How To Decide A Ecommerce Marketing Budget For Your WooCommerce Store?

So you’ve created your online store with WooCommerce and now you’re wanting the customers to visit your store to purchase products and services. But do you believe that building and setting up a store is enough to bring in customers? Not without marketing for which you need a strategic eCommerce marketing budget.

Whether you are a business owner of a brick-and-mortar store or an eCommerce store, you can’t overlook the importance of marketing. Especially for business owners that have just inaugurated their first WooCommerce store. In this article, I’ll be sharing how to decide a marketing budget for a WooCommerce store that is effective and cost-efficient.

Is Marketing Possible On A Tight Budget?

When you design a new online store there are too many upfront expenses that have to be considered. From themes and extensions to necessary expenses such as shipping all have to be taken into consideration while planning a marketing budget.

But the question remains the same – “Is marketing for an online store possible on a tight budget?”

The answer is yes. But to do so you’ve to work smart in the planning phase. Making some small tweaks such as using inexpensive or free tools can easily facilitate achieving business goals even on a tight budget.

Whether you’re on a tight budget or have ample money to spend, I’ll be sharing with you some insightful tips to plan a marketing budget for your online store in 2021 and coming years.

Tips To Plan A Marketing Budget For A WooCommerce Store For 2021?

Once you’ve built your online store with WooCommerce, your next step is to market your products and services to the relevant audience.

But before you start making people aware of your business, you need to decide on a budget or specifically speaking, a marketing budget. So let me share with you some quintessential tips to plan your WooCommerce marketing budget for 2021.

1. Start By Planning Your Sales Funnel

The very first step for planning a woocommerce marketing budget is establishing a sales funnel.

In the process of planning a marketing budget for your online store, determining a sales funnel will help you understand how much you can spend on each stage. A typical sales funnel looks something like this:

The stages of a sales funnel are as follows:

Awareness

This stage is more of a moment in which a business owner first catches the attention of the target audience. The idea is to make your prospect aware of your brand and grab their attention.

The awareness stage is like courtship where you have to woo your prospects and make them engage with your store. This stage is very important for a new online store because you want the maximum number of people to know you.

Interest

In the interest stage, the customers that are aware of your business explore your products, do comparisons, and research. In the interest stage, the customers evaluate your brand, and based on the interest levels they make competitive research before buying a product.

Therefore, you need to allocate a fraction of your eCommerce marketing budget to strategies that attract your customers’ interest. Strategies could be up-selling and cross-selling are effective in retaining customers in the interest stage.

Decision

After the interest, your customers are armed with information and ready to make a purchase. You have to put all your efforts into swaying prospective customers to make a purchase. Providing discount coupons, reward points, or offering referral rewards is a very subtle way of winning their trust.

Action

Whether a customer makes a purchase or not you have to use a portion of your marketing budget to nurture the leads. In the action stage, your eCommerce marketing budget should be invested in customer retention strategies.

Understanding your sales funnel is very important. It gives you a clear picture of where your online marketing budget needs to be invested so that you can avoid more people falling out of your funnel.

3. Establish Your Business Goals

Any known business consultant or an expert will tell you that you must establish your business goals. While planning your eCommerce marketing budget, it is important to be aware of what you want to achieve for your online business.

Here are some common goals that on average all businesses want to achieve:

• Making more sales
• Increase awareness of the brand
• Increase the number of subscriptions
• Capture more leads

The best way for deciding your business goals is to do a SWOT analysis.

SWOT analysis is one of the popular ways and according to me is the most effective approach for assessing your business. Thus, letting you visualize all the factors that can make or break your success towards your business goals.

You might find more than one goal desirable to you for your business but it is highly recommended to pick one goal and put all your money wisely to achieve it.

As you grow and your profits increase you will have more resources like time, staff, and most importantly money to consider multiple marketing goals.

4. Estimate Your Expenses

As I mentioned before, some necessary expenses cannot be ignored because your business runs on these expenses. These expenses may include the following:

• Operational costs like shipping, creating or adding products to online stores, management of inventory.
• Costs for hiring a staff to work on your business, freelancers, or in-house.
• Electricity, water, and other bills.
• Finance related costs like taxes and rents.

Marketing is a very small component for running an online business and therefore before establishing a marketing budget these need to be taken into consideration.

Interesting Fact: According to a February 2020 CMO Survey, the marketing budget projected to 11.3% of a percentage of firm budgets.

All these costs must be established before you allocate your WooCommerce marketing budget. This will also help you in deciding the pricing of your products and services thus, letting you set a baseline for your ROI.

5. Analyze Where You Fit In The Market

Another very important tip that plays a crucial role in deciding your marketing budget. It will give you a correct idea of where you rank consequently, you can plan a strategy to outrank your competitors.

You can do this with the help of marketing analysis tools like SEMRush, Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, etc.

Analyzing where you fit in the market is a great way to figure out where you lack and what areas do need improvement. Consequently, you can allocate your eCommerce marketing budgets to make those improvements happen.

