4 Strategies To Grow Your eCommerce Business

Building any kind of business takes time and effort. It’s important to create your own identity while taking a blueprint from those who have done it before. There’s a difference between being smart and wise especially in eCommerce. Being very strategic and planning things a bit at a time will help you make less mistakes along the way. Also, it shows you things you’re good at and what needs to be improved. Here are 4 key strategies to help grow your eCommerce business.

Starting An Affiliate Program

For some people, this can be the gateway to really putting together a good marketing campaign. When you target your core audience and they actually believe in what you have to say, that makes things a lot easier. One of the first things you should do is decide if you’re going to make your own in-house affiliate program or join an affiliate network. Either way, it’s great for overall growth. Check out Omnistar Referral Marketing Software if you are looking to create your own in-house program.

As you can see, Omnistar has a 15-day free trial to help you decide on a good course of action regarding your eCommerce business. This is a great tactic and offer to give your new prospects because they can actually see if they enjoy using your program. Also, it gives you an opportunity to see what those members do in 15 days. It’s important to find out who really has your interest at hand. If you’re unsure how to get started, you can take a look at a great video on this page:

The video does a great job of showing how the program works and how you can really increase your sales, your referrals, and more. This is a great beginning to developing your eCommerce business because you always want to attract an audience. It’s all about cultivating the audience as well.

Also, there’s some good advice to go with setting up your affiliate program:

1. Make it easy to promote your work in social media
2. Converting your customers by using exit pop-ups
3. Use feedback surveys to get your best customers to promote your brand.
4. Discounts and coupons help you recruit affiliates.
5. Smart targeting to help you find which visitors to recruit.
6. Use “Thank You” pages to recruit affiliates.
7. Integrate with different shipping carts.

Although these are all services provided by Omnistar, you can use some of these tactics to help you setup your own affiliate program. Let’s say you are a Shopify user. You can take a look at this guide to help you integrate it with Omnistar in an easy manner.

Besides an affiliate program, there are other ways you can help grow your eCommerce business. In all aspects of business, diversity is key. One strategy may work better than others for a particular business, but don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.

Tailor Your Products To The Consumer

How do you do this? Good question. There are great services out there like Amazon that already set the example. One of the best things you can do is measure someone’s behavior. When someone shops on your eCommerce site, it’s good to have some smart data in order to draw them into your page more. For example, if someone was searching for cologne, then you would entice by the season or the scent they like. If it was a colder month, you would suggest an oak/wood kind of scent like a Polo Red Intense.

Better yet, what if you know someone that likes a specific fragrance and it’s the time of the year where you kind of need to cater to your loved ones. You would make a grave mistake to not take advantage of a holiday or particular season.

Now this is very important. In the photo, you see different ages, a warm feeling, and products. As an eCommerce person, you really want to know your customer and setup a more personalized feel. You can do this by looking at the buying behavior, what kind of items they like to use, and even suggest some things that they didn’t consider buying. It’s much better than sending a random email that doesn’t even capture their interests.

This is the first instance that shows you care. You’re not spouting out random products that people will end up clicking out of anyway. Also, you need to make sure you upsell after the checkout. Of course, Amazon is the king of this kind of marketing. Let’s take a look at purchase and what happens afterwards:

Above you can see the product ordered along with how long it’ll potentially take to get there. Additionally, it shows what other people bought along with the product. Whether it’s a shirt, a pair of pants, or a hat, you have to know how things add up. It’s like how the food industry goes with a waiter asking, “How do you like your steak? Do you want fries with that or onion rings? Do you want to start your meal off with a glass of wine?” Although this seems like generous thing to ask, it’s a subtle yet direct way of getting you to purchase more BECAUSE it pairs well with your initial request. When you find out what your customers like before they even search for it again, that’s how you get them coming back. It shows general care and it’s really feeds into their wants. Give the consumer what they want and make them feel special and you’ll certainly catch more purchases. It doesn’t matter if you have 10,000 people that purchase one product because it’s better to have 1,000 people make 10.

