TL;DR
New e-commerce marketing leaders face intense pressure to deliver results quickly, but the most successful ones resist the urge to make immediate changes. Instead, they spend their first 90 days listening, learning, and building relationships. The key priorities: understand your market and customers deeply, learn the business economics from finance, evaluate existing teams and partnerships fairly, and establish clear communication systems. Only after this discovery phase should you start making strategic changes.
E-commerce marketing leaders are under a lot of pressure. It’s tempting to come into a new role swinging, making big changes to prove their worth, but we’ve seen that go both ways.
Let’s talk about what actually works when you're stepping into a marketing leadership role at an established e-commerce brand with messy historical data, tangled channels, and a legacy team.
Watch the full video below or listen to the episode here for the complete conversation. Prefer to skim? Check out the top takeaways below.
As a marketing leader, you need to know your market better than anyone else at the organization. Your first move shouldn't be diving into ad accounts or demanding new tools. It should be understanding your customers at a deeper level than anyone else in the company.
This means reading customer reviews and using AI tools to aggregate insights quickly. Join customer service calls to hear frustrations firsthand. Get on sales calls with retail partners to understand the complete customer journey. Attend focus groups if they exist, or create informal customer interview sessions.
The goal is understanding how customers think and talk about your products versus the entire category you're competing in. This foundation becomes critical for every marketing decision you'll make later.
We often encounter two types of new marketing leaders: those who believe they need to fix everything in the first 90 days, and those who spend those 90 days listening and learning before building their plan.
The listening approach consistently produces better long-term results. Your first 90 days should focus on building a holistic picture of the customer, product, marketing program, teams, and C-suite dynamics. These insights become the foundation for informed decision-making later.
Those first 90 days are for gathering intelligence. The temptation to prove your worth through immediate action is strong, but resist it. The leaders who last build their changes on deep understanding rather than assumptions.
One of the biggest mistakes new marketing leaders make is treating finance as the budget gatekeepers to negotiate with. Smart leaders treat them as strategic partners to learn from.
Understanding how budget decisions get made, the profitability of different product categories, and the unit economics that inform business decisions help you better communicate marketing value. You need to be able to tie marketing results back to business results.
This isn't just about getting budget approval. It's about understanding the financial levers that actually matter to your company's success (and your finance team).
Many marketers get hired based on experience with similar industries or products, then apply the exact same playbook without questioning core assumptions. This is a mistake.
Even within e-commerce, products vary dramatically in their marketing requirements. Selling subscription hair care requires completely different strategies and KPIs than selling mattresses. The comparison research phase, customer journey length, measurement approaches, and success metrics are entirely different.
Subscription hair care focuses on lifetime value, churn rates, and frequency metrics. Mattress marketing centers on long research cycles, content strategy, and attribution across multiple touchpoints. Fashion brands deal with seasonal trends and inventory considerations that SaaS products never face.
Before implementing any strategy from previous experience, make sure you understand what makes your current product unique. Assumptions about what works could be costing customers and revenue.
When new leaders inherit existing agency relationships or internal teams, there's often pressure to clean house and bring in trusted partners. But the smart move involves giving everyone a fair chance to prove their value under proper conditions.
The immediate question to ask isn't whether current partners are good or bad, but whether they've been set up for success. If incentives were misaligned, goals unclear, or the previous leader wasn't enabling good work, fix those conditions first before making personnel changes.
This applies equally to internal teams. Past poor performance might reflect inadequate leadership, unclear expectations, or misaligned goals rather than incompetent people. Give inherited teams the chance to shine under better conditions before deciding who stays and who goes.
Plus, existing team members possess institutional knowledge you desperately need — why certain decisions were made, what tests have been tried before, and where operational challenges hide.
Team leadership requires building trust with each individual team member, not just the group as a whole. While team meetings and group brainstorming sessions have their place, the foundation of good leadership happens in one-on-one relationships.
This means regular individual check-ins, understanding each person's unique challenges, and positioning yourself as someone who enables their success rather than just assigns tasks. Be helpful to the point of being annoying in those early weeks. You want to prove you understand their work and can support them when needed.
This individual trust-building serves two purposes: it helps you understand what each person is capable of, and it creates the foundation for honest feedback when you need to understand what's really happening in the business.
Marketing teams, especially large ones, need structured communication at multiple levels to function effectively:
The goal is making sure everyone knows why they're doing their work and how it connects to bigger business objectives. People want purpose in their work and these communication systems provide that clarity while keeping the team coordinated.
Once you understand business fundamentals, dig into historical performance data systematically. Look for trends over time rather than point-in-time snapshots, but pay special attention to anomalies and outliers.
Build a metric hierarchy to understand how top-line numbers break down. Revenue equals purchases times average order value, which breaks down further into new customer purchases and returning customer purchases, each with its own conversion rates and traffic sources.
When you find anomalies (months where sales dipped unexpectedly or traffic spiked without proportional conversions) investigate ruthlessly. Was it conversion rate changes? Traffic quality issues? AOV shifts? Competitor actions? Algorithm changes? Supply problems?
This root cause analysis reveals how vulnerable your business is to different factors and helps you understand which marketing elements are actually foundational to success versus nice-to-have optimizations.
The most successful new e-commerce marketing leaders resist pressure to make immediate changes. They invest their first 90 days in deep discovery, relationship building, and systems thinking. Only after this foundation is solid do they have the context to make strategic changes that drive long-term growth.
You're not just inheriting a marketing program. You're inheriting relationships, data systems, team dynamics, and business economics that took years to develop. Understanding all that complexity is your real job in those first 90 days. The changes you make afterward will be far more effective because they're based on reality rather than assumptions.