I was having a conversation with my friend the other day who works in tax, where he mentioned that people seem to be unable to comprehend the losses they are incurring, if they are not willing to pay attention to them. He gave me the example of his clients who know full well the large penalties they will incur, if they don’t submit their tax returns on time. Yet, they continue with their selective ignorance, blind to the problem until it’s too late. He was particularly surprised by his wealthier clients, who stood the most to lose from the problem of their own making.
This applies to business owners too. I couldn’t tell you the number of ecommerce stores that chose to ignore suggestions about areas of their store that were either costing them money, or significantly hampering their potential earnings. They worry about small bottlenecks, like developer costs and monthly plugin fees that are a drop in the ocean compared to the potential benefits. They are focused on the wrong things and therefore unable to fully consider the problem. Or even worse, company bureaucracy prevents anything from moving forward.
People aren’t stupid, but when they aren’t focused on the problem, they might as well be.
People who earn a lot of money can be more susceptible to this for two reasons.
- They have much more to lose. These people are in positions of high leverage and any percentage based costs or fees incurred will be significantly larger than average.
- Somewhat understandably, given their above average success and net worth, they may consider themselves to be less prone to the problem. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. We are all human and, very often, the extra confidence can blind you to the awareness you are currently lacking.
With all that being said;
Here are 51 different tactics that help ecommerce brands grow their profitability in a sustainable manner through increased traffic, conversion rate, average order value, lifetime value and retention.
Don't fall victim to the same mentality.
- Increase Mobile Conversion Rate - This can kill your marketing ROAS. Test the whole buyer journey on your phone regularly.
- Improve your product pages' copy by selling to your customers first and optimising for SEO second.
- Improve all your product pictures - This can be done in less than a day with photoshop.
- Add an attractive hero section to the top of your web pages.
- Install a light review plugin and make adding reviews extremely easy for customers
- Add video content from real customers - quality is not overly important - authentic testimonials and unboxing work great.
- Add social proof throughout the store using an extension like FOMO
- Increase Order Value through cross-selling/up-selling on add to cart and at checkout
- Encourage bulk orders through discounts
- Make subscribe and save an extremely attractive option to maximise lifetime value and give your marketing campaigns every chance to succeed
- Test selling your products on Amazon if the fees are acceptable but look at your Amazon product page and NEVER let it be better than your own store. You want new people to discover you through Amazon but buy directly from you as much as possible.
- Increase your page speed - this is directly linked to revenue
- Add a dynamic, one-click checkout option
- Add urgency to checkout by offering a small discount that expires quickly or mentions limited stock.
- Make sure that your store breaks up its different product categories by URL. These are called category pages and they help with both navigation and SEO
- Add content to your category pages to make sure they index well on Google for SEO
- Use a quiz funnel to direct users to the category of product that suits them best. This is also a very effective way to monetise your organic, blog traffic. You can build this quite quickly using Typeform and Klaviyo. Show it to users with a subtle pop-up.
- Collect email addresses with this quiz funnel to grow your email list
- If any products are out of stock, add a waitlist option that collects user email addresses
- Optimize all of your social media pages to move followers from social to your email list. For example, include email subscribe options in your bio or pinned post at the top of you profile.
- Offer lead magnets or discounts for people who join your email list.
- Use Smart site search to stop users from getting lost and frustrated
- Offer an option to skip login and checkout as a guest
- Ask your friends and family to use the website on multiple devices and try to get to the checkout - see what issues they encounter and improve your checkout flow. Become obsessed with the buyer’s journey on your website.
- Add verified payment provider badges to checkout to increase trust
- Have a secure HTTPS website - obviously
- No dead links or 404 errors. Ever.
- Be extremely transparent about your shipping policy. If you don’t deliver to certain areas or if shipping is very expensive to certain states, communicate that early and clearly to avoid angry users. If you offer free shipping over a certain order value, show users how close they are to reaching it and encourage them to get there.
- Segment your email list based on recency, frequency, and monetary value of customers (RFM Analysis), or if you can't get that data - simpler factors like open rate - this can be done in Mailchimp. Send different types of emails to them depending on these factors
- Focus on retention and margins. Make Lifetime value and profit your priority metrics, not revenue and Cost Per Add to cart.
- Add your email list to your marketing campaigns so you can retarget them on Facebook and Google Ads
- Upload all of your products to Google Merchant Centre and ensure your feed is set up correctly, including your GTINs to avail of free clicks on Google Shopping
- Launch a Google Shopping Campaign in Google Ads for these products
- Expand your Google ads offering by testing some search campaigns that use very specific long-tail keywords, related to your products. Don’t use broad match.
- Once this is working at a suitable ROAS, you can test a wider range of keywords.
- Test a Google Ads campaign targeting your competitors’ brand name and/or products
- Import your merchant centre store into Microsoft Ads and run the same campaigns on Bing to scale them profitably.
- Create a specific product feed for each social channel so you can add a ‘Shop’ tab to all of your social media pages
- Test product catalog ads on Social using the products from these feeds
- Sign up for ‘Buy on Google’ so people can buy your products directly from Google, commission-free.
- If you have physical stores - sign up for ‘local product listings’ and ‘local inventory ads’ in Google Merchant Centre.
- Create a new Google My Business Location for every store you have to maximise your local SEO traffic
- See if you can get your products featured on coupon/referral websites such as Dealscove, Couponfollow, etc.
- Analyse your product margins and how much you spend on advertising each product. Cut products that are costing you money
- Analyse your source/medium report in Google Analytics to see which channels are leading to the most sales. Double down where possible.
- Stay on top of your logistics so that you never run out of the products which make you the most profit.
- Reach out to the right kinds of influencers with products that will deliver their audience tons of value.
- Be creative in your marketing tactics and reach out to reporters to get free press
- Leverage your customer video content across Facebook and IG ads
- If you have a female-focused product run Pinterest video ads too. They work particularly well on this platform.
- Launch a display remarketing campaign on Google and Facebook for non-buying users who have:
- Visited the website
- Added to Cart
- Abandoned Checkout
- In both the last 7 days and the last 30 days
- You should bid more for customers further down the funnel and users who were more recent
You can read another article about social media marketing in 2024 here.
