10 Strategies to Increase Competitiveness for your Small E-Commerce Business

If you are a small e-commerce business owner, your business grows only if you do things that give your customers every advantage. You need the right technology and strategies to pull that off though. You must therefore make concerted efforts to position your small business to benefit from the right technology, tools, and even advice from trusted advisors of your choosing. If you do the right things, you can stimulate your own business growth through good relationships, more referrals, expanded network, and responsive and loyal customer base. Doing the right things means implementing the following strategies.
 
1. Develop a Good Marketing Strategy

If you develop a good marketing strategy, it will ensure that your small e-commerce business does not miss out on critical opportunities to get its products in front of potential customers. Such marketing strategy will help your business to attract more customers by promoting products in the most effective ways. You can get this promotion done through search engines, re-targeting ads, social media, email, or text marketing. This strategy will simply help to encourage your customers to learn where their target markets are most likely to engage. You can always test and re-test your marketing campaigns to find out which are the most effective to encourage your customers to so act.

2. Consistently Create Good Marketing Content

The best content that can help your small e-commerce business to be competitive is such content that effectively communicates your messaging. As an e-commerce business owner, you must always endeavor to look at your product pages through the eyes of your customers. Aside posting qualitative and highly informative content, you must always ensure that your online pages act well to make your products stand out and be noticed online. To make your product pages effective therefore, ensure they have a clean and simplified layout, brief titles, eye-catching and professional images, detailed yet concise descriptions (including dimensions), and customer reviews. In addition, the webpages must be optimized for search engines.

3. Make Your Checkout Process Seamless and Easy

Significantly, the checkout experience is about the most critical part of an e-commerce buyer’s journey. To make your small e-commerce business competitive, you must ensure its shopping cart abandonment is reduced to the barest minimum. There is research evidence that a very high percentage of e-commerce shoppers abandon their shopping carts mostly on account of a long, complicated and cumbersome check out process. You can reduce this by making your checkout process seamless and easy. It is advisable to streamline your checkout experience with a single payment page to make things really easy and convenient for shoppers. For repeat customers, a one-click checkout option is most ideal.

4. Use Omni-Channel Payment Options

To embrace all your customers, ensure you deploy an omni-channel payments solution. This solution provides a centralized visibility into sales on all channels. It enables customers to move seamlessly across all channels for the best shopping experiences. It also streamlines back-office processes for e-commerce business owners. It in addition provides an omni-channel payment platform that helps future-proof a merchant’s payment technology as it provides the flexibility to adapt as tech advances. The solution is flexible enough to allow merchants to offer omni-channel processes like buy online pickup in store and returns much easier. It greatly helps to build customer loyalty.

5. Carefully Study Your Competition

If you run a small e-commerce store, you can create a list of competitors who offer similar products/services as yours. You can then carefully evaluate elements of their operations which include pricing strategy, customer experience, and payment options. Next is to implement strategies, technology, and tools to capitalize on all the opportunities you identify.

6. Encourage and Emphasize Sustainability

E-commerce merchants should always highlight their sustainable products and operations to build customer loyalty. This is hugely important because consumers in all age demographics are increasingly willing to pay more for sustainable products. This translates to sustainable good business. It is therefore advisable for e-commerce businesses to align with this trend and to use energy-efficient solutions to do their part to preserve their business environment.

7. Consistently Deliver Exemplary Customer Experience

For small e-commerce businesses to be able to compete effectively, they must always try to deliver a seamless and personalized experience to their customers. From the moment a customer first clicks on a site to the final purchase and even beyond, personalizing the shopping experience to individual customer shopping preferences can help ensure a smooth intuitive journey for the customer. This is great for customer experience and loyalty.

8. Offer Popular Payment Choices

Popular payment choices help to satisfy customer preferences. This directly impacts revenues for the e-commerce business. When shoppers can’t find their preferred payment choices, they tend to abandon their shopping carts as a result. So, it is best to for e-commerce businesses to accommodate all popular payment types including credit cards, prepaid cards, gift cards, and mobile wallets. As much as convenient, you can even consider adding support for alternative payment methods like payment links. These links benefit merchants by providing a simple and secure way to accept payments without needing a website or complex setup. Convenience is assured because the links can be easily shared via email or SMS. This allows e-commerce businesses to reach customers directly thereby greatly expanding their payment options as a result. In addition, such payment links can be handy to streamline the checkout process. This helps to reduce friction for customers and increasing the likelihood of completing a sale. This flexibility can help to improve cash flow and customer satisfaction, especially for small businesses with limited technical resources.

9. Use Payment Data to Predict Customer Behavior

If well interpreted, payment data can provide a range of insights into the shopping experience of shoppers on e-commerce sites. Therefore, e-commerce business owners must understand how to track, review, and analyze data to gain insights for better decision-making. They must be able to generate insightful reports that can easily and quickly identify patterns that can help avoid issues. They can use such insights to predict customer behavior and capitalize on buying trends.

