Implementing an E-Commerce Growth Strategy
Jul 9, 2024
The Ultimate Guide To Implementing A Successful E-Commerce Growth Strategy
In the present world of online retail, opening an e-commerce store is not a difficult job. But the real challenge is to stand out in this competitive, challenging, and dynamic marketplace.
Like many other e-commerce businesses, you are probably struggling to grab the attention of potential customers in this crowded digital market. If so, you lack a well-defined and successful e-commerce growth strategy.
So, if you want to grow your e-commerce business in this highly competitive online market, this guide will help you to ensure your online store's sustainable growth!
What Is An E-Commerce Growth Strategy?
An e-commerce growth strategy is a set of activities and plans a business uses to sell its services or products online. It is like a roadmap that helps businesses reach the right people, convert them into loyal customers, and generate repeat purchases. A business can also assure customers a smooth and enjoyable shopping experience by implementing an effective e-commerce strategy.
The best e-commerce growth strategies are reliable and comprehensive and always ensure the expansion of your e-commerce business. It is why, for now, an e-commerce growth strategy has become essential for the success of businesses in the online market.
If you also want to turn your online store into a go-to shop for your target customers, choose and implement the best e-commerce strategy. Crafting and implementing the growth strategy is about understanding the market and your customers.
It is a strategic process involving multiple steps and ensures your business will thrive in the present digital economy. So, to develop and implement your e-commerce strategy, follow the below-mentioned steps:
Step 1: Identify The Target Market:
First, pinpoint your potential customers. Please take a minute and consider whether they are value-driven consumers looking for the best deals or savvy online shoppers searching for the latest trends.
Besides that, you will also have to recognize their preferences and unique needs to create targeted marketing campaigns on different social media platforms, improve the e-commerce website's customer journey, and bring more sales to you.
Step 2: Analyze The Competitors:
In addition to understanding the customers, keeping an eye on your competitors is equally crucial to ensure the success of your business strategy. So, you must analyze everything from their social media marketing to loyalty programs and try to learn from their mistakes and successes.
After a keen understanding, you can shape your e-commerce business strategy more efficiently and create a unique value proposition for your e-commerce brand.
Step 3: Set Your Goals And Key Performance Indicators KPIs
Whether you want to boost website traffic, enhance overall customer experience, or increase customer retention, your goals and KPIs provide a benchmark for success. So, you must set the target to increase online sales, improve product visibility, and expand your customer base. All of these ensure that your store remains focused and driven toward success.
Remember that retail e-commerce sales are expected to rise to 6.3 trillion globally this year (2024). It will reach new heights in the future. So, be very careful while developing the e-commerce growth strategy, as it will later contribute to developing a robust approach to traffic generation and growing your online business. Also, every aspect of your strategy must align with the overall business objective, from email marketing to engaging your present customers to attracting new ones.
Understand that e-commerce strategy is not about selling your products but achieving long-term success in the crowded and competitive e-commerce market. Besides that, you can foster loyal customers and create a memorable brand experience with a successful e-commerce strategy.
Example Of E-Commerce Business Using Growth Strategy
A business can provide its customers with a relevant, customized, and engaging shopping experience by using personalized marketing strategies in e-commerce. It ultimately increases customer satisfaction, loyalty, and, of course, sales.
Take the example of Allbirds, which uses Shop Pay on their cart. In this way, the platform reduces purchasing friction to increase the customer's chances of completing the purchase.
So the customers can easily and effortlessly buy the products they want without taking time (and potentially make mistake) by entering their credit/debit card number. It ultimately enhances conversion rate, which is crucial for your e-commerce business's growth.
What Are The E-Commerce Growth Factors?
The growth of e-commerce is affected by different factors. A few of these are uncontrollable, but many can be partially or completely controlled. Let's look over these factors one by one here:
The Factors You Don’t Control At All As An E-Commerce Owner:
Below are the three main e-commerce growth factors that you don't control being the e-commerce owner:
Technological Advancements:
The growth of e-commerce technology is impossible without the internet and technological innovation. A reliable internet infrastructure is crucial for this business to grow. Therefore, due to the higher internet penetration, more online shopping platforms have become accessible to people. As a result, more online transactions are taking place.
