If you’re a proud owner of a new ecommerce store, but things aren’t going the way you planned, take a moment to reflect on how you do business. Ecommerce statistics show that people can’t imagine their lives without shopping online, so you can do more to attract people to your store.
Luckily, you have many tools and options available to grow your eCommerce business. Today, everything you need is available at the click of a button. Here’s what you should do.
1. Rethink Your Business Plan
Chances are you had a business plan when you started your ecommerce business. However, consider making an entirely new business plan if you notice that you’re not achieving your desired results.
Make sure to streamline your business strategy, develop a financial plan (or change the existing one), and see who your competitors are.
Usually, even the slightest change in your business plan can make significant results. However, if you don’t know how to do it, you can always hire an expert to help you out or use business plan template to help you get started.
2. Set Clear Goals
If you upgraded your business plan, you likely included new goals. Each business should have clearly defined goals that will help it move forward.
Think about your end goal and what you should do to get there. For example, if you want 10,000 new customers in the next six months, calculate how much money you’ll invest in marketing or how many products you’ll have to sell in that timeframe.
There are several different types of ecommerce goals that you should think about:
- Revenue target
- Product launch
- Margin
- Brand repositioning
3. Optimize Your Website
You’ll want your existing and new customers to have the best possible shopping experience. This is why you should optimize your website both for mobile and desktop. Know that more and more people prefer to shop via their mobile phones, so you should hire an expert developer to create a user-friendly interface.
While you’re at it, explore other features of your platform and think about what you can change. If you don’t have a Q&A section, consider making one. Utilize chatbots that can help with simple questions, and design your store so that it’s easy to navigate.
You can also include a voice search feature, a live chat, and make sure to improve your product pages by including the right keywords. All this will improve the customer experience and help you grow your store.
4. Hire Quality Copywriters
One of the best ways to increase your sales is to write excellent copy. Keep in mind that copy isn’t only a product description. It’s any line of text that’s written on your website. It’s your store’s slogan, pop-up message, and even a FAQ page.
Each of these segments should serve the purpose of selling your products and represent your brand. This is why hiring the right copywriter can turn your store into a money-making machine.
Before you rush to hire writers, ask for samples and recommendations. Copywriting can be expensive, and you don’t want to waste time or money on a writer that doesn’t suit your business needs. Eventually, offer to pay a lower price for the trial period and give your new writer a week to see how they perform.
5. Create a Blog
Chances are, you heard about eCommerce stores adding a blog to their website. That’s a smart move to make since blogs can help you improve your online presence, sell products, and raise brand awareness.
With the right optimization, your blog will bring in steady traffic from search engines, which will increase sales. In addition, you can use your blog to write reviews of your products that showcase them better.
Eventually, with the right tone of voice in your blog posts, you’ll show what your brand is all about. Ecommerce blogging might take some time to learn, but it’s worth it.
6. Boost Social Media Presence
Social media is a growing phenomenon. Facebook changed the way people promote their products and find customers, and other platforms followed suit. However, there are a few tips and tricks on how to use each platform.
Think about your ideal customer before you start posting on Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Consider their gender, age group, interests, and needs. Each social network has its own user demographics, although they sometimes overlap.
Being familiar with social media demographics will also help you set the right goals for your ads. Using the right social media platform is crucial to get the most out of it and grow your business with the right customers.
7. Offer Sales, Deals, and Coupons
There’s nothing that customers love more than seeing a good sale or a discount. These offers will also make them return to your store and follow you on social media to stay updated on the most recent deals.
Depending on the type of products you sell, you’ll likely offer at least a seasonal sale or a clearance. When it comes to digital products, you probably won’t be pressured to offer deals since they don’t take up space in your storage. Regardless, you should at least offer occasional discounts.
For physical products, you’ll likely focus on clearances since you’ll have to stack up on the new products for the following season. Either option is an excellent way to generate ROI and grow your business.
8. Provide Convenient Delivery Options
The courier services that you use as a business also play a crucial role in your business growth. Customers usually relate the home delivery experience to you and not the company that provides those services. That’s why you should do your best to provide excellent shipping options and home delivery options.
Selecting the right shipping provider can also save you money. Even though you’re just looking to grow your business and increase sales, don’t wait until the last moment.
This is especially important if you ship internationally. If you can provide an efficient international shipping service, you’ll have many loyal customers around the globe.
9. Scale Customer Support
As with shipping, don’t wait until you need 10 more customer support reps to handle your customers’ inquiries or complaints. Instead, consider slowly expanding your customer support team so that your customers don’t have to wait a lifetime to get a reply. Also, your employees won’t be overwhelmed with work.
Add a live chat to your website and have someone on standby at all times. Make sure to educate your teams properly and show them the best practices before they start working. Create the structure around how they should respond to questions and provide templates to speed up their responses.
While many companies decide to hire customer representatives who aren’t natives, sometimes having a native speaker is a better solution. That depends on where you offer your products and who your customers are. Chances are, only a native speaker will understand some difficulties that your customers are faced with, for example, local shipping issues.
10. Invest Properly
Many believe that starting an ecommerce business doesn’t cost much, but that’s not true. You’ll have to pay for your website, domain name, employees, marketing, and many other things that will contribute to increasing your sales.
While you can start with small investments, you’ll likely need to increase your budget in the future, especially if you sell physical items.
This is why you should create and continuously revise your business plan and goals. Those will help you make the right decisions, grow your ecommerce business, and utilize your budget in the best possible way.
Conclusion
Growing an already existing E-commerce store can be challenging, mainly because you’re used to doing business a certain way. However, if what you’re doing doesn’t bring in revenue, you’ll have to adapt to survive.
Start by rethinking your business plan, goals, and budget. Then, proceed to test your website. Check out the latest web development trends, and consider adding a chatbot to your platform. This option will also help your customer support team do their work more efficiently.
Don’t ignore your customers’ needs and offer the best shipping options, especially if you sell products globally. Offer discounts and share them on social media to improve your online presence. It might take some time for all this to work, but you’ll see growth if you stay consistent.
Digital Web Services (DWS) is a leading IT company specializing in Software Development, Web Application Development, Website Designing, and Digital Marketing. Here are providing all kinds of services and solutions for the digital transformation of any business and website.
