The utmost aim of every e-commerce store owner is to grow their business. Unfortunately, there are lots of competition online. Your previous strategies might have worked to a certain point, but eventually, they will grow stale.
It is time to come up with new e-commerce tips to grow your business. This is because consumer habits are changing. Therefore, it is essential you keep up with new trends.
In this article, you will learn how to use four e-commerce tips to grow your business.
Let’s get started.
1. Partner with other business in your niche
The first e-commerce tip that will enable you to grow your business is to partner with other businesses in your niche, especially those who sell complementary products. Instead of seeing them as competitors, see them as potential partners that can help you grow your business.
Below are ways you can partner with other businesses in your niche:
a) Partner with other businesses to promote your products and grow your business
You could start by searching for businesses in your niche where you could partner together to promote each other’s products. A good example of this is the Nike & Apple partnership. Two giants came together to bring music from Apple to Nike customers’ workouts with the aid of technology.
They built activity tracking technology into athletic clothing, shoes, armbands, and even basketballs to sync with Apple iPhone apps to track and record workout data such as time, distance, heart rate, and calories burned. This is called product bundling.
Just like Nike and Apple did, you could partner with businesses in your niche to create a unique product or merge your products together. You could each list the same products in your e-commerce stores and promote them to existing customers. You can also share your email lists with other businesses so that each of you can market to a new customer pool. This will open your stores to an entirely new audience and help you grow your business.
b) Partner with other businesses in your niche to do content marketing and grow your business
Content marketing is a popular strategy most brands are using to grow their business. You could partner with other businesses in your niche, such as those offering website development services and content creatives, to create and embed content like how-to-videos, long-form blog posts, ultimate guides, round-up posts, industry news, opinion pieces, infographics, etc., and post it on each other’s blog. By so doing, you will get your content in front of established audiences. This will help you grow your business tremendously. You can publish a good number of content on each other’s blogs or websites. This is also a great e-commerce tip to grow your business. Content marketing is a popular strategy for business growth.
The next e-commerce tip you can use to grow your business is ‘automating everything’.
2. Automate everything
The second e-commerce tip you can use to grow your business is Automation. Marketing automation and e-commerce automation are gaining ground quickly. This is why more than 11x more companies are using marketing automation to grow their business as far back as 2011.
Also, in 2021, the automation industry is estimated to generate around 214 billion U.S.D. worldwide and by 2022, 63% of marketers plan to increase their marketing automation budget.
So, what is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is the use of software to automate manual processes in marketing, such as sending emails, nurturing leads, and social media posting.
Marketing automation is a tremendous tool that can help your business to grow. Below are more benefits of marketing automation.
- It saves time and cost
- It turns prospective customers into paying customers
- It generates high-quality leads
- It increases the lifetime value of your customers through customer retention.
- It gives you the ability to work ahead
Now you know the benefits of automation and how it can help you to grow your business, what tasks can you automate to grow your business quickly?
According to a study by Regalix, most businesses automate email marketing, lead nurturing, and software integrations of systems such as CRM, mobile and social media.
These are the core activities of marketing that can increase sales productivity by 14.5% and reduce marketing overhead by 12.2% and thus help your business to grow. Check out the different automation below.
- Social media automation: Social media automation helps you to manage your business’s social media accounts. Automation tools include Buffer, CoSchedule, Hootsuite and Crowdfire.
- Workflow automation: The workflow automation helps you to take care of routine tasks to allow you to focus on more important business.
- Customer service automation. This enables you to take care of customer services using tools like chat bots. IBM predicted that by the end of the decade, 85% of customer service interactions will be done without humans.
- Marketing automation – This enables you to streamline your marketing activity to save time and cost. It includes email marketing automation.
- Sales automation: This helps you to seamlessly handle all sales processes such as prospecting, lead enrichment, email automation, sales engagement, and sales call automation.
Leadsbridge has a load of marketing automation tools (actually about 390 integrations) you can integrate with your business to make it grow. These include CRM, email software, chatbot, events management, call center, messaging, payment gateways, helpdesk software, etc. My personal suggestion is to sync your favorite CRM with your campaigns and then discover our CRM retargeting feature, which will help maximize the results of your campaigns.
The next e-commerce tip you can use to grow your business is to Focus on your existing customers.
3. Focus on your existing customers
The third e-commerce tip that can enable you to grow your business is to pay attention to your existing customers. When a business is having issues with growth, the normal thing is to think it is because of not having enough customers.
But here, instead of spending all your efforts on customer acquisition, look for ways to improve your customer retention strategy. The truth is, it is 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. This is because they already know your business and they are familiar with your products or service. So, do make sure to offer the best customer service to your customers. However, if you don’t have a huge in-house customer care team to handle customers’ queries, consider online chat software or the live chat outsourcing team.
Below is the impact loyal customers can have on an e-commerce site.
From the chart above, you can see that existing customers add more items to carts, convert more and they bring in more revenue to your business. In order words, they make your business grow.
So, how do you retain your existing customers?
Good question.
a) Use customer loyalty programs to grow your business
A customer loyalty program will give your existing customers an incentive to spend more money each time they visit your e-commerce store.
You can create a reward program that will translate the money they spent into a reward point. When they gather all the points together, they can redeem them for discounts or other promotions. Check out Evy’s Tree Who’s Hoo reward program below.
With this reward program, Evy’s Tree saw 83x return on investment, 65% redemption rate overall, 58% repeat customer rate increase, and $1,032 monthly ad spend reduction. What a great way to grow your business!
b) Use a referral program to grow your business
A referral program is a program that encourages your existing customers to refer their friends and family to your e-commerce store and rewarding them for it. See an example from Harry’s below.
This way, you are getting new prospective customers for your business while treating old customers well by giving them shopping rewards such as discounts when they refer others to your store to make purchases.
The next e-commerce tip to grow your business is ‘launch seasonal campaigns’.
4. Launch seasonal campaigns
Holidays are coming again. This is the perfect time to grow your business. It is during Christmas and Black Friday that people are prepared to buy expensive products. This is the right time to plan for your seasonal campaigns.
There are different ways you can plan and get your prospective customers to be excited about the holiday campaigns. They are:
- Plan at least 5 weeks ahead to design your marketing campaign
- Use user-generated content to promote your campaign. This includes the use of hash tags on social media networks such as Facebook and Instagram. This was what Starbucks did. They created #redcupcontest to promote their holiday drinks.
Conclusion
Above are four great e-commerce tips you can use to grow your business. Have you tried any of the e-commerce tips above? Share with us in the comment section below.
If you want to know more about this topic don’t forget to check out our video!
