Setting up an eCommerce business is simple enough; however, growing your eCommerce business requires a solid strategy. If you’re looking to grow your store into a successful business that brings in significant revenue, you’ll need to implement some proven growth techniques. The secret to a successful business of any kind lies in freeing up the time spent doing manual tasks to allow you to focus on income generation. That can be done by hiring extra members of staff, but that incurs costs you may not have factored in.
A growth company is one whose business generates significant positive cash flow and whose earnings increase significantly at a fast rate. Positive growth leads to reinvestment opportunities or high profits for company owners to enjoy.In 2020, global eCommerce sales grew by 27.6%, so the industry itself is showing signs of serious growth. There has simply never been a better time to break into the eCommerce market.
If you’re looking to make a living from your eCommerce store, there’s only one thing to have in mind: growth, growth, growth. Growth involves increasing your revenue and average order value and attracting more customers to your store. Once you’ve got to a certain number of consistent orders, you can start hiring more staff to take on roles, and even extend your offerings to other countries. Having a wider team around you frees up your time to further increase eCommerce sales, or even start another business to supplement your income.
More and more people shop online these days, with more than 2.14 billion people shopping online in 2021. That’s great news for you – but great news for your competitors too. The more people turn online to look for products, the more you have to differentiate yourself from your competitors, which can be easier said than done. What you need is a killer marketing strategy. If you’re not already marketing savvy, it’s worth exploring marketing tactics that have been tried and tested and shown to work by other eCommerce companies. Depending on which eCommerce platform you use, there may be the option to invest in marketing apps or integrations, which work alongside your online store to capture customer data and maximize sales.
Social media has been one of the most important advances in marketing in the last 20 years, and the best part? You can do social media marketing entirely for free if you don’t pay for sponsored ads. The most effective way to take advantage of social media’s power is to create a social media strategy that fits neatly into your overall marketing campaign. If you have an upcoming sale and you’re sending emails and posting blogs about it, complement your efforts by posting about it on social media. There are multiple ways to collect user-generated content to use as part of your marketing strategy. One is to hire a content creator to make content that shows your products being used in a real-life setting. This strategy is particularly effective if your target audience includes younger ages since 70% of teens trust influencers more than traditional celebrities.
If you know you want to start an eCommerce business, but aren’t yet sure what you’ll sell, make the most of market research. Research industries that are not only popular now, but are set to become even more popular in the future. Once you’ve found a sector experiencing significant growth, see how you can offer something different, or more niche, to differentiate yourself from business that already exist within that sector.If you’re launching a luxury handbag service, for example, consider creating handbags made from vegan leather instead of regular leather, to appeal to a smaller subset of consumers. Although it might seem that niching down excludes a portion of your target audience, it makes it easier to get sales because you’ll be competing in a less saturated market. To continue with the handbag example, there are more consumers shopping for regular handbags than non-leather ones, so you’ll have fewer other businesses to compete with if you streamline your offerings. Older users are more likely to use Facebook, so if your target audience is 40 and above, use Facebook as your social media marketing platform of choice.
In the world of business, every mistake can be turned into a lesson for the future. When you try a new technique in a marketing campaign or invest in an app that doesn’t work as well as you’d hoped, don’t beat yourself up. The only way you’ll ever continually improve is by learning from previous mistakes and using them to inform your future strategies.
Another way to learn from the past is with analytics. There are plenty of ways to analyze the performance of marketing campaigns and the like. Depending on the email provider you use, for example, you can check click-through and open rates for your emails to check which subject lines perform well, and which perform not so well.
Customer engagement is important, but if customers come to your store and experience poor customer service, they’ll make sure people know about it. The negative impact that poor feedback can have on your store shouldn’t be underestimated.
From negative reviews to word-of-mouth complaints, one bad interaction can cost you thousands. If you’ve ever had a poor customer service experience you’ll know that it puts you off returning to a particular store or service provider.
With that in mind, excellent customer service is non-negotiable for any eCommerce business that’s serious about growth. But with so many tasks for an eCommerce business owner to juggle, how do you find time to provide excellent customer service at the same time as creating foolproof marketing strategies, and building relationships with suppliers
The beauty of the eCommerce industry is that it doesn’t rely on brick-and-mortar stores. Customers aren’t limited to only shopping in areas local to them, which means eCommerce stores can reach a wider audience than is possible with traditional, physical stores.
Once you’ve established a loyal customer base and strong digital presence in your own countries, you could turn your attention further afield to ensure a steady increase in sales – especially if there’s a booming market for your product or service in another country.
If you’re worried about communicating with customers who don’t share your language, try investing in a helpdesk with auto-translate features, so you’ll never be held back from your store’s full potential by geographical location.
Nobody likes a copycat, and you certainly don’t want to be accused of plagiarising another store’s content, but keeping up to date with the competition is a necessary part of growing any business.
Look at what your competitors are selling, as well as the marketing techniques they’re using, and see where you can do better. To keep up with general trends in the eCommerce space, follow some of the most in-the-know eCommerce influencers and listen to podcasts that discuss industry updates and upcoming trends.
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