Competition is always good but not always fair. When you have companies that are armed with billions of dollars and tens of thousands of employees, how do you, a small ecommerce site, compete? The answers are available and within your reach and can make you an ecommerce giant killer.
Reward Customers for Their Loyalty
Perhaps the most important area of your business is taking care of your existing customers. When someone makes a purchase from you they are the most valuable VIP in your entire business because they are the most definite path to additional sales and customers. This is why you need to let them know that you know this and appreciate them. The best way to do this is to reward them for their loyalty. You can do this in several ways which include: discounts, free goods, exclusive offers or even gaining access to products first or to ones that are in limited supply. This should also extend further to customers who provide positive reviews and often contribute with comments of any kind. You can also offer rewards for customers who simply visit the site. Remember shoppers will see activity by current customers as an indication that your company is doing well. Of course any comments need to be positive so you should respond to any negative comments immediately and correct any complaints as soon as possible.
Maintain Your Marketing Budget
It’s very easy to lose sight of how your marketing budget helps your business. You put out ads and purchase space through Google and your responses are low do not seem to be improving. So you question if this money is better spent on some other area. From using social media to offering deals that many customers will end up talking about via word-of-mouth, always keep in mind just how important your marketing efforts are to maintaining a financially healthy business. Advertising should never be looked at as an expense or a drain on your profits. A marketing budget is an investment. It should be viewed in the context of a necessary tool that will help you reach your goals. You should certainly monitor what you spend and put in processes to test how your marketing is being received, but you must market in order to get your message out about your company and products. Think about tying conversion tracking codes to your marketing efforts to see where customers are coming from, which demographics are responding, and what attracted them. Marketing should create a return for you and you should calculate the return on your marketing investment with profits, not sales.
Use an Ecommerce Solution to Create Your Ecommerce Store
Building and maintaining your own ecommerce store in this day and age is a monumental task that will consume a lot of your time. The best approach is to work with an ecommerce solution that can provide everything you need to get started quickly and maintain your site flawlessly.
Need help but don’t know where to start? Shopify is known for its ability to assist in setting up an ecommerce store. They are ideal to work with, as ecommerce providers handle the technology and let you focus on the products you are selling and how you’re selling them. An ecommerce solution maintains every aspect of your store from the look to your checkout and even provides a payment platform for you.. You can pick from hundreds of themes that are filtered by industry. So if you want to sell art, there are dozens of art themes from ecommerce providers like Shopify that you can use.
Using these services, you can have an ecommerce art store, or any time of ecommerce store, in no time. Just make sure to keep abreast of your marketing budget and reach out to your existing customers on a continuous basis and you should be on way to competing with the ecommerce giants in your niche.
