Every business reaches a point where the once-explosive growth in sales from year to year slows down. While many owners see this trend as a signal that their store has reached adulthood, others see it as adolescence, and know that their store is ready for driver’s education and prom, with years of growth still yet ahead.
Hasty merchants often jump to their feet after the second year of seeing a similar plateau. Many disassemble their stores to find a source of hemorrhaging revenues, or look for ways to trim processes. While somewhat helpful for reducing costs, trimming fat will never result in growth.
For a majority of businesses facing these changes, the common source of inertia comes from reaching a ceiling within their market. Every business can have hundreds of markets, and every one can (and will) change constantly. Often, the population initially identified as the ideal target market on day one may be just a fringe few of your current regular shoppers.
Stretching and reaching for further brand awareness should be a constant effort, but unfortunately it is commonly found on the backburner of many small businesses. This occurs for a variety of reasons, the most common of which is the limited understanding of marketing channels that are available. While every store will have unique needs and shoppers, there are a set of blueprints and a toolbox for every online storeowner. We’re here to put a spotlight on some you’ll need when looking to grow.
Step 1: Explore New Marketing Channels
When you’re picking which tools to add to your new toolbox, look back at your first strategy. A majority of business plans focus on identifying how to repay any costs incurred during opening, but in those early hours it’s easy to overlook the long-term plan. Greeting your new markets will take equal dedication, and won’t come immediately; therefore, your resources need to be ready for all of the future.Immediate return - the quick turn-around:
Comparison shopping engines (CSEs):
These are product-focused image advertisements that show in search results on most of the major search engines or shopping sites.
- Google Shopping / Product Listing Ads
- Bing Product Ads
- Amazon Marketplace
- com (Now eBayCommerceNetwork)
These are customizable, text-based ads that are triggered by your carefully-selected group of keywords and phrases. They also show on all major search engines.
Mid-range, the day-to-day:Affiliate Networking
These are networks with thousands of online merchants waiting to stock their shelves with your products. Sellers pay these networks a commission only when traffic funneled from their site generates a sale in your store.
Email MarketingBuilding an email list of thousands will take time. You’ll end up with direct access to your most engaged market: people who are opting in to be directly contacted with news and offers.
Blogging
Keeping your store’s blog updated with industry news and helpful how-tos helps shoppers discover new products and buy confidently. Fresh content also makes you more relevant to a shopper’s search and more appealing to search engines.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is lightly used for organic traffic, yet it’s a growing network of paid advertising that lets you engage directly with your shoppers and really showcase your store’s stamina.
The Long Term:Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO generates easy-to-read, helpful, and original content on your site’s pages, and lets you show off when a user searches for something on their engine of choice.
Landing Pages
As your market grows, the interests of your new shoppers will differ from those of your former customer base. Creating new and unique landing pages will allow you to target new keywords in organic & paid search. Well-organized landing pages also craft relevant content and provide attractive offers for your new shoppers.
Marketing is and always will be a critical piece of your attack plan when you’re working to grow. If you’re already utilizing these strategies, keep in mind that each one is programed and targeted to work at capturing a specific audience. As such, they can be expanded to reach new users. Don’t be afraid to experiment! Try new keywords, meet new affiliates and develop new content for your site. After all, no matter how much data is packed in to it, ALL marketing is an experiment to see what will work best.
Step 2 : Know Your Audience
When setting out to overcome a plateau, the most important thing to realize is that the first market you identified is only one of thousands in the world. To reach out to new shoppers, you will need to understand them as well as you understand your own business: because if all goes according to plan, new shoppers will be your business. Over time of tracking activity, an analytics tool will be bursting with information regarding traffic and sales. Any storeowner worth his or her weight in gold will be able to rattle off the profile of their average shopper. Examining their analytics, storeowners can also identify fringe markets. Whether the issue is lower traffic or users with poor engagement on their site, owners can work to build a new target profile and get over a sales plateau.
Google Analytics: This is the standard for visibility of on-site behavior and traffic sources. Google Analytics integrates seamlessly with any site, and provides detailed information regarding a shopper’s behavior, demographic information and point of origin.
