Create Your eCommerce Success Roadmap with Joe Russell (episode 432)
Joe Russell is the eCommerce Strategy Director at Adobe and Magento dev agency JH. The eCommerce strategy specialist shares his advice on how to establish a framework to get you 80% of the way there – and how to avoid the common hurdles.
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What is a Roadmap?
A roadmap is a set of steps that show where you are today in your business and where you want to be at the end of a certain period, usually twelve months. These steps can be projects or goals you want to achieve, with a plan on how to achieve them.
However, roadmaps can be longer than twelve months if you’re thinking of pushing things off and not doing everything in just one year.
How do you build an eCommerce Success Roadmap?
The best place to start when creating your roadmap is with your goals. Identify what your goals are and how you plan to measure them. Examples of goals are growing your revenue, bringing down costs, or minimizing customer complaints.
Then, fill out your roadmap with things that will move you in the direction you want to go. Joe gives us three things you can do to simplify what you want to put on your roadmap:
- Optimisation tasks or improvements
- Adding something or filling a gap
- Removing something that’s not providing value
Last, develop strategies and projects you can do to reach your objectives. Think about them in sequences and put them in an order that makes sense for you to do.
Avoid These 3 Pitfalls
In building your roadmap, Joe says there are common mistakes to avoid. These are:
- Not having clear goals. You have to go through the process of identifying your vision, your strategies, and the projects you want to put on your roadmap. There are constraints on time, budget, and other resources, so you have to focus on what you can actually achieve in the next twelve months.
- Disorganisation. Make sure to organise, such as with your strategy, sections of your website, etc. This will help you see what things are complementary to each other or where dependencies might exist.
- Gatekeeping. To avoid this, think of your roadmap-creation exercise as a democratic process that encourages collaboration. Also, make it public by using tools like Miro, so you can share what you’re working on with a link.
eCommerce Book Top Tip
- Just Enough Research by Erika Hall
eCommerce Traffic Top Tip
- For Joe, it’s email newsletters because they have the power to drive traffic and sales, especially if you have the proper segmentations and automations. Joe adds that you can also begin to look at SMS and messaging in general.
Tool Top Tip
- Miro visual collaboration platform and other similar tools such as Mural, EnVision, and Figma.
- Email Marketing Expert Podcast Episodes
- SMS Marketing Episodes
Growth Top Tip
- Map your end-to-end customer experience. Identify the pain points and possible resolutions, and also look for that point where you can offer something unique or special to your customer that can set you apart from other brands.
Interview Links
- Visit JH eCommerce Agency
- Grab a copy of the JH eBook on eCommerce roadmaps
- Joe on LinkedIn
Related episodes
- You Asked, Chloe’s answering – it’s our epic 100th Episode (episode 100)
- eCommerce Success Goals – what are they? and how to work out yours. with Chloe Thomas (episode 200)
- Chloe’s Marketing Launch Framework (episode 362)
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