Whether you are planning to sell goods and services or are already selling online, you might be interested in knowing how to attract newer customers using some ecommerce strategies. An ecommerce strategy can be defined as the one that describes the goals and the principles required to actualize that goal. By describing the goals, we do not ask you to describe your everyday goals or your monthly goals; however, we suggest you define a few milestones that your ecommerce company needs to achieve in order to accomplish your goal. An ecommerce strategy typically covers three main aspects viz. the goal in ecommerce, the ways to achieve the goal and the skills that need to be worked upon. In this article, we are going to cover all these aspects and provide you with a few strategies that are sure-shot helping you in boosting your sales and revenue, while bringing in newer customers.
What are some ecommerce strategies?
If you are focused on your business growth, you’ll need a clear direction and smart ecommerce strategies. Below are some tried and tested ecommerce strategies to assure your business growth in a jiffy:
Increase your ecommerce search usability
Make sure that your ecommerce website or store is recording as well as analyzing the keywords that are searched by people. If you have already implied this into your store, we must say that you are most probably having effective navigation and search usability. You must categorize the visitors who know the products they wish to buy and the visitors who are casually browsing through your store. For the visitors who know what to purchase, you must need to provide information regarding the product or service as soon as possible. When it comes to delivering satisfying customer experience, a high-performing search bar is of prime importance. The reason being, if the visitors are not able to find what they are looking for, they will simply click the back button and find a better store.
For the visitors who are casually browsing through your store, you must make sure to provide easy-to-use navigation to product categories and pages. Make sure that your search bar and navigation is user-friendly. After all, that’s what matters for boosting your ecommerce sales. For this, you might need to focus on a few areas, such as the design of the search bar, the search scope selection, the autocomplete feature, the layouts, the filtering, and the sorting of the search results.
Optimize your ecommerce website/ store
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the key to marketing your ecommerce store. Therefore, you must be sure that you have rightly optimized all your product pages as well as your entire store based on the exact keywords your customers would search to reach you quickly. A quality investment of time in keyword research would be of great help for optimizing your ecommerce store. Also, look out for the differences in the dialects as well. For instance, if your potential customers use medicines instead of tablets, you might need to show results for all kinds of medicines including tablets.
Predefine your sales cycle
Every business is unique, and so must be the business model and strategies. Knowing how long your potential customers are taking to make a purchase in your ecommerce site and the way they are completing your sales process can aid you in creating the best ecommerce strategies. If you do not focus on the time taken for your potential customers to complete your sales cycle, you might find it difficult to know the selling platform you need to work on and the right timing to retarget the customers who left the sales cycle half-way. You should know when such potential customers are getting converted; a week, a month, or a year. In order to predefine your sales cycle, you would need quality time for research as well as practical testing.
Utilize Content Marketing
Many ecommerce businesses consider blogging as the sole source of marketing. However, there are many more on our list. You can consider publishing ebooks that could help attract customers to your ecommerce site and later, you can encourage them to sign up for your email marketing or other marketing campaigns. Although content marketing is free of cost, you can also consider hiring professional content marketers to develop your ecommerce content marketing strategies. However, know that you do not have to market the products or services you are selling in your ecommerce store through your blogs. Instead, if you are an ecommerce seller who wishes to promote electronic appliances you have in the house, you can publish blogs that could include content for smart ways to get the right electronic products online. Such blogs that instil knowledge in the readers’ mind, which are the questions that are most searched by people, you can be assured that you are getting a kick-start to your ecommerce sales while gaining some long-term customers.
Personalize your services
Research has found that people are reluctant to share their personal information with random websites, while they readily register with the ones that offer personalized services and recommendations. If you can successfully manage personal data with the utmost responsibility, you can easily target your customers using personalized recommendations with a list of customized product searches for different kinds of customers. However, by any chance, if you mismanage personal data, there is a big threat to the reputation of your ecommerce store as well as your entire brand. The right use of customer data has a significant impact on customer satisfaction. There are many tools available online that can help you collect, analyze, and manage large sets of customer data to personalize your ecommerce services efficiently. However, you need to be transparent with your store visitors about their data being collected. You might have seen a pop-up message that asks a visitor to accept that they are fine with the use of cookies to collect their data. That is one of the ways to collect customer data. Whatever your choice of method to collect customer data is, you must be transparent about it with your customers and website visitors.
Offer subscriptions for your customers
Since the past few years, the rate at which the subscription feature of ecommerce store has risen would be unbelievable. It is a complete 100%! With the right use of the subscription feature, there is a wide room for your ecommerce business development as well as for generating recurring revenue. Instead of waiting for your customers to come back to your ecommerce site, using a subscription plan can help you predict your recurring revenue. The subscription feature is beneficial for both, the customers, as well as, the ecommerce business. For customers, subscribing can help them assure a continuous service without having the hassles to search for the products each time they wish to purchase. And, for businesses, they can ensure recurring revenue from the customers who have subscribed to their ecommerce business. You might need to analyze the services you can offer as recurring subscriptions for your customers on a monthly or annual basis. Based on your business niche, you can decide upon the services you can offer to your customers on a recurring basis. Nevertheless, there is a comprehensive subscription plan that can be offered by businesses of all kinds, the newsletter. In such subscriptions, you can ask your customers to register for the newsletter wherein they will get the benefits of subscribing with you through regular newsletters based on their shopping interests.
Use quality product descriptions and high-definition product images
Any customer who is interested to purchase with your ecommerce store is bound to check the features of the products, the quality, the product description, how to use, and other specifications. If you are serious with selling online through your ecommerce business, you must focus on providing the right product information to your customers. You must know that the product descriptions have great potential to convert visitors into customers. Talking about the product images, what is the first thing a visitor sees in an ecommerce store product page? Obviously, the product images. Do you believe in the concept of love at first sight? Well, we do, and let us tell you, product images have the same role in boosting your conversion rates. They can potentially convince a user to go to the details of the product and finally make a purchase. Therefore, you must be sure that the product images you upload are of high definition, relevant, and attractive. Also, only showcasing quality images and product descriptions certainly are not enough for the success of your ecommerce store; you need to meet their expectations by delivering the same product or service as shown in your images.
These ecommerce strategies were some of our tips to help you boost your sales and your revenue like a pro. All these strategies are practical which are tried and tested by some of the ecommerce giants including Amazon. Imply these strategies into your ecommerce business and experience the massive positive changes in your business!
