If you’re looking for incredible company development this year but don’t know where to start, don’t worry; you’ve come to the right place. Whether you want to improve your client base or focus on profit, you must take all of the necessary actions to grow your business this year. While it may appear challenging at first, there are several wonderful ways for you to achieve incredible success in your organization.
Ecommerce growth strategies and approaches are always developing. What was beneficial a year ago may no longer be so now. Every firm has its business plan, and what works for one may not work for another. For a firm to develop, it must be creative and adaptable. The absence of adequate tools is the key to eCommerce success. You’ll need an attempted framework to help you develop your eCommerce business and achieve long-term success. That’s what we’ll show you in this article.
Do you know Dreams To Life is nominated as the Top-rated Shopify Agency according to Designrush?
If you’re ready to stop fighting and start growing your business in both the short and long term, this is a must-read.
Let’s get this adventure begins!
How do most eCommerce businesses fail to grow?
Before we begin, it is essential to understand why the vast majority of eCommerce growth efforts fail. Only two-thirds of enterprises survive their first two years, and only half survive their first five years, according to the US Small Business Administration. Only one-third of firms survive a lifetime. If your company is unable to grow, it faces extinction.
The expense of doing business is increasing. Every year, inflation ranges from 0.7 to 3 percent, but if your company can’t attract (or keep) enough consumers, it won’t be able to grow. Because you did not expand rapidly enough to be successful, you will be one of the companies that close its doors within the first few years.
1. Targeting a Unique product
The most common cause of eCommerce companies’ slow growth is that they do not are open to consumer needs. The developer had a “cool or viral product” and instead of going to the market for what the market wanted, he decided to start his own company. Even if you achieve product/market fit, your company won’t grow until it attracts new customers. It may appear possible at first, but it will never fully thrive unless more customers can be discovered.
2. Insufficient cash management
One-third of small company owners identified a lack of money as the most significant problem. Many organizations focus on earnings early on, but few pay attention to cash flow. Profit and accounts receivable are both growth signs, but neither tells you how to support current and ongoing costs.
Managing your cash flow is critical, especially if you’re just starting, and changing your eCommerce business model to increase cash reserves may allow you to focus on long-term goals.
3. Inefficient Human Resources Management
As a firm grows, finding new personnel is frequently at the top of the priority list. Almost every eCommerce firm will need more personnel to service more consumers and grow. Employing a team is difficult since not everyone is capable of performing the function, and hiring good people who lack strong leadership qualities will result in them becoming awful people. Poor people may improve in some situations if they are given outstanding leadership, but they will not be able to do so in others. Developing and managing a team, as well as maintaining a healthy culture, is a hard and multifaceted endeavor.
According to a YouGov poll, 55% of employees leave their jobs due to poor management. Even if you are successful in attracting exceptional people, the leadership, team dynamics, management practices, and culture must be positive and empowering. If you don’t, you’ll find yourself in a never-ending, costly cycle of turnover, which will stifle your growth and even ruin your entire company.
4. Unorganized Activities
In the business world, there is always something new on the horizon; a new approach, set of tactics, or so-called “hack” that is designed to unleash client flow. Your eCommerce company, on the other hand, will not expand if you repeatedly change techniques. Imagine, for example, that you want to grow your company through content marketing. For two months, you’ve been searching for the “holy grail” of blog material…
However, because your competitors are increasing their Google Ad spend, you must do the same. So, what comes next? You lose the momentum that your content marketing campaign has built. You’re beginning again and focusing on something new. In the end, you spent money on each channel but got nothing in return since you didn’t put in enough time and effort. This is commonly known as “experimentation,” but true experimental design and implementation define the time and money required to begin, perform, and analyze an experiment from start to finish before altering direction. As a result, the most successful firms frequently act by their own internal culture. Businesses that embrace a “go big or go home” mentality thrive. New ideas based on the owner’s or chief marketer’s emotions are discouraged.
5. Ignoring Consumer Loyalty
Analysts believe that retaining current customers would be 60% less expensive than recruiting new clients. A missed chance is failing to impress and keep a consumer who has previously purchased from you. Because retention isn’t as popular or thrilling as acquisition, it may be ignored by both new and existing businesses. Don’t be such a fool! The purchasing process starts before the sale and does not end with the transaction.