The wide range of payment options, such as digital wallets, debit/credit cards, and other various payment options, significantly boost the growth of e-commerce. Aside from that, cash on delivery is another important factor that makes online shopping more accessible and attracts thousands of customers.
Lastly, you can suggest or recommend personalized products with AI. Not only that, but AI can also be used to enhance customer services, price optimization, and customer segmentation. Ultimately, all of these boost the success rate and growth of e-commerce.
I could have talked about the mobile-friendliness of e-commerce on the side. But today, most online shop-building tools are set up to be mobile-friendly. So it's no longer a differentiating factor.
Changing Customer Behavior:
Every online store tries to provide a seamless user experience, making their e-commerce business more successful. The easy navigation options on their websites, personalized product recommendations, and fast loading times also enhance customer satisfaction, which drives repeat business and increases retention rates.
In addition to convenience, the diverse product selection attracts more customers and increases growth and sales. Plus, excellent customer service lets businesses make loyal customers and contribute a lot towards the success of their business.
Ultimately, convenience, a broader range of products, and familiarity with digital platforms are changing customer behavior. They prefer to shop online, boosting online transactions and e-commerce growth.
Regulatory Environment:
The legal and regulatory environment of different regions greatly impacts e-commerce growth. So, now, due to favorable regularity policies, easier cross-border transactions, and consumer protection laws, online business activities are growing tremendously. It also plays a key role in the country's economic growth.
The Factors You Partially Control As An E-Commerce Owner:
Here are factors you can partially control being the e-commerce owner:
Cost Efficiency:
The pricing models of e-commerce stores differ from those of physical stores. You can save on staffing, rent, and inventory management. The online stores can offer their products at competitive prices, attracting loyal customers, enhancing profit margins, and boosting e-commerce growth.
Enhanced Customer Experience:
In an e-commerce business, the customer experience is the key to success. So, every business has a user-friendly and easy-to-navigate website with responsive designs. Also, every store tries to provide a personalized shopping experience depending on their past purchases and shows amazing growth.
Also, you can provide optimized product descriptions and listings to enhance the customer experience. Aside from that, now, businesses know how important customer services are. So, they are making it their top priority, which helps them achieve success in the market.
The Factors You Control As An E-Commerce Owner:
Below are the factors you can completely control:
User-Friendly Design:
Elevate your website's design using intuitive layouts, clear CTAs, and captivating visuals. Testing and refining the user interface (UI)/ user experience (UX) elements is crucial for customer satisfaction). Besides that, ensure that the website is easier to navigate. It will enhance the user experience and boost your growth in the marketplace.
High-Quality Images and Descriptions:
These days, consumers are bombarded with visual content on forums, social media, and streaming platforms. With so much visual content everywhere, consumers ignore most products that don't match their imagination. How will your customers trust you with low-quality product photos?
So, if you want to grab the attention of your potential customers and boost your e-commerce growth, invest in product photography and provide high-quality product images.
Beautiful and clear images attract the attention of humans, so they should be self-explanatory and can sell your products. But, when a prospective customer takes a step forward after seeing the product images, the other important factor you need to pay attention to after visual representation is the product description. Try to describe your products and let the buyers know how your products will be advantageous.
Customer Reviews and Social Proof:
Customer reviews are an effective way to add transparency to the popularity of your products. A study reveals that 88% of consumers trust online reviews. The positive reviews on the product detail page (PDP) create high customer trust and loyalty. Also, the reviews let the customers make informed decisions, reduce high-cost returns, and increase sales conversion rates.
Like the reviews, the social proofs are equally crucial for the future of e-commerce stores. You can use the customer testimonials to influence your potential or future customers. You can also add reviews and customer testimonials for low-effort conversions in social campaigns and ads.
Clear Value Proposition:
The value proposition is what sets a business apart from others. It should resonate with your customers and give them a clear reason to choose your products. For instance, an accessories brand stands out among the competitors by giving a lifetime guarantee. Likewise, a kid's brand sets itself apart by offering the items to little ones based on their stage and size.
Though building an effective value proposition takes time and focus, it ultimately helps you convert visitors into customers and loyal customers into your brand ambassadors.
