Your results indicate you are in the Adoption Stage.
Your foundation is now in place. Now you can focus on getting your internal people to evangelize your eCommerce site, and on driving and deepening existing customer adoption. In this phase, your eCommerce sales are typically between 10 and 20 percent, and this phase is about pushing toward 30 percent of total revenue.
Your primary goal is to move through Adoption so you can move to reposition for Acquisition. Most companies in this stage:
The X eCommerce System
We base the insights below on the X eCommerce System that covers planning, people, technology, product content, customer experience, analytics and operations for your Digital Branch.
We wrote a book about it to help you understand all these components. You can get it for FREE:
Update Your Plan / Strategy
It is time to revise your plan to move beyond foundational and into adoption activities. Define your two-year plan for eCommerce adoption growth. What is the budget and human resourcing plan? What are the gaps?
If you are not sure where to start, check out this article on Building Your Strategy.
There are two frameworks for systematically thinking through customer acquisition and customer adoption. Check out the Framework training here.
People: Building the Team
Seats you should have filled by now:
- eCommerce leader (DigitalBranch manager)
- Product content manager
- Platform analyst
Seats you should consider filling in this phase:
- Data analyst
- Digital marketing
Continue to build your internal DigitalBranch team, incorporating a dedicated product person, analytics support, and a dedicated, experienced marketing person. A data analyst is often needed in this phase to manipulate data from multiple sources.
Supplement with third parties for social, SEO, UX, and email marketing (as needed).
Make sure you have the right Technology
By this time, you have your eCommerce platform and CMS in place. Now it is time to think about marketing tools—marketing automation and email. In this stage, you also should make sure you have an on-site search optimization process in place to constantly optimize your search box and SERP (search engine results page) for on-site search.
In this stage, you should also start thinking about A/B testing tools.
Product Content: Put a Product Content Program in Place
Product content is a program, not a project. There is no such thing as perfect data, only improving data.
In the adoption phase, product content and on-site search begin to go hand in hand. Based on search analytics, build product content according to what analytics tell you to improve.
Build a system to test and learn from content, design, and UX performance. This starts with analytics that will tell you what content is.
Customer Experience
Continue to incorporate journey mapping before any project. Journey mapping will put your customers at the center.
UX improvements should be based on what issues you see from analytics. Often these improvements fall into the registration, “My Account,” and checkout processes.
Analytics and KPIs
Review the scorecard and make changes as necessary to make it as understandable and actionable as possible. Use weekly meetings to drive change.
Marketing and Operations
Ramp up customer marketing initiatives, including customer adoption and new-customer acquisition. Look at customer service and fulfillment to define opportunities to differentiate your business.