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8 Essential Tips for Building a Successful E-commerce Business
In an ever-changing and highly competitive post-pandemic market, many businesses are putting more emphasis on their e-commerce offering, especially as up to three quarters of consumers deviated from their usual online store to a new service, store or product offering during Covid-19.
This shift in consumer habits has encouraged businesses to focus more on their approach to e-commerce in order to stay competitive, increase conversions and revenue and ultimately build a successful e-commerce business.
Here are 8 essential tips to consider when building your e-commerce business:
1. Implement an effective e-commerce strategy
An e-commerce strategy is one of the most important steps to ensuring your business is a success online. Once you fully understand the marketplace in which you operate, your competitors and your prospective consumers, an effective e-commerce strategy can then act as a roadmap to every single marketing technique that you will implement in order to achieve your business goals. This can include analyzing the personas of your customers and mapping out their buying experience, while using this information to optimize your marketing efforts.
2. Focus on building a positive brand identity
The lasting impression that customers have of your brand, whether that be a thought or feeling evoked from your logo, a positive or negative experience due to your customer support or a perception of your business from your marketing campaigns, will determine your brand identity and ultimately whether a consumer uses your business.
By spending time focusing on your brand identity and how you want your ecommerce business to be perceived in the marketplace, will help you to build a successful ecommerce business from the outset.
3. Ensure that your e-commerce website is conversion optimized
As an online business, your website is arguably the most important attribute in ensuring your e-commerce business is a success. Building a stunning ecommerce website isn’t just about creating a visually pleasing design, your website will need to be conversion optimized in order to drive sales and increase revenue.
In order to ensure that your website is conversion focused, you could consider:
- Intuitive and user friendly pathflows
- Responsive and mobile friendly design to ensure a user friendly experience
- Integrating online reviews
- Integrating a status tracker at checkout to reduce “cart abandonment”
4. Offer several customer support channels
Focusing on customer experience is crucial when building a successful ecommerce business. By offering omnichannel customer service, your customer support will be much more accessible to consumers and more practical and convenient, enhancing their user experience. You can consider many options when it comes to customer support, whether that be via live chat, social media, email or dedicated customer service telephone lines.
5. Encourage customer feedback and reviews
By incorporating methods to increase the number of customer reviews will be beneficial to your business, especially as 93% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase. Emailing your customers and inviting them to leave feedback is a really simple method to encourage reviews.
6. Focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to increase your rankings
Search engine optimization is absolutely crucial in ensuring your website receives traffic, aside from paid ads. Search engines take into consideration many factors when deciding a website’s rankings and it could be beneficial to hire an SEO expert to assist you.
However, there are loads of simple steps that you can implement which will help you to contend with your competitors:
- Ensure that your website is accessible; Search engines take into consideration accessibility when it comes to SEO. Ensuring that your website is responsive on mobile devices, including alt-tags to images and correctly using headings are all easy ways to make your website more accessible
- Ensure that your content is optimised with keywords; You should be mindful of the written content on your website and ensure that you use keywords within your text
- Website speed; a quick website that is responsive and receptive will help to boost your rankings in search engines
- Incoming links to your website; Encouraging new visitors to your website from external sources that link back to your website is a great way to compete in search engines
7. Consider targeted paid advertising to increase site traffic
In today’s competitive market, you might want to consider implementing a paid advertising strategy in order to increase traffic to your website. Social media platforms, such as LinkedIn or Instagram, offer easy to use paid advertising which can be targeted at specific audiences. Google ads are also a beneficial way to help with your website rankings. However, it’s important to remember that ads are costly and many companies spend thousands of pounds on adverts with sometimes little return.
8. Incorporate cart abandonment reduction within your marketing strategy
You’ve done the leg work to ensure customers reach your website and even start adding products to their shopping cart, but like many of us, customers can change their mind and navigate away from the page before completing their purchase.
Oftentimes, cart abandonment occurs when a customer feels like the checkout process is too much hassle or is taking too much time. By focusing on your cart abandonment strategy, customers are more likely to complete their purchase and ultimately your ecommerce business will generate more revenue. You might want to consider:
- Adding thumbnails next to items at checkout to remind customers of the items they are purchasing (and why they liked them!)
- Allowing customers to checkout as a guest rather than creating an account
- Incorporating several payment options so that guests can pick the most convenient option to suit them
To conclude…
Building a successful e-commerce business takes time and a lot of planning. There are many approaches that you can take but ultimately the goal is the same; to boost sales and consequently increase revenue. By focusing on the fundamentals, your e-commerce business will have a strong foundation in order to compete in a highly competitive and unpredictable market.
AUTHOR: Isabella Goode
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About the Author Jackie Groundsell
Jackie Groundsell -The Connector, owner of 1230 The Women’s Company (TWC) is also known as the queen of women's business networking meetings and events. As a businesswoman herself for the past 25 + years, she’s been there, done that and got the T-shirt! She’s an approachable recognised business Expert, Mentor, IT Trainer and has e supported thousands of small business owners through her events and lunch-time meetings Jackie is also a weekly Radio presenter, reaching and supporting even further into the business world. ... and would love to hear from you.