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September 29, 2023How to Start a Successful E-commerce Business: A Step-by-Step Guide
September 29, 2023In this day and age of advanced technology, numerous doors of opportunity have opened up, including the era of online businesses. Without a doubt, e-commerce is gradually gaining ground. By 2026, it’s projected to account for a staggering 24% of retail sales globally due to its explosive growth. This data unequivocally demonstrates how online commerce is progressively playing a larger role in world trade.
It’s no surprise that many people aim to establish an online business nowadays, which comes with its own set of challenges. This is where certain strategies can help you set up a successful online business.
In this blog, we have listed 10 proven strategies for growing your online business. So, what are you waiting for? Let’s dive right into it.
10 Proven Strategies to Grow Your Online Business
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO plays a significant role in the successful growth of an online business by utilizing keywords to increase traffic on your website and ultimately improve search engine rankings. Brands and agencies in the US will shell out approximately $79.27 billion for SEO services, according to a study in 2020. The following are some SEO tips you can use:
- Use keywords appropriately.
- Look for “suggested” keywords.
- Post helpful content related to the industry.
- Optimize meta titles and headings.
- Construct quality backlinks.
Be mindful of these tips when setting up a website for your online business, as SEO is proven to aid online businesses. 68% of search engines help in online business, and studies show that in regard to marketing, SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate.
High-quality Website
Having an eye-catching, pleasant-looking, efficient website and content can attract many customers to your Online business. You can take a look at some of the tips to improve your website and hence grow your online business:
Website Speed:
Improving website speed to run smoothly and efficiently makes it easier for customers to browse through, attracting traffic. You can improve your website speed by:
- Enabling browser caching.
- Minifying CSS and JavaScript files.
- Optimizing images.
Consistent Branding:
Aim to build and maintain a uniform visual identity throughout your website to make it more appealing. You can do so by doing the following things:
- Logos
- Unique brand colors
- Typography.
Color Scheme:
By using certain colors and keeping your palette colorful and open, you can attract many customers. Colors are linked to emotions and have a psychological effect on viewers. Therefore, choosing a suitable color scheme can turn out to be a significant advantage.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media is a huge platform to utilize to promote your online business. Social media marketing has become a prevalent and efficiently proven form of growing online businesses of all sorts. Make Social Media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter the center of your online marketing.
Build a Presence
You must make your mark on social media platforms and build a presence. The following are some ways to build a presence on social media:
- Post regularly.
- Interact with customers and address their queries sincerely.
- Maintain contact information and links to websites.
- Keep your content appealing. Attractive graphic images are preferred over text. LinkedIn articles with photos have a comment rate as high as 98%.
Social media marketing is a proven process that can help raise awareness for your brand, boost sales, and forge leads. A study by Statista concluded that 37.9% bought a product after noticing a social media advertisement.
Ad Campaigns
Ads are an effective way of growing your online business by raising awareness and boosting sales. In fact, business growth strategies are incomplete without Ad campaign strategies. Following are some of the finest approaches to getting satisfactory results from ad campaigns:
- Utilize ad extensions to increase click-through rates.
- Different sorts of ad extensions, like contact, location, etc., provide viewers with extra information, which makes them more likely to click on ads.
- Multiple ads can be tested via multivariates to work out the most suitable key variable combos.
Ads can increase brand awareness by 80%. There are different sorts of Ad campaigns.
Paid Advertisements
Paid Ads are the most common and popular form of advertising. They help you reach the target audience at the right time by focusing on peculiar demographics, interests, and behaviors.
For instance, Paid Google Ads are very popular and beneficial as well. Google Ads helps you by assessing target keywords and further improving the growth of customers. They also guide you regarding customer behavior, providing useful insights.
Know your Audience
Setting up an online business means focusing on attracting your target audience, which is of utmost importance. In order to know about your customer, there are certain things you should think about, such as:
- What do your customers look for? What do they find most attractive and important? Price? Quality? Or something else?
- What is the age bracket of your customer?
