Looking for more ways to boost your sales the smart way and build your own eCommerce empire? There’s no doubting that eCommerce is a cutthroat industry where everyone’s out to carve their own slice of a $1 trillion-dollar pie – and getting a rich slice is no longer as easy as just throwing up a website and sitting back.
This article follows on from my last, in which I shared some expert tips – but let’s face it: you can never have too many tips to help you build your business. So, if you’ve already applied those tips and are hungry for more, read on!
Use Your New Best Friend: Subscriptions
One shocking thing that many eCommerce stores don’t leverage at all is one of the simplest: subscriptions. If you’ve been looking at Amazon lately, you may have noticed that there are quite a few products that come with subscriptions and a healthy discount for those who take that option.
Subscriptions won’t work with all products, but if you’re selling something that needs replacing (such as dog food or makeup), then this is a great sales tactic. A subscription option means that they never run out and that you make clockwork sales every set time period.
If you’re thinking this might not work for your business, it’s worth remembering that Dollar Shave Club sold to Unilever in 2016 for a cool billion dollars, all off the back of a brilliant marketing campaign and subscription model.
If you’re using Shopify, it couldn’t be easier to start using subscriptions: just use the “Recharge” feature and enjoy scaling new heights of profit.
Don’t Abandon Shoppers Who Abandon You – Chase Them!
It’s every eCommerce owners most frustrating customer: the abandoned shopping cart. Nobody knows what stopped them, and everyone wishes that they would just come back.
Yet a surprising number of stores don’t do anything. For example, in 2017 just over three-quarters of online shoppers left their cart abandoned. Out of every hundred shoppers, that’s 75 people just leaving their full shopping carts lying around, leaving, and never looking back.
That is, if you just let them go – along with all the money they take with them.
Which is what many eCommerce stores do.
But how can you chase after them and get them to buy? There are a few solutions open to you, but one of the most effective is also one of the easiest.
Simply collect customer emails and names before they start the shopping cart process. If you do this and they disappear, then you can email them with tempting discounts, coupons, and more. Everyone loves a bargain, and it might just be a nice discount that gets them to come back and pick up where they left off during the checkout process
Speaking of checkout processes…
Optimize Your Checkout Process to Reduce Abandonment
Let’s face it, on a lot of websites; the checkout process is pretty horrible. Sometimes it can seem like an entire site has been optimized perfectly – and then you get to the checkout process, apparently designed by a Russian bureaucrat having a very bad day.
It’s no wonder that 75% of people just abandon their shopping carts when confronted with a crazy long checkout process that takes too long to get through.
Just optimizing your own checkout process is one way to make a lot more money, simply because you’re making it less painful for people who just want to buy stuff.
This isn’t rocket science: just snip out all those unnecessary fields and make sure there’s no teeth-grinding repetition – ultimately, you want to keep it as simple and streamlined as possible, so they get their products and you get their money. You can also make it a two-step, two-page process so that there’s a feeling that the progress is swift and getting them places faster.
Ultimately, the name of the game here is to make it easy, quick, and painless. Doing this and doing it well can easily increase your profits by as much as 15% – which makes it well worth your time and effort.
Don’t Forget the Power of Referral Programs – Use It or Lose It!
Word of mouth is one of the most powerful marketing weapons that you have at your disposal – and twinning that up with a referral program can give it even more marketing oomph. If someone is already purchasing from your eCommerce store, they’re likely happy and know that you have a good solution for their needs – which makes it a lot more likely that they’ll tell friends and family later on.
With a referral program, you can reward them for being an awesome customer. This is really easy with apps like ReferralCandy, which lets you create smart referral programs on the fly. It also lets you set conditions – so perhaps every time someone refers to your store and that referral buys, you give both parties 10% off, or another enticing offer to encourage that valuable sharing.
The key here is not just to reward the person giving the referral, but also the person accepting it. By compensating and gifting both sides, you’re showing them that you value their business, rather than seeming like you’re on a cynical marketing drive for more profits.
Ultimately, Focus On Your Customers – They’re Your Goldmine
If you follow the tips in this article and my previous one, you’ll be doing a heck of a lot more than 97% of eCommerce stores out there, putting you in a great place to double your profits.
You may be wondering which of these tips is going to yield the best results, or where to start, but don’t get bogged down by that. Pick one, implement it, then move onto another.
If you can spend just a couple of hours on your site every day working on improvements, you’ll see the results coming in – and fast. The key is just to keep improving and focusing on what your customers want.
If you know what they want, and you can deliver it to them with some thoughtful tweaks to make the shopping process easier, you’re going to find that your eCommerce business is way more profitable than you ever could have imagined.
