Running an ecommerce business can be both exciting and challenging. With the rise of online shopping, the competition in the ecommerce space has become more fierce than ever before. As a result, it's crucial to implement effective strategies to grow your ecommerce business and stand out in the crowded marketplace. 

In this blog post, we'll share some tips and tricks on how to grow your ecommerce business, increase your revenue, and build a loyal customer base. Whether you're a new ecommerce store owner or an established online retailer, these tips will help you take your business to the next level.

 

The 3-step strategy to grow your eCommerce business

Growing your eCommerce business comes down to a 3-step strategy. First you attract customers to your store, then you try to keep them in your store by making it an enjoyable experience. This will hopefully lead them to the 3rd step - convert them to buy and keep coming back to your brand consistently. 

Lets go through each step in the strategy: 

 

1. Customer Acquisition

What is customer acquisition?

Customer acquisition refers to the process of gaining new customers for a business. It involves the activities and strategies used by a company to attract and convert potential customers into paying customers. The goal of customer acquisition is to increase the number of customers a business has and generate more revenue. This process typically involves a variety of digital marketing and sales tactics, such as paid social media marketing, search engine optimization, paid search, email marketing, and more. 

What are the channels for customer acquisition?

There are many different channels that can be used to acquire new customers. Here are the main channels that brands use: 

1. Paid Advertising: This can be in the form of pay-per-click (PPC) ads, social media ads, display ads, or other types of online ads.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This involves optimizing your website and its content to appear higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords.
3. Social Media Marketing: This involves using social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok and Instagram to reach and engage with potential customers.
4. Content Marketing: This involves creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and engaging content to attract and retain a specific target audience.
5. Email Marketing: This involves sending promotional or informational messages directly to a customer's inbox.
6. Influencer Marketing: This involves partnering with influential people in your industry or niche to promote your products or services.
7. Referral Marketing: This involves encouraging existing customers to refer new customers to your business through incentives or rewards.

What are the best customer acquisition strategies? 

1. Run ads to your target market: Before starting the marketing campaign, it's important to define your target audience. This will help you create more effective marketing messages and campaigns. Then you find the right channels appropriate to run ads directed at potential customers.
2. Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Optimizing your website for search engines can help drive organic traffic to your website and generate leads.
3. Create Valuable Content: Creating valuable content that educates or entertains your target audience can help attract potential customers and build your brand.
4. Leverage Social Media: Use social media to connect with potential customers and share your content. Consider using paid social media advertising but also utilising influencers or microinfluencers to showcase your products. 
5. Offer Special Deals and Promotions: Offering special deals and promotions can incentivize potential customers to try your product or service.
6. Build Referral or loyalty Programs: Referral programs can incentivize existing customers to refer new customers to your business and loyalty programs help to build trust and commitment with your customers. 
7. Use Email Marketing: Email marketing can help you stay in touch with your target audience and keep them informed about new products, services, or promotions.
8. Provide Excellent Customer Service: Providing excellent customer service can help build trust with your customers and turn them into loyal customers who refer others to your business.

How to measure success of customer acquisition strategy?

Here the metrics to use when measuring the success of your customer acquisition strategy: 

1. Cost per Acquisition (CPA): This metric measures how much it costs to acquire a new customer. It's calculated by dividing the total cost of the campaign by the number of new customers acquired.
2. Return on Investment (ROI): This metric measures the return on the investment made in customer acquisition efforts. It's calculated by dividing the total revenue generated by the campaign by the total cost of the campaign.
3. Conversion Rate: This metric measures the percentage of visitors who take a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a contact form.
4. Customer Acquisition Cost Payback Period (CAC Payback Period): This metric measures the time it takes for the revenue generated from a new customer to offset the cost of acquiring that customer.
5. Customer Retention Rate: This metric measures the percentage of customers who continue to use your product or service over a specific period of time.
6. Net Promoter Score (NPS): This metric measures how likely your customers are to recommend your product or service to others.

It's important to track these metrics regularly and make adjustments to your customer acquisition strategy based on the results. By monitoring these metrics, you can identify what's working well and what needs improvement to optimize your customer acquisition efforts.

 

Want to learn how to calculate ROAS (Return on ad spend)? Read more here. 

 

2. Customer experience

What is customer experience (CX)?

Customer experience refers to the overall experience a customer has with a business or brand, from initial contact through the entire customer journey. It includes all interactions, touchpoints, and engagements a customer has with a brand, online and offline such as website browsing, social media channels, customer support, product usage, sales assistants, and more. 

Why is CX important for your business?

A positive CX is crucial for building customer loyalty, increasing revenue, and improving brand reputation. By providing an exceptional experience, businesses can create satisfied customers who become advocates for their brand and drive revenue growth. 

Customer experience strategies:

1. Conversion rate optimization

An effective method for a better customer experience is conversion rate optimization (CRO) which is the process of improving the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a newsletter. The goal of CRO is to increase the conversion rate, which is the ratio of visitors who take the desired action to the total number of visitors.

