I head up the e-commerce department at Liquid Rubber, a leading provider of home improvement and DIY water ingress prevention products.
Today’s customer has nearly unending options when they’re shopping online. Just about anything you can think of buying is a search and a few clicks away from becoming a potential purchase. Knowing this, e-commerce brands must understand—and embrace—the fact that they have a limited window in which they can close a purchase from an interested prospect that lands on their website.
As a leader in e-commerce and product placement, here are the very best lessons that I’ve learned. Use them to grow your e-commerce brand.
Understand your audience.
Knowing your audience—and what resonates with them—is the first step. Crossover Audiences won’t help you much when selling on congested marketplaces like Amazon or Walmart. (Disclosure: My company is a retailer with Amazon and Walmart) Direct audiences, however, can catapult your brand’s namesake and lead to future sales via direct or marketplace share.
To better understand your audience better, put yourself in their shoes. Understand why they would want to purchase and use a product or service you offer and use this exercise to gain an understanding of the pain points you can address when creating engaging copy. Speaking of copy, spend ample time thinking about how you describe your product or service to expand the reach and to better captivate your prospects.
Pro Tips: Consider taking a deeper dive through segmented audience analytics and implying worthwhile tests of marketing content. If your budget allows, also consider adding paid surveys to mix to gain better insights that can serve to improve the ROI of your campaigns.
Know your competitive price point.
Price point strategies are an integral aspect of winning in e-commerce. Pricing your premium product too low, for example, can lead consumers to think that you’re an “economy brand” and can put your lineup in a sector that you’re trying to avoid. Going too high, on the other hand, can have equally detrimental effects. Using the “Goldilocks Method”—and finding the price that is just right is the key.
Pro Tips: The goal is finding, and adhering to, a pricing strategy that works for your brand. When I price out products for my business, for example, I look at a few key factors. These include supply versus demand, the competitiveness of the given product and market and setting the ideal price.
An ideal price, by example, will provide a viable value to the consumer while affording a lucrative margin for your brand that maintains your ideological footprint, all while avoiding placing you in a “bargain bin” economy that can potentially hinder your growth.
Don’t be afraid to explore new channels for growth.
Don’t limit your marketing to one channel. The last thing you want to become is an “Amazon-only” brand that forks over a cut-off each sale forever. Alternatively, you won’t want to miss out on added sales you wouldn’t have had otherwise by avoiding large marketplaces, either.
Instead, think with a multichannel mindset here. All channels have value, and all channels can nurture sustained growth. While some channels offer better margins than others, the difference gained via exposure can lead to exponential growth, too.
Pro Tips: I like to take on the mindset that there isn’t a bad channel to sell my products on. While some channels result in a higher net yield than others, the difference in realized revenue can also be attributed to brand exposure and improved loyalty along the way, which ultimately levels the playing field to your advantage.
Offer help along the way.
The very best thing I have learned that you can do to grow your e-commerce brand as quickly as possible is to offer your consumers help along the way and to be as sincere as possible while doing so. For instance, our brand prides itself on customer service. We know that countless undecided consumers are considering whether to use our brand for their DIY needs and also that many of them have unanswered questions before they make a buying decision. This is why the customer service hub of our business is just as critical as any other department.
Pro Tips: The reality is that undecided consumers are more likely to do business with your entity when they feel their needs are being met before the purchase and early in the sales cycle. This bode of confidence not only improves your sales across the board but is also an important loyalty and retention driver, too. When followed up in the aftermath with equally as adequate and devoted support, you’ll have the chance to earn a lifelong customer as well as invaluable word-of-mouth referrals.
Jeff Bezos said it best when quoted by Inc. magazine, “The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal (Amazon) is to be earth’s most customer-centric company.”
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