Ecommerce sales have been booming. Last year alone they generated $4.2 trillion worldwide, which is a lot of money. And it is expected to increase eCommerce sales to over $6.54 trillion by 2023.
Online shopping is one of the world's most popular activities, especially during periods like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. And if you look at a lot of the large eCommerce companies based on GMV, Alibaba is massive, same with Amazon, JD, eBay, Shopify, and the list just keeps adding up. And these companies are all going to grow at a very rapid pace as more people start buying online.
In this article, we're going to go over eCommerce strategies as well as some best practices.
Hi there, and welcome back to Serendipity Marketing. We're a digital marketing agency with a mission to help small businesses grow by applying psychology to their marketing strategies.
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So, let’s dive straight into the best practices to increase eCommerce sales.
1. Protect your success and learn from every mistake
You want to learn everything you can about your business. You need to be super competitive just like how sometimes there are price wars or sometimes they get really creative doing not just free shipping, but free next day air shipping.
You want to focus on retaining customers and providing the best experience.
We've also found that when you're just doing CRO, and you're competing in business, being persistent, putting your team first, whether that's safety or whether that just making sure that they're doing well from a mental, emotional standpoint.
Innovation is also huge. The more innovative you can get, the better.
Sometimes these days we’re seeing deliveries actually happen by little drone bots that are just roaming around the street, which is pretty innovative.
And this is helping them get a leg up on their competition. And no matter who you are you're going to have some failures, just learn from them and keep adapting, tweaking, and innovating.
We also never want you to stop experimenting. You need to be willing to fail, and then adapt and learn from mistakes so that you can just keep going.
Because you're not going to get the results you want always on the first time, or even second, or third, or fourth, but if you keep going, eventually things will work out for you. As long as you're following the lessons, the worksheets, the cheat sheets, and the handouts that we're giving you.
So, that way you can maximize yourselves. You need to obsess about your customers.
Amazon is a great example under this perspective. You need to really figure out what they want, and if you figure out what they want and you obsess about that and you provide that, you'll win.
Identify and remove any risk in your business. You can't do it for all of it, but you can do it for some.
Don't think short-term, be willing to take short-term losses for long-term gains.
2. Invest in the right team
The other thing that you need is to have the right team. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, Elon Musk is the one putting everything into space. Yes, he's part of it, but it's also his team. And Jeff Bezos didn't create Amazon on his own, he had an amazing team.
You need to be stubborn but flexible. If you have data that shows that you're going to be right, that's fine, but you also need to be flexible to other people's input and ideas.
We recommend that you diversify your offerings over time, and speed and agility are super important, especially with testing.
You should also consider that trends are going to constantly change and they're changing at a quicker pace, but you need to be leveraging them.
And you need to go online, claim your business on Google, use the different social media platforms whether you like the, what does that chat company Clubhouse, or whether you like TikTok or hate it, it doesn't matter.
Just start leveraging them and if they work great, use them more. If they don't, then at least you have your account and if it ever picks back up, then you can start leveraging it in the future.
Optimise your content, your product pages, and your emails. Think of everything as a whole funnel.
Alright, now before we move on with the next tips on how to increase eCommerce sales, have you ever thought about how much you should invest in marketing to generate constant business growth? Click the button below to calculate the ideal marketing budget you should allocate for higher visibility, engagement, and profit.
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3. Use retargeting
Decide what to gate on your content, and how to use online advertising. And once you get the traffic, one of the highest converting channels that you'll find is retargeting.
And when you retarget those people, you'll find that because they're already warm to you they're much more likely to convert.
We love retargeting, and you can do this on Facebook, YouTube, and Google, you can do this through banners all over the world.
It works extremely well and Facebook and Google are the two main channels to use for retargeting.
You can also set up messenger bots. They have a wizard that walks you through it, sets it up, and you can only send one message every 24 hours if people aren't responding.
You're only allowed to send them one or more messages if they're responding to you, or else you risk getting blocked. So, just be careful with messenger bots.
The benefit though, compared to emails is their open rates. Messenger has 80% plus open rates, while emails are roughly at 20%.
Real people are less likely to continually open your messages though if you can't get them to reply. So, just make sure your messages are much more personalized and that's what these bots are for.
And ways you can use them are lead capturing, giveaways quizzes, and webinars signups. And you can just build up a connection with your audience.
4. Study your competition
One other thing to keep in mind is, what is your competition doing to increase eCommerce sales? So, you're using messenger bots. You're going out there. You're optimizing your conversion. You're doing retargeting. But what are your competitors doing?
And that's something that we want you to keep in mind too when you're going through this whole process.
There's the Porter Five Forces Model that you should check out. The threat of new entrance, the threat of substitutes, bargaining power of buyers, bargaining power suppliers, rivalry among existing competitors.
There's also the PEST Analysis. It analyses the external environment of an organization, often the most important analysis.
Then the most common one that a lot of people have heard of is the SWOT Analysis. It analyses things like strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
when you take all the data that you're getting from this analysis, whether it's the PEST method, a SWOT analysis, or the Porter Five, it'll give you tests ideas.
And when you're running tests, you can end up running A/B tests or even multivariate tests. And a multivariate test is when you're taking many different elements on a page and combining them and seeing what the best combination is, versus just doing a straight-up A/B test.
And unless you're getting a lot of traffic, you're probably going to end up doing A/B testing versus a multivariate test, and you can use Crazy Egg as it just tells you which variation is within so you don't really even need to use a calculator.
So, how are companies like Amazon, New Egg, Shopify, and Big Commerce using CRO to maximize revenue?
Well, they're optimising their site speed, they're constantly improving their website navigation, optimising their call to action, and even testing new headlines.
In addition to this, you'll constantly see social proof.
Hence, they have all these ratings and detailed reviews, and they're combating fake reviews, because that helps reduce abandonment cart rates.
And they also optimise the checkout process by letting people pay through multiple payment methods, such as PayPal, and throughout this process what they found is the simpler they make it, the better they get with conversions.
If you need help with your digital marketing and SEO to increase eCommerce sales and grow your business in terms of visibility, engagement, and profit, contact us today and speak with one of our digital marketing experts to see how we can build the bridge between the point you’re standing at right now and your goals.
