The Best Digital Marketing Practices for Your E-Commerce Business

Setting up one’s own business not only takes courage, but it also requires a huge deal of planning. In the current market situation, where almost every field is more or less affected by the recession, opening up your business takes critical and careful planning, followed by fool-proof execution, lest it backfire. Nevertheless, it gives you a better understanding of the market situation and the market fluctuations. This gives you an opportunity to choose from numerous fields. One of the best businesses to start in the current age is an E-Commerce chain. An E-Commerce business gives you a lot of options to explore and experiment from, and though it seems a bit on the trickier side of handling it, an E-Commerce business is one of the best areas to choose to set up one’s own business.

Initializing Your E-Commerce Business

Like mentioned earlier, setting up a business requires intense planning and foolproof execution. Unless you have a proper layout and framework, your entire business will eventually dwindle. The stronger you prepare your business, the more customers you’ll get, and thus, the more sales will be generated. But to start an ECommerce business, there are many factors that you need to keep in mind for a smoother functioning of your business.

Focus Area

What is it that you’ll be selling on your E-Commerce platform? Do you want to make it a different hub, where people can find everything, ranging from toothpicks to washing machines to sofas? Or, do you want to make it a more centralized place, selling only specific items, like clothes or household decors, for instance? What you sell plays a significant role in your business, be it everything or a single category of items. It not only helps you streamline your strategies, but it also helps your business grow at a better rate. For every organization, building up an ecommerce platform for their business is a must to remain focused, survive and prosper in today’s fast growing ecommerce industry. Here are top 10 hosted ECommerce platforms for your reference

The focus area of your E-Commerce business defines your sales and growth (KartRocket)

Keep Your Plan Ready

Irrespective of the type of business you own, a rigid framework takes your business a long way. And when it comes to E-Commerce companies, it is thoroughly necessary to make sure that your plan is not only robust and worthy but is also capable of yielding the best-required results. Make your plan easy enough to be carried out but also make it secure enough to work out without loopholes. A reliable and potent strategy is highly useful in taking your E-Commerce business to a better height, since it helps you to keep track of how and where you should spend your money, which people you should target and how much exactly is your growth rate with respect to your previous statistics as well as your competitors’ current growth rate.

The more detailed your E-commerce business plan, the better chances of a satisfied customer base (Trans Cosmos)

Maintain a Low Fund Policy

If you’ve ever wanted to open an E-commerce business, but always backed out, thinking that the costs involved are way too high, then you’re under a pretty big misconception. Whatever the cost requirement be, it all comes down to you. You can start by getting low, small funds for your business. That way, it’s easy for you to regulate and keep a check on where you spend the money and how frequently you need a recharge on it. So, when you pay back your loans, you don’t have to spend all your revenue on repayment. This helps in maintaining a steady, calculated budget and a more controlled expenditure and expenses.

The lower your initial funds, the lower your loan repayment (Bit Bond)

A Resourceful Website

It’s 2017 and almost everything important happens over the Internet, no matter how big or small. The Internet is a powerful platform, and with the right and the witty usage, it can work wonders for your business. Now, let’s say your business is going well and good. But you still need a website to promote yourself to a wider audience and target a bigger, better audience. An E-commerce website should be built in such a way that it is insightful and gives the proper and detailed explanation of your business. It should also be easily navigable because a clumsy website drives potential customers away. Also, ensure that your site runs smoothly on all possible devices that a user might be having.

Your website is a compact explanation of your business (Best Techie)

Never Overlook the Legal Aspects

Before going forward with anything, you first need to get your E-commerce business legally affiliated. The laws on E-commerce are pretty strict, and once they are violated, your entire business can be at stake. Make sure that all your legal matters are properly looked into regularly.

This video by Dian Mano, explains the Republic Act 8792 that is related to E-commerce

Analytics for Your E-Commerce Business

Before diving into the main topic, let’s discuss why your E-commerce business needs Analytics. The market, even in its current fluctuating state, has a lot of people driving a lot of firms. And as an E-commerce business owner, there is a lot of competition out there. So how can you use Analytics for your business to help you maintain, and outrun your competitors?

Managing Your Supply Chain

For any E-commerce business, a significant chunk of the business is reliant on the inventory. So imagine this- you have a huge customer base, but somehow, your inventory is running low on stock. Wouldn’t that be a massive turn-off for your clients, and thus your business? E-commerce business is heavily dependent on an updated inventory, and managing that is a pretty challenging and tricky task. Here’s where Analytics comes in. Via Analytics, you can not only manage your inventory; you can track the delivery proceedings from the warehouse to the customer as well. Not only that, you can manage and optimize the required costs that are involved.

This is a representation of how Analytics works for inventory management (Infosys)

Easy Detection of Fraud

In a business as vast and spread out as E-commerce, there are high chances of fraud, both at the merchant and the customer end. And falling prey to any such fraudulence not only hinders your business, but it also poses a high threat to your reputation before your clients. Manually handling such frauds takes too much time. With analytics, you can easily manage and stop any such fraud that might be a threat to your business.

This data shows losses due to fraudulence (SlideShare)

Merchant Relations

If you own an E-commerce business, you might know pretty well how dependent your business is with merchant partners. It’s safe to say that merchants are one of the building blocks of an E-commerce business. So as part of this relation, the E-commerce players as well as the dealer’s advise each other on where to expand their focus areas. With the help of Analytics, it’s easier to track where your merchants are spreading their services, and accordingly, you can enhance your services to the customers.

Merchant Metric shows how you can use Analytics for your business.

Product Management

Customer satisfaction is the priority of any business, and in E-commerce sales, the priority increases tenfold. With Analytics, you can see what your customers want, what they like, how popular a product is, sales forecast, etc.

