How to create a winning e-commerce strategy at a time when e-commerce is exploding? To set your store apart from the thousands of new e-commerce sites created every day, you will need to equip yourself with a stable and sustainable online sales strategy. But what are the main stages?
Before delving into planning your e-commerce strategy, here is a quick overview of e-commerce at the dawn of the 2020 decade.
COVID-19 Has Accelerated the Progress of E-Commerce
In 2020, the share of online commerce in global commerce is still reasonably moderate (16%). But if a lack of trust in online shopping sites could deter some users from buying online, the Coronavirus pandemic has reshuffled the cards: online commerce has become practically unavoidable.
Between the ever-increasing share of Amazon and the multitude of new sales sites, how to find a place and be profitable in e-commerce in 2020? Here are the steps we recommend you take to create a robust e-commerce strategy.
STEP 1: Plan Your E-Commerce Strategy
As with developing an SEO strategy, the first step in creating an e-commerce marketing strategy is to plan and direct your future efforts where they will pay the most.
Choosing the Right Niche Industry
If you have not yet defined the product you want to market on the net, a good e-commerce strategy first and foremost requires the right choice of industry. Observing the companies that are currently on the rise will give you a first idea of the sectors set to establish themselves in the coming years. For example, industries in which e-commerce is not yet king, such as personalized care, food, or lifestyle are expected to experience substantial growth.
Here are the criteria to consider when choosing the industry in which to deploy your e-commerce strategy:
Identify and Understand Your Target
Another criterion to take into account before you start is to know your target and identify the stages of their online purchasing process. For this analysis, you will need to conduct a keyword study.
Researching keywords will give you a holistic view of how your customers are looking for information on the Internet and, more specifically, on search engines. This analysis will allow you to position the content of your e-commerce site as an answer to these needs and questions. By using tools such as SEMRush or Google Keyword Planner, you should be able to bring out the key phrases used by your target throughout their buying process.
STEP 2: Build your online presence
With your target market clearly defined, you need to start building an online ecosystem that is conducive to selling.
Identify what is of value to your target
With the proliferation of new sites and sales platforms, defining a unique and strong value proposition is essential.
What will make one Internet user buy your product rather than another?
For our e-commerce experts, the first step is to focus on your consumer, identify their fears, and needs to offer a message and an experience that provide them with the solutions they are looking for.
In short, the more you can offer practical and visible solutions to your clients’ major pain points, the more successful you will be.
Choose the Right Platforms
There are two leading families of e-commerce platforms: If you want to have complete freedom on your site, it is advisable to use an “open source” model set up and optimized by your technical team. If the desire for customization is less reliable or you have more limited resources, a SaaS platform like Shopify or WooCommerce will be very suitable, especially for the support services available (forums, help centers, numerous articles, and tutorials on the web).
And don’t forget, your e-commerce site does not live alone. It needs a complete ecosystem to be visible on local pages, online reviews, social networks, and comparison sites.
Should You Sell on Amazon?
According to our e-commerce experts, to answer this question, you have to assess the size of the community and the maturity of your brand. At the start of a business, Amazon can be great for building a community. However, the more your e-commerce marketing strategy grows, the less the desire to be dependent on Amazon will be felt.
Optimize the Technical Structure of Its Website
A good e-commerce strategy requires that you regularly check and optimize certain technical aspects of your website. These aspects have a direct influence on the ability of your website to attract and convert leads organically.
Here are the primary criteria to take into account to optimize the technical aspects of your e-commerce strategy:
Equip Yourself with Good Work Tools
Once your web architecture is optimized, you will also need to equip yourself with tools. Among these tools, you will find absolute essentials such as Google Analytics to analyze the behavior of your users, or MailChimp or Hubspot to monitor customer relations and offer promotion and loyalty programs.
STEP 3: Attract Customers
There are several channels to attract customers to your products online, such as social media, Google advertising, and natural referencing. It is all about knowing how to use them together and at the right time.
If you are in the launch phase of your e-commerce strategy, you will probably be dependent on advertising to attract your first customers. Once your campaigns have been launched and optimized, you can then take the time to develop your natural referencing. SEO will allow you, in the long term, to position your products in front of users who are actively looking for them. Organic traffic remains very important to develop sales of e-commerce sites. It now represents 40% of global traffic to an e-commerce site in the US.
Create an Emotional Attachment to Your Brand
Today, the main target of e-commerce strategies is embodied by the “Millennials” (people born after 1982 who represent ⅓ of purchasing power in the USA). This target consumes via the web and pays particular attention to your brand’s values.
Our e-commerce experts advise you to promote your brand through various criteria such as:
- A precise and differentiated positioning
- A solid multichannel marketing strategy
- U quality content distributed across
- A “responsible” positioning and operations with a strong social impact
STEP 4: Optimize the Conversion
The conversion rate between purchase in a physical store and online shopping experience is very different. 55% of consumers who go to stores buy, while only 1 to 3% of Internet users convert on a website. This difference can be explained in particular by the lack of human contact on the web.
STEP 5: Retain Your Customers
Soliciting your customers over time to maintain a healthy relationship is one of the keys to the profitability of your e-commerce strategy. A loyal customer can serve several benefits:
- It can re-consume more quickly (and therefore at a lower cost) than a new customer
- He can become an ambassador of your brand
Once all these actions are in place, you will need data to assess their performance and adjust your e-commerce strategy. Tools like Google Data Studio will allow you to centralize critical data on visualization boards.
Conclusion
Electronic commerce is a booming industry. Amplified by recent social and health upheavals, e-commerce will gradually become an essential channel for many industries. With competition expected to increase, it is becoming a priority to have a complete and sustainable e-commerce strategy. These five main steps should allow you to see more clearly!