If we have learned anything about the last two years, it is that customers have now moved a great deal of their business online and so this is where your business should be if you want to be able to reach out to your current customers and to the many thousands of potential customers. Your business cannot afford to stand still and you can no longer be completely reliant on your brick and mortar store on the high street. Hopefully you saw the warning signs and you started making changes over 24 months ago to set up some kind of e-commerce business website.
Clearly it should be your goal to improve upon your e-commerce business and you should always be open to new ideas and tactics that will improve it and increase your e-commerce sales. It is important to listen to other business owners to try to get as much information from them as possible because some of them come up with excellent ideas that you could use yourself. If you’re still fishing for some new ideas then the following are some of the strategies that you might want to try.
- Build up your brand awareness – Customers need to be able to trust your e-commerce store and they need this trust so that they can continue to buy from you. The key to any successful business is to make sure that many more people know and trust your brand name because then sales will follow. To improve your overall brand awareness, you should always be trying to focus on quality and that means creating high quality content for your business website.
- Use email marketing – It is incredibly important that you are always trying to build relationships with your customers and this is what makes email marketing very important. You should never take your long-term customers for granted and so you should always be reaching out to them telling them about any new products and services that you currently have to offer. You should always be trying to increase your email list so that you can encourage repeat purchases from repeat customers.
- Engage with customers on social media – People will admit to visiting the popular social media websites at least 15 times a day and so this is where you will find your customers. Facebook advertising is an excellent way to bring new customers to your online store and to chain them into customers who buy and then buy again. You cannot afford to not advertise on Facebook and so if you are not doing it already, then you should talk to your digital marketing agency as soon as possible.
- Improve your conversion rate – You should always be trying to put things in place that can completely optimise your online store and your marketing channels. You need to find out if certain methods of advertising are working and you need to be able to establish your ROAS to make sure that you are spending your budget wisely so that you can afford this year’s holiday. As a business owner, if you are not meeting your goals then you need to start looking at the numbers to see why it’s not working and where you can make changes.
- Know & understand your customers – In order for this to happen you need to be able to properly communicate with your customers and you need to be doing this on an ongoing basis. Once you are able to better understand your customers needs and wants, then you can create better advertising campaigns and create products and services that they want. Social media sites can allow you to reach out to customers and actually ask them directly about what it is that they want and their expectations. Once you can begin to fill in the gaps between what you know and what you think you know, then you know exactly what’s going on.
- Provide the best customer service possible – Customer service is the name of the game and sometimes it is the only thing that can properly separate you from your closest competitor. It’s not good setting up chat bots that are supposed to engage with customers because customers clearly know that this is not a real person that they are talking to and so this damages your customer service image. It is true to say that customers prefer speaking to a real person and when that happens, they are more likely to purchase your product or service.
This is not an exhaustive list and there are many other ways to build upon and to add to your current e-commerce business. It’s all about creating returning customers who will buy from you again and again and so you should be concentrating a great deal of your efforts on the customers that you already have, while still trying to increase your customer base.
