13 Clever Ways To Grow Your Ecommerce Business

Today, we’re going to help you do just that. We’ve compiled 13 ecommerce growth tips that can help anyone expand their business, no matter the industry or experience level. 

1. Determine KPIs Keep Track of Them and Improve Processes 

You can’t really start developing an ecommerce growth strategy without knowing how to know what needs improvement. You need to learn how to calculate your growth rate with KPIs. 

What made your store successful in the first place? Is there anything that needs improvement?  What revenue-boosting strategies work best? 

Understanding what drives your business will help you grow your business. That’s why you need to track your Key Performance Indicators.

KPIs every ecommerce business should track fall into four distinctive categories: 

1. Monetary Indicators: Tracking profit and revenue and increasing return on investment 
2. Customer Indicators: Regulating the number of former, current, and future customers
3. Purchase Indicators: Analyzing people that have attempted or made a purchase 
4. Conversion Indicators: Assessing the number of people that have converted 

Benefits of Tracking Ecommerce KPIs

Tracking KPIs requires you to acquire new tools, learn how to use them, and train your employees. Is tracking KPIs really worth your investment? Here are a few reasons why it is:

• Provides you with a complete overview of your goals and progress
• Gives you the ability to make more informed decisions based on data
• Allows for a fact-based employee management approach and better evaluation
• Shows who is and who isn’t doing their job allows you to get rid of bad fruits 
• Increases brand exposure, lowers bounce rates, and improves CTR

Want to Know More About Tracking Ecommerce KPIs?

Keeping track of performance can help you bring your business to new heights. If you’re interested in knowing more about KPIs, how they can help you, and which ones to track, read our dedicated ecommerce KPI guide. 

2. Create a Long-term SEO Plan to Rule Google Search Results

Staying up to date means appealing to new generations. Can you use the same old advertising techniques to appeal to them?

New data indicates that almost 40% of ecommerce traffic worldwide comes from search engines like Google. One of the reasons for this is the fact that users, especially the young ones, seem to actively ignore paid ads. 

That’s why your store desperately needs SEO, and will always need it. 

Not only will SEO allow you to rank ahead of your main competitors, but it will also do wonders for your business as a whole. It will bring in more people, help you sell more products, and make you a leader in your industry. 

Benefits of Ecommerce SEO 

Does SEO really work as good as people make it out? Can even a small business benefit from it? Well, let’s take a look at some of its biggest benefits:

• Allows you to stay competitive despite the increasing number of new stores
• Lets you compete with large corporations despite a modest marketing budget
• Helps you bring a steady stream of shoppers to fill the marketing funnel
• Significantly lowers your PPC costs while allowing you to stay competitive
• Creates lasting value, allowing you to rank long after your campaign ends 

Want to Know More About Ecommerce SEO?

You’re curious about ecommerce SEO? You want to know why your SERP position is more important than you think and what you need to do to improve it? Click here and find out how to start dominating Google in 8 steps. 

3. Master Social Media to Get More Traffic, Sales, and Exposure

To understand your customers, you need to put yourself in their shoes. Luckily, all of us are consumers, so it’s not that hard to.

Ask yourself, when you’re shopping online, who do you reach out to for help? Ask your family for advice? Perhaps you ask your friends for recommendations? Well, 87% of shoppers go to their Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram account, looking for purchasing help. 

Not only can social media persuade your target demo that you’re the right store for them but it can also expose your business to customers you didn’t even plan on targeting. In addition to retail sales growth, it will help you expand to markets you haven’t even thought about.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Of course, having a page/profile on all of the more popular social media platforms is a must nowadays. But should you continuously invest in social media marketing? Consider this:

• Brings in more traffic to your website and increases online sales in the process
• Increases conversion rates by helping you create relationships with followers
• Creates awareness and lets you establish a recognizable brand 
• Builds trust with your target demographic and boosts brand loyalty
• Leads to better customer satisfaction rates through direct dialogue 

Want to Know More About Social Media Marketing for Ecommerce?

If you want to read further about how your store could benefit from social media marketing or know more about the best strategies, we recommend you read our article on the topic. There, you’ll find out everything you need for a winning social media strategy. 

4. Prioritize Customer Support to Keep the Regulars Loyal 

Without your customers and their loyalty, your business wouldn’t exist. As simple as that. That’s why you need to keep them satisfied. 

