7 Business Strategies for Your E-commerce Business

Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Ecommerce Financial Model (Excel workbook). Model Options: This template is a detailed and user-friendly financial model that considers an e-commerce business's specifics. By Taking into account key assumptions such as traffic from different sources, conversion rates, the average purchase value for different product categories, and the [read more]

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Sales are the lifeblood of any profitable e-commerce business. In this article, we will cover seven business growth strategies that will take your e-commerce business to the next level. Each of these on their own can have a dramatic impact on your business, but went implemented together they can take your business from surviving to thriving.

1. Get Repeat Business from Existing Customers

One of the most overlooked sales channels in any e-commerce business is existing customers. A lot of new e-commerce businesses poor all their time, money, and effort into expensive marketing campaigns to try and get more sales.

Though increasing sales should be the goal of every e-commerce business, where sales come from can be looked at in two different ways. A lot of people try and sell a product to a customer once, and then move on to try to find a new customer. But if you adopt a mindset of acquiring a customer, with less focus on making a sale, you can be a lot more profitable in the long term.

A useful analogy is to consider yourself a farmer, as opposed to a hunter. A hunter is searching for prey and trying to kill it, whereas a farmer has got a long to approach, where they are preparing the fields, sowing the seeds, and then doing the same thing again in the next season.

When your business is focused on serving people who have already bought from your business, you find that your cost of sales decreases dramatically. Somebody has already bought from you, has already proven themselves to be a customer that is happy to spend money, someone that is interested in your niche, and someone who trusts your brand enough to give you money. It will be a lot easier to sell another product to an existing customer than it will be to sell to a new customer who has never heard of you.

2. Focus on the Funnel

Another way to rapidly grow your e-commerce business is to conceptualize a sales funnel, rather than just trying to sell a single product.

The concept of a sales funnel describes a process whereby you have an ongoing conversation with your potential customer as they go through the purchase process. It’s not simply confirming the purchase of a simple product, and then processing the payment. It’s a matter of asking questions and seeing if you could further serve the customer with other related products or services.

For example, if I’m buying a pair of shoes online, after I’ve confirmed my purchase of the shoes, I might get an offer to purchase some shoe cleaning products that could be used to maximize the lifespan of my shoes.  Then based on my choice there, I might get offered a lower price product such as an alternative pair of shoelaces that are a different color, so I can customize my shoes if I want to.

Depending on the type of products you sell, the sales funnel with its upsells, cross-sells, and down sells will look very different. Regardless, it’s very important to take a funnel approach to e-commerce sales.

E-commerce stores that work with sales funnels tend to have a higher average order value, which means they can spend more money on customer acquisition, which means more orders, increased market share, and increasing their existing customer base which we have already discussed are the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to increasing sales.

3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A strategic search engine optimization campaign can serve an e-commerce business for years after the campaign has finished.

If you find a skilled and experienced ecommerce SEO agency to work with that understands e-commerce, you can give your business a buffer, that most businesses who rely on paid advertising, do not have.

Paid advertising should always be part of your marketing mix, but executing an SEO campaign, that has long-lasting benefits for years to come can help your company decrease marketing spending at times if you need to come up without sacrificing on sales.

A good search engine optimization campaign is going to consist of on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to your website itself, the content on your website, and how that content is structured and optimized. Whereas off-page SEO refers to activities that take place away from your website that still build the trust and reputation of your website on the internet. A very common aspect of off-page SEO, is what is known as link building, which is where other websites link to your website. The more links you get to your website, the more Google and other search engines respect it, and they then promote it higher in the search results.

4. Pay per Click

As the name suggests, a pay-per-click advertising strategy is where you work with an advertising platform, often Google or Facebook, and you tell them that you want to attract visitors to your online store, that are searching for certain things, or that have certain attributes.

When Google or Facebook then send this online traffic to you, they charge you a fee per click, hence the name pay-per-click.

Pay per click Is a great way to get your first customers, and increase customer numbers,  and works very well in conjunction with an SEO campaign.

This can be a very effective, but very expensive way to acquire new customers, and boost sales. But you can use tools like Synchronize, to help you track the impact of ad spend on sales, and make decisions accordingly.

5. Email Marketing

As email marketing technology has improved, you can generate a lot more revenue using email.

It’s the ultimate tool that we can use to better communicate, connect, and monetize your existing and potential customers.

6. Recurring Subscriptions

More businesses are becoming aware of the power of recurring revenue. Recurring revenue, also known as the subscription model, refers to the business strategy where you offer a product or service that the customer buys on repeat, often monthly, automatically.

Utilities and mobile phone companies have been making significant money on this type of business model for years because you only need to acquire the customer once, and then you keep charging them over and over again until they decide to leave you.

It’s easy to conceptualize how this might work for certain service businesses, but it may seem harder to envisage what a recurring business would look like for a physical product. But there are not many products, where a bit of creative thinking could not lead you to a way to convert it into an ongoing recurring subscription.

7. Use Social Proof

Social proof matters when you’re trying to increase your conversion rate. There are multiple different versions of social proof you can use. Common examples include testimonials on product pages, review sections on product pages, and sales widgets that are embedded on the website, which let the website visitors know that there was a recent sale.

Potential customers trust other customers more than you and your marketing copy when deciding whether to purchase your product. So the more social proof you can include, the better.

The seven business strategies discussed in this article can make millions of extra dollars in revenue for a medium-sized e-commerce business. Start with one strategy, get it set up and fine-tuned, and then move on to the next, and by the time you’ve got to the bottom of the list, you will have a completely different business.

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