Ecommerce Growth Roundup: How To Grow Your Ecommerce Business
The exciting thing about the ecommerce industry is that it keeps evolving. Ecommerce growth strategies that were working yesterday might not work today. Hence, being a stakeholder in the ecommerce industry, you need to keep evolving by staying updated with the latest marketing trends, ecommerce growth strategies, and other crucial tactics.
This month, we have invited some expert ecommerce professionals for our Experts Round-Up. They have discussed a wide range of topics and shared their wisdom with our audience. Undoubtedly, this wisdom right from the horse’s mouth will help you grow your mind ecommerce business.
Over to the experts…
Ecommerce Expert #1: Brett Fallarino (aka Lord Ecom)
What strategies would you suggest to E-Commerce businesses for growth hacking in 2021?
Having a great strategy to generate content is going to set you ahead of your competition in 2021. Content generation is the most important factor for a successful business right now. People’s desire to consume content increases as the average attention span gets shorter. With new social platforms like TikTok arising, it quickly impacts our younger generations’ attention span. A great way to grow hack your E-commerce business is to outsource content generation to influencers specifically on TikTok and Instagram.
What are the lesser-known ecommerce hacks that one must know?
What it means to build a brand. It is your brand stands for, and the value you’re providing to this world. These are the 3 things that a lot of business owners fail to grasp. I highly recommend that you learn and understand these 3 business concepts before going any further in your current venture.
What is your take on “Sell by Chat”?
Selling in the DM’s, or by email, chat can be very effective if done correctly. You have to be an effective copy-writer to get effective results with a “Sell by Chat” method. To be an effective copywriter, you have to connect with the customer on an emotional level. You can’t just spam your way into a customer’s wallet, it will never work. You’ll be able to take your business to a new level if you can effectively teach your Customer Service employees, or VA’s to Sell by Chat while dealing with your customers.
One marketing platform that E-Commerce businesses should not skip in 2021.
DO NOT SKIP TIKTOK! TikTok is and will continue to be the most effective platform in 2021. Who knows what’s to come in the future, but for right now I can see TikTok being the number 1 reach platform of its day.
One pro-tip that helped you/your audience skyrocket your E-Commerce business.
The best tip that I can provide was mentioned before. Please provide value to the world. Without value being provided, your brand is worthless. This alone will connect you with so many individuals with the same type of goals and lifestyles that your brand lives. This is how to truly build something great.
Ecommerce Expert #2: Chloë Thomas
What strategies would you suggest to E-Commerce businesses for growth hacking in 2021?
Growth hacking is all about finding fast routes to big growth. I find that in a lot of eCommerce businesses the fastest growth comes from trying a new strategy in an existing channel or optimising something you’ve already got in place.
Two examples for you.
1. Google Ads – a new strategy that’s well worth testing is Discovery Ads.
2. Email marketing – when was the last time you analysed the performance of the welcome campaign you send to new sign-ups? If it wasn’t in the last 3 months you’ve got some serious opportunity right there. Same with your post-purchase automation.
What are the lesser-known E-Commerce hacks that one must know?
Look after your existing customers!! Do right by them and they’ll be a brilliant source of both new and repeat business. A huge part of that is having the right packaging, and couriers in place to make the receiving and opening of your parcels exciting. PLUS including something nice and interesting in those packages – a personal note, offer off next purchase, or even a free gift.
What is your take on “Sell by Chat”?
Any real-time comms tool your customers use to communicate with you should be thought of as a SALES channel, not a customer service channel. Just like a member of staff in a retail store is a sales person, not a customer service person. So make sure you’ve got the right people manning it, and your operating it at the times your customers are most likely to buy.
One marketing platform that E-Commerce businesses should not skip in 2021.
Facebook Ads.
One pro-tip that helped you/your audience skyrocket your E-Commerce business.
Allocate a test budget to use in testing new marketing strategies and channels. That budget should include:
– Money
– Time to learn
– Time to implement
Ecommerce Expert #3: Rishabh Dev
What strategies would you suggest to E-Commerce businesses for growth hacking in 2021?
The real opportunities for ecommerce growth are found in channels that are underused by other ecommerce marketers. This also helps with developing a more omnichannel strategy for ecommerce marketing and reduces dependency on a single channel.
Some of the examples of such channels to run growth hacking experiments on including Top-of-Funnel campaigns on offbeat ad platforms like Pinterest Ads and Snapchat Ads and exploring Influencer Whitelisting Campaigns and TikTok Influencers.
