It’s no secret that online shopping has continued to grow over the last few years, particularly after the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2025, retail e-commerce sales worldwide are expected to exceed $4 trillion as global internet access and adoption, particularly for shopping, increases. The U.S. alone is expected to contribute over $1 trillion to this figure.
With so many potential customers out there willing to spend their money online, it’s essential that your e-commerce marketing takes full advantage of this. But e-commerce marketing is a unique challenge of its own, so developing a tailored marketing plan that takes your specific growth goals into account is the best way to achieve the results you’re looking for.
What Is an E-Commerce Marketing Plan?
An e-commerce marketing plan is a strategic roadmap that outlines how a business will attract, engage, and convert new customers to their online retail business. It outlines the marketing channels to be used and the tactics and strategies that the marketing team will implement, along with goals that will increase sales and build brand awareness.
A good e-commerce marketing plan should be flexible and adaptable to accommodate changes in consumer behavior, market trends, and even algorithm changes on search and social platforms.
For small to medium businesses especially, the marketing plan should prioritize channels that offer the best return on investment (ROI) and fit within the overall marketing budget. The goal should always be to move customers through the different stages of the marketing funnel, from awareness to purchase, while also nurturing those customers into long-term brand fans.
Why Is Your E-Commerce Marketing Plan Important?
Whether you’re a small business selling products from your home or a growing company with a wide product distribution, having a strong marketing plan is essential. Without a clear strategy in place, marketing efforts become scattered and disjointed, leading to wasted time and money.
One of the biggest benefits to having a marketing plan is that it gives you and your team focus and efficiency. Operating with limited resources means that every dollar and minute count. A structured plan helps you prioritize the most important and impact-driving channels, ensuring that where you’re putting in time, money, and effort aligns with your goals.
Brand consistency is also vital when building awareness and trying to attract top of funnel (TOFU) visitors to your website. Customers very rarely make a purchase through a first website visit or interaction on social media. Instead, they’ll pass through multiple touchpoints with your brand as they move through the sales and marketing funnel on their way to a purchase. Having a well-defined and clear e-commerce marketing plan ensures that brand messaging, branding, and customer experience remains consistent across all channels.
Finally, one of the most overlooked benefits of a marketing plan is its ability to make your team more adaptable. When success metrics are clearly outlined in the plan alongside goals, it makes it clear to your team when marketing efforts are working well and when changes need to be made. From there, you can make necessary adjustments that allow you to stay competitive.
Broad versus Specific Approaches
Focusing on Overall Improvement
A broad approach to e-commerce marketing means that your plan covers multiple aspects of the business, rather than relying on specific marketing channels in any great depth. Full-funnel approaches are generally best for businesses looking to build a loyal customer base long term, along with teams who have never created an e-commerce marketing plan before.
This typically uses approaches like search engine optimization (SEO), content creation, and a focus on improving the customer experience. Multiple channels will be used but specific goals for each will not be outlined in the plan. Instead, overall growth metrics will be assessed instead.
While this can be beneficial in some cases, it’s also important to remember that trying to cover every marketing avenue without specificity could lead to budget being stretched too thin. Without tracking these channels in granular detail, it can be more difficult to attribute both successes and failures within the business’ marketing efforts.
Focusing on Specific Channels
The opposite of a broad approach, an e-commerce marketing plan that focuses on specific channels can be beneficial when testing new options like paid ads or content creation.
Typically, teams that have been working on e-commerce marketing for several years and are comfortable with this approach will move toward this type of plan. This is because they have the expertise to understand what channels may be best to add, or to stop using, while also having the knowledge to assess detailed metrics from these new opportunities.
However, there are also pitfalls to this approach. Being too narrowly focused on a single channel or handful of channels means that efforts could be wasted in one area, with a potentially successful channel being overlooked. Your team may also struggle to make this plan a reality if they don’t have the necessary resources to support them.
E-Commerce Marketing Plans: What Should They Include?
1. The Executive Summary
The executive summary should be in a short paragraph at the start of the marketing plan. This outlines high-level answers to questions like what your team wants to accomplish with the plan (e.g., the revenue goal for overall marketing efforts for the year), where your brand currently stands, what will be changing, and how those efforts will happen.
2. Business and Marketing Goals
The overall business goals should be briefly outlined in this section of the plan, before moving onto the marketing-specific goals. All marketing goals should align with the bigger picture, but this section doesn’t need to describe how these goals will be achieved.
3. Target Audience and Customer Personas
Identifying your target audience is one of the most important sections of an e-commerce marketing plan. Keep in mind that you may have more than one target audience, particularly if your plan is covering multiple products that your business sells.
Break these audiences down by personas that outline the typical demographic information for this group, their behavior, and the needs they have that your business fulfills.
4. Competitor Analysis
Knowing who you’re competing against and what makes them different from your business is essential. Look at both direct and indirect competitors, locally and nationally, to see where your business stacks up against what they offer. From here, you can identify gaps in the market that you can take advantage of with both your marketing and product suite.