Simplified Checkout Process:
How easy it is to complete a purchase on your e-commerce store matters. Remember that if the journey you send to your customers is not delightful and smooth, it will increase cart abandonment rates while, as per the Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics, this rate is still very high.
So, if you want your customers to feel satisfied when they purchase the product, excited when they receive it, and happy when they tell their friends about your products, make your checkout process as simple as possible.
You can use express payment solutions or enable purchasing without creating a user account to reduce purchasing friction.
Mobile Optimization:
About 7 billion smartphones are in use today, and 86% of the world's population owns smartphones. So, most of the organic traffic that a global website receives comes via mobile phones, and the same is true for online stores. M-commerce or mobile commerce lets the users buy the products and transact anywhere. It is the reason for the rapid progress of mobile commerce.
By optimizing the online store or website for mobile commerce (m-commerce), you can also automatically improve the conversion rate. The best to improve your store for mobile commerce is by improving the web page loading times. Consumers tend to be impatient, and they want instant gratification. So, how can you convert visitors to buyers if your site takes hours to load?
Targeted Marketing Campaigns:
Without e-commerce marketing campaigns, your user engagement, sales, and returning customer base will drop. So, understand the customer behavior by using the data analyst. Later on, create a targeted marketing campaign to reach your potential buyers. You can share the discount coupons, other rewards, and product updates with buyers. It will reactivate your inactive customers.
Businesses can include pay-per-click (PPC) advertising in their targeted marketing campaigns. PPC ads are equally beneficial for both large and small businesses. Data drives these ads. Offers great ROI (returns on investment) and is easier to scale. The ads work great for the e-commerce business because they target ready-to-buy customers, which leads to higher sales than organic marketing. Isn't that amazing?
Social media marketing campaigns are the other effective ways to grab the attention of target buyers. Also, with these campaigns, you can boost brand awareness.
Why You Need An E-Commerce Growth Strategy?
The e-commerce playground is vast and ever-evolving. It would help to have an effective e-commerce strategy to guide your online store toward success, outperform competitors, and adapt to the ever-changing market trends.
The e-commerce growth strategy is the basis of your business's success, ensuring that your website does not mix up with the background but stands out in the marketplace. Not only that, an effective e-commerce growth strategy offers you various other benefits like:
Attract New and Existing Customers:
A well-defined growth strategy understands existing and potential customer needs and caters them accordingly. So this way, a business fosters customer loyalty, generates traffic, and drives repeat business.
The well-crafted e-commerce growth strategy always focuses on the customers' journey and aims to create a memorable and seamless shopping experience. It ultimately helps in customer retention.
Not only that, after understanding the target market, the strategy also offers everything from products to shipping options per the needs or expectations of customers. The personalized experience is essential for long-term success as it will boost sales and build a stronger customer base.
Increase Sales Revenue:
A successful e-commerce growth strategy enhances every aspect of your business, from refining marketing strategies to optimizing the store. All these efforts aim to improve user experience, make customer journeys comfortable, and boost conversion rates. All these ultimately increase the sales revenue.
Stay Competitive in the Market:
Days have passed when shoppers spend hours browsing through different stores. Today, consumers are turning to stores they know and trust. That's why we're seeing more and more online businesses taking care of their social media image. They understand the importance of having a loyal community behind them.
However, it has also increased competition in the online marketplace. So, to succeed in the market, one has to build a strong online presence, which is where the e-commerce growth strategies come into play.
The strategy helps you to differentiate your business in the increasingly crowded place by adapting to new trends and technologies and understanding customer behaviors. It ultimately brings sales and lets you stay ahead of your competitors.
Reduce Operational Costs:
Compared to a physical store, opening an online store does not cost that much. But, even then, it involves other operational costs. An effective e-commerce strategy becomes your savior by cutting down these costs. The strategy reduces the cost by better resource allocation, improved customer service processes, and running efficient marketing campaigns.
Also, with the growth strategy, you can optimize inventory management, tech stack, supply chain processes, order fulfillment, and other aspects of the customer journey. It helps you avoid hidden costs, maximizes productivity, and minimizes errors. This way, a business stays operationally lean and serves its customers the best products at competitive prices.
