Essential eCommerce Features for Major Growth

Is your eCommerce business struggling for growth and you want to finally break through to compete with the industry leaders of your marketplace? Achieving fast growth is not always possible as there are a lot of factors at play. Your market may be too saturated or new products have made old ones obsolete.

However, with the right strategies, you can give your eCommerce business the best chance of success regardless of the circumstances. A mixture of customer loyalty, building a modern eCommerce website and focusing on long-term marketing efforts has proven to work for other businesses. Focusing on these 3 areas of your eCommerce business is doable and can make your business thrive.

Encourage customer loyalty

You’ll see an improvement in profits by 25-95% if you manage to improve customer retention by 5%. Therefore, establishing a loyal customer base that keeps coming back is a great way to improve profitability and grow your eCommerce store.

There are various ways to encourage loyalty, which means any business can do it in any industry. Here are a few ideas to get started:

• Create a newsletter where you provide regular discounts and updates on your product range. It gives customers a reason to shop at your store and they are informed about the latest products. Take care not to spam your customer lists and add personalization to achieve the best engagement.
• Loyalty program. Create a loyalty program that rewards repeat buyers in the form of discounts, samples, and loyalty points they can spend on your store. Ensure that loyalty program rewards are attractive without denting your bottom line too much. You can do this by giving a discount on your highest profit margin products or creating cheap samples.
• Brand message. Buyers want to purchase from a company that has a good back story. It might be that they are trying to reduce the use of plastics across the world or use their profits to improve struggling communities. Promoting your brand narrative can have wonderful effects on loyalty if there is a message they can get behind.

Loyal customers are essential for huge growth because they will make up the biggest portion of annual sales. A loyal customer base makes forecasting sales and profits predictable. Attracting new customers is a hit and miss game as it depends on too many variables. Therefore, focus on customer loyalty and you’ll be tilting the odds of eCommerce success in your favor.

Build a modern eCommerce website

Your website will be the single digital asset that cannot be taken away from your business. Other digital assets such as social media account and videos on YouTube can be closed down because third party companies run them.

Start by coming up with a domain name for your brand. The name should be closely linked to your brand or ideally include your brand name. You’ll also need to invest in an eCommerce platform to help grow your website and add sales promoting tools. For example, did you know that the average cart abandonment rate is 68.8%? Ecommerce platforms offer the functionality to target visitors that have abandoned their cart.

When choosing an eCommerce platform consider the features to see if they line up with your requirements. Also, note the possible integrations. Ideally, existing software integration is possible with the eCommerce platform you choose.

The user interface is another vital aspect of your website that contributes to growth. Customers should feel comfortable while in your store. Therefore, a minimalist approach works best with clear menus and a logical navigational structure. You’ll see that the top eCommerce stores have a white background – it contributes to the minimalist approach.

Don’t fall into the trap of adding too many graphics and pictures. They add to the loading time, which decreases website performance. Long webpage loading times are linked to a higher bounce rate, so you need to prioritize website performance.

Focus on long-term marketing

Marketing is an essential component of growing your eCommerce business, but you need to know where to spend your marketing budget. Short term instant traffic methods like pay-per-click have value but focus on sustainable long-term generating traffic for major growth. Here are a few examples of long-term marketing to consider:

Social media

Marketing on social media platforms takes time because you need to generate subscribers by releasing a consistent content dose. The power of social media lies in viral content. Create controversial, funny, or thought-provoking posts and you can generate floods of traffic to your sales funnel. Each social media platform requires a unique approach. For example, Instagram audiences digest pictures more readily, but you can add more words to each post on Facebook.

Search engine optimization

eCommerce websites can achieve amazing growth for sustained durations with good rankings in the search engine result pages. It’s a long-term strategy because the ranking algorithm tends to increase rankings slowly as the backlink profile grows and the domain builds trust. Solid SEO practices are a mixture of good content, a user-friendly interface and strong backlink profile. It’s a daunting task for beginners, but you can use eCommerce SEO services to help your site get on the right track.

Build a YouTube channel

You may have noticed that an increasing number of brands and celebrities are regularly releasing content on their YouTube channel. It’s a smart idea that will pay off once your audience grows to a sizeable number. Big eCommerce brands should have no trouble generating many subscribers by promoting their channels on the website.

The great thing about long-term marketing strategies is that it takes little effort in the future to generate floods of traffic. At first, you may pour in resources for months before seeing meaningful results. Overcome this hurdle to reap the rewards in the future.

Final thoughts

Growing your business today is easier than ever before in the history of eCommerce. The range of tools at your disposal for generating new customers is overwhelming. You can grow a massive following on YouTube, utilize SEO, fight for social media attention or combine each strategy for massive growth.

The good news is that the buyer base across all industries is exploding online. Therefore, you have a lot of room for error. It gives you the freedom to try new strategies to see what works best for your eCommerce business. Get started today so your business can experience major growth sooner rather than later.