How To Grow An Online Retail Business

If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve recently started your online retail business and looking for ways to grow it quickly and effectively. Here are some tips for how to grow an online retail business:

First of all, congrats, you’ve achieved something that a lot of people only dream about. Second, get ready to face the challenges of growing your business, because you’re going to encounter them sooner or later.

Chances are you’ve already encountered them since you’re reading an article about ways of getting more customers.

Anyway, if so, you’re in right place. This article explores 3 affordable and effective ways of expanding an online retail business, and at least some of them should be right for your company. Let’s see how you can start working on your growth right now.

1. Deploy an Effective Social Media Plan

This can be said without any doubt: your target audience uses social media and company review sites. Therefore, you need to be smart about that and ensure that you’re doing everything you can do get your products moving faster online.

A great social media strategy for online retail businesses involves a number of areas, including:

Content Production

You may have heard this saying before: content is king. Not those “salesy” posts that try to push products but useful quality content related to your products (infographics, videos, guides, how-to articles and so on). This kind of content includes tips to buy a certain product (of course, you should sell that product), how-to articles related to the industry, and comparisons of products.

Remember, everything you post on social media should help your customers make informed purchasing decisions and deliver content in the form they prefer.

For example, 80 percent of Millennials prefer to consume quality video content and consider it useful for helping them decide on purchases. So, if they are your targeted market, creating short but helpful videos is a great idea.

Engaging Industry Influencers

You’ve probably seen at least one form of influencer marketing while you browsed through your social media feed. Here’s how it works: company partners with a social media user who has a lot of followers and facilitates their marketing effort by promoting their products on their page in a non-salesy way.

This strategy often drives significant traffic, therefore revenues, to the business’s social media page and website. In fact, Social Media Today claims that influencer can generate up to 11x the ROI of traditional advertising and 67 percent of marketers think that this strategy helped them to reach their targeted audience.

So, if your goal is to reach your target audience in a unique and meaningful way, influencers can be a huge marketing help for you.

Here are some other fascinating facts about influencer marketing ROI:

Tip: use free Influencer Finder tools like Kred and BuzzSumo to see who is doing well as an influencer in your industry or specific niche.

2. Take Advantage of Email Marketing

Think that email is outdated or even dead? Well, listen to this, a recent Mapp Consumer Views Survey found that 60 percent of online shoppers said that email marketing influenced them to make a purchase.60 percent! That’s huge!

Moreover, the same source suggested that 46 percent and 20 percent admit buying online once a month and multiple times a month from marketing emails, respectively.

Clearly, email marketing works and helps generate revenues!

But what kind of content should you send in emails to people who registered on your website? Well, Mapp Consumer Survey has a good answer to this question, too.

Here’s what online shoppers said they wanted to see from companies in emails:

Use this information to personalize the emails that you send to your leads and customers, and don’t forget to measure the results by comparing the performance of different versions of messages.

And don’t forget to be creative! Use emails to:

  • Welcome customers to your site after registration
  • Send a discount on their birthday
  • Send a discount to encourage them to visit your site after a period of inactivity
  • Send information about new products, discounts, and sales.

3. Get the Basics Right

Don’t forget that you still have to get the basics right because they can hold you back from growing your online retail business.

Use user-friendly payment systems. Losing customers because your store doesn’t have their preferred online payment method is just wrong. Remember that PayPal isn’t the only option used by people to pay for products online, so check out other nine popular online payment solutions.

Make the ordering process simple. According to the data calculated by the Baymard Institute, 69.23 percent is the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate. Yes, that’s how many people choose to abandon a product they wanted simply because the checkout process is complicated! For you, this means that you should allow your customers to check out with only three clicks. And don’t request information that isn’t related to their order, including hobbies, workplace, age, etc.

Growing your online retail business requires some effort, but it’s not something that you can’t achieve in a short-term. Besides, you’ve already passed one major milestone (launching your business), so this one should be totally doable. Just give it the best you can and use tactics that work (like the one we just described), and the success will come.

Over to you now. Have you launched an online retail business? Any tips to share? Tell us in the comments below.

Source: business-achievers.com