Enhance Customer Experience:
Customer experience is one of the crucial factors that cannot be ignored when it comes to e-commerce business growth. More than 90% of businesses understand the importance of customer experience and always make it their priority. So, to enhance the customer experience, a growth strategy also leverages advanced technologies (artificial intelligence and personalized marketing).
Not only that, the growth strategy also ensures that your website is optimized, has a responsive design, and is easy to navigate. Buyers enjoy a comfortable shopping experience, significantly enhancing customer retention and repeat purchases.
Aside from that, growth strategy never overlooks the power of personalization. The customers get personalized suggestions and enjoy a customized shopping experience, which enhances the customer experience. Also, the customers feel valued, ultimately increasing their chances of returning.
What Are The Best E-Commerce Growth Strategies?
Here are the best e-commerce growth strategies that are effective, easier to follow, and keep you up in the competition. So, read on to find what these tactics are and how you can incorporate them in your online store for continued and sustainable growth:
Implement Referral Marketing:
When a customer is satisfied with their purchase, the buyer's chance to refer that product or brand to its family and friends increases multiple times. Referral marketing, also known as word-of-mouth marketing, helps you to maximize these recommendations by optimizing the customer experience, actively reaching potential customers, and urging them to recommend the products to others.
Remember that your referral marketing strategy should include a seamless referral process. So that the customers can easily recommend your products without feeling inconvenienced; understand that when it is done, the strategy will motivate the customers, and they will advocate your brand. It will create brand awareness and allow you to convert first-time buyers to loyal customers.
Now, let’s try to understand why referral marketing is so valuable:
According to a Wharton Business School study, referred customers generate an average of $0.45 more profit per day compared to other customers. Additionally, the customer acquisition cost (CAC) for referred customers is $23.12 lower than that of non-referred customers. Over a six-year period, referred customers demonstrate a 60% higher return on investment (ROI) when considering the initial referral reward. In other words, the cost of referral rewards is nothing when compared to advertisements or sponsorships.
Building brand awareness has always been important, but it has become crucial because buyers have become more selective. So, where other marketing channels look limited, referral marketing lets the brands build awareness on social media networks.
In the present era, customers truly want to know that the brand values them. Through incentive-based referral marketing, you assure your customers that you consider and appreciate their loyalty. Plus, incentives also maximize their participation in your referral program.
Through referral marketing, you can build a strong relationship with your customers on their trust. It is so your new customers find you more trustworthy when someone refers you.
By empowering satisfied customers to share their reviews with their close ones, you can differentiate yourself from the competition when it matters the most.
Unfortunately, however, due to inefficient referral programs, most e-commerce businesses fail to take advantage of referral marketing. These programs lack of flexibility and most of the rewards are really poor and worthless for the customer. Duo is the solution to your problem if you face the same issue.
Our tool lets you implement the post-purchase referral marketing strategy with an instant cashback. It is better and more effective than previous ways of rewarding the loyal customers.
The best thing about our referral program is that it is flexible and customizable. Plus, the immediate cashback is directly added to the customer's bank account, and there is no use for a proxy refund solution. Aside from that, Duo doesn’t store or sell your buyers' personal information.
So, why not create an ultra-personalized referral message that can improve the chances of turning your referral into a real success with Duo?
Personalize Customer Journeys
You can get loyal customers and boost your growth by offering services tailored to the customer's needs. Personalization throughout the customer journey effectively increases conversion rates and reduces cart abandonment rates. But, your personalization strategy should be well-incorporated throughout the consumer decision-making process.
To personalize the customer journeys, you can also get help from AI (which will help you understand individual preferences). Aside from that, businesses can also apply cross-selling approaches, dynamic content, and user-generated content (reviews or testimonials) to add a personal touch to their products.
Embrace Omnichannel Commerce
Omnichannel commerce is a unified e-commerce multichannel approach. It creates smooth integration between different sales channels and offers a consistent customer experience whether a customer shops from mobile devices or offline.
It has also been observed that omnichannel customers spend more, providing a competitive business advantage to the store owners. The Omnichannel customers show more loyalty to brands and offer an integration data collection for online customer interactions and physical stores.