Make Sure You Have A Social Presence

These days it’s always about finding the right presence to market and stay relevant. For some people, they are great with short messages so Twitter might be the best. You can easily setup an account for free and begin promoting your products. However, the key is being “social.” You can create interesting dialogue that gets people to re-tweet what you have to say. Sometimes, being social is a great marketing tool especially when you talk about something that trends. Take a look at this example from Emirates Airline:

In just a bit over a week, this has thousands of re-tweets and likes. The impressions can be over millions of views and people depending on the list. Not to mention, this surely became a trending topic on Twitter. That’s not even counting how many blogs or even other social media it was posted on. The tweet alone did something, but they also created a small commercial that’s under 40 seconds. This captures your attention without going too far deep. It pays to keep your attention to what’s relevant because they “trolled” United Airlines for its behavior with a recent customer. Of course, you don’t have to go to this extreme, but this just shows why being relevant and social can tie into your own business. As a result, it’s possible they were able to get more people using Emirates immediately.

Another way you can grow via social media is by having your products on display. Let’s say you love interacting directly with the people. You can create a Periscope or Snapchat account. This is much more direct approach and shows the daily thing you do. Sure, YouTube is great and has its own live feed. However, these platforms are very in the moment, which people enjoy. It makes you feel like you’re literally right there with your favorite celebrity or businessperson. Check out this article by Social Media Examiner called “How Snapchat and Periscope Can Grow a Business.”

Although you’re a business, it’s important to have human aspects. Maybe you can do a daily vlog or even show what you do on vacation. The importance is to show the regular things that can help you relate to your audience. From time to time, show you can be a bit extravagant because everyone aspires for more. Social media helps to give your audience an experience. That’s ultimately what you want to do in your business is to give them an experience or a moment in time that no one else can present. Whether you create a post a day to inspire someone and come up with unique content that will fuel tons of views on your scopes. Maybe the snaps  you create show off a behind the scenes look from a crazy concert. Those 15-second posts can be golden if done strategically. At the end of the day, it’s about capturing the person’s attention while promoting something beneficial to their lives.

Focus On A Great Mobile Experience

Having a good web page is great, but how does it look from a mobile device? The problem these days is not enough online brands think about their mobile audience. In a society that focuses on the latest trends and the “here today, gone this afternoon” mentally, you need to always evolve. Either you do that or you evaporate out of existence. Point. Blank. Period. If you’re still not sold on mobile, you might want to take a quick read on this article titled “2017’s Four Most Important Ranking Factors, According to SEO Industry Studies.” In this article, Aleh Barysevich talks about a mobile-first user experience. Google Search Console is going to be a big factor in adding and verifying mobile websites. As anyone that works online knows, Google is STILL the dominant force when it comes to ranking websites organically.

You need to keep your feet a few steps ahead of the competition and being great with mobile is one of them. Take a look at this simple design from Domino’s Pizza:

You can see that they optimized the page well enough so that it’s colorful yet easy to scroll. The main deals are right in your face so you don’t have to guess what you want. When you’re out and about, you might actually want to place your order in so you can pick it up on the way home. Take a look at the tab on the right to display more options in the drag down.

All the things you would see on the desktop site is there in plain view. The only difference is this is truncated to be more responsive. A few things make up a good mobile site: it’s easy to navigate, fast response time, and it has everything you need to get to the final purchase. If you give users a great mobile experience, then this will ensure that your eCommerce brand gets more sales. Sometimes, a good app can really make things easier. You don’t have to go to a physical website or scroll. You can just use the app directly at your own convenience. Also, you can update the app to continue to improve the service.

More businesses are finding that the mobile world is continuing to grow and explore new territory. They key to sustaining in this realm is to build your online platform, create a mobile site, and develop an app that can make it more tangible for your brand to reach your core audience. It all boils down to the user experience no matter what platform you decide to use.

What are some strategies you use to help you grow your eCommerce brand? Do you like an affiliate site that helps you branch out in a more organic manner? Are you more interested in a personalized connection with each and every customer? Do you use social media to stay relevant with the people? Does the fast and simple direction of a mobile user entice you to create?

Post a comment below and let us know what you think.