How to Create an eCommerce Marketing Plan

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How to Create an eCommerce Marketing Plan

What do you think is required to create a killer marketing plan for your eCommerce website? If you are clueless, read on to find the critical content of a marketing plan.

There is a wide range of marketing tools available, and there is always a chance of being lured by the new online marketing concepts. This is the reason that having an e-commerce marketing plan becomes essential as one can easily stick to it. Only when the plan’s underlying assumptions require any changes can there be alterations in it; otherwise, everything will be going as it was decided earlier.

The sole purpose of creating a plan is not just to strengthen your position as an investor. It will also help you solidify your thoughts and come up with practical and actionable strategies. Following is a step-by-step guide on how to create an e-commerce marketing plan:

Come up with a Reason to give to the Customers

The foremost step is to find and identify why people should buy you. There is a solid need to have a unique selling proposition (USP) created or placed. The reason could be anything ranging from offering a low price for your product to being the only one in the market who sells this particular product or service.

One cannot differentiate themselves by relying solely on these two reasons and need something else to stand out. For example, the user experience on your e-commerce website will be very engaging, or you can deliver the goods at lightning speed. Whatever the reason is, it should be solid and different to attract people to your website.

Set Your Marketing Goals

You would only be able to achieve something if you knew what you were working towards. For this reason, it is impertinent to create an intermediate set of goals. We call these goals intermediate because they help in adapting to the changes that we undergo during the execution process. The intermediate destinations can be molded accordingly when we meet our targets or when the goalposts change because of unforeseen or unforeseen issues.

After sorting what we want to achieve, the next step is to determine how we’ll’ know when we have achieved our goal. This can be done by setting measurable and definable goals, which will make it clear if we have achieved something or not. The plans are attainable, but we can stretch the targets too.

Defining Target Market

You cannot just consider that the entire public will come to your website and become your dedicated clientele. You need to define your target market as you will be creating the plan while keeping this in mind. You can start with covering a general target market and slowly get further in this.

You can outline different personas and make subgroups that are likely to act differently. Therefore, as these subgroups have varying interests, they should be marketed employing other methods and channels.

What to do to Market Your Website Well?

You can develop the greatest e-commerce website, but what benefit would it bring if it has no visitors? Firstly, you must be able to define success in terms of volume, earnings, or any other measurable target. Only this will help you determine how near or far you are from your goal.

Secondly, you must list the challenges you need to overcome on your way to success. If you start pondering over all the possible challenges, you will be wasting a lot of time. Therefore, you can bring your research down to the top three ones you will face in getting success for your e-commerce website.

The Attraction Plan

Your plan should be focused on getting new visitors to the website, too, which means that it will focus on all the ways used to lure the customers. But, again, we can divide these ways into two separate categories – ongoing and one-off campaigns.

When we talk about the ongoing e-commerce marketing channels, we refer to the ways of marketing we rely on constantly. For example, Ad words and automated email recommendations are used quite frequently while testing new ideas.

On the other hand, the on-off channels are the ones that are utilized only for a set period, and then they become obsolete. They can be devised to achieve specific goals and once those goals are completed, the channels are shelved—for example, a big sale on selected items.

The Conversion Plan

This part of the plan is focused on the customer’s journey as the idea is to bring potential improvements so that a specific goal can be attained. For example, you might be converting new visitors or the old ones, but you are getting their focus to particular website areas.

After you have already defined the goal, you can formulate a strategy to achieve that goal. Be prepared to test a few ideas before you finally find the one that will make your plan easy.

Retention Plan

There is a lot of competition in the market so the trick is to retain all the visitors which you have attracted so far. You need to keep most of your customer base happy, so they don’t’ go along looking for other options. Apart from the routine retention campaigns, you will also be trying out new channels to keep the customers’ interest intact.

You will be remarketing the same audiences with on and off campaigns. One should take this seriously because the current customers are the heart of the business. Therefore, it is more important to retain existing customers than get new ones.

Success Metrics

You will be measuring the overall success of your e-commerce marketing plan with the help of specific metrics. These metrics should be defined in the plan because they will help you know how close you are to your initial goals, what you have achieved so far, and what other things you need to get done to cover all the shortcomings in the plan. Good luck with your plan!


Author’s’ Bio: Jane Winslet is a writer on a marketing team and holds a Master’s’ degree from a prestigious university. She is a part-time blogger and loves to educate people about marketing. She is also pursuing a UK dissertation.

How to Create an eCommerce Marketing Plan

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