Leverage AI for Enhanced Customer Experiences
It has been found that people leave the brand after 2 to 3 poor experiences or interactions. So, you need to understand that there is little room for mistakes. As an e-commerce owner, you don't have enough personal interaction with customers, but you can still deliver an exceptional experience with the help of AI.
Various AI tools are available that let you give dedication and care to your customers, which you can give to your customers at a physical store. Below are the five tips that you can follow while using these tools to maximize your ROI:
Recommend the products by using the predictive algorithms on the previous user behavior
Get benefits from the virtual assistant or chatbots to instantly respond to your customers. Different tools like Botsify and Chatfuel can be used to create the chatbots.
You can build indexed help centers to resolve your customers' most common issues.
You can make a “can” system to store customer support replies
With the help of AI, optimize your website's search engine for popular keywords. Various free tools (Google Keyword Planner, MOZ, and Keyword Surfer) are available to find the popular keywords.
Optimize Your Website
The jumbled content and poor design will never let your audience return to your website. So, if you want your e-commerce market to be top-notch, you must optimize every pixel of your website architecture and content.
For SEO, you can go beyond the traditional keyword strategies. Add long-tail keywords, consider local SEO to reach the niche segments, and focus on generative engine optimization. In addition to online store optimization, ensure your website is intuitive, user-friendly, and easier to navigate. Plus, chatbots can also be a great addition.
Then comes your website's content. Adding a few words on-site would not be enough to stay competitive. You will have to work on a fresh content marketing campaign regularly. You can add social media posts, blog posts, email marketing and video marketing.
Create Engaging Content
To ensure your growth in the market, you need to develop content that resonates with your customers, establishes authority, provides value, and improves your brand's recognition. Besides that, adding videos, blog posts, and infographics (which can educate the audience or solve issues) can also be effective.
Here, you can also take help from Google Analytics to understand your customer's behavior and preferences. You can subscribe to competitors' newsletters and get strategic insights using different tools. Also, regularly review your previous campaign and find out what has worked or not worked for you. Resultantly, you can make the required adjustments accordingly.
Build a Strong Social Media Presence
A stronger social media presence brings benefits similar to referral marketing. Both strategies can add trustworthiness and authenticity to your market efforts. Also, they both can result in unprecedented results within your sales channels as they both have the opportunity for virality.
But remember that to build a stronger social media presence, you need to do something more than consistently posting. You must take a comprehensive approach and have strategies (direct messages, influencer partnerships, and giveaways) in place for your social media platforms.
Run Influencer Marketing Campaigns
Social media platforms have become an integral part of consumers' lives, and today, billions of people are using these platforms actively. So, running influence marketing campaigns in 2024 is not a trend, but it has become an efficient way for online businesses to connect with their audience. Businesses can boost sales, enhance customer engagement, and achieve sustainable growth.
Influencer marketing involves partnering with individuals who hold influence over a specific audience. These individuals can promote your products, and you effectively get benefits from influence marketing by:
Finding Relevant Influencers: You can identify and collaborate with those influencers whose audience or followers align with the target market. It ensures authenticity and resonance with your target customers.
Making Strategic Partnerships: You must develop clear goals and expectations for the influencer partnerships. Also, focus on brand advocacy, content creation, and driving more sales.
Measuring Influencer Marketing ROI: You can use analytics and data insights tools to track your campaign's performance. Besides that, you can also evaluate the impact of the campaign on sales and brand awareness and measure the engagement metrics with the help of these tools.
Focus On Up-Sell And Cross-Sell
In the dynamic world of e-commerce, you must constantly seek innovative strategies to enhance customer satisfaction and increase revenue. Among those effective e-commerce growth strategies are up-selling and cross-selling.
In the up-selling approach, you encourage the buyers to upgrade to a higher-priced version of any of the products they want. For this purpose, you can showcase the products with enhanced capabilities or additional features.
In cross-selling, you can show the related or complementary products to buyers they are intended to purchase. It increases the average transaction value and improves buyers' shopping experience.
With these approaches, you can provide a personalized shopping experience to your customers and maximize your sales. Plus, you can also encourage repeat purchasing by suggesting the relevant products. Also, this way, you show that you understand your customers, and it fosters a sense of loyalty.
