5 Ways E-Commerce Businesses Can Drive Sales Using Influencers

As competition bites harder in e-commerce business, marketers tend to think more of viable ways to stand up to competition and make more sales. Working with influencers is one of such viable ways. Influencers help marketers to bring their products in front of their large audiences. That’s where they become quite relevant in e-commerce marketing. Working with influencers is a scenario of people working with people for mutual benefits. It can be a very highly rewarding experience for marketers if they learn to work with influencers as people. Learning to do very simple things other marketers do but in different ways while working with influencers can at times make the real difference in enhancing sales. The following five ways are such tested and viable ways.

1. Make Things Simple: When working with influencers, it is best to adopt simplicity over complexity in everything you do. Buyers usually don’t have much time on their hands. Getting a simple message out to them through influencers can make things really easy for influencers as well as the buyers. So, if for instance you are trying to launching a marketing campaign using influencers, it helps if you can put yourself in the buyer's shoes. That way, you can discover how quickly and comfortably you can make it for them to purchase the products you are marketing. Making available to influencers the right affiliate links helps to make things really simple for them to push your products in front of their followers. This and any other simple things that can shorten the path to a purchase are desirable.

2. Focus More on Result:  Yes, most influencers always have a very large reach but that shouldn’t be the main focus. Even though desirable, results from the reach are by far more important for e-commerce marketers than the size of the reach. It is advisable therefore to always focus more on result than reach. Reach still matters no doubt, but in the fiercely competitive e-commerce industry, there's nothing more important than sales, sustainable sales. It is best therefore to carefully choose influencers who deliver results in terms of sales. Such partners must be results-oriented particularly in terms of sales and not just views.

3. Give Preference to Full-Fledged Partner: Partnering with an influencer tends to yield better dividends than using them for just a one-time ad channel. This makes it better to share with influencers not just a product description and goals, but results as well. If you partner with an influencer that shares your long-term vision for brand development, they help you to make more sales. You can share with them analytics and any insights that can help them better understand your processes. That way, they can easily buy into and help you build a sales strategy based on the data generated. This yields better sales results over the long term.

4. Encourage Freedom: To get the best out of an influencer, try to encourage their freedom to operate. Avoid any attempt to control what they do and how they do it. Always remember that they’re influencers and independent business persons in their own rights. That they’re partnering with you does not in any way mean they’re ceding their independence to you. Influencers as content creators know their audiences and their needs more than anyone else. As e-commerce business owner partnering with influencers, it serves your interest best to just give influencers direction and leave the rest to them. Just make sure the direction you give aligns with your goals. It is then left to the influencers to freely create content that's organic to their audience in alignment with your goals.

5. Always Think Long Term: When partnering with influencers, it is always better to think long-term instead of short-term. Most people never do things without taking their time to think things through. Making a buy decision takes a similar pattern. Long-term partnerships with influencer content creators help to build the much needed audience trust. That gives them ample time to get sufficiently interested in the products they’re promoting to earn real credibility in doing so. Their involvement therefore means the products are worth buying. This stems from long term trust building.

Bottom Line

E-commerce businesses that partner with influencers benefit in many significant ways. They mostly benefit from the large reach of influencers. This large reach helps with conversions and the opportunity to create long-term business value for the audience. This is why the content creator influencer economy isn't just about increasing visibility for a business. It involves tangible and measurable results too, particularly in terms of sales. It is hugely important therefore, not to see influencer content as just another element of commerce, but to effectively use it as one of the main pillars of traffic, conversion and sales.

7 Effective Ways to Use Predictive Analytics to Improve your E-Commerce Sales

Technically, predictive analytics is a data analysis technique in e-commerce business. It helps businesses forecast future growth opportunities and pain points. E-commerce businesses that use predictive analytics models do manage to stay ahead of the curve by deploying the technique to anticipate product sellouts and nudging their customers to repurchase at the right time. The technique allows business owners to proactively anticipate challenges or opportunities instead of reacting to issues as they arise particularly as related to sales. Predictive analytics makes seeing the future possible by using past and real-time data to forecast future trends as they’ll affect sales. If well deployed, predictive analytics techniques can help business owners to permanently transform their businesses and set them on the path of profitability.

