Your Ultimate Guide for Developing an Effective eCommerce Strategy

If you’re looking to take your business online, whether it’s an established bricks-and-mortar store or it’s now just time to make that dream brand a reality, you’re going to need a solid eCommerce strategy in place. Without it, it’ll just be done to pure luck if you succeed. 

Of course, if you’re new to eCommerce, it’s understandable if you’ve not considered an eCommerce strategy — or even heard of one! — so we’ve put together this blog for you. We’ll teach you what an eCommerce strategy does, and how to make your own. These fundamentals will go a long to helping you make that eCommerce journey smoother and more successful. You might even find that your eCommerce-side of the business becomes the real breadwinner of your brand!

What Does an eCommerce Strategy Do?

It’s a fair question to ask. When you’re running a business, there’s lots of strategies to be devised and plans to be followed, so throwing another one into the mix can feel redundant. However, if you’re serious about succeeding in the eCommerce market — and it’s a competitive one, no doubt — then you need to lock in an eCommerce strategy as soon as possible. Preferably before you start to sell anything online to ensure you get the most value for your investment and money.

Your eCommerce strategy is a plan to help you connect with online users. Think of it a bit like you’re playing fate. You want them to be drawn to your brand or business and get them to complete a specific action. This might be to learn more about you — and hopefully discover that you’re a brand that shares the same values as them, building up loyalty — to engage your services or purchase a product, even to give you feedback so you can better tailor your services and products to the market. While you can have a range of goals for how you want online users to interact with your business, it’s best for your eCommerce strategy if you only have one or two. This helps to ensure that your message to users doesn’t become muddled, leading to them choosing a competitor over you.

What your eCommerce strategy will look like will depend on this goal, however, you want to see several marketing tactics and techniques plotted out to help you reach the goal. While it can make things a bit easier to just plan one marketing move to engage with users, you’re really missing out if you aren’t using an omnichannel strategy. This is where you have multiple marketing tactics in place at once, all working towards the same goals. As a result, you are minimising the online users that will miss your message. For instance, if you only invest in Facebook marketing, you might be missing a host of interested parties over on LinkedIn. Similarly, if you stick to only marketing on social media for your eCommerce strategy, you aren’t likely to target the segment of your audience that are organically searching for products and services like yours.

So, briefly, your eCommerce strategy is your plan for connecting with online users and getting them to complete a specific action. This can be achieved through a range of marketing tactics, but it’s up to you to decide which are best for your audience and goal.

Let’s Build Your eCommerce Strategy!

While eCommerce strategies vary between businesses and industries, they all start with 4 important steps. 

1. Know Your Goals

As discussed above, the key to your eCommerce strategy is your goal for online users’ actions. This needs to be something that you can actively measure so you can see if your eCommerce strategy is working or if you need to go back and revise your marketing methods. Your goal will also depend on what stage your business is at. For instance, an established bricks-and-mortar brand may just want to see more site traffic to know that their established customers are finding them online too. Alternatively, a fresh business that is based online might be looking to improve revenue so it can get through that difficult first 5 years. On the other hand, an established small online brand might want to attract new customers to join their existing loyal customer base. 

As you can see, your goal may be quite different to another business.’ You may also have two goals that are related, such as getting new customers and turning them into repeat customers. Regardless of what your goal is, all that’s important is that you are committed to it, and it is the right action for your business now. If you’re having trouble defining your goal, remember to keep it simple. Similarly, it can be helpful to talk with other members of your team to learn about what they think the goal of your eCommerce strategy should be. This can give you insights into where your team thinks improvements can be made or where your business is already succeeding. 

Whatever the goal you decide on, you want to be able to measure it. There’s a lot of ways you can do this with various online tools and software. Make sure that when you establish your goal, you take a baseline reading to allow you to monitor the effectiveness of your eCommerce strategy. Similarly, set up regular check-ins with yourself and your team to review your progress towards this goal. This allows you to tweak your eCommerce strategy in action to get a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t. This knowledge is invaluable in maintaining a strong eCommerce presence and business.

2. Know Your Audience

Without a customer base or audience, your eCommerce business isn’t going to take off. That’s why the next most important part of creating your eCommerce strategy is to think about and understand your audience. This will help you tailor your marketing strategies to best engage them. For instance, if your audience is young and active mums, Instagram marketing, and even influencer marketing, may be the best way to talk to them. On the other hand, if you’re targeting professionals in their mid-30s, LinkedIn marketing or SEO may be a better way to connect with them.

Do some research into your audience demographics and what they’re looking for. This includes the service and product features they want, as well as what they want from a brand in general. Are they interested in brands that present as ethical or sustainable? Or is it more important that they are affordable and have fast delivery? 

It may take some time to find these answers, but with them you will be able to choose marketing funnels and more that better connect with your audience, improving ROI and ROAS. It will also help you better meet your overall strategy goal.

3. Know Your Competitors

The eCommerce marketplace is a competitive one. While this can feel like a disadvantage or negative at times, it also is an excellent opportunity for you to do some research and learn how your brand can improve.

Spend a while looking at your competitors’ online platforms and picking apart their eCommerce strategies. What do you think their goal is? How are they working to achieve it? Do you think they’re on the right track? 

With a better understanding of what’s happening in your online space, you can then look at how your brand measures up. Remember, though, your more established competitors may be able to take more risky but higher reward actions. Additionally, you do not want to have the exact same strategy as a competitor as you will be competing in the same space. You want to be unique and focus on what your brand does well.

4. Choose Your Marketing Strategies

With plenty of research undertaken, it’s time to start creating that omnichannel eCommerce strategy with a host of marketing techniques. If you’re unfamiliar with the digital marketing space, you may like to do some more research at this stage to understand how these techniques work and are best used. 

Ideally, your chosen tactics will work together to meet your goal by connecting with your audience. Additionally, they won’t exactly mirror your competitors. Even if you use the same tactics at face value, you might be targeting different keywords, promoting various aspects of your business, or even simply using unique designs, imagery, and copy.

Bonus Step! Monitor, Optimise & Repeat

We’ve mentioned it a few times before, but if you really want your strategy to be as successful as possible, you need to be ready to tweak it and even rebuild it from scratch. This is for two reasons. Firstly, unless you’re the luckiest person in the world, you’re never going to hit on the exact formula the first time out, even with careful research. Secondly, trends change and so do how people search and shop online. What worked last year, last month, even last week may not be the right choice today. Therefore, having a way to monitor your progress is crucial. 

Need Some Help With Your eCommerce Strategy?

If you think this is a big task, you’re not wrong. Unfortunately, it can be quite overwhelming for people to devise their own eCommerce strategies. And even those who want to may find they simply don’t have the resources or skills to do so. Luckily, Blank Theory is here to help. A digital marketing agency based in Melbourne, they can help you build the ultimate eCommerce strategy, packed with effective marketing tactics, and keep working on it to keep delivering you top results. To learn more, contact them today via www.blanktheory.com.au.