Pre-2020, the eCommerce industry was growing steadily on a global level. Certain industries were doing slightly better than others, and various countries and regions were growing at different rates.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic has swept across the world, eCommerce has taken off more than anyone had ever expected. And, what is more, it is expected to keep growing as rapidly into the future.
So, if you are running an eCommerce business, or looking to kick yours off, what should you be focussing on? How can you take the right steps to expand your business and reach new audiences that you might not have been able to before?
We broke down some of our top tips on ways that you can effectively scale your e-commerce business and grow it into the global empire that you’ve envisioned it becomes.
1. Provide Your Audience with Accessible, Educational Content
One of the most vital aspects of eCommerce is your content. Content works in two ways; first and foremost, it serves as a way to heighten your SEO, and secondly, it draws in new customers and converts them to loyal ones who can trust you.
The first thing you will need to do is to create an effective knowledge base management system. In other words, you will need to have this content and knowledge effectively posted and categorized for your customers and audience to find it.
This usually entails creating well categorized and organized blogs and content pages filled with information that is highly useful for your target audience. With this, you can provide your customer with the knowledge they need to make informed decisions.
Let’s take a look at an example. Let’s say that you are a pet retailer, specializing in pet food and accessories. You need to create content that will educate, inform and entertain your audience in order for them to convert.
Information like ‘How to Keep My Dog Fit,’ or ‘Why is My Cat Getting Fat’ will all be information that your customer will be searching for online. In these blog posts, you can include useful information that the customer can use, and thereafter include links to products that are actually on the site.
Having this information available and well organized will certainly make a huge difference for your customer to find what they are actually looking for.
2. Be Active in Reducing Your Churn
As much as conversion rates are critically important to your website and your customers, so is keeping the churn levels as low as possible. This may seem like a nearly impossible task, but there are a few things that you can do to keep the drop-offs and churn low.
The first thing you need to do is find out what exactly is causing the highest amounts of churn on your site. What are your sales funnels looking like and where are your customers dropping off? You can track this and determine where along the lines you are losing your customers.
The biggest causes for churn are due to:
- Unexpected shipping costs and added fees;
- Long, complicated checkout processes;
- Having to complete the customer profile several times and;
- Lack of personal information and payment information updates.
You can make use of a payment recovery ROI calculator to identify just how much you are losing out in your organization and start working from there. Re-targeting and open communication with your customer can help you both in recovering the funding and starting to reduce the losses.
By automating these systems, you can instantly contact them about the failed payments and encourage them to make the payment.
3. Focus on the Customer Journey
The customer journey is certainly one of the most overlooked aspects of the brand, especially for start-ups and new businesses. Mapping out a customer journey throughout your site, from the entry, through to last-mile delivery is vital and it should definitely be something you should be doing from the get-go.
When you are launching your company, you need to take your website through a UX exercise. How are your landing pages laid out? What flow will your customer go through from the landing page to the product page? How quick is the checkout process?
How have you optimized the flow of your site? Are your elements placed optimally to guide your customer to the next page? Once you start getting your website primed for the customer journey, you can start working on your touchpoints.
From the second your customer finds your brand, they will start engaging with you. So, you need to make sure that every point is carefully branded, has uniform messaging and branding, and provides the customer with the right information they need.
4. Test, Measure, and Monitor Everything
Our last piece of advice is to make sure that you are carefully monitoring how well your hard work is doing.
Once you have created your website and refined your customer flow, make sure that it is actually working and that customers are converting. Tools like Google Analytics are great to keep an eye on all of that traffic. Make sure you pay attention to where it comes from, how it behaves, and where it churns.
Use other tools like HotJar to see how your customer actually acts on your pages. How far do they scroll down, which buttons do they click, where do they hover? This kind of data will allow you to place CTAs strategically throughout the page, center images in locations where your customer will see them, and insert content into the right space.
Lastly, A/B tests everything as much as you can. Create two different versions of everything and identify which your customers respond better to. You may be surprised, but things like CTAs and pop-ups can really impact your site.
So, test everything that you can before making the final call on it for your site. Just make sure that you do not index one of the pages as Google will pick it up as duplicate content and penalize you for it. This is the kind of thing to can have a massive impact on your SEO.
Wrapping Up: Effective ways to scale your e-commerce business
In order to scale and expand your e-commerce business, you will need to get your customers and audience invested in you and your brand.
Spend time identifying your customers and their wants, needs, and behaviors. You can then create a brand around what you think they would respond to best and ensure high conversion rates.
Remember to keep everything brand-aligned and to ask yourself. If it is not educating, informing, and entertaining, is it worth it?
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