E-commerce marketing planning is about formalizing how you intend to drive traffic to a website and convert it from prospective users to customers.

The plan specifies exactly how a business intends to use e-commerce marketing channels to attract, convert and retain customers. With an integr...

The RACE Framework is the perfect tool to assist the e-commerce marketing planning stage, allowing you to focus on each stage: plan, reach, act, convert, an...

Plan: Create a digital marketing strategy, mission and objectives

Reach: Grow your audience online, situational analysis and competitive landscape, target audience, budget and goals

Act: Encourage brand interactions and leads, media a...

Begin your plan by assessing the previous year’s performance. To create an effective digital marketing strategy, you must first have a good idea of what is working as a strength as well as knowing your weaknesses.

You should also have a view of the market and your competitors’ activities.

What is the growth timeline and how do you intend to reach new customers?

Reach involves building awareness of your brand, products, and services. After all, no one can buy from your business if they don’t know it exists.

ToFu (top-of-funnel) tactics as part of your e-commerce marketi...

• Define your key brand messages to focus on awareness, familiarity and purchase intent.
• Embed campaign tracking and attribution to adequately review performance.
• Perform keyword research to identify strengths and opportunities (both paid and organic search) 
• Identify t...

What channels and content works best to grab attention with the target audience? What makes them take action?

The ACT stage in the e-commerce marketing plan is aimed at encouraging interactions that will result in lead generation. It focuses on creating interactions with content rather than...

How do you intend to convert a lead to a sale? What activities will persuade your audience to take that vital next step and turn into paying customers? BoFu (bottom-of-funnel) looks at the end of the process; generating the conversion.

Today’s customers expect a personalized digital experie...

It’s important to remember that payment can be made through online e-commerce transactions or offline channels. The customer journey is not linear and a deep dive into analytics and customer data is essential to understanding the path to purchase. You should consider this as part of your omnichan...

This stage in the funnel requires you to keep adding value to your brand experience to generate repeat purchases, build loyalty, and improve customer satisfaction.

• Plan how you can use content to nurture the post-sale relationship. Examples include storytelling, case studies and engagi...

Your e-commerce marketing plan should include a view as to how you will track and report on all KPIs:

• Customized Google Analytics goals, segments, events and dimensions to reflect campaigns
• A conversion-based forecast model for media ROI
• The conversion rate for differen...