Have you set up an eCommerce store and still struggling to get some leads? The time has passed where you just establish a new store, list it up on directories, add products and start earning right away. Whereas, now your customers, as well as the search engines, are too picky to complete the checkout process due to the high end competition prevailing in the industry. You must execute some “out of the box” strategies to gain and retain new customers every now and then. E-commerce is way much better than a physical store but the situation might turn around to be vice versa if adequate techniques are not used effectively consequently pushing your rivals ahead.
#10. Establish Your Brand
If you don’t build up your brand name, then you’ll be just another cart at the fish market. There are countless advantages in building your own brand. Start creating your brand identity as soon as you start your business. Starting with your logo, which is the turning point for your brand, like now the alphabet “M” is associated with McDonalds. Brands develop trust, builds up financial value of your firm, generates new customers and you can even use the price skimming strategy at this point of time and there are hundreds of more advantages associated with building your brand.
If you’re a newbie and have no budget to develop your brand, simply start with adding your store to local business directories, create social media channels, collect reviews, associate experts with your brand and follow the cycle.
#9. Spend Money To Earn Money
Whether it’s social, search or physical. You need to spend money in terms of advertisement to gain new customers. You cannot just wait for search engines to rank your site and provide you leads. An average person spends around 50 minutes on Facebook and their monthly revenue is an average $2 billion monthly and most of the money is earned from advertisements. For every dollar you spend on Facebook can spread your reach to 4000 people if done effectively. Start advertising to get some new orders now. Be sure to read the terms and conditions of these advertising platforms as they’re really strict about them.
#8. Product Placement
The biggest attraction of an eCommerce industry is ecatalogue. People nowadays have become miserly when it comes to time. Instead of money, successful people tend to save their time. A smart search console is a need of any eCommerce store where you have to provide an option to your customer to search with respect to type, price range, color range, sizes, delivery time and any other feature which is required. According to research from e-consultancy the customers using smart search convert 1.8 times more as compared to the ones not using the smart search.
#7. Easy and Secure Checkout
The biggest drawback of any e-commerce purchases are unsecure checkouts. If you never want to get wrapped up in a legal claim then the most important part is the safe and sound checkout for your customer. Don’t push your customer to enter all the personal details for checkout. Satisfy them to believe you that their details are safe and sound with you.
Add SSL Certificate (Secured Socket Layer) to your website. Your website needs SSL to accept payments from your customers. Once you get it passed from a few audits, then you can simply apply for one and start receiving payments. Without it, you can be dragged in a big mess as the personal transaction details will be easily available to the potential hackers out there.
#6. Customer Service
Yes, the customer is always right. Treat your customers and clients like an infant and help them in any possible way you can. Customer service is the most important feature for any business, either it’s a physical outlet or any eCommerce store. Customers have queries about your product and you have to be actively present to resolve their issues right away. Provide different mediums to your customers to contact you, either through contact forms, emails, social media, and the most important but not the least “live chat”. Websites using live chat reported that with the help of live chat their sales are increased 3x times.
#5. Expert Reviews.
Giant companies have celebrities associated with them as brand ambassadors who have millions of followers and fans. You cannot hire a celebrity as a startup, but can ask some experts of your industry to review your business/products. There are several ways to get expert reviews, first ask your friends and family to mention and make the proper use of the word of mouth theory on their social accounts, blogs, they’ll do it voluntarily. Supposedly having around 300 friends/family reviewing your products, again each of them got around 200 friends approximately (mutual excluded). With 35% post reach of Facebook/Instagram, your product can reach up to (200*200*0.35) = 14,000 new people.
#4. Never rule out e-mail marketing
Email marketing earns you $35 for every $1 spent effectively. It surely is a great figure to give it a shot. Email marketing is one of the best tool to stretch your sales funnel if done properly and precisely. Do not irritate your customers with tons of e-mails. Add attractive images, add good content, be precise, and don’t spam the inbox, figure out the impact of the time when you shoot out the e-mails. It leads with different experiments with images and content and you’ll easily increase your conversion rates. If you don’t get good results, then either change the e-mail address (might be spammed) or the person who handles e-mail marketing but don’t get demotivated.
#3. Customers love sales
ales, bargains, deals and coupons is a total eye candy for any consumer. 86% of the customers believe that their buying behavior in selecting brand is affected by coupons. This strategy is used by companies to increase their sales and revenue, more items sold = more revenue. You can gain new customers, you can sell your outdated inventory quickly, and also the sales of your products also increases which aren’t even discounted, and hundreds of other monetary and non-monetary advantages flow in.
If you’re a startup and having trouble with building your brand, then coupons can definitely help you out in getting brand mentions and links from high quality coupon websites. Before opting for this strategy, make sure about the calculations so you don’t fall into trouble.
#2. Never Overlook The After Sales Service
The most devastating mistake which a company can make is not providing the after sales support to its customers. Once your product is delivered to the customer, keep a check on them if they like the product or not? Does it fit with their needs, is it functioning properly? If the customer is satisfied with the final product, if they are happy with your product you can also ask them to review your product/service at the very same time. Always remember this equation, Satisfied Customers = Good reviews = Enhanced brand value = INCREASED SALES
One unsatisfied customer can ruin your business and can cost you a lawsuit or millions to redeem the loss. Taking an example of “DELL” when a journalist Jeff Jarvis started a blog in 2005 called “Dell Hell” when customer service department didn’t listen to his request and weren’t even replying for his queries. In that blog, he has clearly mentioned about all the prevailing problems he was facing with Dell and their after sales services and gathered a handful of angry customers through this blog. The story eventually got picked by big publications and the brand “Dell” transformed into “Dell Hell” subsequently. In 2005, the technology and communication wasn’t that advanced but now due to the technological advancements one has to be extra cautious considering the fact that anyone can write down their opinions and start the campaigns through social media.
#1. Your UI/UX Design is a significant factor
UI (User Interface) and UX (User Experience) Design. UI is the combination of pages, banners, icons, buttons and all other elements which are in hand of a graphic designer which are to be placed on a website. Whereas UX is responsible for enhancing consumer behavior and providing ease and pleasure to the customer while interacting with product or website. In-short if you consider your product as a celebrity, UX is all about acting skills whereas UI will cover the appearance, cosmetics and physical features.
Try to target every market separately with their own language, (your developer can do this job), and customize every bit of your website according to your target market, don’t go for the layman themes and designs if you’re targeting a different market, age or gender.
Discussing about the downfall of E-bay in China and success of Alibaba was due to UI/UX. There were some other reasons too like Alibaba offered free services and more. E-bay opted for the same design and strategy which they used in US and Europe but failed badly.
Alibaba introduced a totally different website “Taobao” for C2C markets and designed it differently as Chinese like the cliché type of fancy websites with lot of colors and animations around. They love their own language and prefer to bargain for products with sellers whereas Americans like to bid for the products. Alibaba introduced these features and won the game.
