what initiatives should be developed to encourage repeat purchases and help you hit your budget.
The loyalty programme is a common tool that many brands utilise in order to reward customers for their loyalty and incentivise future purchases. Third party apps are available that deliver an effective programme with the opportunity to customise your rewards structure and branding.
Email will probably be your most valuable asset when it comes to communicating with your customers and inspiring the next purchase. There are some incredibly powerful data-driven campaign management solutions that integrate comprehensively with popular SAAS ecommerce platforms now so that you can easily set up highly targeted and personalised automated programmes in just a few easy steps.
The logged-in experience could also be an area of focus if your products are purchased at a mid-to-high frequency. Personalised product merchandising and Buy Again functionality being two opportunities to facilitate a faster route to re-purchase.
With the subscription model also becoming increasingly popular across a variety of industries (streaming services, beauty retail, meal delivery), it may make sense to explore the profitability of this as an option on your site.
So now you have the framework to write an ecommerce strategy that defines key areas of focus to help you succeed and hit budget! But do you have all the resources required to make it actionable…?
Technology – the success of your ecommerce strategy will be dependant on your tech stack. The flexibility and functionality that your ecommerce platform offers and its third party app ecosystem may either help or hinder you in delivering against your ecommerce strategy.
Analytics – as a consequence of setting SMART objectives, you will need an accurate and effective method for measuring the impact of your strategic initiatives. Web analytics, customer data, channel data – all should be available to you so that you can monitor performance (and any changes in it), benchmarked against your goals.
Skillset – Whether you have it in-house or outsourced, you'll need to cover a range of skills in order to implement your ecommerce strategy to full effect… Analytical, creative, tech-savvy, solutions-driven, organised, collaborative – it may be worth noting down the most important attributes you will need from your team to deliver the ecommerce strategy and then performing a gap analysis on your existing org structure…
If you're looking for support with your ecommerce strategy, or the development of your existing ecommerce function, please don’t hesitate to get in touch for an informal chat.