A quick rundown of tested and trusted strategies and hacks for growing your ecommerce business.

“Growth Hacking” is fast becoming an ecommerce buzzword. Almost every content you’ll find online about ecommerce businesses will reference some growth hacking tactics or the other. And you’re also aware of the concept, which is why you’re here to learn how to use it.

Growth hacking means analysing digital environments and creating strategies to fuel specific activities that improve your brand. In ecommerce, growth hacks provide ways to increase online sales and market share. 

But to apply this idea to ecommerce businesses, you must adopt a relentless focus on development. You’ll then act on it by developing and running proven ecommerce growth strategies to push the venture.

Now, that brings us to the issue of how you can grow your ecommerce business. So in the following sections, we’ll consider powerful ecommerce growth hacks to boost your business performance. 

Ecommerce Growth Hacking Tactics to Use Outside Your Website

You can take two primary approaches to boost your ecommerce conversion numbers. The first involves the off-site measures that effectively reach potential customers and encourage them to do business with you. 

(MMM) Marketing and More Marketing

No business can grow or survive in today’s digital market without a comprehensive marketing process. So, not doing marketing for your business is primarily you having value and not showing it to the world. It’ll only be visible to the few people around you, and you won’t make much of it.

Fortunately, marketing has become much easier and well-diversified thanks to increased internet accessibility. Your marketing efforts are no longer restricted to word-of-mouth recommendations and billboards. 

Now, you have several more effective ways to advertise your ecommerce business while limiting your spending. Some of them are;

Google Ads

Google offers two distinct ad platforms to enable markets reach more people with their products and services. You can use Google Search or Google Shopping ads to promote your ecommerce business.

Thanks to their functionality, Google search ads are the more popular of the two options. So, you can use them to advertise anything from events to products, services, or even your birthday. Google shopping ads, on the other hand, are primarily for B2C businesses. I.e. Google specifically created them to target shoppers; its other name is Google Product Listing ads.

We recommend you incorporate both into your ecommerce growth hacking tactics. So, invest your paid ad budget in a mix of Google search and shopping ads. That’ll maximise your opportunities on both search ads and shoppers’ lists.

But of course, it’s not enough to pay for ads; you must optimise them for a specific target market. Below are a few tips to help you with that.

• Bid aggressively on relevant specific keywords/Keyphrases
• Make the ads focus more on your store’s bestsellers
• Regularly analyse and optimise your product feed to stay ahead performance-wise

Social Media Ads

Social media ads do the same thing as Google ads but on social media platforms. These adds will help you reach a wider audience on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. 

The advantage of social ads is you can reach your targets even without them searching specific keywords. That’s because social platforms constantly study their user’s interests and digital footprint. They analyse the data and use it to curate a list of potential customers to target with your ads. So, social media platforms automatically display your ads to their users that fit specific demography.

However, social ads can have the opposite of the desired effect if you use them poorly. Social media users may find the ads interruptive and annoying, which may cause them to have a negative perception of your business.  

Email Funnels

Email funnels let you curate, nurture, convert and retain customers in a series of well-calculated processes. The first stage includes the lead generation process, during which you get interested prospectives to sign up for your email list. 

After that, you proceed to the nurturing stage. Here, you’ll consistently send the prospects newsletters and promotional offers to arouse their interest in your products.

If your content strategy is excellent through the first two stages, you won’t encounter much resistance as you attempt to make the prospective buyer patronise your business. And that’s what the third stage is about; it’s where you convert the prospects into customers. 

The last step of the funnel primarily deals with customer retention. It involves encouraging the customers to make subsequent purchases after the first one.

Email marketing is undeniably effective when done efficiently. Statistics also show that 73% of millennials prefer email correspondence. Up to 56% of UK consumers purchase products after receiving a marketing email. Not to mention, it’s also beneficial for retargeting customers.

Retargeting Ads

Most buyers won’t make buying decisions immediately, especially when shopping online. Instead, they want to first compare items from different stores or rethink their needs to avoid impulsive buying.

However, while rethinking their choices or comparing prices, they can forget the items they viewed on your ecommerce store. And, that’s where retargeting ads come in. 

Using retargeting ads is one of the best ecommerce growth hacking strategies because you’re primarily targeting people who already showed interest in your products but are yet to buy for some reason. This customer category only needs a little nudge which an excellent retargeting strategy will provide.

You can send retargeting ads via email if you have their email addresses. But if you don’t, other marketing avenues such as google display and social media ads are also suitable for this purpose.

