In the competitive world of ecommerce, setting clear and measurable goals is essential for achieving long-term success. Without a detailed roadmap, it’s easy to jump between multiple strategies and tactics without moving one step closer to your ecommerce marketing goals.
In this post, we’ll cover why you need ecommerce marketing goals and how to define them. I’ll provide a step-by-step guide on how to set them effectively. By creating a strategic marketing plan, you can easily drive growth and maximize your return on investment.
So, where’s the best place to get started with ecommerce marketing goals?
Why Are You In Business?
Before we can set marketing goals for our ecommerce brand, we need clarity on our goals for the business and life. From there, we can split goals into smaller chunks and use KPIs to track our progress.
I believe your vision informs a lot about your mindset and so it’s worth having a clear idea of where you’re going. Consider where you’d like to live, the car you want to drive, how many hours you’ll work per week, and what you’ll do with your free time.
You might find it helpful to build a vision board and a costed list of what you want. A vision board is ideal for saving on your phone and computer to remind you daily of what you’re working towards.
Secondly, having a total cost enables you to plan how much your income you need and put a plan in place to get there. You can’t buy a $2m house without understanding that’s what your dream home costs!
With your long-term vision set, you can set shorter-term targets. These goals could be to save $10k toward your first property or get out of personal debt. Next, go down another level to find the first goal you need to hit.
If you’re trying to save $10k, your first target could be $100. Sounds silly, but you need to start small and build momentum. Your second goal could be $1000, and so on.
How does all of this relate to business? Trust me it does! If you know you want to earn $100k next year, you need to calculate the amount of sales you need to make. To measure sales, you need to be tracking your marketing.
Setting SMART Ecommerce Marketing Goals
Now you’ve defined your purpose, we can shift to talking about how to get there. One way is to do better marketing that targets people who are ready to buy and spend less on brand building.
My favorite framework for setting goals is SMART:
- Specific: Clearly defined and measurable
- Measurable: Quantifiable with metrics
- Achievable: Realistic and attainable
- Relevant: Aligned with overall business objectives
- Time-bound: Set with a deadline
Use the SMART framework to achieve your desired outcome quicker and stay focused.
Here are 3 examples of SMART goals you can set for your ecommerce marketing that will help you hit your overall goals:
#1 Generate $50,000 in sales from social media marketing campaigns in the next six months
- Specific: Generate sales from social media
- Measurable: $50,000
- Achievable: Yes. We can use effective social media advertising, content creation, and engagement strategies.
- Relevant: Social media is a powerful channel for driving sales.
- Time-bound: Six months.
#2 Reduce cart abandonment rate by 10% within one month
- Specific: Reduce cart abandonment rate
- Measurable: 10%
- Achievable: Yes! We can improve checkout processes, abandoned cart recovery emails, and offers or incentives
- Relevant: Reducing cart abandonment can directly increase sales
- Time-bound: One month.
#3 Increase customer lifetime value by 25% in the next year
- Specific: Increase customer lifetime value
- Measurable: 25%
- Achievable: Yes! We can use effective customer retention strategies, loyalty programs, and personalized marketing
- Relevant: Increasing customer lifetime value can lead to long-term profitability and growth
- Time-bound: One year
Hopefully, these 3 examples help you understand how SMART goals can help you market your ecommerce brand more effectively.
What Goals Should You Use For Each Marketing Channel?
There are a ton of goals you could set. However, just because you can doesn’t mean you should!
I believe in setting 2 or 3 top-level SMART goals for your marketing. These should give you a big picture view of whether your marketing is working or not.
Every day, you could measure Revenue, Conversion Rate, and Customer Ticket Resolution Time.
From there, you can use secondary SMART goals and KPIs to dive into each channel. With these, you might measure them weekly. Let’s jump in and look at a few examples.
SEO
There is so much you could measure when it comes to SEO.
#1 Reduce the bounce rate on your product category pages by 15% within two months
- Specific: Reduce bounce rate
- Measurable: 15%
- Achievable: Yes with improved page structure, faster load times, and relevant content
- Relevant: A lower bounce rate indicates that visitors are finding the content valuable and engaging
- Time-bound: Two months.
