Are you a successful e-commerce vendor, or a newbie just learning the ropes? Either way, there are always new things to learn about the industry and new ways to improve your operations.
As we enter the new year, there are a few resolutions every e-commerce vendor should make. Below are a few of our suggestions, but it is likely that you will come up with some of your own as well. We encourage experimentation. After all, you never know what might give you an edge over your competition.
Dedicate More Resource to Paid Advertising
Social media marketing is fantastic for a lot of reasons: It’s cheap, it’s easy and it’s a form of marketing consumers actually enjoy. Then again, it doesn’t hurt to throw some money at the effort for time to time.
If you have explored paid advertising for social media before, it might be worth a shot. Instagram and Snapchat are both great avenues for showcasing your products to potentially interested audiences. Similarly, advertising through Google helps put you at the top of user search results. Keep a close eye on the results of these campaigns. The successes of one or more of these methods will likely stand out among the others for your audience.
Boost Your Retargeting Campaigns
Wonderinghow to make an ecommerce website more successful? Many online guides will provide tips for finding new shoppers but how do you ensure that new shopper isn’t just a one-and-done buyer? Retargeting campaigns help instill a sense of loyalty within your customer base.
Here are a few ways to make this happen:
- Send an email to shoppers who have abandoned carts, reminding them to finish their purchases.
- Include an exclusive, limited-time coupon code in all your outgoing packages to pull customers back into the sales funnel.
- Establish a loyalty plan with rewards for your top customers when they buy from you once a month.
Make Friends with Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketingis selling your products through a partnering site. This might seem strange at first. After all, why would you sell your goods elsewhere when you have a perfectly good e-store of your own?Affiliate should be leveraged for products that don’t quite fit your branding, as well as overstocked goods ortest merchandise. It also helps you reach an audience who might not be familiar with your e-store. Affiliate marketing goes the other way too. You can host other people’s goods and get a cut of the profit.
Improve the Quality of Your Merchandise
If you want to build your reputation as a quality ecommerce merchant, you’ll need to improve the quality of your merchandise. Of course, this means different things for different vendors. If you sell handcrafted goods, you will likely have seen your quality and creativity blossom with practice. Keep doing what you’re doing. You’ll only get better with time.
For retail ecommerce, you might want to consider switching up your manufacturers, suppliers and drop shippers. Don’t just swap suppliers on a whim, of course. Do a little research to see if they can bring up the quality of your goods. Or negotiate with your current suppliers to boost the quality of the materials used.
Think ‘Green’ in 2018
One of the most important resolutions every ecommerce vendor should make is lessening their impact on the environment. Ecommerce can be particularly wasteful when you employ poor packaging practices. Try switching to more sustainable packaging materials in the new year.More and more customers are interested in supporting ‘green’ companies, so you can even use this as a selling point.
This guest post is courtesy of Michael Zhou. He is Senior VP of Business Intelligence Development. He is also contributor on Esprittoday. “I have assisted the Fortune 1000 company with expertise in the web as a whole, including ground-zero marketing efforts that benefit both consumer and vendor. I’m a thinker, communicator, marketer, competitor, people person, and all-around busy bee. I’m a relentless networker with several years of real world experience and two college degrees under my belt.
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