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The eCommerce industry has been experiencing a boom in the past two years. With the advent of the global pandemic, more people resorted to eCommerce to meet their needs.
According to Statista, more than 2.14 billion people made online purchases in 2021, which was way higher than the 1.6 billion that made online purchases five years earlier. As a result of this, now is the best time to consider venturing into the eCommerce space as an entrepreneur.
This doesn’t mean that once you open an online store, you are bound to succeed. Far from it. In fact, the competition is almost stifling, as there are about 24 million online stores globally, with over 2 million in the United States alone.
With the number of stores out there, it means that if distributed evenly, only about 100 people are supposed to make purchases from each store. To thrive in spite of that staggering competition, you have to stand out.
Among all the eCommerce websites that exist today, Amazon has grown to become the most popular with more than 197 million monthly visitors. And the top secret behind their success has been identified to be their dedication to high-quality customer experience.
This means that if you want to stand out in the eCommerce industry, you must make customer satisfaction a priority. And in this article, I am going to show you a few tips to help you build a thriving and customer-centric eCommerce business in a few steps.
If you are ready, let’s dive in.
1. Connect with your target audience
Before a prospect will become a customer, they need to feel that they know, like and trust you. And you can’t do this if all you do is run ads on Facebook and send generic emails.
Not only do you want your audience to become your customers, but you also want them to become your brand ambassadors. This means you need to wow them with your service. And you can’t delight them if you don’t connect with them.
Here are a few things you can do to connect with your target audience:
-Respond to their messages
Nobody likes to be snubbed. Any customer that makes the effort to reach out to you deserves to be responded to. You may have to train your staff on how best to do this. You can equally employ the use of CRM software to make sure this is done.
Even if the feedback you get is negative, make sure your audience feels heard. Listen to them, show empathy and promise to solve their problems. If you do this effectively, the party involved is likely going to become a repeat buyer.
-Create a community and get them involved
It is one thing to run an ad about your products, and it is another thing to have a satisfied customer give a positive review about your product.
Create a community for your audience where they can talk about your products among themselves, and with family and friends. These communities could be anything within the ranges of tweet chats, Twitter spaces, Facebook groups, Radio shows, or meet and greets.
-Employ the use of video
In 2022, you must learn to use video if you want to connect with your audience and get them to buy from you. Videos have proven to be a very effective medium of communication and, connection. From Instagram reels to TikTok videos, you will be missing a lot of opportunities to connect with your audience if you don’t make use of videos.
-Make them the hero in your content marketing efforts
Everybody loves heroes. But there is a great feeling that comes from knowing you are the hero in the marketing campaign you are seeing. To do this, create content that shows your target market how they can become the saviors of the day by the use of your product. This way, their emotions get involved, and they will love your product even before they get to buy it.
Even though you can’t be everything to everybody, to stand out in the already saturated eCommerce space, you must have to connect with your customers.
2. Make the most of digital marketing
Even though mainstream advertising is still a powerful tool today, digital marketing has come to stay. According to the Founder of Ocere, “Digital marketing is the best way you can spread your company’s message to the right people. It begins with having the right content strategy and grows into social media marketing, search engine optimization, video marketing, link building, and advertising”.
Some of the ways you can maximize digital marketing as an eCommerce entrepreneur are:
-Live videos
Video marketing is an integral part of digital marketing, but it can be expensive to produce. Live video, on the other hand, can be made with minimal expenses. And with it, you can give your eCommerce business a face and a brand that people can relate to. One of the reasons it is so effective is because it gives your audience a sense of intimacy and immediacy. And this is done at no extra cost, as anyone with a phone can go live.
-Social commerce
Not everyone will have the patience to jump through all the hoops that exist between your social media pages and your checkout page. But platforms like Pinterest and Instagram have simplified that process.
Customers can now make in-app purchases on social media platforms. From Instagram ads to Facebook shops, and even Snapchat, the process has been simplified, and you should maximize these channels and take your audience from the awareness to purchase stage immediately.
-Advanced SEO tactics
For a long time, there has been competition for Google search top position. And since a lot of buyers still come through organic traffic, you should not take this lightly. Doing the regular things that other business does like, keyword planning, keyword research, and the use of meta tags won’t cut it.
To win the SEO game, you have to employ other tactics. Gone were the days that customers’ queries come as keywords. Now they come as questions.
One of the ways you can remain relevant and get loads of organic traffic is by tailoring your content to answer the questions your target audience is asking.
But not just that, since voice search has started booming, you should start optimizing your content for voice search too. Make your content conversational and direct so it can easily get synced to search queries.
In conclusion, eCommerce has come to stay. And by applying the steps above, your dream of building a successful eCommerce business is going to come to become a reality in no time.
