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Developing and expanding an eCommerce business is not an easy task. The competition is huge with so many big giants already ruling in this industry. On the other hand, customers have become more selective when choosing brands for doing business.
In such a scenario to stay ahead in the long race, developing an effective eCommerce growth strategy is important, and it should be aligned with customer preferences and their buying behavior. Your eCommerce business strategy must combine the latest technologies such as AI, innovation, adaptability, and practical planning.
Sound complicated? Don’t worry. If you want to know how to expand the online business then you are at the right place. Here today I will discuss, what an eCommerce growth strategy is, why it’s important, and the best 10 ways to get it right.
So, keep reading this space to know more!
An eCommerce business strategy is a set of comprehensive strategies and activities that outlines how an eCommerce business can achieve its goals: selling products online, eventually growing its business, and staying ahead of others in the digital marketplace. This strategy covers different aspects of the eCommerce business operations including customer support, sales, marketing, technology, logistics, etc.
The goal of an eCommerce business strategy is to maximize revenue, profitability, and market share while delivering value to customers and maintaining operational efficiency. It involves analyzing market trends, understanding customer needs and preferences, identifying growth opportunities, and developing actionable plans to capitalize on those opportunities effectively.
Having a road map is always helpful for making your business successful. Here is not an exception. Having a clear growth strategy for your eCommerce business helps you to have a clear vision of how to proceed further. Its benefits include:
An eCommerce business development strategy works as a blueprint for new product launches, upgrades, campaigns or even targeting a new customer segment. You can get new customers as well as turn one-time clients into loyal ones.
Your eCommerce strategy covers everything from marketing and customer service to sales. It gives you an idea about website traffic or even monthly revenue. You get the info about why website visitors are dropping and how to get back on track. In short, it helps you to have a stable company with happy and satisfied team members.
As a part of the eCommerce growth strategy, you need to do competitor research to understand what extra they are offering and how you can improve your product offerings to stay ahead of the competition. With research, you can create your unique value proposition and offer your customers what exactly they want.
Your business growth strategy helps you to save costs on different segments. It enables you to optimize tech stack, inventory management, supply chain procedures, costings, and productivity to serve customers in a better way.
Improving your online store can be tough if you’re not sure what’s going well and what’s not. But with eCommerce growth tactics, you can see data about your target audience, their buying behavior, and preferences. This info helps you figure out what needs fixing so you can make your online store better.
In an online business, you aim to make money. A well-thought-out structured growth plan helps to pinpoint inefficiencies and provides exceptional online shopping experience and top-notch customer service that increases sales conversions.
Studies indicate that it costs more money to get a new customer than to keep one you already have. Having an eCommerce plan helps turn one-time buyers into regular customers who pick your brand among other options.
You can properly strategize in such a way that new customers land on your eCommerce website and purchase from you. Just like retaining old customers, it helps to gain new ones also.
Building a successful eCommerce growth strategy requires careful planning and consideration of various factors. Here are some key things to keep in mind before you start creating one.
A mission statement is like a company’s heart—it shows what it believes in, why it exists, and what it promises to do. Making one can steer your business choices in the right direction and can also help tell people about your business in a good way. People prefer to buy from companies they believe in, even if it costs a bit more.
Decide first what is the objective of your eCommerce brand. Understanding what you want to achieve in one, ten, or even 20 years will help you to develop the right roadmap for your business.
Instead of focusing on short-term goals, look broad. Otherwise, you may miss out on big investment plans that can be beneficial for you in the long run.
If you don’t know who are your target customers and have not segmented the target market, you are in trouble. Because they are the ones who are going to buy your products and for them only you have developed your product offerings.
Pause before jumping into creating a growth plan. Understand the needs, pain points, preferences, and buying patterns of your target customers. Once you get all that data, develop a solid eCommerce business strategy based on that.
Once you know who buys from you, you can go even further to figure out what they need and like. There are many tools and techniques to do this such as by looking at numbers on Google Analytics or just by asking them questions in a survey. This will help you understand your customers better, so you can make smarter decisions for your online store.
You need to visualize the buyer’s journey from beginning to end. This will help you to make changes if required to streamline the whole process and make it a smooth journey for your customers.
One way to do it is by creating a flow chart detailing the marketing funnel where all the necessary steps are added that a customer needs to take in the journey- starting from knowing about your brand to becoming your repeated customer. It has to be specific and detailed to understand all major interactions that will happen between your brand and the buyers.
Customers have their preferred mode of communication. It can be email, phone, live chat, chatbot, or maybe social media channels. To serve them better you have to be available on each of these platforms and manage all the interactions efficiently. You also need to be careful that the messaging is consistent everywhere otherwise it may create confusion.
So, taking the omnichannel approach is important if you want your eCommerce brand to do well in the competition.
It’s been nearly 4 years since the onset of COVID-19. Most of the companies have successfully partially shifted to online for catering to the high customer demands. To make this transition sustainable, you need to manage many important aspects carefully like the proper technology, infrastructure, right team recruitment, shipping, and billing.
To make things perfect, and stand strong in the huge competition you need to develop a strong eCommerce growth strategy. Here are the 10 important tactics for your kind consideration. These techniques will help you boost interaction, and improve conversion rates, and business growth.
The shopping experience has to be seamless and delightful. Customers should feel good while browsing your online store. So choose a good eCommerce platform, and make your website easy to access, user-friendly, and visually appealing. Also remember to optimize it for both desktop, tab, and mobile.
How can you do it? Here are some tips for you!
The multichannel approach is super important nowadays. Besides your website, think about selling on social media and other online marketplaces. This helps you reach more people. When you sell in these different places, make sure your brand looks the same everywhere. This helps you to gain customer trust.
