10 Popular Strategies to Grow Your eCommerce Store
Starting something is often the hardest. So, if you’ve managed to set up an awesome eCommerce store, kudos to you. Now, it’s time for sales to roll in.
But growing your eCommerce store is a whole different ball game. You might find a lot of advice on how to grow your eCommerce sales but more often than not, such advice is generic and outdated.
So, that’s what we’ll try to avoid in this post. Here’s we are going to talk about some of the most effective strategies to help you grow your eCommerce store.
Apply the strategies that you think will work for you and gain a competitive advantage over your competitors. So, let’s begin.
1 - Improve your customer service
Your first and foremost preference should be your customers. It’s your customers who’ll determine the growth of your business.
Along with a good user experience, you must focus on delivering excellent customer service. Ramp up your customer service so your customers can reach out to you at any time.
Become easily contactable, and this alone becomes a good reason for customers to buy from you. We live in a world where everyone wants quick results. So, make sure you give customers what they desire.If having a 24/7 team is a big ask, you can take the help of chatbots to do the heavy lifting for you. As per a report by Juniper Research, eCommerce transactions via chatbots are projected to reach $112 billion by 2023.
2 - Have a solid email marketing strategy
Email marketing needs to be an integral part of your marketing strategy in 2022. Having an email list ensures you have a direct communication link with your customers without having to rely on any social platform.
You must leverage email marketing to stay in touch with your customers. The global market for email marketing is projected to reach $17.9 billion by 2027. Businesses that do not have a place on their website for customers to sign up and receive updates are ignoring a huge part of eCommerce that could boost sales.
Having a big email list means there are more prospects for you to build a relationship with.
Pro tip: Don’t just use emails to sell stuff or share updates about offers on your store. Also use emails as a way to provide value to your customers. Maybe share exciting information, tips & tricks, news, or give away freebies in emails. All of this will help you build customer loyalty.
3 - Optimize your website for mobile
We are living in the age of mobile eCommerce or mCommerce. This means that people are increasingly using wireless devices like smartphones or tablets to make their online purchases. It’s a natural evolution of eCommerce that gives people more flexibility for their shopping needs.
As per Statista, in the United States alone, retail mCommerce sales are forecasted to reach $710 billion by 2025.
So, if you want your online store to have a slice of this huge pie, it’s essential that you optimize your website for mCommerce. Ensure that your webpages are mobile-friendly, consider all aspects of usability in a mobile device, and integrate payments to boost the checkout process.
4 - Personalize your communications
We already discussed how staying in touch with your customers is essential to building trust. But you can take it up a step further by personalizing customer communications.
Using various marketing automation tools, you can automate communications sent to customers on birthdays or anniversaries.
These automation tools help you set up sequences that send customers personalized emails at specific intervals.
As per a study by Epsilon, 80% of customers are likely to purchase products from brands that offer personalized experiences. The one-size-fits-all approach of yesteryear isn’t going to work in 2022.
5 - Leverage long-form content marketing to boost SEO
Content marketing is one of the best ROI-giving marketing activities. It is one of the most effective and proven ways to help businesses grow.
Although it’s a long-term approach, the results are significant. Long-form content pieces are one of the most consistently high-performing content mediums for increasing engagement, traffic, and revenue.
Unfortunately, many business owners ignore content marketing since it takes time and effort to deliver results. Moreover, it requires producing quality content on a regular basis. This can be in the form of informative blog posts, newsletters, videos, or any other form of value-drive content.
The more helpful and engaging content you can share, the easier it will be for customers to find you organically. This will also instill trust among your customers.
Brands that put out content strategically are considered experts in their niche. This results in customers buying products from these brands.
As per Statista, a survey conducted in 2019 highlighted that 91% of organizations worldwide were using content marketing as part of their promotional efforts.
6 - Work with influencers to boost brand exposure
It’s impossible to scroll through social media these days without seeing some form of influencer marketing. It’s a popular and fast way of significantly increasing your eCommerce brand’s exposure by working with influencers who already have a large following on social media.
By partnering with influencers in your industry, you can reach out to thousands of targeted customers. Brands can use influencer marketing to promote their store, share user-generated content, or create testimonials.
The influencer marketing industry as a whole is expected to reach $16.4 billion in 2022.
7 - Use scarcity tactics
At times, it’s beneficial to dip into human psychology to figure out what motivates people to make purchase decisions.
One such psychology-based method is to use scarcity tactics. By offering your products in a limited supply or by making the sale live for a short time, brands can motivate their website visitors to make a purchase.
The various ways of using scarcity tactics include flash sales, countdown timers, limited-time free shipping, or limited items in stock.
Studies have shown that incorporating scarcity in your marketing strategies can increase your click rates and boost sales.
And it’s quite easy to implement as well. Just add a popup on the product page with a brief message or a coupon code.
8 - Offer customers complementary products
If people come to your eCommerce store with a particular product in mind, you can entice them by offering complementary products. For example, if you are selling clothes, you can offer add-ons like accessories, shoes, etc.
Many brands employ the ‘Shop-the-look’ strategy to increase their total sales.
9 - Marketing your most popular products
Applying the Pareto principle to eCommerce, one can state that as much as 80% of your profits are derived from 20% of your products. So, by focusing on 20% of your products that drive the highest sales, you can achieve exponential growth.
Focus on marketing your most important products to grow your business instead of focusing on marketing all products.
10 - Make sure your product images are top-notch
Probably the most important aspect of growing your online eCommerce business is to ensure that your product images are of the highest quality. Unlike physical stores, users cannot touch or feel your products. Therefore, high-product photos are essential to help customers showcase your products in the best way possible.
For more than 90% of online buyers, products photographs are the most important factors in making a purchase.
Conclusion
These are just a few top strategies that we’ve discussed here. You can choose to follow some of these or all of these based on what you feel will work the best for your business.
Our suggestion is to keep trying different strategies and then double down on those that start showing results. No matter what you sell online, these strategies will come in handy.
In case you need help with product photographs for your eCommerce store, we suggest using DoMyShoot to simplify the process for you.