Is your customer service doing a good job of attending to your shoppers? Is everyone completely satisfied? More than 80% of businesses tend to think that they provide great customer service. The problem is, only around 8% of consumers seem to agree with this. 

Customer service affects every aspect of your business. You need to use it correctly if you want to become a go-to store for consumers and build trust with them that will last for years to come. 

Benefits of Ecommerce Customer Support 

Without a question, investing in customer support is a must. Here are some of the benefits you can expect when you start improving it:

• Gives you a direct communication channel with the consumers 
• Establishes a reputation as a caring brand that takes good care of shoppers
• Helps you stand out of the crowd by building a brand around customer friendliness
• Allows you to find out what your customers like, dislike, and want in their shopping carts
• Lowers cart abandonment rates significantly and helps with cross-selling efforts  

Want to Know More About Ecommerce Customer Support?

Your business heavily depends on customer experience rates staying high. If you’d like to know how to keep your shoppers feeling satisfied, how to prevent bad experiences, and stimulate good ones, read our customer support tips. 

5. Implement Live Chat Watch Satisfaction Rates Grow

Free shipping and quick returns play a large part in increasing customer satisfaction. 

But above all, consumers value their time. Around 7 out of 10 customers in North America say that the value of their time is the most important aspect of good customer service. 

Live chat gives you the best way to address all of your customers’ inquiries and respect their time. It doesn’t require the store visitor to break the shopping experience to get their answers. 

Plus, it allows your customer service agent to serve multiple customers simultaneously. 

Benefits of Live Chat for Ecommerce 

Unlike physical stores, online stores provide limited communication options to their visitors. A customer can’t just walk up to you and ask you a question. That’s why you need a live chat on your website. Here’s what can live chat do for you:

• Saves your customer service agents as well as your buyers precious time
• Providing shoppers with instantaneous solutions to their problems 
• Enables customer service agents to serve several people at the same time
• Allows your clients to ask questions without breaking the purchasing process
• Gives you relevant insights into customers’ behavior while they’re shopping 

Want to Know More About Live Chat for Ecommerce?

This CX-enhancing technology bridges the gap between real-world and online retail by enabling you to help your customers in real-time. Perhaps want to know what else can live chat help you with? Then read our piece on the benefits of live chat. 

6. Automate all of the Time-Consuming Tasks

As your business grows, time-demanding tasks increase. That means, as time goes by, your workers will have more and more small tasks to attend to. On their own, these tasks are harmless. However, when you sum them up, they take up a lot of time.

Before you know it, these tasks will pile up. In turn, your operation will become less and less efficient. If you don’t solve this problem, your business could start suffering.

Thankfully, tasks like customer segmentation, order tracking, and social media posts can all be automated. With the right tools by your side, you’ll ensure that your business stays profitable. 

New research indicates that automation helps increase online sales by almost 15%. 

Benefits of Ecommerce Automation

Small tasks can consume a lot of your time. What can you do with all of that free time? Here’s what ecommerce automation does for you:

• Helps you manage your inventory much easier and ship products faster
• Offers better customer experience with better response time, shipping, and returns
• Allows you to focus on more complicated aspects of your operation and improve ROI
• Improvers customer service with automated letters and email responses to inquiries
• Makes social media marketing a lot easier by scheduling posts on multiple platforms

Want to Know More About Ecommerce Automation?

With so many benefits, how can you pass on ecommerce automation, right? If you want to know more about the process you can automate and the tools you can use to do so, click here and read all about it in our write-up. 

7. Find Profitable Niches to Expand Your Business

In ecommerce, a niche is a specific segment of the retail market, which has a distinct target audience mainly interested in a particular product type. Niches can be narrow and wide. A wide niche would be beauty products and a narrow niche would be male, eco-friendly care products.  

Do you know what are the most profitable niches? These are the five biggest money-makers in ecommerce for the past 3 years:

1. Games, toys, and action-figures
2. Consumer electronics
3. Apparel
4. Personal care products
5. Home accessories
   
   

If you want to expand your business, it would be smart to find a particular niche to target. This would allow you to tap into a market not touched by major companies. By targeting a specific group of customers, you can more easily establish yourself as the go-to brand. 

Benefits of Finding a Profitable Ecommerce Niche

Trying to please everyone is a recipe for disaster. Finding a niche and sticking to it will help your business with: 

• Improving the bottom line by allowing you to sell products at high prices
• Attracting a group of people that is willing to pay more and stay loyal to a brand
• Helping you stand out among your competitors by having a more unique offering
• Letting you stay on top of current trends and staying in touch with young consumers
• Lowering your costs of advertising and helping attract new people more easily

Want to Know More About Profitable Ecommerce Niches?

