The idea is that if you expose your brand to consumers, sales will naturally follow. However, given that paid advertising has grown absurdly costly and that many consumers focus their purchases on customer experience and trust rather than ad expenditure, this strategy for growing e-commerce is out of date. For additional sustainable, customer-focused advice on e-commerce growth strategies, see our guidance before allocating a large portion of your growth budget to paid customer acquisition.

Even if you’re relatively new to e-commerce, you’ve seen decades’ worth of progress and rapid growth occur in the field in a short of years. The best way for online merchants to grow in the past was to invest heavily in sponsored advertising. The concept is that sales will happen on their own if you introduce your brand to them.

Proven E-commerce Growth Strategies

Some of these tactics outline further steps that may be done to increase sales incrementally, while others show how to maximise pre-existing strategies that you may already have in your e-commerce toolbox. Continue reading to see how you may use these methods for your brand for long-term, steady growth.

1. Benefit from Referral Marketing

It describes the strategy of gaining new clients or raising brand exposure through affiliate or customer recommendations.

Establish KPIs and use those indicators to reverse engineer your plan.

It is virtually impossible to create an e-commerce growth plan if you don’t know what has to be improved. Without reliable key performance indicators (KPIs) to serve as a guide and standard, your growth plan would essentially be conjecture. Hold off on “growth hacking” until you have reliable information.

You may get the answers to some of the following questions by measuring your KPIs:

• What initially made your store successful?
• Which endeavours haven’t yielded results?
• Which revenue-generating tactics are most effective?

KPIs that are important for e-commerce businesses to monitor may be divided into four categories:

• Financial indicators: monitoring earnings and sales and raising return on investment
• Monitoring the quantity of previous, present, and potential clients
• Purchase indicators: Examining individuals who have tried or completed a purchase
• Conversion indicators: Measuring the number of individuals who have undergone conversion

You may track important KPIs with the aid of any customer care platform that is worth the cost.

Also Read: 10 Best Digital Marketing Strategies For 2024

2. Develop an Advanced SEO Strategy

Although search engine optimisation (SEO) may seem vague, think about the benefits of an efficient SEO-focused e-commerce strategy before you give up. Customers who type a phrase into a popular search engine on their desktop or mobile device are providing us with two crucial pieces of information:

• They are shopping with the intention of making a purchase.
• They have a specific search in mind.

Customers who use SEO in e-commerce are similar to those who go into stores and tell salespeople exactly what they want. They have already completed half of the task. All you have to do as a brand is point them in the right direction.

By connecting qualified customers with your inventory, an efficient SEO strategy may boost your business by lowering acquisition costs and raising conversion rates. If your selection is pertinent to their inquiry, these already highly-intent buyers are far more likely to make a purchase. Additionally, SEO offers a fair opportunity to contact clients on a reasonably equal playing field as well as an entry point into new markets.

3. Establish a Robust Online Identity

Like referral marketing, having a strong social media presence helps your marketing efforts become more genuine and reliable. Additionally, both of them have the potential to become viral and provide never-before-seen outcomes in sales channels.

A solid social media presence and strategy go beyond influencer marketing and a regular publishing schedule. Adopt a thorough strategy and make sure your company has plans in place for every major social media network. Managing direct messages, freebies and contests, publishing choices (video, stories, static posts), and influencer collaborations are all included in this.

To build a network of influencer alliances, think about starting a brand ambassador program. You should also keep an eye out for customer-generated social media material that you can rework and use in a campaign that includes client endorsements.

4. Make Good Use of Live Chat

Customers who use SEO to enhance their purchasing experience are qualified, highly-intent buyers, much like those who use an e-commerce site’s live chat tool.

It makes sense to go above and above for these clients. They are assisting you in aiding them, in addition to offering insightful customer information and qualitative data about client expectations.

Investing in and providing additional support to users of live chat features boosts user engagement, income, and the overall conversion rate of your website.

Make sure the live chat staff—whether they are artificial intelligence or human—is appropriately educated or configured to incorporate upselling into their communications plan when developing a live chat strategy. Increasing the AOV of a small number of purchases on a regular basis can have a significant impact on your brand’s revenue growth.

Also Read: What Are The Latest Trends In E-commerce Development?

5. Make Repetitive Tasks Automatic

Automation is a luxury of e-commerce that is frequently absent from the operations of the majority of brick and mortar stores. Reducing manual systems and increasing automated procedures saves time, money, and frequently leads to improved customer relations.

Even while it might be tempting to automate most or all of an e-commerce brand’s activities, realise that some tasks call for a human touch and a white-glove approach. With occasional quality assurance checks, little chores like labelling, merchandising, or recapping may probably be automated.

By automating these procedures, your company may free up resources to develop expansion plans, put CRO (conversion rate optimisation) methods into practice, or organise important projects that will keep the company ahead of the curve and foster growth.

Also Read: Top 7 Web Marketing Techniques That Will Generate Leads

6. Make Use of Reviews

Reviews are a useful tool for increasing openness and calculating your product’s popularity. A product description page (PDP) with reviews fosters a strong sense of consumer loyalty and confidence.

Yes, this also applies to unfavourable reviews. To get the most out of reviews, make sure your program has a rating system, the option to add media (pictures or videos), relevant product and customer attributes (size ordered, height for clothing, skin type for cosmetics, physical activity for sports equipment, etc.), and visual cues (fit indicator, for example) when applicable. Using a reputable site for consumer reviews makes this process much simpler.

Giving prospective or future buyers a thorough understanding of the product they are thinking about can help them make an informed choice, boost conversion rates, and cut down on expensive returns.

Also Read:

7. Leverage Social Proof’s Power

Reviews and social proof are complementary. Using client feedback or even their behaviour to persuade future or potential consumers to make a purchase is known as social proof marketing.

