After a long day at the office, you get on the bus to go home and decide to log onto Instagram. Within five minutes of scrolling on your smartphone and tablet, you have seen three e-commerce adverts; two of the ads are from a men’s clothing brand, while the last one is from an electronics store. Already, the sound system you just saw lingers in your head and then proceeds to head to that online store to buy it. Many people are like this nowadays, casually going about their day, then seeing something that intrigues and finally buying it. Brands employ numerous e-commerce strategies daily to capture the attention and sustain their audience’s interest. But how do these brands understand what people need? Better yet, how do they make their products so appealing?
This article will uncover ten easy and smart ways to scale up your e-commerce platform to increase your website traffic and patronage.
However, you need to understand this. E-commerce has become a viable platform for the world today. With more people on their smartphones, tablets, and other mobile apps, it is easy to capture their interests with effective e-commerce strategies. More importantly, for you to do so, you need to stand up from the crowd. There is an insane amount of e-commerce brands in the world today, and some of them are currently in your niche. No need to panic; it only shows a growing need; if you can find the right strategies, you can effectively increase your reach.
As such, the first place you need to look at in scaling up your e-commerce platform is content. You have to understand that it is either quality or nothing when it comes to implementing e-commerce strategies. This is because customers and potential customers are bombarded with a barrage of information every day by direct competitors and other brands. Therefore, your customers find another e-commerce outfit that offers them more if you do not scale up your e-commerce platform. Again, it is not a time to panic but invest in guaranteed techniques that will elevate your brand.
1. How Good is Your Content?
Content marketing strategies are essential to your brand, and they can be the deciding factor in breaking through the market and folding up. No brand wants the latter, but there is a thin line between both ends. However, employing the right content, marketing strategies will ensure that you are steps closer to reaching your goals and ultimately scaling your e-commerce brand.
Let’s address the elephant in the room – Content. What type of content do you want to be churning out as an e-commerce brand? What are you looking to achieve? Content varies depending on what you intend to pass across to the audience; there is video, audio, and written content that you can use depending on the content marketing strategies that you have in place. Also, the type of content you are churning out depends on the social media platform you are using. You must know what social media platform your audience uses the most, so you can implement the content marketing strategies there.
Regardless of the social media platform, you are implementing these content marketing strategies on, they all have to be quality and engaging. If you are running a clothing brand and you want people to see your new collection for summer. Probably you choose to use video content on Instagram, the video quality and sound have to be great to attract the right people. No one will want to watch a video that is not clear online. It is reported that the attention span of an average person is 12 seconds. This means you have about ten seconds to capture the interest of the audience and the remaining part of the video to sustain their interest. The same thing applies to the written content about your brand; you need to have a powerful introduction and an engaging body before closing on a high note.
2. Provide a solution!
In a world where thousands of brands occupy almost every ecommerce niche, you need to be able to adopt conversion optimization practices. This means you have to find a way to stand out and ensure more people come to your website and patronize your products, so aside from content market strategies, what else do you do? Providing a solution is also an aspect of content marketing, but it is more than scribbling down many catchy phrases together to form a killer headline. Your e-commerce brand has to find ways to improve the standard of living of its customers. This is why big e-commerce brands sell because they continue to find new ways to improve the customer experience every day. Therefore, scaling up your e-commerce business means providing a solution to your customers.
One way you can do this is by reviewing the competition and the industry in general. Find out what people are offering customers. Then also, look at what they are not giving the customers, is it in customer experience or the products. You need to capitalize on what the other brands are not doing.
3. Optimize Everything!
If you walk into a restaurant today, you will find that almost half of the people there are on their smartphones and tablets. You cannot blame them; everything is done on their phones today, whether it is banking transactions, emails, communication, you name it. Consequently, many people access websites and social media apps from their smartphones and tablets. Therefore, you need to optimize your website to function properly on mobile phones and tablets. You would not want a smartphone user to be a potential customer to wait minutes before one page of your website loads. People don’t have that much time; therefore, web optimization enables people to have a decent experience while checking your website.
Furthermore, optimization also means using the right keywords so that people can easily find your e-commerce brand. There are some popular words that people search for when they are looking for the type of product you offer. Therefore, optimizing your website to carry enough keywords to rank on search engine result pages is one great way of scaling up your e-commerce brand.
4. Connect with Influencers and other brands
In scaling up your business, you want to ensure that people think your brand is credible. You are looking to improve the reputation of your brand by partnering with well-known influencers and brands. Have you realized that e-commerce brands gain more followership and patronage when a reputable celebrity endorses them? It is an aspect of e-commerce strategies that brands use to scale up their business. With comedy skits gaining popularity globally, many e-commerce brands partner with influencers to make skits centered around solutions that the brand offers customers. This then creates brand awareness and increased patronage.
5. Customer Reviews
Some e-commerce brands dedicate some particular days to flaunt the reviews of customers who use their products. It would be best if you were not shy about showing how your products have greatly impacted your customers’ lives. Many people are looking for the comfort and solutions that your brand offers; therefore, customer review is another way to check the credibility of your brand. It helps to improve brand reputation and enhance the image of the e-commerce brand.
Depending on the content marketing strategy, you can choose what content you want to use to show customer reviews. Some brands use before and after pictures to showcase how well the customer has benefitted from the products.
6. Multiple Payment Options
There are many payment platforms that people use these days to make online transactions, so how do you know which ones to use? Asides from picking the popular payment gateways for your e-commerce platform, you need to conduct proper audience analysis to know which payment platforms are viable. Also, ensure that the payment gateways are working 24/7 since you never know when a customer makes a payment, and it can be a stain on your reputation if there are issues when it comes to payment for the product.
7. Quality Customer Service
Although there is a lot of work on the online aspect of the e-commerce business that you run, you also need to focus on other aspects. One way to scale up your e-commerce platform is by providing quality customer service. Conversion rate optimization increases when you can serve your customer better than the competition. Quality customer service entails prompt delivery and getting the exact order of the customer. Therefore, you must maintain a high level of quality when it comes to customer service, so your business continues to have a good reputation.
8. Diversify into new markets
Some e-commerce brands have ex0ansion into new markets; others have evolved into mobile apps to make their services even better. Therefore, it would be best if you thought about new ways you can expand your reach. Whether it means looking at a new demographic or adding another product or service to the ones you already have. E-commerce brands are constantly upselling their business; therefore, think about something more to offer your customers.
9. Update your website design
This might look a bit trivial in the grand scheme of things as an e-commerce brand; updating your website and the design can improve the conversion rate optimization of your business. You want to keep the customers engaged and offer new options to potential customers; a good website upgrade can do the trick. Ensure that you update your website from time to time. People love a good change, and although it might take some getting used to, it intrigues them.
10. Offer Discounts
It would help if you let the customers feel like you care about them, that you are solely about them having a great experience when they come on your platform. One Of the viable e-commerce strategies you can employ is providing discounts to customers from time to time. This is why you see brands talk about mid-year sales, Easter sales, and other discounts for special occasions. Also, it would be nice to throw in some freebies to reward customers.
Conclusion
Running an e-commerce brand can be grueling if you do not employ the right strategies. However, understand that you are dealing with people like yourself. Therefore, do not offer them the things that you cannot take. It is important to put customer experience first above all. This is the drive, so in implementing content marketing strategies, web optimization, and other ways of calling up your business, remember that your goal is to improve your customers’ standard of living of your customers and potential customers.
