E-commerce businesses range from start-ups to globally renowned organizations—all after one goal of growth. Growth is not only about succeeding but also managing the successful business efficiently. If you have a small e-commerce business, you need to reach a point where you can use specialized functions and responsibilities.
In this article, we are describing how you can manage your e-commerce business’s website effectively.
Sourcing Function:
Customers’ interest can change anytime. They can go for a new brand living your brand waiting for their return. You need to deliver the ordered product within the expected time to remain a trust-worthy brand to them. Situations like this will minimize the unfavorable outcomes of many possible scenarios.
Marketing:
Most e-commerce pros know the importance of marketing. There are many options available, like pay-per-click (PPC) ads and search engine optimization (SEO). Some spend their energies on optimizing their PPC services in San Francisco and some drive traffic through SEO and focus on link building. The approach to enhance sales varies as per the business’s objective.
Technology:
Digital marketing is a technology-enabled play. So you need to be at the top. This starts with making decisions like choosing your host, domain name, and shopping cart software, and many more. You need to continually upgrade your tech-factor by measuring and managing your websites well.
Finance:
The growth potential of e-commerce businesses is not related to the infusion of money. The finance function is not just about funds provided; it’s about deliverables management, accounting, financial engineering decisions that allow innovative payment options to customers, and more.
Conclusion:
The above five functions are not sufficient for you to manage your e-commerce business. There are more functions, like human resource management. But the motive is to address any small e-commerce business where everything is done, to gain success eventually. Then a proper management strategy from a digital marketing agency in Sacramento is required for the company to remain at the top.
Every e-commerce company needs proper planning of strategies of e-commerce marketing its excellent execution to maintain the growth of its ROI.
Here are 10 e-commerce marketing strategies to boost your sales.
1. Boost Product Visualization:
People have become very visual. You need to use exceptional visualization of your product so that the customers can look into the details without spearing any time to read the details.
Artificial Intelligence can make a significant impact on your e-commerce sales. It can collect info of customers and use it to analyze customer’s future behavior.
4. Reduce Cart Abandonment:
Cart abandonment likely occurs when a customer doesn’t find the delivery options of his preference. More than 69% of the time, this is due to the additional charges, like shipping, charged by the sites. To reduce cart abandonment, you can introduce an email recovery strategy, where you can almost one-third of the abandoned carts sales.
Cart abandonment
5. Mobile Friendly
Your website needs to be mobile-friendly to access every mobile user, and the user number is enormous. According to Adweek, Google found 73% of consumers will leave an unfriendly mobile site for a mobile-friendly one.
6. Use Re-targeting
Re-targeting, the existing customers, is vital to succeeding in the digital marketing field. It allows you to follow customers around the internet and make them aware of the products of their interest and thereby a purchase.
7. Email Marketing:
Email Marketing is another way of successfully converting prospects into new customers or bringing the existing one to your page, boosts your sales.
Email Marketing
8. Improve Checkout
Complicated checkouts slow down purchases but increase frustration. You should make your check out simpler to prevent the customers from cart abandonment.
9. Price Comparison:
Price comparisons have become a source of information that makes customers more and more demanding. It is advised to establish partnerships with individual price comparisons to boost the customer’s chances of purchase.
10. Encourage Social Purchases
You should use a social media platform to encourage purchase. Social media like Facebook and Instagram can help you get more traffic to your site and increase your ROI.
Selecting the right e-commerce platform is vital for the success of your brand. It would help if you were careful while choosing as those platforms will be responsible for your brand to grow or change.
Firstly, you need to analyze which e-commerce platform is ideal for your brand as not all of them focus on the same thing.
After listing your priorities, you can look at the given below e-commerce platform that might boost your sales.
1. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is ideal for those brands that need a customizable platform, know WordPress well, and have coding chops. It is a platform that has high customizability, built-in analytics, and 24/7 customer support. However, it doesn’t allow proper SEO and social media marketing.
2. Shopify
Shopify is extremely popular in the world of e-commerce marketing. It is the platform for those who rely on social media marketing to sell or who do drop shipping. It is simple, flexible, and scalable for small and medium-sized brands. As Shopify focuses on marketing and gives customer experience management, it struggles to handle the most significant brands.
3. Big Commerce
Unlike Shopify, Big Commerce can handle large brands and with better SEO performance. It has a one-page checkout experience that can boost your conversion rate, but it fails to give the one-click up-sells that Shopify does. But if you go for Big Commerce, you can get high customizability and constant customer support.
4. Open Cart
If you find Big Commerce expensive, you can go for Open Cart. It’s open-source and free-to-use, but you can invest in add-ons costing from free to $100. It would help if you had a strong coding ability to use its high customizability as their support isn’t as strong as others.