Here are seven effective ways to use predictive analytics to improve your e-commerce sales:

1. Financial Planning

Effective forecasting depends hugely on predictive analysis. For any e-commerce business, one of the most important ways to make business forecasts is by predicting revenue in order to properly and adequately allocate resources. With predictive analytics, it is possible to project future revenue based on past trends taking into account the seasonality or market conditions. You can use predictive analytics to forecast what time and season to expect low or high revenue streams and to plan for it. With proper forecasting, you can do better cash flow management. This allows you to adequately budget payroll, marketing, or inventory holding costs. You can manage your business better if through forecasts, you are able to know how much revenue to expect. With such vital information, you can make more informed decisions on how and when to spend and how much to spend in your business.

2. Personalization

You can leverage predictive analytics to deliver more personalized experiences to your customers. This you do by diligently analyzing their past purchase history and behavior. With such information, you can recommend products that fit the personal styles and needs of your customers. It is such products they are most likely to purchase. You can use predictive analytics to locate customers who purchased certain types of products in the past, then recommend same products or something that complements the products to the customers. Such information can be passed to these customers by way of targeted emails. These mails will help to remind these customers to replenish their stock and to recommend other products that complement the ones they’ve purchased earlier.
 
3. Marketing Campaign Improvement

If you focus on audience segmentation, you can use predictive analytics to improve your marketing campaigns. It simply involves the use of historical data and current trends to predict customer behavior among different customer subsets. What you do after that is to send the appropriate marketing materials/messages to different audiences based on the segmentation. You can have very effective marketing campaigns if you are able to use predictive analytics to anticipate that repeat customers will likely convert from text messages and new customers will likely convert from emails. Craft the right texts and messages to suit these marketing channels. You can get the best results by sending these messages in form of texts and emails to the different customer segments you’ve identified since it allows you to optimize your conversion odds without inundating your audience with too much marketing materials.

4. Price Optimization

Predictive analytics helps e-commerce businesses tailor their pricing strategies to specific customer segments or individuals. You can for instance carefully analyze customer behavior to identify price-sensitive shoppers. You can get such shoppers to convert if you offer them a discount. Predictive analytics can also help you to predict how price fluctuations might affect future demand based on seasonal influences. With such vital information, you can act accordingly and take good advantage of when it is right to cut prices (for instance at end-of-year sales) and when to raise prices on your products/services.

5. Customer Service Optimization

Many e-commerce businesses are seasonal. They habitually have peaks and lulls all year round. Predictive analytics not only helps predict this seasonality but enables businesses to act strategically. If you are a business owner and you know when the busy period of your business is approaching, you can adequately prepare to meet the rush by scaling up your customer service operations in tandem. With predictive analytics, you can anticipate a surge in demand then engage extra customer support staff to meet the surge. This way, it is possible for you to significantly improve customer satisfaction and maintain a seamless customer experience.

6. Churn Prevention

With predictive analytics, e-commerce business owners can identify customers at risk of churning then take proactive steps to retain them. Predictive analytics relies on valuable customer data like purchase history, cancellation frequency, or negative complaints to identify “at-risk” customers. With predictive analytics, you can anticipate which customers are most likely to churn. Once these customers are identified, you can deploy your marketing skills by sending them personalized marketing messages to retain them. That significantly helps to prevent churn.

7. Inventory Management Optimization

To have a significant portion of your capital tied up in inventory that’s not moving during slow periods isn’t healthy for the overall growth and survival of your business. Selling a product on back order and forcing customers to wait for it isn’t healthy either. Technically, predictive analytics uses historical sales data to predict when sales demand will increase or decrease. This vital information can help you to optimize your inventory management. Good inventory management allows businesses to restock products during sales spikes and decrease inventory when demand dips. This management technique not only helps your business to avoid sellout or overstock issues but also helps to save money in inventory holding costs.

