When you start your eCommerce business, your main priority is probably to make a few sales and just find a way to break even at first.
While this is a good plan for the early stages, pretty soon you have to think about growth and find ways to scale your eCommerce business.
If you’re a new business owner, you probably don’t know how to scale a business, but it isn’t as hard as it seems. As long as you know all the steps to follow, you won’t have any issues. Without further ado, let’s get into the five important steps to scaling your eCommerce business.
Think about SEO
If you want to scale your business, you have to make sure your website is optimized for search engines. With the right SEO strategies, you will be able to get your store on the first page of Google.
Keep in mind that SEO doesn’t happen overnight and it can take up to a year to see results, but the hard work will be worth it in the end. You just need to know how to optimize your eCommerce site for search engines.
Some of the tactics you can apply include:
- Keyword research. Research your competitors and visit popular eCommerce stores in your industry to see which keywords they use to attract website visitors. This way, you’ll be able to predict what your target audience searches for most often.
- Add a blog. The best way to include keywords in your eCommerce store is to write them in blog articles. This will help Google rank you higher on its list and you will be able to provide your customers with interesting and educational content.
- On-page SEO. This type of SEO requires using keywords in all of your URL slugs, meta tags, headlines, and subheadlines.
- Include backlinks. One of the factors Google uses to determine whether your website is worthy of a high-ranking position is backlinks. It’s important to have high-quality backlinks from reputable websites to show Google your eCommerce store is trustworthy.
Of course, these tips are just some of the basics of SEO and there is a lot more to optimizing your website. If you want to make sure your website is search engine friendly, you should hire an eCommerce SEO company to help you achieve your optimization goals.
Hire a good leadership team
As a business owner, you have to get used to making day-to-day decisions. However, if you want to scale your business, you need to accept that you need a team that will make those decisions for you. This will allow you to spend more time on other important business activities.
This is why every good company has a leadership team, a group of smart and well-trained individuals who can make good business decisions. However, you need to realize that not everyone is suited for leadership and you can’t hire just anyone for a position in this team.
There are two important things you need to remember when you’re looking for people who are going to make up this team:
- Hiring the right employees
- Training them well
A lot of business owners make the mistake of hiring the first person who has leadership experience, which is a big mistake. The right person for your leadership team does have to be experienced, but they also need to embody your company’s values and possess all the required skills.
Once you find the right people for the job, you need to put in the effort to train your team. It’s not enough just to explain the basics of your business and trust them they can handle leadership.
You need to remember training is a constant process and provide them with the proper resources that will allow them to learn and grow as the business expands.
Use email marketing
You can’t expect to scale a business without marketing. While there are many great and effective marketing techniques, there is one that stands out from the crowd and that’s email marketing.
It’s almost impossible not to find success with it, as the average expected ROI is $42 for every $1 you spend on email marketing. Of course, not every email marketing campaign is the same and while some are extremely successful, some end up being a waste of time and money.
The difference between a successful and a failed email marketing campaign is in the tactics you apply. That is why you need to know the most effective email marketing strategies:
- Segment your audience. To create the best emails, you need to segment all of your email recipients so you can create messages that appeal to them. Some categories you can use to segment audiences include age, gender, location, interests, and income.
- Personalize every email. Personalization is a powerful tool that shows your email recipient that you see them as an individual, not just someone you’re trying to sell a product to. Personalization doesn’t have to be elaborate, it can be enough just to include the recipient’s full name.
- Write the perfect subject lines. For your email marketing campaign to be successful, your recipients have to open your emails first. To ensure this, you need to entice them with attention-drawing and well-thought-out subject lines that have a natural tone.
- Don’t overwhelm your subscribers. More emails don’t mean more engagement. In fact, the opposite will happen if you send too many emails. To find the perfect weekly number of emails you should send, ask your subscribers to fill out a survey about how frequently they want to hear from you.
Don’t fulfill orders by yourself
Self-fulfillment works only for small businesses that are still in their early stages and don’t have too many orders to track and send out. However, as a business grows and orders start to increase, you’ll realize that fulfilling your own orders is practically impossible.
Just think about all of the things you need to do just to send out one order and then multiply it by a hundred or a thousand. A successful eCommerce store owner never picks, packages, and ships their items by themselves. Instead, they hire a fulfillment service.
A fulfillment service is a company that holds all of your products in their warehouse and once a customer places an order in your store, they go through the process of sending the package. This leaves you to take care of more important tasks and focus on running your company.
Build trust with customer reviews
A big part of scaling your business is showing potential future customers that your store is trustworthy and that current customers are satisfied with your products. Marketing will get people to visit your website, but customer reviews will be the thing that helps them make the final purchasing decision.
Reviews and customer testimonials are a necessary part of every successful eCommerce website because they reflect your product’s value. They also serve as social proof, which is invaluable because people need to read an average of 10 online reviews before they can trust a business.
Try to make your reviews as genuine as possible by including a picture of the satisfied customer next to their review as well as their full name. In the review, they should talk about why your product is great and how it improved their life or solved a problem they had.
Final thoughts
Scaling a business is a long process that requires a lot of work. But if you’re serious about running a successful and profitable eCommerce store, you need to think about scaling from the day you start your company. As long as you follow all of the steps you just read about, you will achieve your goals.