Build a Brand Reputation

Creating a positive reputation for your brand is a powerful growth hack for ecommerce businesses. Think of top brands like eBay and Tesco; they don’t have to do much advertising to get customers flooding their stores. That’s because they’ve built solid reputations over the years. Doing the same may not push your business to the same level as eBay, but it’s sure to make it grow. 

Guest posts With Backlinks to Your Store

An excellent way to grow your reputation is to post helpful content on blogs/social media and add backlinks to your webpage. For example, you can write some insightful snippets somewhere popular and then include a link to your website’s original content.

So, as people click on the backlink, it’ll lead them to your webpage, which will translate into more visits for you. Plus, when you constantly post relevant, helpful content, your audience will recognise you as an authority on the subject. You can then use that to promote your brand identity.

Get Good Ratings on Review Websites

Getting good ratings from review websites is one growth hacking tactic most ecommerce business owners tend to underrate. 89% of shoppers check reviews online about products before buying them. So, you may lose potential customers because you don’t have a feature on any review website or a poor rating.

Hence, you should do your best to be on the positive side of such lists. Understandably, you can’t put yourself on the websites. However, you can work your way into it. And you can only achieve that by prioritising customer satisfaction. Also, encourage your customers to leave kind reviews if they enjoy your products. 

Use Popularity Strategy

A popularity strategy involves activities that spark widespread engagement with your brand. Generally, the purpose of marketing is to create these effects. 

But there are other ways you can quickly draw people’s attention to your brand without using traditional marketing tactics. For example, consider the following ideas for a popularity strategy.

Do Strategic Giveaways

People love freebies, so they’ll always create a buzz wherever they find free value. Hence, doing giveaways is a great growth hacking tactic to draw attention to your ecommerce brand and increase your popularity.

However, be careful not to do a non-effective giveaway. That’s what happens when you do it without using a strategic approach.

For example, giving away big-ticket items like apple gadgets will draw attention. However, most of your audience probably already have the latest iPhone/iPad. So, it may not encourage active participation from many of your targets.

Then again, the audience may prefer products from direct competitors to Apple Inc. Hence those items may not mean much to them.  

Hence you should study your audience and choose an item that most of them will love to have as your prize. An excellent choice will be products that hold relevant value to your target market and will give them reasons to continue patronising you. Those can be sample products, reward-based incentives, or loyalty rewards.

Find Your Influencers

Influencer marketing is tailor fit for the ecommerce industry. Hence, it’s one of the best growth hacking strategies for ecommerce businesses. It primarily involves getting an influencer to positively portray your products to their followers. And since ecommerce products are mostly tangibles, influencer endorsements are easier and more effective.

For example, if you run an ecommerce fashion brand, you can propose a partnership where the influencer wears your designs. Their followers are sure to see it in their pictures and video uploads. This strategy is effective because several people like to copy their favourite influencers. So, if they see the influencers using merchandise from your brand, they may also start using your brand items.

Run a Referral Program

Giving referral rewards encourages buyers to recommend your offerings to others. Interestingly, you don’t need to offer a prize to get people to tell others about your products. A study by Texas Tech University showed that 83% of consumers are willing to refer friends and family to a brand they had a positive experience with. 

However, not all of them do. Why? Because you didn’t remind them to do it. So, always encourage your existing customers to tell others about you. And if that’s not enough, then you should incentivise it. Let the buyers know they’ll get some value in exchange for every new customer they bring.

Ecommerce Growth Hacking Tactics to Use On Your Website or Ecommerce Store

The ecommerce business growth hacking tactics mentioned above are primarily for off-site campaigns. But you still have some work to do on your website to make your growth campaign more comprehensive. 

Let’s consider some on-site growth hacking tips for scaling your business in the UK market and globally.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is another term that’s fast becoming a marketing buzzword. But buzzword or not, its ability to boost ecommerce growth and conversion numbers is undeniable. And the best part is that it can be completely free if you know how to do it yourself.

However, this system has a slight issue; there’s no easy way to execute a comprehensive SEO strategy. That’s because SEO is primarily optimising your website to show up higher in search engine reports. So, it involves several aspects and depends on the search engine algorithms.

Fortunately, one strategy has proven most effective for SEO and ecommerce growth over the years. And that’s keywords strategy.

How to Use Keywords Strategy

Using keywords strategy is all about creating relevant text content and littering them with specific phrases shoppers use to browse for items online. For example, shoppers may search for items using keywords like “where to buy affordable sneakers”. 

