The Internet has created a huge amount of opportunities for all kinds of companies. There was a time when retail stores could only serve their local communities, but now, a business can sell products to customers all over the world. E-commerce business can have huge potential, but you need to make sure you have a strong growth strategy in place to achieve your goals.
In this guide, we’ll go over how you can design a winning Ecommerce growth strategy for your business. Keep reading for more.
Why Ecommerce Marketing Is Crucial
Even if you have the best Ecommerce business around, you’ll only have success if you have a good customer base. Marketing is vital if you want to reach a wider audience.
Whatever you sell, there will always be competition. An effective growth strategy will help you stand out as one of the best brands in your industry. Every other Ecommerce brand will be making use of a growth plan, so if you don’t, your brand will fall behind.
Optimize for Search Engines
SEO might not seem like the most important part of a growth strategy for e-commerce. It’s an old practice, and yet it’s still a very effective one. Most shoppers use search engines to find the products they’re after, so showing up higher in SERPs (search engine results pages) could have a huge impact on the growth of your E-commerce brand.
Google Shopping
Google Shopping makes it easy for users to compare similar products on different websites. You can optimize your brand for Google shopping by doing the following:
- Create a Merchant Center account for your business
- Upload your products
- Link it to your Google AdWords account
- Implement a Google Shopping campaign
Ensuring you show up in Google Shopping results will help you increase online sales significantly.
Other SEO Algorithms
Even if you’re only focused on selling products, there are plenty of other things you can do that will indirectly lead to more sales. Things like keyword implementation, inbound/outbound links, and quality blog content will all help your SEO. This will bring in more organic traffic, helping to put your brand in front of a wider audience.
Voice Recognition
This is one of the more modern technologies you can implement, and it’s quickly growing in popularity. Shoppers are starting to use voice searches to find various products. As more devices are offering it as a feature, the number of people making use of it will continue to grow.
You should make product information scannable using short, simple descriptions. Consider how a user might ask questions relating to a product to form the basis of your descriptions.
Embrace Social Marketing
Social media has become one of the most useful tools for marketing businesses. If you’re not already leveraging various social media platforms, you should start as soon as you can. It’s important to make sure you’re concentrating on the platforms that will get you the best results.
You can make use of platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and more. Knowing which ones your target audience is most active on is vital. This is why you need to do your research on them beforehand.
If you’re targeting a younger audience, for example, TikTok is a good choice — but this may not be the case for an older audience. Once you know what platforms are most important to your brand, you can prioritize your resources appropriately.
Influencer Marketing
Plenty of influencers have huge followings, and you can partner with them to promote your brand or products. When doing this, make sure you find influencers that have audiences who are likely to be interested in your brand.
It’s typically more efficient to work with nano influencers who have about 1,000 followers. Their audience will be more engaged, and therefore more likely to trust any brands an influencer promotes. Nano influencers are also likely to charge less than larger influencers, so this will keep things cost-effective.
Referral Marketing
This is ideal for getting people to talk about your brand and spread the word. Implement a referral program to encourage your customers to share your brand with their friends.
You can provide current customers with a referral link that they can send to people. Offering discounts for both people making the referrals and the ones that shop with you through referral links is a great incentive.
User-Generated Content
Engagement is crucial, so sharing content that users make relating to your brand can be incredibly helpful. It’s a cost-effective marketing method and will make people feel more involved in what your brand is doing. This helps build stronger relationships which are great for customer retention.
Video Marketing
Video marketing has become one of the most effective marketing methods in recent years. It’s now suitable for a range of platforms and provides an engaging way to promote products or educate your audience. They’re ideal for catching people’s attention, and an easy way for them to digest a lot of information quickly.
Competitions
Users sharing your content is always beneficial, and you can run competitions to help encourage this. People will always be more likely to share content if they know there’s a chance they’ll get something back.
A common practice that many brands use is to make an Instagram post about a certain competition or promotion. You can do this, and state that to be eligible to win, a person needs to be following your page, like and share the post, and tag one or more people in the comments. This is a great way to spread the word about your brand and bring in a lot of new customers.
