2020 has been a year for the record books. But, fortunately for eCommerce brands, eCommerce sales increased in several areas, even in the midst of a pandemic.
Although consumers are shopping more online, eCommerce is still a tough game. How can you keep your sales from plateauing, or even decreasing, because of changing consumer habits and competition?
How do you build customer loyalty that translates into dollar signs?
It’s time to rethink your customer experience and marketing strategy. Use these 10 tips to build the eCommerce biz of your dreams—and make more sales in your sleep.
So many businesses create customer personas and promptly file them away, never to be seen again. But you own a business that sells to humans—humans who are, more than likely, different from you.
Customer personas are a critical tool for understanding your customers’ needs, hopes, and pain points. If you don’t start with an in-depth understanding of your customers, your other eCommerce promotional strategies are moot.
A good customer persona includes things like:
Some eCommerce brands create an intricate back-story for their personas. Those are okay, but focus on the meat of your persona before you write her origin story.
Not sure how to write customer personas? Don’t worry. HubSpot’s “Make My Persona” tool will walk you through the process in a few minutes.
But don’t just create customer personas for the sake of making them. Whip them out every time you strategize your marketing, product pages, or customer service. That’s the key to communicating effectively to your target audience, touching on all the points they need to hear to give you their business.
SEO is a great long-term strategy to get traffic to your site, but there’s nothing more immediate than paid ads. But some eCommerce brands shy away from paid ads altogether, citing concerns about ROI and cost.
Yes, PPC ads cost money. But when you approach them strategically, you’ll see a better return on your investment. With average CPCs of just $0.88, eCommerce actually has one of the lowest costs in the world of paid ads.
As an eCommerce brand, you can see amazing gains in revenue when you advertise on:
Regardless of the advertising platform, though, you still need to structure your campaign for results. Remember your customer personas? Use them to structure your audience segmentation, targeting, landing page, ad copy, and even product photos. Make sure every component of your ad campaign ties to the customer persona.
Use the buyer’s journey as a framework to do just that. Every eCommerce customer goes through a period of Awareness, Consideration, and Decision before buying your products. You can create relevant ad copy, landing pages, and offers for every customer persona at the Awareness, Consideration, and Decision stages for hyper-relevant ads.
And don’t forget to set up remarketing at every stage, too. That means you might have 6 ad groups running for each customer persona, but this hyper-focused strategy is what you need to stop thumbs.
Did you know that trust is the number-one factor for a customer making a purchase? 81% of all customers say they have to trust a brand to make a purchase.
Problem is, just 34% of customers actually trust the brands they’re buying from. It’s your job as a brand to bridge that trust gap.
But that’s a challenge for eCommerce. After all, customers can’t physically touch your product before buying. They need more proof of your legitimacy than they would from, say, a brick and mortar shop.
You’ve got to boost trust. It might sound like a fluffy marketing practice, but there are several ways you can boost your eCommerce trustworthiness, including:
Optimizing your checkout process can lead to a 35% lift in conversion rates. That shouldn’t be a surprise, given the fact that plenty of customers bounce during the checkout stage.
You worked hard to get that customer. Nudge them to finish their transaction and boost your sales with these quick checkout tips:
Your email account is like a digital home base. But we’re living in a world where users get over 120 emails a day. If you’re asking for space in their crowded inbox, you’ve got to make it worth their while.
Fortunately, with a 4,400% ROI on average, email marketing is a worthwhile tactic to boost eCommerce sales. Email encourages repeat purchases and even gives you an avenue to reduce abandoned carts.
Here’s how eCommerce pros get sales from their email list:
Are your product pages really selling the value of your product? You’d be surprised how many opportunities you have to overhaul your product pages.
If your sales figures leave a lot to be desired, give them a facelift by:
CRO is a must-have for eCommerce shops, but many store owners don’t invest in nearly enough testing. When you test, test, and test some more, your data-first approach will reap dividends.
As an eCommerce seller, you have the amazing chance to test literally everything. Since everything online is quantified and recorded, testing is a no-brainer.
You can manually run split tests and serve different versions of your site to customers, experimenting with:
The sky’s the limit. But remember, test only one thing at a time. Otherwise, you won’t know which features were actually more successful. You can also try split testing tools like Optimizely or Google Optimize.
Let’s say you’re selling products without IP protections. What separates you from the other copycats in your space?
Customer service is a differentiator that shoppers care about. Plus, competitors can’t steal your sunny disposition or helpfulness, so lean into customer service as a differentiator.
That might mean:
You aren’t meeting customers in-person to sell your shoes, home goods, or self-care gift baskets. eCommerce brands have to mimic the experience of shopping in real life, which means customers need more multimedia content to trust your brand.
Add videos to your eCommerce site. That might mean:
These videos, at a minimum, should give customers an idea of why they need the product, the problem it solves, and how to use it.
Depending on your product, you might have some seasonality to your business. In all likelihood, you rely on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other big holiday shopping events to boost sales.
But there are other ways to do timely offers outside of Q4. If you sell swimsuits, that means ramping up your marketing efforts a month before customers want to hit the beach. This makes your product offering more relevant, creating a sense of urgency for customers to quickly complete their purchase.
That might mean:
eCommerce is all about customer experience. Give site visitors a reason to buy from you with these 10 smart, revenue-boosting tactics. That means:
You’ve put your blood, sweat, and tears into this business. Keep your hard-won customers around longer so your business weathers any storm.