Once your business is up and running, the temptation is strong to take your foot off the pedal; after all, you’ve had months of planning, designing, branding, marketing and sourcing. However, you need to keep the momentum, and keep looking at ways to better your business; a slowdown is detrimental to the longevity and success of your business. Even if you have a business that is no longer within its infancy, there are always tweaks that you can do to your business practices to maximize your company’s efficiencies. Here are 3 ways that you can use e-commerce systems to make your company even more efficient and raise your bottom line.
Join the Dots
Within your business, you will have diverse ways of storing your essential data, and while this is necessary, you run the risk of data inaccuracies and repetition. You need to implement a system that joins the dots, and allows your data to be stored within one place so that it can be used across the business. A content management system (CMS) is a set of programs that are used to create and manage your digital content; it facilitates great collaboration within the business but also streamlines customer interactions. By improving your customers’ experience of your e-commerce store with a CMS, you can offer them personalized options of discounts, voucher codes or loyalty points, which promote customer confidence in your brand and instils a sense of loyalty. Check out weaveability.com for an example of what can be achieved.
Target Your Customers
You will, no doubt, know your website’s content inside out: your products, your prices, your contact information; but, you also need to include a blog section on your site. The blog content of your website is a powerful tool that brings visitors to your site, and so the content that you publish must be relevant to your customers’ demographic: answer questions about your products and have a ‘how to’ section. Your site should be optimized with SEO tools, and you should have social media marketing, email marketing, and offline marketing initiatives to raise your company’s profile. However, for an efficient strategy, you need to incorporate Pay-per-click Advertising (PPC) for an efficient way to translate clicks into sales. Companies often shy away from PPC, but with its ability to target geographical areas, control the time your ads are published and to define the demographics of who sees your advert, it really is the quickest way to generate sales.
Up-sell and Cross-Sell
To maximize the sales of your e-commerce store, you need to increase the volume of sales, and to be efficient, you need to increase the value of each sale. You can increase your sales by up-selling and cross-selling. So, what is the difference? Up-selling is when you provide your customer with more expensive options than the one that they are currently interested in, and cross-selling is when you offer complementary products to the one that is being purchased. Up-selling occurs during the customer’s research phase, and so alternative options should be displayed on the product pages, whereas cross-selling opportunities are most successfully placed on the checkout pages. Research suggests that you can increase sales by as much as 30% by using up and cross-selling strategies.
