Since the pandemic struck everyone is trying to build their business online to mitigate any loss in revenue that might come if physical stores close with a lockdown again this winter. Increased competition means increased costs, and often existing marketing strategies are not as effective now as they were 2-month ago.
We’ve brought the whole Teylu team together to outline the areas you should be focusing on to make sure your eCommerce business stands above the rest and sees growth this Christmas.
We’ve split our improvement projects into two camps – Functionality and Marketing. At TMA we know that you can have the shiniest comms campaign, but if the nuts and bolts of your business don’t support it all that time and effort goes down the drain.
Why should you trust us?
After almost two years of a pandemic everyone has begun building their businesses online with serious focus. It seems like the only safe bet left in this new world order. Customers who used to go out and shop locally, or perhaps even hit up some of those larger “big box” stores like Tesco, New Look and Debenhams are shopping online for everything under the sun more and more.
To capitalise on the ecommerce boom and overcome fierce competition, you need to optimise commerce across channels like online marketplaces, social media, retail, and wholesale. That also means building—or purchasing—a technological foundation that frees your team to create immersive, unified experiences wherever your customers are.
An excerpt from Shopify’s Future of eCommerce report published in 2021
The business benefit is resilience, allowing your business to quickly shift efforts and resources from offline to online, and back again, based on customer demand. We’ve combined data from Google Trends, Shopify, our own projects with info gathered from our own research with 150 eCommerce store marketers in the UK to build out these tips and help you focus your efforts.
Functionality Tip #1 – Unify your customer and product data
If you don’t already, manage your customer data and product data in one place – ideally in a headless commerce system. This will enable you to develop your business around a single platform to manage sales channels in one place.
Why do this?
- Saves administrative time
- Improves cross-sell opportunity identification
- Helps your track VIP customers
- We can help you unify your customer data, get in touch if we can help you
Functionality Tip #2 – Synchronise product info and inventory
Lots of rapidly growing eCommerce brands still run their original technology stack, they’ve just bolted on lots of extra functionality with plugins and extra payment options – like subscription functionality. Try and get your technology stack as simple and effective as possible with the end goal of having your inventory and product information syncing in real time.
Why do this?
- Reduce revenue loss
- Stop slow price, volume or shipping cost changes
- Offers less stress for administrative personnel to QA your store when changes are made to a live storefront
- We can help you synchronise your product info and inventory, get in touch if we can help you
Functionality Tip #3 – Integrate your sales and supply data
We’ve already talked about unifying your customer and product data into one place. The next step after that is getting your physical stores data and your online stores data all in one place to accurately track performance. One brand we worked with this year took on this challenge and installed a POS system for their physical store led by their eCommerce store through Shopify. The result was that the client started to identify VIP customers not simply based on revenue online, but also revenue in-store across several locations and leveraged that information to generate reviews which grew the business exponentially online.
Why do this?
- Having your in one place means you can efficiently track performance
- You can use a POS system to connect your digital storefront to retail locations and accurately compare their performance to make investment decisions
- We can help you synchronise your product info and inventory, get in touch if we can help you
Functionality Tip #4 – Upgrade to a headless architecture
The pandemic and Brexit has affected established and fledgling businesses in similar ways from an operational perspective based on what we’ve seen. Both have seen huge increases in marketing costs, both have seen less physical store traffic and both have their own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to customer service. Regardless of your business age, it’s important to focus on having a flexible online system in place that will grow with you in the coming years without limitation as eCommerce continues to become a larger retail channel.
Why do this?
- Headless commerce, an API-first solution, decouples the front-end customer experience from the back-end technology infrastructure of your website
- This gives better integration, flexibility and omni channel functionality
- We can help you upgrade to a headless architecture, get in touch if we can help you
Marketing Tip #1 – Prioritise Mobile Shopping Experiences
More than ever, users have been shopping using mobile devices. Having a store that is designed for mobile first is crucial to make sure that conversion rates are high but crucially to make sure your user experience is intuitive and high quality for a user potentially seeing your products on a 10cm screen. Prioritising mobile design and updating your website is a sure fire way to continually see revenue growth.
Why do this?
- 92% of eCommerce growth seen in recent years has been seen on mobile
- 50% of global eCommerce sales are happening on mobile devices
- Mobile devices are designed and built with software to encourage habit forming behaviour from customers. If your store leverages similar structures and user interfaces to encourage repeat visits from customers you will see increases in revenue
- We can help you prioritise mobile shopping experiences, get in touch if we can help you
Marketing Tip #2 – Make your website truly responsive
Lots of templates, website builders and developers will talk about pages being responsive to work across devices. Achieving basic resizing across devices is easy, but making your site truly responsive so that the customer experience on each device is fully tailored is another thing. This tip links to prioritising mobile experiences. Spend the time to make sure the experience is rich and engaging for a user on desktop and mobile. That might take the form of simpler design on mobile to help customers find product categories easier or on desktop make use of creative you’ve used on TV to bring the wider screen experience to life.
Why do this?
- Your website will become more useful to customers
- As result you will see growth in revenue and user numbers
- Well designed responsive websites improve SEO, site speed and overall user experience
- We can help you make your website truly responsive, get in touch if we can help you
Marketing Tip #3 – Convert your website to a progressive web app
As in point one, mobile devices were designed to be accessible, intuitive and lightning quick. From our research into our client bases eCommerce website mobile device visitors we found that 48% were on mobile networks, not Wi-Fi. If your site is a progressive web app it will load faster, and stay loaded, so your drop-off rate will be lower and customers will enjoy browsing your products more. Implementing a web app is a big step, but if you have more than 60% of your conversions happening on mobile, it’s likely you should focus on that part of your user base more than the other device users. One way to approach this is focusing on your most successful range and trying to make it as easy as possible for loyal customers to refer your brand and generate more sales by presenting a cleaner and more focused experience.
Why do this?
- You will provide a much better mobile experience, selling to customers even if they have no internet connection
- Combine a progressive web app with an an accelerated mobile page and you will be unbeatable on speed, user experience and search performance
- A stripped down HTML copy of a web page in this form loads instantly – no more bounce rates due to site performance
- Doing this will get you prioritised in Google search and will reduce your bounce rates massively onto the pages of your flagship products
- We can help you convert your website to a progressive web app, get in touch if we can help you
