Essential Digital Marketing Frameworks for eCommerce

Are you ready to find your customers? They're out there. All you need is the right framework. A digital marketing framework is a structure that breaks the growth of your online store into stages, each with a clear job and a clear way to measure it. It is the foundation you build your business, customer base, tools and systems on.

The ideas here started with Dave Chaffey, co-founder of Smart Insights, who spoke about digital marketing frameworks for eCommerce at International Ecommerce Day 2016. This guide sets out an agile, strategic approach in three stages (Exploration, Decision Making and Advocacy), then shows the named frameworks that give the same idea a formal shape, and who created each one.

What a digital marketing framework is

Every part of digital marketing takes work. Content creation, social media, SEO, CRO, you name it. There's no digital business model you should approach half-heartedly. In eCommerce, many tasks need to be done, and when they aren't, conversions stay low or never arrive.

Consumers buy online more than ever, and they respond strongly to offers such as free shipping. In 2015, Econsultancy reported research by Walker Sands finding that eight out of 10 consumers would shop online more if offered free shipping. The lesson has not aged: you need to be where your customers are. They don't have to find you; you have to be there for them.

A framework keeps that effort organized. It tells you which stage of the customer relationship a tactic serves, and which number should move if the tactic works.

Why you collect data before you change anything

Take shopping cart abandonment. One of the proven ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment in the past was to make navigation between the cart and the store effortless. Does it still work? Maybe. But in today's eCommerce model, you need to know why people abandon the cart before you touch it.

So instead of trying to fix something, find out why visitors left the checkout page in the first place. Ask them with an exit survey, watch where they drop out in your analytics, then fix that exact problem and test the fix against the current version.

What an agile, strategic approach to digital marketing means

The web is a rich source of ideas to grow your eCommerce business. A quick search and you'll be blown away by the depth of information. But don't be deceived by free information. It still costs you time and focus. If you want a business that thrives through downturns, you need an agile, strategic approach.

That's a mouthful. So what does it mean? Let's break it down.

• Agile comes from a method of project management, used especially for software development. It divides tasks into short phases of work, with frequent reassessment and adaptation of plans. In practice, you split a complex task into short, simple processes.
• Strategic is originally a military word. It means identifying long-term goals and devising the means of achieving them.

Merge the two, and an agile, strategic approach to digital marketing is the process of breaking a complex task into simple, easy-to-implement steps in order to achieve long-term goals. That's all. Let's look at the stages that make it real.

Stage 1: Exploration — understand what your customers want

Your greatest eCommerce asset isn't your online store, your six-figure earnings, or your number one Google ranking. Can you guess what it is? You guessed correctly. Customers. Care for them.

Without motivated customers, you don't really have a business. A good-looking website will eventually be forgotten if the right people aren't visiting and referring friends, colleagues and family members.

In the exploration stage, your job is to understand your audience. Ask yourself: "What exactly do these people want?" Why would customers visit your store and not your competitor's? Just to buy the product? I don't think so. Millions of loyal customers shop at Amazon not because they can't find the same product elsewhere, but because Amazon takes care of them. Jeff Bezos built the company around customer obsession.

There's a simple way to sharpen what you know about your customers: when people ask what you do, take a little extra time to give them a clear picture.

If I ask you what Zappos does, you'll quickly tell me, "Zappos sells shoes." Of course it does. But the late Tony Hsieh, Zappos' longtime CEO, never described it that way. He talked about the company's purpose as delivering happiness to customers, and Delivering Happiness became the title of his book. See the difference?

If you sell digital cameras, don't describe yourself as a camera shop. Tell people that you help photographers and travelers find the ideal camera to take memorable pictures. Once you have that picture of your business, it's easy to create content people will love. Many eCommerce marketers fall into the trap of creating any content related to the products they sell. Don't do that. When you're sure about your audience's needs, you've found gold.

How do you find out? Ask. Jobs-to-be-done interviews reveal why people hire your product, on-site surveys tell you what visitors came for and what stopped them, and your order data shows which customers are most valuable. Our guide to what customers expect from an eCommerce store is a good checklist to start from.

Stage 2: Decision Making — turn knowledge into specific actions

Who says you need inspiration before making decisions for your eCommerce business? You don't. Decision making is critical for your growth. You have to act as the manager of your own enterprise and decide its direction.

Good process pays off. In a three-month study of 100 managers, described in the Harvard Business Review article A Checklist for Making Faster, Better Decisions (Erik Larson, 2016), managers who made decisions using best practices achieved their expected results 90% of the time, and 40% of them exceeded expectations.

We defined "agile" earlier as simplifying complex tasks. Your decisions should be the same: simple and easy to implement. As you follow customers on their journey, take practical steps that bring results.

Don't just say you'll "promote your website." That's vague. It doesn't mean anything. Break it down:

• Write two guest posts for publications your customers already read, and link back to your store. If you publish guest content yourself, our guest blogging guidelines show what editors look for.
• Better yet, capture the email addresses of website visitors and engage with them. Search and email marketing are still very effective eCommerce channels.
• Pick one page where visitors drop out, write one hypothesis about why, and test it. An A/B testing plan turns that into a repeatable routine.

