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• Seasonal Calendar Download >
• Article PDF Download >

This blog is part three of a three-part series where we aim to support you in understanding how e-commerce products can be integrated into your annual marketing calendar.

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Boost your marketing strategy with e-commerce

Our series of insights around building a dream digital infrastructure so far has covered how to integrate your e-commerce infrastructure into your current business & how to leverage the data you are then enabled to collect.

To gain real benefit and ROI from your digital infrastructure, you need to ensure that you have a best-in-class marketing strategy to sit alongside your digital capability.

I (Chris) asked Sophie MacDonald, Marketing Director at Fuse & Ignite, for her top tips on how to approach e-commerce in your marketing strategy and share some examples of the activations and features that could transform your business.

“Sophie, how does e-commerce fit into your annual marketing plan?”

“There are several touch points to consider when incorporating your e-commerce strategy into your marketing plan. You can consider Order & Pay at Table, Collection, Gift Vouchers, Event Ticketing & of course your Online Shop. Each one of those touch points has benefits if you plan correctly.

I would consider how the above products fits into your annual plan:

• Offers calendar e.g. high season, low season and days of the week offers
• Seasonal calendar e.g. Mother’s Day and Christmas (download seasonal calendar example)
• Multi-channel campaign calendar e.g. brand campaign ideas”

“Can you talk us through these touch points and share some examples of the features that can benefit a restaurant business?”

“For Order & Pay at Table the key benefit of this from a marketing perspective is to capture actual customer transactions data. What they order, where they order from and their frequency. This can feed my CRM strategy with rich customer data.

I need to ensure every opportunity to increase spend per head is maximised with Order & Pay at table – are QR codes visible on the table, do staff have incentives to use QR ordering, is the side order upsell functionality set up. Does the customer wifi promote the use of Order & Pay at Table when customers sign in”

The Gift voucher market has huge potential to add revenue straight to the bottom line.

I’ve created a seasonal calendar to highlight the opportunities to drive additional revenue via gift vouchers. I’ve also demonstrated how they can be used in campaigns and cross-promoted for your online shop.

The basics need to be covered by offering monetary vouchers and experiential vouchers – afternoon tea, mixology, pasta making class.
I’d have a very big focus on partnering with 3rd party websites to promote by vouchers and maximising direct sales during Christmas.

Event ticketing has huge opportunity for growth in 2023 and beyond. This is only going to get bigger for hospitality brands.

I’d ask myself how I can develop my brand to create experiential events that my customers would love. How can I also get staff involved and champion our brand in the events? Drake & Morgan are amazing at this – check out their event ticketing landing page

Is there a trend to jump on or should the events be music related, or food and drink focused. Can they involve participation such as a cooking class or mixology class.

The tech must also facilitate the management of the event to pre payment, customer details and email communications are all managed and automated

“How can you integrate e-commerce into your marketing campaigns?”

“I’ve developed a marketing campaign plan as an example. I think it’s best to give an example of how e-commerce can be integrated into a marketing campaign and it’s a great resource for marketers to use to inspire when creating their next campaign. Check it out – it can be downloaded above”

“How do you create engaging & successful campaigns without a big budget?”

“Large multi-channel digital campaigns are necessary, but also costly. In this economic climate it’s important to continue to do exciting marketing campaigns, but how can costs be managed and revenue maximised? Integrating experiential, in person events into a campaign gives you the opportunity to drive revenue via ticket sales.

E-Commerce event ticketing is a powerful way to let customers experience the campaign first hand, generate revenue via ticket sales and capture data from an engaged audience.”

“How much does tracking and reporting data influence your marketing plan?”

“Data will inform most decisions that go into e-commerce whether it’s product, price or offer related – it’s imperative. Reporting is a key part of this mix and setting up the correct report is essential in tracking the success, whatever the KPI.

If you don’t have the expertise in-house then I’d always recommend outsourcing the tracking of your digital infrastructure.

Ensure the data is boardroom worthy. If you had to report the success of a campaign or activity to the board, is it clear how much was spent, what was delivered and what was figures were achieved. Numbers are important but what value and benefits did it offer your customers or staff? Be sure to include those.

Report on the life-cycle of the campaign. Campaigns should aim to deliver long-term benefits so how is your campaign continuing to deliver value? Namely this is the benefit of collecting data and the long-term value that brings in the way of Loyalty”

“How do you apply budget to e-commerce? Is it separated or not?”

Each product should effectively have its own budget, particularly those with costs such as events, the shop products and then staff training. Campaigns can swallow some of those event costs because the revenue generated from events is powerful to attribute to a campaign. Generally costs should be manageable within the marketing budget and remain low.

“What are your top 3 tips for building an e-commerce marketing strategy?”

1. Create and use a marketing activation calendar all year round, it will help you plan, budget and execute. (download here)

2. Understand where your business needs a helping hand. Which month or day of the week needs support and utilise e-commerce products to support in boosting sales

3. Understand the full cycle of how e-commerce can benefit your business. Developing your brand, supporting days or months when takings are low, creating experiences for your customer, allowing customers to share the love of your brand – all of those enable the brand to collect valuable customer data and drive well informed long-term loyalty.