Starting a new D2C brand is never easy. If you have already set up your eCommerce store, pat yourself on the back. Now, let’s move on to the most crucial part of your business, “SALES”!
The internet is overloaded with advice, but this is not another generic post about the top ways to grow an eCommerce business.
We have accumulated five proven methods that numerous eCommerce businesses have tested and seen positive results.
Try these strategies to gain a competitive advantage; read on!
Improve Customer Service
Research shows that if customers receive good service, they will talk about the company to two or three people. Customers are the heart of any business, and providing them with bespoke customer service thus becomes crucial.
The happier your customers are, the more they will return to your brand and shop. 86% of Indian customers value customer service more than the actual product. Once you become contactable and you genuinely show your customers that you care about them, the more your customers begin to trust you.
Few strategies that you can follow to enhance your customer service:
Monitor Customer Feedback
Do you know that around 80% of companies vouch that they provide the best customer experience, whereas a study shows that only 8% of customers agree?
To provide optimum customer service, the first thing that any company needs to do is monitor customer feedback properly. The feedback your customers provide is directly linked to their purchase making decisions.
Send a feedback form to your customers after every call so that they can rate their overall experience. Don’t just add rating stars; let them write something too. Ideally, this should be done via the backend as well, and the right channel would be email and chat.
Distribute customer reviews and testimonials strategically. Also, it will be better to create two distinct processes for sharing customer feedback. One needs to be for negative reviews, which your company must work on. Negative reviews will help you understand the flaws and gaps that need to be fixed.
And the second for positive reviews. Use them to tell your customers how great your company is. Share them to your website, Google My Business, and wherever you can.
Tools That Can Help
UserReport
UserReport is a user engagement tool with multiple features. It lets you find what your customers’ actual needs are so that you can offer them the best services and products. UserReport is a preferred customer engagement tool by top companies such as TripAdvisor, Toyota, Johnston Press, etc.
This tool is built on two simple widgets- feedback and survey widgets. Moreover, UserReport can be easily integrated into a website or an app. One good thing about the survey widget is that it offers a Net Promoter Score to understand how well your customers respond to your services or products.
The feedback widget helps companies collect information about the issues they need to address or services and products that are performing the best.
Key Features
- Feedback and survey widgets for feedback and data collection.
- The free version is available and is more than enough for businesses with a tight budget.
- Provides you with NPS to work on your products and services better.
- Google Analytics integration is available.
Suitable for: Freelancers, small and medium businesses.
Price: UserReport is a free-to-use tool.
Website: https://www.userreport.com/
Typeform
Typeform is a professional and one of the best customer data collection software. It provides you with thousands of ready-to-use templates for questionnaires and surveys. It not only lets you create feedback forms but also quizzes and surveys that your customers will enjoy answering.
Unlike other feedback collection forms, Typeform takes a different approach. It asks one question at a time so that customers can take their time to think about their responses and fill in more detailed answers.
You can add videos and photos from the library to bring life to your feedback forms. Each question will have a logical flow, making feedback form more engaging.
Key Features
- Pre-designed templates are available and allow you to create feedback forms in a minute.
- It provides you with real-time results of your feedback forms.
- It comes with good features such as question branching, online polls, poll management, etc.
- Logical flow from one question to another.
Suitable for: Small to large businesses.
Price: Free version is available | Paid version starts from $25.00 per month.
Website: https://www.typeform.com/
Ask Nicely
Customer service of any company is the frontline team that deals with a company’s customers directly, and it is on them to provide the best service. Keeping that in mind, the next recommended feedback tool that we suggest is Ask Nicely.
Ask Nicely works on a simple idea- to help companies work on feedback based on NPS reports. The feedback you will create using Ask Nicely can be shared with teams via Slack, PowerPoint, etc., in real-time so that you can take immediate actions. You can collect feedback by sharing feedback forms via SMS, web, and email.
Key Features
- It lets you create multiple-question and short survey forms in a few minutes.
- The tool sends an alert the moment someone fills a feedback form.
- You can share the feedback results with teams throughout your organisation in real-time.
- It comes with an in-built dashboard enabling you to monitor feedback performances.
Suitable for: Small businesses and start-ups.
Price: Free and demo available on request | For more features, please contact the company.