In the store, you should focus on growth hacks across all stages of the conversion funnel: this includes collection pages, product pages, cart, and checkout pages.
Show price deals on the product pages, create urgency using timers on cart pages, show trust badges on checkout pages, and upsell on the thank you page!
What are the best lesser-known E-Commerce hacks that one must know?
Top 3 hacks that we use for many clients but I haven’t seen many other marketers use include: Offering Live Flash Sales, Thank You Page Upselling, Email Campaigns with Deep-Personalisation, and Personalised Home Pages.
What is your take on “Sell by Chat”?
One marketing platform that E-Commerce businesses should not skip in 2021.
One marketing platform that E-Commerce businesses should not skip in 2021.
Email.
While all digital channels are great to try, email is always going to be a channel that’s golden. This is because you own the contact information of your potential customers and you can access them directly.
One pro-tip that helped you/your audience skyrocket your E-Commerce business.
Always be experimenting. If you get satisfied with your current marketing stack, you’re missing out on a potential unicorn growth hack. Always remember that you’re just one experiment away from developing another successful channel that can hugely improve your bottom line.
Ecommerce Expert #4: Tanner Larson
What strategies would you suggest to E-Commerce businesses for growth hacking in 2021?
– There is one strategy I would recommend above everything else for ecommerce growth hacking in 2021, and it revolves around DATA.
– Collect complete and accurate Google Analytics data for your business, and get good at reading it, interpreting it, and acting on it.
– Learn how to make data-based decisions for your business instead of a “HiPPO” (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) or gut-feeling decision. Data is KING and it’s everything when it comes to growing a business.
– You can’t grow an e-commerce business (or any business for that matter) without knowing your numbers and taking appropriate action.
– Your numbers tell you your business’s story … and you can’t be the creator of your story if you don’t know the story you’re in.
What are the lesser-known E-Commerce hacks that one must know?
There are too many to mention here, however, they all stem from the one hack that almost nobody is paying attention to nowadays—Revenue Optimization™ of your business.
Optimize your website first, so you can get the most out of the traffic that’s already landing there … and then worry about bringing more traffic to your store.
Because here’s the truth: Traffic is NOT your problem. Your unoptimized store is the problem.
Think about this: The global e-commerce conversion rate is around 2%. That means that 98 out of every 100 people that land in your store don’t buy.
Why would you try to bring more people to your store, thinking it will solve all your low-conversion problems when you can’t even convert more than 2 out of every 100 people that do come to your store?
You need to optimize your store first, so you can convert at least 4-5 of every 100 people. Then (and only then) worry about driving more traffic to your store.
Optimize before you maximize. That’s the one hack that everybody must know and practice if they want their business to survive (and thrive) … especially in today’s highly competitive marketplace.
What is your take on “Sell by Chat”?
Despite all the reasons for more and more people coming to prefer shopping online over their local brick-and-mortar stores (because of more product information, more selection, convenience, etc.), online stores often fail spectacularly at solving issues brick-and-mortars handle with ease—mainly product selection guidance and the human touch.
While much of the first can be handled with significant investment in customer-centric user experience design, the second is extremely challenging for all but the most well-oiled, machine-learning-powered behemoths.
A quick way to address these issues, especially for smaller-scale businesses, is by using live chat, whether directly on the store’s website, or via social media or other instant messaging platforms. Those reaching out to your business are already primed to make a purchase … they often just have some unaddressed concern or difficulty in the process.
Empower your chat operators (or customer service specialists) with everything they need to get these users over the line. This means knowledge of the products and which user preferences are best satisfied by which, the freedom to go off-script (within an established framework), and the core focus of truly serving the customer and not the business.
One marketing platform that E-Commerce businesses should not skip in 2021.
This may come as a surprise to some, but during such turbulent times in marketing, there is one form of marketing that has stood the test of time.
That thing? Email marketing.
And for e-commerce, Build Grow Scale strictly uses Klaviyo as our platform of choice.
Klaviyo is extremely low cost yet offers one of the highest ROI opportunities out there. With over 3.9 billion daily email users (this number is expected to hit 4.3 billion by 2023), opening emails is a part of our everyday lives, which is why it has remained so effective!
We consider email marketing to be the lifeblood of our businesses. It is common for us to see a minimum of 30% of total revenue coming from Klaviyo alone.