What Are The Most Important KPIs For E-Commerce Growth Strategy?
E-commerce KPIs (key performance indicators) are the metrics that tell you about your online business's performance against your set goals. They also help you understand other factors based on which you can make decisions.
By tracking the right e-commerce key performance indicators (KPIs), you can make the right decisions to boost conversions, improve customer satisfaction, increase revenue, and enhance overall operational efficiency.
Hundreds of KPIs are available, but not all are important to your e-commerce business's success. So, if you want to know about the ones that can provide you with the most valuable insights, we have already mentioned them here:
Conversion Rate:
One KPI that helps you understand and evaluate how well your e-commerce business is doing is conversion rate. It estimates the percentage of your visitors who took the desired actions as subscribed to your newsletter or made a purchase. Most of the time, the conversion rate stands in place of actual sales, telling you about the effectiveness of the marketing efforts and website.
By tracking the store's conversion rate on your Google Analytics account, you can pinpoint the areas where you need to put more effort and make the required changes to improve the customer's experience, performance of your store, and conversion rate optimization (CRO). The most important factors influencing the conversion rate are clarity of product descriptions, website design, and CTA effectiveness (call to action).
Average Order Value (AOV):
AOV (average order value) helps you estimate the average value of an order placed on your store or e-commerce website. You can use this KPI to track and optimize your store's overall performance.
Also, this information can be effective for making strategic decisions regarding your marketing campaigns and product pricing. It can help you understand how successful your upselling and cross-selling strategies are.
If you want to increase the average order value of your e-commerce business, you should:
Track the purchasing history of your frequent buyers to offer them incentives
Run time-gated sales (it will create a sense of buyer urgency)
Create “bundle offers” and offer discounts
Customize the recommendation to offer the premium variants of the same product
For social proof, publish the reviews or testimonials of your customers
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV):
It tells about how much customers will spend on the services or products over their relationship with your business. Customer lifetime value can also be used to predict your customers' future spending patterns.
Higher CLV (customer lifetime value) means customers will be profitable for your long-term business. So, investing in their loyalty will be the right decision. When you are calculating CLV, there are many factors that you need to consider, including the AOV of customers, their frequency, and loyalty to your e-commerce business.
Repeat Purchase Rate:
Repeat Purchase Rate (RPR) measures the percentage of buyers who make a second purchase from your e-commerce store. So, this way, a higher RPR means the customers are happy with their first purchase and will return to you for repeat purchases. Also, it indicates the effectiveness of your retention strategies.
If you want your e-commerce business to thrive, try to achieve a positive repeat purchase rate. The factors that can influence your customers to make multiple purchases are:
Prices of your products must be fair
Customers must be satisfied with the quality of your services or products
Ensure that customer experience is positive
Gross Margin:
It tells you the difference between the revenue generated and the total product cost. Gross margin is always expressed in percentage. It shows you the overall profitability of your e-commerce business or tells you whether your online store is making a profit on each product you sell.
A negative gross margin indicates that you are making a loss on every sale. If you want to improve the gross margin, you must either decrease the cost of every sale or increase the revenue per product.
Net Promoter Score (NPS):
Most of the key performance indicators discussed above were related to the financial aspect (revenue generated or net profit). The net promoter score measures the customer experience from a different perspective and the effectiveness of your customer service.
Measuring the client's perspective can be challenging for e-commerce businesses as it is intangible. Also, as an e-commerce business owner, you can't analyze the data for this KPI. So, to calculate the net promoter score, you need to ask questions from your customers.
Finally, to calculate the net promoter score, you must determine how many of the visitors are your promoters. For this purpose, ask how likely you are on a scale (1 to 10) to recommend this business to your friends. The answers of 6 or below are considered as detractors, 7 to 8 are passive, and 9 to 10 are the promoters. After that, you can use this data to calculate the net promoter score.
Conclusion
Spending on advertisements can get their products in front of the target audience and boost their sales. Undoubtedly, it used to be a highly effective tactic in the past. In 2024, shoppers make decisions based on customer experiences, not on your ads. So, you must opt for a smart and successful customer-centric e-commerce growth strategy to maximize your sales and boost growth!
