Selling your Digital Marketing Strategy to senior management

28 Sep 2018 Dominic Comments Off on Selling your Digital Marketing Strategy to senior management

One of the most challenging aspects of implementing any new digital strategy within an organisation is selling your vision into senior management. YOU know what needs to be done however how do you simplify and concentrate on just a few quick wins? You have already considered all the other main requirements for your new digital strategy such as:

• Clarified goals
• Defined applications
• Defined data requirements
• Defined the technical architecture
• Defined the people and processes

Lots of hard work, long hours, challenging discussions and your next step is the boardroom and getting the senior management team on board. So what should you be looking at in order that you get that approval to proceed?

You should start with the quick wins from the above which can demonstrate an immediate ROI. I worked with one company who added 600k onto the bottom line in one year (from a previous year’s trading of £1.5 mill) simply by emailing customers – incredibly they had been collecting the data but doing nothing with it!

For example if part of your strategy is get justification for an advanced email marketing program, then make sure you have some great apps such as browser and basket abandonment set up and that you have interrogated your database re additional capabilities.

ROI planning helps you to get that buy in by focusing on those areas of your plan which can easily be costed and modelled up re improvement in conversion, basket uplift etc. Small scale testing should be done of each major change in order ROI improvement can be measured correctly then rolled out.

Your ultimate aim is improving effectiveness and efficiency – and I think these are where you may find the big / quick wins in your business case:

Target high value segments

Do you know who your best customers are? If not you should! If you do, why are they your best? Undertake a small profile of them and draft some pen portraits. These customers should be the most important asset you have so look after them. They are the ones most likely to convert to a sale.

Improve conversions late in sales funnel

I mentioned in a posting recently that I believe in a very simple method that every small business should use to simplify how they trade a website. This is focused on a 4 step model – Traffic, Trade, Convert and Retain. Once your customer has decided to buy then you need to remove all obstacles to conversion.

You need to understand the dropout rate at your checkout (maybe using Google Conversion funnels) and think what you can do to improve that conversion rate

Increase average order value

There are many tactics you can use to increase average order value from Free Shipping and Returns promotions to basket upsell strategies and limited offers – looking at ways to get that customer buying more starts at trying to increase your AOV.

Identify customers about to lapse

Every season you will have customers who will lapse but you need a program in place to identify them and pre-empt them lapsing. For example identify those customers who

Determine your Customer Lifetime Value

This is essential in any organisation. You need to understand how much you can expect to make from each customer for that customer’s recruitment to be profitable. For example if your average CPA is #40 and your customer only spends 20 then it will take 2 transactions from them to break even.

After break even you should then be running analysis each season to show each of the customer segments profitability. This is key to understanding your customers trading behaviour each season

Identify your most profitable channels

As you recruit more customers through more channels (eg Paid Search, Affiliates, Social etc) so your costs go up as does your CPA. With many channels working independently of others it can be difficult trying to identify what is REALLY your most profitable channel however what you can do is look at what is working within each channel.

You may be working with some affiliates that drive traffic but do not convert – possibly costing you money and adding to that ever increasing CPA.

Focus on improving mobile conversions

Even now in February 2015, some online retailers do not have a mobile optimized website. In my experience retailers should now have around half their traffic from mobile / tablet devices and by not offering your customer base a smooth user experience you are losing valuable sales. Consumers are becoming more demanding and the chances of them trying to negotiate your desktop website on a mobile device are slim.

Summary

Make sure you know your customer database inside out – what is good / bad? What additional information is required and how do we get it? What are your customers doing?

By knowing this information and being able to mine it with a view to increasing sales, you can put a plan together which senior management and the Board should embrace.

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