Website: https://www.asknicely.com/
Be Active on Social Media
One good thing about eCommerce companies is that you already have an online presence. What you need to think about is how to engage with the right audience on the right platform and at the right time! Social media is the backbone for D2C brands and eCommerce businesses that directly sell their services and products to customers.
Customers these days look for brands on different platforms, and that’s why being active on social media becomes crucial. You have better chances of engaging with your customers on social media platforms.
Two social media platforms that you can’t ignore are Facebook and Instagram. Having a solid presence and advertising your products on Facebook and Instagram will enable you to create the right impression in front of your customers. Share content that will resonate well with your audience, and avoid posting random posts on these platforms because that can alienate them.
Social media marketing will require a proper strategy, and the strategy can have the following things:
- First, question yourself and determine why your brand wants to be on social media? Is it to increase brand awareness? Do you want to generate more leads, attract more customers to drive traffic to your company’s website, boost brand awareness, provide better customer service, etc.? The more questions you will ask yourself, the clearer the picture will become for the reason to be on social media platforms.
- Second, think about your target audience. Based on your target audience, you will be able to create a social media post calendar that will work for you. So, think about your company and what it sells. Then think about your target audience’s age, gender, location, etc. Where are your customers most active? Is it on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.?
- Third, have a clear picture of what you will share (photos, reels, videos, stories) on social media platforms. Based on the products and services you sell, try to keep your audience up-to-date about the latest trends in your industry. The best way to go about it is by doing competition analysis and finding what your competitors are up to. Don’t copy what they are doing, but take inspiration and ideas.
- Fourth, have a social media calendar ready. You might feel tempted to share your posts as soon as you are ready with your content, but the key here is to know when your audience is most active on social media. Some tips that will help you analyse your audience’s behaviour on social media:
- Sports fans are most active on social media before and just after a match. This is when they interact the most.
- Travel enthusiasts are most likely to be active during the weekends. Weekends are the best time to plan for a trip; hence posting content related to travel, be it travel gear, accessories, clothes, travel packages, etc., during weekends can garner attention.
- For clothing brands, the right time to share posts on social media is Friday (evening) to Saturday (particularly from 11 AM to 1 PM). Friday is the last working day of the week for most working professionals, and this is when they feel most comfortable exploring clothing brands.
Make Your eCommerce Website Mobile-Optimised
The usage of mobile devices to shop online or browse websites has increased exceptionally. In fact, in October 2021, over 113 million shopping apps were downloaded. By optimising your eCommerce website for mobile users, your chances of sales can escalate too. People these days like to shop on the go, and missing out on mCommerce customers means missing out on a lot of revenue and profits.
Even if you don’t want to invest money in an app immediately, you should definitely make your website mobile-optimised to cater to mobile users’ requirements. Allow your customers to navigate through your eCommerce site without hassle, no matter which device they use. Make the content on your eCommerce site easily digestible by different users.
Here are a few tips that will help you get started:
- Have a responsive website. Responsive designs allow different website elements to adjust themselves based on a customer’s device. Since customers prefer to use different devices to shop or browse websites, it makes sense to have a responsive website design. This way, your website will be able to perform under different circumstances.
- While designing a web-based website, you have more freedom to design it as you want. But 49% of mobile users prefer using one hand while browsing websites. Based on this, your customers will have limited reachability when exploring your website on their mobile devices. So, what you can do is place clickable content in more accessible locations for mobile devices.
- Mobile screens are smaller than computer screens, which is why you should think of including a navigation menu to increase user engagement. The hamburger menu, for example, is the most popular, and that’s because the hamburger menu allows items to appear properly and, most importantly, consumes less screen space.
- When it comes to forms, try to simplify them as much as possible. Since mobile screens are small, ask for absolutely necessary information, this will minimise the number of form fields. Add drop-down menus wherever possible to allow customers to choose an option quickly. Even checkboxes will be a good option.
- Another important tip that you should consider is eliminating pop-ups. Of course, you will like to tell your audience about the ongoing offers or the latest product, but too much of them can annoy your customers. Pop-ups are one of the main reasons why so many customers abandon a shopping website. If you absolutely must have pop-ups, test them rigorously before making them go live. Make sure that the pop-ups don’t appear here and there and are easy to close.
Upsell, But in a Better Way
As per research, the probability of selling to existing customers is much higher than to new ones. In fact, if you want to sell new products and services to new customers, the chances of being sold are only 5-20%, whereas when it comes to old customers, the chances increase by 60-70%.