How to Increase Your Ecommerce Store in 2022 (and beyond)
Now that we’ve gone over some of the most frequent reasons why eCommerce firms fail to grow, it’s time to look at how to build your business efficiently.
The steps in our 7-step process are as follows:
- Choose an objective or metric that will serve as your “North Star.”
- Form a team and provide them with the tools they’ll need to accomplish their best work.
- The Evidence Speaks for their self (Quantitative Data)
- To evaluate performance, people (qualitative data) are used.
- Keeping and delighting existing consumers
- You Can Improve Your Marketing and Sales Funnel with These Three Simple Strategies
- Create a consistent lead generation channel for your business.
If you follow these steps, you’ll be able to avoid the stumbling blocks that many entrepreneurs face and keep your company on course for exponential growth.
1. Decide on your “North Star” goal or metric.
The first step in making progress is choosing which goals are most essential. Your “north star” statistic, which you strive to improve and use to track your success.
A north star metric is commonly related to one or more of the following subjects:
- Monetization values (such as sales, purchases per customer, or customer lifetime value)
- Users’ activities (such as the number of active users, or the amount of time spent using the product)
- Customer Retention (such as Net Promoter Score, repeat purchase rate, or churn rate)
It’s crucial to recognize that being a thought leader isn’t a sure sign of success. Measurable objectives include things like “customer retention of greater than 80%” or “customer defection rate of less than 2%.” The most successful CEOs in history are humble individuals you may have never heard of. They are modest, intelligent technicians who avoid the limelight and have no desire for celebrity.They are always looking for ways to provide value, manage resources, and improve efficiency while remaining outsiders.
How do you determine the north star’s position?
Customers’ perceptions of your product or service, as well as the benefits they obtain from it, determine whether or not they will buy from you again.
Take a look at these two areas of your company. Which metric combines the two?
For example, “nights booked” may be Airbnb’s guiding metric. Because its clients use (and pay for) it on a nightly basis, it makes more sense to focus on “nights booked” than on a vanity figure like “number of bookings.”
A social networking service, such as Twitter, may keep track of how frequently a user opens the app. This is a significant indicator since neither the advertising platform nor the company would be lucrative or successful if clients did not use their platform.
For example, a retail chain’s north star metric may be “purchases per customer.” They understand that retaining existing customers is more useful (and less expensive) than acquiring new customers, therefore they work hard to maximize the number of transactions each customer makes to build brand loyalty.
Have you figured out what your north star metric is?
Naming a KPI isn’t enough; concentrating on just one indication won’t provide significant results.
Your team must fully embrace your north star metric and track their progress against it at regular intervals to see whether it is helping you get closer to your KPI.
Let’s go to work on putting it into action. Consider the situation when your organization provides online training. User engagement might be your north star metric in this case.
If your course is a success, you want individuals who buy it to read it and follow the advice you provide them, and then recommend it to their friends.
Instead of focusing on acquiring new clients through inbound marketing, you may upgrade your current course material and onboarding methods.
These measures are all aimed at boosting user engagement, which is the north star metric by which your business may succeed—KPIs that help it expand.
To summarize, you should eliminate any tactics that aren’t directed at your north star KPIs.
2. Find a group and equip them with the tools they’ll need to execute their best work.
Your staff will be the most significant factor in deciding your company’s success once you’ve proven product/market fit. You’ll get there with strong leadership and amazing people. Ineffective management or staff will not get you there. It’s tough for a single business to implement techniques that influence their north star indicator, especially when there are other flames to extinguish.
The huge number of variables you must manage is mind-boggling. Operations, customer service, finance, and a range of other concerns will be on your plate. Each of these tasks depletes your north star metric, yet they are all required.
So, how would you go about it?
The simplest option is to outsource your responsibilities and start building a capable staff, or to employ eCommerce CRM and other growth tools.
Determine what you’re strong at, what daily activities you’d want to focus on, and what areas of expertise are most important to your business, and then hire individuals to execute the jobs that aren’t on your list.
Consider the following example:
You may realize that you despise keeping track of your finances, in which case you should employ someone to handle it for you.
Spend your time instead on something that will help you fulfill your north star metric, such as changing your finances.
If you don’t want to deal with customer care, you may outsource your email marketing to a team.
Hiring great sales and support staff is a certain method to help your company grow—especially if your north star metric is NPS, which indicates you want every client to be completely satisfied with your service.
