Every aspiring online entrepreneur dreams of building a successful business. They spend a lot of time studying and analyzing what it takes to create a foolproof business plan starting from choosing among different business models, finding the right ecommerce platform, and building an effective marketing strategy.
Despite this, some online businesses still struggle with dawdling business growth. While a stagnant business can still bring in revenue, allowing your business to plateau can negatively affect its performance in the long run. There is a wide range of reasons why your business is struggling to achieve significant growth. Here are some of the most common reasons why an electronic commerce business is stuck in a performance dead zone.
Marketing to large and vague audiences
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Ecommerce is a highly competitive industry. Given that there are thousands of other online stores selling the same digital products, goods, and services, the fight for customers is more likely to be a tight horserace. To edge out the competition, ecommerce businesses need to know how to utilize an effective and efficient digital marketing strategy.
One of the primary elements of online retail emphasizes the need to reach the right audience at the right time. Taking this into consideration, it’s important for digital marketers to understand the importance of identifying a target audience and target market for their marketing efforts. While advertising on a large scale can still bring your ecommerce business some attention and interest, learning to address specific audiences and markets in your marketing efforts can generate more valuable leads.
Determining a target audience or market allows you to promote your beautiful product or exceptional service to people with a higher chance of purchasing from your business. Let’s say you have an ecommerce store selling vehicle accessories and paraphernalia. In this case, it wouldn’t be ideal to promote in an ecommerce platform or digital channel that focuses on clothing or fashion. Instead, your target market would be those interested in the automotive industry.
Continuously failing to design your marketing strategy for a specific audience can make it difficult for your business to establish a loyal customer base and solid community. However, identifying and promoting to different target markets can provide your business with a wider reach that can bring in more traffic, generate leads, and increase sales.
Failing to convert valuable leads
Effective marketing is the first step for your business to gain traction and boost its online presence, brand awareness, and web traffic. However, all of your marketing efforts may be for naught if you’re unable to identify and convert the valuable leads that were generated from your marketing campaign. However, some may say that completing an online sale is harder to achieve.
Converting leads comes in two parts. The first one revolves around identifying quality leads from the rest. Some marketers often disregard web traffic as a metric for a successful marketing campaign. Instead of the mere number of visitors, marketers should look into the type and quality of interaction made with each visit.
Users who spend a considerable amount of time on your website browsing your products, reading reviews, and learning about your business are considered valuable and quality leads. On the other hand, those who immediately clicked out of your site can easily be disregarded for the next phase of your campaign.
Once you’ve identified your valuable leads, the next step is to apply marketing tactics that will encourage and guide them through their buyer’s journey. Provide valuable content, push targeted ads, or even send personalized emails that can help convert your leads into actual sales.
Misprioritizing search engine optimization
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Having an online presence is crucial when it comes to starting a business in the ecommerce industry. It provides your store with just enough exposure to begin promoting and selling your products or services aside from people within your close circle.
However, your business cannot grow with an extremely limited customer base. It’s crucial that you invest in marketing tactics in order to boost your online visibility and expand your customer reach. However, another marketing mistake that new business owners make is ignoring the importance of search engine optimization.
While you can use social media marketing, email marketing, and the like to advertise and promote your business, search engine optimization or SEO is still one of the most effective and cost-efficient ways to increase website traffic and generate valuable leads online.
Your ecommerce website’s search engine ranking is based on how relevant and valuable the content of your website is. It uses keyword tools and search engine software that accurately identifies what words or topics people on the internet are looking for. The more relevant your content is to the keyword or key topic, the higher your ranking would be on the results page and the more visible your website would be.
Overlooking the importance of SEO as part of your marketing strategy means that search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo won’t be able to recognize the quality and value your website can bring. Make sure to follow proper search engine optimization in every aspect of your ecommerce website. Starting from your website headlines, content titles, product descriptions, internal link structure, and more.
Overlooking ecommerce website design
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Most ecommerce business owners choose to sell their products on popular ecommerce platforms such as Shopify and BigCommerce. One of the reasons for this is that it is significantly easier to operate and manage an online business on these platforms instead of anywhere else. While these platforms make it hassle and trouble-free to start a business online, some entrepreneurs overlook the importance of creating a good and functional ecommerce website for their business.
Aside from your product or service, it is also important to understand that you are also selling your brand. Your ecommerce website is one of the primary channels where a customer would interact with your business the longest. Therefore, it’s crucial to ensure that the site is designed to provide the best possible experience for anyone going through it. Invest in your website’s user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design to optimize your site starting from its color scheme, themes, features, navigation, as well as other processes. Through this, you can provide an easier way for your customer to check out your products, read through blogs, and check out their orders with ease.
Neglecting customer service
While completing an online sale is important to grow a business, it is important for entrepreneurs to prioritize their customers as well. One of the biggest mistakes that new business owners make is focusing too much on high revenue that they neglect to ensure the quality of service their customers’ experience. While your product or service can show its worth, customers also take note of how they are taken care of during their journey.
Poor customer service can make it difficult for a business to have a solid customer base or repeat customers. Aside from that, negative customer reviews or testimonials can significantly hurt the brand’s name and reputation. Taking this into consideration, business owners need to ensure that they provide quality customer service from start to finish of each customer interaction.
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