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1. Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics Software
2. Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics For Dummies
3. Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics Tutorial
4. Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics Platforms

There’s no shortage of advice on growing eCommerce sales, but most of the advice is quite generic and, in many cases, outdated.

In this post, I want to avoid the obvious and share some of the more advanced strategies that forward-thinking eCommerce businesses are using to gain a competitive advantage. While I don’t expect all of them to be relevant to everyone, I hope you’ll get at least a few good ideas to take away and experiment with.

So, let’s start off with one of the biggest emerging trends this year; mCommerce.

1. Go from mobile ready to mCommerce optimised

Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics Software

According to IBM, in the week around last Thanksgiving, 26% of all online sales referred by affiliates were made from mobile devices. Needless to say. we’re past the point of mobile commerce being an upcoming trend – it’s here to stay.

While having a responsive website is a good start, optimising for mobile commerce requires a more proactive approach to improving your website’s mobile user experience.

From using simple mobile payment processing to testing the design of your mobile checkout, mCommerce optimisation is an ongoing process that will surely pay off as mobile adoption rates continue to rise.

2. Setup post-purchase automation to upsell, collect feedback, and keep customers coming back

If you run an eCommerce website and haven’t adopted marketing automation, this might be one of the most valuable points you read in this post.

Marketing automation tools like ActiveCampaign allow you to set up ‘sequences’ that can nurture, educate, and upsell to customers based on their actions and behaviour.

Let’s say, for example, you run an eCommerce website aimed at brides. If a customer bought some wedding invitations from your site, they could automatically be placed into a ‘pre-wedding’ sequence of emails that walk them through the wedding planning process, recommending products like bridal shower gifts and thank you cards along the way.

In fact, one wedding eCommerce site called Paper Style actually did this, raising their revenue by 330%.

The scope of what you can achieve with post-purchase automation is only limited by your imagination. At Venture Harbour, we use ActiveCampaign to drip feed coupons and trust-building content to our eCommerce leads, which significantly increased our conversion rates.

From sending a personalised email out to customers twelve months after their purchase, to cross-selling related products, this is by far one of the most powerful tactics you can adopt to grow your eCommerce business.

3. Use Facebook Exchange retargeting to reduce lost sales

Thanks to the level of segmentation, Facebook Advertising can be enormously effective for acquiring new customers and re-activating old ones.

For eCommerce sites specifically, Facebook Exchange is particularly effective in reducing shopping cart abandonment.

Facebook Exchange works by dropping a cookie on a user’s computer when they visit certain pages on your site. If a user adds a product to the shopping cart but doesn’t purchase, a cookie can be dropped on their computer, signalling Facebook to display an advert on their timeline encouraging them to complete their order.

In combination with standard Facebook Ads, this technique is extraordinarily powerful. In a study of $1.2M in eCommerce sales, Nanigans found that customers who entered FB Exchange remarketing pools after first viewing a standard Facebook ad purchased 89% more in sales revenue than those who entered FB Exchange remarketing pools from other channels, such as organically or through search.

4. Automate birthday, anniversary, and seasonal cash discounts

One of the simplest ways to boost customer loyalty and lifetime value in a personalised and automated way is to set up anniversary, birthday, and seasonal discount coupons.

Using a marketing automation tool you can set up sequences that send each customer a personalised message on their birthday, and at specific intervals after purchasing from your site.

In a study of 10,000 birthday and anniversary emails, Experian found that personalised birthday emails had almost five-times the transaction rate of standard bulk birthday mailings.

Ideally, these should be dollar-off coupons e.g. $10 off your next order.

In the same study as above, Experian found that when compared to other popular discounts, such as a %-off or free shipping coupon, dollar-off discounts generated the highest redemption rates and revenue per mailing.

5. Use long-form content marketing to boost SEO traffic, social engagement, and drive sales

As outlined in yesterday’s post, one of the tactics that we’ve experimented with extensively at Venture Harbour s long-form content marketing.