5. Brand Position and Messaging
From your competitor research, you should be able to identify what makes your business unique. Outline your unique value proposition (UVP) in this section of the plan to help your marketing team put together messaging that clearly demonstrates what makes you different. This will help them establish a more consistent brand voice and tone.
6. Marketing Channels and Strategies
This is the part of your marketing plan where you’ll outline the different channels that you want to use as part of your marketing mix. This will likely include strategies like SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, paid advertising, and email marketing.
7. Budget Allocations
Each marketing channel should have a dedicated budget allocated to it that, together, forms the total marketing budget for the year. How you allocate your budget is up to you — for many small to medium businesses, budget often aligns with the experience of the marketing team and which channels they’re most comfortable using, along with which will provide the greatest ROI.
Always allocate some budget for discretionary spending. New product launches may need additional support on certain channels and you may want to invest more money in high-performing channels throughout the year.
8. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Tracking your marketing performance is essential for knowing what’s working well and what isn’t. Outline in this section of your plan the specific metrics that you’re going to use to establish success and what specific results you’re expecting to see.
9. Timeline and Execution Plan
Briefly outline any deadlines or campaign launches that you expect to have throughout the duration of the plan. For instance, a new product launch will need a more targeted marketing effort, so ensure all of the details are outlined here, including who is responsible for each channel.
10. Contingency Plan
It never hurts to be prepared, and this is especially true for e-commerce businesses. Include some information here that details what you’ll do in worst case scenarios. Your crisis communications plan should be separate from this, but details about preparations for out of stock items or supply chain issues should be mentioned.
How to Craft an Effective E-Commerce Marketing Plan
Research Everything
Before you can implement any aspect of your marketing plan, you need to do your homework. From competitors to customers, ensure that you do everything you can to know as much as possible before launching your new marketing strategy.
SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) is one of the best ways to keep an eye on what competitors are doing, while conducting current customer research (or market research for newer brands) can give you an idea of where pain points are that might need addressing.
Set Clear Goals
Every goal you set should be tied back to bigger business goals and also fall under the SMART framework: Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timely. This will help you craft goals that are not only more achievable but also keep business owners happy when you actually reach them! Set yourself up for success rather than overpromising and under-delivering.
Track Progress
Always track every marketing effort as much as possible. Data is a marketer’s best friend, so you want to ensure that your efforts are being recorded and measured accurately. Keep data accessible to the whole marketing team so any important information is being shared.
How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your E-Commerce Marketing Plan
Conversion Rate
This is one of the most important metrics to track as part of your marketing plan. The conversion rate measures the percentage of visitors to your site who complete a desired action, likely a purchase. For instance, if 1,000 people visit your site and 50 make a purchase, the conversion rate is 5%. Many marketing plans use this metric as one of their top goals e.g., increase the conversion rate from social media by 10%.
Cart Abandonment Rate
For e-commerce businesses, knowing the percentage of shoppers who add items to their online cart but never complete a purchase is vital — clearly these visitors are interested, but something is stopping them from buying. If 200 shoppers, for example, add items to their cart but only 100 complete the checkout, the abandonment rate is 50%.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
For most businesses, acquiring new customers through sales and marketing is more costly than retaining them. It’s also important to know the average CAC to see if you’re spending more on marketing in certain areas than the revenue those channels are generating. For instance, if you spend $500 on ads and bring in 10 customers, the CAC would be $50 per customer. It’s also good to know this number for comparing against average order value (AOV).
Examples of the Best Marketing Plans
Coca-Cola
Not all marketing plans need to be in written text, although this is helpful for referencing! Coca-Cola’s 2020 marketing strategy is a great example of using video to discuss their plans for the year when it came to content marketing specifically.
EMBED VIDEO: Coca-Cola Content 2020 Initiative Strategy Video – Parts I & II
Lush Cosmetics
While preparing to launch their brand in Portugal, Lush Cosmetics put together an extensive marketing plan that outlines the unique considerations to be accounted for in their new market. Included in this was information about their market, the cosmetics industry in general, their mission and values around sustainability and ethics, along with details about their online and in-store marketing mix.
Key Takeaways
Building an effective e-commerce marketing strategy is essential for success in today’s growing, but competitive, online retail world. With a data-driven approach and extensive research, an e-commerce marketing plan can help teams stay agile, while also remaining focused on marketing efforts that align with business growth goals.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is the best marketing strategy for e-commerce?
The most effective marketing strategy depends on your target audience and goals. A multi-channel approach typically works best when looking for long term success, along with boosting sales immediately.
What is the best e-commerce marketing platform?
For businesses looking at an all-in-one solution, Shopify is one of the best e-commerce platforms out there. Meta owns both Facebook and Instagram, so is essential for any brands looking to market on social media, along with running paid advertising on these platforms.