With the use of highly targeted, personalized broadcast emails and automated flows, you’re able to focus your efforts on people who really want to engage with your content as opposed to cold leads.
The best part? It is incredibly simple to get started and will cost you pennies. Email marketing remains at the forefront of digital marketing strategies (as it has for the last 40 years), and with rising ad costs on other platforms, we marketers need to do more with less. And email marketing allows us to do that in an extremely personalized way.
One pro-tip that helped you/your audience skyrocket your E-Commerce business.
Here’s a pro-tip that has proven effective and successful for our clients and us time and time again (and it will for you too): Get to know your audience.
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and tackle every single part of your e-commerce business in a very customer-centric way. Forget what “you think” may work and base your decisions and changes on data generated by your store’s actual visitors.
Gather feedback whenever you have the chance and be humble enough to keep learning and re-learning.
This is key to skyrocketing your e-commerce business.
Ecommerce Expert #5: Rihab Seb
What strategies would you suggest to E-Commerce businesses for growth hacking in 2021?
I don’t actually believe in “growth hacking”. Growth can’t be hacked, it is simply built.
My top strategies to succeed in eCommerce are the following:
– Work on creating a brand “not on creating another eCommerce store”. This means to value your customers and try to create a community out of them.
– Over-deliver! Never ever let your customers receive less than what they expected. Always give them more!
– Genuinely care about your customers’ best interest. Focus on retaining them for years not only on making the first purchase.
– Diversify your marketing channels. The whole marketing world is changing because of the new privacy updates such as the iso14 update. Paid ads are currently way more expensive than before, that is why building your entire customers’ acquisition funnel on paid ads is no longer an acceptable or even affordable solution.
– Leverage email marketing, and SMS marketing to increase the long life value of your customers
– Use social media to become an authority in your niche. Pick your audience’s favorite social media platform and start sharing valuable content.
What are the lesser-known E-Commerce hacks that one must know?
Do your best to collect user-generated content such as written and video reviews. And use them in your marketing strategies.
What is your take on “Sell by Chat”?
Not a bad strategy but I don’t favorite it. It makes the brand less authoritative.
One marketing platform that E-Commerce businesses should not skip in 2021.
Instagram.
One pro-tip that helped you/your audience skyrocket your E-Commerce business.
Always put your customers first!
Ecommerce Expert #6: Harry Coleman (aka Beast of Ecom)
What strategies would you suggest to E-Commerce businesses for growth hacking in 2021?
Make sure you are interacting with all comments on your adverts, even if they are just tagging a friend. Reply to them all and thank them for commenting and ask them a question or put your link to your product page. Everyone who comments is a potential buyer, plus FB loves conversations on their platform so it can help with improving the engagement on your ads.
What are the lesser-known E-Commerce hacks that one must know?
It’s not so much of a hack, but SMS marketing is still very much under utilized by a lot of ecommerce stores. We use it for abandoned carts and get extremely high ROI on our flows.
One marketing platform that E-Commerce businesses should not skip in 2021.
TikTok is very cheap to advertise on right now and it converts. The biggest misconception is that it is only for kids. While it’s majority is a younger demographic, the platform is ‘aging up’ and we have had success selling to 35+ on the platform.
One pro-tip that helped you/your audience skyrocket your E-Commerce business.
Testing out more creatives and angles. Right now, those who test the most creatives on paid platforms like FB and TikTok win. A new angle paired with an existing product can unlock scales you never thought was imaginable.
Ecommerce Expert #7: Claus Lauter
What strategies would you suggest to E-Commerce businesses for growth hacking in 2021?
Conversion & Revenue Optimization and focus on Owned marketing.
What are the lesser-known E-Commerce hacks that one must know?
Multi-level abandonment cart strategy and go old school with direct mail and press releases.
What is your take on “Sell by Chat”?
I am a big fan if done right. Done wrong it will hurt your brand reputation.
One marketing platform that E-Commerce businesses should not skip in 2021.
SMS marketing.
One pro-tip that helped you/your audience skyrocket your E-Commerce business.
Perfect your unique selling proposition & value proposition
Summing it up:
So that was it. We hope you have gained some amazing insights about ecommerce growth and new strategies to help your business skyrocket in terms of brand awareness, revenues, and profits. We will keep sharing such experts’ round tables to help and enlighten you. Keep checking this space for more updates.
