What Is an eCommerce Business Plan for Vape Shops and How to Create One
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Running a successful online vape store requires a bit of luck and a lot of planning. Most of the luck you’ll have is self-made, so make sure you focus on the planning side of things.
In this article, you’ll learn to draw up an eCommerce business plan for vape shops, along with a few tips that will help you make it even better.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
What Is an eCommerce Business Plan?
How to Develop an eCommerce Business Plan?
Tips to Planning a Successful E-Commerce Sales Plan & eCommerce Sales Promotions
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What Is an eCommerce Business Plan?
A business plan is an official document defining what your vape shop’s measurable top-level goals are and outlines how the company will achieve them. Every company should have a business plan to follow.
A sales plan is just like a traditional business plan. Only it outlines objectives, tactics, potential risks, and target audience focusing specifically on your business’s sales strategy.
Your business plan should lay out your top-level goals. Your sales plan specifies the steps you need to take to achieve the goals specifically related to sales.
A strategically sound sales plan should communicate your sales objectives, provide direction to the sales team, define the responsibilities for each sales role, and allow you to compare your sales team’s results to your organizational goals.
How to Develop an eCommerce Business Plan?
Planning a sales plan is not very difficult. It just takes some time to get right. If you follow the eCommerce business plan template provided below and add a little bit of time and patience to that, you’ll be able to draw up a solid sales plan.
This section of the sales plan can be extracted from your original business plan. It should detail your business's mission and vision, which could include helpful background information that will allow you to implement and structure your sales plan.
2. Roles & Responsibilities
This section is where you’ll detail who fulfills which roles and responsibilities within your sales team or other teams directly impacting your sales strategy.
3. Define Your Target Market
The target market is the portion of the population interested in the type of product you are offering. In your case, you are interested in discovering who the vapers in your target market are.
Defining your target market can be tricky because the first target market you represent might not be the first one you will do for your vape shop. It’s ok if your target market changes, meaning that you’re getting closer to who your target market is.
Once you’ve defined a market, you are now ready to segment it even further.
4. Sales Tools (Software & Resources)
Remember that your sales plan should serve as a guideline for your sales team to follow and use as a north star. You want to include this section because it will help your team know what tools they can count on to accomplish their sales goals.
5. Where Does Your Vape Shop Stand
This section is known as ‘positioning.’ In this section, you write down who your main competitors are and how your company fits into that scenario.
It’s also essential to define market trends, new sales software gaining fame in the industry, and anything that could give you an edge over your competitors.
6. Marketing Strategy
Here, you will get into the details of your sales strategy. Make sure you describe your pricing and the details of any promotions you are planning on offering.
Also, make sure you define the key actions that will help your company meet its sales goals, like sending marketing emails each week, etc.
7. Prospecting
Having sales leads is one thing. Qualifying them and knowing what segment of your market they represent is prospecting. Prospecting should also include the criteria your sales team needs to know before reaching out to a potential customer.
In an online vape shop, prospecting will have a lot to do with SEO or other methods you can use to raise brand awareness, attract new customers, and retain existing ones.
A clear client prospect will help your sales team identify the inbound and outbound sales methods they need to optimize sales closure.
8. Action Plan
The entire sales plan is in itself the action plan. This section should summarize it into easy-to-understand and measurable steps you have to take. For instance, part of the action plan could include the number of sales emails that need to go out every week, including which days of the week and what product or segment they target.
9. Goals
For this section, write down your goals. Sales goals can take many shapes; they can be revenue-based or volume-based. They can focus on new consumers or customer retention.
You’ll have to factor your product’s price into whatever indicator you choose to use as your target goal. For instance, if your goal is to sell 1,000 vape pens for a specific brand each month, then you should factor in the sales price and profit margin your business makes from the sale of each of those devices.
You’ll probably have more than a single goal, and in this section, you want to write them in a bullet point/spreadsheet format that allows you to prioritize them by importance.
Goals can also be laid out by territory and timeline. So, do you have specific sales goals for a particular city or state, and by what date and time are you planning to accomplish them? When it comes to a timeline, most companies usually structure their goals quarterly or monthly.
10. Budget
Every goal requires a budget because every plan has associated costs attached to it. Standard variables to consider when drawing up a budget include salary, commissions, training, resources, and other operational fees.
You should also keep your sales forecast at the top of your mind when writing your budget. Although it seems obvious, you’ll want to make sure that the budget does not exceed the profit based on your sales forecast for the period.
Tips to Planning a Successful E-Commerce Sales Plan eCommerce Sales Promotions
Sales promotion can be anything from promoting an event to an exclusive discount. Some shoppers only make purchases when there’s a promotion involved, but the steps to an innovative sales and promotion plan should do more than just offering discounts.
Understand your customer first, then define what incentives will motivate them. You can do this by visiting your customer’s historical purchasing habits, analyzing them, and putting them into action.
Once you’ve understood the motivations behind your customer’s purchasing habits, you can mold your sales plan and promotions to match them.
Only you know your customers, so use that knowledge to create engaging sales campaigns specifically tailored to them. If you don’t know your customers well, then bear in mind that nobody has more potential to get to know them, so make sure you exploit that.
2. Apply Cross-Selling Tactics
It’s easy to get caught up in giving away discounts on your top-selling products. Although sometimes this could make sense, other times it ends up being a waste of profit.
Cross-selling is a powerful tool to push other products that don’t have as much rotation as your top-selling items. It is also a way to keep your customer happy by making the shopping experience more convenient.
A customer appreciates when you make it easier for them to purchase the products they were looking for, making their experience with the products more enjoyable (i.e., Offering an e-juice at a discounted price for the purchase of a vape pen).
3. Target Sub-Niches
Once you know the profiles that compose your primary target market, you would benefit from splitting them into smaller, more precise segments.
For instance, you know your customers like vaping 3-7 days a week. But there might be a segment that prefers disposables and another one that desires refillable devices. Or perhaps you’ve identified a segment that prefers mentholated e-juices and another one that leans towards fruity flavors.
Customizing your sales and promotion strategies to fit each segment (or your most profitable segment of consumers) could help you close sales more effectively. Chances are, you have all the information to make the assumptions necessary to segment your market.
If you don’t, talking to your customer service team and looking at your online sales information are great places to start.
4. Use All Your Promotion Resources
Perhaps you’ve built up a robust Facebook or Instagram presence. Or maybe your sales strategy utilizes email marketing as its sales tool of preference. Whatever your sales strategy says, make sure you are using as many platforms as possible to promote your sales efforts.
If you are offering a discount or a cross-selling opportunity, you’ll need to make sure that your customers know they have that option. The best way to interpret this is that social media engagement is fun, but it isn’t functional unless you attach a business goal.
5. Focus On Customer Retention
Not only do return customers spend more than first-timers. It’s also more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to retain existing ones.
There are many ways to cultivate customer loyalty. A few standard methods focus on customer engagement on social media, having a newsletter that adds value to your customers, and developing a rewards program for returning customers.
Conclusion
An eCommerce business plan for vape shops is a document that works as the guiding principle to accomplishing the company’s sales goals. Developing an eCommerce business plan requires knowing and understanding who your customers are. This way, you’ll be able to create successful e-commerce sales promotions and campaigns that drive your business.