- Which social media platform attracts the most customers?
- How can you get customers to buy more products or engage more?
After finding the answers to such questions, you can build your business and marketing strategy accordingly to get more customers. Surveys, feedback forms, etc., are some of the many ways you can find the answers to the above-mentioned questions to get to know your customer better.
Customer Service
Customer service is an important aspect when it comes to online businesses interacting with and getting closer to customers by addressing their queries and troubles. It also makes your business more reliable, leading customers to stay loyal. Some features of quality customer service include:
- 24/7 call center/chat support.
- Reliable refund and replacement policies.
- Accurate explanation of return policies.
- Well-established relationships with courier services.
- Customer compensation in case of any inconveniences or unfair treatment.
These are just some ideas for adequate customer support. You should be cautious about matters regarding this since it is an important strategy for growing your online business.
Email Marketing
This form of marketing is powerful; it effectively drives traffic to your website and business, raises awareness, grows your audience, and builds your connection with customers. Email marketing is done by sending relevant emails to target customers, who may be your subscribers or potential customers. The inscribed way is how email marketing works:
- By creating emails with relevant content that focuses on a targeted audience.
- The email chains are then sent to these customers, and this ignites customer engagement and conversations which ultimately build brand awareness, generate sales, and grow your business.
Email marketing remains a powerful and effective means for growing all sorts of businesses. By 2023, it was shown that revenue generated by email marketing reached approximately $11 billion.
Influencer Marketing
In influencer marketing, you collaborate with well-known influencers to promote your brand/product. This is a good way of promoting and gaining an audience and awareness because influencers have a significant impact on their audience, especially nowadays. You can implement influencer marketing by
- Researching and determining which influencers are most influential in your related industry
- Be cautious of the fact that the influencer you collaborate with has a clean, good reputation
- After deciding which influencer is most suitable, contact them and form a partnership to promote your product, services, and brand.
Studies have shown that, regarding this form of marketing, 50% of consumers trust influencer-recommended products.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing utilizes mobile phones and platforms to grow your business. This is an era of technology, so ultimately, it’s best to use technological devices as much as possible. Mobile marketing involves various forms of marketing via mobile devices, such as:
- SMS marketing.
- Mobile app marketing, which also encourages businesses to create mobile-friendly websites, will flourish the business.
- Mobile apps encourage push notifications as well, which further promotes a business’ brand, product, and service.
Mobile marketing is learned to effectively increase the growth rate of online businesses. A recent data collection in January 2023 showed that in the last 6 months, 79% of smartphone users used a mobile phone to purchase products.
Showcase Customer Reviews
Showcasing can be an effective form of gaining new customers and their trust. When new customers browse through your product and service, they won’t be sure whether your product/services are reliable or not. However, by checking out customer reviews, they can trust that you have a certain credibility. Therefore, they may end up purchasing your product or services, which ultimately increases the audience, raises awareness, and helps you grow your business. It has been proven that around 95% of customers go through online reviews about a certain product before purchasing it. You can display customer reviews in numerous ways:
- Displaying reviews on your website’s home page/social media platform.
- Posting customer reviews by influencers on your website/social media.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are multiple strategies that have been proven to help grow online businesses. Implementing any or multiple of these strategies can effectively help promote your business. It’s best to research which strategy suits you best and results in the most progress so that you may implement it and grow your business accordingly.
FAQs
What is the best way to grow your online business?
There are a number of factors to consider if you want to grow your online business, such as improving SEO, enhancing customer experience, and building a good brand image.
How to gain more customers for an online business?
To gain more customers, you should adopt SEO optimization, social media marketing, and paid advertisements. This way, you can garner more attention and appeal to a wider audience.
Why is customer service important?
It’s important to focus on always improving your customer service so that you can improve your customer relationship with your brand. Your customers are the ones who keep your business going, so it’s important to keep them satisfied at all costs.
What is a high-quality website?
A high-quality website is a website consisting of unique content, good speed, an aesthetic color theme, and consistent branding.