Regardless of whether you are a start-up or an established company with a loyal customer base in place already, there is no denying that as a business owner, you need to stay up to date with the latest marketing trends and what technology is currently pervading the e-commerce business place. For small and medium businesses, e-commerce has proven to be a boon to grow their brands along with their bottom lines.

In the coming years, the e-commerce economy is expected to continue this rapid growth and the share of e-commerce sales within any industry is likely to start accounting for a majority share. While e-commerce, in general, is expected to grow by leaps and bounds, how can you as a business owner benefit from it?

11. Become E-commerce Optimized To Grow Your Business

Being mobile ready is key to the growth of any business. Today, the popularity of mobile devices knows no end and this trend seems hardly likely to stop. Majority of all online sales nowadays take place from a mobile device, be it a smartphone or a tablet. So, it is safe to say that the trend of m-commerce or mobile commerce is not going anywhere. As the market for mobile devices keeps growing, it is expected that the market for mobile commerce is going to grow by nearly 300 per cent faster than your traditional e-commerce formats. It is a good idea to jump onto the m-commerce bandwagon now and grow your business by building a mobile app.

10. Provide a Seamless Customer Experience

Customers today are looking for an end to end seamless shopping experience. You are more likely to get a loyal customer base if you provide this experience to them on a consistent basis. This translates into providing them with your brand’s experience, good availability of your products, perfecting your promotional strategies on time and marketing or getting your content across to your customers dot at the time when they need it. All these combined go on to allow the customer to have a seamless experience wherein he/she can move around comfortably from one channel to another, be it selecting the item, checking out and ultimately having it delivered with the least amount of hassle.

9. Utilizing Product Videos Effectively to Convert Sales

Product videos are a great idea to build a customer base and also to connect with your customers. Videos are an effectively proven way of conversions as it is the ideal way to help a customer understand the nitty-gritty of your product. In fact, research shows that visitors to a website are up to 65-85 per cent more likely to purchase a product if there is a product video attached to the product being sold. That is an incredibly high conversion statistic that you cannot afford to be not part of. Also, videos are very popular with many of the younger customers and business owners often tend to underutilize this incredible strategy of selling.

8. Stay on Top of your SEO Game

SEO or Search Engine Optimization has always been an important part of e-commerce promotional strategy. It is still believed to be one of the most important ways of optimizing an e-commerce website and making sure that it shows up in top results on Google. SEO surely gives a great boost to your e-commerce business but you also need to work with the SEO content and make sure that the content is fresh, up to date and catchy for your customers as well. Not updating your website with SEO content will also keep driving down your rating on Google and as a result, Google will keep ranking your website lower in the search engine results.

7. Keep a Blog and Update it with Fresh Content Regularly

Maintaining a blog is an excellent way of directing traffic to your website. The higher the number of blog posts on your blog, the more traffic will get directed to your website. However, you need to understand that your blog needs to contain quality content and has to be updated on a regular basis so as to ensure that your website ranks higher on Google’s search pages. A regularly updated blog also builds credibility with customers and further establishes engagement with your customers, leading to the creation of a loyal customer base. Blogging also ties in with establishing more firmly the concept of SEO, as discussed above.

6. Short the Time to Checkout

Having a website free from confusion, especially in the checkout process, will go a long way in increasing your chances of getting a sale. Most visitors first tend to scan a website with their eyes and also mentally assess the feasibility of using and shopping from your website. If there are too many obstacles to the final checkout process, visitors are likely to abandon the shopping cart and move on to another website. You want that visitors should not get the time to change their minds. But at the same time, you want to give your customers the confidence to trust your website with their financial details during the shopping experience. Therefore, focus on creating a seamless checkout design that will get the work done.

5. Use Affiliate Marketing to Grow your Business

A great strategy that is often overlooked by many businesses is of growing by using affiliate marketing. This style of marketing is a performance-based marketing technique wherein you provide commissions or rewards to affiliates when they successfully complete a sale for you. This strategy is an attractive one for online businesses in particular as you only need to pay your affiliates if and when they complete a sale for you. Be aware, however, that affiliates tend to promote the highest paying or the best product in the industry they are operating in. So, make sure that you find a reliable affiliate in order to grow your business.

4. Using Emails, Newsletters and other Social Media Forums for Promotion

Staying engaged with your customers is the new demand of the business world we live in today. Times are changing and if you want to stay connected to your customer base then you need to reach out to them through several avenues. Some of the more tried and tested avenues in this regard are through emails, newsletters and social media forums such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Email marketing campaigns are still known to be one of the more successful manners of getting conversions. Sending out regular newsletters to your customers keeps them in the know about your latest products, what’s happening in the company and any kind of interesting tidbit can find its way into the newsletter. Such activities keep the customer hooked on to your company.

3. Indulge in some Targeted Re-Marketing

Abandoned shopping carts can guide you to explore what issues are there on your website, leading to customers leaving halfway through. Targeted remarketing is an excellent tool to use to target these customers back. You can use channels such as Facebook, Google search advertising, and others, to help market across to them. The thing to keep in mind here is that time is valuable to target remarketing customers. They may in that time period move on to a competitor’s website. So be quick in your promotion and re-target them and redirect them back to your website. Often times, if a customer is reminded of the product he/she left behind, they might be motivated easily to go back and pick that up.

2. Listen to What Your Customer has to Say

Often times you might come across a product that is refusing to leave the shelves and no amount of marketing is getting any sales in. During such times, having positive reviews from customers might help to get things going. On an overall level as well, positive customer reviews go a long way in ensuring a higher conversion rate. It is a fact that most customers prefer to read product reviews from previous customers before they go ahead and confirm their purchase. So reviews and feedback can have a huge impact on sales. Reviews will also further add to the SEO content of your website, thus driving traffic automatically.

1. Summing Up

Being on top of your marketing and digital media trends are going to go a long way in helping you grow your business. This era belongs to e-commerce so there is no way around it. If you want to grow your business, you will need to understand how e-commerce trends and techniques work. Meet and address your customers’ needs in a unique way and keep the content on your website fresh and catchy to keep drawing more customers on a regular basis. By involving your customers in the growth of your business, you will find even more ways of improving your current media campaigns and outreach techniques.