Campaign brief template for Ecommerce

The campaign brief with four fields a store needs: which slice of the catalogue is being sold, the margin on it, how much stock stands behind it, and the promotion the campaign sits inside.

Everything else is the general brief, unchanged. One outcome, one metric, one message, one approver by name, and a definition of done with a date in it.

Write it before the season is built and before a single asset is commissioned. In a store the brief is the document that decides which part of the range the quarter is about, and that decision is far more expensive to reverse in week three than it is to argue about now.

Use it again the week a promotion opens. A brief written for full-price selling and left in place through a sale is a brief whose message has quietly stopped matching the offer.

A campaign brief is not a summary of a campaign. It is the document in which somebody decides what the next stretch of spend is for, and in a store that decision is almost always about the catalogue rather than the audience.

The audience for most stores is stable. What changes, constantly, is which part of the range is being pushed, and that choice carries everything with it: the margin available to win an order, the creative that has to be made, the landing page, the promise about delivery, and the definition of a good result. So the catalogue segment field is filled in early and everything else is written against it.

This is also why the brief has to precede the assets. A shoot commissioned before the segment is settled is a shoot for whichever product was easiest to photograph, and a store ends up with beautiful creative for the line it was not trying to sell.

The gross margin field asks for a number most briefs leave out, after discount and after expected returns, and occasionally after shipping where the store carries it.

It matters because it sets the ceiling. A segment whose margin cannot support what an order costs to win in your market does not need a better campaign; it needs a different segment, a different price, or a different offer. That is a conclusion worth reaching at brief stage, when it costs an afternoon, rather than at the end of a flight when it costs the flight.

Leave it blank if you do not know it, and say so in the notes. A blank margin with a name against it is a question somebody can answer this week. A guessed margin is a target that will be defended for a quarter by people who never saw where it came from.

The offer field and the message field do different jobs and both are commonly fudged.

The offer is what is actually being given: free returns, a bundle, early access, a price. In most stores the offer moves the result more than the creative does, and briefs that treat it as a detail to be settled later end up with creative built around a promise nobody has agreed to make.

The message is the one thing the reader has to believe. Not three things and not a slogan: one sentence a person could repeat to somebody else without the ad in front of them. If the brief cannot produce that sentence, the campaign will produce five versions of it and none of them will land, because the team never agreed which belief they were buying.

A store can sell out, and a brief that does not say how much stock stands behind it is a brief that can quietly promise something the warehouse cannot deliver.

Write cover into the brief in weeks or units, with the date it was read, because the number moves. Then treat it as a condition rather than a note: a hero product with a few days of cover is not a campaign, it is a way to spend money teaching people about something they cannot buy, and a good brief kills that idea before anybody commissions the photography.

The reverse case is worth briefing for as well. A segment with too much cover has a different job and will often justify a higher cost per order, because moving the stock is worth more than the margin arithmetic suggests. Say so in the outcome rather than forcing the campaign to answer to the usual number.

A brief sits inside one offer. When the offer changes — a sale opens, a drop lands, a seasonal peak arrives — everything downstream of it changes too, and the brief that was written for the old offer is no longer describing what is running.

So the promotion window is a field, and a brief that would span the edge of one is two briefs. This costs a second document and saves an argument in the week after the sale, when the results either side of the edge are being compared as though they were the same campaign.

The landing page field is the one most often filled in last and it deserves to be argued about first, because a store's campaign is usually lost there rather than in the feed.

Name the exact destination: the collection, the product page, the page built for the offer. Not the home page. A brief that leaves it blank will inherit whichever page was handy, and the campaign will be judged on a page nobody designed for it. Where the page does not exist yet, that is a dependency with a date, and it belongs in the brief rather than in somebody's memory.

It is also worth writing down what has to be true on that page: the offer stated in the same words as the ad, the delivery promise visible without scrolling, the returns policy where the offer depends on it. A message that is made in the ad and abandoned on the page is the most common reason a good campaign produces poor orders.

The definition of done is written before the campaign starts and it has three parts: the date, the number, and the person who writes the result up.

The date is usually the flight end. The number is the primary metric against the baseline, not against the target — the target was a hope and the baseline was a fact, and the honest comparison is with the fact. The named writer matters because a brief with no author for its conclusion does not get one, and the next brief is then written without the benefit of the last one.

Write the result whatever it is. A store that keeps briefs with their outcomes attached can answer, in a year, which segments and which offers have ever worked for it, and that record is worth more than any single campaign in it.