Here’s how to do it:
Yes, you can say data is the most important thing to consider in your eCommerce growth tactics. It gives you detailed insights into customer demographics, buying behavior, and preferences so that you can personalize your offerings. Not only that, detailed analytics helps you to tweak your sales, and marketing strategies, and optimize inventory management for better results.
Pro Tips:
Customers need instant assistance with their queries. Providing exceptional customer support has to be in your growth strategy if you want your online business to go long. Apart from traditional phone and email support, offer real-time assistance through live chat and AI chatbot.
Live chat tools for your eCommerce business offer instant assistance to your customers on the web, mobile, and other social media platforms. It lets your agents monitor customers in real time and proactively engage with them to offer assistance before they ask for it.
The conversational commerce solutions like AI-powered eCommerce chatbots are great options when you want to automate different business operations including customer service. It can handle multiple customer interactions simultaneously 24/7 even after your business hours.
How to choose the best live chat solution for your business? Here’s one checklist for you!
To increase sales conversions, you need to optimize your eCommerce website. It helps to bring in more and more visitors and gives you a great opportunity to turn them into paying customers. Suppose you are getting 50,000 visitors to your website from Facebook, but the website takes too much time to load. In that case, you are going to lose many of them. Such kind of bad experience will make you lose lots of prospects no matter how much you invest in other marketing and sales campaigns.
How to optimize the website? Here are some tips for you!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps you to get a higher rank in the search results when users type keywords (different phrases that they search to get details) related to your business. Getting a higher rank there gives you more and more visitors to your online store.
Let me give you one example here. Suppose you have an eCommerce website for designer clothes and accessories. One special segment in your collection is vintage hats and you want more and more people coming to that specific page.
So, with SEO you need to optimize the page using the keyword ‘vintage hats’ so that when people type with that keyword, your page will come in the top results and customers visit that page to know more about it and finally buy that product.
I have some SEO tips for you!
We all get thousands of emails every day so do your target customers. But do we open all of them? Not exactly. You need to make them open yours. How? Through attractive subject lines and email content. So, write catchy headlines, and add high-quality pictures, useful content, and social proofs in a beautiful template. Also, you need to have an email sequence that should be sent to customers at various stages of their buying journey to get the maximum results.
Pro Tips:
Arranging a loyalty program is one of the best marketing strategies for eCommerce businesses. It always helps you to retain more and more customers. It’s a great idea to reward your customers for their repeat purchases. it makes them feel valued and motivated to do more business with you. The rewards can be anything from bonuses, and free samples to exclusive deals.
An excellent example is makeup brand Sephora’s ‘Beauty Pass’. They have a loyalty system where customers get better rewards as they spend more money.
Some loyalty program ideas:
Nearly 82% of people use social media platforms for online shopping so always be available where your customers are. Your social media presence will help you to reach more prospects, increase brand awareness, and boost sales conversions. Apart from that, the more you interact with them on diverse platforms the more you will get to know about their likes, dislikes, and buying behavior. It’s a great way to develop a long-lasting relationship with them. It helps you to retain your existing customers as well as attract new ones.
Many brands use social media for brand awareness and sales. Milk Bar is one such example. Before COVID-19, Milk Bar, a bakery chain in the U.S, made most of its money (75%) from its stores. They also got 25% from online sales. But when COVID-19 came, they could lose most of their money. To prevent this, its founder Christina Tosi, started using Instagram to advertise.
Now, Milk Bar’s Instagram has 870K followers. They also bring many visitors to their online store through social media.
Well, influencer marketing is a trending concept nowadays. What is that? Individuals who have a significant following and influence on social media platforms promote your brand. These people, known as influencers, promote your products or services to their audience, leveraging their credibility and reach to drive engagement, traffic, and sales for your brand. Influencer marketing often involves partnerships between brands and influencers, where the influencer creates content featuring the brand’s products or services and shares it with their followers.
Teaming up with such popular people in your field can help your online business grow a lot.
Here’s how to do it:
To retain customers, increase engagement, and improve sales conversion, you need to offer excellent customer support. This is one of the most important aspects of your eCommerce growth strategy. REVE Chat can be the perfect fit for you here.
REVE Chat serves as your comprehensive hub for all customer service needs. As an omnichannel AI-powered customer service software, it facilitates instant support across your website, mobile apps, and various social media platforms including Facebook, Viber, Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp.
This platform allows you to monitor visitors on the web or mobile apps in real time along with insights into their browsing patterns and current page views. Leveraging this data, you can personalize your communication and proactively engage with users, providing instant assistance even before they express a need.
Moreover, REVE Chat offers a smart AI chatbot capable of automating numerous business operations, including customer service. This ensures round-the-clock customer assistance, even beyond regular business hours or during peak support agent activity.
With advanced features like co-browsing, voice/video chat capabilities, a ticketing system, canned responses, and detailed reports, REVE Chat empowers businesses to elevate their customer support experience.
Curious to experience its benefits? Sign Up for a 14-day free trial today and witness firsthand how REVE Chat can revolutionize your customer service approach.
Start a 14-day free trial, no credit card required
Suvashree Bhattacharya is a researcher, blogger, and author in the domain of customer experience, omnichannel communication, and conversational AI. Serving as a content marketing strategist at REVE Chat, she develops contextual and interesting content for customers from different industries and segments like customer service, customer satisfaction, engagement, messaging platforms, etc. Passionate about writing and designing, she pours her heart out in writeups that are detailed, interesting, engaging, and more importantly cater to the requirements of the targeted audience. Her interests include reading, painting, and traveling.
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