5. Squarespace
Squarespace is used by small brands, who don’t need much coding skills. It is an appealing platform with excellent design from a simple drag-and-drag interface based on several beautiful templates. But it is not ideal for you if you want high sales or focus on e-commerce.
6. Magento
Magento, by Adobe, is especially prevalent in Asia. Now, North American companies have started to acknowledge the power behind this platform. It is an ideal platform for small or large brands that can handle a more complicated interface than Squarespace.
The best e-commerce platform for your brand will be the one that fits your need of coding skills and expectations for growth. The right platform can get you the right traffic, boost your ROI, and popularise your brand name.
Growth Hacking is a new thing happening in the world of revolution. It is a new concept developed by Sean Ellis in the year 2010 as a consultant for start-ups to achieve success within a short period.
Start-up companies, who are familiar with the term, will have the upper hand in the marketing sector as it provides a competitive advantage. This is why some start-up companies have shown ridiculous growth over a short period.
Every start-up wants to ridiculously grow its business, so they have started using the concept of Growth Hacking. This helps to acquire new customers and retain existing ones.
You should have a look at this guide to clear your concepts about the term.
Definition of Growth Hacking:
As said earlier, Sean Ellis first coined the phrase “Growth Hacking” in 2010 while coming up with a new job description. He then, as a consultant, helped a lot many start-ups to reach incredible growths.
However, the problem starts when he tries to find a replacement for himself to purse new business instead. He wanted someone who could take over the charge of growing the start-up.
Traditional marketers are quite different from modern marketers. Like them, modern marketers don’t care about factors like budgets, expenses, conversions, etc.
As Sean posted, “A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth.”, he made it very clear that a growth hacker is a person who cares about the growth only.
A growth hacker can be anyone with a focussed determination.
Growth hacking is done by using analytical, inexpensive, creative, and unique methods to bring about the start-up’s enormous growth. To achieve the goals set, growth hackers use appropriate measures and consider every aspect of their growth.
Overview:
New start-up businesses need marketing but don’t have big marketing budgets for offline marketing. They need cheaper ways to promote their goods and service.
For example – Uber taxi service. The service depends on the customer being picked up from a place and dropped at a different location. And the payment is made via the app, which is used by an infinite number of users. This is scalable.
Also, the product promotes itself. A user of the app tells his associates about the app and also the user experience. And they would spread it further.
That’s how growth hacking was done on a large scale to see exponential growth.
We will provide you with the ways that growth hacking could be done to hike up your brand’s growth rates.
Step 1:Make sure you create a product people want
Through an extensive market of even a mediocre product, it can show great results. But if it’s terrible, the world will know it in no time, that is., people don’t want your filthy product.
To avoid these kinds of responses for your products, it’s better to get feedback for the users on an early stage itself, to keep on improving the product and make it more like user-desiring.
Two steps to make your product more market fit:
Firstly, you need a proper survey of the market to understand what the people need, to make a market-fit product.
Secondly, get feedback as soon as you have an idea. When you explain your approach to people, they would question many problems that can arise afterward.
Keeping the problems in mind, you can produce a decent product.
A company that did this is Instagram. Talking back and forth with the potential users made them realize that there’s no decent app for sharing photos and all. Then they modified the then app into a suitable app, which had 25,000 installs on the first day itself and reached 2 million users within 2 months.
Step 2: Don’t target everybody
If you target every person to be your customer, you might end up with zero sales because the growth hackers won’t know whom to convince and why. Just like not everyone likes pizza, some like burgers too.
So, it’s vital to know that your customers really want. Not all of them, but a few of them.
Unlike traditional products, the buzz creation after the launching of the software is more important than the buzz created before the launch.
They launch the product at an event after gathering the ideal customers and creating a buzz about it. Impressed people go for the product, and others give their feedback.
Step 3: Acquisition:
Eric Ries helped the people worldwide learn about growth hacking, though Sean Ellis created its concept.
In Eric’s book, The Lean Startup, the people from the tech and software world knew the concepts about growth hacking.
In the book, he had explained how beneficial growth hacking could be to all types of industries around the world.
The three engines he described in his book are:
Viral – your growth depends on their referral to their associates.
Sticky – a fantastic experience that makes people have you around.
Paid – you paid to gain a customer who will give you more business.
Step 4: Activation:
You want customers in the long run. If they eventually leave, it’s not a proper activation.
Fraser Deans pointed out three distinct phrases on an activation:
Pre-signup: Kinds of Stuff that someone uses before they are opt-in.
First User Experience: detailed steps to help someone follow the concept
Post-signup: Kinds of Stuff that comes later so that someone doesn’t have any regret.
Step 5: Retention:
The easiest way to success is to maintain the customer count. Before gaining new customers, you must try to retain existing customers.
