5 Tips for Growing Your eCommerce Business

Running an eCommerce site can be a very profitable venture if you know how to grow your business. It is also a smart move for the future because it’s expected that as much as 95% of shopping will be facilitated by eCommerce by the year 2040. So it’s wise to start investing in your eCommerce business now.

There are a few ways you can grow your eCommerce business. If you don’t want to put in too much work from scratch, you can find an eCommerce business for sale and start making money right away. However, if you are ready to create and grow your eCommerce business from ground zero, you need to know how it’s done.

Here are some tips that will help you grow your eCommerce business.

Highlight What Your Customers Think About Your Brand and Products

There is nothing more important to a business than its customers. When you’re trying to grow your business, you’re simply trying to bring more people to your store and convert them into customers. While your marketing efforts might have brought them to your website, they probably still aren’t ready to convert.

A lot of people don’t know if they can trust eCommerce stores for various reasons, but there is one proven tactic to make people trust your store and feel safe about shopping there. That tactic is to show potential customers what your existing customers think about your brand and products.

Highlight what your customers think by using ratings, reviews, and testimonials. Research has shown that 72% of customers won’t take action until they read reviews and 15% of users don’t trust businesses without reviews, so the chances of growing a business without them are slim to none.

If you want your customer testimonials to be effective, they need to have three different elements that show the customers’ purchase history:

• The “before” stage. This part of the testimonial resonates with the current emotions of the customer and all the emotions they may be feeling. This can include insecurity, doubts and difficulties the customer felt before purchasing a product from your eCommerce store.
• The “after” stage. The second part of the testimonial shows what kind of results the customer saw after they purchased your product and highlights all the benefits of making the purchase.
• The emotional response. Finally, a good customer testimonial shows how they feel after purchasing or using your product. These positive emotional responses can trigger potential customers into wanting to experience those same emotions for themselves.

Another thing that is important to remember is including customers’ pictures with their reviews so people who are reading them can see the person behind the experience.

Start a Referral Program

A lot of businesses fail because they focus most of their attention to customer acquisition instead of customer retention. Even though it is important to bring new customers to your business, it’s much more important to keep your existing customers happy.

This is because it costs much more to find a new customer than keep an existing one, five times more, to be exact. That is exactly why you should put in effort into customer retention and gain your customer’s trust. However, that doesn’t mean you can just forget about customer acquisition.

Luckily, there is a strategy that allows you to focus on both at the same time – referral programs. This is something a lot of eCommerce stores have, and the concept is very simple. For every new customer that signs in with the referral code, the person who referred them gets a reward.

When you set up the program, these are the steps you need to take:

• Choose the reward. Nobody will sign up for the program unless you offer a reward as an incentive. This can be anything your customers consider valuable. Most stores use things such as store credit, discounts, and free products or samples as rewards for their referral programs.
• Introduce the program. Introduce it only to those customers who have already purchased something from you and were satisfied with your products and company. You can introduce it via email, social media or any other platform you use.
• Make it easy for customers to invite referrals. Allow your customers to invite people without ever leaving your website. One of the best ways to do this is by setting up a contact picker that will make the process more efficient and much easier. This way, they will be able to refer their friends without even typing their name or email address.

Update Your SEO

No website can succeed without applying the correct SEO strategies, and this is a well-known fact. However, a lot of people don’t realize that you need to update your SEO as time goes by because Google constantly changes the details of how search engine optimization works.

When we look at marketing trends, we can see how SEO updates are changing the game once again, and if you want to grow your eCommerce business, you need to adapt to those changes. SEO is different today than it was during the previous few years. Below are some tips for implementing effective SEO in 2020.

• Think about search intent. Since Google introduced BERT, the search engine got much better at understanding search intent and the intent behind certain keywords. That means you need to publish content your customers want to see and intend to find, not just a string of keywords.
• Content is (still) king. One thing that will hardly ever change is the importance of content for SEO. Because search intent is so important now, you should focus on creating high-quality and meaningful content.
• Adapt for voice search. Voice search optimization is becoming more important every year, especially among younger generations. About 43% of people shop online via voice-enabled devices, so you will probably lose a lot of business if you don’t adapt to this trend.
• Upload videos. Videos are great for business as customers enjoy this type of content, but they are also good for SEO. You just have to transcribe your videos so Google can understand them and add the title, appropriate tags and description.

The whole point of SEO today is that, more than ever, Google is focusing on its users and knows what kind of content seems “natural” to people. Boiling your SEO just down to keywords doesn’t work anymore, you need to put in more effort.

Cross-Sell and Upsell Whenever You Can

Even if a customer came to your website to buy one product, that doesn’t mean they won’t leave your website with multiple items. You can grow your business by upselling and cross-selling your items to buyers who are already ready to purchase from your eCommerce store.

Cross-selling encourages customers to buy more items that complement the ones they have already purchased. If you show customers these items while they’re in the check-out process, they might consider buying them because it adds more value to their purchase.

Upselling, on the other hand, motivates customers to upgrade their purchase before they’ve completed it by showing them a better version of the item they intend to buy. This version of the item is more expensive, but it also comes with benefits for the customer.

The most important thing about both cross-selling and upselling is that it needs to be present in your eCommerce store, but you should never push these items onto your customers.

Always Measure Your KPIs

You will never know if your business is growing unless you track eCommerce sales. You need to track the performance of your sales and revenue so you can have an insight into your conversion ecrate and average order value. With this information, you can make data-driven decisions to generate more sales.

Final Thoughts

Ecommerce growth isn’t something that is going to happen overnight, but something that requires a lot of time and effort. However, if you follow these tips and offer high-quality products, you will notice significant growth very soon.

eCommerce shopping concept -DepositPhotos

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