However, while recruiting for growth, it is vital to choose the right people for the job.
Hire an expert who understands what they’re doing if you need someone to take on responsibilities so you can focus on your north star metric.
Many business owners make the mistake of prioritizing money above quality when it comes to human resources. They regard it as an expense rather than an asset to their organization, therefore they go for the cheapest options.
This is not the approach to take. Because of training, turnover, and cheap manufacturing costs, prioritizing costs will cost you more in the long term. If you hire high-quality employees, you’ll make a lot more money than you put in.
Hiring amazing people solves a lot of problems, but even with exceptional employees, you’ll need to create processes and rules that allow them to perform at their best.
Here are a few goals you should strive towards with this strategy:
- Keep all instructions brief and simple: As a manager, your major responsibility is to effectively explain the goal and provide the appropriate guidance. You must not make any assumptions. Your staff should be aware of what is required of them at all times, as well as their top priority and how it ties to the company’s north star aim.
- Provide Information and guidance: Having competent staff allows you to avoid having to micromanage them. Once you’ve given them clear instructions, let them excel. It’s unlikely to look the same as if you created it yourself, which you’ll find is a good thing in general.
- Incentives can be used to promote: Link your employees’ success to the company’s success. If they support you in any way, it should be very beneficial to them as well. Is it conceivable for your company to turn performance incentives into a total disaster? Don’t dismiss small victories as insignificant. Small prizes should be given for minor achievements, whereas large prizes should be awarded for great ones.
3. Statistics Speak for Themselves (Quantitative Data)
In an expanding world, numbers are the key to success. You are now making $X and want to increase your earnings to $XX. Aside from your sales and revenue data, there are a host of other essential figures to consider. To be successful, you might be well in statistics. Quantitative data is represented by “numbers,” and you need to understand how each component of your organization works.
From beginning to end, you must understand all aspects of your business: every client touchpoint, every stage of the customer journey, and every action taken.
Begin by tracing your customer’s journey from the minute they contact you until they leave. Make a list of everything a potential customer may do between the moment they contact you and the time you interact with them.
Every step of the journey must be tracked, and the information must be processed and explained.
You’ll also need to make a list of all the factors and pathways that define each person’s journey:
- Which channel(s) do you feel provide the majority of your revenue?
- What are the most common ways of acquiring?
- What pages do consumers browse before making a purchase?
- Our efforts to expand will be useless if we don’t comprehend what’s going on in our business right now.
- If you do business online, you’ll need analytics software to aid you. The Zoho Analytics Reports are an excellent starting point.
- You may build a report that shows the most popular pathways on your website using the “Made a Purchase” feature.
You will recognize:
Which landing page(s) are the most effective?
How many times does the average client contact your company?
What kind of material do your clients consume before making a purchase?
The final page that a potential consumer sees before going to the purchase confirmation page.
Once you’ve installed Zoho Analytics on your website, you’ll be able to collect and analyze data to make better business decisions.
You’ll be able to record and use this data after installing Zoho Analytics on your website to make better business decisions. You may see that 90% of your customers visit the product page that you promoted through Facebook advertising. This suggests that content marketing would be quite beneficial—you’ve shown that most customers expect this sort of content before making a purchase. While you are unaware of this information, you continue to publish product pages on Facebook. Although “conversion” is your goal, we all know that most people do not convert immediately away.
Instead, optimize your ads towards a lower-cost goal, like brand awareness or link clicks, to reach more people and provide them with the information they genuinely require.
As a result, determine the normal client path. To select which pages should be prioritized, you’ll need to understand the touchpoints you have with them at each stage.
Remember to cross it off your to-do list once you’ve completed it. Your client journeys should be re-examined regularly, since they may vary as your firm grows.
Cost increases and more focused consumer targeting can have a big influence on how people transition from “stranger” to “client.”
4. Humans (Qualitative Data) Are Being Used to Determine Success
Numbers are simply one sort of data, and they can only reveal a part of the truth.
On the other hand, there are people on the other side:
Your consumers have a lot to say about how well your company is run. Your employees, too, have distinct points of view to share with you.
We may now use a range of technologies to better analyze data and develop insights that will aid the organization’s progress.
Using the quantitative research methods we described, get to know your consumers on a personal level. The concerns listed below should be investigated properly:
- What your consumers are saying: What help do they require? What problems are they seeking to solve? What problems are they experiencing with it? Request a list of FAQs from your sales team to obtain this information.