5 Simple Ways E-Commerce Retailers Can Boost Sales

In today’s e-commerce retail environment, there’s not much difference in the shopping experiences of most shoppers. Every shopper craves to easily find online the products they are looking for, purchase them and have them delivered safely, quickly and intact to their chosen locations. This is why most shoppers prefer to carefully browse products online before making a purchase even if some may ultimately visit brick-and-mortar stores looking for same products. For e-commerce retailers therefore, it helps to have a strong e-commerce presence if they want to boost sales. These days, as consumer behavior continues to shift toward digital engagement, retailers must strongly enhance their e-commerce strategies if they want to boost sales and stay competitive.

These here five quick tips are very handy in that quest.

1. Carefully Craft an Engaging Homepage

As most e-commerce retailers very well know, the homepage of a business’ website is often the first interaction online shoppers have with e-commerce stores. It is really crucial therefore to ensure your homepage is designed and positioned to have a strong first impression with shoppers. You must always endeavor to prominently feature your best-selling products and current promotions to easily catch visitors’ attention. Ensure the page is easy to navigate with intuitive menus that guide visitors to browse products, sign up for newsletters and view special offers. Clearly provide essential information such as store hours, contact details and delivery options in a prominent location on the page to ensure shoppers have the information they need at a glance. You may in addition choose to optimize the page for mobile devices to increase the likelihood of conversions. This is because presently, 70-80% of online shoppers do so via mobile devices. Deliberately and carefully optimizing your e-commerce website is hugely important because failure to do so can result in a poor user experience, high bounce rates and lost sales. To enhance this and continue to boost sales, make sure to regularly test your website on various devices to identify and quickly fix any issues as they crop up.

2. Always Keep your Homepage Fresh

Yes, keeping your homepage fresh with content is always cool with search engines. This is why you must always endeavor to keep your homepage timely and engaging by regularly updating it with new products, promotions and seasonal specials. It is a good marketing strategy to always try to highlight limited-time offers, new arrivals and holiday-themed promotions. Doing so can help you to easily capture visitors’ interest and encourage repeat visits as well. If you manage to keep your homepage dynamic and fresh, it is possible for you to consistently maintain customer engagement and drive continuous sales growth.

3. Leverage Customer Data

If you have the right analytics tools on your website, you can significantly harvest valuable customer data. These analytics tools are quite handy to track customer behavior and gather data about purchase patterns and demographics. Such data can provide valuable insights into shopping behavior, preferences and trends. This valuable information allows you to carefully tailor your offerings and marketing efforts for best results. You may choose to also start a customer-loyalty program that can help you gather valuable data while rewarding repeat customers along the way. You can move a step further by leveraging such data to personalize marketing campaigns, optimize product recommendations and improve customer engagement. These tips will ultimately help you enhance user engagement and boost sales.
 
4. Leverage your Website for E-Commerce

For organic traffic purposes, search engine optimization, SEO is hugely important in your e-commerce retail website. A well-designed and SEO-optimized website can significantly impact your store’s visibility and attract more customers to your e-commerce store. This is especially given the fierce advertising and marketing competition on the internet. You can thus leverage WordPress with its vast array of plugins and customizable features to position your website well enough to compete favorably. The customizable features of WordPress allow retailers to set up product listings, manage inventory, process orders and accept payments securely on the same platform. Should changes arise as they are bound to, WordPress is well positioned and proactive enough to create the right solutions which can be implemented via the platform’s global marketplace.

5. Pay Special Attention to the Content you Create

You need high quality content on your website for Search Engine Optimization, SEO purposes. You are no doubt aware that in digital marketplace, content is king. So, you must always try to create high-quality and relevant content on your website. Good content helps drive organic traffic to your site and improve your rankings in search engines particularly Google. If you regularly update your website with stories about topics related to your products, do product reviews and provide related industry news, it can attract and engage visitors on your website. For optimization purposes, you can carefully incorporate SEO best practices. This you do by using relevant keywords on your content, optimizing meta tags and building backlinks. Good SEO on your website can help the site to rank higher on the SERPs of search engines. That means more organic traffic to the website because SEO makes it easier for new and established customers to find you. More customers finding you translate to more sales and a boost in business.