5 Investments You Need to Make to Boost Your Business Growth
Every eCommerce company wants to boost business growth with the right investment. With the massive expansion in 2020 and sales increases predicted for 2021 as well, now seems like the perfect time to get things right and make your site more appealing. Whether your brand is pivoting in hopes of surviving customer shifts or has an opportunity to scale your sales, it’ll take time and capital to get you to the next level.
Here we’ll look at a few methods designed to get you to the next phase and increase that revenue stream, targeting multiple channels:
- Revisiting your load times
- Focusing service on existing customers
- Refreshing your market research and pricing
- Adding down-sell options
- Growing partnerships in fulfillment and more
These investments provide a broad range of support for growing your business and potentially reducing expenses. All the benefits from them start with your ability to keep people interested and have them visit your site, whether the customer’s goal is a purchase or support.
Hire developers to load faster
Most modern companies know that load times impact your sales. Recent research highlights that the first five seconds matter, and you can lose up to 4.42% on conversion rates for each additional second. Your search rankings also depend on speed, so going slower also reduces your overall audience as it harms conversion rates.
It’s easy to remember to go for speed when you build your website and sales channels. However, it’s also easy to forget to come back to this metric as you grow. Spend some time testing your site, landing pages, and big sellers to ensure they’re loading quickly. Invest in development here to speed up your site while maintaining high-quality images, video, and other elements critical to your audience.
Every other investment you’ll make for new customers and people returning to buy again is harmed when your website loads slowly. Start here and stress test your site to ensure that you’ll have fast loading speeds and a quick checkout process, even on days like Cyber Monday.
Expand service for existing customers
Most customers read reviews for your business, and one thing that can harm any review is low-quality service. So, spending on customer service support and tools helps improve your reviews and keeps existing customers coming back to buy more.
Your first goal is to take any feedback you have already and use it to improve your operations. Target the areas where existing customers complain or have frustrations. Getting it right for them will help you get it right for new customers too. Your current audience is also a little more likely to give you another chance to get things right and provide feedback on new efforts. Plus, some 93% of people say they’ll make a repeat purchase from a company that offered excellent service.
Where you spend depends on your current business and customers. You might be best served by adding chatbots to your site or implementing ones specific to a channel like Facebook Messenger. Adding customer service phone lines or growing your library of support videos may also help address customer issues. Even something like improving packaging — making it more secure or more eco-friendly — might be a solution that your customers love.
Review targets and pricing
Part of boosting your business is ensuring that your current audience is the right one. If your store is struggling to grow or is losing ground, you might be targeting the wrong market or making the wrong offers. Your leads should be interested in your products and agree with the value that you place on them. If you’re misaligned in either, your marketing won’t be as successful as it can be. You’ll end up spending too much for leads and customer acquisition.
Take some of your existing budget and spend it on market analysis. You can adopt new tools, outsource for support, or expand your time. The goal is to gain knowledge on people and your overall market. From there, you’ll be able to determine if you need to adjust products, pricing, or even consider changing an offer to match your customers’ needs.
Thankfully, building personas and audiences often highlight the ability to increase sales due to small changes like offering free or fast shipping.
Add down-selling options
Economic changes happen quickly and continually. Your audience today may see their spending power grow or decline throughout the year. Many successful companies offer lower-priced items to help keep people engaged even in those downturns. Your eCommerce store or service business may want to consider options related to what you sell but a more baseline alternative.
The down-selling concept covers any offer of an alternative to your higher-priced goods, and usually serves at least some of the same function as your core product. You’ve likely seen this in the software when a first offer may only include one or two accounts or has other capacity limits. That allows interested customers to buy a low-price option to test out your company.
As the customer’s budget increases, they have a chance to upgrade to your bestseller or higher-tiered option. Not only does down-selling lower the barrier to entry, but it also gives people a chance to test you and your products out without feeling like they’re spending too much.
Try multiple partners
The first partner you work with isn’t always the best or the only one you need. Most growing businesses realize this once they shift from sending orders out at a carrier’s store and sign up for a business account. As your sales volume grows, you can negotiate even better rates to control costs further. That’s because your growth is valuable to your partners.
Capitalize on that value by testing multiple partners and relationships. You’ll want to A/B test services just like you do marketing. Partners should be willing to support these efforts. Expanding to multiple carriers or fulfillment partners, for example, helps ensure reliable delivery options and capacity as you get ready for fourth-quarter sales.
Look at places where your business struggled and try to identify more options. Can you try to use a fulfillment partner for just a certain region? Could a new marketing company help you land more sales on Instagram? Are there multiple wholesalers who you could use to avoid delays due to ports?
Flexibility not only helps you scale but also mitigates risks from single points of failure.
Conclusion
It can be difficult to invest in areas that have a strong return. Unfortunately, there’s no place where you get a “guaranteed” return, despite the promises you’ll hear from marketing teams or someone trying to get you to read their blog. Instead, look for investment areas that match either what your customers want or the problems your business faces.
Tackle shortages, delays, and disruptions that impact your ability to support customers or cause negative emotional reactions among shoppers. Get them right and you’re both building up existing customer lifetime value and making it easier for the next person to make their first purchase.
Jake Rheude is the Director of Marketing for Red Stag Fulfillment, an ecommerce fulfillment warehouse that was born out of ecommerce. He has years of experience in ecommerce and business development. In his free time, Jake enjoys reading about business and sharing his own experience with others.