#2 Increase the conversion rate from organic search traffic by 20% within one year
- Specific: Increase conversion rate
- Measurable: 20%
- Achievable: Yes with optimized product pages, clear calls to action, and a seamless user experience.
- Relevant: A higher conversion rate directly impacts sales.
- Time-bound: One year
Email Marketing
We can do the same thing for email marketing. Here are some examples:
#1 Improve email click-through rates by 30% within two months
- Specific: Improve email click-through rates
- Measurable: 30%
- Achievable: Yes with compelling calls to action, relevant content, and a well-designed email layout.
- Relevant: Higher click-through rates can lead to increased website traffic and conversions.
- Time-bound: Two months
#2 Increase the conversion rate from email campaigns by 20% within six months
- Specific: Increase conversion rate
- Measurable: 20%
- Achievable: A 20% increase is achievable with targeted email campaigns, personalized offers, and optimized landing pages.
- Relevant: A higher conversion rate directly impacts sales.
- Time-bound: Six months
Other marketing channels
I won’t bore you by covering every possible marketing channel as you hopefully understand how to use the SMART framework to set ecommerce marketing goals.
You can also use SMART to improve Conversion Rate, boost Average Order Value (AOV), enhance Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV), and other key metrics you need to measure that will help you reach your organizational goals.
Strategies for Achieving Your Goals
We’ve talked a lot about the theory of setting ecommerce marketing goals. But how do you actually make progress and complete them?
There’s a famous saying, from French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “A goal without a plan is just a wish!“
One route is to plan every tiny step in detail and couple these instructions with milestones and KPIs that get increasingly harder. Such a plan leaves no room for you to course correct based on real-world conditions.
Another option is to focus on the outcome, try a bunch of things, and believe you’ll figure it out as you go!
We could take the middle pathway, where we build an overarching plan with the likely steps we need to complete with KPIs, milestones, and rewards for hitting these. This plan would be open enough for us to change steps and adapt our approach while having metrics to hold us accountable along the journey.
Let’s revisit one of our SMART goals from above:
Increase customer lifetime value by 25% in the next year
- Specific: Increase customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Measurable: 25%
- Achievable: Yes! We can use effective customer retention strategies, loyalty programs, and personalized marketing.
- Relevant: Increasing customer lifetime value can lead to long-term profitability and growth.
- Time-bound: One year
So we have 12 months to increase CLV by 25%. First, we need to calculate our CLV and can use this formula:
CLV = Average Purchase Value * Average Purchase Frequency * Customer Lifespan
Milestones
Next, let’s set 4 milestones. Our first will be a 5% uplift and we expect to complete this by the end of month 3.
By month 6, we should be on the way to a 10% uplift. We need to hit an increase of 17.5% by month 7 to end the year having increased our CLV by 25%.
KPIs
In terms of KPIs, it’s worth starting month 1 with a KPI to increase CLV by 1%. I’d recommend you measure this daily to ensure you’re on track. This might seem like a tiny goal but will give you momentum.
So how can we increase CLV by 1%?
You could ask your top 100 customers to fill out a short survey and use these insights to offer a better product mix and service. Another option is to build a list of customers who used to purchase regularly but haven’t in the last 6 months. Next, email or mail them an irresistible offer.
With both of these ideas, you can repeat them with different customer segments next month and see another lift.
As you build more retention marketing systems, you can keep increasing your CLV. And as with the milestones, you want to keep raising your KPI as more time passes.
How To Set Ecommerce Marketing Goals And Stay Accountable
The reason we set goals and use milestones and KPIs is to hold ourselves accountable and to bring our dreams to reality. Without these in place, you’re just wishing, or as director James Cameron said: “Hope is not a strategy.”
By using the SMART goal framework, you can focus on 3 to 5 ecommerce marketing goals that will move the needle and are achievable. After setting some goals, you need to continuously monitor your progress and adjust your tactics to ensure success.
Remember to set goals, break them into chunks, set how you’ll measure them and when, and create momentum that will drive you forward to exceed them. If in doubt, keep going, you’ll get there in the end!
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