After a five month absence from writing, I’m finally back to adding content around innovation and developing an entrepreneurial mindset. My wife and I made a permanent move from Boston to Chicago and this has been the focus of my time for the past several months.
Now back to a stable schedule, I’ve decided to continue adding content on this site but also update the focus of my site to now include digital analytics. This is a top interest of mine and I think this can blend well with the other topics I write about.
Now on to my discussion about creating a digital marketing and measurement model for an ecommerce company….
Creating a Digital Marketing and Measurement Model for an eCommerce company
After starting a humidor ecommerce business several months ago, I recently decided to create a Digital Marketing and Measurement Model in order to provide clarity around the marketing activities I need to undertake in the months ahead. I was inspired by Avinash Kaushik’s post here about how to create a Digital Marketing and Measurement Model for improving your digital marketing campaigns and the web analytics used to measure the mechanics of the campaigns. The process involves these 5 steps:
- Document your business objectives
- Identify goals
- Choose KPI’s (key performance indicators)
- Choose targets
- Choose segments for analysis in web analytics software (e.g. Google Analytics)
Below is what I put together over a couple of hours of thinking through the above five steps (I left out my actual targets):
Digital Marketing and Measurement Model for eCommerce
Here’s some of my thinking around each section:
Step 1: Document your business objectives
As an ecommerce company, I don’t need to focus on generating leads or driving eyeballs to view media content for ad revenue. I need to focus on creating sales (“Generate Sales”) and to focus on how I will grow my brand (“Establish The NH Brand”).
Step 2: Identify goals
With the help of Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz in their book, Lean Analytics, I determined that my ecommerce company is a hybrid company—one that can focus on both New Customer Acquisition and Customer Loyalty as growth strategies. I included these strategies in my goals section and also established some goals around generating sales.
Step 3: Choose KPI’s (key performance indicators)
Now that I knew what goals I’m aiming at, choosing the KPI’s was fairly straightforward.
Step 4: Choose targets
I decided on some targets for that want to hit by March 1, 2015. I first picked reasonable goals for ‘New Visitors per Month’, ‘Conversion Rate’ and ‘Average Order Value (AOV)’, which told me roughly how much money per month I would earn in profit. This profit number seemed like an achievable goal if I put in the effort, so I went with it.
Step 5: Choose segments for analysis in web analytics software (e.g. Google Analytics)
Here I decided on some segments that I would look at in my Google Analytics account in order to help myself refine my marketing tactics to help me better achieve my goals. This is one area I could likely put more time in, but I decided to stick with what I have for now. I will definitely be spending some more time in the near future digging into my Google Analytics account to find those segments that I need to focus my efforts around.
Conclusion
Going through the above process has been very helpful in determining what my marketing goals should be and how to measure the results on a recurring basis. If you are interested in creating a Digital Marketing and Measurement Model, I highly suggest you read through Avinash’s post here.
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