Online store business
A common attribute that you’ll find among many online entrepreneurs and business owners is that they’re never quite pleased with the status quo, regardless of what level of success they’ve reached.
Whether it’s named the entrepreneurial spirit or ambition, these online entrepreneurs are regularly looking for ways to take their online businesses to the next level. However, doing so is hugely dependent on whether their online business model can grow or not. And there is nothing more necessary than good testing of what you make. Testing professionals from Bulletproof are ready to do everything required for testing and successful performance of your online store or any other kind of software.
The good news here is that growing your online store is way easier than trying to expand its traditional brick-and-mortar counterpart. As you already know, the business is mostly virtual, so you won’t need to scout additional storefronts or worry about finding more physical space.
There are presumably endless ways you can spend time on promoting and effectively growing your online store. Still, for most online store owners, trying to tackle every method and technique all at once isn’t the right way to drive further growth. Not only will your efforts consume all of your time, but you’ll likely produce lackluster results.
The best approach is to select a limited number of ways to promote and expand your online business venture. Focus your efforts on the following ways, and measure your results to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. Read along to find out our three expert methods to generate more sales and effectively grow your online store.
Improve Your Content Marketing Efforts
When it comes to online stores, the most significant improvements regarding scaling up and expanding your online venture are tightly connected to having a top tier content marketing strategy in place. Publishing unique content provides an opportunity to explain what sets your store apart from the rest, and it creates a corpus of content that can fuel a powerful media presence.
Besides, producing highly valuable and free content builds trust in your brand, keeps potential customers informed on your products or services, and helps you rank better in search engines like Google. Once you improve your content marketing efforts, you’ll see the power of it via increased visibility in search engines, social shares, and overall increased traffic to your store.
So, what particular tactics should you use to grow your store using content marketing?
Don’t Overlook SEO
When content marketing is combined with a suitable eCommerce SEO strategy, you can expect more organic traffic to your website, achieving exponential business growth. By creating and delivering original SEO-friendly content like blog posts and infographics, you can insert keywords that will help your content achieve top SERPs results. Take the time and find out which keywords people usually search for when looking at one of your products, and use them throughout your original content to boost your organic rankings.
Besides the usual SEO practices, consider the following strategies to drive even more traffic to your store with content and eCommerce SEO:
- Create foundational content. Don’t neglect that many customers who come to your store are in the very early stages of the buying process and need educational content on the product and how to use it. Having reliable foundational content will lead to more time on-site and better engagement, one of the key signals used by search engines to validate keyword accuracy.
- Remarketing. When someone visits your website or blog, track them down using remarketing cookies, and afterward serve specific content and messages to them over the next couple of weeks as they browse the web and social.
- Rich snippets. These will allow search engines to understand better what information is contained on each web page. However, make sure that your snippets include a clear, concise description of each page and not only a keyword-laden signal to the search engines.
By the way, there is also a high importance of high-quality hosting for your website. Proper hosting affects SEO positively, so make sure you use the excellent one.
Your Content Should Be More Than Just Blog Posts
As you probably know, running a blog is one of the top ways to build brand awareness and create a loyal following, especially if you’re publishing top-of-the-funnel content. However, suppose you want your online store to stand out and achieve future growth. In that case, you should think about providing free content to potential clients and offering them valuable and in-depth content pieces like courses, ebooks, podcasts, case studies, etc.
Additionally, you can leverage this “free” content to require the name and the email address of your store’s visitors to access these premium pieces of content and market to those visitors via email campaigns in the future. After all, email has the highest ROI out of all marketing campaigns, so using it is very important to growing your online business. To put things into perspective, you should know that email marketing contributes to 20% of all traffic driving eCommerce sales.
Video content is all about creating high-quality video content that shows what a specific product does, how it benefits its users and is one of the most underrated ways to promote an online store. Once you’ve created and published the video content, promoting it heavily on social media drives engagement and lures new customers.
Attract More Customers Via Sales Campaigns
A considerable portion of the people who shop online almost immediately click the “sales” tab to find the best prices and deals on the website. By creating a sales campaign, potential clients will come running to your store looking for a good deal.
It doesn’t matter if the campaign is planned for no particular reason or just in time for the next holiday season, people will respond, and your store will achieve rapid growth and generate more revenues. To help you get started, here are our three favorite sales campaign ideas you can quickly implement:
- Offer a giveaway. Customers love being rewarded. By creating a giveaway campaign, you can offer an incentive in which your online store’s visitors receive a freebie if they sign up for your mailing list, for example. A giveaway campaign will motivate people to enter your store and shop.
- Create a coupon. Coupons are a surefire way to lure visitors in, whether it’s 20% off or 70% off. Make the coupon accessible only through your website, so customers can come your way and find themselves shopping.
- Buy one, get one deal. It doesn’t matter if you sell clothes, cosmetics, furniture, or greenery; most people are more inclined to buy when they know they’re getting something for free. At the very least, people will come to check out your website and learn what the deal is all about.
Creating the sale campaign is only the first step. It would be best if you had a sound promotion plan to back your campaigns up, or you can end up running down lost roads. That’s where marketing promotions step in. Whether you conduct your advertising efforts via email marketing, social media, or other, make sure to combine a creative sales campaign with strong promotional efforts to have the formula for successful growth.
Make Sure That Your Online Store Is Mobile-Responsive
As the share of mobile eCommerce sales in total eCommerce sales has increased from 52% market share in 2018 to the current 67%, mobile shopping accounts for over 30% of all online purchases worldwide. There’s no indication that mobile commerce growth is bound to stop anytime soon.
As an online merchant, you have to ensure that your online store’s website is mobile-friendly so that customers can make purchases, no matter what type of device they’re using. Online sellers should develop their websites according to operating systems’ guidelines and requirements and use design templates that are already set to be mobile-friendly to make their site device-friendly.
For instance, always opt for vertical designs over horizontal designs to scroll and view your content on phone screens. Make sure to test your store’s mobile responsiveness by loading it onto your phone and browsing through it for errors now and then.
Final Words
Possibly the most prominent way to grow your online business is to put the effort in. Whether it’s creating original and highly valuable content that will engage the audiences and help you rank better in search engines, organizing and promoting sales campaigns, or just working on your website’s backend, it takes a lot of work to become a success story.
Put the work in, identify and utilize the techniques and strategies that work the best for your business, and become great at what you do.