Although user-generated content (UGC) and customer reviews are highly effective and convert well, they are frequently found on the site’s bottom-funnel research sections (like PDPs).

The idea behind social proof is that good, high-converting material can be leveraged to attract new clients and spur gradual development by being moved up the funnel. For doses of extremely efficient, low-effort conversions, use reviews, customer testimonials, and user-generated content (UGC) in your social campaigns, display advertisements, or lifecycle marketing efforts.

8. Customise the Client Experience

By facilitating faster product discovery for your client base and lowering cart abandonment rates, personalisation across the customer journey may significantly enhance conversion rates. Subtle and well integrated personalisation should be used throughout the decision-making process of the customer.

Simplifying and making little personalised changes might result in a customised and customer-focused experience rather than flaunting personalisation efforts and raising anxiety or privacy issues. Examine onsite content and marketing initiatives to see which areas may benefit from personalisation.

The use of product suggestion quizzes and audience segmentation for email advertising may have a significant influence on conversion rates and the allure of the online shopping experience.

9. Make Use of Email Marketing

Email marketing is a focused and amiable kind of advertising by nature. You may contact consumers directly in their inboxes with email newsletters, and you can even design personalised, behaviour-based email campaigns like cart abandonment or browsing to boost client loyalty.

Utilise email marketing in your growth efforts by using a few of the previously mentioned techniques. Email marketing is ideal for social proof, automation, and personalisation. When crafting emails, think about using dynamic content to customise the message for each individual or consumer group.

When it makes sense, combine automation procedures with trigger email campaigns or streamline common email sequences (such as order confirmation and subscriber welcome emails).

Utilise user-generated material, social proof, and customer evaluations to repurpose lower-funnel content and improve the performance of your email marketing efforts.

10. Pay attention to CRO or conversion rate optimisation

Concentrating on conversion rate optimisation is essential to sustaining development in the face of increasing CPA costs and a more competitive and saturated e-commerce market. Without CRO tactics, all of your time, money, and effort spent on bringing visitors to your website and obtaining new clients may be in nothing.

The money you spent on advertising to get a consumer to your website would have been wasted if they landed there but then left because of slow load times, poor user experience, poor customer service, or even worse, bounce rate.

Do a comprehensive evaluation of the customer experience before investing a large sum of money in an acquisition campaign. Make sure the UX works well, the main pain points are addressed, and the entire experience is made to appeal to the target market. A few proactive steps will help save expenses while creating room for possible sales development.

11. Enhance Product Photography 

When it comes to SEO efforts, customisation strategies, and site improvements, product photography usually ends up at the bottom of the priority list. Why? Due to the fact that photography is an expensive, labour-intensive, and one of the few manual operations that has limited automation alternatives.

Restricted product photography is one of the biggest obstacles to making a buy. If a buyer cannot physically see the product or comprehend its material, proportional size, and usefulness, how can they make a purchase? The success of a PDP can be determined by how well it is photographed.

Several perspectives showcasing important product attributes, unique features demonstrated in use, virtual try-ons, detail or material shots, and even 3D pictures or relative size scales are examples of strong product photography.

Recognise that online shoppers are making purchases without having the opportunity to view, handle, or feel your merchandise. In order to boost comfort levels, decrease hesitancy, and maximise conversion, make sure your product images and overall content production are well-considered and valuable additions to the PDP.

12. Make an Investment in Superior Client Care

Because e-commerce, by its very nature, promotes self-service and autonomous purchasing, customer service is frequently undervalued. However, e-commerce success depends on consumer connection, just like in physical businesses. Building brand loyalty and retention requires it.

Website conversion rates are inherently lower than those of physical stores due to the higher risk associated with online buying (inaccurate information, returns, ill-fitting merchandise, and a delayed sense of satisfaction). Establishing a well-trained customer care staff and putting excellent customer service rules and best practices into effect can help allay worries, lessen reluctance, and increase conversion to levels that will rival those of physical businesses.

Expert product knowledge combined with extensive training may lower the chance of returns, boost retention, upsell to raise AOV, and leave a positive image for a longer customer lifetime value and future expansion.

The Most Vital KPIs for Growth Strategies in E-commerce

Consider your key performance indicators, or KPIs, as your vital signs while assessing your e-commerce growth strategy. The most important performance metrics for expansion should be the conversion rate, overall value of orders, and client lifetime value.

An additional lever to pull for revenue development is the average order value (AOV), which shows how much clients regularly spend on your website.

Customer Lifetime Value: The anticipated profit margin from a client for the duration of that client relationship. Reducing customer acquisition cost (CAC), raising customer retention rates, or raising average yearly spend are the three ways to increase client lifetime value.

Using HA Technologies as Your E-Commerce Growth Platform

HA Technology provides a full range of tools that are intended to support you in continuing to expand your online business. With the help of our technologies, companies can create reviews using user-generated content, tailor interactions using actionable customer data, offer rewards through customer loyalty programs, and expand their referral networks for a comprehensive approach to e-commerce growth.

We can support your existing growth marketing initiatives to boost conversion, retain consumers, create memorable customer experiences, and provide long-lasting outcomes by combining these technologies into a single, integrated customer marketing platform.

In Summary

E-commerce growth strategies entail much more than just allocating funds for sponsored advertising campaigns. Take into account several growth marketing strategies, such as using social media platforms, email marketing, referrals, reviews, and social proof as a resource for long-term growth, for a more thorough strategy.

To make sure that any money spent on increasing traffic is not being wasted, assess and improve CRO metrics like live chat, customer support, product photography, and the in-person experience before investing in any advertising. Schedule a demo with HA-Technologies  to see how we can improve your long-term, sustainable development tactics and assist with your upcoming campaign.