RACE Framework: Plan, Reach, Act, Convert, Engage

Created by Dr. Dave Chaffey - https://www.davechaffey.com/digital-marketing-glossary/race-marketing-planning-model/

Overview

The RACE Framework is a marketing planning model that organizes every marketing activity around four stages of the customer lifecycle: Reach, Act, Convert and Engage. Dave Chaffey, co-founder of Smart Insights, created it in 2010, the year Smart Insights launched, because he kept finding businesses that used digital marketing without a structured strategy (Smart Insights: The RACE Framework). Smart Insights writes the full sequence as (Plan) > Reach > Act > Convert > Engage, so the RACE marketing model is really a plan followed by four stages of execution.

Each stage has a plain job. Reach builds awareness and visibility of a brand, its products and services on other sites and in offline media, to drive visits to the places the business controls. Act, which Chaffey says is short for Interact, persuades a visitor to take the next step: view a product, read a post, sign up, or become a lead. Convert is the sale itself, online or offline. Engage is the long-term relationship with first-time buyers that produces repeat purchases and advocacy. Chaffey's own write-up, Why and how I developed the RACE marketing planning framework, gives these definitions and the measures he attaches to each.

The Plan phase comes before the four stages. In Chaffey's words it covers creating the overall integrated digital strategy, objective setting and governance. Smart Insights notes that some members call the whole thing PRACE, but the company prefers the name RACE Planning for simplicity (Smart Insights). In practice, Plan is where a team audits current performance, reviews the market, and sets the objectives that the four stages will be measured against.

What sets RACE apart from a generic funnel is the separate Act stage. Chaffey explains that, unlike simpler Reach, Convert, Retain frameworks, he made Act its own stage because winning interactions on websites and social media is so hard in a crowded, fragmented media landscape. For most businesses, the main aim of Act is to generate leads that can then be nurtured toward purchase. That split gives the consideration stage of the buyer journey its own goals and its own budget, instead of folding it into conversion.

RACE is also meant to be measured. Smart Insights recommends defining KPIs at each stage for setting targets, reviewing results in analytics and dashboards, and optimizing continuously. Its RACE dashboard guide suggests reporting on just four metrics for each of Reach, Act, Convert and Engage in a regular monthly review. This makes RACE a tool for customer journey analysis as well as for planning: when a stage's numbers fall, the team knows which part of the plan to examine.

Although RACE is usually described as a digital marketing framework, Chaffey says it was always meant to cover online and offline communications together. The Convert stage explicitly includes offline sales, for example a phone call or a store visit, which is why he calls RACE an omnichannel framework and says it applies to B2B services as well as retail ecommerce (Chaffey).

The skills in this method turn the model into working artifacts: a planning template, KPIs per stage, a mapping of your journey stages to RACE, a RACE customer journey map, and stage-level playbooks for Reach, Act and Convert. Together they give a team one shared view of the funnel, from the awareness stage of the customer journey to the decision stage and beyond.

Core Principles

Plan before you act

The Plan phase sets the strategy, objectives and governance that the four stages serve. Without it, RACE becomes a list of channels with no agreed targets. Smart Insights pairs RACE with a three-part improvement process called OSA, for Opportunity, Strategy and Action, which starts with auditing performance and reviewing the marketplace before any tactics are chosen (Smart Insights). A plan also tells you what to stop doing, which matters as much as what to add.

Reach means building visibility over time

Chaffey describes Reach as maximizing reach over time to create multiple interactions, using paid, owned and earned media touchpoints. Reach is judged by whether the right audience arrives, not only by how many people see an ad. Search, social media, content and email all contribute. A Reach plan that buys traffic without checking what that traffic does in Act is incomplete.

Act is its own stage

Interaction is treated as a separate stage because it is hard to win and easy to lose. Chaffey suggests defining Act actions as top-level goals in analytics, such as "Viewed product", "Added to Basket", "Registered as member" or "Signed up for an e-newsletter" (Chaffey). Giving these actions their own targets stops a team from judging content purely by immediate sales. Smart Insights notes that for many businesses, especially B2B, Act means generating leads.

Convert covers every channel where a sale happens

Convert is the step that turns a prospect into a paying customer, whether payment is taken online or offline. Because Chaffey built offline interaction into this stage, a sales call, a showroom visit or a quote can all be Convert tactics. That keeps RACE useful for businesses whose sale does not happen on the website. It also means the Convert KPIs should include offline outcomes, not only ecommerce transactions.

Engage grows lifetime value

Engage is the long-term relationship with first-time buyers, aimed at repeat purchases and advocacy through the site, social presence, email and direct contact. Chaffey measures it by repeat actions such as repeat sales and sharing, plus the percentage of active customers and customer satisfaction and recommendation. A plan that stops at Convert leaves repeat business unmanaged. Engage data also feeds back into Reach, because loyal customers show which audiences to target.