After testing a variety of formats, and content lengths, we found that producing highly visual 3,000-8,000 word guides was one of the most consistently high performing content mediums for increasing social engagement, search traffic, email subscribers, and revenue.

When created around specific product categories, eCommerce content marketing provides a great opportunity to acquire targeted traffic for the one-off investment in producing the content.

I’d argue that this is among one of the biggest opportunities for thousands of eCommerce businesses.

6. Plug the biggest gaps in your conversion funnel

Do you know where potential customers are dropping out on your website?

If you use Google Analytics conversion tracking or a tool like KISSmetrics, you should be able to see a visual representation of where the leaks in your website’s conversion funnel are.

With this information to hand, you can begin to research what the cause of these leaks. By surveying customers, commissioning user tests, and even watching a customer use your site, you should start to see ideas for improving the areas of your site that will translate into increases in conversions.

Once you have a set of ideas to test, you can use a tool like VWO or Optimizely to run a split test experiment. By repeating this process, you can systematically improve the user experience and increase the value of all other marketing activity by reducing the barriers for customers to give you money.

7. Expand into new territories

An often overlooked strategy for growing an online business is to translate the site and begin targeting customers in multiple countries.

While there are dedicated translation plugins and add-ons for most major eCommerce shopping platforms, it’s often best to hire specialised translation services in the countries you wish to expand into.

If you do decide to target new markets, be sure to also take into account the implications on SEO (e.g. geo-targeting URLs and using the Hreflang tag), as well as ensuring that your payment processor accepts payments from the country’s main currencies.

8. Focus 80% of effort on your best products

According to Pareto’s Law, it’s likely that 80% of your profits are derived from 20% of products.

By focusing on the small number of products that disproportionately contribute towards your website’s success, you can achieve exponential growth.

Why? Because It’s typically easier to grow a product generating £100,000 / month to £200,000 / month than it is to get a £5,000 / month product to £10,000 / month. You’re better off focusing on the £100,000 improvement than the £5,000 improvement.

As a side note, I highly recommend reading The One Thing by Gary Keller, and Essentialism by Greg McKeown. Both books highlight the importance of focusing on the single most important thing that contributes to your growth at any one time.

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9. Offer the best affiliate program in your industry

Pareto’s Law applies to more than just what products you should focus on. It also applies to which products affiliates in your industry will promote.

In the majority of cases, 80% of affiliates in a given niche will promote the best / highest paying products and affiliate programs in that niche.

First of all, if you don’t have an affiliate program setup, it’s probably worth investigating. Not only do affiliates do a lot of your marketing for you, a good affiliate program acts like a moat around a castle. If all the affiliates in a niche are promoting your business, it makes it harder for competitors to gain market share from your business.

If you do have an affiliate program, the next question is – would you rush to promote it if you were an affiliate?

While you might not be in a position to compete with the 6-8% payouts offered by sites like Amazon, there might be other ways to sweeten the deal for your affiliates. The first opportunity is to have a better conversion rate than your competitors.

Most affiliates would rather promote a program that offered a 3% commission and had a 5% conversion rate, than a product offering a 5% commission and a 2% conversion rate. In fact, they’d be silly not to as the first program would generate them 33% more income.

Another technique is to run affiliate contests. Many companies give away iPhones, iPads, free holidays, and other gifts to their affiliates to keep them loyal.

10. Send an urgent specific discount to your customers

While the results of this campaign are unknown, I was impressed when I came across this email campaign sent out by Petflow.

By providing customers with a specific discount of $4.25 that was valid for only 24 hours, they gave existing customers a compelling reason to take action quickly. For a site like Petflow, where pet owners will always likely need something, I imagine this offer was incredibly successful.

Could you test a similar tactic for your website?

11. Use multichannel marketing to impress customers and stand out from the crowd

It’s said that conventional thinking leads to conventional results. If you want to stand out from the crowd, consider how you can appear where no one else does.