6. Choose Your eCommerce Marketing Strategy Wisely

Once you’ve established your sales funnel and decided your business goals, the last tip is to choose your marketing strategy wisely.

There are many ways to market your business, but you have to be very precise in choosing the right approach and investing your marketing budget in them. Here are some of the common marketing methods used by online businesses worldwide:

eCommerce Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is great for people who have just started their business and looking for an organic approach to reach their audience. Here are some numbers that tell you why SEO deserves a portion of your eCommerce marketing budget:

• Over 42% of people start their purchase journey with a Google search
• 37.5% of traffic to eCommerce websites is from search engines.
• The first result on average gets around 33% of the total traffic from search engines.

Did you know Amazon’s all-time organic traffic is 1.8 Billion which is much greater than the paid traffic?

eCommerce PPC Advertising

Pay per click or PPC is an online form of advertising in which you’re charged when a user clicks on your ad. eCommerce PPC advertising is an online marketing strategy that allows you to promote your products or services through PPC ads.

The PPC ads are displayed at the following locations:

• Search engine result pages
• Social media marketing
• Webpages

If your eCommerce marketing budget allows you to invest in eCommerce PPC advertising to increase the brand awareness of your business. Did you know for a search query PPC ads rank above the organic search results?

Social Media Marketing

Today social media has become an integral part of a business growth strategy. Maintaining a social media presence is a commitment that helps you develop connections with your target audience.

Here are some important reasons that’ll convince you to invest a portion of your marketing budget in social media:

• Social media channels are loaded with tools that play as a catalyst in bringing natural traffic to your website.
• Since social media is responsible for driving traffic, therefore, it plays a key role in boosting your SEO efforts.
• Social media allows you to build a one-to-one connection with your customers and prospects.
• A positive social media presence helps your business in building a solid brand image.

As you can see investing your eCommerce marketing budget isn’t a choice, however an impulse for each business.

Email Marketing

One of the oldest yet effective marketing techniques is email marketing.

With email marketing, you can send your customers tailored content that matches their interests and compels them to engage with your brand. Through this marketing strategy, you can send:

• Promotional emails
• Exclusive deals and offers
• Reminders for abandoned carts
• Content wins back lost leads

And many more…

If you’re short on funds and want to make the most of your marketing budget, emails can be a worthwhile investment. As per a study by Campaign Monitor, emails were found to drive major revenue for small businesses.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a very important component that cannot be ignored. In the online world where the merchants and customers cannot see each other, content marketing speaks for you to your customers.

It is a must that you invest a fair share of your marketing budget in content marketing. Since it allows you to share valuable information about your business with your customers.

Content is the key ingredient that is present everywhere, whether it is social media copy, blog posts, or product descriptions. You need content to convey the right message to your audience.

7. Identify Free Or Low-Cost Tools To Help You Get Started

If you’ve just started your business, money management is a must for you. Therefore, you need to invest smartly in tools that are both effective and cost-effective. In the beginning, you can take the help of free and low-cost software for monitoring your business growth.

Let’s suppose that you want to increase your organic traffic through SEO. In such a case, you can invest your eCommerce marketing budget in one or more than one of the following tools:

• PageSpeed Insights: Google’s free tool to measure the performance of your online store. It also suggests points where improvements can be made.
• Answer The Public: A great tool for content marketing. This awesome tool shows you questions related to your topic and turns those questions into keywords.

• Google Analytics: Bringing traffic to your WooCommerce store is not enough; you need to track whether your SEO efforts are paying off or not.

  Google Analytics is not really an SEO tool, rather it shows you data like organic traffic, bounce rates, traffic source, and demographics. Consequently, allowing you to create relevant content to please your audience.

• Moz Local: Moz Local can be very handy for local businesses. The tool shows you how locally searching customers see you and recommend improvements for better searchability.

Most of these tools are inexpensive and the only investment they demand is time. In the beginning, you can achieve your goals using these free tools and later switch to premium tools.

8. Focus Upon Increasing Your Average Order Value (AOV)

One of the biggest challenges for new online businesses is to acquire a huge customer base. Therefore, you need to invest in strategies that can boost your Average Order Value (AOV).

AOV offers you a window into the shoppers’ behavior and tells you how much they are willing to spend in a single visit. As a result, you can plan the pricing of your products and services to scale your profits and revenue growth.

WooCommerce Marketing Plugins To Scale Your Growth

Whether an old or a new online business, constant marketing efforts are much needed for building a perpetual buzz among your target audience. If you’ve created an online store using WooCommerce, you can take the advantage of a variety of free and premium plugins to remain on the top of your marketing goals.

Now, I’ll be sharing some free and premium WooCommerce extensions that’ll fit within your eCommerce marketing budget and worth every penny.

1. Points And Rewards For WooCommerce

Customer loyalty programs are an eCommerce marketing strategy that aims to retain your loyal shoppers by making them feel valued. As a common business saying goes, retention is cheaper than acquisition.