10. Excel at Customer Service and Support

Customer service and support is key to the survival of small e-commerce businesses. If well handled, it provides an opportunity to gain an edge over the competition. This is why it is advisable for such businesses to deploy well-considered solutions that prioritize responsiveness and efficiency. This is where AI tools like chatbots become quite relevant. Smart tools like chatbots are great for handling frequently asked questions, FAQs. If deployed, they help to provide customers immediate assistance during and outside of business hours 24/7. To deal with more complex consumer inquiries however, it is best to have a process in place where human agents can be reached or transferred to from a chatbot.

8 Ways Digital Marketing Benefits Your E-Commerce Business

In today’s e-commerce world, strong digital marketing campaigns can be hugely beneficial to businesses in many ways. The marketing techniques can be really impactful no matter the size of the business. This is why many e-commerce business owners take digital marketing as an essential and at times indispensable part of their marketing plans. They find digital marketing helpful to attract and target new customers and leads. They rely on it to directly communicate with target audiences, collect data on customer behavior and marketing campaign performance. This is because a good digital marketing strategy technically encompasses multiple channels such as a website, social media, email, digital advertising, and online search.

Discussed hereunder are 8 of the many ways digital marketing benefits your e-commerce business.

1. Targeted Audience Reach

Digital marketing tools are very handy tools that offer a wealth of data to businesses aiming to target specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. Through digital marketing, business owners can effectively gather customer data through various channels. They can thus effectively segment their audiences and directly tailor their marketing strategies to engage specific customer niches. By way of direct targeting, e-commerce business owners can for instance effectively use many email and advertising tools that allow for audience segmentation. These tools can help provide the right insights business owners can use to create customized campaigns that resonate with targeted groups.

2. Staying Ahead of Competition

Digital marketing tools are handy tools that can assist business owners to be competitive. These tools not only help to provide business owners the much-needed visibility on customer behavior, they also offer a rich landscape of information on industry and market trends. Such vital information helps businesses to stay up to date with digital marketing best practices for their industry. For instance, by taking advantage of local SEO, businesses can often create a competitive advantage for themselves in relation to competitors who aren’t as savvy.

3. Easy Adaptation to Changing Consumer Behavior

In e-commerce marketing landscape, consumer behavior is constantly changing. The reason digital marketing must change with it. Digital marketing thus helps businesses to quickly adapt to these constant changes and stay competitive. The tools are very handy to track Key Performance Indicators, KPIs and other core metrics that allow for trend analysis or even prediction. Such vital data enables businesses to easily evolve their strategies in tandem with changing consumer behavior.
 
4. Increased Online Visibility

Good digital marketing tools are effective to help businesses enhance their online visibility. With these tools, business owners can widely share content with a wider audience much faster than they might reach through traditional channels. With an effective SEO strategy, businesses can also make it easier for their customers to discover their websites and or content online. Good content picked up by search engines can effectively help to increase website traffic and consequent visibility.
 
5. Lead Generation and Conversion

E-commerce business owners can rely on digital marketing techniques to generate leads and convert the leads into customers. They can effectively use marketing techniques like email marketing, social media advertising, and content marketing to get it done. Using digital marketing techniques, business owners can make contacts and communicate with customers through their different stages of interaction with the business. The main aim of this interaction/intervention is to persuade customers to complete a desired action. Suchlike actions as booking a demo or consultation, signing up for a trial or completing a sale can come about through such intervention by way of digital marketing techniques.

6. Cost-Effective Marketing Channels
 
When business owners want to create marketing content or run communications, many digital marketing tools are very handy and cost-effective. Many of the tools are either free or offered for a small monthly subscription fee. This makes the tools well-suited to small business budgets. You can do cost-effective marketing through websites, social media, email and blogs. These channels tend to be more cost-effective to operate and advertise on than traditional marketing methods such as print, TV and radio with their attendant high costs.
 
7. Building Brand Awareness and Loyalty

Business owners can rely on digital marketing techniques to build brand awareness and establish or maintain a positive reputation online. Technically, if you cultivate an online presence, it can reflect your brand personality and business culture. This can help create affinity and connection with both new and existing customers to enhance awareness and loyalty for your business.

8. Tracking Results Accurately

Good digital marketing tools are handy online to help businesses to accurately track their marketing data. This is irrespective of the sheer quantity of online data encompassing customer demographics and behavior. With these tools, it is easy for a business to see and track who’s clicking on its ads, visiting its website, and following and engaging with it on social media. Such vital data offers good insights and feedback to business owners regarding their online presence and marketing campaigns. This helps them to properly shape their decisions about future strategy and marketing campaigns.