10+ eCommerce Tips and Tricks to Help Fuel Growth

1, Establish Personal Connections

“Know Your Customer” has been an ongoing mantra for businesses across various sectors and verticals. Accordingly, online stores started segmenting audiences and grouping them together based on commonalities. Such an approach introduced some amount of personalization to the online shopping experience.

However, even that’s not enough for modern-day customers. About 72% of consumers strongly believe that businesses should recognize and acknowledge them as individuals rather than cohorts.

In this vein, there are several ways to extend personalization - from tailored marketing messages to relevant product/service recommendations - it all begins by understanding your customer at a granular level to drive a high degree of personalization.

2, Create Unique Customer Journeys

Unique customer journeys are, in a way, an application of personalization. However, it deserves a special mention of its own since it spans the entire customer lifecycle - from awareness to acquisition to retention.

As such, stores will have to leverage smart personalization tools to establish a one-to-one relationship with every customer at every touchpoint.

Such digital solutions typically harness cutting-edge technology like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), Big Data, etc., to understand customer behaviors, history, and triggers. Based on this knowledge, they curate distinct customer journeys from the homepage to checkout.

The roaring success of Amazon is a testament to its ability to boost sales.

3, Add Compelling CTAs to Your Website

CTA, or Call-to-Action, is an interactive webpage element that offers site visitors a nudge in the intended direction. Think of these as signposts along the customer journey. Clearly, the lack of CTAs would result in a dead end in the customer journey.

Online stores typically deploy CTAs to drive conversions (“Register” or “Sign Up”) and sales (“Add to Cart” or “Buy Now”).

In more complicated sales funnels, you might even see them pointing to lead magnets (“Download Case Study”) or trials (“Try for Free”).

Regardless of the application, you need to make the CTA powerful and actionable to attract clicks. And while you’re at it, try personalizing the CTAs as well, for it can boost performance by 202%

4, Optimize Your Store for Mobile

Mobile eCommerce or mCommerce has been touching new highs every successive year. Retail mCommerce has touched $359.32B in sales in 2021, which is a 15.2% increase from 2020.

That’s not all; mCommerce sales are slated to touch $728.28B by 2025 - nearly doubling in rate! With such a mobile-focused growth of online shopping, failing to optimize your store for mobile devices is equivalent to leaving easy money on the table.

Even if you cannot make the best of mobile-native store development, test your store’s theme and layout for cross-platform performance to penetrate such a high-potential market segment.

5, Craft Effective Sales Copy

Sales copy is nothing short of an elevator pitch. You only get limited space and time to make an impact, so why not make it worth the buyer’s time?

The trick to writing effective sales copy is simple - front-load value from the customer’s perspective. Rather than focusing on the features and specifications of the product/service (boring!), hone in on why customers need it in the first place.

Talk about the impact, benefits, and USP of the item, and customers will be tempted to click on buy!

A word of caution, though, no matter what, never overpromise, exaggerate, or inflate capabilities in sales copy, or you will be setting the stage for disappointment (and returns).

6, The Permanence of Omnichannel Everything

Love it or hate it; omnichannel everything is here to stay. From marketing to sales to customer support - businesses should embrace as many channels as possible while maintaining a boundaryless business ecosystem.

Omnichannel presence offers higher brand visibility while also granting customers the convenience to purchase or engage from the channel of their choice.

The “omnichannel” nature of such interaction ensures consistency and reliability in customer experiences, which lays the groundwork for customer loyalty.

Given this background, it comes as no surprise that marketers using 3+ channels per campaign gained a 494% higher order rate than a single-channel campaign. As such, in case you haven’t done so yet, make everything omnichannel.

7, Gamify the eCommerce Experience

Gamifying the eCommerce experience makes the business-customer communication more interactive, which pushes customer engagement up a few notches. Several eCommerce giants are leveraging this tactic to drive conversions, get more sales, and retarget cold leads.

All you need is a little creativity, and gamification can help plug any revenue leakages at any point of the marketing-sales funnel.

For instance, you can have quizzes during the onboarding stage to recommend products/services, configure platforms, and orchestrate customer journeys.

Similarly, you can have gamified tools like a simple slots machine during the holiday season to offer promos and discounts to push for sales.

You can even have a visual indicator to mark milestones in the customer journey. The possibilities are endless.

8, Strategic Upselling and Cross-selling

Upselling and cross-selling are the go-to strategies for increasing average order value. However, you have to play your cards right to excel at upselling and cross-selling, lest your customers feel put off by your pushiness.

The best approach to winning at upselling and cross-selling lies in having a real-time view of the customer’s cart, understanding buyer intent, and having knowledge of their purchase history.

Then carry out timely interventions that will maximize the effectiveness of an upselling or cross-selling strategy and increase revenue along with it!

9, Share Social Proof

Customer reviews and testimonials for social proof, instills trust in your products/services (and the business itself).

While you may think that asking for reviews may be extremely difficult, the reality is anything but so. In fact, nearly 65% of buyers are willing to leave feedback - all you need to do is ask.

Make it a practice to request feedback at drop-off points, say after cart abandonment, to understand why customers leave.

At the same time, also follow up on successful purchases - albeit after some period to allow buyers to use the product/service and offer a more meaningful review.

You can even incentivize or gamify customer feedback (take inspiration from Local Guides of Google Maps) or integrate user-generated content as feedback from social media websites (with due permission, of course).

10, Diversify Payment Options

Gone are the days when accepting credit/debit card payments or cash-on-delivery options was all it took to complete an online transaction.

However, modern-day shoppers want more. They expect to be served a buffet of payment options starting from digital wallets and third-party payment apps to even cryptocurrencies.

Some online stores are also tying up with financial institutions to offer “Buy Now, Pay Later” and “Flexi-Pay” facilities that are making shopping with them a delight! This simple consideration will massively decrease checkout abandonment and drive sales in the process.

11, Learn, Relearn, Pivot

As online shopping becomes ubiquitous, so does customer data. Naturally, market trends are a great indicator of the winds of change, but one has to keep in mind that these are mostly generic.

On the other hand, the data available to you through your store gain greater relevance.

Exploit this data by subjecting it to extensive analysis to better understand your target audience and their demands. Use the insights generated thus to refine the store, products/services, or customer experiences.

These learnings can be put to practical use in increasing sales in other specific ways that might otherwise go unnoticed when studying broad industry trends. So, keep looking for opportunities.