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How To Ask For A Bigger Budget – A Guide to Budget Planning for Ecommerce

How To Ask For A Bigger Budget – A Guide to Budget Planning for Ecommerce


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Budget planning plays a crucial role in determining the success of a business. As online sales continue to grow, businesses must allocate their budgets strategically to maximise their return on investment (ROI). However, with so many variables to consider, budget planning can be a daunting task for many e-commerce businesses. 

In this article, we will provide a deeper understanding of how you can pinpoint exactly where the budget should be spent and which tools you can utilise to do so – including using a Conversion Rate Calculator.

Implementing this free and easy-to-use tool can help ease your budgeting worries by being able to understand your business goals, and then analyse data to create a data-driven budget. 

How to Ask for a Bigger Marketing Budget

If you find yourself in a situation where your current marketing budget is insufficient, it may be time to ask for a bigger marketing budget. While this may seem like a daunting task, it is essential to advocate for the necessary resources to achieve your business goals. 

In this section, we will provide practical tips and strategies to help you successfully ask for a bigger marketing budget, including how to effectively communicate the value of your marketing efforts and how to make a compelling business case for increased investment – with measured evidence, thanks to our Conversion Rate Optimisation tools.

1. Start with a plan: Before asking for a bigger budget, it’s essential to have a clear marketing plan in place. This plan should outline your business goals, target audience, marketing channels, and expected results. 

2. Highlight past successes: It’s important to demonstrate the value of your past marketing efforts and how they have contributed to your business’s success. This can include Google Analytics metrics such as increased website traffic, improved conversion rates, and higher revenue.

3. Identify opportunities for growth: Identify potential areas for growth and explain how increased marketing investment can help you capitalise on these opportunities. For example, if you’re planning to expand your email marketing efforts or paid social budget, you may need to find evidence that this will prove successful.

4. Evidence – Show the ROI: One of the most critical factors in securing a bigger marketing budget is demonstrating the return on investment (ROI) of your proposed marketing efforts. Be prepared to present data and analytics that show the expected ROI of your proposed marketing initiatives. This is where SaleCycle’s Conversion Rate Calculator can help you.

Maximising ROI – How To Plan Budget For Ecommerce

For any ecommerce business owner, it’s paramount to recognise and utilise areas of your business that could be driving key revenue and creating positive ROI.

Implementing a cart abandonment solution can help businesses recover some of these lost sales by sending automated email reminders to customers who have abandoned their carts, offering incentives or abandoned cart promo codes to encourage them to complete their purchase. Without this solution in place, businesses may miss out on potential sales that could have been recovered through targeted follow-up efforts – such as timing based segmentation emails.

Here are a few examples of what your industry could be gaining (on average) according to the latest stats and trends, when inputted into our Ecommerce Sales Conversion Rate Calculator:
(We have taken the following data from some of the biggest brand names within each industry, combined with industry market data from SaleCycle ecommerce reports to provide the following examples).

Retail: Electrical Goods

Visits Per Month: 145,500,000

Average Order Value: £325.80

Current Conversion Rate: 3.20

Current Abandonment Rate: 77.27%

SaleCycle Solutions Implemented: AOV uplift of 13%

salecycle-conversion-calculator-retail-electrical

Travel: National Airlines

Visits Per Month: 15,900,000

Average Order Value: £1,071.75

Current Conversion Rate: 1.6

Current Abandonment Rate: 89.03%

SaleCycle Solutions Implemented: AOV uplift of 13%

salecycle-conversion-calculator-travel-airlines



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Fashion: Commercial/ Fast Fashion Brands

Visits Per Month: 17,000,000

Average Order Value: £155.47

Current Conversion Rate: 3.2

Current Abandonment Rate: 78.46%

SaleCycle Solutions Implemented: AOV uplift of 13%

salecycle-conversion-calculator-fashion-commercial

Retail/ Fashion: Sporting Goods

Visits Per Month: 145,500,000

Average Order Value: £304.12

Current Conversion Rate: 3.2

Current Abandonment Rate: 77.3%

SaleCycle Solutions Implemented: AOV uplift of 13%

salecycle-conversion-calculator-retail-sports

How SaleCycle Can Help Maximise Your ROI

At SaleCycle, we track some of the largest online businesses across all sectors within the retail, travel and fashion industries. For example, in our most recent 2023 Ecommerce Stats and Trends Report, we tracked: 

  • Over 6 billion user-journeys
  • Over 5 million online conversions witnessed over 480 million abandoned baskets
  • Over 120 million cart abandonment emails

to be able to utilise and assist even more online businesses in targeting and improving key areas of their business within their budgets, including: the number of site visitors per month, average order values (AOVs), cart abandonment rates, etc. to boost conversions and overall sales.

