Buying and selling online is one of the most lucrative business ideas that you could come up with today. The 21st century consumer is primed and hungry for more and more opportunities to be able to finish their shopping experience with ease from the comfort of their own home. But you have to be smart about the strategies you use to grow your ecommerce business. If you know how the consumer’s mind works, the task becomes absolutely smooth sailing.
1. Strategically Market Your Business
Buy ad space on popular websites and search engines to market and grow your ecommerce business. Focus on video ads and only market your most popular products.
The first major decision-making junction comes at the stage of marketing. Let’s say you already have a website or an app. How are you going to let people know about it? Which products will you market? Where will you market them and how? These all might seem a bit overwhelming, but they follow each other naturally and once you get the ball rolling, it will gather momentum on its own.
The ideal solution would be to buy advertisement space on popular websites like YouTube and Facebook and search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! etc. Your ads should preferably be in video form, since the typical consumer spends 88% excess time browsing a website with video (especially without sound). Videos create more engagement with the user and that results in positive action.
2. Focus on Customer Retention
Retain your current customer base and offer frequent incentives to make them feel appreciated.
The importance of a loyal and regular customer base cannot be emphasized enough for you to be able to grow your ecommerce business. They are the ones who will visit your website or app again and again and buy multiple items. 65% of a company’s business comes from previous customers. Maintaining these customers with good customer service and showing them you value them beyond one-time customers creates goodwill, word of mouth marketing, and a steady increase in sales. One popular, tried and true way of doing this is by having loyalty cards. Great emphasis should be placed on customer satisfaction at every stage of interaction with your business; you should work with a call center support services provider like IdeasUnlimited that specializes in customer retention.
3. Affiliate Marketing and Discounts
Get more customers through affiliate marketing and entice them to purchase.
Partner with another business and offer promotions and discounts specific to those customers to bring in new users. Not only will you develop a strong business partnership, these new website visitors would have a high conversion rate due to the strong referral. You get to grow your ecommerce business without directly expending any sales effort.
Flash sales are also effective ways to create urgency to boost sales and profits, because customers do not want to walk away from a good deal. Never miss out on having sales during festive occasions or celebrations and holidays. Your ecommerce business will generate the most revenue in that time.
4. Widen Product Base
Widen your range of products to cater to a wider clientele. These can include supplementary products and services related to each other as well as completely fresh product lines.
Although most ecommerce businesses start out small, it is prudent to slowly try to attract other market segments as well. If you have a stationery business and the primary consumer is a school-going child, it is highly likely that their parent or caregiver is doing the online shopping. Think about the extra traffic and revenue you would generate and how much you can grow your ecommerce business if you increased your range of products to entice mothers with kitchen utensils or home décor, for instance.
5. Optimize the Customer Experience
Ensure you have good customer support, a user-friendly website/app interface, and a hassle-free shopping experience.
The first-time user especially will not take long to form an opinion and turn away from the website if their initial experience was negative or anything less than ideal. You need to make certain all issues are dealt with before they even become actual problems by ensuring your ecommerce support is par excellence.
A user-friendly interface means optimizing your website for mobile devices or even creating an app for it. 79% of smartphone users have made an ecommerce transaction in the last six months, so this is just astute business sense.
Your call center support should be professional, courteous and, above all, make the customer feel heard, understood and helped. You don’t need to invest in anything in-house; simply find a reputable call center for small business like IdeasUnlimited or partner with a firm that can handle your established business.
Do you feel like your business has stagnated and is not producing the desired profits? This is the ideal time to think outside the box in order to grow your ecommerce business. Come up with creative and fun marketing techniques. Use social media and affiliate marketing to boost your audience reach. Never underestimate the importance of your happy return customer. Most importantly, find an ecommerce support services provider who is experienced in tackling all the above.
