The world of ecommerce can be cutthroat.
With such a wide variety of products and services available from around the globe, it takes a lot of forethought and planning to ensure your product gets the exposure and interest it deserves.
However, finding the right way to boost your sales and profits is certainly not easy when there are just as many ecommerce strategies as products available.
We’ve compiled the top five overlooked options to help you take your business and sales to the next level.
What Are Ecommerce Strategies, and Why Should I Care?
True to its name, an ecommerce strategy is how you plan to promote your online business and get more sales of your products or services.
There are hundreds of different strategies out there, but they all focus on getting more exposure for what you’re selling and boosting your profits by converting a higher percentage of passive attention to paying customers.
Here are the top five overlooked ecommerce strategies that are making waves in the online business world today.
1. Shoppertainment
However, unlike the typically sponsored videos where a quick overview of a product is given, these new shoppertainment livestreams meld genuine shopping reactions and demonstrations of products with the famous personality of the influencer using them.
In 2020 alone, the Alibaba Group’s live streaming channel, Taobao Live, reported a 150% increase in sales for the third year in a row.
This is likely because shoppertainment targets Gen Z, the younger generation now entering adulthood or their mid 20s, who currently influence over 93% of household purchases.
Shoppertainment in the form of live streaming hauls or product demonstrations targets this new, younger audience who is also more likely to shop online than the older generations.
By getting influencers to promote your product in this way or setting up a channel where there are regular demonstrations or launches, you can significantly increase your sales by attracting a bigger audience compared with standard text or image ads.
2. Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
In most cases, your ecommerce site’s conversion rate is the percentage of people who buy a product or service compared to the number of people who view them. Usually, the simplest equation to enumerate this is:
[number of customers who purchased a service or product] ÷ [number of visitors to your page or sessions spent on your page] x [100]
Average conversion rates usually lie around 2%, which means 2% of visitors to your site should turn into customers. However, if you aren’t using strategies to optimize your conversion rate, you may find your ecommerce site’s numbers fall far below this.
Thankfully, there are many easy-to-implement methods to ensure you’re doing everything possible to boost your conversion rate optimization. These methods include:
– Improving user experience. Users who have positive experiences on your website will be more likely to purchase something you’re selling. This means you need to optimize your website’s speed, make sure it’s easy to navigate, use high-quality images, and make sure people can easily find what they’re looking for.
– Focusing on the goal behind each page. It may be tempting to create many tabs and pages for your website to make it look fuller, but this can overwhelm potential customers or leave your page feeling cluttered. Every webpage needs to have a purpose. It needs to have a goal tied to an action that your team can measure to understand the page’s effectiveness. This could be a form, an offer with a CTA button, a downloadable PDF, or even an option to purchase your product.
– Mapping your website with the customer journey in mind. Put yourself in potential customers’ shoes. What would make their goal of finding a product or information on your page easier? The better the experience of potential customers on your website, the higher the chance they will make a purchase, boosting your conversion rates and profitability.
3. Amazon Marketing (Of Course)
If you’re selling a product online, you need to be using Amazon.
Sure, many brands make do with selling from their product website, but with online shopping only growing in popularity, people place greater importance on convenience over finding the exact product they need.
Like the classic department store or mall, Amazon offers quick access to products from all over the country in one convenient, easy-to-navigate online store.
By advertising your product on Amazon, you can get guaranteed views, build your brand popularity, and reach more people with live videos in Amazon’s shoppertainment section. People prefer buying from Amazon for its guaranteed shipping windows, convenience to navigate, simple purchasing, and overall product availability.
In fact, product availability accounts for 66% of the primary reasons why customers prefer the platform. No matter what they’re searching for, Amazon is bound to have some variation of it in stock, which means your product will be open to more exposure and sales potential.
4. Social Commerce
More than half of America’s population is set to make a purchase on social media this year. With more and more people joining social media platforms, and with Facebook hosting 2.9 billion active monthly users, there is incredible potential in marketing your product on these platforms.
Whether through promotions, opening a Facebook store, or by tagging your products in popular posts, the social commerce market is ripe for the picking.
As an online business owner, take advantage of social media’s ability to reach niche audiences, to use things like hashtags and locations to narrow down the audience that would be most interested in your product, and to pitch your service or product to these potential customers in a way that resonates with their needs.
Nearly four billion people own smartphones. And one of the easiest ways to get directly in touch with millions of future customers is through SMS marketing. Millions of business clients want to receive product offers via SMS, and over 67 million Americans redeem coupons via their mobile phones.
You could skyrocket your sales by using SMS marketing and offering a discount on your products for those who respond to this strategy.
Leveraging (or simply including) an SMS marketing campaign is one of the best ways to boost sales and help create a name for your business by reaching out directly to customers instead of hoping they resonate with your online ads or website design.
Take Your Ecommerce Business to the Next Level
If you’re ready to take the next step in growing your ecommerce business, contact the team at National Positions.
With years of experience in helping companies grow, expand and become wildly successful using all the strategies mentioned above and then some, the National Positions team has all the information and expertise your business needs to reach greater heights than ever before.
Drop us a line via our contact us page – or call us today at (818) 918-5188 to chat with one of our experts today. We also have a ton of resources available for download if you want to try some of these ideas for yourself today.