Growing Your Ecommerce Business? Focus on These 5 Areas

An ancient quote from Heraclitus continues to hold true to this day: “The only thing that is constant is change.” Nowhere is this principle more evident than in the innovative ecommerce industry. Companies that stay the same risk falling behind their more adaptive competitors. There’s no such thing as treading water—that is, if your business wants to survive in a competitive marketplace filled with other companies vying for room within the same space.

Growth demonstrates your company’s ability to evolve. However, it’s important to grow intelligently. When you’re growing your ecommerce business, focus on these five areas in particular.

Marketing Campaigns

It only makes sense to grow the scope of your marketing strategies alongside your actual online store. After all, the need to drive traffic to your website never diminishes. As you grow, it’s important to layer your marketing methods for a more comprehensive way to attract buyers.

Boss Magazine provides this example: Let’s say your store started out running paid advertisements on Google. A savvy complement would be adding a retargeting campaign meant to re-engage shoppers who weren’t quite ready to take the plunge the first time around. Other kinds of campaigns worth exploring include social media, email, content and word-of-mouth.

Ecommerce Platform

Some enterprise ecommerce platforms facilitate growth with built-in scalability and nearly 100 percent uptime—running your store this way will help you avoid growing pains. Downtime can be inordinately costly for a growing online business. In the short term, site glitches and crashes cause merchants to sacrifice revenue. In the long term, every instance of downtime risks alienating customers, perhaps even preventing them from returning to attempt future purchases. Sustainable growth is only possible with a platform capable of supporting expanding traffic and inventory levels.

Content Strategy

Ecommerce operations of all sizes can benefit from a great ecommerce content marketing strategy. Why? Here are just a few of the advantages:

• Content provides an opportunity to generate leads via blog posts, social media pages and more.
• Informative pieces of content, like how-to guides, help educate your consumers so they can make better purchasing decisions.
• Through content, ecommerce brands can forge genuine relationships with their audience.

Product Catalogue

As your website grows, it’s only natural to evaluate your merchandising decisions. Are you stocking the right products? Are you staying ahead of the curve on trends within your sector? Is your inventory sufficient to comfortably meet customer demand? Many retailers, especially large companies, are starting to leverage data analytics to uncover patterns related to inventory, sales and shipping. But even if you’re not quite at that level, you can still analyze your company’s historical performance data to make more informed decisions for the future.

Customer Service

Achieving a higher sales volume means you’ll also have more customer interactions, each one bringing with it the potential for necessitating customer service. People will have questions and comments. As you grow, you’ll need the best ticketing systems for shopify stores in place to handle more of them without breaking a sweat.

Some customers will reach out on social media, either via private messaging or as a comment. Make sure your customer service team is equipped to handle these interactions in a timely manner. Personalize the service by attaching a name to each interaction so consumers know they’re speaking to a real person, not a faceless stranger. It’s also savvy to facilitate Artificial Intelligence-driven live chat systems like Stackbear to answer basic questions without human intervention.

Focus on these five areas when you’re growing your ecommerce business for smoother expansion.