As you are working in the ecommerce industry you must be aware of one fact that consumer can change his mind anytime and keep your audience engaged with your site is the most challenging aspect. How do you ensure to be at the top of consumer’s minds and keep selling your products?
We bring you 6 growth hacks which will help you grow quickly.
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Table of contents
1) Have an engaging web presence
Consider your ecommerce site as a physical store and make it presentable as people do not prefer to walk-in in any store that is not aesthetically pleasing. Check the smallest aspect of your website and follow basic rules to ensure that your audience loves your site. You can check some points that can yield you immediate results.
a) Have a test of your site:
When you are developing/designing your website, you often consider only your point of view and not your audience’s view. Ask your near ones from friends and family to review your site. Let them use your site and ask them questions if they found your site easy to use or not. You can use paid tools like Usertesting.com which is a platform where you can ask target audience to use your site and take their feedback. You can also analyze buyers behavior and activities they did on your site by using tools like HotJar which gives you insights into recorded video format.
Choose tools like Google Analytics which will give more insights about your customers.
b) Check your page download time and user-friendliness:
Preferably your page download time should not be more than 2 seconds or you might lose customers interest. Your site must have easy navigation else it might create confusion for your user. Use Google Page Analyzer to check the details of your site.
c) Check your product images:
You need to sell your product with the images you display. If the product images are perfect, the product gets sold there and then. Product images have to be high resolution and attractive.
Small size images (usually 300 x 300 )should show the various perspectives of the item such as front, side, and underneath i.e. viewable from all angles with zoom and or detailed view.
d) Check your product description. It should not be very lengthy but key product features are a must.
e) Check your Call To Action buttons:
Your CTA buttons have to stand out with contrasting colors from that of your website theme only then you will be able to catch attention and generate a lead or directly a sale.
The same applies to your mobile presence/app as the ecommerce audience is tech-savvy and prefers seeing products on a small screen than on laptops. Make your mobile app eye-pleasing too. At the same time, it has to be easy to use else in no time your consumer will switch to other sites. You can check if your site is mobile-friendly using this Google app to analyze mobile-friendliness.
2) Manage your marketing and sales activities
You may get busy attracting new leads from different marketing channels, however, do not forget to keep track of the leads you generate on these channels right from the commencement of your business as these will give you the most minor insights helping you grow further.
A CRM will be your best buddy to handle all your inside sales and marketing activities. Check how:
a) You can auto-record the sign-up made by your customer directly in the CRM.
This will reduce your manual efforts of recording a lead you generate from different channels. You can record purchase-related details like the name of the customer, contact details, source of purchase, quantity purchased, etc. This will give you a 360-degree view as you will be able to see customer information, and source i.e. channel from which the customer visited your site helping you analyze ROI of every marketing channel, the product he was interested in and the quantity he/she purchased.
b) Report
At the end of a quarter, you will also be able to analyze by creating reports on which marketing/ sales /social media channel has been the most profitable in terms of ROI and you can cut your investments on unfruitful channels.
Similarly, you can gain insights into sales by creating reports quarterly or annually. These reports will help you plan your further sales and marketing strategies.
c)Follow the customers’ behavior
In the case where you want to filter your database and understand customer behavior patterns or customers’ likes and dislikes (product interested in), you can gain such insights too and see people who are interested in the particular product and you may check which type of products are high in demand.
d) A proper after sales support is what will ensure repeat purchases from same customer or same customer visiting your site again.
Keep in touch with your leads/ customers by sending them bulk emails and informing about the discounts or upcoming sale. You can also plan your weekly or monthly email campaigns using a CRM and this will reduce your cost of buying another email marketing tools.
3) Product tangibility- Let consumers try your product before purchase.
Let your customer be sure that you will deliver them the same product as they saw on site and this will increase the chances of the purchase. Possibly you can also allow your customer to try the product before purchasing as that will eliminate the factors that product bought online miss tangibility. Of course, product images do help, however, does not really help with product look and feel aspect. Sometimes product looks different in images and after delivery, it is completely different. Some courier or logistics companies do have a provision to let allow customers a trial of the product before they purchase. Such companies may help you in generating product tangibility features.
4) Smooth payment gateways
Make sure that your payment gateway is smooth or have multiple gateways like PayPal, and 2Checkout.com as people who buy online and use cards to make the payment do not like to stick on “please wait we are processing your payment” window. If one payment gateway fails, other should help in making smooth payments and this will reduce the chances of order cancellations.
Some payment methods work in a particular country but do not work for other. Like in the USA, buyers use more credit cards whereas in India, buyers use multiple mediums of payment like Net banking, Credit card, Debit card, and Cash On Delivery. Analyse the market that you are selling in and remove all possible obstacles that stop you from receiving payments.
5) Personalized product packaging and on time delivery
An offbeat trick that can be used while delivering a product may be making package personalized. You can address the product by the first name of the customer which does give a personal touch and there are more chances for you to shine on social media as well because people post selfies with such packs. There are many sites which do have such personalized packaging options but only if consumer demands. You can shine by personalizing every product you deliver.
In fast-paced life, the customer will expect that product to reach on time but at the same time for as a new bee in ecommerce, creating own logistics division might be an expensive idea for a growing ecommerce company. You can try to tie up with third party shipping companies but before you do so check some points:-
A] Check the reputation of the company.
B] Check the locations they deliver.
C] Check the speed of delivering the package.
D] Check tracking
These pointers might help you in choosing the correct shipping partner.
6) Retarget and engage with your customers on social media
Often customers visit your site and add many products to their cart but don’t purchase them. In such situations, you can always retarget them and show them products they have viewed the most or that are available in the cart.
On social media, it is not always necessary to retarget and push your products but you can think exceptionally by launching contests, giving discounts or even run a referral program which will give your brand more visibility and you will stand out from other ecommerce websites.
e-commerce marketing
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