To create a point-based reward system for your WooCommerce store owners you can take the help of the Points And Rewards For WooCommerce plugin. This is a WooCommerce extension that allows merchants to create customer loyalty programs for their WooCommerce store. As a result, letting you boost your brand loyalty, customer retention, and conversion rates.

With the Points And Rewards extension, you can reward your customers with redeemable points for the activities they perform in your store. Consequently, turning your prospects into loyal shoppers.

The Points and Rewards Plugin is available in both paid and free versions.

2. One-Click Upsell Funnel & Order Bump Offer

Upselling is one of the oldest and the most effective marketing strategy. Therefore, many brands including the eCommerce giant Amazon use upselling for increasing the average order value (AOV).

Upselling is not only a technique for increasing sales, it is a great way to offer a relevant product to your customers to increase the purchase value. Here are two solutions that let you create one-click upsell funnels on your WooCommerce store:

One Click Upsell Funnel Pro

The One Click Upsell Funnel for WooCommerce is a plugin that lets you create post-purchase upsell offers. Your customers can grab these offers in just one click without re-entering the payment details.

Upsell Order Bump Offer

This is another upselling solution that lets you create upsell offers on the checkout page. Customers can add your offers to their existing orders before they leave the checkout page and pay.

Here are the prominent features that you’ll find in both plugins:

• Smart Offer Upgrade: The smart offer upgrade lets the customer exchange the current product in purchase with a better variant.
• Customizable Offer Templates: Both these upselling solutions come with pre-built templates that are completely customizable.
• Compatibility Multiple Payment Gateways: Both One Click Upsell and Upsell Order Bump Offer are compatible with multiple payment methods.
• Funnel Performance Reports: The plugins give you deep analytics of all your upselling funnels. You get to know metrics likiggered, offers viewed, offers accepted or rejected, and total sales.
• Sandbox Mode: You can test your funnels in the sandbox mode and isolate changes from the production environment.

3. Abandoned Cart For WooCommerce

Abandoned carts are an inevitable evil of online selling. The worst part is that you cannot bring the abandoned cart rates to zero but cut them down significantly.

Did you know roughly 60 to 80 percent of shopping carts are abandoned in an online business setup? This means you could be making only one-third of your potential sales.

By recovering your lost sales you’ll see a hefty growth in your profits as a result, giving you more funds for your eCommerce marketing budgets.

The Abandoned Cart Recovery For WooCommerce is an all-in-one solution for WooCommerce store owners to recover lost sales. One of the best approaches to recover lost sales is sending cart abandonment recovery emails to customers. With Abandoned Cart Recovery For WooCommerce, you can create automated workflows with different stages that are triggered at different intervals.

The merchant can also give exclusive discount coupons to customers for completing their incomplete purchases. Also, the plugin gives you deep insights into your abandoned carts thus, letting you make informed marketing decisions.

4. Analytics For WooCommerce

Marketing is all about making informed decisions and for doing so you have to perform a deep analysis of your marketing data. One of the most powerful tools is Google Analytics that shows you all the important metrics for your business.

What if there’s a way to integrate Google Analytics with WooCommerce and show data specific to your business?

You can take the help of the Analytics For WooCommerce extension and use the power for analytics to track users’ activities.

5. HubSpot For WooCommerce

Marketing automation is a marketing approach in which you identify your potential customers and automate the process of nurturing them to sales readiness. Automation massively improves the efficiency of your marketing efforts as a result, quickly turning a broad number of prospects into happy customers.

HubSpot For WooCommerce is a marketing automation solution that integrates HubSpot with WooCommerce very easily.

Hubspot is a full stack of software for marketing, sales, and customer service, with a completely free CRM at its core that lets you give full visibility into your sales pipeline. The HubSpot For WooCommerce extension maps all your HubSpot data in WooCommerce. Consequently, you’ll see a tidy timeline of each contact’s activities, orders, and transactional information.

How Much Money Should You Allocate For Ecommerce Marketing?

If you’re new in the business world it can be hard for you to decide how much of your eCommerce budget you should allocate for marketing.

So the question is how much money should you spend on marketing?

Well, I cannot give you an exact answer, but it is mostly seen that a common marketing budget allocation ranges between 9-12% of the annual budget. Even the smallest of the businesses may go as low as 2%.

The main advantage of this approach is that the budget for the marketing of your eCommerce website is not fixed. It will grow along with the revenue and as your business expands. Also, this discourages you from overspending on extravagant campaigns as a result, ensuring long-term profitability.

Start Planning Your WooCommerce Marketing Budget Now….

With this, we’ve come to the end of our article. Although some potential customers might find your store while browsing products online, you cannot win the game without marketing. Marketing is very much needed if you want to increase the reach of your WooCommerce store. And yes, it requires some capital.

Luckily you can make each dollar of your marketing budget count if you spend it strategically. In order to do so, you have to decide your goals and proceed towards them by tracking each and every aspect.

Do let us know in the comments if you find this article helpful? Also, throw in your suggestions on how you market your business on a budget.