A keyword strategy application, in this case, will be you putting up an article about sneakers on your website and mentioning the phrase in it a few times.

Another good example is this blog post; you probably found this page by entering the phrase “ecommerce growth hacking tactics” on google. That’s how keyword strategy works, and you can apply it to bring people to your website.

But to do that, you will first identify common keywords people use to search for items online. Then, you’ll infuse them in relevant content, which you’ll post on your website’s blog.

Improve The User Experience In Your Store

A major deal breaker, especially on ecommerce websites, is below-par customer experience. If visitors have difficulty doing what they want on your website, you can’t count on their continued patronage.

Make the Navigation Smooth

Smooth navigation is an easy way to make a buyer stay longer on your website and eventually buy something. A customer having difficulty finding their way around your web store will probably leave out of frustration without making the purchase. 

But the one having a hitch-free experience on your web page will be more likely to place an order before leaving.

This growth hacking tactic works particularly well for getting window shoppers to order from your ecommerce store. A fluid system enables them to browse through several categories quickly. Plus, it gives them little time to rethink their impulses. 

Of course, impulse buying is not guaranteed business, but it’s an excellent place to start. For example, if someone buys an item from you impulsively, they may come back to repurchase it if they enjoyed it.

However, creating a smooth navigation system on your website isn’t about populating your product pages with links. Instead, you should make it easy for the visitor to move from one page to the other exact page they want.

Make the Search Bar Obvious

This point further buttresses the previous one. Search bars primarily serve one purpose: to enable visitors to quickly find what they’re looking for on your web store. 

A common mistake many developers make when designing ecommerce websites is they hide the search bar behind some fancy icons and styles. Yes, the icons look nice, but they don’t make it any easier for customers to find what they want on the website.

Most customers don’t want to take their precious time checking every category on your website before finding something. Therefore, it’s better to simplify the process by including a dynamic search bar at a prominent place on the web page. Needless to say, that should be at the top of their screens.

Optimise Your Website Speed

Slow-loading web pages can lead to dire consequences for your ecommerce business. For example, you must have been in a situation where you hastily left a web page because it took forever to load.

So, think about the number of people who will quit midway browsing through your website because it’s not showing up fast enough. This scenario is why increasing page load speed is an obvious growth hacking tactic for your ecommerce store.

Then again, fast-loading pages are good for SEO and search ranking on Google. On the other hand, slower load time will negatively affect your page indexing on search engines. 

The best way to speed up your website is eliminating elements that take longer to load. These elements often include heavy videos, images and other content. But, of course, you shouldn’t remove the items outrightly. Instead, substitute them for lighter ones.

Make the Order Confirmation and Checkout Seamless

Several buyers go through product search and selection only to turn back at the final stage. Why? Because something put them off while they were trying to check out their items. 

One of the biggest reasons customers bail at the last minute is the checkout system. For example, unfamiliarity with the payment system may discourage the buyer from purchasing the item. That’s why you should diversify your checkout and payment frameworks to include as many methods customers typically use.

You should also make it easy for customers to confirm their orders. You should practically take the work out of it for them. Make it such that a click is enough to complete order confirmation. Your customers will appreciate it.

Build Trust and Confidence

Trust, confidence, and loyalty are essential things you must develop in your customers to grow your brand. Unfortunately, most people ignore this growth hack even though most successful ecommerce businesses regularly leverage it to increase online sales. 

You should build trust by consistently providing commodities that satisfy the buyers. That’ll bolster the customers’ confidence in you to provide good value for them every time. Customer loyalty then comes once you’ve earned their trust and confidence. 

Display Customer Review

Most users won’t trust what you say about your products. You’re selling the products and unless you’re running some crazy campaign, it’s natural to showcase only the positives. 

However, an actual buyer who has used the product can give a more honest opinion. And prospective customers will love to see such views before making purchase decisions.

Hence you should always get feedback from customers and display them prominently on your website. Seeing that others have used your products and have good things to say about them will encourage potential customers to buy.

Be Intentional about Ecommerce Business Growth

The growth hacking tips above should form the foundation of your bid to conquer the UK ecommerce market. However, simply learning how to grow your ecommerce business isn’t enough. It’s more important to learn sustainability. You may temporarily increase your ecommerce sales. But it may not last long if there’s no solid foundation or support system.

Axis Shift is an experienced investment team looking to partner with underperforming ecommerce businesses. Our goal? To your ecommerce outfit into a profit powerhouse. Contact us today to discuss a prospective partnership.