Scaling your business can be a stressful task. Even if you have natural growth, there is still much to do to grow your business. Failure to effectively scale your business can hinder the possibility of your business growing to the level that you desire.
Ecommerce has a reputation of being one of the most difficult businesses to scale. Selling a service to consumers is one thing, offering a physical product requires management & careful planning.
Is your business at a stand still? Is it growing at a pace that you would like to continue? If any of this applies to you, take a moment to read over the three crucial things you must do in order to build your ecommerce business and scale.
1. Create a bullet proof marketing campaign
It’s impossible to grow your business without marketing. Even if you have customers that are currently buying your products, you must have a strategy in place to reach new potential customers. If you don’t, your growth will eventually plateau. You will need continued momentum to continue growth and ensure your business remains profitable.
It doesn’t matter how busy you are, you must make your marketing efforts a priority if you want to build a sustainable business.
Selling a product online does require a very strong presence and positive reputation, you also need a method in place to close potential customers that come to your website. Consider learning more about sustainable traffic like SEO, make sure you also make it “worth it” to your visitors with rewards on continued purchases & discounts.
A popular method for ecommerce is investing time into growing your social media presence along with incentives through email marketing. Over 60% of shoppers often leave their shopping cart after going through remorse. Many ecommerce websites have an automatic email reminder to bring the potential customer back with a discount as an incentive so they can continue shopping.
2. Don’t waste time fulfilling orders yourself
A very time consuming issue with ecommerce is stocking, packing, and shipping the products that customers purchase. Do you have all of your products at home clogging up space packing and shipping your items? This is very labor intensive which takes away time from building your online presence and marketing your business. Look into a fulfillment services to free up your time so that you can focus on bringing in more customers and providing a good customer service experience for them.
A fulfillment service stores and ships your products for you. When an order is placed, the fulfillment company you work with them packs up the item that is ordered and ships it to your customers with minimal involvement on your part. Fulfillment is a necessity if you wish to scale your business.
A strong fulfillment service will give an ecommerce company the opportunity to focus on the important tasks associated with growing their margins, marketing, social media , customer support, etc.
A fulfillment service has multiple benefits that will enable you to scale your business. Countless hours are saved which can then be reinvested into other areas of your business. You also save money on the costs involved with shipping. You no longer need to waste time or gas to drive back and forth to the post office along with the costs involved with packing and postage.
3. Craft an enticing customer service experience
Lets take a look at the numbers. If one customer out of 99 who purchase your product complains, those are really good numbers. Now, imagine scaling your business to over 5,000 customers, which means you now have 50 who are unhappy. Bottom line, the more customers you bring in the door, the more unhappy ones you will eventually encounter.
You need to properly address your customers issues & concerns as they can effect your reviews online. Your customers are the core of your ecommerce business, it should be a priority to address their concerns in a timely manner as they come in. Social media will more than likely be the first avenue an unsatisfied customer will complain, take care of your customers so they share their positive experiences online to help with your reputation.
Your customers original problem is often not why they will complain. It is how you handle their complaint. Having a strong process in place on handling and addressing upset customers is important to keep your customers returning to your store.
In closing - scaling your business
Remember, these are not the only things you should do in order to build a profitable and sustainable ecommerce business. However, these three are very important. Focus on building momentum to continue sales. Work on outsourcing as many tasks as possible so you can focus on helping your customers while bringing new customers in the door.