Crazy Egg: Crazy Egg is a unique tool that hides itself backstage on your website and monitors every user. After a week it’s capable of producing reports showing every click on your pages, heat maps of user interaction and visibility to where browsers are scrolling on your pages.
HubSpot: A suite of analytics & marketing tools designed to give you feedback not only on traffic patterns, but on your marketing efforts and content writing. An immersive dashboard allows you to modify, review and post to your website and its content all while providing direction for improvements.
Step 3: Revisit Your Current Markets:
The average online store will make two thirds of their revenue from returning shoppers: a population that makes up just one third of the entire site’s traffic. To put it simply, returning shoppers will typically spend more than first-time shoppers.
Because of this, remarketing is one of the most powerful tools in the online marketing arsenal. It is designed and engineered to encourage users to return to sites they have previously explored as well as reinforce brand awareness. In the hands of an online store owner, remarketing can be used as a reminder of great deals, and can also be a perfect way to entice departed users who weren’t impressed the first time around. When a shopper makes a purchase, storeowners can offer complementing products, visibility to other offers or simply reinforce their brand name. Did you know that in 2014 98% of all American households already had a toothbrush or an oral-hygiene device of some kind, and yet the annual revenue for Colgate for the year was $17.4 Billion?
Regardless of your product, every customer can be a repeat customer who will buy more confidently.
Step 4: Know Your Competition
Once you’ve begun investigating a new market, take a good look at your competition. We’re living in an age where opening your doors for business means you’re in an arena with every store in the world, not just the local guys. No matter who you are, you have competition.
Online shopping allows users to compare and make purchasing decisions at an aggressive and alarming speed. While the driving factor behind every purchase is the product itself, there are always more factors behind a shopper’s decision to complete their transaction. Many users will scour the Internet to compare prices, find freebees like shipping or rewards and inspect reviews for each store.
Prices aside, how do you stack up with your competition?
- Is your site easy to navigate? Is theirs easier?
- Is their product actually superior in any way?
- Do they offer more options for each product?
- Does their site feature a more streamlined checkout process?
- Are they using better/higher resolution product photos?
- Does their content gain the shopper’s trust through more engaging content?
- On whose site is it easier to find assistance on?
Step 5: Try New Tactics
It might be time for something new. It’s rare that a “one-size-fits-all” shirt is also a “one-size-looks-good-on-everyone” shirt. For online store owners, finding that something new can be as simple as carrying a supplementary product, offering a new service such as recurring orders or warranties or creating a bundle of well-paired existing products that shoppers frequently purchase together. It can also mean exploring different marketing channels not already utilized. One such channel that’s quickly gaining steam is email remarketing.
Email Marketing & Remarketing
Email marketing remains one of the most impactful tools in eCommerce. A subcategory of email marketing is email REmarketing. Utilizing email remarketing is another way to improve sales without the need for a major investment or change to the way you are currently doing business. An email marketing tool like Autoresponder Max can assist you with capturing lost sales or capitalize on missed opportunities. An example of this would be an abandoned cart email. Email remarketing gives merchants the ability to send potential buyers an email after they’ve abandoned their cart without making a purchase. Abandoned cart emails can be an effective way to prompt buyers to complete the transaction with minimal effort.Emails like these can be automated for a variety of event triggers: cross-sell opportunities, “time to reorder” reminders, first purchase acknowledgements, product reviews and more. Adding email remarketing to your toolbox might be the easiest—and most affordable—marketing tool you can implement. The return on investment is often very high, time commitment is low and the ability to stay in front of your customer base is priceless!
These five steps are designed to help business owners identify the opportunities that may otherwise go unnoticed, but they are far from a complete strategy. Weeks of planning may go into each aspect of marketing, and yet it’s still easy to overlook some of the most simple elements and outlets for growth!
Here at Autoresponder Max, we are excited to provide our clients with an affordable, simple and customizable email remarketing solution that has brought tremendous success to our existing clients. We would be happy to help you in implementing the right email campaigns to match the unique goals of your growing business. Contact us to learn more about the solution we can provide your eCommerce business, or schedule a demo today through our site: www.autorespondermax.com. Or feel free to contact us at sales@autorespondermax.com.