How could you use SMS messages or postcards to engage your customers, solve their problems, and increase their loyalty to your brand?

While there are numerous companies that will integrate with your CRM system to enable you to send personalised SMS and personalised messages to your customers, some automation tools like Ontraport are beginning to offer this as standard.

12. Turn your likes into leads with social contests

Running a contest on social media sites is one of the most rapid, affordable and scalable tactics I’ve ever come across for capturing email addresses and potential leads.

In a campaign that I ran for a client last year, I managed to collect 681 email addresses of potential leads, 75 of which signed up for their service for a total cost of $37.

If you have a large following on Facebook or Twitter, it might be worth using a social contest tool to turn some of your likes into paying customers.

13. Upgrade your eCommerce software

Sometimes you need to take one step back to take two steps forward.

If your eCommerce software is outdated or prevents you from taking advantage of powerful techniques like automation and multichannel marketing, it might be time to reconsider your backend software.

Last year, I made the decision to migrate an eCommerce site that I run in the music industry from our clunky bespoke software to one of the mainstream eCommerce software providers.

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After a 2-month dip in sales, the site reached double the revenue it was previously turning over, simply due to the fact that it was easier for us to get more value out of our CRM, implement automation sequences, and make rapid split testing changes.

In Summary

At any point, your business is either stagnating or growing. To ensure that you’re is always growing, it’s important to understand what your customers want that you’re not offering them, and to experiment with technology that can improve the overall experience and process in which you do things.

I hope that this post has given you at least a few ideas to think about. If you have any other tactics worth sharing that you’ve found particularly useful, please share them in the comments below.

Starting a running an eCommerce business can be hard work and sometimes it can be difficult to see what step you should take next in order to grow your business. There are many pros and cons to having an online business, as the internet can be both a blessing and a curse. The number of e-commerce businesses continues to grow and that means if you want to stand out from the crowd and be successful, you need to ensure you’re on the top of your game. There are certain key skills that are crucial to focus on if you’re seeking to grow your eCommerce business. These are skills you should not only try and hone and perfect yourself, but also skills that you should look for in potential employees. Here are five skills that will help you your ecommerce business find success.

1. Content Writing and Creation

One of the keys to running a successful business is creating high quality content that is going to drive traffic to your site, build trust amongst your potential customers and attract new leads. Creating valuable content is a way of communicating with your audience and helps to build credibility. Create content that has relevance to your customers and answers the questions that they might have.

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If readers get something out of your content, if they are informed or entertained by it, they are more likely to buy your products. For this reason, content writing acts as an effective sales pitch because rather than directly selling to a potential customer, you are teaching them about an aspect of their life that your product can help with.

It helps to change the user experience of your site and to present your products in a more interesting and personal way. In order to grow your eCommerce business, make sure that are putting time and resources into content creation, with a publishing schedule and regular content being produced. Be sure to proofread and edit anything and everything you post because a few spelling mistakes can have a big impact on the credibility of your site.

2. Data Analytics

If you’re running an eCommerce site, in order for it grow, you need to have an understanding of analytics and be able to read data and recognise what it means. Being able to reach customers in a saturated market relies on optimising your site, improving your operations and managing the needs of customers and to be able to do all this better, you need data analytics. Those with successful sites are the ones who examine the

facts in front of them and use these to make good business decisions.

The beauty of an online business is that every day there is information to look at that tells you about how your business is doing. By seeing what content drives traffic, what products are popular, what customers engage with and what pages don’t get any traffic, you can enhance the running of your business.

However, one problem eCommerce entrepreneurs may encounter is having too much data to sift through. Big data refers to the combination of both traditional and digital data gathered from inside and outside of your business and determining what data to use or how to harness the raw power of big data can be difficult. Used effectively, big data provides deep and meaningful insights into the world of online business and big data analytics can help in timing your content distribution and figuring out patterns that result in higher profits.

