1 Understanding objectives

 

Introduction

This chapter explains what we want to achieve by bringing the e-commerce and e-marketing solution in place. We will cover:

 

objectives hierarchy

  • Broad Business objectives
  • Long/Mid term objectives
  • Detailed objectives
 

can be

  • Tangible benefits
  • Intangible benefits
  • SMART where possible
  • Using the RACE cycle for completeness
 

are dependent of

  • Critical success factors
 

When looking into the objectives you want to achieve, start from the broad ones. You could even try to write a sort of mission statement. Go from there to long & mid term objectives and descend eventually to the very detailed objectives. Those are typically short term ones. Objectives can be quite concrete - tangible - or harder to proof - intangible. To further structure out thinking on detailed objectives, we will walk the RACE cycle and check if this provides us with objectives. You should be able to formulate the tangible objectives as SMART ones.

 

We will also have a look into the critical success factors required to achieve this.

Objectives Hierarchy

So lets look into objectives starting from the broad, moving to long/mid term ones into the detailed and typically shorter term ones.
 
 

Broad business objectives

Broad business objectives resemble writing a mission statement - not a generic one but one with a focus on your objectives for e-commerce en e-marketing.

Our mission statement:
Write a “mission statement” about the objectives you want to reach using e-commerce and e-marketing for your company.

 

Example ebay:"Ebay's mission is to provide a global online trading platform where practically anyone can trade practically anything."

 

Long/Mid term objectives

Let be a bit more concrete in our objectives and start looking inot long and medium term objectives. Those can be helpfull to explain to your employees and investors what you are trying to achieve with your business.

You can further sort those objectives into onces which will result into

  • Tangible benefits
  • Intangible benefits

Benefits are looked into both from a customer and provider view.

 

Tangible benefits

A tangible benefit is a real benefit which should be straight forward to confirm. Its easy to understand your new solution is the root reason for this benefit, and it should be possible to confirm and measure the benefit to make it tangeable. (For example it is easy to measure and associate with your webshop)

We identified:

  1.  
  2. ...

 

Examples:

  • Increase sales revenue by 10% adding an online channel wihtin 2 years
  • Reduce the cost of a remote order by having a shorter processing time (labour cost) compared to the processing time we measure for orders coming in by phone or mail.
Above examples should be quite easy to proof - making them tangible benefit.  E.g., for the first example: If you have the sales figures for your brick and mortar channel and your webchannel, and if you query your order database for address information, you can proof without any doubt the benefit.

 

Intangible benefits

It is an indirect benefit which can't be felt or touched. The result is harder to measure or verify. Its more a sentiment: we believe this is a benefit, but it's way harder to proof it in an objective way. You will a tough job to come up with any quantification as proof. That's why we call them "intangible", you can't "touch" the benefit.

 

We identified:

  1.  
  2. ...

 

Examples:

  • The conservative shop image we have might improve by adding an online offering
  • Improve customer satisfaction for our brick customers by adding an e-business support solution for warranty claims.