- They’re looking for the following information: What terms do they employ to find answers to their problems? To find these, use keyword research tools like Ahrefs or Ubersuggest.
- What they’re talking about (and where they’re talking about it) on the internet: What social media platforms do they use? Do they participate in any specialist forums or groups? Do they use terminology? Customer surveys can assist you in obtaining this information.
Make accurate buyer profiles using the information you’ve obtained, but more importantly, uncover what makes your buyers tick. According to one survey, 71 percent of organizations that beat their sales and lead goals employ personas.
You can do anything with these vast profiles:
- Speak to your clients in their own language (this helps with relatability).
- Find more people that suit your target customer profile and use the same language to persuade them to convert.
It is important to understand your ideal customers if you have all of the tools necessary to collect (and use) as much continual feedback as possible.
Currently, many businesses receive useful information that is rejected. They lack ways for dealing with criticism, even if it is constructive.
To combat this, consider incorporating customer feedback research into your regular practice. Create a feedback channel where consumers may make their requests through email, and appoint one team member to “own” the feedback solicitation process (through questionnaires, user testing, and interviews).
To go through the concepts, hold a monthly strategy meeting. Invite every member of your team since they may know whether or not to execute it and how to respond.
Let us demonstrate how we can put it to use. Consider the Fortune 500 as an example. Assume you give advisory services to Fortune 500 companies. You will be discussing the following criticisms:
- “May you offer me a website where I can read the notes from our sessions at any time?” says Customer A.
- “It would be fantastic if you could set up a live chat to reply to particular queries,” says Customer B.
You reach the conclusion that Customer A’s opinions are unimportant. Your staff has never encountered a consumer who requested an online portal. Despite the fact that demand vastly outnumbers supply, you put it on your list for a six-month re-evaluation.
Customer B’s feedback, on the other hand, is really beneficial. You can do it right away without doing any research, so you set up live chat on your website and assign one of your customer care personnel to react to inquiries.
Whatever you decide, make contact with the consumer who provided you with feedback and let them know.
Customers will believe that their voices are being heard, giving you a significant price advantage.
5. Attract and delight current customers
Customers are handled as though they aren’t important. Customer service is a popular issue that everyone wants to discuss. It’s fantastic to have new clients. It’s fascinating. Dopamine release is significantly increased as a result of it. But, in reality, it’s not nearly as vital as retention.
Long-term success is built on customer retention and satisfaction.
- Previous clients are five times more likely than new ones to purchase from you (Marketing Metrics).
- Recruiting new consumers costs five times as much as keeping existing customers (Forrester Research).
- Customers that are loyal to a business are 43% more likely to spend more money with them (Fundera).
You might be surprised to find that your business’s efforts to retain clients begin the moment they meet you. If they don’t know, like, or trust you from the start, it will be hard to convince them to return. If a client’s order viewing on your website fails, they’ll likely shop around for future purchases. Customers would look for a company with an unstable website rather than go through the trouble of using your website when they can just go to another company that works perfectly.
It’s also important to realize that just because a consumer receives their purchase confirmation doesn’t mean they’ll become a loyal customer. You must win their trust by providing that every first interaction with your company, whether through the internet, an app, or a product, is flawless.
Set up processes to maintain clients for a long period once you’ve mastered the essentials. It might be:
- Having a variety of customer support options (live chat, social media, email, and phone)
- Going out of my way to help them
- Emailing re-engagement messages
- Inquiring about their opinions and putting ideas into action is essential.
- Maintaining a Loyalty Program
- Providing promotional codes or discounts
- Finding new consumers isn’t enough; they must also trust your product or service and become dedicated champions!
For a firm to grow, its current clients must be preserved. You’ll avoid the difficult (and time-consuming) task of recruiting new consumers if you can keep your present customers happy. Customers would buy again and again if they had a pleasant experience, according to Shopify’s study. After a pleasant experience, people are ready to promote, so you may use this method to turn existing customers into loyal and new customers.
Isn’t it much easier to win over a few dozen new consumers who have never heard of your business before?
6. Improve Your Marketing and Sales Channel Using These Techniques
If you own a business, you have a sales process. It may not have been well planned. In any case, it exists. If you’ve been reading this far, you’ve presumably already planned out your customer journey. That is, in conclusion, your channel. You should be keeping track of it right now, and if you are, you’re in a great position to make changes!