Since product recommendations can increase your revenue and sales, one should know when and how to recommend products to customers. Show the products at the right time, and your chances of selling your products increase, but show them the upsell pop-up at the wrong time, and your customers won’t take a second to abandon their carts or leave your website.
Few things to keep in mind before you upsell your products:
- The right place to upsell a product is actually the product page. This is where you can show off different product versions of the same product. Another good place to upsell is when a customer adds an item to their cart but hasn’t checked out yet. When you show other similar or upgraded products when they add one product to their cart, they get to take a look at products that can be more valuable to them.
- Do upsell, but never be too pushy. Even though the products you are trying to upsell are beneficial for your customers, they will leave your website if you show upsell pop-ups at the wrong time. For example, don’t upsell products the moment they visit your website. There is no point trying to upsell something when customers land on your website because they have not even checked what’s there to buy. This will only annoy the customers and push them to leave the website.
- When you upsell something, always be relevant. For example, if a customer adds a marketing book to their cart, upsell products related to marketing, maybe another book on marketing or an audiobook of the same book. Someone showing an interest in a marketing book won’t find a children’s book appealing. So, ensure you are being relevant while upselling.
- Spotify does an excellent job when it comes to upselling. They are not just relevant with their upselling tactics, but they are really good at it. They choose the correct language to upsell their products. For example, when customers go for a free plan, they upsell their paid subscription plan by showing what their customers will miss out on if they don’t pick the paid subscription plan. This makes Spotify customers rethink their purchase decision. Therefore, the key takeaway here is to know the correct language to persuade customers.
Provide a Seamless Checkout Experience
When a customer shops online and till the time they pay, they have to go through multiple steps. So, even if an online business can’t change a customer’s mind if they don’t like a product, what they can do is save customers from having a bad experience when they proceed to checkout.
What’s commonly seen in checkout pages is that a customer has to fill multiple form fields. As per Baymard, there are 11.8 form fields a customer has to fill on average before actually completing a purchase. Now, that’s tedious and one of the reasons for cart abandonment.
Moreover, inconsistent checkout experiences across brands also lead to drop-offs/cart abandonment. Checkout needs to be designed in a frictionless and ideally personalised manner, which requires domain expertise in the checkout, given how vast the scope of checkout is.
Not just this, earlier, there used to be two payment methods- debit and credit cards. However, eCommerce businesses soon realised that they should include multiple payment options to cater to a more extensive audience base.
Customers prefer different payment methods. Not every customer will be willing to prepay, so offering payment options like COD and new age methods such as EMI and Pay later makes sense.
More payment options mean more conversion, lesser cart abandonment rate, improved brand perception, faster checkout, and reaching out to a broader audience.
A study stated that COD is the chosen payment method for 66% of orders placed on all leading e-retail platforms in India. Out of which 33% of them are not delivered.
Razorpay Magic Checkout gives you the provision to disable the COD payment option in real-time for high-risk orders and encourages customers to prepay. It analyses each order and red flags high-risk orders with a high propensity to RTO based on customers’ historic RTO patterns across hundreds of brands in the Magic Checkout network.
Razorpay has been serving millions of E-commerce businesses with a clean, customer-friendly, frictionless, and most importantly, secure checkout for more than six years. Our checkout domain expertise makes us a go-to checkout provider for eCommerce businesses who want to offer a frictionless & 5X faster checkout experience to their customers that converts 40% better.
Wrapping Up
These are the top five marketing strategies that you can implement to grow your eCommerce business. You can pick one or all of them based on your requirements. But our recommendation is to keep trying different marketing strategies before figuring out what works best for you.
Always remember that your customers want the best from your eCommerce store. So, let your customers feel their very best when they browse through your website. Remember the five key strategies, improve customer service, engage with your customers via different social media platforms, have a mobile-optimised website, upsell in the right way, and last but not least, provide a seamless checkout experience.
While you work on the rest of the strategies, there is one strategy that Razorpay Magic Checkout can help you with, and that’s providing your customers with a seamless and hyper-optimised checkout experience.
Magic Checkout automatically prefills delivery details and information of customers who have shopped previously from Magic Checkout network stores, allowing customers to checkout 50% faster.
If you need any help regarding checkout and want to know how Razorpay Magic Checkout can help you, don’t hesitate to write to us at magic-checkout@razorpay.com.
