In Indonesia, more and more small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) are using the internet, especially social media, as a shift in business and consumer activities from brick-and-mortar stores to online shops continues strongly. No wonder, digital transformation has become the buzz word in recent years.
Small businesses rely on growing their sales to drive revenue and support a healthy cash flow. Your need strategies to increase your customer base for your e-commerce store so you can increase your sales. Use these 5 proven strategies to increase sales with current and prospective customers.
1. Understand your target audience
To make the right decisions about your products and marketing activities, you need to understand your customers. As in conventional brick-and-mortar store, when your customers are online you also have to proactively take steps to learn about them and find out what appeals to them. By using analytics tools in your online store to identify their purchasing patterns and preferences. You can also use analytics to learn how customers find your store. While nothing can replace a face-to-face conversation, you still have lots of opportunities, including email, online chat, and phone calls, to ask questions to learn about your customers.
2. Find your unique selling proposition
Ask yourself these questions: What do you offer that no one else can? What is the story behind your store, your products, and yourself? Once you know what makes you different, you need to “shout” it using every virtual channel. You can include it in your tagline, make it prominent on your home page, announce it in social media ads, and highlight it in your email marketing. By building your marketing campaigns and efforts around your unique selling proposition, you give people a reason to come to your online store and, most importantly, buy your products.
3. Simplify your customer experience
Of course, you want it to be as easy as possible for customers to find what they are looking for and then make a purchase. If your analytics show a high number of people are visiting your site and leaving without buying, your customer experience may be the reason. Enlist friends or family members and watch them go through the process of finding and purchasing items in your online store. Look for areas where they struggle or make missteps. Common areas to fix include your website’s search feature, product navigation, and checkout.
4. Provide a chat feature on your website
More and more customers have started to rely on chat to communicate with businesses. If you don’t have a chat feature, add one to your website and monitor it throughout the day. Since you can’t be tied to your computer 24 hours a day, include an autoresponder to let customers know when you will return. You can also use Virtual Agent Technology (VAT), or better known as chatbot, to immediately answers common and basic questions for customers.
5. Choose the right fulfillment center
You can have the greatest product in the world, but if you can’t get it to your customers safely and on time, it won’t mean much. For this reason, choosing a fulfillment company for your e-commerce business is a crucial decision. If you make the right choice, your fulfillment partner can greatly contribute to the success of your brand—but make the wrong choice, and it could ruin your customer experience and prevent you from bringing in future revenue from repeat customers
What now after your sales have increased?
With more and more people finding out about you, you’re likely going to see yourself overwhelmed with warehousing and processing new orders. But did you know that you don’t have to take care of these yourself?
Leave it to 8Commerce to take care of your warehouse and fulfillment problems, so you can focus on more important parts of your business. We have the capability and experience in integrating Order Management System (OMS) and Warehouse Management System (WMS) to speedily process and effectively manage orders from multiple online marketplaces, allowing you to quickly scale up your business.
With support from the experts, we’re committed to provide the best services to support your business growth. Need more info about us? Reach out to our team now by clicking this link!