How to Grow Your Ecommerce Traffic

5. Setting reasonable goals and then working backwards

Implementing an Ecommerce marketing strategy plan without first defining clear and actionable goals is a bit like getting into a car in a city you’ve never visited, with no navigational tools, and being asked to reach a destination. Sure, you might end up there by luck, but if someone asked you to take a different route to the same place and get there faster, you’d be left scrambling.

The question for any Ecommerce business owner who is creating a new marketing plan, or completely retooling an existing one, is how do you hit the sweet spot wherein your goals are achievable yet sufficiently ambitious?

Using educated assumptions to guide your path forward

Most of us learn that relying on too many assumptions will get us in trouble, but the concept of assumptions can be very powerful in a business sense. If you’re just starting your Ecommerce business, or if you’ve operated for several years already, you should have developed a comprehensive sales plan (if not, your marketing strategy hasn’t been designed to serve the larger aims of the company). By taking the assumptions outlined in various parts of your sales plan, you can work backwards to develop a suite of marketing goals that will help you meet and exceed your revenue needs overtime.

Using your goals to inform a feasible working budget

Another area where marketing novices feel lost is in determining initial budgets. With so many marketing channels to exploit, and with complex components and unexpected costs, it’s understandable to be overwhelmed by the specter of a budget spinning out of control.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be a terrifying prospect. Using the strategy of starting with specific sales goals and working backwards, combined with an estimation of how much each channel may cost, you can decipher how much you’ll need to spend per visitor to drive traffic that’ll convert into the volume of sales needed to achieve your revenue milestones.

Committing to optimizing strategies

Nothing informs your strategies more than your goals, which is why operating in the absence of clearly defined objectives is a recipe for frustration. We’ve seen that using these benchmarks along with reasonable assumptions to steer strategic thinking doesn’t have to be overly complicated, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy either. You, as the owner of the company, have to dedicate yourself to making sure your strategic initiatives are only implemented after proper due diligence has been performed, and that you actively work to refine your processes for optimal results.

It’s hard work and it requires patience, attention to detail, proper internal communication, and a comprehensive set of KPIs and measurement tools. The good news is any Ecommerce company can do it, and it will lead you down the path to a properly aligned marketing plan that engages customers at the right time and drives website traffic and conversions.