Tips for Your eCommerce Small Business

It’s small business week, and here at efelle creative, we love working with small businesses to help them perfect their eCommerce design and strategy.

If you run an eCommerce business, here are some of our tried and true strategies for growing and optimizing your small business.

Know Your eCommerce Data

When you’re looking at your eCommerce strategy, it’s important to start with the data that you have and to keep monitoring that data as things change over time.

For eCommerce websites, we always recommend using Google Analytics. It’s the gold standard for tracking what pages users are visiting, how they’re finding your site, what journey they take on your site, and more.

If you know where to find that data and what it means for your business, you’ll be able to adjust your strategy so that it’s easier for prospective customers to become paying customers.

For instance, Google Analytics will tell you the sources of your website traffic. If Facebook is driving traffic, you’ll know you want to keep up with ads or posts there. Likewise, if your traffic is coming from Google, you’ll know that your SEO efforts are important.

You’ll also be able to tell where there are shortcomings on your website. If you aren’t getting traffic regularly from sources you think you should be, that tells you there needs to be an adjustment in your strategy.

You can also notice if the people visiting your website drop off quickly or don’t navigate to other pages after the homepage. That can usually mean that your website isn’t appealing or easy to navigate. There’s not enough to engage people once they get to the site itself.

Google Analytics tells you a lot about your website and should be checked at least once a quarter to ensure things are moving in the right direction.

Keep in mind, that Google Analytics just recently announced a move from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4. You’ll need to transition your site to continue getting this helpful data. You can read more about this update on our blog.

Think of Mobile Experience

According to Statista, 90 percent of the global internet population uses a mobile device to go online in 2021. That means your site has to be as appealing and functional on a mobile device as it is on desktop.

Too often, eCommerce companies will lose out on a sale because a customer struggles to complete the checkout process or can’t find the right product on a mobile device.

You could be missing out on sales if your site isn’t making the mobile buying experience an easy one.

Grow & Optimize Email Marketing

For a well-rounded eCommerce strategy, you’ll want to ensure that your email marketing is set up to encourage repeat customers and connect with customers that might have drifted.

For instance, if someone visits your website, starts adding items to the cart, and then gets distracted, do you have an email sequence to follow up with them? That abandoned cart sequence can help encourage purchases from customers that you already know are interested.

You can also use emails to promote special discounts or remind customers of certain holiday deals.

Make sure that you add an area on your website where people can register for your email list. That could be a pop up or a sign up form.

A good email marketing plan will also segment out the lists that you have. That way, you can email people based on how frequently they engage, what products they’ve looked at in the past, and how they first got connected to your company.

List segmentation also ensures that you’re not emailing people too frequently with messages that they aren’t interested in.

Use Retargeting Ads

As we mentioned above, it can be helpful to follow-up with people who added items to the cart but never finished their purchase. Similarly, you can retarget people who visited your website with ads on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and more.

These sites have what are called Pixels. They’re lines of code that can be added to the backend of your website to track who has visited your site and retarget them when they visit another site.

The great thing about Pixels is that you can even narrow it into particular pages. If you’re really hoping to do a push for a certain product category, you can retarget people who visited that category on your site.

You’ll just want to make sure that your Pixel is set up and functioning properly. You’ll also need a disclosure on your website that tells people you are using a Pixel for tracking.

Incorporate Social Media

Along with retargeting ads, you’ll want to make sure that your eCommerce site has a strong social media presence. There’s a lot that goes into that, but one of the key things is connecting your catalog to sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. This lets users buy directly on the app when they see your products tagged in photos.

Having that functionality makes it much easier for people to find products you’re sharing on social media and convert to a purchase as soon as they’re interested.

Need help with your eCommerce Small Business Strategy?

If you’re struggling with one or all of these tips, we’re always here to help. Just reach out to us to get started.