3 Steps to Creating an eCommerce Strategy for Your Business

For an eCommerce store to be as successful as it can be, the business or individual behind it needs to have a clear strategy. This is because a strategy helps keep the business-focused, and also allows you to measure how your business is doing, which can give you critical insight on how to develop and change your approach in the future.

A strategy is an outline of how your store is planning to achieve its goals and improve its market position. Strategies can alter depending on the specific goals for the business, and these can range from reaching more customers to boosting customer engagement. There are a few things to consider when making a strategy for your ecommerce strategy, here are some essential steps you can’t miss.

Create a Buyers Persona

When making a strategy that targets your audience in some way, you must get a good understanding of who that audience is. It’s useful to know their interests, demographic, age, income, location, as well as other factors, as this can inform how you go about your strategy.

One of the best ways to get to grips with your audience is to create a buyer persona. These are semi-fictitious representations of your customers, which are informed by some of the data you have on previous buyers. A good persona will go deeper than the surface level details and investigate their desires and wants in terms of buying, what challenges they may face and what they’re interested in, as these can help you implement the right procedures and processes into your eCommerce website. If you’re unsure where to start, you can use a template to make sure you cover the essentials.

Set SMART Goals

SMART goals help you define what you want to accomplish and puts tangible metrics in place that can be used to track your progress. For example, your overall goal may be to boost customer engagement. As SMART goals, this will be translated into things that are numerical and measurable, such as increasing the number of shares, comments or likes, or boosting the number of reviews customers leave. SMART goals have to be the following:

Specific, meaning that it’s defined and not too broad.
Measurable means that that you can track your progress.
Achievable, so that it’s realistic.
Relevant, meaning that it’s useful.
Timely, meaning that it has a deadline to be achieved by.

It can be challenging to know what goals you should be aiming for, and which of them would help improve your business. That’s why a lot of ecommerce businesses turn to third-party companies such as this Magento agency in Manchester, as they can help you find the perfect strategy and build a fantastic website.

Define Your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

KPIs are pieces of data or information that can be used to track how well your strategy is performing. There are many different performance indicators and metrics, with some being only useful in certain situations and criteria, meaning that it’s essential to identify which indicators are useful for your specific goals.

It’s important not to get performance indicators confused with outcomes. An indicator is something that’s active and tracks efficiency, and is usually represented through percentages or ratios, such as a click-through rate or bounce rate.