It doesn’t matter how good your eCommerce marketing strategy is, it will fail without robust execution aligned tightly with other leaders in your organisation. 

20 years in marketing and it’s the one thing I see marketers struggle with the most. “What do I do and when should I do it?” Creating a roadmap of activities prioritised based on a myriad of dependencies is a skill and should be led by one of your most senior lieutenants within your organisation. Yet, most times it isn’t, and companies wonder why projects don’t run to time, why performance objectives aren’t being met. Of course, when they’re not, it’s everyone else’s fault, another team, a supplier, an industry event, all of which can be avoided with the right eCommerce marketing execution strategy – COVID-19 is an exception!

Gone are the days when your marketing eCommerce execution strategy was fulfilled by following the campaign calendar!

2009 was a pivotal time in marketing; 

  • It’s when data driven marketing became easier for marketers, for the first time there were drag and drop tools that allowed marketers to orchestrate 1:1 consumer experiences easily. 
  • Yet, this was a problem, why? Most companies would spend the next decade battling between a campaign-centric and customer-centric approach to marketing. Usually this was a result of product buyers under pressure to buy products for the lowest price (buying more products to increase profitability for the company), and the CEO demanding more revenue, demanding the CMO send more campaigns; which seemed an entirely counter productive approach, especially if the goal is to increase CLT or Customer Lifetime Value. 
  • It was then that agencies were forced to think different about how they made money from marketing services. The thought of becoming more data driven, more automated, raised concern across the marketing agency world; how would they make more money if marketing became automated, if they weren’t sending hundreds of campaigns per month for each customer? 

Personalised eCommerce Marketing

It was the same then as it is now as we move from 1:1 personalisation to erm, ..1:1 personalisation (is there a difference?). Oh yes, some companies are actually doing it now while others still say they do it. The real difference is that we’ve now got way more data than we can shake a stick at - 50x more than just five years ago! The ideas aren’t that different; it’s just that the technologies available to us now allow for additional data sources to be analysed and activated in real-time and at scale. 

Here are six best practices to consider when developing your eCommerce Marketing Execution Strategy; 

1) Design your customer contact strategy. At a minimum identify your customer life cycles and, if you feel persona marketing is the way to go, create your personas and document them. Use this to influence the content you present to your customers to guide their experiences with your brand. 

2) Create a campaign calendar (nothing new here, wait for it!), and be open to changing it frequently when you identify new and innovative campaign or automation ideas as a result of testing (best practice number three)! 

3) Test, regularly! I know most eCommerce functions will be doing this regularly already (keep it up), but for everyone else this is the single biggest activity to boost your top line revenue (which makes up for the extra work it requires!). Stay true to your testing strategy. Don’t just A/B or multi-variant test new campaigns or programs, ensure you regularly test with a view to optimising performance of your current programs, inject renewed performance or change them. Embrace a culture of experimentation! 

4) Clearly define your objectives, including the timeline in which you need to achieve them by; and before you do, ensure you are confident about how your marketing program is performing today - ensure you’ve taken an average of the previous 12 months (minimum!). If you’re a new company, use industry benchmarks as your baseline. If you’re not a new company, use a combination of the previous 12 months prior to COVID, and relevant industry benchmarks. Understand the level of sophistication you’ve achieved to this point, the personalisation blocks, the channels you’re currently orchestrating experiences across, the waves in each program on your contact strategy, and the number of data sources driving personalisation today. 

5) Agree which activities are having the biggest impact on business performance. Agree this as a marketing team, but also with your extended teams (the teams that you need support from to continue doing the great work you’re doing). If these teams understand how your effort helps to grow the company they work for, they’re more likely to keep helping. Once you’ve agreed this, obtain commitments from your team and your extended teams about the level of effort and the number of activities they can support on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis. 

6) Build a success-focused culture. No matter how small you think they might be, share the successes! Share progress on how the number of activities completed are influencing business performance. When your team feels the joy of being part of a successful group, you’ll be amazed at how much harder they’ll work. 

In summary, when your eCommerce marketing strategy is thriving, the gravitational pull it creates with other parts of your business is contagious, like a gyroscopic mechanism driving the ship upright and forwards. 

I hope you enjoyed this article or at the very least can take a small piece of value from it. Perhaps show your appreciation by reacting or commenting in the post below.

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