Measure each stage with a few KPIs

Smart Insights recommends reporting on four metrics per stage in its RACE dashboard, compared month on month and year on year. A small set keeps the monthly review focused on decisions. Every KPI needs a baseline, a target and an owner. When a KPI cannot change a decision, drop it.

Integrate the stages instead of running four programs

RACE works when the stages are planned together. A campaign should state what it does in each stage, and a change in one stage should be checked for its effect on the next. Smart Insights applies this to campaigns with a five-step plan across plan, reach, act, convert and engage (Smart Insights campaign plan). Problems often sit at the handoffs, such as a Reach channel that attracts visitors who never interact.

Steps

1. Audit current performance by stage Start by listing every current marketing activity and assigning it to Reach, Act, Convert or Engage. Pull the recent numbers for each stage from analytics and the CRM: visits and their sources, key interactions and leads, sales and conversion rates, repeat purchase and active customers. Note which stages have no activity or no measurement at all. Compare with competitors where you can. The output is a one-page picture of where the funnel is strong, weak or blind.

2. Set objectives in the Plan phase Turn the audit into a small number of objectives tied to business goals. Smart Insights uses SMART objectives (specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, time-bound) and gives worked examples for every RACE stage in its guide to SMART marketing objectives. Agree governance at the same time: who owns each stage, what budget each gets, and how often the plan is reviewed. Keep the objectives few enough that the team can remember them.

3. Map customer journey stages to RACE Write down how your customers actually move from first contact to repeat purchase, using research rather than internal assumptions. Match each journey stage to a RACE stage: awareness to Reach, consideration to Act, decision to Convert, and post-purchase to Engage. The RACE funnel mapping skill covers this alignment in detail. Where the fit is poor, for example a long B2B evaluation that spans Act and Convert, record the overlap explicitly. This mapping becomes the backbone of the plan.

4. Choose KPIs and baselines for each stage Pick a few KPIs per stage that reflect the objectives, and record a baseline for each from the audit. Reach KPIs cover audience and traffic, Act KPIs cover interactions and leads, Convert KPIs cover sales and conversion rates, and Engage KPIs cover repeat purchase, active customers and satisfaction. Set a target and a date for each. Check that every KPI can actually be collected before you commit to it.

5. Select channels and tactics per stage For each stage, choose the paid, owned and earned channels and the tactics that serve its objective. Smart Insights breaks RACE into a set of core activities, five for each part, in its member resources (Chaffey), which is a useful checklist for spotting gaps. Give each tactic an owner and a budget. Favor tactics that hand off cleanly to the next stage.

6. Build a prioritized plan and campaigns Assemble the objectives, KPIs and tactics into one plan. Smart Insights recommends starting with a 90-day prioritized plan and then building a longer-term annual plan and roadmap (Smart Insights). Campaigns inside the plan should each say what they do in Reach, Act, Convert and Engage. The RACE planning template skill shows how to lay this out.

7. Review monthly and optimize the weakest stage Track the KPIs in a stage-by-stage dashboard and review them on a fixed cadence, monthly for most teams. Find the stage where performance is furthest from target or where the drop between stages is largest, and focus changes there. Test changes before rolling them out, and record what each test taught you. Feed the results back into the Plan phase at the next planning cycle, so the plan improves as well as the tactics.

RACE and Related Funnel Models

RACE belongs to a family of models that split the customer journey into stages. Chaffey credits one of them directly: he says the REAN framework influenced his thinking in 2010 (Smart Insights). The table compares RACE with its closest relatives.

SOSTAC and RACE can be used together. Chaffey says SOSTAC did not reference specific digital activities such as search, content and email, which is part of why he built RACE, and he has published a video on integrating the two (Chaffey). One way to combine them is to use SOSTAC for the overall plan and RACE to structure the tactics and KPIs inside it.

When to Use

• When a marketing team is organized by channel and needs one model that shows how search, social, email and sales activities contribute to the same funnel.
• When you are writing an annual or quarterly marketing plan and want objectives, tactics and KPIs laid out stage by stage.
• When leadership wants to see how spending at the top of the funnel connects to sales and retention, because RACE gives every stage its own measures.
• When a business sells both online and offline, since Convert explicitly includes offline sales.
• When you need a shared vocabulary between marketing, sales and customer success for who owns which part of the customer lifecycle.

When Not to Use

• When the problem is positioning or brand strategy. RACE organizes activities and measures; it does not tell you what your brand should stand for.
• When you are running a single short tactic, such as one press announcement, where a full lifecycle plan adds overhead without changing decisions.
• When you cannot measure behavior at any stage yet. Fix basic tracking first, because a RACE plan without data cannot be reviewed.
• When the business has two sides with different journeys, such as a marketplace with buyers and sellers, unless you build a separate RACE plan for each side.