If you are not particularly tech-savvy it is a good idea to look into hiring somebody who does have these skills. Hiring somebody with experience in data analytics means that they can concisely give you the information you need to have to make business decisions. It is useful, however, to look into learning more about analytics if you’re invested in running your business in the long-term. A short course in analytics, big data and data science could be the starting point you need to gain the knowledge required for making sense of what is happening with your site.

3. Social Media Prowess

Living in the digital age, social media is a hugely significant part of our day-to-day lives. We use it for both personal and professional reasons and many of us spend hours a day trawling through Facebook or Instagram, using it a source of news and events and a way to socialise and check-in with friends. Regardless of what your eCommerce business sells, social media can be used to help your business grow and to drive traffic in unique ways.

You can use social media to keep your customers up-to-date, to create a sense of community, to share your content and to promote your product. Being active on your social media pages allows you to prove quality customer service and be on-top of any complaints or issues customers may be having with your products. This is the type of behaviour that builds brand loyalty amongst customers and turns one-time customers into lifetime devotees to your business. It also demonstrates to potential customers that you are invested in the happiness of those who buy your products and this builds confidence because it shows that your business is transparent.

You can harness social media to do some ‘social listening’ and see what people are saying about your business in different spaces and use this information to improve your products or other aspects of the running of the business. As well as this, depending on the social media platform you’re using, you can do brand storytelling. For example, using a medium like Instagram you can create visual content that tells a story about your brand.

If you are new to social media, doing a short course on how navigate different social media platforms and leverage its power can be useful. You can courses such as these online over the course of a couple of months at a pace that suits you.

4. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

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SEO is an important part of any eCommerce business and boosting the SEO of an online business is one way to find success. For many eCommerce sites, organic search is the main source of traffic so this means if you aren’t actively doing keyword research and using this to create optimised content and improve your site, then you’re likely to fall behind in terms of Google rankings and how successful your business is. The aim of keyword research and SEO is to help search engines locate your site and to do this they need to understand your content. If search engines can find you, your customers can find you. As they say, you have to be in it to win it and It’s a cost-effective way of improving your traffic and it has l

ong-lasting results.

Often businesses, depending on their size, will outsource SEO work to a company that specialises in this field. As the role of SEO becomes more important in the digital age, this is definitely worth considering as an expert with the relevant skills will be able to help your eCommerce business in way that someone with those expertise wouldn’t be able to. It is a good idea to do plenty of research before hiring an SEO company to do work for you. First consider what you’re looking to achieve with their help and how you will measure success, and second, investigate 3 or 4 companies and their quotes before making a decision. Look at the prior work they’ve done and any testimonials or reviews the company might have. You should make your decision on a combination of referrals, price structure and similar communication styles.

5. Graphic Design

As an eCommerce business, your website and logo are crucial to the success of your brand. For this reason, graphic design skills and an understanding of designs that work an those that don’t will help to grow your business. Every piece of content you publish, whether it be a blog post, a leaflet, an email or an infographic, says something and sends a message about your brand. An unprofessional or sloppy design is going to impact the credibility of your brand and undermine your work. In contrast, good, clean, consistent design helps to build your brand profile and highlight the high-quality of the company. You should especially consider the look of your logo because when people see your logo they will make certain associations about your business and the brand. A cheap-looking logo is not going to do wonders for the how professional people think your company is. All aspects of graphic design should be considered and thought-through when it comes to growing your eCommerce business.

As the owner of an eCommerce business, you may not have graphic design skills yourself. If this is the case, like with SEO, you may outsource the work to a freelance designer or hire an in-house graphic designer. When looking to hire a graphic designer, keep in mind what your design needs are and what your budget is. Make sure to make the work sound appealing to the graphic designer (it’s a two-way street) and to properly look into their past work. You want to a designer whose aesthetic suits your brand.