My Approach to Online Retail Management 01/23/11
The future of marketing is digital. Any marketing leader today should have a digital bias in their experience in order to be able to effectively leverage the integrated campaign opportunities now open to online retailers. Online Retail Manager, Web Strategist, Online Channel Manager, Online Sales Manager, eCommerce manager and even Chief Digital Officer are titles for similar job prescriptions that take responsibility for the long term planning and ongoing digital program success within an organisation. It entails the development and implementation of a strategic framework that can be used to rapidly deploy, test and optimise systems across every digital touchpoint in the organisation through collaboration with department and project managers. The responsibilities are far-reaching, but I like to focus on delivering value in 6 key areas:
According to Jeremiah Owyang(web-strategist.com) the six key areas of responsibility are:
- How to align the web strategy to meet corporate objectives
- Project Prioritisation
- How to allocate digital resources
- How to measure ROI
- How to understand what customers think of our online consumer touch-points
- How to leverage the latest technology and digital trends
Here’s my approach to each of these areas:
Aligning the Web Strategy With Corporate Objectives
Start by answering two fundamental questions: What are the business goals? And how can the web help to achieve these goals? We are looking for a vivid understanding of what the business wants to achieve, including specific Key Performance Measures, so we can start to build a web strategy framework.
Key success factor: Consideration of a global web presence and localisation requirements.
How to Measure ROI
Focus on actionable metrics that answer business problems. Apply the “So What?” Rule: Ask “So What?” three times and build a measurement framework that includes only KPIs that pass the test. This is the first step towards the creation of a continuous improvement regime, where we use data to drive enhancements.
Example: “Research from company XYZ suggests that including peoples’ faces on our website is a trust factor that can boost sales. This is a tactic already used by competitors A, B and C. Based on this my hypothesis is that including an image(s) of friendly faces will increase conversion on key pages/products. I propose the following A/B tests…”
Tie KPIs to revenue and profit in a monthly dashboard. For example:
Furthermore, we want to benchmark our progress versus the competition – our share of voice, and how has this trended over time? Have our TV commercials had the impact we expected?
How To Allocate Resources
What forms of web marketing do we need to use to meet business objectives? With marketing budgets shifting towards digital, the online channel manager becomes a key driver in the success of the organisation. A holistic understanding of digital marketing opportunities and their relationship to the organisation’s web properties is the key to success.
How do we select vendors? You’re looking for more than just technology – a solutions provider, one that meets business requirements today and in the future. They have a great organisational fit, are great communicators and their solution can be deployed easily. Their support team is second-to-none, the technology is frequently updated to meet evolving user needs, they demonstrate thought leadership in their niche and of course, the solution comes with a service level agreement.
How Do We Prioritize Our Projects?
Resources are in short supply, competitors are moving ahead with their initiatives, there are 101 ideas on the drawing board. A project prioritisation framework is needed to systematically determine which ideas get the go-ahead and in what order. Every project will be subject to the scrutiny of an ROI model that describes the anticipated benefits, with a bias towards revenue and profitability.
Highest Impact: KPIs. What is most likely to help us meet our targets?
Shortest Timeframe: How quickly can we pull this together?
Sustained Value: What’s the potential impact over the next 3,6,12 months?
Projects will be reviewed and those with higher anticipated ROI will be completed sooner, while eliminating those that are not worth doing. Project submissions must have sound reasoning and data to back them up. Any examples of international best practice and/or Data to back up the theory / trend?
Started with an idea, then get some data to back it up and offer a proposal, highlighting two or three things of value to the business that we can measure.
Example: Smartphone and Tablet uptake in the Asia Pacific is being fuelled by widespread adoption of iPhone, iPad and Android OS devices. Of particular note is the penetration rate in our key markets of Australia,New Zealand and Japan. There is a clear and present opportunity to capture the attention of this user segment and captialise on a growing technology trend. We propose the creation of native applications and advertising assets designed to enhance the brand experience for users on these devices. - We can measure application downloads and resulting engagement levels, including any lift in sales.
Qualitative assessment enabling internal submission and voting of ideas can also form part of the process, using a solution like Bloomfire.
How to Understand What Our Customers Think About Our Website
Sales funnel analysis will help derive insights into what parts of your website are most useful. You can then form hypotheses that are the basis of conversion optimisation testing.
Qualitative User feedback should be solicited at various points of the purchase cycle. The approach taken could be email or a SAAS solution like Uservoice or GetSatisfaction. Over time, you will notice peaks in support of common issues and these typically take precedence in your project priority queue.
How Do We Leverage The Opportunities Of New Technology & Digital Trends?
The web strategist has an intricate understanding of the latest technology and digital trends, and how they can be leveraged to meet business goals. Crowdsourcing and Team Collaboration factors heavily in this area. The requirements are:
1. Keep up to date: With limited time, making use of Twitter lists and RSS feeds from a set of key publishers and thought leaders to keep abreast of developments is a key time-saving tactic.
2. Crowdsource: Solicit ideas from within the organisation. Implement a solution like Bloomfire that enables internal communication and collaboration. Experts can make themselves known throughout the organisation, while ideas gain evangelists that are eager to see them become real solutions. Turning great ideas into reality can take time, especially culture shifting ones, but its important to seed the idea and continue to champion its merits passively and as the evidence mounts, buy-in is inevitable.
3.Innovating for your industry: What international best practice and solutions implemented in other industries can be applied to ours? What current technology solutions can be tweaked to deliver value to our niche? What digital trends should we take action on today or keep monitoring over the next couple of quarters to see if it is a real trend or just a fad? All of this is encompassed within the above-mentioned project prioritisation framework.
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One Responses to this article
I believe it is far more important to know what you need to do than how to do them, your blog gives very clear idea on how to break down the online marketing channels completely, Thanks for sharing.
And i guess it will be great if more information on KPI of each channel, that will form a whole picture on how to start the online marketing plan, implement them and what is more,give evaluation and adjustment.