Starting an eCommerce business is a real challenge, and you can't just set it up and hope for the best. You have to go out of your way to find potential customers and work with them continuously to make sure they buy things from your store and return time and again. So here are seven things you can do regularly to help your eCommerce business grow.
1. Identify your target audience
Don’t make the mistake of trying to please everyone. That might be fine for huge companies like Amazon, but most great businesses don't work that way. And even Amazon didn't start like that. At first, they only sold books. Once they started making money, they added more products. You need to figure out what kinds of people are most likely to want to buy your goods. Once you know this, you need to start thinking like them. What goods do you think they would love the most that would be easy to find? Once you have a supply (or production line) of these perfect products for your target group, you can focus on marketing them.
2. Get people to come back
Someone who is already a happy customer is much easier to sell to than a stranger. People who have already decided they like your goods shouldn't be forgotten. If you give them great customer service, good products, and reasonable prices, they will keep coming back. And if you're lucky, they'll tell their friends, too. Too many companies focus most of their advertising on getting new people to visit their websites. They forget that they already have a group of happy customers who will come back when they need a replacement or a new product that is similar. A common strategy is to give your customers loyalty cards that reward them for return business.
3. Offer add-ons and related products
Upsells and cross-sells are both ways to add more value to a sale. They also help you get to know a customer better, which can lead to more business in the long run. Upselling means trying to get people to buy a similar, higher-end product instead of the one they were looking at first. Cross-selling is when you try to get your customers to buy goods that go well together. It’s also a good way to find related goods that fill a need that the original item didn't. Most of the time, these are items that the customer may have bought anyway at some point in the future. Cross-sells are often found on the checkout pages of online stores.
4. Give great service to your customers
Making sure you have the best customer service possible is another way to get people to come back. Don't forget that the sales process doesn't end when you make a sale. Since customers can't touch or try out your product before buying it online, unlike in a physical shop, you need to make the buying process as easy as possible for them. You also need to make sure they trust you enough to buy from you, knowing that if something goes wrong with their purchase, you will help them. Not only will bad reviews make it less likely for someone to return and become a repeat customer. They also make other people less likely to try your goods and buy them.
5. Most online businesses can sell internationally
If you have a brick-and-mortar store, most of your customers will come from the area around your store. If you don't want to set up an eCommerce extension, the only way to get more customers is to open more branches, which costs a lot. But most eCommerce companies serve customers all over the world. If your product could be useful to people all over the world in any way, you might want to add information about foreign shipping to your site. Obviously, if your product is digital, sending it to the other side of the world is no more expensive than sending it to your local neighbourhood.
6. Use marketing automation to offer special deals
This is like using upsells and cross-sells but in a different way. You can set up a number of emails to be sent after a purchase. Set up a series of nurturing emails (or messages) to teach your customers and help them after they've bought something from you. These emails can also offer discounts on other goods that the customer would be interested in. Marketing automation can also be used to keep track of customer events like birthdays, anniversaries, and even holiday events like Christmas. You can also set up a series of personal messages that remind people of the special day.
7. Think about marketing with special content and influencers
Content marketing and marketing through influencers are two good ways to market online. Both involve making useful content that your potential customers will be interested in. The big difference is that with content marketing, you usually make and share the content yourself, but with influencer marketing, you pay people with large audiences to do that work for you. As we've seen, good reviews are good for all eCommerce companies. When people with a lot of impact write reviews, the effect is bigger.
The bottom line
Growing your eCommerce business takes a lot of grit and staying power. But it also comes down to carrying out strategic and methodical steps on a continuous basis. These seven steps will hold you in good stead and will be sure to grow your eCommerce business in 2023. If you need working capital to fund any aspect of this strategy, contact Merchant Capital and begin growing your eCommerce business in the next 48 hours.