With that being said, how can you know if a niche is good for you? What niches will your customers gravitate to? How can you even find them? You can read all about it, and more, in our article on ecommerce niches. 

8. Form Relationships With Influencers in Your Industry

This year, more than 3.6 billion people around the globe are using social media every day. The number definitely won’t go down any time soon. Among other things, people use social media to find new products and look for recommendations from people they trust. 

These people are the ones you need to partner up with. Regardless of what ecommerce industry you’re in or what niche you’re targeting, certain influencers can help you improve sales. 

Not even your geographical location makes a difference. There are influencers in North America, Latin America, and even in the Asia-Pacific region. Yes, there are, in fact, influencers in China. 

Working with an influencer can expose your brand to the global ecommerce market and boost your marketing efforts beyond your wildest dreams. If done correctly, partnering with an influencer can expand your social reach, ensure growth, and improve your bottom line. 

Benefits of Teaming Up With Influencers

Although “influencer marketing” is considered a recent buzzword, people have been using the influence of others to sell products for decades. Here’s what you can expect from it:

• Building trust between you and your customers in a short period of time
• Getting more people to know about your store, offering, and brand message
• Helping your content strategy reach new levels and attract more people than ever
• Providing content and value to your target demographic on a regular basis
• Reaching audiences you haven’t even thought about and sending them your way 

Want to Know More About Influencer Marketing for Ecommerce?

Do you know any influencers in your industry, personally? If not, do you know who they are? How about, how to contact them? Discover how to find the right influencers, get in touch with them, and partner up, by clicking this link right here. 

9. Pick the Right Digital Payments Platform for Your Store

Consumer behavior has changed drastically over the past decade. Just 10 years ago, a vast majority of consumers couldn’t imagine going shopping without any cash on them. Today, most people are more than glad to go cashless. 

Online payment platforms are slowly taking over. Here are preferred payment methods of online shoppers, on a worldwide scale:

• 36% of consumers use payment apps
• 23% of consumers use credit cards
• 12% of consumers use debit cards
  
  

Merchants that want to expand their businesses need to offer seamless payment options to their customers. Having the right platform will speed up the entire purchase process for both local and international customers alike, all while making them feel 100% safe. 

Benefits of Having the Right Payment Platform

What’s the preferred platform for your audience? That’s the question you need to answer. Here’s how using the right payment gateway helps your business:

• Allowing customers to open accounts on your website without entering too much data
• Accepting multiple payment methods through a simple, single integration
• Enabling cross-border payments, helping you reach a worldwide consumer base
• Speeding up transactions and increasing customer satisfaction rates in the process
• Increasing security levels and helping you gain the trust of first-time customers 

Want to Know More Ecommerce Payment Platforms?

Did you know that selecting the right payment platform can help you attract more customers? If you’re still not sure what payment option will work with your ecommerce platform best, read more about the topic in our article and get all the information you need. 

10. Use Ecommerce Advertising to Expand Your Reach

Even though in-store spending is still on top, around 96% of consumers have bought something online in the past 12 months. A large percentage of them have found what they were looking for through targeted ads while browsing the Internet randomly. 

PPC or Pay-Per-Click advertising is a form of online advertising in which the business owner pays a certain amount of money every time a consumer clicks on their advertisement. 

There are plenty of platforms you can use to host your ads. This includes search engines like Google and Bing, social networks like Facebook and Instagram, as well as popular websites like TechCrunch and Search Engine Journal.  

Benefits of Ecommerce Advertising

SEO might be a more cost-effective way to market your business, but let’s face, without paid advertising, you’ll miss out on hundreds of sales each month. Here are the benefits of paid ads: 

• Targeting highly specific groups of consumers
• Giving you an additional source of website visitors besides SEO
• Helping you track your ad spending exhaustively, to the last penny
• Saving your money until you start seeing new visitors and real results
• Allowing users to adjust their ad strategy and spending on the fly

Want to Know More?

In the ecommerce industry, advertising is simply a must. But there are many platforms out there. Are you really sure what platform you should advertise on? You should read our ecommerce advertising guide to find out everything you need to get started. 

11. Realize the Power of Email Marketing

Even though some people think that email marketing is on a decline, that’s not even close to the truth. Failing to invest in email marketing would be a huge mistake. The fact of the matter is, without email, your sales, user engagement, and customer numbers would drop. 

