When is the best time to start thinking about marketing your new eCommerce website?  Obviously, you can’t post a blog or send a link to the new site if it hasn’t been built yet, but don’t wait – each aspect of your site build-out has marketing implications whether or not you plan for them!

Especially in the early stages of project planning, it plays to keep one eye focused on how you will eventually promote visits to your site. Your ideal customer’s purchase behavior and other demographics might lean variously toward social media, email, mobile, traditional advertising, couponing or any number of tactics and strategies.  These choices will, in turn, point to the proper platform for your site and the kind of content you will offer.

When working with your developer, the temptation is to build the site to accommodate a graphic design or existing content. Instead, the most successful sites are built with marketing tools in mind: Will you want to offer special pricing to certain groups of customers? Do you have an existing loyalty program you are administering manually today? Is your product line growing and can the search engines make sense of how the products are grouped?

Taking these potentially complex considerations into account up front ensures that your site will perform to your needs, rather than having to adapt your operations to the limitations of your website. As a bonus, it’s always cheaper to select and build the features you need up front, instead of trying to write code and shoehorn them into place at a later date!