4 Essential Strategies for Fledgling Customer-Driven E-commerce Businesses

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If you’re just getting started in the hectic world of e-commerce, you probably already know that you won’t be successful without a strong customer base. Attracting new customers and keeping them interested in your brand is vital and to do that you must focus on how to be truly customer-driven. Here are some tips you shouldn’t miss.

Website design 101: Make purchases easy

A great way to think about good website design for e-commerce businesses is remembering a successful website involves “quietly allowing the products to shine, and helping you to make your purchase in the most seamless way possible.” Information and design element overload will send customers fleeing. Sure, beauty is important, but without a seamless pathway from product to cart to payment, it’s all for naught.

Make social a full-time job

If you can’t devote hours every day to social media marketing and customer interaction, then you need to hire someone who can. It’s that important. According to Forbes, brands that engage with their customers on social media boost their overall revenue by 20 percent to 40 percent per customer engaged. Ignore social media at your own peril.

Leverage analytics (both from your website visits and from the social media channels themselves) on your customers and fans to make a plan for what kind of content will work best. Plan a social strategy that is consistent in tone across all platforms, but not the same. For example, you can prioritize visual content for Instagram and use content meant to spark discussion and shares on Facebook.

Drive customers to your site by becoming an SEO master

As important as social media is to keep customers engaged, you have to have the customers there to engage at all. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play. No matter what you think about all your other marketing efforts, you can’t get anywhere if your website is buried at the bottom of a Google search page — or on page two or three. Your goal should be to rank high when people search for terms involving your business and what you sell.

SEO helps you do just that, so learn the basics. Get the help of an SEO expert if you can’t get a handle on it. Once you have to basics down, you’ll want to implement some e-commerce-specific SEO strategies, like using unique tags on product pages and 301 redirecting no-longer-available products.

Don’t rest on your laurels

Once you start making some good sales and drawing in a respectable amount of new customers, it’s easy to put things on cruise control. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, right? Well, the problem with that mentality is that the e-commerce market is crowded and people get bored. To keep customers engaged, you use social media and good communication practices. But to keep them truly interested you need to offer them new products on a frequent basis. This means changing up your inventory as much as it makes sense for your particular business.

It’s also important to make sure you’re actually reaching your customers, which means that you’ll need to look into digital marketing. For example, if you sell primarily through the Amazon Marketplace, you should use job boards such as Upwork to find an Amazon PPC specialist for hire, who can help you take advantage of the retailer’s “pay-per-click” marketing system.

Ecommerce is exciting but it’s also a competitive field. To stand above the rest you’ll have to focus on drawing in customers, and once you have them, your focus must turn to keeping them hooked.

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