Last year, 78% of marketers saw an increase in email engagement. That means, even in 2020, email is still one of the most effective sales tools. 

With email, you’ll be able to directly reach your customers and serve them weekly content, without relying on social media algorithms. Not only that but with retargeting, you’ll be able to lower your cart abandonment rates significantly and increase conversions in no time.  

Benefits of Email Marketing for Ecommerce 

Paying more attention to your email campaigns comes with a lot of pros and a very few cons. Here some of the benefits you can expect to experience:

• Gathering actionable feedback from large groups of customers
• Sending your subscribers fresh content weekly through newsletters
• Mailing discount coupons and other rewards to loyal customers
• Retargeting customers that have left your site without making a purchase
• Lowering cart abandonment rates and reactivating inactive customers

Want to Know More?

Is email marketing something you want to get into? Do you know how to start building a list of leads? What do you want to accomplish with your strategy? Take a look at our beginner’s guide to email marketing and learn the basics. 

12. Do Everything to Boost Your Conversion Rates

Have a low conversion rate? In the world of ecommerce, that’s nothing out of the ordinary. Most US ecommerce websites have a conversion rate between 1% and 2%. 

Of course, the rate varies greatly between different sectors. Some ecommerce niches have rates as high as 4.9% while others have as low as 1.4%. 

All of this doesn’t mean that you should be satisfied with your rate. Your website can always use some conversion rate optimization. How can you boost your conversion rate? In many ways actually, some of which include:

• Avoiding lengthy sign-up forms
• Allowing shoppers to buy without registering
• Placing CTA buttons in all of the right places
• Sending cart abandonment emails 
• Making your paid ads stand out 
  
  

Don’t underestimate the power of CRO. By improving your conversion rate by a percent, you can double your revenue. 

Benefits of Boosting Conversion Rates

Dedicating a certain amount of time each week to conversion rate optimization can make your business strategy more effective. But there are lots of other CRO benefits:

• Learning more about your regular customers and their shopping habits
• Boosting store revenue by running ads based on your customer insights
• Lowering customer acquisition costs and improving the average order value
• Improving SERP rankings and exposing your store to a brand-new audience
• Making more informed business decisions and taking only calculated risks  

Want to Know More?

Are those the only benefits of boosting conversions? What can you do to make sure that more people convert? How can you track your conversions more closely? Find out all about it in our article on conversion rate optimization.

13. Invest in Product Photography to Improve Sales

As an ecommerce store owner, your job is to sell products. Quality products are the backbone of your business, right?

Nowadays, consumers are being bombarded with visual content.  Social networks, streaming platforms, and forums, all thrive from visual content. With so much visual content on the Internet, consumers now ignore most things that don’t tickle their imagination right away.

Around two-thirds of consumers feel that image quality is “very important” when they’re making a purchasing decision. 

That’s why you need to take steps to ensure that your products are looking crisp. Whether this means hiring a professional to handle the work or taking things into your own hands and snapping a few pics is all up to you. Just make sure that your visuals are on point. 

Benefits of Investing in Product Photography

Organizing a professional photoshoot is not a small task to tackle. A lot of time and money goes into photo sessions. Here are a few reasons why you need to focus on product pics:

• Allowing consumers to have a better perception of your products
• Helping mobile shoppers have a better view of your product offering  
• Improving the speed of trust, making the shoppers trust you right away
• Increasing the conversion rates by helping customers make quicker decisions
• Strengthening your business’ brand identity and separating you from competitors

Want to Know More?

What’s more effective, learning how to take quality pictures yourself, or hiring a professional? Will working with a professional product photographer pay off? Will you be able to recoup? To find out answers to all of these questions, read our guide to product photography. 

Conclusion

Those were our ecommerce growth tips. However, we still didn’t talk about the most important thing you need to do if you want your ecommerce business to grow. 

Whether you decide to invest in PPC, hire a product photographer, or start working on an email marketing strategy, one thing is certain: your customers always come first. 

You need to keep your customer service at a high level, in order for your business to continue growing. And you can’t possibly do that without the right tools.

Gorgias is a helpdesk that will allow you to have all customer-related data in one place. You’ll be able to view profiles, answer questions, and chat in real-real time with customers. 

Go ahead, sign up for Gorgias, and get an exclusive 15-day trial for free. 

Special thanks to our friends at Gorgias for their insights on this topic.