If you’re looking for quick wins to boost your ecommerce store, check out our MD Sarah’s latest video.
You’ll find some super simple but effective ways to increase sales, which many businesses overlook.
We’re not just talking about technical solutions either, sometimes it’s little changes that have an impact on visitor behaviour that makes all the difference.
Scroll down for the transcript if you prefer to read rather than watch, and as always, feel free to share this with any small business owners you know who may benefit from our top tips.
We’ll have a new episode each week, which will appear here & on our YouTube channel (if you subscribe there you won’t miss one).
Got questions about anything in the video? Drop us a line or give us a call at Fastnet HQ.
Quick ways to grow your ecommerce store – video transcript:
“Now there are hundreds of small ways that you can grow your ecommerce store. but the reality is you need results right now. So I’ve picked my five quickest ways to grow your ecommerce store.
So for the best advice on how to grow your ecommerce store quickly & profitably, subscribe to this channel and hit the bell as well, so you notified – I get a new video out every week.
So I’m Sarah, I’m founder of The Fastnet Agency, and we help exciting, up and coming ecommerce brands to scale quickly and profitably using digital marketing. Ok, so number one.
Now probably the quickest way that you can get your new ecommerce brand in front of as many people as possible is to run advertising. Now there are a range of ways in which you can advertise your online store.
But the two main ways are either through Google Ads, and Google actually has a number of options, we’ll jump into those in a minute, or via Facebook and Instagram. So let’s look at Google first. So the two types of Google ad that you can use to promote your store is the actual Google ads themselves, which just appear in search results and Google shopping ads, which actually appear as a link to your shop when people type in a certain product that they’re searching for.
There’s also the option to run Google display ads, which is where you see an advertising banner displayed on various different websites linking through to your products. So there’s the two kinds of search feed- lead ones, and there’s also the display advertising. We often use display advertising to retarget people that have already looked at products on your site and put those products in front of them again.
The other main player when it comes to advertising your store online is Facebook and Instagram. Now Facebook and Instagram are linked, they’re all owned by Facebook, so it means if you’re running ads on Facebook, you can run those ads also automatically on Instagram. You can control these ads with Facebook Business Manager and I did a video all about running Facebook ads profitably, I’ll chuck a link to that at the end of this video.
Now, the main things to remember when you’re running your ads is to get your targeting right when are you displaying this ad to them? Have these people never heard of you before? Or are you retargeting them because they’ve already looked at your product? You will need to change your messaging depending on what type or part of the funnel that those people are on.
The main problem that people also make when they’re running their ads is that they focus on features and not benefits. You need to make sure that you’re putting your benefits in front of people. And if you’re not sure how to do that then focus on the problem first, identify the problem that your customer has and then tell them why you’re solving that problem.
You can go into the features later. Tip number two is to focus on these two key metrics. Now the two key metrics that we use in order to ensure that stores are growing quickly and profitably is your average order value and your lifetime customer value.
Now, if you can raise those two things, and that will automatically increase the profitability off your ecommerce store.
Now you can do this by focusing on cross sells and upsells, so ensuring that people buy products that are similar or complementary to the product that they’re actually initially set on buying and also up selling them to A perhaps more advanced version of the product. So it’s basically so you’re increasing the amount that people spend at the checkout.
You can also get people back to your store to increase the lifetime value of that customer by doing things like retargeting and email marketing. So when people have already bought from you, they’re low hanging fruit to buy from you again. So using these various different marketing techniques to increase that lifetime value of the customer.
So yeah, a really good exercise on how to do this is to look at how you can bundle things together, or upsell things together to increase that average order value and then look at those low hanging fruits. Look at those customers that have already bought from you and workout methods of getting them back to your store to buy from you again, and it really is as simple as that. We can go into some quite complex methodology behind this, but those are really the basics behind it.
Ok the third quick way to grow your ecommerce store is to reduce checkout blockages. So stop putting people off buying by making the checkout process too complicated. Ensure that it’s just really smooth, really quick, that they don’t have any time to think about this. They just put it in their basket, check out, job done.
That will really help to increase the amount of checkouts on your store or reduce abandoned carts. So when you’re looking at your own store, take a little look through and think, how many clicks do I need in order to get to the product, or to put that product in my basket, or to check out? Try and reduce this to as few as clicks as possible.
Any way you could remove a click, you’ll be getting more people through the process and more people checking out so that’s really important, it’s just slightly easier to navigate.
Again, think of this from your customer’s point of view. They’re looking for a particular product or a particular item. Is it easy to find it? How long does it take for them to find it? Can they search for it easily?
Try and remove anything which stops the customer from going ‘oh, no, this is too complicated’ and bouncing back off your site because that will definitely increase the amount of orders you get through your checkout. How long does it take to add multiple items? If people want to add more than one of something, you don’t want to discourage them from doing that, that will increase your average order number.
So you really want to make sure that you’re making it easy for people to add multiple things to their basket quickly. So it might be that you have a list of products and you have the option to click through to the actual product page.
But you also have the option just to add it to the basket without viewing the product page. You can add multiple things very quickly and go to checkout, so people who are familiar with your products, they know what they want to buy, and they just want to shove it in the basket and checkout, they have that option.
So make sure you’ve got that built into your site. Now, one of the main reasons for people bouncing off and not checking out and not buying from you, is site speed, the actual load speed of your websites, and make sure that your site speed is two seconds or less to load. That will mean that people aren’t sat there waiting for your site.
Now, people get very impatient these days, we’ve all got superfast broadband, we’ve all got 4G, people are used to sites loading very, very quickly. They won’t hang around. So the quicker your site can be, the better advantage you’ll have over your competitors. And look, is there a way for your customers to save their information or to have a one click checkout?