Customers go around the internet visiting new channels and analyzing your product and their products before buying.
This is called the “Zero Moment of Trust” by Google, explaining the customer’s way of thinking. They visit different channels and consult various experts before trusting someone.
You need to connect to your customers via email or messages, where they can converse with you directly.
Live chatting is another way to communicate with customers. This helps the customers to get their queries answered. This is far better than emails, which takes days to get answered.
Step 6: Revenue:
Software companies always have a tight budget. So, they need their investment to bring ROI.
Your company might not bring back the investment within the first few months, and you remain stuck in negative cash flow.
So, the growth hackers have created a unique email campaign with an excellent offer to bring loads.
Sometimes, you might get colossal ROIs as well.
Growth hackers have technical skills to know what to do to implement changes and work accordingly. They always come up with new ideas, tests, measures, and ways to get you the ROI you want.
Step 7: Referrals:
There are so many companies around the world doing things for people. They spend a lot of time, energy, money, and effort to make a product and give their customers a feeling of satisfaction.
But do they refer their preferred company to their friends?
Worldwide E-commerce marketing is vast, and there’s a constant increase in it.
People prefer to buy products online over to visit the stores in person. That’s why the buying frequency online is way higher than that of offline.
The buying frequency online is too high, with 95% of Americans shop online at least once every year and 5% shopping daily.
But like everything else, E-commerce marketing also has some positive and negative aspects.
E-commerce marketing is a platform where there is an enormous number of marketers trying to get a hold onto the same customer you are after.
E-commerce marketing is difficult without any marketing and advertising budgets.
The competition to survive in the market is too harsh, with all those stores and markets out there, giving customers the chance to access different products from different shops.
And you need those sales to run your business, which is not easy at all.
Fortunately, there are a couple of ways to maintain not only your buying frequency, but also amplitude it.
The below ways can help you drive 10x more sales.
Use Pinterest to drive sales
It might sound strange to many of you that if you are told to use Pinterest to bring in deals.
Well, you need platforms to promote your brand and your product. Pinterest can very well serve the purpose. It is a fantastic platform for bringing in sales, especially for your e-commerce products.
Buyable Pins are efficiently used to drive in sales incredibly. These pins allow the users to search and buy the products directly on Pinterest, irrespective of the users’ device.
And the best news is that it’s FREE.
You don’t need to pay anything to set up Buying Pins.
But why Pinterest? Is there anything more than just a few beautiful pictures?
Well, it’s worth the use.
Pinterest is used mostly by females of varying age, but males are getting drawn to it gradually.
It has users all around the world with different income levels.
87% of people on Pinterest have purchased a pinned product, while 93% of pinners have used the pins to plan future purchases.
Pinterest allows users to view the product and analyze the benefits they might get from it. They can easily explore your products.
Pinterest can drive a lot of traffic, helping your business.
Add more checkout options
Another annoying feature of many e-commerce sites is the lack of checkout options. This makes a lot of users leave the site without a purchase, turning out to be a loss for your business.
In a study, PayPal found that only by adding their fast and secure transaction ability to a site can bring 70% more checkout conversion rate.
It was also found that 24% of online shoppers leave, without a checkout, because of the lack in checkout options.
A simple change in the checkout section can increase a lot more sale.
Send cart abandonment emails
When a product is added to the carton to your e-commerce site, there is a lot of chance that they won’t buy the product, instead, leave the site abandoning it.
Even if you manage to get an interested customer to buy a product, there remains a chance of them abandoning your product.
Then what’s the use of all these marketing if people leave on by showing some interest?
That is when you need to email them, to remain about the product they were interested in buying. This can increase your sales instantly.
According to InboxArmy, 75% of people leave intending to return someday. But they forget. Your emails remain them about the product, and they are most likely to return and make a purchase.
Upsell to repeat customers
It has always been easier to sell to an existing customer than to gain a new.
To gain a new customer, we need to do a lot of work starting from brand awareness to giving attracting offers.
This is expensive.
Rather than attracting a new one, why not go for the existing one.
They are aware of you and love your service.
And you also have their email addresses.
Now, you need to send them an upsell email, to divert their attention towards you.
This can help you increase your sales even further.
Set up an Instagram storefront
Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms, where visually attracting different e-commerce marketers to sell products.
With nearly 1 billion monthly users, it’s one of the most commonly used networks, where people follow popular brands.
According to Instagram, 80% of their accounts are business accounts. And about 75% of their users take inspirations from their posts.
This lets users explore new products and brands, thereby, becoming one of the places to bring leads and organic sales.
On top of everything, Instagram is FREE from any charges.
You can fully use this platform to socialize your product and popularize your brand.
To survive in this market, you need to have a reliable product to compete against your market competitors. And with that, you need the above tips to land with sales.