Focus On Existing Customers
Outbound marketing is essential, but inbound marketing can be just as important. You need to keep your current customers coming back if you want to see real growth.
This can be more difficult than it sounds, but a coaching program such as Ecommerce Equation can help you do this effectively. It’s worth noting that it’s a lot more expensive to gain a new customer than it is to retain an existing one. As such, focussing on customer retention is a very effective way to maintain high profits.
Email Marketing
Email marketing has long been a useful tool, and that won’t change any time soon. You can use a mailing list to keep in contact with past customers, sending them things like updates about your brand, information about new products, special offers, and more.
Personalizing emails with customer names can help increase engagement. You could even send more personalized emails based on previous customer behaviors.
A common example of this is sending emails about products that are related to ones that customers have purchased in the past. Knowing the types of products customers are interested in will help you put the right items in front of them
SMS Marketing
This works similarly to email marketing but is generally much faster. 90% of SMS messages are opened within three minutes of being received. A good strategy is to send a message immediately after a customer buys a product offering a discount on their next purchase.
Chatbots
These are another type of tool that is quickly becoming more popular. They provide users with fast, interactive customer service and they can carry out various functions.
They may simply point customers in the right direction of certain products, but could also offer customer support 24/7, which is especially useful for businesses that only offer traditional customer support during specified hours.
This means that users won’t have to wait around for a customer service representative to respond to them. People also like being able to solve problems themselves without needing to speak to someone, so this will help improve the user experience.
Personalize the Shopping Experience
You don’t have to limit personalization to your email marketing. Doing the same for the shopping experience can produce great results.
You might want to show customers products that they’re more likely to be interested in or offer them discounts that align with previous purchasing behavior. Various tools will allow you to log details such as age, gender, location, and profession. This will help you tailor things to each customer individually, improving their overall experience.
Optimize the Checkout Process
The more elements you optimize, the better. It’s not uncommon for people to get all the way to the checkout, and then abandon their shopping cart. There are several things you can do to reduce the chances of this happening:
- Optimize your E-commerce store for mobile devices
- Be transparent about shipping costs
- Implement social media shopping carts
- Accept a wide range of payment methods
- Remind users of guarantees/warranties at the checkout
If customers do abandon their baskets, you can always implement email reminders. This helps to bring users back so that they complete their purchases.
Retargeting
Plenty of users will take a look through your site but end up not making a purchase. Retargeting software will show your ads to users that have done this. It helps remind them about things they were thinking about buying, and many of them will return to make purchases.
Humanize Your Brand
People place a lot of value on trust, and they’re more likely to trust a brand that they feel like they can relate to. Connecting with your customers on a more human level is an incredibly effective way to reach out to people.
Eco-Friendy Operations
Being eco-friendly will help improve your brand image significantly. People want to support brands that are trying to help the environment. Showing that you work to keep your carbon footprint to a minimum and stay as sustainable as possible will have a strong positive impact.
On top of this, it can also help you save money. Making use of renewable energy sources or reducing the packaging used for your products, for example, are both beneficial for the environment and should lower your costs. The larger the scale of your company, the more money you’ll be saving.
Communicate With Customers
While marketing is very important, there are other ways you can communicate with your customers. Replying to them on social media is a great way to do this.
They may leave comments on your posts or send direct messages, so if you can respond to these your customers will feel heard. Listening to what your audience has to say may also give you better insights into what they think about your brand. You can then make future decisions based on the opinions of your customers.
Social Support
Upholding the value of community shows people that you care. Look at social issues that your audience is invested in, and determine if there’s anything your brand can do to offer support. This can include things like donating to charitable organizations, volunteering at community events, or simply sharing posts from related accounts.
Developing Your Ecommerce Growth Strategy
Building a strong Ecommerce growth strategy is no small task. It will take time and resources, but when done correctly, it will yield amazing results.
Understanding your audience is one of the most important elements here. Pay attention to what they want and how they behave. You can then make decisions and prioritize resources to yield the results you’re after.
Make sure you’re constantly tracking things so that you can adapt to changes. This will help ensure that your strategy is always as effective as it can be.
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