These are simple, relatable decisions that make you want to get to work. Each time you make a decision and follow through, even if no one sees it, you strengthen the framework (the foundation) of your business against collapse or gradual failure.

Stage 3: Advocacy — turn customers into promoters

You'd expect a stage dedicated to increasing sales. Did I forget it? No, I didn't.

If you focus on understanding your audience through exploration, and on simple, consistent decisions that put you ahead of the curve, sales will naturally follow. Here's a scenario. Do you write product reviews? Then you'll agree that when you hype a product and push people to buy it, more often than not, no one listens. But when you take the focus off quick sales, review the product with an open mind and even point out its weak spots, people trust you, and your sales grow.

In the advocacy stage, your aim is to dazzle customers with excellent support. How? Spend time listening to them on social media and on your own blog, and respond to comments, posts and questions yourself. Once you're known as the go-to store in your niche, it's easy for customers to spread the news, share new products with their followers, promote your brand and buy from you willingly.

Measure it, too. The Net Promoter Score tells you how many customers would recommend you, and RFM segmentation shows who your loyal, high-value customers are, so you know whose voice to amplify. Nexus by Omniconvert builds those RFM segments from your order data and pushes them directly to Meta Ads, Google Ads and Klaviyo.

Digital marketing frameworks worth knowing, and who created them

You don't need all of them. Most stores use one planning framework and one measurement framework, and map both to the three stages above.

RACE

Dave Chaffey created RACE at Smart Insights to give marketers a practical structure for a digital marketing plan. Reach builds awareness, Act encourages first interactions, Convert turns them into sales, and Engage builds long-term loyalty. Smart Insights later added Plan in front of the four stages. RACE maps closely to this article: Exploration feeds the plan, Decision Making drives Reach, Act and Convert, and Advocacy is Engage.

SOSTAC

PR Smith's SOSTAC is a planning sequence: where are we now (Situation), where do we want to go (Objectives), how do we get there (Strategy), the details of the strategy (Tactics), putting it to work (Action), and measuring and adjusting (Control). It is useful when you need a plan that someone else can approve and review.

See-Think-Do-Care

Avinash Kaushik introduced See-Think-Do on his blog, Occam's Razor, and later added Care in See, Think, Do, Care (2015). It groups people by intent rather than demographics: See has no commercial intent, Think has weak commercial intent, Do has strong intent and is close to buying, and Care is your existing, repeat customers. Its lesson for stores: most budgets go to Do, while See, Think and Care are left underserved.

AIDA

AIDA describes the steps from Attention to Interest, Desire and Action. It is usually credited to E. St. Elmo Lewis, who used the slogan "attract attention, maintain interest, create desire" in an advertising course in 1898 and later added "get action." The credit comes mainly from Edward K. Strong Jr.'s 1925 book The Psychology of Selling and Advertising, and some researchers question it. It remains a useful checklist for the order of a product page or an email.

AARRR

Dave McClure presented AARRR, or pirate metrics, in 2007 as a way for startups to track one number per growth stage. Online stores usually reorder it so Revenue comes before Retention. Our full guide to AARRR metrics for eCommerce gives the formula and a worked example for each stage.

The 4Ps

E. Jerome McCarthy defined Product, Price, Place and Promotion in his 1960 textbook Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach. It is not a digital framework, but it catches a common eCommerce mistake: spending on promotion when the real problem is the product, the price or the delivery.

Two related Omniconvert guides go further on the customer side. Customer lifecycle marketing gives each lifecycle stage a job, a metric and an action, and the KPI pyramid orders your marketing KPIs from traffic at the base to loyalty and customer lifetime value at the top.

How to build a digital marketing framework for your store

1. Explore your audience

   Run on-site surveys and customer interviews, and read your analytics and order data. Write down, in the customer's words, what you do for them and why they choose you.
2. Choose one framework and one metric per stage

   RACE or SOSTAC for the plan, AARRR or the KPI pyramid for the numbers. Give each stage one primary metric, and resist adding more.
3. Turn each stage into specific decisions

   Replace "promote the store" with actions that have an owner, a date and a target: two guest posts, an email capture form, one checkout fix.
4. Test before you roll out

   For any change to a page that makes money, write a hypothesis and run an A/B test. Keep what wins; learn from what loses.
5. Build advocacy

   Answer every question, measure promoters, and find your most valuable customers with RFM segmentation so you can look after them first.
6. Review and adapt

   That's the agile part. Re-read your stage metrics on a fixed schedule, find the weakest stage, and make it the focus of the next cycle.

Steps one and four are where Omniconvert Explore helps: on-site surveys tell you why visitors leave, and A/B testing shows whether a change helps before you roll it out. Explore has run more than 70,000 experiments across 7,000+ websites, with an average uplift of 23.2%.

If you want the wider method behind the advocacy stage, the CVO Academy covers Customer Value Optimization end to end.

Frequently asked questions about digital marketing frameworks