To begin, you must first determine what you hope to accomplish with your funnel.
This framework is not limited to email. This should apply to all platforms and channels. When we try to increase anything, the first step is to figure out what the issue is.
Consider the following situation:
Assume that each month, we receive hundreds of new visitors to our site as a consequence of interesting content, effective advertising, or another source of attraction. These visitors read our information and stay on our site for a long time before leaving, but we never see them again. As a result, people are becoming more afraid to share their contact information.
There are two potential issues here:
- To begin, there may be a need for more harmony between the initial product that buyers are so interested in buying and the rest of our range. The remainder may or may not be important to their requirements. In this case, getting some qualitative user feedback might be beneficial.
- On the one hand, we could be having a “pleasure” problem. Maybe the low-cost item we’re selling is indeed not enough. It’s not desirable, and consumers are dissatisfied and unable to do business with us again after paying us money to receive it. Receiving personal input may assist us in determining whether or not this is a problem.
Data is important for optimizing your channel, therefore if you don’t track and identify it, you won’t be able to make any adjustments.
7. Create a consistent lead generation channel for your business.
When you chose to discover how to develop your business, this is undoubtedly the issue that sprang to mind. It belongs in the very last position. We’ve placed it last for a reason. Profits are, at the end of the day, the most crucial part of launching a company… but they aren’t the only ones.
You’ll need a strategy for generating high-quality recurring leads monthly.
Unfortunately, when it comes to marketing, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all answer. The channels that work for one company may not work for another, which would need some experimentation.
Any of the channels listed below might be a good fit for you:
Writing long-form blog articles about a topic that your target consumers are interested in is part of content marketing. (Based on your customer research, you should already have a list of subject ideas.)
To convince website visitors to join your email list, create pop-ups and welcome mats that offer free, one-of-a-kind material. To motivate individuals to buy after they’re on the list, send them regular emails with links to popular goods or discount offers. Create an audio podcast using your client’s information and send it to others you trust. To reach a larger audience, upload the content to iTunes, Spotify, or Stitcher.
Social media advertising is a terrific method to get your feet wet in the advertising business. They are usually less expensive than radio or television commercials; on average, Facebook ad clicks cost $0.27. Fill up the demographics of your buyer personas in the audience targeting area to send ideal customers back to your website. Take the topics that are most important to your customers and address them in video format. You could upload the video on YouTube, optimize it for search, and direct visitors back to your website where they can join the channel.
The approach that successful, expanding businesses adopt to driving creation is what differentiates them from enterprises that “could have been.” Amateurs choose a channel based on what they find appealing and simple, or on the account of a well-known businessperson who describes how quickly he or she developed through one specific channel. They make decisions based on prejudice and enthusiasm.
Customers choose a channel based on their needs. This is all part of the qualitative data that we discussed earlier. They concentrate on long-term channels that will assist them in reaching their target audience. Then they zero down on that channel and devote the time and resources necessary to thoroughly investigate it.
Amateurs are always changing their minds, second-guessing their decisions, and looking for the next great thing. Investing in a winner varies from investing in a loser in that the former aims to ascertain whether the channel is profitable and, if not, switches gears and tries another. They increase their investment in a successful channel by putting in even more effort to achieve extraordinary results.
So, to begin, pick a channel to explore with.
When choosing your first channel, consider the following questions:
- Where have all of your customers gone? What city are they in? What are their plans? What are the platforms they’re using?
- What’s the most efficient approach to reach out to your customers?
- Where would your clients be most responsive to your company approaching them?
- Is there a point where it’s both easy and inexpensive to get in front of customers and where they’ll be receptive to seeing you?
- Is there a channel where your offer will mesh with the user’s objective when they browse or visit?
Once you’ve chosen a starting point, go all in. Learn all there is to know about that channel and put your entire life into it for three months. Some channels require far longer periods than others, so don’t use three months as a guideline. It’s more of a thin attitude.
Don’t be distracted from this research in any way. Concentrate, finish, and then adjust your options depending on your results.
Steps to Take: Expand Your Online Store
Techniques and tactics for eCommerce growth are always evolving. What worked a year ago may no longer work today.
Every company’s business plan is unique, and what works for one may not work for another.
You will be able to expand your eCommerce business if you follow this seven-step process.
