Developing an Effective eCommerce Strategy

1. Establish E-commerce Goals

Establishing your goals in any field is the first step to actually determine the strategies you need to employ to achieve said goals. Same with e-commerce strategy, it starts with your goals. As a business or a company, what are you trying to achieve? Are you looking for a specific number of customers or earn a certain amount of revenue all within a specified time period.

Specifying your goals not only helps with creating a good strategy but also tracking your performance and progress. Your efforts will be metered and then you would know which strategies are effective and which are the ones you should let go of.

Standards and benchmarks towards your goal are the starting place you have to set before anything else.

Create or write down your objectives and the specific results that it means. For example, your objective is to be a well-known coffee company like Starbucks, the specific result would be to have X number of customers per day or sell X number of cups of coffee per day.

This framework would be used to set up your online store and pages and promote your products and services.

This would also help you align the steps needed to achieve this goal.

2. Knowing your target audience

Knowing who your target audience is an important part of strategizing for your success. Different demographics will react differently to the same strategy that is why it is important to profile them. Who are your products for, what age range are they, what are their priorities, spending habits, how much are they willing to spend, and what are the products they are more likely to buy?

Creating a list of your customers’ personas will help you be more specific in targeting them and creating the perfect content and advertisement that they can identify or relate to.

You should also include in your data gathering the existing products and services your target demographic is already using so that you know what types of products are they buying or what kind of purchasing habits they have. These are free information you can get that would be valuable for your business. Your competitor has done the experiments and you can benefit from it too.

3. Identify Your Unique Value Proposition

What is it that you offer that is different from other brands and businesses? What added value do you give to the market and why should your potential customers choose you from the rest of the sellers online?

Online customers do a lot of research and read lots of reviews before making any purchase. That is why you must impose on what sets you apart from everyone.

Some brands even go to great lengths to actually provide a detailed list of the reasons why they should be the one their audience should choose.

4. Create Effective Product or Service Descriptions

Using high-quality content will greatly help your customers understand what you are offering them. Using images that are compelling and enticing can help boost your sales. Attractive as they should be, you must still stick with the real product and do not try to deceive your customers as that could backfire.

Also using effective descriptions can help your customers know what they are getting. Use specific product descriptions such as color, dimension, material, or if it is a service, detail what they will get with your service package.

5. Satisfy Your Customers

There are many ways to satisfy your customers aside from giving them the right and proper products and services they are availing. Throw in some promos and discounts or loyalty perks so that they will keep on coming back to you. With consistent rewards, they are encouraged to stay loyal to your brand and they will feel that they are getting value for their money.

Another thing that will help in satisfying your customers is being responsive to queries and having an active social media page or customer support that will value their input and reviews.

Listening to their feedback is another way to keep them happy. It means a lot to let them know that they matter and they are heard. Actively respond to claims if there are any and apologize and redo the product or services if needed.

Customer recovery is an essential part of any strategy as you will not only lose your existing customer if not handled well, you will potentially lose future customers as well.

6. Optimize the Checkout Process

A smooth checkout process ensures that your customers will not get frustrated along the way of purchasing and paying for your products and services. Make sure your platform does not lag or does not have too many steps in order to check out their cart.

Also, it is important to make sure that your checkout page is secure for online payment transactions.

Most of the time there will be abandoned carts but do not lose heart there are ways to call them back and proceed to purchase and checkout their carts.

Provide a return policy or money-back guarantee or refund if they are unhappy with their purchase, that way they feel safe with going to checkout.

Offer free delivery or more convenient delivery options so that they will feel like they are only paying for the product itself much like shopping in a mall.

Provide easy access to customer support so that your customers are well taken care of and they have access to information about your products or their claims whenever they need it.

7. Optimize Your E-Commerce Site for Mobile Devices

Shopping has never been this easy. You can now shop through different digital devices such as phones, laptops, and tablets. With that businesses must also keep up with the demand.

Most businesses that have websites forget to optimize them for mobile users. But that should not be the case as research shows that most people around 33% shop through their mobile phones instead of opening their laptops. You could be losing sales if you neglect this part.