Some common techniques for CRO include:

• Simplifying forms and checkout processes
• Improving website speed and performance
• Optimizing call-to-action buttons
• Using social proof, such as customer reviews and testimonials
• Personalizing website content and offers
• Using persuasive language and storytelling

2. Personalization

Customers appreciate personalized experiences that cater to their preferences and needs. Businesses can use customer data to personalize product recommendations, marketing messages, and communication channels.

3. Omnichannel approach 

Customers want to engage with businesses on their preferred channels, whether it's social media, email, phone, or in-person. An omnichannel approach ensures that customers can access consistent information and support across all channels.

4. Customer journey mapping

Mapping out the customer journey helps businesses identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. By understanding the customer journey, businesses can create targeted interventions to improve the CX.

5. Proactive communication 

Businesses can proactively communicate with customers to keep them informed about order status, shipping updates, and other relevant information. Using things like email, social media channels, chatbot etc. can help to support better communication. This helps build trust and reduces customer anxiety.

How to measure success?

1. Webstore analytics. Use the store analytics and/or outside tool to see customer behaviour onsite e.g., bounce rate, how long they spend time on site, and click-through rate.
2. Collect feedback from the customers and plan the whole journey carefully step by step. Net Promoter Score (NPS) can be used to figure out the likelihood that the customers will recommend their experience to others.
3. Conversion rate. How many of the customers are making the purchase or other desired action.
4. Do A/B testing between different sites in your store and see which version of the site performs best. Then you can see what works best for your customers.

 

3. Customer retention

What is customer retention? 

Customer retention refers to the ability of a business to retain its existing customers over a period of time. It is the process of keeping customers engaged and satisfied with a company's products or services, and encouraging them to continue doing business with the company.

Why is customer retention important?

Customer retention is important because it is more cost-effective to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones. Retaining existing customers also increases customer lifetime value, as loyal customers tend to make repeat purchases and refer others to the business.  Additionally, loyal customers are more likely to provide positive feedback and help to improve a business's reputation.

Customer retention strategies

Many of the customer retention strategies are similar to the ones of customer acquisition and experience strategies. Offering valuable content and building a community with loyalty programs and subscription services is a great way to engage your customers long-term. By providing excellent customer service with these different strategies, is all a part of the holistic customer experience that will create a lasting imprint on your customers. This will build trust with your customers and they are more likely to come back to you for another positive experience. 

How to measure success?

1. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): This metric measures the total value a customer brings to your business over their lifetime. It's calculated by multiplying the average value of a sale by the number of repeat purchases and the average retention time.
2. Customer retention rate: This is a measure of how many customers continue to do business with you over time. If your customer retention rate is high, it suggests that customers are satisfied with your products or services.
3. Customer reviews and ratings: Online reviews and ratings can provide valuable insights into customer experience. You can monitor review sites, social media platforms, and other online sources to see what customers are saying about your brand.

Listen to Victoria Beech from Yotpo Solutions talk about best loyalty strategies: 

Woolman's Growth Services 

Woolman's Growth Services can be divided into three categories: customer acquisition, customer experience and customer lifetime value. Growth services provide the base for the successful growth of your Shopify D2C e-commerce business as we always relay our decisions and suggestions to your data. As Woolman’s customer, you can choose the best operating model for your brand. It is possible to outsource growth services for us to handle, we can provide consultation for your brand and let your team handle the hands-on work or something in between. Now let's take a look at the selection of services our growth services include.

How do Woolman Growth Services work?

We operate in an agile data-based sprint model in all of our services. The key is identifying your current situation, needs and goals and developing a holistic and personalised continuous improvement plan to help you achieve your targets. You can choose the services your brand needs or we can help to decide where it is best to start your growth journey. The services can be chosen from different categories or you can focus on just one category at a time. It is possible to change the number of services along our partnership.

We work with a sprint model, so we have regular meetings to go through the results and based on the data the next steps are defined.

We specialise in Meta, Google, Tiktok, Pinterest advertising, technical SEO, content analysis, competitor analysis and UGC.

For customer experience we use heatmaps and session recording to analyse your customers' behaviour in detail and develop and execute a plan to make it better. Developing the customer experience includes for example SEO and theme development depending on your current store, goals and our team's observations. Utilizing product reviews and user-generated content well will generate social proof for your brand which helps the customers make the purchase decision. 

For retention we use Klaviyo email marketing and automations, SMS marketing, loyalty programs such as Yotpo, customer segmentation and retargeting on different channels such as Meta and Google. The aim is to benefit from your existing customers which are efficient because the customers have already shown their interest towards your brand! It is possible to choose one or more services based on your organisation's needs and goals. 

Why Woolman?

• Expertise in Shopify, Shopify Plus, e-commerce and D2C business – Your partner in development and growth
• Talented data know-how and our own data platform Ellis where all your important D2C commerce data is united into one platform
• A holistic service provider – you can have all the services you need from one service provider e.g., store development, data expertise and growth services!