Q&A: What's the best way to grow your eCommerce business?

The increasing importance of high value content to customers has become a key strategy point for businesses committed to their customers’ experience and eCommerce growth. Whether it's gold-standard product information, relevant articles or leveraging data to simplify the buying journey, it's a shared vision and buy-in across the enterprise that clearly drives success.

Here are six ways to increase your eCommerce sales. We actually also discuss these with the digital experience experts over at Episerver. So, if you're more of a video consumer, you might want to check out the video discussion via the button below...

1. The amount of ROI you gain from eCommerce depends on how well you know your business processes, not your choice of solution

It all starts with knowing what you or the businesses you work with are trying to achieve at a granular level. For instance, think about what aspects of the business work well now and what might be holding you back operationally.

You’ll see, then, that it’s not about what eCommerce solution you’ve chosen to work with. It’s how the business pushes itself forward and best leverages that technology.

Then, you can start working on tactics to boost your ROI.

2. Adopt a customer-centric mindset to drive eCommerce success

To truly drive eCommerce success, you need to build your experience around what your customers are trying to achieve. These include:

• Marrying your online-offline experiences
• Creating a better exp-driven approach with relevant content/info delivered to the customer
• Offering individual-level personalisation
• Providing a consistent brand experience across devices/channels

The most successful businesses are those that interact with their customers in the way that they (the customers) want. 

3. It’s important to get buy-in from all the teams involved in your eCommerce strategy, regardless of hierarchy

When it comes to strategical business changes and projects (like a new eCommerce strategy), what typically happens in most businesses is it starts with the senior stakeholders. By the time it trickles down to the teams who actually do the implementing, much of the original messaging is lost – sort of like a game of Chinese whispers.

Because that messaging has been lost, your employees can find it difficult to buy into what the changes are and why they’re happening. This then makes it tricky to ensure seamless, excellent eCommerce delivery – which is exactly why you need to get their buy-in.

You can do this by ensuring your key teams are kept in the loop from the start. For example, rather than only having senior stakeholders in those initial few meetings, why not have a member from each team that will be involved in the project in as well? And encourage cross-team collaboration too so you can get a range of expert opinions.

These two approaches keep the relevant teams directly in the loop, reduce the chances of misunderstandings and ensure your vision is retained. 

Discover some easy tips to get your team's buy-in here.

4. Good product management can ensure your creative teams are gelled together to release powerful, customer-centric product messaging

There’s a natural disparity in brand messaging for businesses who sell a wide range of product ranges – such as ones that sell toys, furniture, appliances, gardening and apparel all in one go (like department stores). It’s difficult to have the same content messaging spanning across the entire operation when you offer so many types of products, some of which may be conflicting.

However, customer-centric messaging is important if you want to provide excellent customer experience.

This is where good product management (and investing in a PIM system) comes in.

5. Deeply analyse your customer behaviours and tailor your content based off that, rather than a hunch

Personalisation is one strategy that’s really driving eCommerce growth. And to truly provide your customers with personalised, relevant content, you need to know what makes them tick.

Here are a few things you could look out for when analysing your customer behaviour:

• What do they look at?
• What are they interested in?
• What topics do they like?
• What types of content do they like to consume (such as videos, blogs, animations, photos)?
• What do they buy?

Then you can use those customer behaviour metrics to tailor your content to your individual customers.

It also helps to analyse your content at a topic level. You can understand what it is that people really want and base your future content off that, not what you think they want. What is it that people are really coming to your site for? It can help drive content strategy and the types of content people are actually interacting with.

6. Know your customers better than they know themselves and be genuine about wanting to help them

Customer expectations are always changing but COVID-19 has really put a spanner in the works. The way people shop is never going to be the way it was before, regardless of the sector or whether they’re B2B or B2C. Which is precisely why businesses need to start being on the ball with knowing their customers’ individual needs, wants and desires.

These include:

• Allowing customers to purchase goods and services in a way that suits them. At the moment, it's online
• Offering customers a variety of methods to get in touch with your customer service team
• Ensuring your website is offering the best online buying experience possible. That means no error pages, slow loading times, complicated navigation and so on
• Humanising your brand so your customers still feel like they're interacting with another person

The blog discusses how the eCommerce landscape is changing in more detail.

Be more customer-centric if you want to improve satisfaction and boost eCommerce sales

As we mentioned earlier, we cover all of these points in more depth with Episerver. Led by Thamar Nazir, we’re joined by Chris Purcell, Product Strategy Manager at Episerver, and our very own James Baker, Digital Product and Customer Experience Lead at Columbus UK.

We really recommend checking out the video - there are some great industry insights from Chris and James!