Ecommerce Sales Conversion Rate Calculator

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is essential to a website’s ability to generate revenue and custom. Website traffic can leave at multiple points during the visitors journey, which means there are several elements of a site that can be optimised to stop people leaving.

SaleCycle’s Ecommerce Conversion Rate Calculator is designed to help you see just how much we can save you and your business.

It’s simple to use and gives you a clear indication just how much you could be losing to your competition. The website sales conversion calculator even allows you to change industries, this will show you the baseline of what we expect to see in different markets such as travel, retail and fashion sectors.

How To Use:

You’ll need some general information about your online sales, including monthly website traffic, current conversion rate (number of monthly sales/monthly traffic), the average order value (total order value per month / monthly sales) and finally, the current number of people abandoning baskets on your site (if you know it). This will give us the information we need to generate a bespoke results email instantly.

Using the numbers imputed into the ecommerce sales conversion calculator, we will apply averages from some of our most innovative and successful clients to generate the following results. You’ll get current conversion rate information as well as potential uplift in a number of areas – such as email marketing.

FAQs:

Why Is A Marketing Budget Important?

Marketing budget planning is crucial for ecommerce businesses for several reasons, such as being able to optimise marketing efforts, measure success, make informed decisions, and importantly, to stay ahead of competitors.

Delving into these concepts, budgeting efficiently can result in:

  • Efficient resource allocation: Planning a marketing budget helps ecommerce businesses to allocate resources efficiently across different channels such as social media, retention email marketing, paid advertising, and content marketing. By allocating resources based on their ROI, businesses can focus on the channels that bring the most value and reduce their expenses on less effective channels.
  • Goal setting and measurement: A well-planned marketing budget allows ecommerce businesses to set specific goals for each channel and measure their success against those goals. This helps businesses to understand the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, identify areas for improvement, and adjust their strategies accordingly.
  • Improved decision-making: By having a marketing budget in place, ecommerce businesses can make informed decisions about the type and frequency of marketing campaigns, the platforms to use, and the target audience (and specifically, which consumer behaviours) to focus on. This helps businesses to optimise their marketing efforts, increase conversion rates, and ultimately boost revenue.
    Competitive advantage: Effective marketing budget planning allows ecommerce businesses to stay ahead of their competitors by identifying emerging trends, staying up-to-date with the latest marketing tools and technologies, and investing in the channels that their competitors may not be focusing on.

Why Use Marketing Management?

Being able to measure and predict the success of marketing performance can be achieved by analysing key areas of your audience.

Some of these features are trackable using Google Analytics metrics, or can be discovered using conversion rate calculations – for example, with SaleCycle’s Ecommerce Sales

Conversion Calculator.

Knowing – and utilising – the areas mentioned can mean the difference between budget losses, and increased cart recovery resulting in great ROI.

Here are some reasons why businesses should consider focusing on marketing management when budgeting for the next campaign:

  • Strategic planning: Marketing management helps businesses develop strategic plans that align with their overall business goals. By analysing market trends, consumer behaviour, and competitive landscape, businesses can identify new opportunities and develop strategies to reach their target audience more effectively.
  • Resource optimisation: By analysing the ROI of different marketing channels and campaigns, businesses can prioritise their spending and focus on the channels that bring the most value.
  • Brand building: Marketing management helps businesses build a strong brand identity by developing a clear messaging strategy, creating compelling content, and engaging with customers across different channels. This helps businesses establish trust and credibility with their target audience, which can lead to increased loyalty and retention and repeat purchasing.
  • Customer acquisition and retention: Marketing management helps businesses attract new customers and retain existing ones. By developing targeted campaigns, businesses can reach their ideal customers and engage with them in a way that resonates with their needs and preferences.
    Measuring and analysing performance: Marketing management helps businesses measure and analyse the performance of their marketing campaigns. By tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) such as conversion rates, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and customer lifetime value (CLV), businesses can identify areas for improvement and adjust their strategies accordingly.
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Casey Turnbull

Casey is a Fashion Journalism graduate & ecommerce marketing executive at SaleCycle. Casey is committed to producing high quality content backed by in-depth research and data. She has experience developing content in a range of sectors including fashion, ecommerce and sports.