Marketing

3 Ways To Make Sure Your Ecommerce Business Outshines The Competition

Last updated by

BusinessBlogs on

December 15, 2022

Looking to stand out in the eCommerce market?

In this article, we’ll give you three simple ways to propel yourself to the top of the ecommerce game in your niche.

Let’s get started.

Table of Contents

1. Superior Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. It’s a great solution to encourage buyer engagement across all stages of your sales funnel.

Here’s an example of a strong email-based eCommerce sales funnel structure.

Stage 1 – These are buyers that haven’t bought anything yet. However, they’ve signed up for a newsletter, discount coupon, free guide, etc. Your goal is to convert this interest into purchases.
Stage 2 – These are buyers who have bought a few products already. Your goal is to maintain these buying habits and encourage them to purchase often.
Stage 3 – These are buyers who have been inactive for a while and have paused all purchasing activities. Your goal is to re-engage these buyers to start buying products again.

Once you’ve identified which stage a buyer is in, you can use automated email marketing campaigns to send them targeted emails.

Here’s what an ideal email for each stage might look like.

Stage 1 – A welcome email that offers them generous discounts to encourage their first purchase.
Stage 2 – Helpful product recommendations based on their previous purchases. This sustains buying habits as they’re presented with relevant products to buy.
Stage 3 – Personalized messages such as “We Miss You” emails, accompanied by heavy discount coupons work well for re-engagement.

The most important thing in email marketing is identifying which stage a buyer is in. If you miscalculate this, your emails are no longer targeted and won’t be as effective. Consider consulting an expert ecommerce marketing agency to show you the ropes before trying this out.

Once you have a good email marketing strategy in place, you’ll be able to attract first-time buyers and maximize customer retention.

2. Savvy eCommerce SEO

Ecommerce giants like Amazon are bigger, better and richer than you’ll ever be. Trying to compete with them using ads is not a smart choice.

Why?

You’d have to spend loads of money on ads, which is risky.
Amazon has way bigger ad budgets than you.

What you should do is invest in search engine optimization (SEO). This will allow your webpages to pop up on Google searches. The next time someone searches for whatever keywords are most relevant to your shop, your webpage on that topic will pop up. This drives traffic to your site and improves your sales.

Here’s how you go about it.

Research Your Competitors – Look at your competitors and what they’re writing about. This gives you an idea of what niches to target. It also gives you an idea of what kind of articles to craft – lists, how-to-manuals, reviews, gift guides, etc.
Do Some Keyword Research – Use a tool like Ahrefs to identify good keywords to target. When looking at keywords in your industry, you should be looking at two metrics. “Search volume” indicates how many people search for this term in a given month, and “Keyword difficulty” denotes how hard ranking for this term will be, due to the search positioning strength of your competitors.

You would generally do best to target high volume keywords in your field that have relative low KD. This will maximize your chances of reaching loads of people with minimal effort.

Use this keyword data to generate a shortlist of the top keywords you want to target. Then write articles that are relevant to the keywords and place calls-to-action (CTAs) in your articles, encouraging visitors to purchase. Also make sure to add these keywords to your product pages and their meta descriptions.

SEO is a sustainable approach for attracting buyers to your website without continuing to shell out excessive money on ads.

3. Vigilant Customer Support

Most eCommerce sites aren’t known for their customer support. Thus, having an omnichannel customer experience with excellent customer support is a smart way to outshine your competition.

There are two main benefits to this: reputation management and curbing customer churn.

Being one of the few eCommerce sites in your niche to proactively care about customers is a good way to build a name for yourself. More customers will flock to your site because they know they’ll be valued there.

They’ll know that their queries will be dealt with promptly. This helps to eliminate the fear factor associated with online purchases. Once they know there’s a good customer support team in place, they’ll be more willing to make a purchase.

Having an excellent omnichannel customer support team can speed up your support ticket processing lags. This is important, as loads of customers are lost over slow response rates. Once a customer realizes that their complaint isn’t a priority, they’ll abandon your site and move on to the next eCommerce site instead.

When you have an omnichannel support team in place, customers can reach out on multiple platforms. This could be via email, phone, webchat or even social media.

By giving them so many options to reach out, you’re making the redressal process easy for them. You’re also speeding up the process as you have multiple outlets to address concerns. It’s a great way to keep customers on your site and buy more.