Setting goals for your online store

Written by Marcel Landeweerd on January 30, 2014

Your online store a success? That depends on definition! One person would be very satisfied with 1 order per day. The other finds 5 orders per day already meager. It is therefore important to make concrete goals for yourself. This will give you something to work toward in the coming months. Goals ultimately too ambitious? No problem, then you know for the next period what is achievable.

Objectives help you to achieve a goal. Too often I see online stores with goals that are too vague. Example are "increase sales in the coming period," "make a profit in the coming months," or other goals that are good in themselves but don't help you work toward anything. So in business administration, we like to work with nice abbreviations. SMART goals are one example. The letters in SMART stand for specific, measurable, acceptable, realistic and time-bound. On Wikipedia , we see the following definition in this regard:

S pecific; Is the objective unambiguous?
M eetable; Under what (measurable/observable) conditions or form is the goal achieved?
A cceptable; Is it acceptable to the target group and/or management?
R e alistic; Is the goal achievable?
T e time-bound; When (in time) should the goal be achieved?

How SMART are your goals? When formulating your goal, it is first important that it be specific. By this is meant that no different interpretations are possible. For example, if your goal is "Increase sales to 20,000 per month within 3 months," then the definition of sales is open to multiple interpretations. Is it turnover including or excluding VAT? Does an order that is returned also count as revenue? And so on. So define your goal in such a way that it is completely clear. Making goals measurable is very important. Some things are easy to measure (sales, visitor numbers, etc.) other things are more difficult (customer satisfaction). So decide in advance how you are going to measure something. So not "Increase customer satisfaction", but "Increase customer satisfaction from a 7.5 to an 8.5 using WebwinkelKeur customer experiences". That way you have set concrete values and also mentioned how you are going to measure them. Acceptable seems a vague concept. In the English version of SMART it is comparable to relevant. This means whether the goal itself has added value for your store. For example, you could set a goal of "Get at least 100 likes on my Facebook page within 2 months". However, the question is whether that goal has added value for your business. Whether it does or not I won't comment here, but for each goal, consider carefully whether this is really what you want to achieve. Realistic is easy to explain, namely, is the goal achievable? Ambitious goals are good, but unachievable goals are not! Goals should provide motivation; if you don't achieve them, it will backfire. On the other hand, goals should not be easy to achieve. In that case goals do not motivate, but will be achieved anyway. Set your goals so that they are realistic but ambitious. You will learn what is realistic and ambitious for you based on previous experience. Goals without specifying when you want to achieve your goals are worthless. So never set a goal like "Increase customer satisfaction from a 7.5 to an 8.5 using WebwinkelKeur customer experiences", but also set a requirement when this should be achieved. Much better is "Increase customer satisfaction within 3 months from a 7.5 to an 8.5 measured using WebwinkelKeur customer experiences". After 3 months, you can then evaluate whether or not you met the goal. Using goals formulated with the SMART method ensures that you really work towards a result. It gives structure to your business. I recommend that you formulate two goals every 2-3 months, for example. Then you can use that period to achieve these goals. In this way you continue to build your business/web store every period.