This is the second part of my guide to developing an e-commerce marketing plan. In the first section, we used the Marketing Strategy document to outline our basic goals, objectives, and all of our work.
In this part, we’ll outline our metrics, develop projections, and schedule out all of our activities.
Before you read this, I would suggest first reading:
Apply Metrics and Quantify Your Tactical Goals
How will you know success and failure if you don’t quantify and measure the results of your work? How do you improve if you don’t have a way to identify lackluster performance and wasted resources?
The fact is this: To achieve anything, you must have the means to track performance.
A marketing goal is reasonable, achievable, and measurable. Every aspect of our work will tie into a marketing goal that is all of these things.
There are no clear-cut “rules” in what your numbers should be; EVERY online business is unique and you’ll have to do the math to figure it out.
Every goal and objective should be quantifiable using tools available to you. Define explicitly how you will quantify each marketing tactic to reach the bigger objective goals.
For example, goals for a monthly Newsletter may be:
1) Revenue from click referrals
2) New Subscribers
3) Subscriber Retention
Notice how each of these goals ties directly to revenue from existing customers (who have opted into our mailing list), and raising number of subscribers (thus, raising the revenue considering we maintain our conversion newsletter rate, which is another metric you can track.)
Goals for any A/B testing a landing page may be:
1) Increased Sales conversions
2) Increased Order Amount
3) Increased Click-thru rate to “X” page (A landing page where, of course, you have tested conversions)
Each of these metrics ties directly into our “Storefront Conversion” goals: Increase Unique Visitor/Sales Conversions, Increase Purchase Amount.
Quantify Projections for the Big Goals
Just simply saying “increase revenue” is not enough, for ourselves and for management if you’re running projections for others.
We need to apply goals that are, reasonable, achievable, and measurable for each of our big objectives. For instance, if revenue increased 20% in 2015 and 22% in 2016, is it feasible to set a goal of increasing revenue 25% in 2017?
Good goals are aggressive enough to keep you and your team engaged and challenged. You want to achieve something grander than the previous trends, goals that mean you deserve the beer you’re drinking when you reach them. With no historical data, you should still set aggressive goals, even if you don’t have background projects. It’s OK to fail at them. You need to collect the data, anyway.
Download the Marketing Metrics Spreadsheet
Download the Marketing Metrics spreadsheet containing the e-commerce metrics I use to review and make projections.
It includes worksheets for these tactics:
- Goals for 2017 – Your overall goals and objectives go here; include any background data you want to help make these projections.
- Key Metrics – Revenue and transactions for the Storefront, including breakdowns by Source. (To help determine the progress of each major sales source).
- Advertising – Any PPC campaign(s) or budgeted advertising program. Useful if you’re tweaking/changing your campaigns regularly.
- SEO – I prefer to track number of unique keywords driving visits/revenue by major search engine. I also track Indexed pages if the site I’m working on has dealt with crawling issues in the past that I’m addressing.
- Social Media, Mail, and Storefront – This tab is to measure your key performance indicators for your other tactics; mine are social media, mail, and some internal storefront programs.
Include as much background for each of these metrics as you have, say, from the past year. (I prefer going by monthly/annual time frames.)