User Experience

Let’s face it- there are too many websites on the Internet. But if you have an E-commerce website, you belong to a niche category. But even then, it’s critical as to how happy customers find your website while using it. If you offer a clumsy or a large website, it won’t take time for your clients to shift to a better website than yours. Using analytics, you can check and monitor how your customers find your website, how much time they are spending on your website, what attracts them, what they are looking for and how they review your website.

The difference between a traditional and a data-driven UX approach (Wharton)

The Best Digital Marketing Practices for Your E-Commerce Business

So let’s say you’ve followed all the necessary guidelines for establishing your E-commerce business. But does it end there? No. In fact, that is rather the foundation of the vast reign you are planning to build and set. The name, Electronic Commerce, itself clarifies that it is exclusively and intensely made for the electronic network. In the current age and era, the Internet has come a long way. As of June 2017, 51% of the world’s population is on the Internet. On a more local note, as many as 367.48 million Indians, which is 28% of the entire population, are using the Internet. This gives a clear idea about how the Internet is an essential part of the present population globally. So when you operate a business that’s based entirely upon the Internet, it’s out there for everyone to see, and that includes your present and likely future customers. Therefore, whatever you do, your clients can easily get the statistics based on the reviews and sales. Now, as an E-commerce business person in 2017, it’s highly essential to make sure you use the right and the best digital marketing strategies for the growth of your business, as well as to stay ahead of your competitors. So what practices and approaches can you adopt for a better digital marketing strategy for your E-Commerce?

Build a Powerful Content

Content is critical. Rich content, with the necessary details as well as all possible questions inherently, answered, wins customers over. So how exactly should you build your content and make it strong enough? Outline your plan- what you intend to showcase to your clients, what are your plans for your E-commerce business, what is your mission and what is your vision. Identify your target audience, because it plays a key role, and then revolve your content customized for your target audience. Make sure your content projects the fact that your business provides the ultimate benefit to customers. A powerful content is not made up of words only. So you need to add videos and images and if required, statistical reports as well. Remember, your customers believe what they see, so make sure you show them your best via the content on your website

The cycle of how a compelling content should be planned (Wikimedia Commons)

Win Over the Social Media

As already mentioned, this is the age of the Internet, and as many as 51% of the global population is on the Internet. The current number of social media users, as of now, is 1.96 billion. Hence, as the owner of an E-commerce business, you must make your business popular on social media platforms as well. Social media is a large, useful forum. People see stuff; they like it, they share it for more people to see and get an idea about something. So if you regularly update and promote your business on your social media channels, it is highly likely that gradually, eventually, you’ll find growth in your customer numbers. Post relevant things, be consistent and keep track of customer engagement. This helps in planning for future contents-what people like more, what drives away people and what people expect to see.

Statistics of customer growth via social media marketing (Vantage)

This very informative video shows how social media can help you grow your business.

A Mobile-friendly Website

The world is moving at a pretty fast pace, and people these days have very little time to spare. Let’s say your website is great on a desktop or laptop but lags behind when it comes to working on a cellphone. People in 2017 are relying on their mobile phones more than their laptops because cell phones are more portable, have better internet connectivity and are more compact as compared to laptops. So obviously, there’s a high chance that many of your customers might browse your E-commerce website via their phones. So if your interface is sloppy in cell phones, customers are pretty likely to turn away, which is the last thing you want. Google recently announced that pretty soon, there will be a mobile-friendly indexing system, which is, there will be different index ranking of websites on Google’s search results for laptops and phones. So, if you want to stay in the game, make sure you remain in sight.

According to Outerbox, 80% of shoppers use mobile phones to either look up product reviews, compare prices or find alternative store locations.(Respondr)

 Learn how to make your E-commerce website mobile-friendly here.

A Strong SEO Plan

In the current market, if you do not have a strong SEO program, it’s almost the same as being invisible. A strong SEO is a key to attract customers. Check your analytics report. That way you can see where you are excelling, where you’re lagging, and where you stand concerning your competitors. Searching for trends of people has changed a lot over the years. People no longer just rely on physical word of mouth or commercials. With all of the information and the data available online, people tend to research more these days before finalizing on a product. For this, people search extensively online. So it is highly necessary to have a good SEO plan adopted for your E-commerce website for search engines to discover you quickly, and hence generate more traffic for your website. SEO gives you greater benefits and these last for a longer time if managed skillfully. So, don’t consider SEO as something that’s elective. SEO is a necessity, so use it to your best possible extent.

Statistics of traffic based on SEO strategies (Deep Core Data)

Funk Up Your Emails

Personally, how many times have you discarded or deleted an email from an E-commerce promotion just because it was too lengthy and dense and boring? Your customers are likely to do the same if you send out emails filled with too many words and data and statistics. But there is a way out. Blend multimedia with your emails. Use images, videos, gifs, audio clips. A graphical email intrigues customers more than a plain, simple, wordy email. It tends to give a thought about your E-commerce business and the products and the services you offer. So next time you’re marketing via emails, make sure you include multimedia that can interest your customers.

Bring On Board Influencers

Teaming up with influencers is one of the best ways to grow your Ecommerce business. Not only do influencers have a significant follower base, but they also actually affect and mold people’s decisions regarding various things with just a single update. Irrespective of which social media platform an influencer uses, people take into account his/her views about a product or business. So partnering with influencers brings you into the public light. People know about your business’s existence and might want to buy from you. Consider influencers as “Conversion Agents.” They not just influence people, they convert them to take actions, which is exactly what you need for your business.

(SEMRush)

The world is gradually turning more and more digital as the years pass by, and right now, it’s not just enough to stay in the game. If you own an E-commerce business, it’s more than important to lead the game. With the effective and efficient use of digital strategies, you can easily stay ahead of your competitors. So what are you waiting for?