Again, this is all about reducing the number of clicks that people spend on your site. Amazon have this absolutely nailed, if you need some inspiration then Amazon are the people to do it. They’ve got that really simple, enter your card details once and then you can check out, over and over again with just one click.
And the more you can try to replicate these big ecommerce giants by reducing the amount of time it takes for somebody to purchase something on your site, the more successful you’ll be at your checkout stage.
Number four, focus on building trust. Now people tend to forget about this alongside all of the technical stuff that you can do to improve your ecommerce store. But this is actually one of the biggest reasons I can see when people speak to me as to why their stores are failing and it’s the simplest one to fix.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily need to involve any sort of technical development, anything complicated, it’s literally just taking a good overview of your website and seeing if that really inspires trust among your customers. So let’s have a look at some of the things that can inspire trust. So first of all, does it look professional?
You know, if you’ve got things that are, if it’s badly designed, if your branding isn’t quite on point, if things just look a little bit messy, then that can all help to make people think that you’re not very professional, you’re not good at what you’re doing, and that has a reflection on your products. So again, it’s not going to inspire trust if your site doesn’t look professional. so it’s an obvious one, but it is what one that people tend to overlook.
So make sure that your website looks clean, looks tidy, is, you know, everything is working on your site, all the links are working properly, and that it’s a professional shop front for your product. Now, branding is an important part of this. This doesn’t mean to say that you have to rush out and get new branding. But what it does mean is that you need to be consistent with your branding.
People need to be able to relate your product to your website and vice versa. By having consistent brands, people can easily recognise you, they can easily recognise your products. It helps to build that trust, so branding is really important.
Do you clearly advertise your security features? You know, making sure that you’ve got a valid SSL certificate is very important. But you can also add in things like the McAfee security and other security elements to your site.
And you can make sure that these are highlighted either at the bottom of your page or on a pop up loader to show that you are running a secure site with a good level of customer protection.
So again, have a little look at your security and if you’ve got good security in place already, then look at how you can best promote the fact that that is the case. Now, one of the biggest mistakes people make is that they leave their ecommerce stores too anonymous. They don’t put any information about who’s behind the scenes operating this company, they don’t give people company information & they don’t give telephone numbers & contact details.
What they make people think, is that if I have a problem with my order, who am I going to contact? Who am I buying from? Is this company reputable? So make sure that you include clear contact details, that you put an About Us page, showing who’s operating behind the scenes, who is going to be packing your order, what does your warehouse look like?
Now an About page takes very little, kind of, technical knowledge to put together, but the more details you can put into that About page, about you, your team, your operations, where your based etc etc, a bit about your products, will really help to build trust, and make people, you know, people like buying from people and it will really help to ensure that people know who you are, where you’re coming from, and build that really important trust behind it.
Now a really important one that you should have on your site anyway from a legal perspective, but obviously from a trust perspective, it’s essential, is ensuring that you’ve got proper privacy pages & terms & conditions set up. People look for this as a standard, make sure that you’ve got those links, that the links are in place, that those pages are comprehensively written out and displayed, because again, people will be looking at these things to ensure that you’re a reputable provider.
I just guess the most important thing to emphasise with this is that your website is your shop window, you know, so people are expecting it to look clean and tidy, to have somebody welcoming behind the door and to ensure that you’re efficient when you’re dealing with your customers, and just because you’re operating an ecommerce store and not a physical store, doesn’t mean to say that you shouldn’t pay attention to all of those points.
So email marketing is such an essential part of building an ecommerce store, because you have control of those emails, you’re not reliant on any third party providers. It means that you’ve got a ready-built audience ready to push out promotions to and offers to, and new products to. So email marketing is essential to building a great ecommerce business, and you can always pull out an email to boost your sales on a slow month, push out a special offer etc etc, so it’s a really good little tool to have.
So in order for this to work, the first thing you need to be doing is collecting those emails. Now don’t just rely on people putting emails in at the checkout, you need to be able to collect them before they’ve necessarily checked out. So have a pop up on your site, a way to subscribe to an email newsletter and make sure that’s incentivised so people are incentivised to put their email address in there. That could be a discount when they subscribe, it could be a list of the things that they get when they subscribe, but make sure that people are incentivised to put their email into a newsletter subscription, pop up or box on your site. Now, this also needs to be linked to an abandoned cart sequence.
So if somebody’s entered their email address into your newsletter subscription subscribe box, and then they’ve added things to their basket and they haven’t checked out, you need to make sure those two things are linked so it automatically sends emails reminding them to check out.
A good abandoned cart sequence can really help to increase your returns to the checkout, ensuring that you get the maximum out of your visitors. Remember that newsletters and emails shouldn’t all be about selling. They should also be about building the trust and value of your brand, so make sure that you include some stuff from behind the scenes a bit more, maybe about the production of your products, with the story behind them or the people behind them.
You know, make sure that you use email marketing as a way to build your overall brand not just as a sales tool, and that will really help you to build a wider brand around your product. Ok, so that was my four top tips for growing your ecommerce brand quickly and profitably. Now, if you want a full breakdown of the sort of email marketing emails and campaigns that you can send in order to build your ecommerce store than check out my video over here.
And if you want my full breakdown on how to run Facebook ads at the top, middle and bottom of your funnel, everything you need to know about getting that set up, then check out my video over here. Now, I release a new video every Thursday, all about growing your ecommerce brand, so make sure you hit the subscribe button. Click the bell as well, to be notified every Thursday when I release a new video.”