5 Ways to Scale Your eCommerce Business
Across both New Zealand, and globally, eCommerce is growing year on year and becoming more important for new and established businesses by the day. In 2021, eCommerce in New Zealand constituted over US$4 billion worth of revenue – a 15% increase over the previous year.
While eCommerce can be lucrative, competition is high, and it is by no means an easy, guaranteed way to get rich quickly. Here at BlueFrog Digital, we work with a number of eCommerce businesses and find ourselves being asked one constant question from current and prospective clients; “how can I increase sales?”. As such, we’ve put together some of the elements, channels and strategies that we ask ourselves when reviewing an eCommerce website.
1. Review site traffic
Every business, whether eCommerce or service-based will have its own, typical marketing funnel. In layman’s terms, these are the steps that a prospective customer may take, from identifying an issue or need for a product, to becoming a paying customer.
In essence, when we’re reviewing an eCommerce business, we ask ourselves the following question
“is the issue here a poor conversion rate, or a lack of traffic to the website?”
The fact is, many new or smaller eCommerce businesses, struggle to get enough visitors to the website to convert into paying customers. Overall, the average conversion rate across industries is around 2% although this varies wildly. If you as a business are only getting 20 people per week to visit your website, you may expect 1 sale every 2.5-3 weeks. In this instance, the challenge is around finding ways to increase your number of website visitors.
If, on the other hand, you’re attracting 1,000 people per week to your website, you may expect roughly 20 sales per week. If you are only getting 1-2 per week, for example, the challenge and discussion will need to pivot so we are asking ourselves why people are not converting on the website and what we can do to improve this. Here, the issues may stem from the site working horribly on mobile, or maybe, there’s a lack of content on the site to convince them to convert to a number of other possibilities.
2. Link Your eCommerce Store With Google Merchant Centre
One strategy to get more (free!) visibility for your products, is by linking your eCommerce store with Google Merchant Centre. In early 2021, Google made the ‘Shopping’ tab on Google, eligible to show free listings, as opposed to saving this space for paid advertising which had always been the case previously. Typically, eCommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, WordPress, WooCommerce etc are all fairly standard to set up. As this is free, your visibility will likely be fairly limited, but there really is no downside to implementing this, particularly if you are working on a tight marketing budget.
3. Google Shopping Ads
As mentioned above, it makes sense to leverage all free opportunities that are available to you. However, if you really want to get your products front and centre of your prospective customers, Google Shopping Ads are the way to do it.
Rather than being keyword-driven like Google Search Ads, Google Shopping Ads show each eligible product individually based on a range of information taken from your website or entered via a supplementary product feed.
Some of the benefits of Google Shopping Ads are that prospective customers are able to see an image of the product, alongside other key information such as price, name, sizes, etc. This results in a more knowledgeable user clicking through to view the product on your website, often resulting in a higher likelihood of purchasing.
4. Better Utilise Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising is something that just about every small business owner is aware of, but where there is a lot of confusion. Here at BlueFrog, we typically like to focus on paid advertising, simply because we find that provides a better ROI and is easier for our clients to outsource to a third-party partner or agency like ourselves. When people ask us about managing their social media platforms on their behalf, we tend to think and say that no one knows as much, or is as passionate about your own business as you. Therefore, we recommend clients post on their own social media channels organically, and we can take care of and test the paid advertising element.
Ongoing changes with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc make this an ever-changing environment to navigate in and advertising is gradually becoming more expensive. However, it remains one of the most cost-effective ways to attract large numbers of people to your website.
Other strategies such as retargeting your products can also be invaluable in increasing sales for your eCommerce store too.
5. Ensure You Have Email Autoresponders
Have you ever added something to a shopping cart, decided to leave, and then find an email from that website reminding you to complete your purchase? They may even throw in a 5% discount code to help convince you.
That’s the work of email autoresponders. Love them or hate them, the data tells us that they do work, and they really are a must-have for any eCommerce business looking to ramp up their sales.
Asides from the time involved in setting these up and any costs involved in subscribing to an email platform, autoresponders are largely free. Again, great for small businesses who need to squeeze every drop of value out of their marketing budget.
So, there you have it. Five ways and opportunities to increase your sales and scale your eCommerce business. If you have any questions or would like to chat about working together, please reach out to the team at BlueFrog Digital today!